Political Necropsy

The Wheels of Justice

2009-03-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

Baltasar Garzon is a name many may have forgotten. The Spanish Judge last appeared in the world press in association with his indictment of former Chilean Dictator Pinochet - the man the US supported while he had hundreds of thousands of his countrymen murdered.

Now the man who was not afraid to drag Pinochet before the courts has started a criminal investigation into the machinations of the infernal Bush machine that set up and ran Guantanamo, as reported by CNN.

Investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzon has passed a 98-page complaint to prosecutors that accuses former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and five others of being the legal architects of system that allowed torture in violation of international law.

It can hardly be believed, but someone is actually taking the first step in dragging Bush, Cheney and the other criminals into the courtrooms. Gonzalez and his cronies will be the first if the investigation bears fruit, as it might, but others may soon follow. If Gonzalez ends up in the Hague, it's unlikely that the Republican standard defense that Ronald Reagan invented - "I don't remember, I don't recall" - will stand up to the scrutiny of the Judges there.

Thank you judge Garzon, thank you for setting the wheels of justice in motion to put right what this perfidious band of dimwits did wrong and for bringing to the surface the dirt that so many would like to simply forget.

The Guantanamo detention center was in itself a criminal abuse of Human Rights for which the former Bush Administration including the former alleged President and his side-kick should answer for. In full.

The Sculpture That Says It All

2009-01-29T20:17:00.000-08:00

Once in a while a real gem comes along that is really hard to ignore. The hard right have been telling us for years in the wake of the "no show" by the Iraqi dancing multitudes to welcome the American invaders, sorry, liberators, that Iraqis are still overwhelmingly supportive of George W. Bush.
When a lonely shoe thrower hurls footware at the former US dictator, the hard right scoffs, that it's the act of a desperate lunatic - the REST of Iraq LOVES George.
So it's with bemusement and amusement to see, unveiled in Tikrit, of all places, a national monument to the projectile pitched at Bush:

A huge sculpture of the footwear hurled at President Bush in December during a trip to Iraq has been unveiled in a ceremony at the Tikrit Orphanage complex.

Keep deluding yourselves that Bush, as seen by the rest of the world and Iraq in particular, was anything but an abject failure, an object of ridicule, a clown. By all means drag up the occasional African American who didn't vote for Obama and wave them like some kind of glorified sock puppet as a means of demonstrating that - well, what exactly? That not all African Americans voted for him? Or quote Rush Limbaugh (of all people) in condemning Obama for not having turned the economy around in a week, by all means.

But until the day you show me a country that has erected a sculptural replica of a missile manually thrown at Barack Obama, don't even bother trying to convince me that he is anything less than a thousand percent improvement on the President that was (not), George W.

2008-12-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

Torture is something that one had not associated with the United States for the past forty or so years. Torture occurred in Vietnam if one is to accept the testimony given by Vietnam veterans. But since the seventies, America has been supposedly the beacon of human rights.

Since Abu Ghraib, that image no longer stands. American troops tortured prisoners repeatedly and regularly and in a number of documented cases, this led to the death of the prisoner. In many cases, the prisoner was not even guilty of a crime in any sense of the word. It has been a dark time for this country.

Just so that we don’t get yanked off track by strawmen arguments about defaming the troops, this is not about the troops. This is about the degradation of a nation that was once regarded as a voice of reason and a leader in the fight against the abuse of humans and their rights across the globe, to a country that incarcerated children and tortured juveniles. It is about the attempt to pervert what this country was purportedly about.

This story is the story of Donald Rumsfeld and many others in the Bush administration, who’s actions, deeds and words, led directly to the torture of young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees," claims a Senate Armed Services Committee report issued Thursday.

According to the committee, prisoners were tortured in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US military installations. Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) were responsible for the content of the Senate's findings.

This article will illicit, I am sure, a response from the right. The very right that is alarmed by Barack Oabama’s past associations with people like Bill Ayers. People scared because they don’t know, or pretend not to know, who the real Obama is.

Where are their voices calling for Rumsfeld’s head? For Cheney to be indicted? For the responsible members of the Bush administration, who have brought shame onto this country to be held accountable? These are not tin-foil-hat ideas about affectations which may or may not have occurred decades ago. These are hard facts. These men and women in the Bush enclave, these supposed real American patriots, in fact not only dragged this country through the mud, but endangered it:

The report determined that placing the blame on "a few bad apples," as Bush administration officials attempted to do in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, is inappropriate.….

The report finally claims that Rumsfeld's torture policies "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority."

Where are you, you who are concerned that barrack Obama may be tainted by his former acquaintances, when you are faced with terrorism in your own party? Terrorism in the form of memos, meetings, nods and ultimately torture. Where are your cries of indignation?

But it’s remarkably still around them as far as these topics go.

Religion In Action

2008-12-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

CNN reports that a sign criticizing religion that was installed next to a Nativity scene was stolen from the Legislative Building in Olympia, Washington, on Friday. It was later found in a ditch.

Amongst other things, the sign read:

"Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds,"

The sign, which was at the Legislative Building at 6:30 a.m. PT, was gone by 7:30 a.m., Gaylor said.

It took some religious wingnut 60 minutes to break the Eighth Commandment.

There's irony for you.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/12/05/atheists.christmas/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

The Real America Arrives....

2008-12-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

At the doors of the Supreme Court in order to pray that the Supreme Court would invalidate Obama's victory.

It's a tiny crowd. They're all wingbats. But they're the real thing.

I promise.

Reported By The Raw Story

Here Comes Newt

2008-12-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

Or, where did the GOP go?

The future of the Republican Party is shaping up in the shadows of the calamitous MCain and Palin campaign. Even before barrack Obama has been inaugurated, the remaining forces in the GOP are vying for power and attempting to define direction. Unfortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, they’ve taken McCain’s defeat as not having been too much of a thing but too little.

Even as we speak, George Bush is crafting “a right of conscience rule” which would give anyone the right to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable. The Hippocratic Oath would become a wishy-washy, worthless expression whilst doctors and nurses refuse to care for patients based on their own beliefs. Pharmacists, caretakers and even janitors could object to working or participating in any way in anything they personally might find objectionable even if they do not understand the facts or are not in a position to grasp the full meaning of a particular issue.

Sarah Palin is shifting to the right with her ramped up rhetoric that panders to the right wing, religious nutcases but that was almost to be expected.

But now here comes Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, that purported icon of forward thinking politicians. Newt has aligned himself with a new movement called The National Committee for Faith and Family. You all know where this is going right?

Gingrich, who almost certainly will run for the Presidency in 2012, appears in a trailer for a so-called documentary in which he says:

"There is no attack on American culture more destructive and more historically dishonest than the relentless effort to drive God out of America's public square,"

Oh really?

One of the movements main characters is David Barton who in the nineties, when Gingrich was trying to bankrupt the government in order to cripple the Clinton Presidency – remember – GOP before God and country, was allied with Christian Identity, a white supremacist group.

As Michelle Goldberg notes in The New Republic, visitors to Gingrich’s website are asked to sign a petition maligning the fact that there are too few references to God in the Capitol’s visitor centre.

This is where the GOP is headed and that is probably good, because with any luck, it’ll dig its own grave there.

Who'd a Thunk It?

2008-11-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

Iran was deemed a nuclear threat after documents which were allegedly stolen from a laptop belonging to an Iranian nuclear physicist were handed over to the CIA.

Although the name 'curveball' had not yet faded from our memories, everyone lapped this information up as being de facto proof of the Iranian nuclear ambition.

Until...

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has obtained evidence suggesting that documents which have been described as technical studies for a secret Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program may have been fabricated.

As reported by The Raw Story.

Another 'doh' moment for the Bush Administration brought to you by the movement: "Obama For Change."

Congratulations America

2008-11-06T08:19:00.000-08:00

You've risen from the ashes and proved once again that you are a great nation, a great people and a great country.

You've broken the shackles of the neocon machine and you've liberated yourselves from the most oppressive leadership this country has ever seen.

Time to clean up the mess left behind by eight years of Republican Presidency.

Thank you for electing Barack Hussein Obama to do the job.

He's an inspiration and the leader we all need right now.

What If Obama Wins?

2008-11-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow's the day. At the end of it, this country will either have voted for at least another four years of Neocon rule, or taken the high road and placed a bet on a young, ingenious Senator. An African American Senator. That's important because there are several outcomes to this election depending on who wins.

If Mccain wins, middle class white America that is afraid of socialist ideals even though these are not upheld by Obama and even though the same white Americans don't know what socialism really means, will feel vindicated. The 'real America' will feel it has won and once again bludgeoned the evil black, muslim, communist snake to death.

The Democrats I think will be shocked and dissapointed. Many will be angry. Because leading up to this election everything points to an Obama victory, a clear victory and a defeat would again raise the spectre of voter fraud, ironically, the same spectre that McCain is wielding as he warns about ACORN. Black America will be insensed at having had this opportunity taken from them and who could blame them - so near and yet so far. But their anger will be tempered by the fact that McCain was not regarded as a specific threat to them. All this is fairly obvious.

What is not obvious is what will happen if Obama wins as anyone who has been following the media will expect him to. There will be of course a lot of rejoicing on the streets by anyone left of the Neocon machine. The Bush era will finally be over and we will be preparing the stage for what will be an historical presidency come what may. But the Neocons and their minions - their blind, uneducated ignorant followers who all shake in fear at the thought of 'their America' disolving into a new version of the Soviet Union, those impossibly dumb people who think that their taxes are going to be hiked even though they are in exactly the tax bracket that Obama intends to help - what of them? What of the incredibly obtuse white trash portion of the population who believe that a McCain, who would actually only pander to the super-rich, would be their candidate?

In several of the videos showing these supporters of the McCain/Palin ticket one can observe unveiled racism and unhidden declarations of a physical attack on Obama should he become President. In at least two of these videos, a man cocks his hand to mimic a pistol and pretends to fire it when asked what will happen if Obama is elected.

These people are nuts. They are dangerous as hell being both ignorant and angry. They are indicative of the shifting mood in the United States. They will be the ones to shift even more to the right when Obama is elected. They are Palin's future.

To understand this, one has to grasp the fact that the McCain campaign has turned into a fascist movement. I do not say this lightly but the facts support that statement. The central position of a fascist movement is to single out a group of people that are regarded as the enemy and are treated and referred to as an existential threat. This is the tool which the one side uses to fuse it's followers together. Single mindedly, with no individual thought, they attack their perceived enemies even before understanding them or wanting to understand them.

So a win by Obama will, in my opinion see a strong shift to the right by the right in this country. This won't change after they notice that, being a part of the middle class their lives get better and not worse under Obama. This will also not change when they notice the country becoming stronger under the new leader. Their point of view is set, their horizon fixed. Their hatred whipped up by a Palin rhetoric is potentially the most dangerous thing this country will have faced for decades. This will be compounded by an isolation of the Republican Senators who will increasingly look to a more extremist corner for support. All the evidence is there and I am concerned for the future of this country, not because Obama will not bring about a change for the better, but because the extreme religious right will destroy it rather than see their convictions go unfulfilled. Those convictions are that if a vaguely liberal minded person is elected president it will mean the end of America as we know it. Clinton and the Clinton years are forgotten. Only fear remains.

So it is with great urgency that I call upon those on the right who have a moral backbone, who have an understanding of the dynamics at play and understand the dangers of motivating large groups of intellectually challenged people using inflamatory rhetoric, to do everything in their power to stop radicalizing Barack Obama. Criticism of his ideas and plans is appropriate. Demonizing him into some sort of anti-christ is not. This should be obvious to McCain and vice presidential candidate Palin. An assasination of Obama is clearly possible and would plunge this country into chaos. It's in the hands of the right to do what they can NOW, to prevent such a disaster.

Barack Obama is no more a danger to the United States and for that matter Israel, than Bill Clinton was. Indeed, his election alone could transform this country. It could free it from the shackles of shame that slavery brought upon it. It could change the dynamic that has dictated hatred and racism, repression and prejudice on the United States for the past hundred years. It will do this even if it does not fulfill his promises. To that end, you too, those of you who don't wish to see him elected but who have the ability to understand the disaster that would ensure should he be brought down by an assassin, you too should do what you can to ensure that that at least does not happen. You should do your part to temper the extreme right.

You can do this by ceasing to spread hatred. You can do this by ceasing to spread fear. You can do this by accepting him as your new President.

The List

2008-10-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

I just thought, you know, with the usual right wing clap-trap brigade all tying their underwear in knots in an attempt to discredit Obama SOMEHOW.....

His friends were terrorists

He's a Muslim
He was born in Kenya
No Fidji
No, The phillipinnes
Hawaii isn't really a state
He's a communist
A socialist
He's going to tax everyone to death

It was time just to put things in perspective. How often, in the past, have so many really crossed party lines to endorse a candidate. Here's a list of notable Republicans who have done just that:

Elected Officials:
Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican Senator from Rhode Island
Larry Pressler, Former Republican Senator from South Dakota
Phil Arthurhultz, a former Republican state senator from Whitehall
Lowell Weicker, Former Republican Governor and Senator from Connecticut
Jim Leach, Former Republican Congressman from Iowa
Wayne Gilchrest, Republican Congressman from Maryland
Richard Riordan, Former Republican Mayor of Los Angeles
Jim Whitaker, Fairbanks, Alaska - Republican Mayor
William Weld, Former Republican Governor of Massachusetts
Arne Carlson, Former Republican Governor of Minnesota
Linwood Holton, Former Republican Governor of Virginia

Government Officials:
Doug Kmiec a former constitutional legal counsel to two Republican presidents.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
Charles Fried, Solicitor General of the United States under Reagan
Jackson M. Andrews, Republican Counsel to the U.S. Senate
Susan Eisenhower, Granddaughter of President Eisenhower & President of the Eisenhower Group Francis Fukuyama, Advisor to President Reagan
Rita Hauser, Former White House intelligence advisor under George W. Bush
Larry Hunter, Former President Reagan Policy Advisor
Scott McClellan, Former Press Secretary to President George W. Bush
Ken Adelman, served in the Ford administration
Lilibet Hagel, Wife of Republican Senator Chuck Hagel

Columnists and Academics:
Jeffrey Hart, National Review Senior Editor
Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations at Boston University
David Friedman, Economist and son of Milton and Rose Friedman
Christopher Buckley, Son of National Review founder William F. Buckley & former NR columnist
Andrew Sullivan, Columnist for the Atlantic Monthly
Wick Alison, Former publisher of the National Review
Michael Smerconish, Columnist for the Philadelphia Enquirer
CC Goldwater, Granddaughter of Barry Goldwater

These are all, ALL, people the neocons respected for years - they've got the message:McCain and Palin are a train wreck waiting to happen - it's a critical time for this country which needs a strong, intelligent leader able to think on his feet, not a doddering old idiot who's main claim to fame is that he crashed about a billion dollars' worth of military equipment into the Vietnamese jungle and his partner, a shabby self-centred diva who is so addicted to feeling like a rock star that she uses inflammatory and blatantly slanderous language to incite hate and violence at her rallys.

One cannot simply dismiss the people listed above as being senile and cretinous. They are respected members of a community and they've made a choice and it is NOT for the person representing their party.That ought to tell the right wing pundits something.

To top it all, here are some memorable quotes:

"For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one." -- Andrew Bacevich

"For me, the national interest comes before party concerns, particularly internationally. We do need a new direction in American policy, and Obama has a sense of that." -- Jim Leach

"I think we have in Barack Obama the clear possibility of a truly great president. I would contend that it's the most important election of my lifetime." -- Arne Carlson

"I'm still a Republican, but I still will always vote for the person who I think will do the best job." -- Richard Riordan

"Obama has a brain, and he isn't afraid to use it." -- Linwood Holton

"Barack Obama is a thoughtful visionary leader who as President will end the decline of American law, liberty, and fiscal responsibility that are the hallmarks of the extremist policies of the current Administration, now adopted by John McCain." -- Jackson M. Andrews

Another Republican goes Rogue

2008-10-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

And McCain blathers on the Late Edition.

It must be wearying to be a hard core Neocon these days. Every week they have to make up new reasons why an until that day very respected Republican Senator, former Republican leaning general or former Republican representative is now just a left-leaning, pinko, commie SOB and why they were in fact never to be trusted in the first place.

The latest Republican who will be receiving these honours is Former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) as reported by Politico. Pressler was the first Vietnam veteran to serve in the United States Senate and is the latest in along line of Republicans backing Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign

Pressler, who said that in addition to casting an absentee ballot for Obama he'd donated $500 to the Illinois senator's campaign, cited the Democrat's response to the financial crisis as the primary reason for his decision.

"I just got the feeling that Obama will be able to handle this financial crisis better, and I like his financial team of [former Treasury Secretary Robert] Rubin and [former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul] Volcker better," he said. By contrast, John McCain's "handling of the financial crisis made me feel nervous."

How right you are Mr. Pressler. It might also be McCain’s increasing senility that is worrying people like Pressler. In an extraordinary statement on CNN’s Late Edition McCain said:

“I would have vetoed literally every spending bill, even those that I had voted for, if I were president of the United States…”

Huh?

If you would have vetoed the spending bills, why vote for them? I mean, was the option of voting against them not there?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that McCain’s aberrant behavior is worrying even the staunchest of Republicans, who are praying fervently that this demented old man doesn’t, by some fluke become president and even worse, die in office, so that the moose killing sycophant gets her shot at destroying this country.

Chicken or Shit?

2008-10-26T12:22:00.000-07:00

How undecided can anyone be in this Mother Of All Elections I ask myself. How can anyone anywhere still be undecided ten days before election day? There is a chasm between the two candidates. Do you want to vote for the old angry white man who’s running mate is a moose killing, crooked governor with a record of cronyism as long as your arm, whose claim to fame is running a town so small it didn’t have a fire department or are you going to vote for the intelligent man with real answers and hope for the future?

David Sedaris of The New Yorker sums it up for us:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

As he says, being undecided is saying: “hmmm…how is the chicken cooked?”

