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| Kenny-Boy (Enron) Lay: The Daddy Warbucks PIMP For His SLUT George W. Bush ... |
| 01.31.04 (4:06 pm) [edit] |
[b]Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay is the PIMP for one of his SLUTS: George W. Bush, the [i]Useful Idiot [/i]... Why do you think that the Feds & the S.E.C. have let Dubya's Corporate Rapist, Embezzler, Thief, Liar-and-Robber-Baron, Swindler & Bird-of-a-Feather Kenny-Boy [i]OFF-THE-HOOK[/i]? ...[/b]
Consider "[i][b]Ahnuld, Ken Lay, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Gray Davis[/b][/i]" on http://www.commondreams.org/v... :
Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t talking. The Hollywood action film star and California’s GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state’s recall election has been unusually silent about his plans for running the Golden State. He hasn’t yet offered up a solution for the state’s $38 billion budget deficit, an issue that largely got more than one million people to sign a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis.
More important, however, Schwarzenegger still won’t respond to questions about why he was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills two years ago where he, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and junk bond king Michael Milken, met secretly with former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay who was touting a plan for solving the state’s energy crisis. Other luminaries who were invited but didn’t attend the May 24, 2001 meeting included former Los Angeles Laker Earvin “Magic” Johnson and supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.
While Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken listened to Lay’s pitch, Gov. Davis pleaded with President George Bush to enact much needed price controls on electricity sold in the state, which skyrocketed to more than $200 per megawatt-hour. Davis said that Texas-based energy companies were manipulating California’s power market, charging obscene prices for power and holding consumers hostage. Bush agreed to meet with Davis at the Century Plaza Hotel in West Los Angeles on May 29, 2001, five days after Lay met with Schwarzenegger, to discuss the California power crisis.
At the meeting, Davis asked Bush for federal assistance, such as imposing federally mandated price caps, to rein in soaring energy prices. But Bush refused saying California legislators designed an electricity market that left too many regulatory restrictions in place and that’s what caused electricity prices in the state to skyrocket. It was up to the governor to fix the problem, Bush said. However, Bush’s response appears to be part of a coordinated effort launched by Lay to have Davis shoulder the blame for the crisis. It worked. According to recent polls, a majority of voters grew increasingly frustrated with the way Davis handled the power crisis. Schwarzenegger has used the energy crisis and missteps by Davis to bolster his standing with potential voters. While Davis took a beating in the press (some energy companies ran attack ads against the governor), Lay used his political clout to gather support for deregulation.
A couple of weeks before Lay met with Schwarzenegger in May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California.
“No,” Cheney said during the Frontline interview. “The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things--an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they’re trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves and bankrupted PG&E in the process.”
A month before the Frontline interview and Bush’s meeting with Davis, Cheney, who chairs Bush’s energy task force, met with Lay to discuss Bush’s National Energy Policy. Lay, whose company was the largest contributor to Bush’s presidential campaign, made some recommendations that would financially benefit his company. Lay gave Cheney a memo that included eight recommendations for the energy policy. Of the eight, seven were included in the final draft. The energy policy was released in late May 2001, after Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken met with Lay and after the meeting between Bush and Davis and Cheney’s Frontline interview.
The policy made only scant references to California's energy crisis, which Enron was accused of igniting, and did not indicate what should be done to provide the state some relief. Cheney said the policy focused on long-term solutions to the country's energy needs, such as opening up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and freeing up transmission lines. That's why California was ignored in the report, Cheney said.
What’s unknown to many of the voters who will decide Davis’s fate on Oct. 7, the day of the recall election, is that while Cheney dismissed Davis’s accusations that power companies were withholding electricity supplies from the state, one company engaged in exactly the type of behavior that Davis described. But Davis would never be told about the manipulative tactics the energy company engaged.
In a confidential settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose chairman was appointed by Bush a year earlier, Tulsa, Okla., based-Williams Companies agreed to refund California $8 million in profits it reaped by deliberately shutting down one of its power plants in the state in the spring of 2000 to drive up the wholesale price of electricity in California.
The evidence, a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone conversation between an employee at Williams and an employee at a Southern California power plant operated by Williams, shows how the two conspired to jack up power prices and create an artificial electricity shortage by keeping the power plant out of service for two weeks.
Details of the settlement had been under seal by FERC for more than a year and were released in November after the Wall Street Journal sued the commission to obtain the full copy of its report. Similarly, FERC also found that Reliant Energy engaged in identical behavior around the same time as Williams and in February the commission ordered Reliant to pay California a $13.8 million settlement.
Had the evidence been released in 2001 when Davis accused energy companies of fraud it would have helped California’s case and voters may have viewed the governor more positively. But if FERC were to publicly release the details of the Williams settlement it wouldn't have jibed with Bush's energy policy, which was made public instead in May 2001. It's highly unlikely that Bush, Cheney and members of the energy task force were kept in the dark about the Williams scam, especially since the findings of the investigation by FERC took place around the same time the policy was being drafted.
But Davis was still causing problems for Lay. California’s power woes had a ripple effect, forcing other states to cancel plans to open up their electricity markets to competition fearing deregulation would lead to widespread blackouts and price gouging. For Enron, a company that generated most of its revenue from buying and selling power and natural gas on the open market, such a move would paralyze the company.
Fearing that Davis would take steps to re-regulate California’s power market that Lay spent years lobbying California lawmakers to open up to competition, Lay recruited Schwarzenegger, Riordan, Milken, and other powerful business leaders like Bruce Karatz, chief executive of home builder Kaufman & Broad; Ray Irani, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum; and Kevin Sharer, chief executive of biotech giant Amgen.
The 90-minute secret meeting Lay convened took place inside a conference room at the Peninsula Hotel. Lay, and other Enron representatives at the meeting, handed out a four-page document to Schwarzenegger, Riordan and Milken titled “Comprehensive Solution for California,” which called for an end to federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in the California energy crisis and said consumers should pay for the state’s disastrous experiment with deregulation through multibillion rate increases. Another bullet point in the four-page document said “Get deregulation right this time -- California needs a real electricity market, not government takeovers.”
The irony of that statement is that California’s flawed power market design helped Enron earn more than $500 million in one year, a tenfold increase in profits from a previous year and it’s coordinated effort in manipulating the price of electricity in California, which other power companies mimicked, cost the state close to $70 billion and led to the beginning of what is now the state’s $38 billion budget deficit. The power crisis forced dozens of businesses to close down or move to other states, where cheaper electricity was in abundant supply, and greatly reduced the revenue California relied heavily upon.
Lay asked the participants to support his plan and lobby the state Legislature to make it a law. It’s unclear whether Schwarzenegger held a stake in Enron at the time or if he followed through on Lay’s request. His spokesman, Rob Stutzman, hasn’t returned numerous calls for comment about the meeting. For Schwarzenegger and the others who attended the meeting, associating with Enron, particularly Ken Lay, the disgraced chairman of the high-flying energy company, during the peak of California’s power crisis in May 2001 could be compared to meeting with Osama bin Laden after 9-11 to understand why terrorism isn’t necessarily such a heinous act.
A person who attended the meeting at the Peninsula, which this reporter wrote about two years ago, said Lay invited Schwarzenegger and Riordan because the two were being courted in 2001 as GOP gubernatorial candidates. A week before the meeting, Davis signed legislation to create a state power authority that would buy, operate and build power plants in lieu of out-of-state energy companies, such as Enron, that the governor alleged was ripping off the state.
For Enron’s Lay, the timing of the meeting was crucial. His company was just five months away from disintegrating and he was doing everything in his power to keep his company afloat and the profits rolling in.
It wasn’t until Enron collapsed in October 2001 and evidence of the company’s manipulative trading tactics emerged that FERC began to take a look at the company’s role in California’s electricity crisis. Since then, memos written by former Enron traders were uncovered, with colorful names like “Fat Boy” and “Death Star,” that contained the blueprint for ripping off California.
Enron’s top trader on the West Coast, Timothy Belden, the mastermind behind the scheme, pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators who are still trying to get to the bottom of the crisis.
