Stu Bykofsky is an author of several Opinion Editorials in the Philadelphi Daily News and Stu Bykofsky is a true Neoconservative. His past writings have included such wondrous titles as "Philly is too gay" and "Carter' book is Antisemitic."

Stu Bykofsky engenders the Neoconservative who's belly aches every morning when he wakes up and watches as America moves further and further away from his beloved Neocon dreams. An America that is less and less interested in attacking Iran, an America that wants increasingly to pull out of Iraq and an America that wants to be at peace with the world. It infuriates him.

So he's hatched a master plan which has been echoed by other Neocons: 'please god let us have another 9/11."

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/columnists/stu_bykofsky/20070809_Stu_Bykofsky___To_save_America__we_need_another_9_11.html


The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.

Come on guys! What are another few thousand American lives if after it, we are all joined in attacking another Islamic nation somewhere. One has to break eggs to make an ommelette and heck! Imagine how unified the UNited States would be if they, say, killed 5,000 Americans! Boy! We'd have enough public empathy to maybe nuke someone!

That, my friends, is the dark shadow that the hard core Republicans have mutated into. They are in a bind mind you. If there is a successful attack, it will mean all of Bush's anti-terror tactics failed. But then, it would give them good reason to crack down even further on everyones privacy and freedom, there would be no objection to wiretapping everyone, opening everyone's mail. It would be the Neoconservative wet dream. Sadly, the spineless Democratic party would probably go with it, flinching every time someone throws out the word "unpatriotic."

So, Stu Bykofsky, if there is another 9/11, I hope that you are in the middle of that conflagration, tears of happiness in your eyes as you watch your nation be sewn back together again by death.

Me? I'd rather have political discord for the next 1,000 years than see another 3,000 people sacrificed for unity.

Bill Sali and the Gods

Recently, a concerned citizen wrote a letter to the Ann Arbor News in Michigan. The person in question commented that they were disturbed by the omission of God and the lack of references to the Bible during the July Fourth speeches this year. Here is the exact text of that letter to the editor:

"Noticeably and sadly missing in the speeches and news editorials celebrating our independence on July 4 was the lack of acknowledgment and tribute to our Founding Fathers and to America's Christian heritage.

The Christian principles that America was founded upon were drawn directly from the Word of God (the Bible). America was a blessed nation because many of the Founding Fathers were determined to honor God and His laws in creating this country. "

Basically the writer assumes that the United States was built on Christian principles and that the Founding fathers had intended it to be a Christian Nation. We know that there is nothing further from the truth, the premise having been that the United States would be a country to tolerate all religions and not promote any. The reasoning was simple. Almost all countries which had inalienable ties to one specific religion and, at the time, particularly Christianity, had engaged in colonialist nation building and the two went hand in hand. The idea that a country would go forth under the protection of "God" was so disturbing to them that they decided to start with a clean sheet and found a country which accepted, tolerated and indeed WELCOMED any and all religions without promoting one of them above the others.We're back to the First Amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....."

Unfortunately this is something that continues to befuddle most Republicans, notably Republican Representative Bill Sali of Idaho who very recently had this to say, as noted by One News Now:

"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes -- and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers,"

The lawmaker from Idaho goes on to assert that the United States was built on principles from the bible and that it is only through the direct protection of God, that the country has been able to survive the onslaught brought upon it by heathens.

Protection by God? Any God? No, Bill Sali is clear on that. He went on to say that when a Hindu prayer is offered, that's a prayer to a "different God" and that that poses problems for the survival of the United States.

It disturbs me greatly, that a Republican Representative knows less about this country's Constitution and the principles on which this country was founded, than a foreigner like myself, but then I'm maybe asking too much from a party that still supports a President like Bush.

AT&T vs. Pearl Jam

When does a state fall into the roll of a repressor? For example, in the eighties, the West would guffaw at news articles which appeared in Правда, the National Soviet newspaper. The translation of ‘Pravda’ is “the truth” but the information in its pages was anything but because the government made sure that any media coverage which it considered to be counterproductive was deleted and censored. This made the Soviet Union appear to be a repressive state.

We laughed because something like that was unthinkable in the West, where freedom of the press is a pillar of our beliefs in a free society, where freedom of the press is a part of The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and where freedom of the press embodies the ability of the individual to make up his mind about what he believes and what he does not believe.

To jog our collective memories, here is the text of The First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It says very clearly, “abridging the freedom of the press.” Nothing ambiguous about that at least. Now let me digress a moment. Three years ago during the run up to the Republican national Convention in 2004, the city of New York and specifically Republican Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly denied groups of protesters who wished to gather peacefully and to protest, the right to do so. There was no explanation and no cooperation from the city and groups such as UFPJ eventually gave up trying to obtain permits after being stonewalled by the New York City Police Department for months. In fact Bloomberg denied the application virtually as soon as it was submitted. Let’s look at our First Amendment again:

“Or the right of people peaceably to assemble.”