McCain Camp Tied to Attack on Staffer

2008-10-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

As reported by the Talking Points Memo, in an amazing but not altogether surprising twist, it would appear that a spokesperson for the McCain camp released inflammatory details of the faked attack on a Pennsylvania woman before they had been released by the police.

John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

The implications of a McCain staffer telling reporters a much more embellished and explosive story than the available facts at the time would allow are obvious. In a nutshell, it is the same propagandist style which has been Palin’s approach these past weeks – to generate hatred against the opposition. The intention is to coerce Midwestern white America into believing, “If you vote for the Muslim Black Man who pals around with terrorists, this will happen to you.”

I can’t wait for November 4th - a farewell to John bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, McCain, a goodbye to the moose killing nutcase and a return to sanity for this country so we can start putting things right again.

For The Love Of Cows

2008-10-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

So you thought it was funny that Sarah Palin said she was experienced in foreign issues because she could see Russia from her back yard? Wait till you hear this:

Palin’s cronyism in Alaska is legendary, having doled out over 25% of state positions to campaign contributors or their relatives, sometimes without apparent regard to qualifications, as reported by the LA Times.

The best one?

"Franci Havemeister, one of several of Palin's childhood friends tapped for leadership jobs, heads the state agriculture division. A former real estate agent, she was ridiculed in Alaska after it was reported that she had cited among her qualifications for the job a childhood love of cows."

You can't make this stuff up!

Slap in The Face For Bush, McCain & Palin

2008-10-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

So here we are arguing back and forth – pull out with a timetable, pull out without one. McCain, and Palin ridiculed Obama for wanting to set a timetable and said it showed his lack of experience in such matters and they endorsed Bush’s inane view that pulling out with a timetable was equal to defeat.

Defeat of what I ask? Because no one has won anything in Iraq and no one is likely to win anything in Iraq. Iraq is pretty much as it was except about a million more dead, a completely destroyed infrastructure and the loss of most of its academics. Other than that – yes, Saddam Hussein is no more, but what difference does that make in a country where people are still being blown to bits and tortured on a regular basis?

Setting a timetable for withdrawal is hardly likely to make things worse. But the Bush Administration won't have any of it because they still hope for some kind of miracle when they can pull out with clean hands and demonstrating strength and control.

So it’s slightly more than laughable, that the latest draft for the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces agreement on the U.S. military presence states unequivocally that US forces are to withdraw by the end of 2011 as reported by Gareth Porter of IPS. It is unambiguous and clear. What is also clear is that even a non-combat US presence in that country is not wanted and will not be tolerated.

I’m laughing my socks off because here’s McCain and his hound dog Palin pretending like they’re going to make the rules.In fact, the only thing standing in the way of this agreement being ratified, is that the Shiites under Moqtada El Sadr, remember him, are revolting against it because they consider the pullout date for US troops to be too late.

This development signifies the entire loss of not only bargaining power but also legitimacy of the Bush regime with regards to Iraq. Here they were pontificating about how they would decide when to pull out the troops when in fact, it had already been decided by the Iraqis:

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad Aug. 21, the United States accepted for the first time a firm date of 2011 for complete withdrawal

The Oct. 13 final draft, a translation of which was posted by Raed Jarrar on his website Oct. 20, reveals that the Bush administration has been forced to give up its aims of softening the deadline for withdrawal and of a residual non-combat force in the country.

The collapse of the Bush administration's ambitious plan for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq highlights the degree of unreality that has prevailed among top U.S. officials in both Washington and Baghdad on Iraqi politics. They continued to see the Maliki regime as a client which would cooperate with U.S. aims even after it was clear that Maliki's agenda was sharply at odds with that of the United States.

"The degree of unreality.....

"Vote for McCain if you want another four years of a few more degrees of unreality. Barack got it right again.

Who's Responsible For the Financial Crisis?

2008-10-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

If you’re a right wing pundit, you’ll still be bleating that the market meltdown was the result of Wall Street pulling it’s money out of stocks in fear of an impending Obama Presidency.

Actually, what now surfaces as reported by Yahoo, is a GOP construction that is so stinky I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae allegedly paid DCI, a Republican Consulting firm more than $2 million in order to scuttle legislation that would have led to regulation of the mortgage markets and would, in retrospect, have prevented much of the housing and therefore, credit crisis.

Ironically, the bill that DCI was targeting was written by Chuck Hagel R-Nebraska. The Bill was preceded by a letter written by Chuck Hagel and 25 other senators; here is an excerpt:

"If effective regulatory reform legislation ... is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole,"

Talk about foresight. To be fair to the Republicans, when the bill was sent to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, all Republican members of the committee voted for it, whilst the Democrats opposed it. That was back in 2005 and that was when FM and FM started using DCI’s services to target Republicans to oppose such legislation.

DCI's chief executive by the way is Doug Goodyear. John McCain's campaign later hired him to manage the GOP convention in September.

Why this is funny is because one of the illogical lies that McCain has been spreading about Obama is that the latter had taken advice from the heads of FM & FM. What McCain fails to tell his supporters is that McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, or his lobbying firm has taken more than $2 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2000. In December, Freddie Mac contributed $250,000 to last month's GOP convention.

In the end, the efforts to kill the bill were successful as nine of the targeted Republicans opposed it. Again to be fair, had the Democratic Senators backed it unanimously, it would have passed.

The amazing upshot of all this is that Freddie Mac CEO Richard and Daniel Mudd, President and Chief Executive Officer of Fannie Mae Syron pocketed nearly $19.8 million and $12.21 million in compensation last year respectively, whilst people lost their homes because of the deregulated market.

These are the people who pulled this scheme out of their butts out of sheer greed. The result of their actions are tens of thousands of destitute families across America – the very ones that the GOP is terrified Obama might want to try to help should he become President.

If All The World Could Vote....

2008-10-17T21:12:00.001-07:00

Well now, in a way, it can:

http://www.iftheworldcouldvote.com/

Visit the site, vote and view results.

At the present time, obama is crushing McCain.

Rolling Stone Nails Palin

2008-10-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

From Rolling Stone Magazine

"Mad Dog Palin"

The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is - it's what her candidacy says about America

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party's fortunes around faster.

Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain's decision to cave in to his party's right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman — reportedly his real preference — by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?

But watching Palin's speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker — and immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly-sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, "five children later," is "still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American: the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.
Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban-American supermom. It's the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

Letterman Nails McCain

2008-10-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

John McCain appeared on Letterman last night to make amends for his having skipped out on the TV showmaster a couple of weeks ago. Then, McCain had claimed that he was canceling the appearance because of the financial crisis. Letterman however showed footage of Mccain preparing for a Katie Couric interview instead.

All this is water under the bridge and the Letterman Show was as usual interesting but Letterman didn’t make it all fun and games. He pressed McCain on the latter’s association with Gordon Liddy. Letterman asked:

“Did you have a relationship with Gordon Liddy?” McCain appears confused and says:

“Uh ahh – I’ve met him…”

Letterman then asks:
“Did you attend a fundraiser at his house?”

MCain replies, “Gordon Liddy’s?” And looks lost.

After a commercial break, McCain then more confidently adds:

“"I know Gordon Liddy. He paid his debt, he went to prison.... I'm not in any was embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy."

Now that’s a fascinating reply. Here are two things that should now be taken into account:

The Republican Party made thousands of phone calls last night to potential swing voters informing them that Barack Obama "had worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.” The same Bill Ayers who was convicted for his role in the Weathermen, served his sentence and is now such a model citizen that Chicago named him their citizen of the year in 1997

Gordon Liddy is a convicted felon who has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in "if necessary"; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a "gangland figure" to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap "leftist guerillas" at the 1972 Republican National Convention -- a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. Liddy also once famously gave his supporters advice on how best to kill federal officials (he recommended shooting them in the head because they might be wearing flak jackets). Liddy has also been unrepentant about his actions.

McCain, who seems too senile to appreciate the irony of the situation claimed during last night’s interview that he “was not in any way embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy.”

Of course not. The right wing is all about being against scumbags unless they’re in one’s own ranks, then they’re all for them.

McCain two faced? You betcha.

A Note To Mrs. Palin

2008-10-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

From the Richmond County Daily Journal:

Note to Mrs. Palin and her supporters: Average Americans don't believe that the Earth was created 5,000 years ago. We don't ignore overwhelming scientific proof about global warming. We don't believe that the Iraq War is a call from God. We don't support states seceding from the country. We don't support banning books. We don't support using political power for personal gain. We do support sexual education that deals with STDs and contraceptives.

We do support alternate energy sources. We do want someone for our country who does not need to hire a city administrator to help with running a town of 6,000 and then put them in debt to the tune of $27 million. We don't believe that you can "pray away the gay." We do want leaders who (along with their families) practice what they preach.

We don't want a "Warrior For God" one heartbeat away from our nuclear arsenal. We do think that radical extreme Christianity is every bit as dangerous to us as a radical extreme of any religion. We do think unstable, belligerent religious extremists should be our enemies ... not our representatives.

Garrison Keillor on Sarah Palin

2008-10-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor is one of my favourite writers and he's now penned a stupendous piece in the Chicago Tribune which I am reproducing in part.

It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. When she said, "One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let's commit ourselves just every day, American people, Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars," people smelled gas.

Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne'er-do-well son of the old Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no cost to yourself—one stink bomb after another, and now Gov. Sarah Palin.

She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Sen. John McCain's first major decision as the Republican nominee for president. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will become a trivia question, "What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?" And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.

GOP Caging of Voters Stopped

2008-10-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

The GOP process of ‘caging’ voters has been declared illegal by a Michigan judge as reported by The Raw Story. The ACLU is applauding the decision which disenfranchised thousands of voters around the country and targeted low income individuals and students.

"You essentially send a first-class letter to a household where you suspect that that person no longer lives there but where they're still registered to vote," explained Allen Raymond, a convicted GOP elections fraudster who spent time in prison after the discovery of a phone-jamming scheme during the 2002 elections. "That letter comes back. ... Somebody [at the local polling place] then challenges that vote if that person comes in to vote."

The GOP in its present form is nothing but filth.

The 23% Ticket

2008-10-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

ABC News reports thatBush’s approval rating has sunk to 23% which is below Nixon’s and just a point above Truman’s lowest. His disapproval rating is at an all time, record-whopping, 73%.

90% of those polled say the country is off on the wrong track which is the highest number ever recorded since that question started being asked in 1973.

The disturbing thing is that 23% of those polled still approve of the job he did despite the biggest economic meltdown of the past 50 years, a war in Iraq which yielded neither WMDs nor anything substantial and certainly not a democratic country with full support of the USA, an escaped Bin laden and a list of scandals that would have made the Bourbons proud.

Those 23% are the hope of John and Sarah, rolling up to promise another four years of the same. It’s hysterical. It’s Saturday Night Live, live! It's the 23% ticket.

Republicans Do Some Straight Talking

2008-10-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

William Milliken is a man to be admired. That’s good, because Milliken is about as Republican as they come, having been a lifelong party member. But Milliken, who originally backed MCain, is now withdrawing his support as reported by The Grand Rapids Press:

"He is not the McCain I endorsed," said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. "He keeps saying, 'Who is Barack Obama?' I would ask the question, 'Who is John McCain?' because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.”

Milliken, along with a number of notable Republicans are disgusted with the McCain/Palin campaign that has dissolved into a mudslinging campaign the likes of which have rarely seen before. Milliken continued:

"I'm disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues."

Milliken is joined by the likes of Lincoln Chaffee, the former US Senator from Rhode Island who says he is voting for Obama and is encouraging other Republicans to do the same. Chaffee, who calls Sarah Palin “totally unqualified” for the post of Vice President says of McCain’s swing to the right:

"That's not my kind of Republicanism. I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what's happened now. In eight short years they've taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they've torn it into tatters."

Other republicans have voiced their concerns as the McCain straight talk express derails and goes crashing into the side of the mountain that is the support that Obama now has across the country. Milliken also voices concerns with the choice of Palin as VP:

"I know John McCain is 72. In my book, that's quite young. But what if she were to become president of the United States? The idea, to me, is quite disturbing, if not appalling.”

McCain is toast.

It's Alive And Well In America

2008-10-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Racism that is.

So often I read material by affronted white people who rant about people like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a vitriolic preacher who preaches, certainly angry words about white supremacists.

Obama is associated with this man in only the most loose of interpretations, but that doesn’t stop the right wing pundits from jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that Obama himself is by proxy a radical. Only one vital piece is missing from the equation: the hate and disrespect that so many, really so many white people still have for African Americans.

The Reverend Wright is certainly not a figure to be applauded for his rhetoric. Yet one has to understand, that the man preaches in a context, as reported by The Raw Story.

75-year-old Wade Williams, arrested Wednesday morning, was angry that he hadn't yet received his voter registration card. According to the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office, Williams threatened a state official over the phone that he would "empty his shotgun," stating an urgent need to vote to "keep the nigger out of office."

Wade Williams has spoken for millions of whites across this country. Not only for the radicals, but all those who won’t say the ‘N’ word, but will say “that one.” He speaks for millions of Republicans horrified by the thought that a black man might ascend to the most powerful post in this country.

This was yesterday. The same people, the Wade Williams of forty years ago, were lynching blacks across the South.

So to put it in context, very little has changed, and yet so much has changed. An African American will be the next President of the United States and those that want to keep “that one” out of office, will have lost their footing again.

The hate filled words that McCain spat at the crowd when he said “that one” will one day be a thing of the past. But for now, they are still present and the McCains and Williams of this world still believe in their own superiority because once, not so long ago, their forefathers bullied, coerced and tortured men, women and children of African descent onto ships and, with no regard for their well being, transported them over the ocean to serve at the whim of the white man, to be raped and beaten by the white man and to be degraded by the white man.

Come November, there will be a severe dent put into the belief that a black man is inferior to a white and there will be a tear in the fabric that supports men like McCain with his disguised racist slurs and maybe even the foundations upon which white supremacists built their castle of hate, will finally have cracked enough to bring the whole thing down.

Maybe.

More cringing? No Thanks!

2008-09-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

For eight years, anyone with any kind of education in the United States has cringed every time President Bush spoke publicly. Hell, even when he spoke privately it was a problem. His faux pas and repeated gaffes embarrassed members of his party as well as anyone who didn’t like his politics.

Are you ready to cringe for another four? Because right wing pundit Kathleen Parker of the National Review thinks that’s what Americans will have to do if Palin becomes VP. She’s openly asking Palin to step out of the race:

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Parker quotes palin twice to make her point:

Palin on hannity:
“Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

and later, Palin to couric:

“What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

Well, after Bush, one could say this form of garbled, meaningless miscommunication is Presidential, but parker tells Palin to step down.

"Do it for your country," Parker concludes.

I don’t imagine parker’s call will be heeded. It’s just that Republicans don’t ever really do much for their country. They think of themselves, Wall Street and their Big Business Buddies first.

The Sraight Talker

2008-09-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

John ‘The Maverick’ McCain has been unequivocal in his denouncement of lobbyists and pork barrel senators and governors. He has also been touting the ‘outside of Washington’ approach that he wishes to adopt.

Why then would McCain take Sarah Pork-Barrel palin as his running mate?
Why would he employ 177 lobbyists in his campaign team, 85 of which work for the very industries that McCain has denounced as destroying America?
Why would he take William E. Timmons, Sr. as his senior advisor for his eventual transition team.

Time magazine wrote:

"By tapping Timmons, McCain has turned to one of Washington's steadiest and most senior inside players to guide him in the event of a victory--but also to someone who would represent the antithesis of the kind of outside-of-Washington change he has recently been promising."

The problem is that these glitches escape the voting masses. This fact, which proves beyond a doubt that Mccain has only one interest at heart and that is to become President no matter what, will be meaningless to most Republican voters.

This country is a country that has a tendency, especially amongst the Midwestern and southern states, to vote for someone because “one could imagine having a beer with that person” or because “she was once Ms. Alabama” or “He has great hair.”

It’s not really about voting for what’s best for the country otherwise W wouldn’t have been elected. There is a very real danger that McCain could succeed in November which would be catastrophic for this country, a country with a depleted military, an economy in tatters and a devaluating currency.

McCain won’t make a good President because he was once a POW.
Palin won’t make a good VP because she shoots animals.

He lies and she’s clueless. That’s really what the right has to understand.

Of Blood and Forgery

2008-08-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

Just when one thinks one has plumbed the depths to which the Bush Administration would stoop to, to get their way, a new revelation shows us that we are no where near the bottom. Back then when George Bush was trying to find a way to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, a letter turned up allegedly from the head of Iraq’s intelligence service to the former dictator linking Hussein to the ringleader of the hijackers that flew the planes into the World Trade Centre.

A new book by Ron Suskind, author of ‘The Price of Loyalty' now states that this letter, one of the mainstays of the allegations by Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush that Saddam and Al Qaeda were inextricably mixed, was a forgery. Moreover, that this forgery was ordered by none other than George W. Bush himself, as The Raw Story reports.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

The creation of a war of attrition under the falsest of pretenses. One can only read and weep. A million deaths based on a lie.

The Ongoing Diebold Saga

2008-07-31T09:31:00.000-07:00

There is fresh evidence that has come to light with regards to the rigging of Diebold voting machines. These machines, which are used nationwide have come to the attention of critics for the surprising results they yielded which contradicted in many cases, the polls held just a few weeks earlier.

A whistle blower has come forward with a claim that a patch was fitted to Diebold machines specifically in Georgia, where Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox requested information from Diebold about an ‘0808 patch’ that was installed on Diebold machines prior to voting in 2002.

Cox did not know that a patch had been installed and The Raw Story’s source says that Diebold workers were told to keep the information from Cox. The most astonishing thing:

What initially raised questions, according to the source, was the behavior of then-Diebold CEO, Bob Urosevich, who personally flew in from Texas and applied the patch in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds.

For those who have forgotten the upsets in Georgia: Incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who was five percentage points ahead of Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss in polls taken only a week before the voting, lost 53 percent to 46 percent. Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic Governor, who had been leading challenger Sonny Perdue by a fairly wide margin of eleven points, lost 51 percent to 46 percent.

Voter Fraud by Republicans?