California is still demanding that FERC order the energy companies to refund the state $8.9 billion for overcharging the state for electricity during its yearlong energy crisis. But FERC says California is due no more than $1.2 billion in refunds because the state still owes the energy companies $1.8 billion in unpaid power bills.
Davis, who refused to cave in to the demands of companies like Enron even while Democrats, Republicans and the public criticized him, was right all along. Maybe Californians ought to cut Davis some slack.
[i]Jason Leopold (jasonleopold@hotmail.com) spent two years covering California's energy crisis as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He is currently working on a book about the crisis[/i].
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| Hypocrite of the Week:-- The Neo-Nazi Bug Exterminator in Congress |
| 01.31.04 (11:34 am) [edit] |
[b]Hypocrite of the Week[/b]
[b]Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Neo-Nazi Bug Exterminator in Congress, has undermined every effort for peace in the Middle East suggesting that the Palestinian people should be wiped-out like "cockroaches" ... [/b]DeLay uses dirty tactics to intimidate, coerce, bribe and punish those in the House with a conscience who are not so willing to loot & rape the American People senseless in order to enrich his corporate paymasters ... This despicable excuse for a traitor, swindler, liar and war-monger should be ousted from Congress ... He isn't fit to serve in Congress.
Refer to the [b]Buzzflash Editorial [/b]entitled [i]GOP Hypocrite of the Week[/i] on http://www.buzzflash.com/edit... :
If you're wondering why [i]BuzzFlash[/i].com has not yet honored former bug exterminator Tom DeLay as our [i]GOP Hypocrite of the Week[/i], the answer is simple. We just didn't think that we were up to the task.
It's much like a hiker who regularly hikes flat trails finding himself in at the base of Mt. Everest.
That's kind of how we felt dealing with the Mount Everest of [i]GOP Hypocrites[/i], Tom "Dioxin Brain" DeLay. The task of detailing his hypocrisy is as daunting as cleaning out the elephant barn after the circus has left town.
This is a guy who claims that he is a fundamentalist Christian, but won't talk to his mother. This is a guy who accused Clinton of impeachable carnal sins, but throws junkets for lobbyists in Vegas at which his daughter allegedly jumps into hot tubs filled with champagne. This is a whacko coward who claimed that he and Dan Quayle were prevented from serving in the military during the Vietnam War because minorities had taken up all the enlistment spots. This is a guy who has been accused of shaking down contributors if they want legislation passed. This is an ex "bug" man who is exterminating democracy in Texas by stealing congressional districts. This is a war profiteer who proudly declared, "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes."
Okay, you get the point. We could write a 50-volume encyclopedia of Tom DeLay hypocrisy and just begin to scratch the surface.
So as someone once told [i]BuzzFlash[/i], when something seems so overwhelming, just take it one hypocrisy at a time.
That's why this week we just want to point out that [i]Tom DeLay has declared that he will not allow a federal ban on assault weapons that expires this year to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives[/i]. http://www.newhousenews.com/a... These are the ugly, nasty, semi-automatic guns that are designed for military purposes, but gun guys claim are useful in shooting flying fish and police officers. That's right, 1/5 of our law enforcement officers are killed with these Uzis, Bushmasters, and AK-47s.
Not only should the ban be extended, but it should also be strengthened to include insignificantly altered assault weapons that have been manufactured since the ban went into effect in 1994. George W. Bush says he supports the ban because he knows that Americans don't want a President who believes in selling guns that kill a lot of cops. But, with a wink and a nod from Karl Rove, Bush knows that DeLay has got the message to keep an assault weapons ban bill from ever coming to a vote. That way Bush won't have to appear like a hypocrite, even though he really is one.
So the next time a police officer is shot and killed with an assault weapon, just thank Tom DeLay, the 16th [i]GOP[/i] [i]BuzzFlash[/i] Hypocrite of the Week.
He will be making many return appearances, you can be assured of that.
Until next week then, remember the [i]BuzzFlash[/i] slogan: So many Republican Hypocrites, so little time.
[b]Another Source[/b]:
"The Bug Exterminator Goes to Jerusalem" on http://www.counterpunch.org/n...
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| An Eye For An Eye Makes Us All Blind: The Shadow Of Iraq ... |
| 01.31.04 (10:12 am) [edit] |
"[i]An eye for an eye makes us all blind[/i]." – Gandhi
[b]It will require generations to recover from the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]illegal and immoral war on Iraq, based upon despicable lies, deceptions & falsehoods, in order to enrich their sordid and squalid corporate pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, etc. ... [/b]
The [i]imbecilic ne'er-do-well [/i]Dubya and the[i] mafioso-style Veep-N-Creep [/i]Cheney are responsible for the massacre of over 520 US Soldiers and Tens of Thousands of Innocent Iraqi Civilians ... Many conscientious Americans are calling upon Congress http://www.congress.org to hold impeachment hearings for the neo-con, neo-fascist Bush regime having committed unconscionable [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i].
The Shadow of Iraq is an [i]ugly stain[/i] upon our nation and we must refuse to be neo-nazi collaborators in the putrid Bushies' despicable crimes in their war-turned-bloody-guerril la quagmire ...
Consider "[b][i]Iraqi Democracy: Not Quite the Cakewalk[/i][/b] on http://antiwar.com/reese/?art... :
If I had a choice of catching 1,000 feral cats or bringing democracy to Iraq, I'd take the cat job in a New York second.
The Shiites want immediate elections; the Sunnis have just organized themselves and oppose immediate elections. The Kurds want autonomy, but the Turks have warned that they'll cause big trouble if the Kurds get it. On top of all of that is an ongoing guerrilla war that, despite the claims of success by the United States, continues to take a steady toll of American and Iraqi lives. Unemployment is still close to 60 percent.
Some say it would not take much of a spark to set off a civil war, and you can bet the guerrillas will be more than happy to strike that spark if they can.
In the meantime, back at the ranch, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney remain in denial, refusing, it seems, to accept the fact that there are no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, nor were there any when they led us to war.
Sooner or later it will sink into the minds of the American people that more than half a thousand Americans have been killed, about 2,500 have been wounded, and $200 billion has been spent on false pretenses, and there is no end in sight.
David Kay, who just quit as the chief weapons searcher, now says there are no stockpiles and probably never were any. Loyal as a lap dog, however, he has given Bush an out by blaming the CIA. The amazing thing is that Bush doesn't have the smarts to take the hint. He keeps insisting he "did the right thing based on good intelligence."
That's so typical of an ideologue. When the facts contradict the theory, ignore the facts and stick with the theory. Bush apparently intends to keep the search going until after the November election so he can always say the issue hasn't been settled.
Yeah, I know that the Bush administration says it plans to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis this summer, but you can't believe anything the Bush administration says. We'll have to wait to see how the administration defines sovereignty. My guess is it defines sovereignty as an obedient Iraqi government that will allow large numbers of American military forces to remain in the country.
Whether Iraqis will agree to that kind of "limited sovereignty" remains to be seen. If the past is indicative of the future, Iraqis will view the government as a front for the United States and eventually overthrow it and kill off the leaders. In that case, all the lives and limbs lost, all the billions of dollars poured down a Middle East rathole, will have been in vain.
It's too bad we elected a president who had no knowledge of foreign policy, but far worse had no interest in or curiosity about it. Richard Perle, one of the neocon architects of the war, has said in public print that Bush knew nothing. That's why he became a willing victim of the neocon ideologues he put in his administration. They saved him the trouble of having to think, and that is apparently what he likes most: not having to think. Don't ask me to think or make decisions, he seems to say; just tell me what I should do and say, and I'll read the teleprompter.
That would have been all right if he had surrounded himself with wise and experienced people, but he chose a pack of mad-dog ideologues with delusions of grandeur who are itching to impose American will on the rest of the Earth and are fanatically committed to their theory, the facts to the contrary be damned.
Let's hope that Bush's replacement will be somebody with a functioning and engaged brain who is more interested in solving problems for the American people than in keeping fit, dressing sharp and reading quips somebody else wrote at carefully staged photo ops.