Which part of that statement did Bloomberg not understand? But until recently he belonged to the party that tramples all over the constitution to get what it wants even if it means soliciting and roping in the big bucks industry. I can already hear the Neoconservatives calling me paranoid but I assure you that it’s true and it is part of what we can observe as being the right shift that has taken place in America, a shift so strong that it reeks of fascism. One of the cornerstones of fascism is corporatism and it has taken root in Dick Cheney’s United States. The Enron scandal and the Energy Bill that emerged form weeks of secret locked door meetings between Cheney and the Energy Corporations was a leading example of it. More recently we discovered the AT&T Narus scandal. The Narus, if you recall, is a device which is designed to ‘read’ vast amounts of data for example in email and to analyze and save the choice bits that fall within a certain parameter. It is called data mining and the FBI and the CIA do it. What is scary about the Narus project is that a private corporation is doing it at the behest of the government. That’s the first step towards fascism, which in turn is not very different to the way the Politburo ran the communist Soviet Union.

What does all this have to do with Pearl Jam and the First Amendment? The link is to be found at AT&T, as reported on CMJ:

According to Pearl Jam's website, portions of the band's Sunday night set at Lollapalooza were missing from the AT&T Blue Room live webcast. Fans alerted the band to the missing material after the show. Reportedly absent from the webcast were segments of the band's performance of "Daughter," including the sung lines "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush find yourself another home."

When AT&T were asked about it they replied that the material was indeed missing from the webcast, and that it was mistakenly cut by AT&T's content monitor.

So my question is, what are the parameters for the content monitor, so that the only thing they cut out is negative information about the country’s leader and who is it who sets those parameters. I also want to know why we laughed at Pravda in the eighties.

Doh!

Glen Kessler of The Washinton Post reports this extraordinary piece of news:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

One has to ask oneself if the US armed forces just want everything that can go wrong to go wrong. I cannot imagine that Homer Simpson could do a worse job at keeping Iraq under some sort of semblance of control. In moments like these, idiomatic descriptions such as "fanning the flames" or "putting out fire with gasoline" just don't do the situation justice. We have here something so staggeringly stupid, of such an enormous magnitude of carelessness that the mind literally simply boggles.

Why not give the insurgents a few hundred million dollars while we're at it?

Oh, I almost forgot - we have already done just that.

Why I am Angry

The Progress being made in Iraq is touted as being an increasingly resounding success, a pat on the back kind of thing between chums who have done the world a great favor. Politicians mince their words as they tell us of all the good things which the dastardly left wing media does not report. Others, such as Ann Coulter and her ilk, still compare Baghdad to Los Angeles or Detroit. “You’re focusing on the bad news’” they tell us. But they are hard pressed to give any good news when asked for it. Good news out of Baghdad is about as specific as Rumsfeld’s famous WMD quote. Somewhere, to the North, the South and maybe a little to the East, there’s been some progress made. A school painted here, a business opened there.

But we cannot simply turn away from the nightmare we have created. Yes, “we” because we allowed that sanctimonious windbag Tony Blair to suck up to George Bush, now crowned George The Ignorant and we allowed both of them to start this war. It will be too easy to slowly relinquish our interest for the disaster that Iraq has become. Every day is another day where the numbers of dead reach the hundreds. We no longer click on the link to find out why another 116 people were found dead in Iraq. We are numbed by the numbers and are weary of death and destruction and yet, we are only reading about it. What if we were there? Here’s an excerpt from the Baghdad Journal:

When will I die? That's the question circling in my head when I awake on Wednesday. I'm sweating, as usual. My muscles ache from another long night of no electricity in weather only slightly cooler than hell. As I dress for work, other questions assail me: How will I die? Will it be a shot in the head? Will I be blown to pieces? Or be seized at a police checkpoint because of my sect, then tortured and killed and thrown out on the sidewalk?

Is this the sign of progress? Waiting for hours for gas that has become prohibitively expensive in a country that is sitting on some of the world’s largest oil reserves? Not having electrical power but for a few hours a day from one’s own generator because the Iraqi government, supposedly supported by the world’s most advanced country, the world’s only superpower, cannot provide electricity to its own citizens, a country running out of medication to treat the victims of bombings and shootings? How can they be running out of medications? What is the US government using the $100,000 a minute that they are spending in Iraq on? I would have thought that at a minimum, medication and hospital equipment should be at the top of the list when one has successfully trashed a country.

But my anger does not come even come from the permanent attempt by the McCains of this world to underplay the catastrophe that Iraq has become in his famous flak-jacketed tour of a Baghdad market, surrounded by marines and watched over by Apache helicopters. It comes from the complacent attitude and the pernicious solipsism that pervades this administration.