Yes Sir.

The Record Setter

2008-07-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

He has set another new record: George W. Bush has obliterated past deficits, except his own personal best of 2004 which still stands at $512 billion. The budget deficit for 2009 will be a whopping $482 billion, dwarfing the records to date held by none other than Ronald Let’s-Spend-All-Our-Money-And-Only-Tax-The-Poor Reagan, which topped out at a paltry $116 billion in 2003.

Still, the Bushies are scrambling and say that in the overall scheme of things, Ronald is still king, having managed to overspend by a blistering 6.8% whilst Bush’s overdraft stands at only 3.3% of GDP.

Nevertheless, CNN reports that Dan Perino defends the stimulus package (or was it The Surge) which cost the government $170 billion and which the Democrats did blindly sign off on for fear of being hated.

"I remember that back when we were discussing the stimulus package, both parties recognized that the deficit would increase, and that would be the price that we pay in order to help improve the economy," Says Perino.

Improve the economy? Hello? Last time I was at Best Buy people were lined up virtually with their stimulus package checks in hand, waiting to buy the latest flat screen HD 50” Plasma TV from Toshiba, Sanyo, Sharp or Sony. A small percentage of that money may actually end up in the USA I agree. But most of it, designed to give Average Joe a small adrenal boost, a quick pecuniary handjob to make us feel better whilst the United States economy plunges downwards at an unstoppable rate, will travel overseas to feed the countries manufacturing the toys that people buy here as a temporary relief against the deppressing fact that this economy, our economy is in tatters.

Not satisfied with that of course, the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae $300 billion Social Help Package has been approved by Congress and will probably be signed off by Bush so that Freddie Mac Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Syron and Daniel Mudd, president and chief executive of Fannie Mae can continue to pocket their monstrous benefit bonus packages of $20 million and $13 million respectively.

Bush needs to get fired and the current Democratic leadership needs to be canned. This country is so ready for something new or it will go to the dogs. The existential threat the current Administration represents for this country far outweighs anthing any terrorist can think up.

Why I don't live in Oklahoma...

2008-07-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

And why I dislike Republicans, version II.

I’d like to introduce you to Brent Rinehart who is running for reelection as Commissioner for Oklahoma City.

Brent’s campaign pivots on a simple fact that he has represented in cartoon form. The devil tries to lure young kids into becoming homosexual while Brent Rinehart and the right can stop from happening as The Raw Story reports..

When asked about the comic, Rinehart replied:“I believe the homosexual agenda is an issue in this campaign. ... I thought that it was a very good campaign piece.

"It’s 2008. It seems amazing to me that someone is still arguing about the normality of being gay.

The Compassionate Conservative

2008-07-21T17:11:00.000-07:00

Or: why I hate republicans, version I.

Self-appointed "Compassionate-Conservative" radio host Michael savage grabbed my eye with this piece of wisdom as reported in Media Matters:

I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, 'Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot.' "

It's evident that Savage has no fucking idea what autism is, has probably never been in contact with an autistic kid and, if he met one, would probably think this kid was faking it. This is brought to you from the man that decided that asthma was a money-making scam by minority families:

"[W]hy was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children? Because I'll tell you why: The children got extra welfare if they were disabled, and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket. Everyone went in and was told [fake cough], 'When the nurse looks at you, you go [fake cough], "I don't know, the dust got me." ' See, everyone had asthma from the minority community."

If that's compassionate, I don't want to know what rates as hard core conservative.

Plumbing The Depths

2008-07-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I thought it would be good to have Hillary win the nomination is that she knows how to fight dirty. Dirty is how the Democrats are going to have to learn to fight to stoop to the incredible barrel scraping depths that Republicans are willing to crouch to.

With their latest effort, Florida Republicans are below sewer level – they are at the bottom of the cess pit. Their new poster, “Don’t vote for a Democrat” sports a picture of the twin towers burning with obvious implicative suggestion, as reported by The Raw Story.

The political scumbag party really has reached new depths in its effort to out-do itself in terms of bad taste and this one may take the biscuit. In a country where ignorance is rife, this poster just may have the desired effect with the desired people.

The End of Bushisms?

2008-07-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are sad that 'Bushisms', those inane non-sensical utterances made by the Idiot in Chief, are soon coming to an end, there is hope yet.

John McCain, the 187 year-old presidential candidate could conceivably make it into the White House and his inane utterances are almost as funny as George's, as CNN reports:

For the second time in two days, John McCain has referred to current events in “Czechoslovakia” – a country that officially ceased to exist in January of 1993.

I keep reading posts of conservatives ragging on Obama but I wonder just how they actually manage to keep a straight face whilst rambling on about obscure Obama conspiracy theories, when their own candidate is mentally still living in 1990.

Torture Approver in Chief

2008-07-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

A new book due to be released next week will publish findings of a Red Cross report that states categorically that the United States used and approved methods of interrogation that constitute torture. Full Stop.

I wrote ‘full stop’ because the idea has been disseminated by the Bush Administration that the methods used are in debate as to whether they constitute torture or not. The Bush Administration along with hacks like Supreme Court Justice Scalia have successfully infused the American public with the idea that waterboarding and other torture methods are “perhaps in some cases, but not necessarily always” torture.

This is wrong. The International Committee of The Red Cross is the world's pre-eminent institution on the subject and they leave no doubt as to the fact that the interrogation tactics used by the CIA in Guantanamo and elsewhere constitute torture.

The book entitled "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," is written by Jane Meyer and cites sources which have read the report which was released last year. These sources say "that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who called Bush a "torture-approver-in-chief who has yet to be held to account for anything" interviewed law expert Johnathan Turley about these developments. Turley replied: "I'd never thought I would say this, but I think it might in fact be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought in my lifetime I would say that," as The Raw Story reports where the accompanying video can be viewed.

Republican Strategy for 2008

2008-07-06T16:58:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell from Doonesbury

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20080706

On the nail.

Beyond All Reasonable Doubt

2008-07-03T16:55:00.000-07:00

After spending 15 years in a jail cell, where he’d been incarcerated on a life sentence, Patrick Waller was freed. He was exonerated of the aggravated robbery and rape which he had been accused of and he became a free man as reported by CNN.

Why this is of special significance is obvious to anyone. But what makes Waller’s story even more special is that he was convicted by the Dallas District Court after being identified in a line up three times, including a live line up. He was identified by three separate people.

Waller, who had always maintained his innocence, requested DNA testing several times and it was denied on all previous occasions by the DA’s office. The judges and District Attorneys responsible for denying him DNA testing I am sure slept soundly in the comfy beds for the past fifteen years. I’m sure they ate well and I’m sure they tut-tutted about how terrible criminals are as they chomped on fois gras and sipped their Pinot Noir.

What makes this all the more special is that Waller was so definitely a criminal that no one thought it worthwhile to challenge his sentence despite him insisting he was not guilty. What makes this all the more special is that had one of the people in the robbery died, Waller would almost certainly have been charged with murder and would almost certainly have been put to death in the State that executes more people than any other. It is special because it is an absolute statement that the death penalty should be abolished because it deters no one and people make mistakes.

No one can give Waller back his life. The DA and the judges should serve at least a year just for being such pig-headed idiots, but they won’t. They will continue clinking their wine glasses, smiling and nodding at each other knowingly and believing themselves to be the ones that contribute to making this a free society.

Patrick Waller was the 19th person freed under the DNA programme since 1992. Collectively, the men who have been freed have served over 400 years of prison time without having done anything to deserve it.

How many have been put to death, we shall never know.

Of Ethics and Business Conduct

2008-04-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

Who is DynCorp International? It's a valid question and if one were to look at their website, one would see that they are an upright company dealing amongst other things in 'law enforcement' and one of their many mottos is 'supporting U.S. interests worldwide.' If one delves deeper, one finds that DynCorp also has a 'code of ethics and business conduct.'

DynCorp International is repeatedly picked by the Pentagon to carry out everything from maintenance of its military equipment to supplying it with infrastructure. As an aside, but a funny one, is that one of DynCorp’s biggest investors and the head of DynCorp’s compensation committee is Herbert ‘Pug’ Winokur, who was also Chairman and CEO of DynCorp from 1988 to 1997.

Winokur…Winokur….Of course! None other than Pug, was ENRON’s Finance Committee Chairman. Boy do these fellas get around. It’s of course redundant to ask if he is a friend of the Bushies.

So here we have a great company doing great and ethical things for America. Or do we?

This morning’s story is brought to you by Muckraked:

“DynCorp’s site manager was involved in bringing prostitutes into hotels operated by DynCorp. A co-worker unrelated to the ring was killed when he was travelling in an unsecure car and shot performing a high-risk mission........At the time, the armored car that he would otherwise have been riding in was being used by the contractor’s manager to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.“

They might want to have another read of their 'code of ethics and business conduct' manifesto.

Protest

2008-04-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while for a couple of reasons. They are personal and do not figure necessarily on the scale of things, but because I have been asked by several people the reason for the hiatus, here it is.

First and foremost is that nothing of any particular note is happening. Iraq is disintegrating again as predicted and this time, probably noting is going to prevent it from sinking into total chaos.

The second is that the only news at the moment is about the primaries. Obama this, Clinton that, Obama said this, Clinton did the other. Here’s my take. I’m pretty much sick of the whole Democratic Primary debacle and I say this, in the context of the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been pulverized, to instigate a race which has simply taken on a distasteful and unpleasant odor.

If you’re an Obama fan, you might object at this point and indicate that it’s all Clinton’s fault. If you are a Clinton supporter, maybe you feel her aggressive attitude was justified and is what is needed in Washington. If you are a Mccain supporter, I feel sorry for your delusional state, but on the other hand, you are probably sitting smugly in a corner, sniggering at the Democrats making utter fools of themselves yet again.

Total receipts between Clinton and Obama now tally upwards of $440 million dollars. Receipts. That doesn’t include any money they’ve spent themselves. Four hundred and forty million dollars.

It’s utterly disgusting and contemptible. Here are two candidates speaking of doing good social deeds and are so at each other’s throats that they’ve totally lost sight of the wood for the trees. I dfind it utterly reprehensible. This isn’t even the campaign for the presidency. It’s the primaries. It’s disgusting. McCain’s $80 million pales in comparison but it isn’t as if he is any better. The Republicans would have easily, willingly even, spent ten times that amount if they deemed it necessary.

I am repulsed. That is why I have stopped posting.

In my opinion, each candidate should receive US$ 1 million at the start of the race and that should be it. Spend it as you like, but once it’s spent. You’re done with. Collectively, McCain, Clinton and Obama have destroyed half a billion dollars in their rabid attempt at getting into the White House.

Yes, I know, half a billon dollars is only two days in Iraq, but we never said that the Bush regime was anything one should try to measure down to.

plus ça change

2008-04-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

It’s been seven years since the Afghan campaign started. Seven years since we allegedly ‘freed’ Afghanistan. It was all going to be better.
Certainly some things are. And then other things just didn’t change. From today's Wiredispatch:

Afghanistan's lower house of Parliament passed a resolution Monday seeking to bar television programs from showing dancing and other practices deemed un-Islamic.

Part of the reason for this is the devolvement of the power and influence of the Afghan government. It’s area of influence has shrunk so far as to barely make it viable. Poppy crops are breaking records, the Taliban are resurgent and the government, in a bid to keep the radicals happy, is toeing the line.

It’s fallout from the Iraq debacle. Had the US and the UK focused on maintaining a presence there, on actually getting aid to the country, instead of gallivanting about on the Euphrates, something may have truly changed in Afghanistan.

I wonder what a fraction of the money that’s been poured into Iraq would have accomplished in Afghanistan. As of today, even Kabul only has power in fits and starts, the majority of the Afghan population is still on the verge of starvation, it still ranks as one of the country’s with the highest infant mortality rate, still ranks as one of the world’s least developed.

The right would have us believe, that the mission to Afghanistan and Iraq were both altruistically motivated. Anyone with even a glimmer of intelligence will have realized that that is not the case. But as both Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq regress into a fundamentalist framework, it becomes glaringly obvious that Western governments don’t give a hoot about the freedoms of the people there.

The One That Takes The Biscuit

2008-03-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

Richard T. Race is the kind of guy you would hope was squeaky clean. He was after all George W. Bush’s specially appointed special Chief Investigator to the Pentagon’s Inspector General. His job description: “investigating fraud and official misconduct.”

Let’s hear that again: investigating fraud and official misconduct. Well, this is going to hurt: Richard T. Race has been arrested and charged with nothing less than fraud and attempting to violate the country’s banking regulations as Bloomberg reports:

Race, 61, admitted he made cash deposits at the Pentagon's credit union on three straight days in March 2007 that were designed to evade laws that track large currency transactions.

I know, the Democrats have these people too, what with William Jefferson and Eliot Spitzer. But I think Race is in fact the 58th Republican Bushie being nailed in a hypocritical scandal in the past 16 months if my memory serves me well. In fact, in 2007, there was a new Republican under investigation pretty much every single week of the year.

What makes it even more palatable is the fact that this is the man that George W. Bush personally chose to trust with the investigation of financial wrongdoing. A man who stoops so low as to try and hide a $20,000 transaction. It’s pathetic. Very, very funny, but pathetic all the same. It is the most succinct and condensed representation of Bush’s presidency I’ve seen so far.

Five Years

2008-03-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, the order was given to start one of the most ignominious military campaigns in the history of human kind. It smacked of over-eager beavers sitting in Washington who could not wait to get the ball rolling and were worried every day, that a final discovery, that Iraq really did NOT have WMD would thwart their grubby little plans to invade a sovereign country under the guise of freedom, the tatty umbrella of the war against terrorism and the absurd notion of installing democracy as if it were a 50” plasma TV one could just set down and hook up.

Seldom has so much stupidity been collectively exercised by such a distinguished group of moronic mass murderers as in the lead up to this war.

George W. Bush
Dick Cheney
Paul Wolfowitz
Richard Perle
Doug Feith
Donald Rumsfeld
General Franks
Condoleeza Rice
Colin Powell
George Tenet

These are the criminals we have before us that set a charade in motion as see-through as Hitler’s attempt in 1939 to accuse Poland of having fired the first shots over the German border and starting the Blitzkrieg to flatten a country that fought his tanks with horses.

The shouts of bravado have grown quieter and the excited arm-chair would-be marines and weapons experts are no longer laughing at videos of American and British tanks destroying Iraqi houses, of planes dropping 500 lb bombs on people’s homes, of cruise missiles raining down on a populated city, at slogans like “Shock and Awe.”

Now, five years later, the Iraqi resistance is still giving pretty much as good as it gets. Faced with a 700 billion dollar war machine, they seem to be holding up pretty well with their sandals and scooters, their decade old Kalaschnikovs and their Chinese made RPGs. We have a David and we have a Goliath and David ain’t having any of it in this battle.

Today, on the fifth anniversary of the launch of the “days, maybe weeks, hardly months” long war, two thirds of Americans are opposed to the conflict and believe the cost in lives was not worth it. Cheney says “So?”

Now there’s a man either to be respected for being so headstrong that he doesn’t care what the people think because he’s forgotten that he’s in a democracy, or reviled because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks, he’s lined his pockets, thank you very much.

Five years after the launch of the barrage of bombs on Baghdad that signaled the start of the war, Bush will be defending his decision to go into Iraq despite the high cost saying that it:

"opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror, making Iraq a place where Arabs fight alongside Americans to drive Al-Qaeda out."

You want to tell him or shall I? No one really believes this clap trap anymore Mr. Bush. You engaged the United States military in an intractable conflict which your successor will have to deal with. You have created a situation of barely comprehendible chaos where stability was of utmost importance. You have kicked out a secular tyrant only to have him replaced by a religious fanatical group. In short, you have thrown Iraq to the dogs and don’t know what to do.

Five years on, nearly 4,000 US service men and women are pointing their fingers from the grave. You and your demented, lunatic Administration, your idiotic guesses as to the costs of the war, your ‘slam dunks’ and ‘cake walks’, your ‘bring it on,’ are a testimony to your complete misunderstanding of the responsibility you had and that you squandered for personal gain and agenda.

Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis rotting in the desert sands bear witness to a crime for which you and your war-criminal friends should rightfully be incarcerated for life. You have destroyed a country and destroyed its people and are just itching to get your grubby little hands on that country’s oil. Five years later, as Iraqi children sit without parents, by the lights of candles as they wait for a generator somewhere to get more gas so it can provide a couple more hours of light, as widows still weep over lost husbands, parents cry over lost children, you can observe your legacy in their stories of horror, death and poverty.

Loophole

2008-03-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

Bezerkistan passed a new regulation compelling companies who observe fraud being perpetrated to report it to the authorities. This was to close a loophole that had existed for years which allowed companies to ignore fraud, a practice which cost their government billions of Bezerkistani Schlocks (1.22 BezSchlks to the US $).

However recently, His Royal Highness the President of Bezerkistan, snuck in a separate piece of legislation exempting companies from the new law if they discovered the fraud abroad. This was because many of Bezerkistan’s companies, who’s CEO’s were personal friends of His Royal Highness the President of Bezerkistan, had contracts that were abroad.

This would make an amusing read except for the fact that the country was not Bezerkistan but the United States of America and the President is unfortunately George Bush, who has again defeated logic in support of his buddies, and thwarted the law in favor of corporations.

The proposed rule, put forth by the White House Office of Management and Budget last year, exempts all companies who do work overseas from a new regulation requiring US contractors to report waste, fraud or abuse they encounter while doing work for the government.

The whole sordid affair can be read in The Raw Story.

McCain With Parsley On The Side

2008-03-13T01:35:00.000-07:00

Or Why McCain Won't Do Part II

"Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art."
- - Miguel de Cervantes (1547 - 1616) Spanish novelist.

In our friend’s case it’s Televangelist Rod Parsley whom we are talking about, who’s endorsement of the Republican Presidential front-runner is valuable to McCain who, it has to be said, is not that picky. The trouble is that our Televangelist is one of those with a particular axe to grind. It isn’t enough for Rod Parsley to proclaim, quite falsely, but who cares at this late stage in the proceedings, that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is:

"In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore."