[i]Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column three times a week for King Features, which is carried on Antiwar.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner. [/i]
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| Conservative Groups Break with Republican Leadership ... |
| 01.30.04 (3:46 pm) [edit] |
"[i]The Republican Congress is spending at twice the rate as under Bill Clinton, and President Bush has yet to issue a single veto," Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of Coalitions for America, said at a news briefing with the other five leaders. "I complained about profligate spending during the Clinton years but never thought I'd have to do so with a Republican in the White House and Republicans controlling the Congress[/i]" - Republicans Angry With Bush
Even conscientious conservatives recognize that the extremist neo-con, neo-fascist policies of the corrupt & squalid Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]are reckless, dangerous and destructive to our nation's well-being and future prosperity ... Moreover, the putrid Bush regime's callous, ruthless and reckless swindling, plundering and looting of our U.S. Treasury on behalf of gluttonous corporations and the filthy richest-of-the-rich is insane, immoral and barbaric!
Consider "[i][b]Conservative groups break with Republican leadership[/b][/i]" by [i]Ralph Z. Hallow[/i] of the conservative right-wing WASHINGTON TIMES on http://www.washtimes.com/nati... :
National leaders of six conservative organizations yesterday broke with the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, accusing them of spending like "drunken sailors," and had some strong words for President Bush as well.
"The Republican Congress is spending at twice the rate as under Bill Clinton, and President Bush has yet to issue a single veto," Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of Coalitions for America, said at a news briefing with the other five leaders. "I complained about profligate spending during the Clinton years but never thought I'd have to do so with a Republican in the White House and Republicans controlling the Congress."
Warning of adverse consequences in the November elections, the leaders said the Senate must reject the latest House-passed omnibus spending bill or Mr. Bush should veto the measure.
"The whole purpose of having a Republican president is to lead the Republican Congress," said Paul Beckner, president of Citizens for a Sound Economy, whose co-chairman is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. "The Constitution gives the president the power to veto legislation, and if Congress won't act in a fiscally responsible way, the president has to step in — but he hasn't done that."
"If the president doesn't take a stand on this, there's a real chance the Republicans' voter base will not be enthusiastic about turning out in November, no matter who the Democrats nominate," Mr. Beckner said.
Mr. Weyrich warned that if the Senate passes the omnibus bill and the president fails to veto it, "in all probability the party's conservative-activist core voters aren't going to work to help win the election for Bush and the Republicans, and they may well not even vote."
The Heritage Foundation has projected that passage of the bill would "mark the third consecutive year of massive discretionary spending growth" following increases of 13 percent and 12 percent in the previous two years.
"Congress' continued fiscal irresponsibility is clearly exhibited in the thousands of pork projects contained in the bill," the Heritage report noted.
The Heritage report says the omnibus bill will set the stage for discretionary spending to increase by 9 percent in 2004 to $900 billion, not the 3 percent claimed by Congress.
Asked for comment, Christine Iverson, spokeswoman for Republican National Chairman Ed Gillespie, said that while the last Clinton budget "proposed a 15 percent increase for spending unrelated to national defense, homeland security, entitlement programs and interest on the national debt," the first Bush budget "proposed lowering this increase to 6 percent, the second budget to below 5 percent and the latest to 2 percent for next year."
But conservative critics said that Congress opted to spend far more, and Mr. Bush didn't move to stop it.
Mr. Bush and the Republican lawmakers are expected to face another barrage of criticism next week, this time from some 4,000 activists at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, where Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican congressional leaders are slated to speak.
"A lot of Senate Republicans will be speaking at CPAC, and the grass-roots conservatives attending won't be shy about their displeasure," said Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union.
Citizens Against Government Waste, the Club for Growth and National Taxpayers Union also joined yesterday's conservative protest of excessive spending.
For more than a year, a rebellion in Republican ranks has been brewing over the spending issue. Conservatives, including some House Republicans, finally revolted openly over the $400 billion prescription-drug benefit passed by Congress and signed by Mr. Bush last year — which would expand the government with the largest new entitlement in a generation.
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| Bye Bye Cheney??? |
| 01.30.04 (2:15 pm) [edit] |
[b]Is It Bye Bye Cheney???[/b]
Rumors are rife that alot of Republicans see the Veep-[i]N[/i]-Creep Cheney as a[i] liability [/i]rather than an asset on the GOP ticket for the upcoming November presidential election ...
Refer to "[i][b]The Cheney Liability[/b][/i]" by [i]Jim Lobe [/i]on http://www.tompaine.com/featu... :
While Democratic rivals battle it out for the presidential nomination, Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be fighting to secure his spot on the Republican ticket behind President George W. Bush.
The vice president, whose moderation and 35-year Washington experience reassured voters worried about Bush's callowness and inexperience during the 2000 campaign, is seen more and more by Republican politicos as a drag on the president's re-election chances in what is universally expected to be an extremely close race.
The reasons are simple: instead of the moderate voice of wisdom and caution that voters thought they were getting in the vice president, ongoing disclosures about his role in the drive to war in Iraq and other controversial administration initiatives depict him as an extremist who constantly pushed for the most radical measures.
[b]Closet Skeletons [/b]
Not just an extremist, but also a kind of eminence grise who exercises undue influence over Bush to promote a radical agenda, a notion that was furthered by the publication of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's recent book,describing Cheney as creating a "kind of praetorian guard around the president" that blocked out contrary views.
In addition, Cheney's association with Halliburton, the giant construction and oil company which he headed for much of the 1990s and which gobbled up billions of dollars in contracts for Iraq's post-war reconstruction, is growing steadily as a major political liability.
Indeed, Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trial are already using Halliburton's rhythmic, four-syllable name (Hal'-li-bur-ton, Hal'-li-bur-ton) as a mantra that neatly taps into the public's growing concerns on Iraq and disgust with crony capitalism and corporate greed all at the same time.
Reports surfaced already two months ago that a discreet "dump-Cheney" movement had been launched by intimate associates of Bush's father—his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and secretary of state, James Baker, who now has a White House appointment as Bush's personal envoy to persuade official creditors to substantially reduce Iraq's $110 billion foreign debt.
In addition to their perception that Cheney's presence would harm Bush's re-election chances, the two men, who battled frequently with the vice president when he was defense secretary under the first Bush administration, have privately expressed great concern over the Cheney's unparalleled influence over the younger Bush and the damage that it has done to U.S. relations with long-time allies, particularly in Europe and the Arab world.
[b]Damage Control [/b]
Cheney's unprecedented rounds of press interviews earlier this month, as well as his trip this week to Switzerland and Italy—only the second time the vice president has traveled abroad in three years—should be seen in this context.
"I think he knows that he's in trouble," noted one prominent Republican activist, who thinks Cheney should be dropped. "I don't think there's any other way to explain why he would sit for a puerile interview for the (Washington Post's) "Style" section. You know he despises that sort of thing."
Cheney's travel and sudden and abundant press availability was noted in Tuesday's New York Times which described his behavior as "a calculated election-year makeover to temper his hard-line image at home and abroad."
What was remarkable, however, is that he may only have confirmed the growing impression that he remains a zealot, an impression that was especially pronounced in an interview he gave National Public Radio (NPR) last week.
Cheney not only insisted that the major stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) may still be found in Iraq, he also asserted that two semi-trailer trucks found in Iraq during the war constituted "conclusive evidence" of WMD programmes.
Both assertions were almost instantly refuted by none other than the administration's outgoing chief weapons inspector, David Kay. In a series of statements published after Cheney's NPR broadcast, Kay said he had concluded that the WMD stockpiles were destroyed in the early 1990s and that the two trailers were intended to introduce hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly rocket fuel, but had nothing to do with WMD.
In the same NPR interview, Cheney also insisted there was "overwhelming evidence" of an "established relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, citing as one clue Hussein's alleged harboring of a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.
But the notion of such an "established relationship" in any operational sense has now been virtually totally discarded by the intelligence community, and Bush and other senior officials have largely dropped the issue.
Moreover, the FBI and other intelligence agencies that investigated the 1993 bombing and the subsequent residence Iraq of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a low-level suspect, never found any evidence that Iraq was actively protecting him or that he was linked to Iraqi intelligence in any way.