"In some ways we probably all underestimated the depth of mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation,"
- US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, August 2, 2007,

Underestimated the depth of mistrust in Iraq, a country so ethnically separated that it took a dictator such as Hussein to hold it together? Underestimated how difficult it would be for ‘these guys’ to form a government. Come on Gates! You could have asked anyone, who had any history of being in the Middle East during the past 40 years and they would have told you that invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power was going to result in a bloodbath of epic proportions and that if the country was not destroyed, its cohesiveness shattered, it would certainly drop into a multi-year internal civil war which would not end before either the country was broken up into separate entities or, another dictator replaced the former one. Everyone knew that that was going to be the outcome, so excusing it with an ‘underestimation’ is not acceptable. It is tantamount to a war crime, which your government, Mr. Gates, committed and for which it is accountable for.

That’s not even the end of it. The cherry on the icing is the arrogance with which American lawmakers are stepping up to the plate not to offer constructive advice, but to chide the Iraqi government for not doing a better job. So the way I understand it is that having invaded a country and caused an absolutely groundless and unnecessary war, having destroyed the infrastructure and poisoned the land, having torn apart the very fabric of society, now the American government is telling the Iraqis that they are not doing a decent job patching things up.

Iraqi legislators are dying like flies and only the police that are supposed to protect them are dying faster. That's the reality of the new Iraq. They have a nerve up in Washington but unfortunately, not much of a brain to connect it to.

A chance to do something right

The next presidential veto coming your way, as reported by Julie Davis of The Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A bipartisan measure to add 3 million lower-income children to a popular health insurance program headed for a final Senate vote after a much broader and more expensive version passed the House over stiff Republican opposition.

Both measures face a veto-threat from President Bush, who says they would cost too much and expand the decade-old program beyond its original mission, inappropriately moving toward government-run health care.

The measure pledges $35 billion dollars towards providing health insurance for children whose families could not afford it. It’ll probably be a no-brainer for Bush: $35 billion for a military surge in Iraq or $35 billion towards providing health care for some 3 million underprivileged children? Why even hesitate right? Military destruction will win hands down every time with the current administration. But even if Bush wanted to help the children of poor families, there would still be an obstacle:

The measures are to be funded through an increase in taxes on tobacco products, you know, those substances that tend to put people into hospital in the first place so, no problem right? It makes total sense - unless of course your administration is one of the biggest subsidizers of tobacco farmers in history.

Here’s the thing: there’s more chance of seeing the second coming than of a Republican candidate winning the next presidential election. So regardless whether Bush vetoes the Bill now, it would get passed in 2009 anyway. But it could be passed now.

President Bush; you still have an opportunity to get one thing right in your Presidency. Please support the children.

Justice Department Shenanigans Part XXXVII

What happens, when a country’s Justice Department is so embroiled in the politics of the party in power? Well, the obvious answer is that corruption of the Justice Department and perversion of the course of justice, are both things that could occur if there was such a marriage, which is why constitutionally, there had to be a separation. As we’ve seen however, this traditional separation, which was carried out to the extreme by the Clinton Administration, which reduced the interface between the White House and the Justice Department to a minimalist four persons – an absolute record to date - has been breached. This Administration has done everything to marry in to the Justice department and the lines of division have become murky and hard to discern.

In the Soviet Union of the 1980s, a company would be basically owned by the government and in that context, many of the perpetrators of crimes ranging from speeding tickets for the CEOs of those companies through to the responsibility of chemical companies for poisoning large tracts of land, water and air were swept under the rug when the Soviet equivalent of the Justice department was basically held back by the politburo in power at the time. That’s one of the reasons the Soviet Union sucked at the time, right?

So what would you say if a US attorney prosecuting a case against an American Drug manufacturer responsible for the wrongful deaths of 146 people was threatened with dismissal if he did not drop the case? One might be tempted into thinking that that was hardly possible. But in this America, it is. The night before a US attorney obtained a guilty plea from the manufacturer of OxyContin, he was called by a senior Justice Department official at the behest of a Purdue Pharma executive. The Justice Department hack told the prosecuting attorney to slow the case down. Here’s how Amy Goldstein and Carrie Johnson of The Washington Post reported the story:

John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, testified that he was at home the evening of Oct. 24 when he received the call on his cellphone from Michael J. Elston, then chief of staff to the deputy attorney general and one of the Justice aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Brownlee settled the case anyway. Eight days later, his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.

The Justice Department, of course, denies any wrong doing. However, it turns out that Elston called Browmlee at Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty’s request. McNulty was the sixth senior aide to Gonzales to resign over the firings of US attorneys.

Enough said.