Holy Mackerel! Say it like it is, Bob, But before that statement even has a hope of being asorbed by the surrounding audience it get’s worse. What? You think it can't get worse? Listen up!

Parsley is not shy about his desire to obliterate Islam. In Silent No More, he notes—approvingly—that Christopher Columbus shared the same goal: "It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492…Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America." He urges his readers to realize that a confrontation between Christianity and Islam is unavoidable

Christopher Columbus set out to defeat Islam? Holy Smokes! That's revisionist history if ever I heard it. Last I read, Columbus wanted to find India. But at the end of his chapter on Islam in which he invokes its destruction, Parsley asks:

"Are we a Christian nation? I say yes." Without actually specifying how Islam should be eradicated, he effectively calls for a new crusade. Parsley was eventually made to shut up but not before he had thoroughly discredited every Muslim in the world as an enemy of the United States.

The core of the matter however is this:

McCain's relationship with Parsley is politically significant. In 2004, Parsley's church was credited with driving Christian fundamentalist voters to the polls for George W. Bush. With Ohio expected to again be a decisive state in the presidential contest, Parsley's World Harvest Church and an affiliated entity called Reformation Ohio, which registers voters, could be important players within this battleground state.

In view of the fact that the Ohio Republican Party has been reduced to shreds by the myriad of scandals that have befallen it and that Ted Strickland, a popular Democrat, is now the state's Governor, McCain and the Republicans will need all the help they can get in the Buckeye State this fall. It's a real question: Can McCain win the presidency without Parsley?
And who is he, that he has to rely on a nutter to do so?

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-rod-parsley-spiritual-guide.html

"War Is Inevitable"

2008-03-10T07:51:00.000-07:00

As the Bush nightmare slowly draws to a close and everyone holds their breath that the idiot in the White House won’t start another war before he leaves office, former Bush loyalists are dropping out and trying to settle scores before the whole mucky neocon house of manure collapses.

Now it’s Doug Feith’s turn and in his new book, Doug doesn’t pull any punches. On his list of targets is Condoleeza Rice, Paul Bremer, General Tommy Franks and Colin Powell amongst others. The funny thing is, that every time one of these Neocons does his little semi-defection dance, all he or she does, is confirm what the left has been saying about the whole Iraq episode.

Feith confirms what Ron Suskind and Richard Clarke had already stated in their books The Price of Loyalty and Against All Enemies; namely that Bush had decided to go to war on Dec. 18, 2002, well before the UN inspectors were anywhere near done and well before all the seriously dodgy intelligence reports about WMDs were published. Feith states that Bush said on that day: “War is inevitable.”

The right however scoffed at Suskind who basically wrote on behalf of Paul H. O’Neill, probably one of the men with the highest integrity who ever served office and they scoffed at Clarke who himself had served under four Presidents, when he stated the same thing. How are the Neocons going to scoff at Douglas Feith, one of the leading architects of the Iraq war?

Feith joins a long line of ex-Bush Administration fatheads who led the country into war and are now backpedaling to save their future careers. What I find so funny though is how all these people are falling over themselves to blame everyone else.

McLellan blamed Cheney in What Happened, George Tenet blames everyone except the CIA, David Kuo blames the entire Rove apparatus and Doug Feith blames everyone except Rumsfeld but especially the CIA. It’s quite clear that everyone in the Bush Administration, without exception was to blame for the fiasco that Iraq has become although Feith concentrates on Tommy Franks who he criticizes for not having any interest whatsoever in any kind of postwar planning as well as the fact that Paul Bremer and the rest of the Bush Administration didn’t listen to him as The Washington Post reports:

The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was "the mishandling of the political transition." The good that Bremer did, he concludes, "was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation."

I can only laugh as I watch this ship of inept fools implode and sink in the very quagmire that they created. These people are criminals, should be treated as criminals and should be made to pay as the criminals that they are – the whole pack of deceitful, pompous, self-righteous, arrogant boneheads that have been trying to steer this country and the rest of the world off a cliff for the past seven years.

Why McCain Won't Do.

2008-03-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

In a symbolic gesture, G.W.Bush today, vetoed legislation passed by Congress that would have banned water boarding. Why symbolic? It’s a symptomatic demonstration that the pack of lying, deceitful, arrogant, pig-headed neocon barbarians running this country do not understand that if you do not uphold the values under which your country was founded, you no longer have a country worth defending.

Congress’ legislation to ban waterboarding as a means of interrogation by the CIA would not have been a revolutionary, nation-threatening move that would have fed the country to a radical Islamic wolf pack. The right wing cabal of fascists in the White House would have the country think so of course, but in fact, this legislation would have brought the CIA in line with the military with regards to the questioning of prisoners. The U.S. Army Field Manual expressly prohibits waterboarding along with several other techniques for extracting information from captives.

In the article run by The Raw Story, Bush cites National Security as a reason for his vote. The real humdinger though, is that the bill was passed along partisan lines – virtually all the Republican Congressmen voted against the measure restricting the methods of questioning to those within the bounds of the Geneva Convention.

If anything, this should be a final reminder to those Democrats irresponsible enough to consider for a minute voting for McCain should Obama lose the nomination. McCain, after his famous torture flip-flop a fortnight ago would certainly also veto such legislation. If you want to finally rid this country of the scourge of torture and the blight that the collective Republican body but in particular, the neocon criminals have instilled upon it, you have to vote a Democratic candidate into the White House.

You have to.

No Need for Wishy-Washy

2008-03-06T07:50:00.000-08:00

The Bush Administration have proven to be world champions of wishy-washiness. One of the major wishy-washy prizes went to Donald Rumsfeld for his Weapons of Mass Destruction Statement:

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Wishy-washy gave way to “I don’t recall” when Alberto Gonzales managed to reply 97 times to questions during a hearing using that statement.

They continue however their inability at precise communication when it comes to torture and more specifically waterboarding. “It’s umm, like torture but isn’t. It isn’t torture unless someone else is doing it? It’s torture unless the bomb’s about to go off….”

All of these have been stammered statements made amongst much coughing into assorted closed fists by members of the Bush Administration or some members even of the Supreme Court. So where to look for a country that has something definite to say about it? Because Great Britain won’t help out – they are traditionally vague and imprecise about everything.

But Canada is coming to our rescue. Canada, that has decided to single-handedly reject ALL the evidence obtained from Al Qaeda suspects if it was obtained through waterboarding – a form of torture. Of course the CIA went nuts and immediately asked the Canadians how they could possibly exclude all this evidence from the dossiers of Harkat and Charkaoui, suspects who may have had some fringe involvement in 9/11. This was the reply as reported by Newsweek:

Bernard Beckhoff, a spokesman for Canada's public safety ministry, which oversees CSIS, said he could not comment on developments in either case because they are both still before the courts. But he then added, pointedly: "The CSIS director has stated publicly that torture is morally repugnant and not particularly reliable. CSIS does not knowingly use information which has been obtained through torture."

Clear, concise. No wishy washy.

joseph Stiglitz and Why

2008-02-28T06:42:00.000-08:00

The dollar hit a new low this week against the major currencies. A couple of weeks ago Bloomberg reported that the Taj Mahal wouldn’t accept the US dollar anymore and since then, other Indian tourist sites also no longer accept it. This trend is being repeated in other countries.

This may seem trivial, but ever since I was a child, the mighty dollar was the one currency one always had to have in one's pocket if one traveled. It was ubiquitously accepted by porters, hotels, taxi drivers and restaurants all over the world. That time is over as I hear form former colleagues, that in Afghanistan hotels prefer to be paid in Euros.

This country is in the middle of an economical nightmare with repercussions from the sub-prime meltdown sure to remain with us well into next year. Now, as The Australian reports, a leading economist and Nobel Prize Winner, Joseph Stiglitz, has laid the blame for the nation’s financial woes firmly at the feet of the Bush Administration naming the overrun in costs for the Iraq war as the fundamental cause for the pending recession:

"When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn't focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.
"(Then defence secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said 'baloney', and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion. We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion. "

Stiglitz went on to say that the figure of $US 3 trillion is conservative and probably understated and that another $US 500 billion would be spent on fighting in Iraq in the coming two years, money that could have been better used

to improve the security and quality of life of Americans and the rest of the world.

To put the thing into perspective, Stiglitz mentioned that the money being spent on the Iraq war each week, was enough to wipe out illiteracy in the whole world and just a few days worth of the Iraq war would be enough to fund health insurance for every American child.

The damage Bush has done to the United States is barely fathomable, but it is certainly greater in an economical sense than the worst terrorist dirty bomb scenario one can think of.

New Look at The Surge

2008-02-25T20:51:00.000-08:00

A devastating account from Iraq has been published in this month’s Rolling Stone magazine. Its entitled “The Myth of The Surge” and depicts the present situation in the country as a disastrous time bomb which will backfire badly. The six page article is a bleak but gripping description of Nir Rosen’s attempt to investigate the current situation there. It begins with a walk through Baghdad’s Dora district, once a thriving neighborhood of high end shops and apartment buildings.

This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. ….. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

Rosen’s investigations describe how Petraeus’ attempt to bring some order to the chaos of Iraq has meant arming the very Sunnis that used to fight the Americans. Rosen accompanies one such group of Sunnis, members of the so-called ‘Awakening.’ He also witnesses the confused and befuddled attempts by the American troops to cash in on intelligence supplied by ‘The Awakening.’ In this example, Rosen is describing an arrest made by a relatively fresh platoon of US soldiers:

For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they're eager for action.

"Somebody move!" shouts one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!"

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist — they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation. A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. ......

As the soldiers storm into nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the Americans come up to me, thinking I am a military translator. They look bemused. The Americans, they tell me in Arabic, have got the wrong men. The eleven squatting in the courtyard are all Sunnis, not Shiites; some are even members of the Awakening and had helped identify the Mahdi Army suspects.

I try to tell the soldiers they've made a mistake — it looks like the Iraqis had been trying to connect a house to a generator — but the Americans don't listen. All they see are the wires on the ground: To them, that means the Iraqis must have been trying to lay an improvised explosive device. "If an IED is on the ground," one tells me, "we arrest everybody in a 100-meter radius." As the soldiers blindfold and handcuff the eleven Iraqis, the two tipsters look on, puzzled to see U.S. troops arresting their own allies.

The case Rosen makes is that in an effort to stabilize the country, one of the cornerstones of ‘The Surge’ is simply to buy off as many Iraqis as possible. Some estimates put the number of Iraqis under contract to the US army at over half a million men. This has been working in the short term but bodes ill for the future:

With American forces now arming both sides in the civil war, the violence in Iraq has once again started to escalate. In January, some 100 members of the new Sunni militias — whom the Americans have now taken to calling "the Sons of Iraq" — were assassinated in Baghdad and other urban areas.

Rosen’s main contact is a Sunni who openly professes anger at the Shiite policemen manning the roadblocks but he also spends time with Arkan, a member of the Iraqi police force:

"The situation won't get better," he says softly. An officer of the Iraqi National Police, a man charged with bringing peace to his country, he has been reduced to hiding in his van, unable to speak openly in the very neighborhood he patrols. Thanks to the surge, both the Shiites and the Sunnis now have weapons and legitimacy. And what can come of that, Arkan asks, except more fighting?

The article makes a great read and is a testament to the ever deeper hole that the United States is digging itself into in Iraq. The right may scoff at such an article and complain of media bias, but they will do it from the comfort of their living rooms across America, without really knowing and not really wanting to know the truth.

Don Siegelmann, Burning Houses and Censoreship

2008-02-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

Many might remember the case of Don Siegelmann, the former Democratic Governor of Alabama who was prosecuted and subsequently jailed on corruption charges in 2006. He had been Governor from 1999 to 2003, when he was defeated by the Republican candidate Bob Riley by a margin of only 3,000 votes, a controversial result as a voting machine malfunction in a single county produced the votes needed to give Riley the election.

In June 2007, a Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson of Rainsville, Alabama, signed a sworn statement that that Karl Rove was preparing to politically neutralize Siegelman with an investigation headed by the U.S. Department of Justice as far back as 2002. According to Simpson's statement, she was on a Republican campaign conference call in 2002 when she heard Bill Canary tell other campaign workers not to worry about Siegelman because Canary's "girls" and "Karl" would make sure the Justice Department pursued the Democrat so he was not a political threat in the future.

In September 2007, Simpson gave sworn testimony to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary regarding this issue including stating that Rove asked Simpson to attempt to take sexually compromising photographs of Siegelmann, which she was not able to do. The fact was, that the White House was directly involved in influencing the political outcomes of gubernatorial elections and showed direct White House involvement in federal prosecutions.

Dana Jill Simpson's house mysteriously caught fire after her congressional deposition.

CBS then started an investigation which was to produce a show on 60 minutes about the Don Siegelmann controversy. Allegedly CBS was told by the White House to back down and its journalists attacked in a widespread campaign on the web. CBS went ahead and finished filming the program. It aired last night but was mysteriously blacked out in parts of Alabama.
The local station blamed CBS and issued a press statement to that effect, but CBS denied having any transmission problems. The show aired flawlessly across the rest of the country. CBS maintains that the problem was with the local station WHNT-TV.

Who is WHNT-TV? The Raw Story tells us:

WHNT in Huntsville Alabama was purchased by Oak Hill Capital Partners from the New York Times Company early last year. Oak Hill is owned by the Bass brothers, Bush fundraisers at the "Pioneer" level – raising over $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in both 2000 and 2004. Lee Bass is perhaps the best known member of the Bass family for his role in George W. Bush’s failed energy venture called Spectrum 7 and later for his bailing out of Harken Energy.

Back To The Light

2008-02-24T20:34:00.000-08:00

This Year's Academy Award for Best Documentary went to Taxi To The Dark Side by Alex Gibney. The film presents an in-depth look at the torture practices of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, focusing on an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base.

In receiving his Oscar, Alex Gibney said:

"This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let's hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light."

Thank you Mr. Gibney for doing your part to do just that.

From Pond Scum to Raw Sewage

2008-02-21T05:53:00.000-08:00

Bill O’Reilly is pond scum. I think most people can agree on that. But even pond scum apparently can sink to new lows. The man who embarrassed himself after claiming to be surprised that “there was no difference in a restaurant being run by blacks” has now targeted Michelle Obama as Media Matters reports:

"I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels"

A lynching party? Please, where’s the right with it’s artificial morals calling for O’Reilly’s dismissal? I’m talking about the same right that attacked Kelly Tilghman when she made a gaffe regarding Tiger Woods. Only the difference is striking and it’s huge.

So if it turns out – because this is what Bill O’Reilly is saying – if it turns out that Michelle Obama really did not have respect for her country prior to her speech the other night, Mr. Falafel-Viagra wants to lynch her.

The guy is so out of bounds it isn’t funny but I’m sure the right, in their ever increasing capability to deny everything will find a way to exonerate instead of excoriate the guy. Yes, yesterday pond scum turned into raw sewage. A chemical miracle.

An Era Ends

2008-02-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

Fidel Castro has resigned as Cuba’s President after fifty years, making him the world’s longest ruling Head of State except for a couple of monarchies. It will signal a change in Cuban politics and a change in Cuban-American relations.

Castro has been a thorn in America’s side for decades. The United States’ embargo and sanctions which were imposed on Cuba crippled Cuba’s ability to create any form of functioning economy up until recent years when Europeans have funneled money for hotel and leisure resort projects to the island.

In contrast to the way many Americans who have never been to Cuba think, Cubans are not of the general opinion that Castro is a criminal, a dictator and most Cubans certainly do not hate him. During my two visits there in the 90’s, I witnessed that many Cubans were not only proud to be Cuban but proud that they, along with Castro, were resisting the intense pressure from the United States. Cubans loved ‘their old man.’ They told me stories about the Bay of Pigs and how they had beaten the United States.

The Raw Story reports:
"He will continue to be my commander in chief, he will continue to be my president," said Miriam, a 50-year-old boat worker waiting for the bus to Havana port. "But I'm not sad because he isn't leaving, and after 49 years he is finally resting a bit."

The sanctions had disastrous effects on the Cuban economy and the United States put pressure on its allies also not to accept Cuban goods. It’s a childish policy which only hurt the Cuban people, the same people America was purportedly trying to help. Despite that, Cuba had excellent schools, colleges and universities as well as excellent doctors and an amazing and of course free health system – if you ignore the fact that they were constantly short on medications.

We should consider what Cuba could have become had the sanctions not been imposed. Contrary to East Germany, which failed miserably as a socialist state, Cuba actually functioned very well mainly because many of its farmers remained autonomous. But the Cuban people, though poor, can now snub their noses at a long list of American Presidents from Kennedy to Bush, but especially to Bill Clinton, who allowed the embargo to be codified into law in 1992 as an attempt “to bring democracy to the Cuban people.”

It’s maybe time to consider that countries should really be allowed to choose for themselves when and how they change their governments. This story was one of the underdog that plainly beat the superpower.

"It Was Wrong"

2008-02-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

Those three words will resonate for a while throughout the United Kingdom, maybe throughout Europe, the West, maybe the world. “It was wrong” is how John Williams, former Foreign Office aide on Blair’s team and alleged author of the ‘sexed up dossier,’ refers to the contents of the well publicized memo that pretended that Saddam Hussein could launch a WMD strike in 45 minutes.

The Independent goes on to say that Williams explains that publication of the dossier will show that Tony Blair and his team were set on proving that Hussein was a threat and that the facts were twisted to fit the mindset.

"The argument was that here was someone who had been known to possess illegal weapons. We regarded him as a threat." He added: "The document will show the mindset that everyone had. It was wrong and we know that now."

But the damage had been done and Tony Blair, ever ready to throw himself behind the miracle of George W. Bush – the only fully functioning president entirely without a brain – made sure that the evidence was skewed so that military action was unavoidable.

“It was wrong,” is a sentence that carries with it the lives of many British soldiers. Having been wrong carries with it the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It allowed the Bush Administration to set another brick in their wall of lies. It was a cornerstone of the Iraq war.