[b]Image Problems [/b]
Indeed, the fact that Cheney would cite Yasin at this late date suggested that he still clings to a theory developed in the 1990s by Iraq specialist Laurie Mylroie at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that Al Qaeda was actually a front for Iraqi intelligence, a notion that is completely dismissed by the intelligence community.
In a recent Washington Monthly article based on interviews with numerous intelligence officials involved in the bombing investigation, Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc., a highly regarded book on Al Qaeda, concluded that Mylroie was, "in short, a crackpot."
In a second interview, Cheney told USA Today that he was not worried about his image as the administration's Machiavelli skilled in the quiet arts of persuading his "Prince" to pursue questionable policies, adding, surprisingly un-self-consciously, "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate, actually."
But whether Cheney likes it or not, he is increasingly seen that way, by Democrats, by Republican internationalists like Baker and Scowcroft, and, perhaps, most significantly for purposes of Bush's re-election prospects, by a growing number of traditionally Republican right-wingers and libertarians who are worried about the exploding costs of the "war on terror" on the country's fiscal health, individual liberties, and armed forces. They also blame Cheney for being administration's key backer and enabler of the neo-conservative vision of a never-ending war against radical Islam which they believe will only accelerate current trends.
''So Dick Cheney turns out to be a true radical—not a moderate Republican," noted Georgie Anne Geyer, a nationally syndicated columnist, who compared the vice president to Cardinal Richelieu of 17th century France in a cover article for this week's edition of American Conservative.
''While there is little mystery about what he has actually done, there remains the mystery of how a man from Wyoming should be the epicenter of a scheme so strange, so Machiavellian, so profoundly disaggregated from the American context'', she wrote. ''But no one should expect Dick Cheney and his group (of neoconservatives) to change. They will not."
In a case of particularly bad timing, Cheney's image as a manipulative schemer was furthered again this week just as he was trying to reassure Europeans about his moderation and commitment to multilateralism.
A new book on Tony Blair, by author and Financial Times correspondent Philip Stephens, depicts Cheney as the surprise guest at key meetings between Bush and the British prime minister. It quotes one Blair aide as complaining that Cheney ''waged a guerrilla war'' against London's efforts to seek UN approval before the war.
The book concludes that Cheney constantly ''sought to undermine the prime minister privately'' and quotes him as telling another senior official more than six months before the war, ''Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools."
Despite Hussein's capture, however, that "victory" still looks rather tenuous, and, what with recent polls showing Cheney's favourability rating at less than half of Bush's at a mere 20 percent and falling, so may Cheney's claim to the number two spot on the Republican ticket.
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| The Corrupt Bush Regime Is PASSING THE BUCK On WMDs LIES!!! |
| 01.30.04 (1:13 pm) [edit] |
[b]Congress http://www.congress.org should be called upon to conduct open-door hearings and an investigation into the lies, deceptions and falsehoods perpetrated by the corrupt Bush regime regarding the non-existent WMDs in Iraq[i] that were supposed to pose [/i]an imminent threat to our national security: their [i]casus belli [/i]for their neo-con, neo-fascist, illegal and immoral invasion of a sovereign nation[/b]. The Bush regime's arrogant & callous "[i]Ooopppsss, I Did It Again[/i]" so-called "mistake" (... [i]uh-huh ... really devised for their Global Corporate Empire to enrich their corporate cronies: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, etc[/i].) has resulted in the DEATHS of 519 U.S. Soldiers and Tens of Thousands of Innocent Iraqi Civilians-- at a staggering cost of nearly $100 Billion thus far-- WITH NO END IN SIGHT TO THE CARNAGE & OBSCENE SQUANDERING OF OUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS!!!
The Republican controlled Congress will [i]only[/i] demand that hearings are called if sufficient public outrage is expressed and [i]only[/i] if they are compelled to do so ... Please express your outrage today on http://www.congress.org .
The Bush regime is PASSING THE BUCK on WMDs ...
Consider "[i][b]Passing the Buck[/b][/i]" on http://www.americanprogress.o... :
The Bush administration's strategy for addressing questions about the war in Iraq is now clear – shift the blame for prewar failures to the intelligence community and claim the war was justified regardless of any solid evidence of an imminent threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But the administration must be held accountable for its prewar misstatements and deceptions.
[b]1. There was no "imminent threat" from Iraq worthy of going to war without the full backing of our allies[/b]. As David Kay’s testimony before Congress yesterday confirmed, there was no imminent threat from Iraq prior to the administration's demand for a rapid invasion of the country last spring. Iraq did not possess any large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons or have a reconstituted nuclear program capable of threatening the U.S. and its allies in any meaningful way. As Kay stated in the hearing, "It turns out we were all wrong."
[b]2. The intelligence community warned the White House that it was on shaky ground[/b]. Throughout 2002, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush administration that its selective use of intelligence was painting a weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored by the administration. Instead of listening to the warnings, intelligence officials say the White House instead pressured them to drive their reports toward a pre-determined policy.
[b]3. President Bush himself is responsible for sending the country to war based on false information and misleading statements[/b]. As Senator Carl Levin stated yesterday during Kay’s testimony, "The administration, in order to support its decision to go to war, made numerous vivid, unqualified statements about Iraq having in its possession weapons of mass destruction – not programs, not program-related activities, not intentions – actual weapons is what the administration’s statements focused on." It wasn’t the CIA that sent us to war; it was the president and his national security team that did.
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]The Center for American Progress [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Why Don't The "PRO-LIFERS" Care About LIFE Outside Of The WOMB??? ... |
| 01.30.04 (10:33 am) [edit] |
[b]Frankly, many of the so-called "Pro-Lifers" sound like hypocrites to me ... Don't they care about LIFE outside of the WOMB??? ... Isn't LIFE outside of the WOMB precious, too??? ...[/b] Not to the so-called "Pro-Lifers" who [i]don't give a damn [/i]if workers are ruthlessly exploited, paid slave labor wages, get sick and die without health care-- are laid off ([i]'cause Dubya's best buddies like, Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay rapes 'em of their jobs, pensions and investments [/i]...) ... or so many elderly citizens living in dire conditions without proper pensions ([i]looted by Dubya & his Wall Street crooks[/i]) etc... !!! Where are the so-called "Pro-Lifers" outrages and lectures, when it comes to the skyrocketing poverty, homelessness, joblessness, etc. that is inflicting misery and desperation upon millions of our citizens [i]outside of the womb[/i]???
Nor do the so-called "Pro-Lifers" seem to [i]give a damn [/i]about the 519 U.S. Soldiers & Tens of Thousands of Innocent Iraqi Civilians, killed by the corrupt Bush regime, based upon false pretexts, lies, deceptions and falsehoods ... A waste of life, [b]Bush's 'Cannon-Fodder' [/b]"[i]flushed down the toilet[/i]" by Dubya in order to enrich his squalid family and his corrupt corporate cronies like the sordid Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc. ...
Consider "[b]US soldier asks: “How many more must die” in Iraq?[/b]" on http://www.wsws.org/articles/... ... [b]Dubya's Answer Is[/b]: [i]Apparently as many as are needed until Halliburton & Co. have raped, swindled, plundered and looted America & Iraq-- for every morsel of OIL & Taxpayer Dollar that we can get away with stealing[/i]!!!
[b]Where are the so-called "Pro-Lifers" when it comes to Dubya's ABORTION of so many American and Iraqi LIVES??? [/b]...
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| Dubya's Neo-Con CON of Iraq: Give You Liberty or Give You Death! |
| 01.29.04 (6:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya's neo-con [i]CON[/i] of Iraq is that [i]by god[/i], he'll give 'em [i]liberty-Dubya-style [/i]meaning:-- "Do As Halliburton Says Or Else" ... Or Else? ... [/b]
Refer to "[i][b]Give You Liberty or Give You Death[/b][/i]" by [i]Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr[/i]. on http://www.lewrockwell.com/ro... :
"The people of Iraq are free," said President Bush in his State of the Union speech. A few days later, a terrible problem presented itself. It seems that the best-selling popular music http://www.washtimes.com/worl... in Iraq heralds the resistance and condemns the occupation.
Here's a sample lyric http://www.dailystar.com.lb/f... : "[i]America has come and occupied Baghdad. The army and people have weapons and ammunition. Let's go fight and call out the name of God[/i]."
CD shops around the country admit, when pressed, that this music is far more popular than the American and Arabic tunes that the US occupation forces stations to play. The US may call it terrorist music, but its message is enormously popular.
So what's the problem? Well, the censors don't know how to deal with the issue of commercial music sales. If the same music were on the radio or television, their answer would be easy. The US has [i]strict censorship [/i] http://www.cpa-iraq.org/trans... against "any sort of public expression used in an institutionalized sense" that would "incite violence against the coalition." This was spelled out in an Orwellian news conference in which Daniel Senor was trying to figure out if the US would crack down on those who sold the music.
The problem, as Senor pointed out, is that the edict against unapproved politics:
"[i]does not reference music specifically. But I could talk to our lawyers and find out if music would apply. You can follow up with me after that. But I would think that any sort of public expression used in sort of an institutionalized sense, in some sort of institutionalized media that would incite violence against the coalition, incite violence against the Iraqis, would be subjected to this decree. But I can check on that[/i]."
The Iraqi people are free so long as they say and do only what the occupation military government tells them to do. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people being detained (the low number claimed by the US, the high number by human rights groups) for engaging in anti-coalition thoughts, words, or deeds. If you think that is striking enough – and what American doesn't shudder at the thought of his own government becoming someone else's despotism? – consider something even more alarming: the US doesn't consider this abnormal.
Listen to these words in defense of military censorship in Iraq: "[i]That is a decree that was modeled after similar policies and similar standards and guidelines in the United States, in the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere[/i]." It might be bad enough to hear extraordinary violations of human rights justified on the basis of some trumped up war power. But it is surely the lowest of the low for them to claim that this is perfectly normal, exactly the kind of thing that exists in the US today.
In short, the US is claiming that it could round up 10,000 to 20,000 Americans and hold them without trial on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing – which could consist only of writing and selling a popular song that takes an anti-regime political view. Many people warn that this is precisely what the administration's Patriot Act makes possible. It criminalizes speech and permits the government to round people up without trial solely on grounds that they are saying things the government doesn’t like.
Just so we are clear: an official spokesman has said that what is going on right now in Iraq is based wholly on laws currently in effect in the US. You might point this out the next time someone calls you an alarmist for saying that the Bush administration is ushering in tyranny. What is even more troubling is that the Bush administration calls what is happening in Iraq freedom itself.
Let us examine how this freedom works, thanks to the report filed by Kevin Sites for NBC. He was there when a squadron drove up at dawn in a rural neighborhood of Baghdad. A soldier stood atop a Humvee with a megaphone and told everyone that they had better report insurgent activity or else face a continued cutoff of basic services like water and electricity. The men present began to complain about the searches of their homes and the lack of kerosene and propane. The soldier speaking got nervous and pops off the cover of his scope on his M4 rifle.
About that time, jet fighters and helicopters began to buzz overhead, in a sound that grew deafening. This is what they call a "show of force." Essentially, it comes down to this: the US demands total obedience and threatens to kill anyone who resists. This is freedom in Iraq. And what is the option? The US is making more and more concessions to the Shiite majority, permitting them to control family law, which means far less freedom for women in Iraq than they had under Saddam.
Why is the US doing this? Because its despotism isn't working. Because of the 500 dead soldiers. Because of the expense. Because the enlisted have lost heart. The occupation has been a failure. The US knows no way out, however, so it improvises from day to day, switching between fascist chic and appearing to benignly withdraw. Administration spokesmen continue to speak as if any attack on "the coalition" is an attack on "the Iraqi people."
Reading all this recalls scenes from the [i]Black Book of Communism[/i], http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... as the Soviets were attempting to politically subdue Ukraine. What began mildly grew ever more severe once the communists were faced with resistance. You threaten, arrest, reward traitors, deny basic services, use propaganda, exact severe punishments, but in the end, the Soviets discovered the only real way to ensure compliance: holocaust.
You might have heard that the US has recently leaned on Russia. It seems that Powell is worried that Putin is acting in autocratic fashion – and we all know that the US is against that kind of thing. After all, Iraq is free. The US is free. So long as we obey, we are all free.
[i]Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com and author of Speaking of Liberty.[/i]
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| Democrats & David Kay Call for Inquiry into WMD LIES: What is Dubya HIDING? |
| 01.29.04 (3:14 pm) [edit] |
[b]Democrats and David Kay are calling for an inquiry into the so-called "intelligence failures" ... (... [i]ooopppsss ... or lies, deceptions and falsehoods [/i]...) regarding the non-existent WMDs in Iraq:-- the corrupt Bush regime's [i]casus belli [/i]for their illegal and immoral incursion into Iraq costing the lives of 519 US Soldiers & Tens of Thousands of Innocent Iraqi Civilians![/b]
Dubya and his corrupt neo-con, neo-fascist thugs and goons in his war-mongering regime do not want an inquiry!#$%*?! ... If Dubya was "[i]innocent[/i]" ...Then [i]what [/i]exactly is he[i] hiding[/i]???????
Consider "[i][b]Kay calls for inquiry[/b][/i]" on http://www.alternet.org :
Democrats calling for a probe into WMD intelligence got a boost from an unlikely source today: David Kay. The former chief weapons inspector told http://www.washingtonpost.com... the Senate Armed Services Committee, "I must say, my personal view, and it's purely personal, is that in this case you will finally determine that it is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people the confidence that you have done it."
[i]Read more on [/i] http://www.alternet.org/waron...
Apparently Dubya[i] ain't [/i]shocked and upset with the Intelligence Community ([i]'cause it really is his own fault[/i]) at having led us into war based upon lies, deceptions and falsehoods ... costing the lives of 519 US Soldiers and Tens of Thousands of Innocent Iraqi Civilians ... as well as nearly $100 Billion in Taxpayer Dollars thus far swindled from working Americans as a payback to Dubya's [i]corporate-take-all [/i]pimps ... [i]with no end in sight to the massacre or the swindling [/i]... Hmmm ...
[i]Read also [/i]"[i][b]Rice Admits Flaws In Iraq Intelligence, Rules Out Probe[/b][/i]" on http://www.islam-online.net/E...
Of course, Condi Rice rules out a probe ... because she and Dubya ([i]along with Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. ... all corporate-owned whores of their corporate pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big OIL, etc. ...[/i]) would [i]all end-up in JAIL[/i]!
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| World Reaction to Dubya's WMD LIES, Distortions, Fabrications & Falsehoods ... |
| 01.29.04 (12:14 pm) [edit] |
[b]The world reaction to the corrupt Bush regime's puppet David Kay's admission that there are no WMDs in Iraq is not surprising ... [/b]The United Nations including 145 out of 191 nations begged Dubya not to rush into war, but to allow U.N. Weapons Inspectors more time to search as Iraq posed no threat to anyone ... But, Dubya, Cheney and their corrupt cabal of neo-con, neo-fascist thugs & goons lusted for their war in Iraq ... to enrich Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big OIL, etc ...
[b]What the World is Saying...
About David Kay’s Statements on WMD in Iraq[/b]
Earlier this week, the administration’s outgoing top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, when asked about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, replied, “I don't think they existed." Kay based his statement on over six months of investigation undertaken by the CIA’s Iraqi Survey Group. The following is a sample of international editorial commentary on his recent statements:--
[b]Japan[/b]
"Recent admissions by top U.S. officials that Iraq might not have had weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, demand an explanation. Questions must be answered and the damage done to both U.N. and U.S. credibility must be repaired... Mr. Bush argued for the need to go to war because Iraq's possession of WMD posed an urgent danger. No such claim can be leveled against 'WMD-related programs.' The U.S. must discover why that gap existed and explain to the world why it acted on the basis of faulty intelligence. Failure to do so will ensure that doubts arise every time the U.S. tries to marshal international support for action in the future."