Williams says they were wrong, but what he infers is that they were deliberately wrong. The dossier was intended to spread fear into the populations of the West to allow its leaders to wage war. So many, so many fell for the fear-mongering and so many still do. It reinforces the idiom: ‘question everything’ and above all, question your government because its motives are not necessarily in your best interests.

Who Needs Forests?

2008-02-14T07:27:00.000-08:00

Interested in seeing where a man’s interests lie? Look where he’s spending his cash. G.W. Bush’s latest budget is tight because lots and lots of money has to go to…..Iraq. Why? Because Iraq is ‘important.’ Where will the man get all this cash that goes to Iraq from? Well, he can’t raise taxes – that would be a no-no. He also can’t take it from his defense buddies and nor can he cut back the billions and billions in subsidies to the oil conglomerates because the poor, record profit conglomerates need the cash to pay the over-inflated bonuses of their fat cat bosses. The Raw Story reports that Bush is set on slashing the Forestry Service budget.

“Well look over here,” said Bush. “The forestry commission has a ton of cash - $4.43 billion to be exct. What the heck – I mean, what the blazes does a forest need cash for?” He exclaimed, scratching his head. “I know, let’s slash the forestry budget.”

“But s-sir..” stammered an aide. “Forestry fires destroyed $2.2 billion dollars worth of property and killed 10 people.”

“Ahh people shmeeple!” Said Bush. We’ll allocate more of the cash to fighting fires but reduce the budget overall.”

“Where should we divert the money from to increase the firefighting budget?” Asked the aide nervously.

“Let’s see…” said Bush, reading very, very slowly. “What’s this word here? Pree-venn-shun? Why’s there so much money allocated for that? We’ll just take it from there.”

“but sir-“ started the aide.

“No buts, son. We’ll reduce the budget for prevention. No butts – get it – no cigarette butts. Get it – cos they like – START the fires. Heh heh.”

Justice Slime Bag

2008-02-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

It’s hard to believe that a Supreme Court Justice can have such a poor understanding of his own country’s Constitution that he professes that the 8th amendment doesn’t apply to foreigners. Actually, what am I saying? Justice Scalia, Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy and probably Darth Vader’s ugly aborted twin is the pinnacle of Neoconservatism and by whom has the Constitution of the United States been completely forgotten, ignored, trashed and otherwise trampled over other than by the Neocons?

In a recent BBC Interview, Antonin Scum-Bag Scalia actually argues that torture may be legal! I’ll repeat that just to make sure we got it: Justice Scalia, a Supreme Court Judge, says that it may be legal to torture someone. Then please, can someone, somewhere, explain to me why we in the West have railed for years about other countries doing it and have invoked something called ‘Human Rights?’ I mean, what rights do humans have if it is permissible to torture them?

The first line of the German Constitution reads: “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.”

A human being’s dignity is untouchable.

It is one of the most powerful lines of prose I have ever read and was written into the new German Constitution following WW II and as a result of the horrors that the Nazi regime inflicted on people. Untouchable. Not: untouchable except when you are drowning them. Not untouchable except when you are forcing them to wear women’s underwear on their heads and to make naked human pyramids although they haven’t done a thing to deserve it. Just ‘untouchable.’

Someone really needs to bang that phrase into the heads of Bush, Cheney, Scalia and the rest of the bizarro, uneducated, incompetent, ignorant as a pig’s bottom and generally uncivilized neoconservative pack.

Addressing a Syndrome

2008-02-07T20:57:00.000-08:00

It’s frightening and very disconcerting to read. I’m talking about Democrats who say they support Obama and who say they’ll vote for McCain if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination. I’m baffled – and then again I’m not. This country somehow, by hook or by crook, managed to get the same criminal bozo elected to the Presidency twice in a row.

I was stunned when Bush was elected the first time. Well, OK, he wasn’t – his Supreme Court buddies and Katherine strip-the-minorities-of-their-vote zombie-ninja-bride Harris stole the election for him along with his golfing pals at Diebold. But in the 2004 election, Bush actually got what would seem like the popular vote. I didn’t understand how that could happen…

But now I see Democrats lining up to thwart a Clinton Presidency if Obama doesn’t get nominated. Wake up people! John McCain is the hundred-years-war man. He’s the “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” guy. He’s the antithesis of the person who might have a chance to repair the cracks and fissures that have developed not only within this country, but between this country and the rest of the world.

Hillary Clinton would be a polarizing figure. Hillary Clinton would be attacked by Republicans. She is not as enticingly innocent as Obama. But is that a reason to abandon the chance of steering this country back on course? Is that a reason to take away the hope of universal health care? Does it make sense to throw away the opportunity of raising America's credibility and stature in the world?

McCain will certainly do neither the first, nor can he offer the second and is certain to do the opposite of the last. McCain is determined to live up to the expectations of the Neocons. By voting McCain, one might as well give the present presidential cretin a third term and be done with it. At least we can laugh at his continuous stream of pronunciation errors.

You Don't Have to Destroy a Country For That

2008-02-05T20:31:00.000-08:00

How angry would it make you to know that despite your best efforts and uncompromised testimony someone destroyed your home believing you to be hiding contraband. How angry would you be if they did it to your whole town? What about your whole country?

The Daily Star reports that Saad Tawfiq, one of Saddam’s known leading scientists, told the CIA in no uncertain terms as early as 2002 that Saddam Hussein no longer had any WMDs or WMD programs.

Via his sister, who was approached by the CIA, Tawfiq replied to twenty questions about Iraq’s weapons systems and capabilities.

'There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing,'" Tawfiq said. "She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: 'No, no, no ...' I kept swearing on the grave of my mother."

But the CIA chose to ignore Saad and instead go with the evidence provided by an unemployed taxi driver who was code named curveball. On his testimony, Colin Powell went before the United Nations and gave the world the show the Neocons wanted.

Tawfiq saw the Colin Powell extravaganza.

"When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying - immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

The CIA said that Saad Tawfiq’s reports were not ignored but were contradicted, so that there was a chance that he was not telling the truth. So the Bush administration was told in no uncertain terms by a leading Iraqi scientist that Saddam’s WMDs had all been destroyed and yet they decided nonetheless to invade Iraq. I don’t find that acceptable even if there was a chance that some programs had not been stopped. As Saad Tawfiq himself says:

"You don't have to destroy a country for that."

It’s so clear that Bush and his Administration are simply war criminals and on this day, this super Tuesday, I can only hope that this country will be given a chance to right the wrongs of the past Neocon regime in the upcoming election.

The Turning Tide?

2008-02-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty certain so far, that Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic nominee and that she will then be elected President by the people of the United States. I personally wouldn't have any qualms about that except that she would be about as polarizing as Bush was. But my feeling was simply that there was a wider base that would support her.

My observations of the current election, bar the news come from a very, very small part of the country. In two relatively well off precincts in Oakland and Berkeley, I had in the past weeks noticed that about 25% of the houses had Clinton signs in the front yards, about 5% Kucinich signs, about 5% signs for Edwards and about 15% had Obama signs.

Yesterday, returning to both those areas - in the line of work and not as a scientific attempt at polling - I noticed that about 40% of the houses had signs that read: 'Obama for President.'I'm pretty sure that the number of houses with signs for Clinton had diminished but certainly, every other house almost had a sign supporting Barack Obama.

I appreciate that there's nothing accurate about this and it by no means reflects the entire country, but maybe it does signify a reversal as more people turn to the hope that real change will come. On this day, 'Super Tuesday', it will be certainly very interesting to see the vote distribution. There are so many factors involved with so many ghosts riding this wave - how many women will vote for Hillary because she's a woman and how many women will do exactly the opposite? Internalized oppression leads to strange choices and the same can be said for Barack. It is almost impossible to really predict how people will vote. D, an African female friend wanted to vote for Edwards! She will probably be voting for Obama she said. Either way, when the votes are cast, these primaries and the coming election will be electrifying. For the first time in the history of this country, either a woman or an African American will be the Democratic nominee.

I am convinced that one of those two will be the next President of the United States and that in itself and of itself, will be an incredible victory over prejudice and chauvenism and will mark a new era in this country.

Having read many posts here about the candidates, I've come to appreciate that Clinton, who will most certainly alienate the right despite being pretty conservative, may not be the best choice for America, but maybe, truly, the one person who can bring this country together again is indeed Barack Obama.

Road Map to Oblivion

2008-02-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Carter should probably be best remembered for his historic role in 1979, in creating the unthinkable; in producing a miracle: peace between Israel and Egypt. It was a spectacular diplomatic coup which earned him the Nobel Prize for peace and deservedly so. Fourteen years later, after fourteen years of Republicans in the White House that is, after fourteen years of unrest in the Middle East, William J. Clinton stunned the world by achieving what no one could possibly imagine: a handshake between Yassir Aarafat and Yitzak Rabin. It was a historic moment and was the first sign that peace between the Israelis and Palestinians was possible in some form.

Ten years later, George W. Bush unveiled his ‘Road Map to Peace’ in the Middle East. Since then, the Middle East has been plunged into new dark ages. It’s like watching a bad film.

- Lebanon’s tenuous peace after years of civil war began to break down. Rafik Hariri was assassinated.
- The Darfur bloodshed began.
- Iraq was invaded causing four million Iraqis to flee their country and seek homes elsewhere.
- A new cold war began with Iran
- A war was prosecuted between Israel and Hezbollah
- The Palestinians have split into two factions and talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis have broken down completely.

Not much of a road map – more of a recipe for disaster. The situation in Israel has become extremely dire. With the rest of the world focused on the American elections, the devolving situation in Afghanistan and the continuing disaster in Iraq, few people have time to cast a glance towards the so-called “Holy Land.”

A quick scan of Ynews.net reveals these two disturbing articles:

Residents of the West Bank village of Azun, near Qalqilya, discovered on Friday morning that someone had hung leaflets outside their houses and on their mosques, warning them to stop hurling stones at IDF forces, or else the soldiers would fire at them and close down their businesses.

As it turns out, the leaflets were hung by a soldier acting on his own accord. However few there doubt that the threat would have been carried out.

The next piece of news was regarding the protest march which took place yesterday:

Thousands of people took part Friday in a protest march in the Arab city of Sakhnin in northern Israel following Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's decision not to indict the police officers involved in the October 2000 riots, which left 13 Israeli Arabs dead.

The police officers should have been indicted – there was at the time a clear violation of rules and an excessive use of force. This was a unanimous feeling amongst the independent observers at the time. The West, which severely criticized Chavez and his government for opening fire on demonstrators, has been extremely quiet about this incident.

The Kuwait News Agency issued this report:

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Feb 1 (KUNA) -- Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shot and wounded five Palestinian mourners during a funeral in Beit Amer, north Al-Khalil, or Hebron, south the West Bank, Friday.

These three incidents have to be taken within the context of the Gaza lockdown which has left dozens dead and thousands without food, water or electricity. The recent breach of the Gaza wall into Egypt has alleviated much of the pressure within Gaza but is of course not a solution. Not unless, that is, someone actually wants the Palestinians driven out of there. Having turned it into one of the most inhospitable places to live, not entirely unaided by a thoroughly corrupt Palestinian sub-government and George Bush’s passive stance with regards to the region, Israel is on the way to destroying the foundation of what once was a promising peace process.

One million?

2008-01-31T07:15:00.000-08:00

We will probably never know the full extent of the damage caused by the Iraq war and we will probably never know the real cost in human lives. But some groups are trying to find the latter out and the way they go about it is that they are questioning members of individual families about deaths related to the conflict within that family.

The latest poll conducted by ORB and published by Reuters has been shocking:

LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups.

The poll has an accuracy, says ORB, of 1.7%. However, even if the poll was out by 20% it would be a statistic to make one pause and think.

It would also be a statistic that finally puts to bed the question of whether toppling Saddam was worth it or not.

If at all accurate, it would mean that George Bush put into motion events that killed a million people who shouldn’t have been killed. His ‘oops’ caused a million deaths. That’s the sort of figure that would normally carry the tag of “mass murderer.”

Bush Destroyed The Republican Party

2008-01-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

No, don’t look at me – I think George Bush destroyed America, but here I’m just the messenger. The person who actually said this is none other than the right’s beloved, iconic Peggy Noonan in today’s Wall Street Journal.

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

I don’t doubt Noonan’s analysis. What puzzles me is that any Republicans out there still support Bush. Do they really hate the Republican Party that much?

935

2008-01-22T20:54:00.001-08:00

It’s the number of false statements the bush Administration made with regards to the security threat represented by Iraq in the wake of 9/11. The findings, by two independent non-profit journalism organizations conclude that the Bush Administration stated unequivocally on at least 532 separate occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that they were trying to obtain them, or had links to Al Qaeda.

Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, staff members of the Fund for Independence in Journalism are quoted by the Huffington Post as saying:

"In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Iraq Vets: Killing Civilians is Policy

2008-01-21T12:38:00.000-08:00

I’m certain that the usual talking heads will splutter and huff and puff and vehemently deny that this is true, but at the end of the day, one can only pit one point of view against another. A group called Iraqi Veterans Against the War have accused the US military of targeting civilians as The Raw Story reports:

"The killing of innocent civilians is policy," said veteran Mike Blake. "It's unit policy and it's Army policy. It's not official policy, but it's what's happens on the ground everyday. It's what unit commanders individually encourage."

It is easy to understand why members of the military past and present would want to deny this and a lot harder to understand why someone would actually come out and state that this is the case and that they took part in such actions.

I fully expect the right that loves the military as long as they play by their rules, i.e. we don’t want to see bodies of Americans, the only casualties we want to know about are Arabs which we can refer to as terrorists, especially if they are dead and we don’t want to hear about atrocities unless they’ve been committed by the other side, to swift boat this group of veterans.

They will very quickly forget the “service to their country” that these soldiers performed and will forget the sacrifices these soldiers made. But these veterans, like the Winter Soldier veterans of 1971, are truly courageous, because in a country such as this where so much is focused on the military, it is harder to speak up. Faced with fellow soldiers who don’t want to hear this it’s harder to speak up. Confronted with what society expects from you it is harder to speak up.

As Maggie Kuhn said, “speak your mind even if your voice shakes.”

These veterans are doing just that and should be applauded not derided.

It's The Economy, Stupid

2008-01-18T08:40:00.000-08:00

This could also be entitled ‘Denial is Not a River.’

What I want to know is where is the right? They should be on the barricades by now. But they continue to pretend that all is well and that the Bush cut-taxes-for-the-rich economy is working. Well it isn’t.

When the first indicators started appearing back in August of last year, the DOW was heading up to “another all-time-high” as the idiots on FOX News announced and with broad grins and puffed out little chests they denounced those that were more cautious and were already warning about the sub-prime crisis. But in today’s America, the real economical data is glossed over and scrapped for a superficial “everything’s great” approach. As late as December experts were still apparently oblivious to the real state of the union’s finances.

One of the major factors here is that the giant corrections that the market experienced when the tech bubble burst along with 9/11 (sorry to sound like Rudi but it really did have an effect) was that the economy slowed significantly from its Clinton days. This was, I’m sure a thorn in the Republicans’ side but their myopic approach to fixing the problem basically was to put a tax-cut band-aid on a gushing arterial wound. To move things along, the housing market was poked and jostled into action and Alan Greenspan decided, when interest rates were at a record low, to suggest ARM mortgages over fixed rate loans.

Millions of Americans were able to buy their houses for the first time as sub-prime borrowers suddenly qualified for houses which were already at utopic prices. The result is the sub-prime disaster and it has not gone away. Only to listen to FOX News or the right wing pundits, you would think it was nothing. Peanuts. But it isn’t. Merill Lynch just posted its biggest quarterly loss ever, Lehmann Bros. are axing jobs and homebuilding has seen its sharpest drop in 27 years. Building permits have dropped to levels not seen since 33 years ago as reported by CNN Money. The ensuing result is that the nations largest builders and at the same time, employers are reeling with huge losses.

That weakness has also hammered at the results of the nation's largest builders. A week ago KB Home (KBH, Fortune 500), the nation's No. 5 builder by revenue, reported a fiscal fourth quarter loss that was nearly 10 times worse than forecasts, as CEO Jeff Mezger told investors during a conference call that "As we enter 2008, we see no indication markets are stabilizing."

The DOW Jones Industrial average is almost back to where it was when Bush took office and basically, if an index doesn’t move forward, it’s going backwards against inflation.

Recession around the corner? No! The recession is here and what does FOX News report:

Bush to Lay Out Plan to Put Money in Your Pocket. President Bush to Push for Tax Rebates, Breaks for Businesses to Keep Economy Growing.

Economy growing? Growing? Guys, the economy is in free fall. Bush dropped the ball. He’s destroyed an unfathomable amount of capital, shredded the value of the US dollar and caused record foreclosures in the housing market. It’s the economy, stupid.

Iraq is Not What It Was

2008-01-17T07:34:00.000-08:00

Just as in Afghanistan, where in the wake of the US led war on the Taliban, farmers were left without any sort of income and a large proportion turned to growing opium poppies, Iraqi farmers are now seeing themselves forced to do the same as The Independent reports:

The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops…..

The speed with which farmers are turning to poppies is confirmed by the Iraqi news agency al-Malaf Press, which says that opium is now being produced around the towns of Khalis, Sa'adiya, Dain'ya and south of Baladruz…

Afghanistan has now become the world’s number one exporter of heroin, providing over 75% of the world’s market. The Afghan opium is normally processed in Afghanistan and then shipped through Iraq. This process was allegedly impossible during Saddam Hussein’s time because of his fanatical dislike of drugs and his control of ports such as Basra.

Although there seem to be no labs in Iraq as yet, one can imagine it is only a matter of time. The question is, who is going to stop or even control this? Is this the next thing the US army is going to have to deal with?

Just for the record, since the US led invasion the following has changed in Iraq:

Women are afraid to go on the streets without traditional muslim dress [check]
Christians are no longer free to worship where they wish [check]
Most of Baghdad is without power and water most of the time [check]
On average about 50 Iraqis die from violence in Baghdad every day [check]
Iraq has started growing opium poppies [check]

That’s a pretty impressive record considering the country was apparently ‘freed.’ Good on ya’ George.