- [i]The Japan Times[/i], January 28, 2004
[b]Australia[/b]
"The resignation of the United States' chief Iraq weapons inspector, David Kay, and his stated belief there are no weapons of mass destruction to be found there, should not be seen simply as another blow to the countries that went to war specifically to eliminate the threat. More importantly, it is a victory for the United Nations and the international community generally who, over the previous decade, put pressure on Saddam Hussein to rid his country of the WMD menace."
- [i]Canberra Times[/i], January 27, 2004
[b]France[/b]
"A year ago, in his State of the Union message, President George W. Bush lacked a sufficiently alarmist formula to describe the immediate danger that Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed to the United States... A few weeks later, citing meteorological constraints, President Bush went to war. There could be no question of waiting any longer: the danger was too great... Almost a year after the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, the head of the US inspection mission in Iraq has just submitted his conclusions. He has worked with hundreds of men. He has operated in the favorable environment of a country administrated by the United States. David Kay was definite: there were no WMD’s."
- [i]Le Monde[/i], January 27, 2004
[b]Malaysia[/b]
"The story of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is turning into a dime novel of farce, fear-baiting manipulation, hubris and hypocrisy. In the latest chapter, David Kay, once stridently bullish about Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons hoard, resigned from the Iraq Survey Group on Friday after having found no stockpiles, or any capacity to build them, that would have justified President George W. Bush's decision to go to war last March… The absence of WMD in Iraq has damaged American credibility in the eyes of the world and struck down the UN's authority to deter aggression."
- [i]Kamrul Idris, New Straits Times[/i], January 26, 2004
[b]China (Hong Kong)[/b]
"[Kay’s assessment] is the most authoritative challenge yet to the claims that Iraq had to be attacked to remove an imminent threat to the world… His conclusions will add weight to allegations that suspect intelligence concerning Hussein's weapons was too easily relied upon and then exaggerated by US and British leaders in a bid to swing international opinion behind the invasion... U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney said last week that 'the jury is still out' on the weapons issue. That may be true. But the jury - in the form of international opinion - is still lacking evidence and is becoming more skeptical by the day."
- [i]South China Morning Post[/i], January 25, 2004
[b]Poland[/b]
"The CIA, and the Bush Administration, claimed the opposite, and the conviction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them was the main reason for attacking Iraq... The most important thing is how [President] Bush made the decision to start the war - whether he was himself misled or he deliberately told a lie... It is imaginable, after all, that the United States told a lie and went to war. However, if the country went to war by mistake, the consequences are appalling."
- [i]Dawid Warszawski, Warsaw Gazeta Wyborcza[/i], January 28, 2004
[b]United Kingdom[/b]
"It's getting embarrassing. Anybody who's anybody now admits that there are no, and were no, weapons of mass destruction worth the name in Iraq. The roll-call of converts to what used to be the exclusive position of the anti-war camp gets more impressive by the day. David Kay, President Bush's handpicked arms inspector and the former chief weapons monitor of the CIA - hardly a limp-wristed European peacenik - quit his post at the head of the Iraq Survey Group last week, concluding that there are no Iraqi WMD to be found: "I don't think they existed," he said bluntly... In 2002-03, governments in London and Washington stretched every sinew to persuade their publics that war was necessary because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But Iraq did not and so the war was fought on a false basis. For that, surely, there must be a reckoning."
- [i]Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian[/i], January 28, 2004
[b]India[/b]
"The United States Administration’s defense of its Iraq policy has been steadily rendered untenable by developments on the ground. Its justifications for the invasion have not withstood close scrutiny and it is unable to contain the consequences of its actions... The administration also cannot take shelter behind the CIA official's statement that errors in judgment should be attributed to the intelligence services rather than to the political echelon. President Bush and his political appointees have so consistently followed a pattern of doctoring data and concocting cases to suit their political purposes that they cannot blame professionals in the intelligence services for the wide gap between reality and their projections of it."
- [i]The Hindu[/i], January 28, 2004
[b]Algeria[/b]
"Despite a negative report, the head of the White House attacked an independent country, dragging the United Kingdom along on his adventure. He gave the American people a single argument to justify his operation: the ruler of Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction. Today the most credible and the most serious testimony is mounting against him. Since 2001 he has not stopped lying and talking about weapons that do not exist, this with the sole aim of seizing ancient Mesopotamia."
- [i]Tayeb Belghiche, Algiers El Watan[/i], January 27, 2004
[b]Ireland[/b]
"[Kay’s statement] is a grave embarrassment for supporters of the war... British and American official statements that the question is still open are less and less credible after Mr. Kay's resignation... It is not a trivial point. Despite the several supplementary reasons for going to war put out before and after it by the Bush administration, the allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which he was prepared to use against other states was the basic justification offered to domestic and international opinion and the most plausible one under international law."
- [i]The Irish Times[/i], January 26, 2004
[b]Pakistan[/b]
"[Kay] said we have searched about 85 percent of the Iraqi area, but we have detected nothing. In this situation, it can be said that Iraq in fact never possessed such weapons... David Kay's resignation is a slap on the US face... He was an American, and he was specially sent to Iraq... By making the so-called WMD’s an excuse, the United States and Britain have committed most shameful aggression against an independent and sovereign country... David Kay's resignation has further exposed their naked aggression."
- [i]Karachi Jasarat[/i], January 26, 2004
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]The Center for American Progress [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Dubya's New Spin: 'CHOCKER-BLOCK' WITH LIES, LIES AND MORE LIES ... |
| 01.29.04 (7:17 am) [edit] |
[b]The [i]panic-stricken [/i]White House is fabricating neo-orwellian spin as fast as their[i] Special Effects Factory [/i]can [i]come-up [/i]with new and creative ways to lie, deceive and falsify their many, many, many Crimes Against the U.S.A. and Iraq![/b]
Dubya, Cheney, Rice & Rove's new spin is [i]'chocker-block' [/i]with LIES, LIES & MORE LIES ...
They are depending on the fact that HISTORY for MANY [i]NOT-TERRIBLY-BRIGHT [/i]AMERICANS begins after morning coffee, when the likes of the neo-con, neo-fascist blowhard Rush Limbaugh regurgitates the Bush regime's neo-nazi propaganda ... [i]OR[/i] they pick up their [i]"Thoughts [sic]" For The Day [/i]from the Joseph Goebbles' News Channels like Fox, WND or Matt Drudge ...
Now these neo-babblers in the White House claim that they never said that Hussein represented an [i]Imminent Threat[/i] ... HA HA HA HA HA!
After Dubya having told us in his State of the Union Screed a year ago, that Saddam Hussein purchased uranium yellow cakes from Niger, that Iraq represented a grave danger to us, and was planning to attack us with [i]all those stockpiles of WMDs[/i]:[i] that proved to be a lie [/i]... After Cheney having told us that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons facilities, had ties with Osama bin Laden & Al Qaida, and was harboring terrorists getting ready to attack us at a moment's notice, with [i]all those stockpiles of WMDs[/i]: [i]that all proved to be lies [/i]... After Rice having told us that if we didn't attack Saddam Hussein ASAP, that "mushroom clouds" would rise-up from our cities, killing millions of us within a 45 minute attack, with[i] all those stockpiles of WMDs[/i]: [i]that all proved to be lies [/i]...
Before Dubya launched his immoral and illegal invasion into Iraq ([i]that the U.N. & 145 nations out of 191 opposed as they begged the U.S.A. to allow the U.N. inspection process to continue [/i]...), his White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, speaking on behalf of the President said "[i]This is about imminent threat.[/i]" ... http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
Of course, what Dubya, Cheney, Rice & Rove all want to avoid now are investigations that would lead to trials that would lead to impeachments that would lead to prison terms ... None of which is likely to happen since we have a GOP Rubber-Stamp Puppet Congress, [i]bought-and-paid-for [/i]by the same corporate pimps who have [i]bought-and-paid-for [/i]the whores & sluts in the White House.
[b]For your information:[/b]
President Bush on Tuesday declined to repeat past claims that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. This comes as former US weapons inspector David Kay says he believes Iraq destroyed its arsenal years before the U.S. invasion.