White House Destroyed Back-Up Tapes

2008-01-16T08:20:00.000-08:00

The Raw Story reports that the White House, which has up till now refused to cooperate in the case of the missing emails regarding the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, has now in fact come up with a statement a few minutes - let's repeat that - a few minutes before their court-ordered midnight deadline ran out:

The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.

How convenient.

Pentagon Sexed Up Straits of Hormuz Incident

2008-01-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Gareth Porter of AntiWar.com analyses the dissemination of the Straits of Hormuz incident and provides a clear description of how what was a pretty routine and normal event for the Navy in those waters, was warmed up by the Pentagon into the international incident that pointed to Iran as an aggressive enemy.

The timing is interesting for this propaganda piece, which came on the eve of a trip by George Bush to the Middle East where he intended, amongst other things to beg the Saudis for more oil and also convince Middle Eastern leaders that Iran was a threat. The incident itself however was so normal that neither the Navy nor the Pentagon saw fit to report it. Only after a strategic decision was taken to ramp up the anti-Iranian rhetoric, did military officials turn it into the story that it wasn’t.

Central to the events of that day is the recording of a threatening voice that is heard on the accompanying video. That voice, it turns out was spliced into the recording in order to give the argument that the Iranian boats were threatening, some weight:

A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHF channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command, and Navy leadership in the field."

The whole was intended as a demonstration of how dangerous Iran is to the peace efforts of the coalition forces in the area and was designed to coincide with efforts by the Bush Administration to align the Middle Eastern countries with the USA and Israel in their aggressive anti-Iranian stance.

In a meeting with Prime Minister Olmert of Israel, George Bush went so far as to discredit his own country’s NIE on Iran, which stated that Iran had in fact ceased work on a nuclear weapons program as far back as 2003. The Newsweek article quotes a senior Bush Administration official as saying:

"He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views"

I guess his own views are those very same gut feelings that told him Iraq was full of WMDs. In my opinion the guy should seek out a gastrologist.

The Most Logical Answer

2008-01-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Large sheets of ice that were previously thought to be unaffected by global warming are now shrinking.

Previously, only ice sheets along the Northern tip of Antarctica near South America had been observed to be melting. The latest findings are that ice sheets in Western Antarctica are now also melting causing scientists to rethink the rising sea-level models that they had up till now held.

This is occurring actually across the board where the melting of ice caps in mountainous regions is also accelerating faster than predicted as witnessed by Professor Lonnie Thompson and stated in his keynote lecture at Ohio State University:

"The information from Antarctica is consistent with what we are seeing in all other areas with glaciers -- a melting or retreat that is occurring faster than predicted," he said. "Glaciers, and especially the high-elevation tropical glaciers, are a real canary in the coal mine. They're telling us that major climatic changes are occurring."

The potential disaster: the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica both melt at the same time which could raise sea levels by several meters. Even if one does not believe that man is causing global warming, one should be attuned to the fact that we may at least be contributing to it and we should therefore be doing everything to try and reduce that contribution by as much as possible.

The article in the Washington Post goes on:

Martinson said researchers do not have enough data to say for certain that the process was set in motion by global warming, but "that is clearly the most logical answer."

The difficulty is that logic doesn’t really count when you’re dealing with an administration who invaded Iraq as a retaliation for an attack originating in Afghanistan.

Back to Waterboarding

2008-01-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

A lot has been made of who said what about whether waterboarding was torture or not. The practice of placing a cloth or a cloth bag over someone’s face and pouring water onto it thus causing the person to instinctively feel as if they are drowning has been hotly debated ever since it became clear that the practice was accepted as far up as the White House. The White House and President Bush in particular were quick to point out however, that it does not constitute torture.

Well the fact is that it does to anyone experiencing it, as National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has clarified in a Huffington Post article:

"If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture," McConnell told the magazine.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey along with McConnell however decline to classify waterboarding as torture because they would open a can of worms the size of Texas. So now we are talking about everyone knowing that it IS torture but declining to offically admit it. Well isn’t that grand. I feel like I’m watching a kiddie’s tea party.

But the bottom line is that the United States has been torturing people and the litmus test is this: anyone experiencing waterboarding – anyone – would declare it to be torture, would claim it was torture and would state that they were being or had been tortured. This, all the while that Mr Bush has been saying “We do not torture.”

Well actually, yes you do. Your own National Intelligence Director just said so.

Homeland Security - if the Bill is Paid

2008-01-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, along come the Telecoms and the FBI to re-create an undercover wiretapping scandal worthy of Mr. Bean. OK, so you are a right winger and you approve of the telecom companies allowing the FBI to eavesdrop on US citizens regardless of whether a warrant is in place or not. Or maybe you’re a left winger and don’t approve of this practice and think the telecoms shouldn’t let the FBI install wiretaps.

The fact is: they do. Until, that is, the FBI neglects to pay its phone bills and then, lo and behold, homeland security, anti-terrorism and the wire-tapping that allegedly goes with it becomes moot as reported by The Raw Story:

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

Who would have thunk it? The FBI of course denies that the service interruptions have caused any breach of security.

What the devil are the wiretaps being used for then, if, when they stop functioning, there’s no danger anyway?

The Pointy Haired President

2008-01-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

Here’s the news: the Pentagon and the Bush Administration have changed the goal posts in Iraq yet again. This time it is actually to their credit I have to admit and that is only thanks to Ambassador Crocker, who has scrapped all previous lofty goals and brought in the new one: “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems.”

Hey! It’s that simple. What some people have been preaching for years has suddenly dawned on the Bushies. As the Washington Post reports it's a far cry from the original targets set out by this administration:

In many cases -- particularly on the political front -- Iraqi solutions bear little resemblance to the ambitious goals for 2007 that Bush laid out in his speech to the nation last Jan. 10. "To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis," he pledged. "Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year . . . the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution."

This is actually the fifth time that the language has been changed to suit the situation on the ground which means that either:

a) the original goals, that of creating a free westernized Iraq with free elections, a democratic process and a state of the art stock exchange and a non-corrupt government which has the power to provide security in its own country, which the Neocons pronounced as the reason for going in there in the first place after the WMD myth evaporated, were completely out of synch with reality (as many prophesied), or

b) the Bush Administration is incapable of fulfilling the benchmarks it had set out to achieve.

The truth is that both of these are correct. So along comes plan F: “let the bleedin’ Iraqis do what they want as long as we get the oil.” But actually it is the first time that they’ve said something sensible and something that could actually work.

So the Baathists are regaining control of the oil and are being re-armed by the US and a blind eye is being turned to the continuing desperate situations in many of the provinces. A retired British General is quoted as saying:

"The new phrasing is both the dawning of reality, and the cynical use of language and common sense to camouflage past errors, hoping to avoid the audit of flawed logic that got us to this point,"

It is actually the first time that language has predicated that the situation in Iraq is actually entirely different to what one had hoped. It avoids anyone having to say: “We lost the war,” and tries to imply it was won in a different way.

That was the news. I could have spared myself writing all that by showing you today’s Dilbert cartoon:

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080110.html

Brought to you by George Bush: running the country like a pointy-haired boss.

Bush Sucks Up

2008-01-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

So sometimes you have to hand it to George. He knows how to suck up and he’s doing a great job of it right now. Considering all the criteria, who would one not want to offer new missile systems and smart bombs to? Well, the list may be long, but there are definitely a few short candidates and anyone in the proximity of Iraq would have to count as one of those.

So why would the Bush Administration be selling $20 billion US worth of smart bombs to Saudi Arabia? After all a large proportion of the 9/11 hijackers were purportedly from Saudi Arabia. Well you have to if they’re your mates though don’t you. But not without some objection form the Israeli side as the Jerusalem Post reports.

Israel has expressed concern over inclusion in the deal of Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMS), commonly referred to as "smart bombs." Nevertheless, it has not actively fought the sale.

Why would Israel not actively fight the sale? Because they are going to get bright shiny new smarter bombs. All this of course is being rushed through Congress because it’s the most important matter at hand seeing as Bush will be visiting both countries and wants to come bearing gifts to both.

Merry Christmas from the Administration that is trying to increase the arms race in the Middle East whilst pretending to look for a solution for peace. It's also not as if these things are ever going to make it to Iraq.

The Desperation Of The Right

2008-01-08T08:02:00.000-08:00

The right is getting desperate. Hillary, who automatically embodies everything the right hated about Bill was an easy candidate to target. But along comes Obama as the front runner. Obama taking the lead in Iowa. Obama looking strong in new Hampshire.

I can just hear them in the neoconservative enclaves: “Think Goshdarnit, think! What dirt can we pull up on this guy?”

Because attacking Obama’s African American roots, much as they’d love to do so, could backfire radically, and attacking his drug use didn’t work, they’ve resorted to try to turn him into – you’ll never guess: a woman.

The New York Post, mouthpiece of the right and one of Murdoch’s little numbers, has produced a piece that portrays Obama as - well, they don’t actually ‘say’ “girlie-man”, but they do warn Americans, that by electing Barack, they won’t be getting a man in the White House:

Yet it's not only Obama's policies and strategies that appeal to women. He is like a woman: slim, good looking, with long elegant fingers, appealingly dressed - all terms more typically ascribed to female candidates.

Unfortunately for the right, with its dwindling support all over the country, this is not really going to have any effect: no one except those already engendered with the idea that being a man means "huntin’, fishin’ an’ …. Well huntin’ again" is going to be taken in by this salvo. Anyone with half a brain is going to understand that these are the words of a right that sees its grasp on the Presidency slipping day by day. They are one sentence away from calling him gay but that will come too.

This from the group that gets upset because we call Dufus stoopid.

The Gulf Of Tonkin Revisited

2008-01-07T07:35:00.000-08:00

The Bush Administration has, by its own admission, been flying drones onto Iranian territory for months, breaching Iranian air space. The US and British navies have consistently also strayed into Iranian waters in the Straits of Hormuz.

Today, in an incident reminiscent of the fracases in the Gulf of Tonkin some 44 years ago, the US navy is claiming that it was harassed by Iranian gunboats in what it terms a "significant provocative act." MSNBC reports:

Military officials told NBC News that two U.S. Navy destroyers and one frigate were heading into the Persian Gulf through the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz when five armed "fast boats" of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard approached a high speed, darting in and out of the formation.

I am not sure what the US government would do if Iranian frigates entered US waters on a regular basis, but I see another attempt to propagandize the situation into a position where war becomes possible, if not a “necessary and unavoidable act.”

The Bush-Cheney administration is the most dangerous government body on the planet.

Body Count in Baghdad

2007-12-17T07:53:00.000-08:00

Everyone with the faintest knowledge of how the Middle East worked could have predicted it. Anyone who had studied history could have seen it coming. Only the blind, right wing, conservative, cakewalk-and-dancing-in-the-streets crowd were in denial. The killing in Iraq’s streets and the massacres that have taken place in her capital have long since outstripped any of the horrors that Saddam Hussein and his henchmen brought down on that country. Mass murdering was on the agenda with rows of bodies lining the streets, as many as a 100 a day dying in Baghdad alone.

Since the so-called “Surge,” violence has decreased in Iraq as a whole. So why don’t we hear cries of victory from the top brass? According to a Newsweek article, the reason is that violence has not dropped as much as we think:

The problem—and the reason no one from U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus on down is declaring victory yet—is that those statistics do not tell the whole story. Body hunters like Sowadi, Baghdad residents and local gunmen all say that militias are making more of an effort to disguise their grisly handiwork—burying bodies in shallow graves, dumping them in city sewers. …."Many militia groups just make people disappear,"

Whereas before, militias left the corpses, beheaded and evidently tortured on the open streets, they are now taking pains to bury them in shallow graves, with several new mass graves appearing in various parts of the city.

The sheer number of human lives this senseless war will have destroyed will surely never be known but it will certainly be in the hundreds of thousands by now. Certainly the Neocons who lusted after this war and those who supported the decision to go to war based on what the rest of us knew were lies, will never own up to having been part of the holocaust that Iraq has become.

The Flip-Flop

2007-12-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

It’s been a long time coming but the International Community in Bali finally humiliated the United States delegation to the Climate conference into an agreement. The reluctant US team fought the agreement for days before capitulating in what was referred to as a flip-flop of never before seen proportions as reported by Yahoo News:

In a day of drama and emotional speeches, nations had berated and booed the U.S. representatives for holding out. A wave of relief swept the room when the United States relented.

Having fought any and every agreement on climate change since the US pulled out of the Kyoto agreement 10 years ago the US delegation took an unprecedented pounding from the committee members of the other nations. Bereft of its usual allies the US stood alone in trying to reject the wording for the agreement which some countries still referred to as too weak and finally, had to cave in as reported by Time Magazine:

In the end, the U.S.'s total isolation was too much for even it to bear. "We've listened very closely to many of our colleagues here during these two weeks, but especially to what has been said in this hall today," said lead American negotiator Paula Dobiansky. "We will go forward and join consensus." Boos turned to cheers, and the deal was essentially sealed.

Toeing The Line

2007-12-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

Michael B. Mukasey is toeing the line as expected. Congress’ attempt to investigate the destruction of the CIA tapes showing the waterboarding of prisoners has been blocked by the Justice Department as reported in The Washington Post. Why aren’t we surprised?

Congressional leaders from both parties alleged that Justice is trying to block their investigation and vowed to press ahead with hearings.
…..
"We are stunned that the Justice Department would move to block our investigation," Reps. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) and Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) said in the statement. "Parallel investigations occur all of the time, and there is no basis upon which the Attorney General can stand in the way of our work."

But there is a basis. It’s called the Bush basis, which is that the demarcation lines between the executive branch and the Justice Department no longer exist. It makes the Justice Department an extended arm of the White House and the Attorney General a lap dog of the President.

As Alberto I-can’t-recall Gonzalez before him, Mukasey is bowing to pressure from the White House to prevent any investigation into this affair.

Bush, who turned the United States into a country that tortures, has also turned it into a country that dissembles the truth on par with the worst of the world’s dictatorships.

Repression Begins At Home

2007-12-11T07:59:00.000-08:00

Climate change is not a myth, it is a fact. The only point of contention is whether humans are directly or indirectly affecting it. The fact that the earth’s mean temperature is on the rise and Global Warming is taking place is not questioned by any serious scientist who is not on the payroll of a major oil corporation. It is almost inconceivable that the excess carbon gases that we as humans produce are not having some effect, if not actually creating and accelerating the process.

In a free country, where free speech is touted as being of paramount importance, one would want people to be free of government censure. That is what we express as freedom of speech. In accordance with that, if an expert in his or her particular field expresses an opinion, countries that then either punish the person in question or stifle their opinions are considered repressive.

More directly, governments that prevent people from expressing an opinion are considered to have something to hide in that particular area. So it comes as no surprise to hear that the Bush Administration has been doing just that.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been investigating the White House for the past 16 months. More directly, they’ve been investigating allegations that the Bush Administration has been systematically interfering on a political level with scientific evaluations and expressed opinions on Global Warming.

The accusations range from exerting “unusual control” over public statements of federal scientists on climate change to extensively editing climate change reports.

The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

It's worth reading the whole thing. If you're still not scared about what Bush, Cheney and Rice have done to this country after reading this you are probably beyond redemption of any kind.

The Greatest Criminals Known to Man

2007-12-03T17:53:00.000-08:00

Which government wishes to govern with fear? Which government wishes through fear, to intimidate its citizens into toeing the line? What type of government would want to cow its citizens into a behavioral pattern?

Why would anyone threaten World War III when they knew it wasn’t on the cards?

"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,"
President Bush, 10/17/2007

Why would anyone threaten war without cause? The answer is someone who avoided military service because of a butt boil:

US Vice President Dick Cheney says Washington considers military action against Iran as a possible solution to Tehran's nuclear standoff.

What does it mean when the drums of war are beaten to the tune of an unconfirmed rumour?

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Bolton said if Tehran does not voluntarily stop its nuclear program, the US has to use force.

That was this morning. This afternoon, the absolute slap in the face for the crippled and morally bankrupt Bush Administration: according to a NIE Report on Iran’s nuclear program, Iran halted work on the development of nuclear weapons FOUR YEARS AGO as reported by Yahoo News!

A new U.S. intelligence report concludes that Iran's nuclear weapons development program has been halted since the fall of 2003 because of international pressure — a stark contrast to the conclusions U.S. spy agencies drew just two years ago.

Is anyone, anyone at all, going to assert that Bush, Bolton and Cheney actually didn’t know this?

It’s unbelievable that they are going to get away with this and it’s unbelievable that there’s a single American citizen with half a brain left, who’s willing to back these bozo’s. With many of us doubting the rumours of Iran's nuclear arsenal, so many still believed that the threat was real because they are driven by fear, blindly hanging on to any piece of news that will confirm that this is the state to be in. It's a political disaster for Israel and a phenomenal, brutal denunciation of the Bush regime's ultimate and continued efforts to sow seeds of hatred and dissent and their willingness to destroy the world for their own ends.

Impeach, impeach, impeach. It’s not too late and it certainly couldn’t come soon enough. Impeach, try, imprison and throw away the key. There is no single greater danger to peace and the good of humanity than these people. They are the epitome of evil and the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

Who'd a Thunk It?

2007-12-02T07:59:00.000-08:00

The lack of forethought to the Iraq occupation is staggering. So is the theft from government agencies and public resources apparently, according to a New York Times article. It isn’t like no one expected this – excepting the Bush Administration of course, but the level of theft has progressed to such an extent that it has reached epidemic proportions. Everything from water to pain killing cancer drugs are stolen and offered on the black market.

The Iraqi government is, to all intents and purposes bankrupt, except for the payrolling from the United States coffers. So the result is….yes, you guessed it:

Some American officials estimate that as much as a third of what they spend on Iraqi contracts and grants ends up unaccounted for or stolen, with a portion going to Shiite or Sunni militias.

Iraq now ranks as the world’s third most corrupt country and even as violence is abating, officials are watching the country slip into an unparalleled level of lawlessness. When looting broke out after the initial fall of Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld, in his eternal wisdom, God bless his soul, said “that is what free people do.” It didn’t occur to the IQ bereft Defense Minister that this was a sign of how things could develop.

Corruption is everywhere – not least in the very administration that brought us the Iraq catastrophe. But that a country overtaken by a power vacuum, steeped in poverty and flooded with money and weapons available only to a select few would not degenerate into the world’s most lawless place never occurred to anyone in the White House.

Fizzle

2007-11-29T06:33:00.000-08:00

The boom’s over. Boom? More like a pop. The artificial high caused by the Bush Administration’s tax decreases coupled with a fortuitous development of markets abroad in which US companies were increasingly vested, gave first the stock exchange a good old heave-ho upwards and with it, the housing market.

Only you can’t build an economy on hot air and promises and soon, the housing bubble burst and the age of “more-people-owning-their-homes-than-ever-before-in-the-USA” as touted by FOX News came to a crashing end. It was followed by an almost 10% correction in the stock market which started just two weeks after Peter Barnes and Jenna Lee also of FOX News fame said:

“We don’t know why everyone’s worried – things are looking great!”

This isn’t about FOX News, but they embody the Bush Administration’s hear, see and speak no evil mentality. Everything is swell all of the time. But it isn’t, as the New York Times reports today:

Credit flowing to American companies is drying up at a pace not seen in decades, threatening the creation of jobs and the expansion of businesses, while intensifying worries that the economy may be headed for recession.

Outstanding commercial and industrial bank loans, and short-term loans are both down by 9% since August. It’s the first time that this source of cash has shrunk so rapidly since – well ever actually, since the Fed started tracking such things back in 1973. Ironically, this development which has alarmed the Fed, caused them to make a statement hinting that interest rates would be cut again in the near future which sent the stock market soaring.

It’s the same sort of superficial nonsense that will cause the spokespersons of this Administration to shrug their shoulders and ask “who’s worried.” But the truth is, we all should be. The consequences of this development will primarily affect small businesses who are already finding it very hard to get a loan form a bank. A year ago banks were throwing money at small companies but those are finding now that they cannot increase their line of credit.

It stops them hiring and stops them from investing and that is a sure sign of bad things to come. All I can do is hope that if the country plunges into a full blown recession, it at least elects a Clinton into the White House in 2008 to clear up the mess that the Republicans have left behind.

Corrupt to the Core

2007-11-28T12:13:00.000-08:00

The corruption and disease that has permeated the Bush Administration is so incredibly convoluted and pervasive, that even special prosecutors investigating Bush appointees are being investigated.

Karl Rove’s office was being investigated by Scott Bloch’s bureau amid allegations that the staff of the former used government agencies to elect Republican officials, which is a no-no. Now Bloch himself has come under fire as reported by John Wilke in the Wall Street Journal:

At the same time, Mr. Bloch has himself been under investigation since 2005. At the direction of the White House, the federal Office of Personnel Management's inspector general is looking into claims that Mr. Bloch improperly retaliated against employees and dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination.

The real question is: is there a single person left in this corruption addled administration that yet has no mark on them and no skeleton in the closet? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Surge is Working - Not.

2007-11-26T08:23:00.000-08:00

Euphoria about Iraq is gripping the right. Violence is down as 162,000 now operational troops provide some semblance of security. “The surge is working!” Is the cry. Only it isn’t and the Bush White House knows it.

The original aim of the surge was to provide breathing space for the Iraqi government to come together and begin to legislate. Reducing the violence was not an aim but a means to get there. However despite the encouraging drop in bombings and sectarian attacks, Iraq’s government remains rooted to the spot, frozen and unable to move.

It’s yet another example of the underestimation of the way third world nations function by the American ruling class. Let’s go back a few years, back to the toppling of Iran’s first duly elected Prime Minister. The reason things came to a head was because the British underestimated the Iranians. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which was ostensibly part of the British government, treated Iranians like dirt. The refinery workers earned less than 50cents a day, slept in ramshackle metal tenements cobbled together with no running water and no sanitation let alone electricity. A communiqué at the time by a British Diplomat described Iranians as being motivated by:

“an unabashed dishonesty, fatalistic outlook and indifference to suffering… The ordinary Persian is vain, unprincipled, eager to promise what he knows he is incapable or has no intention of performing, wedded to procrastination, lacking in perseverance and energy but amenable to discipline……although an accomplished liar, he does not expect to be believed….”

Now, being brutally honest, one could probably say that that could be taken as a pretty close description of how many Americans might view Iraqis today. It isn’t because Iranians or Iraqis are like that. It’s because our differences in culture make us see them that way.

At the bottom of this, is a belief that we can outwit them and that they won’t even mind even if they realize they are being outwitted. This outlook cost the AIOC its foothold in Iran. Whilst American companies were viewed at the time as being fair – Aramco was offering Saudi Arabia 50% of it’s profits, the Anglo-Iranian was stuck on 15% of profits from books cooked so that less than $100,000 a year flowed to Iran from His Majesty’s coffers. The result was a revolution and the privatization of Anglo-Iranian under the leadership of Mossadegh. The British were so incensed that they brought about his downfall using the Americans who were coerced into worrying that Iran would fall into Soviet hands.

This little piece of history is vitally important today, because it highlights the fact that we in the West still believe we can nation-build and that we can mold those nations to our liking. Nothing can be further from the truth and today, the evidence is in Iraq where the surge has worked, but it has failed. The Iraqi government will not divest itself of all its resources and hand them over to British and American oil companies just as the Iranians refused to back then.

To counteract this threat, the US is rapidly building military bases on top of oil platforms and fields. It’s truly like a vision of the apocalypse in Mad Max where countries will finally wage battles for the last drops of oil in fortresses defended by the West.

Already, as reported in a New York Times article, the original aim of the surge has already been changed to accommodate the latest developments:

While Bush officials once said they aimed to secure “reconciliation” among Iraq’s deeply divided religious, ethnic and sectarian groups, some officials now refer to their goal as “accommodation.”

So accommodation is the new ‘reconciliation.’ What this means in real terms is that the surge is not working as part of a solution for the country ‘Iraq’, but that it is part of the ongoing catastrophic quagmire that that land has become. Unable to reach consensus on any broad issues let alone details, the Iraqi government will falter and trip until the USA loses patience with Maliki. Desperate they will search for an alternative and like a Jack in the Box, up will pop one of the skeletons that has been plaguing the country for the past 25 years. The end result will be a crippled country, bereft of any income whilst its natural resources are plundered by an insatiable Western metal juggernaut of SUVs and a poverty stricken population with only the knowledge in their hearts that they were robbed. Together, that will most certainly provide the ultimate breeding ground for radicalism and hate towards the West.

Well done Mr. Bush. Your legacy is set to go.

Plame Won't Go Away

2007-11-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

That the Bush Administration lies is nothing new. However, that a former Bushie, namely Scott McClellan has come forward in a new book and said: “They lied about Plame and used me to cover it up” is.

In what is sure to be a controversial move, former White House spokesman McClellan says that his statements about the involvement of Rove and Libby in the Plame affair were simply fodder to keep the press wolves at bay. The Raw Story quotes from his new book:

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," writes McClellan. "So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby."

………..

"There was one problem. It was not true," he writes. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."

This was what George Bush said on February 11, 2004:

"If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,”...“If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of."

Only George already knew and sure enough, he did take care of them. He took care that they were never prosecuted.
Anyone who still supports Bush still care to bleat “where are the lies?”

Backing The Wrong Horse, or 'The Impasse'

2007-11-19T07:02:00.000-08:00

Back in 2001, in the wake of the September attacks, those famous words fell: “with us or against us.”

Of course the world was with the USA back then with regards to an anti-terrorist stance, but was divided when it came to what to do about it. Allies had to be found and bullied into compliance. With Afghanistan as the target, Pakistan was an interesting proposition and Musharraf seems to have been told in no uncertain terms, “if you don’t help, we’ll bomb your country back to the stone age.” In fact that is precisely what he was told.

So Musharraf helped. Sort of. It was a decision by the Bush Administration made much like their other decisions: shallow, brash, arrogant and not thought through. Pakistan’s weapons escalation programme which was designed to keep it abreast of India had it developing nuclear weapons back in the 1990s. In fact, Pakistan joined the “Nuclear Club” with the detonation of its first warhead in 1998. So Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld et al, decided that a country with a rife potential for turning radical, peppered with madrassas especially in the North, run by a military dictator and armed with nuclear weapons should be “our friend” and would be immune to the sort of threats and criticism that have, for example been thrown at Iran.

But here’s the problem. Now you have a Pakistan devolving into chaos and possible civil war, populated by Muslims who are not America-friendly, poor and therefore a hotbed for religious fanaticism and possibly harboring Osama Bin Laden and the USA can’t even forcefully impose sanctions to reign it in.

You might ask: “well what would a neocon do?” The answer appears in an article in yesterday’s New York Times. Frederick W. Kagan of the right wing, I’d go so far as to say radical right wing American Enterprise Institute, proposes an invasion of Pakistan – the Neocon solution to all their problems. Now why am I not shocked?

He proposes that the USA invade Pakistan, help sympathizers fight the common enemy, establish bases and secure peace and order whilst we wait for the country to stabilize. Now where have I heard that before? More worrisome is that invasion seems to be the order of the day. Invade Iran, invade Pakistan as if it were possible, but what it mainly does is gnaw away at the bare thread of credibility by which this country still hangs.

The only real conclusion of this mess, which has positioned a real nuclear threat in a virtually untouchable space, whilst concentrating on an Iranian hand-puppet who has nothing, is that Bush and his strategy, not only effed this country up, but he’s managed to eff the world up - an almost intact world he held in his hand on September 12, 2001.

The Upcoming Earthquake

2007-11-14T07:26:00.001-08:00

2008 will be a stellar year for the Democrats. As of now, not a single Republican candidate has shown that he has the ability to lead anything but a lukewarm campaign and the various scandals, problems and flip-flops surrounding them will sink their ship even before it gets down the slipway.

No one, but no one really takes McCain seriously anymore. Giuliani has sunk himself with his Kerik scandal, the latest being that celebrity book publisher Judith Regan was asked to lie in order to protect Giuliani. Who wants a President who can be impeached before he’s even taken office. Mitt Romney doesn’t really stand a chance and Ron Paul, though in a way I’d love to see him as a front runner won’t make the numbers. Mike Huckabee is coming up fast but his campaign will lose steam when the primaries start. Fred? Fred who? Oh, Fred Thompson. Yawn.

Of course it’s early days yet, but the writing’s on the wall. Bush has made such a dog's dinner of running the country that no Republican candidate necessarily wants to be associated with him whereas traditionally, the most successful candidates always got a boost from the incumbent President. At the same time, the Republican candidates can’t lean too far away from their aggressive chicken hawk stance that they’ve been holding onto for the past five years for fear of being accused of flip-flopping.

It’s going to be a landslide and with all probability, Hillary’s going to make it into the White House. This is great because it’ll almost be like having Bill as President again and it’ll drive the Republicans nuts. Of course the negative side is that Republicans will spend the next eight years trying to impeach her for some imagined offense.

As for the House, there are a number of retirements for various reasons. In all however, 3 Democrats are retiring:

Micaehl McNulty (NY)
Mark Udall (CO)
Tom Allen (ME)

McNulty has simply had enough after 10 (yes ten) terms, whilst Udall and Allen are running for the Senate.

On the Republican side however, we have 16 retirements:

James Saxton (NJ) - retiring aged 64
Heather Wilson (NM) – running for Senate
Jerry Weller (IL) – scandals
Jim Ramstad (MN)
Deborah Pryce (OH)
Rick Renzi (AZ) – scandals
Ralph Regula (OH) – 82 years old
Dennis Hastert (IL) – scandals
Ray LaHood (IL)
Steve Pearce (NM) – running for Senate
David Hobson (OH) – 71
Duncan Hunter (CA) – Running for President
Tom Tancredo (CO) – Running for President
Terry Everett (AL) – 70
Chip Pickering (MS)
Barbara Cubin (WY) – probably being asked to go after threatening to hit a person in a wheelchair

Whilst the democratic seats are pretty safe, the Republican ones are hotly contested. It gets even better (or worse depending on which party one is affiliated with). The DCCC, headed by Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has $20 million in the bank to help out in tough races for the House, whereas the NRCC, run by Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, has only $2 million in the bank offset by $4 million worth of debts. Cole has already said that he can't help GOP candidates much and is trying to get rich businessmen to fund their own campaigns as candidates, a strategy that historically has had no success.

The only thing standing in the way of the Democrats sweeping away the presidency and making considerable gains in the house are the Democrats themselves. If they don’t rapidly grow a backbone and a decent sized pair of cojones, I can see people turning away from them again by the time elections are up.

United and strong they can make mincemeat out of the GOP which has been left in tatters after eight years of neocon frenzy. I can’t wait.

When Things Go Bump in the Night

2007-11-13T06:52:00.000-08:00

When Turkish helicopter gun-ships fired on villages in Northern Iraq this morning, they certainly weren’t out to defeat the PKK. The attack which occurred on abandoned Kurdish villages came at dawn and it was a distinct ‘up yours’ not only to the Kurds in the North, but to the Bush Administration. It sends a strong signal to Washington that Turkey will defend its interests.

The Bush Administration has maneuvered itself into a similar position with the Kurds and the Turks as it has with the Shia and the Sunni. In short they’ve managed the impossible: to alienate everyone. The US government now officially supports the Kurds in the Northern provinces whilst declaring that the PKK is a terrorist organization. At the same time, the Turks are declared to be best buddies and allies, but are told that attacking Kurdish positions inside Iraq is a no-no.

The Huffington Post, which quotes aTurkish Colonel as its source reports that clashes have been going on for a whole day but that this is the first such strike inside the Iraki border.

This brings up two points:

1. The escalation in the North is the worst possible case scenario in which sporadic fighting in Iraq develops into an all out war between the Turkish forces and the Kurdish Peschmerga. The United States is now in such a position that it is unable to support the Turks and unable to prevent them from invading.

2. The fact that the US Government evidently feels it has the right to invade whomever and wherever they please but are able to dictate the rules to others is not going to sit well in the Middle East. It will increase the feeling that the USA is only focused on its own vested interests.

This latest step is a logical follow up to every single event so far and has been predicted by many people. It remains to be seen how the Bush Administration reacts to the latest developments but if history is anything to go by they’ll manage to eff it up. Stay tuned for an all out war in the North.

Brought to you by the Administration that would never have thunked it.

The Tale of Kasim

2007-11-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

Kasim Al Safar is a name that is going to haunt the Pentagon for weeks if not months to come. No, he’s not one of Al Qaeda’s number two’s, he also isn’t head of some new, obscure but upcoming terrorist organization. In fact, Al Safar was a friend of the Bush Administration’s and may very well still be a friend of the Pentagon’s.

Not having learned that trusting people is a very different thing in the Middle East than it is here despite their run in with Allawi, the Bush Administration thought long and hard about how to quell the insurgency back in 2004 when it was rapidly gaining speed. Now you’re thinking: they entrusted Al-Safar with making sure that as few weapons as possible got into Iraq, a tactic which may have only slowed the insurgency a little, but which at least would have had some positive effect. You would be wrong.

Bush Administration officials paid Al-Safar large sums of money to import and distribute weapons in Iraq. They were supposed to go to the new police force and the new army. But Al-Safar, bless his soul is a business man so he set up a business selling guns. Quite illegally, but with apparently full knowledge of the Pentagon.

Now you’re thinking: clever! He and the USA could make money from these weapons by selling them to the ‘good guys’ instead of giving them away. Wrong! Kasim sold the weapons to whoever showed up with cash including insurgents that struck at US troops and terrorist PKK members who attacked Turkish troops with the very same guns. You can’t believe it can you? Nor could I. But the whole sordid tale of how the USA lost some 190,000 firearms in Iraq between 2004 and 2006 is in this New York Times article. To quote John Tisdale, a retired Air Force master sergeant who managed an adjacent warehouse:

“This was the craziest thing in the world, they were taking weapons away by the truckload.”

The Torture of Mukasey's Confirmation

2007-11-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

Last night George B. Mukasey was unfortunately confirmed as AG to follow in the footsteps of Alberto I-Do-Not-Recall Gonzales, which I am sure he will do diligently. His confirmation sends very much the wrong message to the world about the position of this country on torture and it was a confirmation which was brought about by another spineless show by the democrats who allegedly believe that anyone in Leadership at the Department of Justice was better than no leader at all. I beg to differ, but that is for another time.

I’ve read a lot of material going back and forth about torture and whether waterboarding is torture and whether what the Americans did to Iraqis at Abu Ghraib constituted torture or not and whether it was OK to torture someone if you had an imminent threat. There is an easy way to determine this so I looked up and arranged to have dinner with Dr. Uwe Jacobs, Director of Survivors International, a non profit organization based in San Francsisco.

Survivors International or SI aid victims of torture in a number of ways and to do so, they established a protocol which is designed to determine whether a person has been tortured or not. Their guidelines and protocol for determining the occurrence of torture has been adopted by the United Nations and is effectively a manual for psychologists, doctors and nurses and others around the globe for ascertaining the incidence of torture. In short, Dr. Uwe Jacobs’ opinion on torture is quite categorical and his opinion is that there is not the least smidgen of doubt, that waterboarding leaves deep long lasting psychological scars and quite unquestionably constitutes torture.

The United States Department of Torture, which must exist by now and if it doesn’t, it should, may beg to differ, but they are by far in the minority. Being American doesn’t make one automatically right and the Global View is that waterboarding is torture. To quote Dr. Jacobs:

“It’s insane that there’s a debate about it.”

Then we of course get to the discussion about imminent danger. That is that some say that torture is justified if one believes a person to have information which could save hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. This is a bogus argument which has been confirmed as being erroneous time and time again. Information obtained under duress is not reliable, that’s the bottom line. But even if it were, what then?

Simply put, torture of any kind crosses an ethical boundary which, when crossed, puts one on the same footing as the evil which one is purportedly attempting to prevent. It even sets the precedent which gives others carte blanche to do the same and worse. A society that tortures, for whatever reason, can no longer claim to be civilized. It’s a simple as that and a society that tortures, can also no longer claim the moral high ground nor the distinction of being a victim. A society that tortures becomes oppressor and tyrant.