Meanwhile during the White House press briefing Scott McClellan claimed the Bush administration never considered Saddam Hussein to be an imminent threat to the United States. McClellan said the threat was "grave and gathering" but not imminent. A reporter responded to this clarification by suggesting that means the U.S. war against Iraq was not preemptive -- which applies to imminent threats -- but preventive -- which applies to non-imminent threats.
And Vice President Dick Cheney's recent comments on weapons of mass destruction are also coming under criticism. Senator Carl Levin from Michigan said "Just within the last few days, Vice President Cheney has said that it is clear that a couple of vehicles that were found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs, exactly the opposite of what David Kay is reportedly saying."
Meanwhile The New York Times is reporting the White House is expected to reject a request by Democrats to form an independent panel to examine how the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq could have been so flawed.
[b]Sources:[/b]
"White House Now Clams Hussein Was Not Imminent Threat" on http://www.democracynow.org/a...
"Why the Bush/Cheney Regime's BIG LIE Over WMDs in Iraq Won't Go Away ..." on http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| Members of Congress Rebuke CBS for Un-Democratic Censorship |
| 01.28.04 (5:52 pm) [edit] |
[b]If Dubya loves "[i]democracy[/i] [sic]" so much, why doesn't he (and his corrupt regime, for that matter) rebuke CBS for acting like a Nazi Gestapo Propaganda Machine?[/b] ... Of course we know that Dubya doesn't give a damn about "freedom" or "democracy" or the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ...
It is obvious to the [i]dumbest-of-the-dumb [/i]([i]except for Dubya's neo-con, neo-fascist brain-dead sheep, ideologues, court-jesters & attack-dogs[/i]) that CBS is in the pocket of the Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] and that they have betrayed their journalistic ethics of informing the citizenry in a [i]fair and balanced [/i]manner ... We no longer have 'Freedom of the Press' so sacred to the life of our democracy-- Instead, we now have entered the age of Corporate Fascism ...
Consider[i] John Nichols' [/i]"[b]The Online Beat: [i]'A Disturbing Pattern'[/i][/b]" in [i]The Nation [/i]on http://www.thenation.com/theb... :
CBS officials are still refusing to air a MoveOn.org Voter Fund commercial during Sunday's Super Bowl game because that the 30-second advertisement criticizes President Bush's fiscal policies. There is no question that the network's determination to censor critics of the president damages the political discourse. But the network has not exactly silenced dissent. In fact, CBS's heavy-handed tactics are fueling an outpouring of grassroots anger over the dominance of communications in the United States by a handful of large media corporations. More than 400,000 Americans have contacted CBS to complain already, and the numbers are mounting hourly.
At the same time, the controversy surrounding the censorship of the MoveOn ad has heightened Congressional concern about lobbying by CBS's owner, Viacom, and other media conglomerates to lift limits on media consolidation and monopoly. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, says CBS should be seen as: "Exhibit A in the case against media concentration."
"The CBS Eye has been closed to the truth and to fairness," he said. "CBS has a great, great legacy. It is a storied name when it comes to public information in America. This chapter is sad and disgraceful," argues Durbin, who took to the floor of the Senate to express his concern that CBS was censoring the ad as a favor to the White House that has aggressively supported removing restrictions on the number of local television stations that can be owned by the network's parent company, Viacom.
CBS officials deny they are censoring the MoveOn ad as part of a political quid pro quo deal with a White House that has been friendly to the network's lobbying agenda. But U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, the leading Congressional critic of moves by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the "Big Four" networks to dramatically increase their ownership of local TV stations, says that the censorship of the MoveOn ad highlights the potential for abuse of the public trust by media corporations that grow large enough – and arrogant enough -- to constrict the political discourse at both the local and national levels.
"Denying MoveOn's 30 second spot about the federal budget deficit seems a thinly veiled political decision," explains Sanders. "I hope that Viacom's move is not in any way payback to the Bush Administration for its ongoing efforts to loosen federal rules to allow large companies like Viacom to own a larger and larger share of the media in this country. I hope it's not but the timing of CBS' censorship is troubling. Regardless, this seems to be the latest example of how concentrated power in the media system harms the public interest."
With U.S. Representatives Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois and Maurice Hinchey. D-New York, Sanders penned a letter to CBS President and CEO Les Moonves, which rebukes the network for refusing to sell air time to MoveOn. More than two dozen members of the House have signed on to the letter, which reads:
"We are writing to express our concerns about the decision of Viacom's CBS television network to deny MoveOn.org paid airtime during this year's Super Bowl. We believe this action sends a negative message to the American people about your network's commitment to preserving our democratic debate. Censoring this ad is an affront to free speech and an obstruction of the public's right to hear a diversity of voices over the public airwaves.
"CBS has said that the ad violated the network's policy against running issue advocacy advertising. However, the network has run a White House issue advocacy spot on the consequences of drug use during a past Super Bowl. CBS also will air a spot by Philip Morris USA and the American Legacy Foundation advocating against smoking during this year's Super Bowl. Additionally, the network profits enormously from the thousands of issue ads which air on CBS stations nationwide during election campaigns year after year. Because of these facts, we must call into question why CBS refuses the advertisement by MoveOn.org.
"Issue ads are commonplace and important for democratic debate. Yet, CBS seems to want to limit that debate to ads that are not critical of the political status quo, and in the case of the MoveOn ad, of the President and by extension the Republican-controlled Congress. Apparently, CBS feels that the topic covered in this paid advertisement -the federal government's budget crisis-is inappropriate or irrelevant for American viewers, despite being one of the most critical issues of our day.
"The choice not to run this paid advertisement appears to be part of a disturbing pattern on CBS's part to bow to the wishes of the Republican National Committee. We remember well CBS's remarkable decision this fall to self-censor at the direction of GOP pressure. The network shamefully cancelled a broadcast about former President Ronald Reagan which Republican partisans considered insufficiently flattering.
"Perhaps not coincidently, CBS's decision to censor the Reagan program and to deny airtime to this commercial comes at a time when the White House and the Republican Congress are pushing to allow even greater and greater media concentration - a development from which Viacom stands to benefit handsomely. The appearance of a conflict is hard to ignore. There may not be a fire here, but there certainly is a great deal of smoke.
"As Members of Congress, it is our responsibility to point out the negative direction in which we see CBS heading. You have been entrusted by the American people as stewards of the public airwaves. We ask that you not violate that trust and that you not censor this ad."
In addition to Sanders, Schakowsky and Hinchey, signers of the letter include Representatives Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; George Miller, D-California; Bob Filner, D-California; Diane Watson, D-California; Barbara Lee, D-California; Lynn Woolsey, D-California; Pete Stark, D-California; Sam Farr, D-California; Jerry Nadler, D-New York; Louise Slaughter, D-New York; Jose Serrano, D-New York; Major Owens, D-New York; Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin; Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona; Jay Inslee, D-Washington; Brian Baird, D-Washington; John Olver, D-Massachusetts; Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi; Robert Wexler, D-Florida and Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Illinois.
Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, a Democratic presidential contender, also signed the letter.
Refer to MoveOn.org [b]'CBS Censors Ads' [/b]on http://www.moveon.org
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| Now Dubya Is Planning To Invade PAKISTAN????? ... It is Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace!!!!! ... |
| 01.28.04 (4:43 pm) [edit] |
[b]Now Dubya is planning to invade PAKISTAN?????
We have now entered the bizarre neo-fascist age of[i] Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace[/i] ...[/b]
[i]Read on[/i]
Consider "[i][b]US Plans Spring Offensive in Pakistan[/b][/i]" on http://www.commondreams.org/h... :
WASHINGTON - The U.S. military is making plans for an offensive that would reach inside Pakistan in coming months to try to destroy operations of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, the Chicago Tribune reported on Wednesday.
The newspaper, in a report from Washington citing military sources, said the plans involved thousands of U.S. troops, some of them already in neighboring Afghanistan.
The Pakistani government denied to Reuters that it would allow such an operation and the Pentagon declined to confirm that such a plan was being worked on.
The Chicago Tribune said the plans were advanced but their execution would depend on events on the ground.