That is why George B. Mukasey should never have been confirmed as Attorney General of the United States. Someone who cannot distinguish this simple fact should not even be running Saddam Hussein’s Justice Department.

State of the Nation

2007-11-08T06:54:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush, President of the United States and pride of some straggling remains in the Republican Party signed a measure on September 28 2007, to increase the limit on the debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion, representing an increase of over a trillion, more than ten percent. Five weeks later the US debt has reached and breached $9 trillion for the first time.

Reuters reports:
In approving the debt limit increase, Congressional lawmakers said the $850 billion increase should be large enough to allow the government to continue borrowing into 2009

The amazing thing is that Congress and the Senate went right along with it and no one is batting an eyelid. Why? Because the way the Republican leadership has structured the fiscal year and the strains of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are exerting a monumental toll on the US economy. The Democrats are afraid to pull funding because the Democrats are afraid of pretty much everything these days especially of being called unpatriotic.

Of course the picture still looks rosy, the DOW hovering around 14,000 points threatening again to break records and the NASDAQ is climbing new highs daily. But the stock market is not an indicator of national fiscal health. Especially during the recent developments regarding globalization, US companies have really become Chinese companies or Eastern European companies. There are emerging markets all over the world in which you automatically partake if you invest in an American product. The ever weakening dollar is also allowing the US trade deficit to shrink but at what cost?

This well known graph shows how the National debt, which soared under Reagan and Bush 41 actually dropped under Clinton. It is actually possible to reduce the National debt whilst increasing expenditure on health care and education. It actually works if one isn’t busy pandering to one’s friends in the defense industry.

Quo Vadis America? Of course there will be a gaggle of Neocons who adamantly deny that there’s anything wrong and if one listens to FOX News it would appear that everything was right. But it is not and the collapse of the housing bubble should tell us there is more afoot. But this isn’t a country where introspection has any room to grow. It’s a country where the sub-prime disaster is already treated as a minor ache. The financial catastrophe that is still sending shock waves around the globe has been forgotten by many here.

But who are we forgetting? There are still families floundering in the rough seas of foreclosures and evictions, families left with very little on their backs whilst their properties are snapped up for a pittance by the wealthy. Sure it is everyone’s responsibility when they borrow money to know what they are borrowing at how much and from whom. But many people don’t have the necessary education to make them leery of low interest AMRs and do not understand the mechanics of negative amortization. They were suckered in to purchasing expensive real estate by people promising them the moon. They were coerced into making false income statements by agents only intent on selling. An entire real estate bureau was shut down recently here in the Bay Area in California, the heads led off in handcuffs and all the computers confiscated because they convinced low income families to falsify their income statements in order to qualify them. This may seem like a small thing but it points at a bigger picture. A country obsessed with racing ahead and damn the consequences.

But the consequences are the people of this country. They are being trodden on as the gap between rich and poor yawns open again. Everyone who calls themselves a patriot should be concerned about this because America is not the lump of earth upon which we sit, but the people who populate it and under the Bush Administration’s Fiscal Disaster Tour they are the ones who ultimately will have to pay the balance.

Deadliest Year So Far

2007-11-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

Yahoo News reports:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Five U.S. soldiers were killed in two separate roadside bomb attacks in Iraq on Monday, the U.S. military said, making 2007 the deadliest year for U.S. forces in the country.

The Idea behind the Iraq War may have been born out of diverse concepts, a gaggle of politicians all wanting something personal, something for themselves. But with the fourth year coming to a close and about 800 to 900 troops dying each year it's a wonder that anyone still thinks this was worth it.

Of course republicans are trying to hold their breaths until 2009, see no evil, do no evil and hear no evil style, when, in a wheesy explosion of halitosis laden dusty musty air, they'll blame the Democrats for the failure in Iraq. They will do it. Mark my words.

Off Topic - Follow Up

2007-11-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, my wife and I have had a bit of a bumpy ride this year with good things and not so good things happening all at once. I always feel that I should share this stuff with my online community as it's part of who I am.

Following my orchiectomy I had a week of rest but was soon fit enough to work again. We more or less got our house ship shape to move in to, the floors got done and most of the trim was finished. The biggest problem is that although the house is larger in square footage than our apartment was, it has only one large closet, whereas our previous abode had four. Closets are great spaces for rubbish and useless items to accumulate and when you move to a new home where these unsightly medicine balls and giant hammock chairs that one’s partner thought at one stage were such a great idea to buy, cannot be stored out of sight, one has a problem. A small one I admit but there you go.

One of the reasons for my lack of posts is also that ComCast screwed up getting us set up with our internet and television connections and in fact, we still don’t have a home phone. I hated the idea of switching to ComCast but it will save us money in the end if their lousy service doesn’t drive me round the bend first.

I started chemo-therapy on Thursday last week and after a day of feeling fine on Friday, I spent the entire day Saturday blowing my cookies although there were no cookies to blow. It got so bad that I ended up in the ER where they filled me up with fluids, gave me an intravenous anti-nausea drug and sent me home, telling me to come back if it should start up again. So far no hair loss to report, although that isn’t something that’s been worrying me: first off I have a lot of it (hair that is) and secondly, it would spare me the expense of a haircut due in December. My next round of chemo is in three weeks and I’m hoping to be better prepared.

With regards to my wife’s pregnancy, it looks like we may lose one of the twins, which does not seem viable to survive, another pretty common IVF occurrence. Its been hard to live with that fact but we are grateful to be pregnant at all so we’re hoping the second baby will survive and be fine.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on the house itself and I have to somehow work in order to keep some kind of income flow going but all in all and considering everything we’ve been through we’re doing well. Not least because of the extraordinary support from our community and friends - even clients - which is quintessentially American in its selflessness. It just wouldn’t happen to the same degree in other countries and we are bother extremely grateful for it.

Bomb Everyone

2007-10-24T07:35:00.000-07:00

When you’re in a hole, stop digging. That is excellent advice and someone should really offer it to the Bush Administration who’s latest Brilliant Plan No. 246 is to bomb the Kurds!

The Herald Sun reports:

THE Bush Administration is considering air strikes, including cruise missiles, against the Kurdish rebel group PKK in northern Iraq.

The question is, who will be left in Iraq as a friend when you’ve managed to strip power away from the Sunnis, repeatedly attacked and killed the Shia in raids and finally bomb the only real ally you have with cruise missiles?

In a region that is moving rapidly towards total conflagration after being ignited by the current US Administration in what is possibly the dumbest move in political history, they continue to fan the flames and pour gasoline to feed the fire they started again and again.

The only explanation is that they WANT World War III. If anyone has a better one, please – I’m all ears.

Why Cheney Hates Iran

2007-10-22T08:20:00.001-07:00

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Landsdowne Virginia, Dick Cheney said the following:

The Iranian regime's efforts to destabilize the Middle East and to gain hegemonic power is a matter of record.

That is certainly extraordinary coming from an American politician. That the United States has been attempting to destabilize the Middle East and gain hegemonic power there is not only a matter of record which goes back at least as long as I can remember, but is legendary.

The 1953 CIA led campaign to overthrow Mossadegh, the then democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister is just such a case in point. In fact it was at the behest of the British that the Americans started to poke their noses in their and at the time, the Americans were trusted by the Iranians. It was the British the Iranians could not stand. But ultimately it was the United States that paid Mullahs to openly denounce Mossadegh who, through his insistence and belief in a free press, refused to quash the movement which was completely artificial and which was being conducted by agents paid by the CIA.

The reason for this legendary overthrow was the nationalization of Iran’s oil by Mossadegh. The Shah was installed in his place and there started a reign of terror and brutality which was certainly notable, but no one in the West took notice because it served their purpose.

If anyone sees a parallel with Hugo Chavez privatizing Venezuelan oil and the raised level of invective against him by the State Department then it is not surprising. But let us return to the Middle East because the meddling in South America and the attempts at destabilizing that continent by the United States is well documented as are its hegemonic attempts and plans.

It’s not like we have to go back in history very far to see evidence of attempted manipulation of events in the Mid-East. The Iraq war, overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Gulf War, events in Lebanon, double dealings with Saudi Arabia, the pressure on Syria. It’s all an attempt to juggle and keep seven or eight spinning knives in the air simultaneously only no one at the State Department has had the intelligence to realize that it isn’t working.

Cheney is effectively calling for a hard line if not all out war against Iran. He sees Iran as the lynchpin to stability in the region. If only Iran fell…… It’s so naïve and devoid of rationale that it’s hard to believe that Cheney was CEO of a company let alone that he’s Vice-President of the United States. But there we have it in Technicolor: Iran should be attacked because it does in the region it occupies what the United States has been trying to do for decades and that’s what really sticks.

Iran is successful at manipulating the forces in the region to its own ends and America has been horrible, embarrassingly unsuccessful. Iran is President Bush’s biggest nightmare because they don’t obey the US State Department. Iran is bad because Muslims and Arabs trust it more than they trust the US and lastly, Iran is the enemy because it does the job of gaining power in the Middle East successfully and without deploying a single soldier – by supporting its neighbors. And that’s why it has to be destroyed.

Of Course it's About The Oil

2007-10-16T00:28:00.000-07:00

The problem the right has is that it has to keep shifting positions to stay ahead of it’s own lies. The reason for the invasion of Iraq has always been a chimera, a changing blob of meaningless rhetoric, a series of stuttered answers that make no sense, a bunch of doubtful associations that fell apart at the first prodding by a second rate journalist. Many of us knew the reason: oil. The little word that means so much to every nation, developed or developing, rich or poor represents a colossus amongst the commodities and this country especially, needs a lot of it.

After years of ducking and weaving and hiding behind first Weapons of Mass destruction, then dubious links to Al Qaeda before jumping to “Liberation” as a just cause, the right has been desperate to avoid the word ‘oil’ when talking about Iraq.

So it will probably hurt just a little bit to know that General Abizaid, the guy who was in charge of much of the Iraq war,has been quoted by Think Progress as saying:

“Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that,”

No You can’t. But you could have come clean about it a long time ago and you could have decided that it was not a valid reason for killing some 90,000 Iraqis and displacing another 4 million, not to mention killing almost 4,000 US soldiers.

There isn’t a why and a wherefor nor is there a ‘but’. The four year campaign by the right to paint the Bush Administration as some kind of collection of Mother Teresas who are overly concerned about some Arabs in a country Far, Far Away just dissapeared in a puff of smoke that smells something like rotten eggs. There was only one reason to invade Iraq and that was to secure the oil and the ex General Abizaid has just said it plain as day.

He went on to say:

“Our message to them is: Guys, keep your pumps open, prices low, be nice to the Israelis and you can do whatever you want out back. Osama and 9/11 is the distilled essence that represents everything going on out back.”

Which is pretty much what everyone on the left has been saying since 2003.

I guess it’s time to swift-boat him too.

The Gap

2007-10-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

The gap between the rich and the poor in the United States has hit a new record high since the IRS started compiling such data. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.

The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.

Some suggest that the 1920s were the last time the divergence of wealth in this country was so great. In fact the trend has been probably moving in this direction for several decades and so it is not entirely a Neocon fabrication, however the size of the gap has also increased at a record pace in the past five years since the Republicans took the presidency.

Between 2000 and 2005, the median tax filers’ income fell 2% between 2000 and 2005, to $30,881when adjusted for inflation whilst the income level for the top 1% grew 3%, to $364,657.

The remarkable thing is that most of those who claim that the Bush economy was good for them probably lost out in this new distribution of wealth. The economic health of the country however depends on wealth distribution. Ironically, a healthy capitalist economy depends in part upon one of the cornerstones of communism. If a country’s economy degenerates to a point where a few wealthy people effectively own everything and the poor majority own almost nothing, there is a breakdown in the ability to move cash. Everything form the local liquor store to Wal Mart depend on average Joe having moolah in his pocket to spend on frivolous stuff. It depends on average Jane being able to fork out for a bit of extra to put on the dinner table and to buy new shoes. A healthy economy does not thrive on the occasional multi-million dollar yacht sale.
This report is the clearest indicator that ‘trickle down’ does not work. Those who scoff at Europe for its wide ranging social systems and heavy taxing of the wealthier individuals will do well to hold their criticisms. If the Democratic Party cannot change the direction this ship is sailing and by all accounts they probably don’t have the guts to do it, we will be in for a major recession in the not so distant future.

Two weeks ago whilst in San Francisco I saw a Bentley Arnage, worth around $250,000 parked on Union Square in San Francisco and next to it a homeless man holding up a sign saying “please help – hungry.” I’m not suggesting that the Bentley owner should have given him the car or even helped him. I am merely saying that we are seeing signs that are reminiscent of an economy of a Third World country rather than a Western superpower and economically, those countries’ economies are rarely healthy and are not to be envied.

The Forgotten Man

2007-10-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

We’ve all heard the story of Khaled El Masri. The Lebanese born German citizen was effectively kidnapped by the CIA whilst vacationing in Macedonia. He was flown to Afghanistan where he was beaten, mistreated and by all accounts abused and tortured. The CIA released him after several months with not so much as an apology. The official stance is “It was a case of mistaken identity.”

Masri has tried hard to get some sort of compensation, some sort of apology for his treatment but to no avail. First, the Germans gave up trying to extradite the 11 CIA agents who captured Masri who is married and has children, then, when his case was taken up by the ACLU, their lawyers were rebuffed and told that trying the case would expose state secrets.

We readily accept that any form of retribution against a fascist or militaristic government in such a case would be a lost cause, but one would have hoped that in a country that professes to be an icon of freedom, cases such as this would warrant people being up in arms about what had happened. One would imagine that Justice would come down hard on the side of the plaintiff. In a country where you can be awarded eight million dollars in compensation for burning yourself with coffee from McDonalds, one would imagine that there would be some sort of ‘making good’ for the giant ‘oops’ perpetrated by representatives of that country’s Secret Services. But that is not the case as David Stout of the Washington Post reports. Masri’s case was denied by the Supreme Court:

The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets.

There is now nothing this country cannot do to you, which you would be entitled to protest against. In this era of Angst and bedwetting conservatives, this permanent state of fear experienced by the most bigoted amongst us, a man may lose everything including his dignity and he cannot demand that the perpetrators be punished; because now, in today’s Neoconservative America, state secrets are more important than freedom.

Deception by Treason

2007-10-03T22:20:00.000-07:00

An absolutely breathtaking piece of news has just surfaced which shows that the Justice Department and in particular, Alberto Gonzalez was actually drawing up a memorandum in 2005, in which the guidelines for interrogating people included subjecting prisoners to painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures at the same time as Congress was moving to disallow “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment.

The Times article claims that the memorandum was kept secret from almost all lawmakers and that it stated that none of C.I.A. interrogation methods violated the standard set by the Congressional motion. However if one remembers correctly, the Deputy Attorney general James B. Comey resigned after repeatedly coming to verbal blows with the White House about, amongst other things, the inexcusable interpretation of the law by the Bush Administration regarding the treatment of prisoners. From the article:

Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

To refresh our memories: John Yoo originally penned the first “Torture Memo,” as it became known which basically said it didn’t matter what one did to a prisoner as long as the man was alive at the end of it. Yoo, who was called ‘Dr. Yes’ by none other than John Ashcroft for his willingness to do whatever the Bush Administration requested of him, eventually left the Justice Department after the memo was leaked. The Justice Department under John Ashcroft eventually started bucking and would not simply accept any form of mistreatment of terror suspects without clearly defining the rules. For example, if keeping a prisoner at a very cold temperature was one accepted method and depriving the man also of rest was another, was it permissible also to combine the two?

The United States Supreme Court ruled unequivocally that the Geneva Conventions applied to members of terrorist organizations just as they did to a normal soldier. This led to the Bush Administration admitting to having shipped suspected criminals overseas in what was referred to as “Special rendition” and the CIA stopped its program of waterboarding prisoners. Later however, a new Executive order was signed allowing for so-called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” In normal speak we are talking again about torture.

To counteract the resistance within the Justice Department, Bush needed to have someone in there he could trust. Someone who would toe the line; enter, Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales effectively transformed the Justice Department into a Neocon circus and turned it into a laughing stock. Gonzales and his minions were soon able to press an embattled Comey out of the Justice Department and with Comey gone, they had free reign. Thus they managed by a series of backhanded comments, to present Congress with the impression that there was movement to ban torture whilst simultaneously ensuring the ability of interrogators to continue to use the very techniques that they were pretending to outlaw.

It’s an unfathomable display of disrespect of Congress and the American people and is the absolute epitome of treasonous conduct.

Take Away Women's Right to Vote

2007-10-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

No, of course I don’t think it’s a good idea but it gives you a good perspective of how desperate the GOP is. Floundering like a galleon holed by enemy canon, sails shredded by a hurricane of scandals involving anything from embezzlement, through sexual harassment of page boys to tapping feet and waving hands under toilet stall partitions whilst soliciting sex in public, rudder and keel destroyed by a reef of disasters such as Katrina and Iraq, the GOP is gaping wide eyed at a 2008 election that is bound to send most of them into reclusive depressions.

What to do, what to do? Well, our favourite GOP hack Ann Coulter has a solution as reported in today's Raw Story:

"If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine….. women are voting so stupidly, at least single women."

Ann, Ann, Ann…. I knew that somewhere under that horse’s head lurked a misogynistic male cross-dresser. Or is it that you actually are a woman but hate other women who are simply happy being women? Or what is it, pray tell us? Maybe it’s just that you cannot take the frustrations of what has already happened to the GOP in 2006 and what is going to happen to the GOP in 2008 and you’ve blown a fuse?

Repealing women’s right to vote as a solution? I don’t think so. But this is the latest evidence of the Grand Oil Party, chest out, head high, arms flailing and windmilling in panic in an attempt to drag this country back to the Middle Ages where it actually never was; ban abortions, instigate a ‘Christian-Only’ rule for politicians and teachers, insist on “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge of allegiance, denounce evolution in favor of creationism and take away that icon of equality from fully one half of the American people that so many women fought so hard for: their right to vote.