This was "not like a contingency plan for North Korea, something that sits on a shelf. This planning is like planning for Iraq. They want this plan to be executable -- now," one source was quoted as saying.
Such an intervention would be political dynamite for Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has only allowed a very limited U.S. military presence in his country. He has cooperated with Washington against al Qaeda but is under pressure from Islamic parties at home.
The newspaper said the U.S. plans were driven partly by concerns over two assassination attempts last month against Musharraf, whose cooperation has been vital to U.S. anti-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan and who is seen in Washington as a force for stability in the volatile region.
The plans were also prompted by a resurgence of attacks by the Taliban, which governed Afghanistan and harbored al Qaeda leaders until it was driven from power in a 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
[b]CONCERN FOR MUSHARRAF[/b]
A U.S. defense official would not confirm the specific operation mentioned in the report, citing a policy against discussing future operations. The official did say that the attempts on Musharraf's life had raised concerns among U.S. authorities.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters U.S. forces staged operations along the Afghan-Pakistan border "all the time," and the American troops in Afghanistan had an "ongoing" offensive against al Qaeda and Taliban remnants.
The Chicago Tribune, quoting sources who requested anonymity, said a team of military intelligence officers would go in to Pakistan ahead of time to prepare an operation which would involve Special Operations forces, Army Rangers and ground troops and an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea.
The operation is being called "spring offensive" in internal Pentagon messages and a series of planning orders were issued in recent weeks, the newspaper said.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Friday Musharraf rejected the need for U.S. forces to enter Pakistan to search for bin Laden. Pakistan's top military spokesman echoed that on Wednesday.
"No foreign forces will operate from Pakistan's territory," Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told Reuters when asked about the Tribune's report.
But a military source described as "well-placed" told the newspaper: "Before we were constrained by the border. Musharraf did not want that. Now we are told we're going into Pakistan with Musharraf's help."
Musharraf said last week that bin Laden and his followers likely were still hiding in the mountains along the Afghan border. He also said he was reasonably sure al Qaeda was behind the attempts on his life.
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| Will Dumb-Dubya DUMP Veep-N-Creep Cheney? |
| 01.28.04 (3:29 pm) [edit] |
[b]Will Dumb-Dubya DUMP Veep-N-Creep Cheney? Ha ha ha![/b]
Who will be left to do Dubya's thinking for him? [i]Oh, yeah [/i]... Karl ([i]Bush's Brain & America's Joseph Goebbles[/i]) Rove, if he[i] ain't [/i]in jail for committing a felony by exposing the identity of an under-cover CIA operative in a petty, mean and illegal act of revenge ... Who then? [i]Oh, yeah [/i]... Condi Rice? The 'murderer' who let 9/11 happen and is in charge of the Iraqi Stablization Group (ISG) that is the sickening, putrid joke of the world? ... Who else? ... Ha ha ha!
Consider "[i][b]Will Dubya Dump Dick?[/b][/i]" by [i]Jim Lobe [/i]on http://www.alternet.org/story... :
While Democratic rivals battle for the presidential nomination in a succession of grueling primary elections, Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be fighting to secure his spot on the Republican ticket behind President George W. Bush.
The vice president, whose supposed moderation and 35-year Washington experience reassured Bush voters worried about the callowness and inexperience of Bush in 2000, is increasingly seen by Republican Party politicos as a millstone on the president's re-election chances in what is expected to be an extremely close race.
The reasons are for their worries are evident. Ongoing disclosures about Cheney's role in the drive to war in Iraq and other controversial administration plans reveal him as not the much-touted moderate but an extremist who constantly pushed for the most radical policies. But more than just an extremist, Cheney is also viewed as a kind of eminence grise who exercises undue influence over Bush to further a radical agenda, a perception confirmed by recent revelations by former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who described Cheney as creating a "kind of praetorian guard around the president" that blocked out contrary views.
In addition, Cheney's association with Halliburton, the giant construction and oil company he headed for much of the 1990s and that gobbled up billions of dollars in contracts for Iraq's postwar reconstruction, is also becoming a major political liability. Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail are already using Halliburton's rhythmic, four-syllable name (HAL-li-bur-ton, HAL-li-bur-ton) as a mantra that neatly taps into the public's growing concerns overn Iraq and disgust with crony capitalism and corporate greed, all at the same time.
Reports of a discreet "dump Cheney" movement, launched by intimate associates of Bush's father (former president George H. W. Bush), were already surfacing two months ago. Cheney's detractors include national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker, who now has a White House appointment as Bush Jr's personal envoy to persuade official creditors to reduce substantially Iraq's $110 billion foreign debt. Both men battled frequently with the vice president when he was defense secretary in the first Bush administration.
In addition to fears about possible impact on Bush's re-election chances, Scowcroft and Baker have privately expressed great concern over Cheney's unparalleled influence over the younger Bush's foreign policy, and the damage that it has wreaked on U.S. relations with longtime allies, particularly in Europe and the Arab world.
The underground campaign explains many of Cheney's recent actions, including holding unprecedented rounds of press interviews in January, as well as his trip this week to Switzerland and Italy (marking only the second time the vice president has traveled abroad in three years). "I think he knows that he's in trouble," said a prominent anti-Cheney Republican activist this week. "I don't think there's any other way to explain why he would sit for a puerile interview for the [Washington Post's] Style section. You know he despises that sort of thing." Cheney's travel and sudden and abundant press availability was noted in Tuesday's New York Times, which described his behavior as "a calculated election-year makeover to temper his hardline image at home and abroad".
But Cheney's appearances may, in fact, have merely confirmed his image as a zealot. In an interview he gave National Public Radio (NPR) last week, Cheney not only insisted that major stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) may still be found in Iraq, he also claimed that two semi-trailer trucks found in that country during last year's U.S.-led war constituted "conclusive evidence" of WMD programs. Both assertions were almost instantly refuted by none other than the administration's outgoing chief weapons inspector, David Kay. In a series of statements published after Cheney's NPR broadcast, Kay said he had concluded that the WMD stockpiles were destroyed in the early 1990s, and that the two trailers in question were intended to produce hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly rocket fuel.
In the same NPR interview Cheney also insisted there was "overwhelming evidence" of an "established relationship" between former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group, citing Saddam's alleged harboring of a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. But the notion of such an "established relationship" in any operational sense has now been almost uniformly dismissed by the intelligence community, and even Bush and other senior White House officials have dropped the issue.
In another interview, Cheney told USA Today he was not worried about his image as the administration's Machiavelli, skilled in the quiet arts of persuading his "Prince" to pursue questionable policies, adding, remarkably, "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate, actually."
But whether Cheney likes it or not, he is increasingly seen as a master manipulator, by Democrats, by Republican internationalists such as Baker and Scowcroft, and, perhaps most significantly for purposes of Bush's re-election prospects, by a growing number of traditionally Republican right-wingers and libertarians worried about the impact of the exploding costs of the "war on terror" on the country's fiscal health, individual liberties and armed forces. These Republicans also blame Cheney for being the administration's key supporter of the neo-conservative agenda, which promotes a never-ending war against radical Islam.
"So Dick Cheney turns out to be a true radical – not a moderate Republican," notes Georgie Anne Geyer, a nationally syndicated columnist, who compares the vice president to Cardinal Richelieu of 17th-century France in a cover article for this week's edition of American Conservative magazine. "While there is little mystery about what he has actually done, there remains the mystery of how a man from Wyoming should be the epicenter of a scheme so strange, so Machiavellian, so profoundly disaggregated from the American context," she writes. "But no one should expect Dick Cheney and his group [of neo-conservatives] to change. They will not."
In a case of particularly bad timing, Cheney's image as a manipulative schemer was furthered again this week, just as he was trying to reassure Europeans about his moderation and commitment to multilateralism. A new book on Tony Blair, authored by Financial Times correspondent Philip Stephens, depicts Cheney as the surprise guest at key meetings between Bush and the British prime minister. He quotes one Blair aide complaining that Cheney "waged a guerrilla war" against London's efforts to seek United Nations approval before the war. The book concludes that Cheney constantly "sought to undermine the prime minister privately", and quotes him telling another senior official more than six months before the war, "Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools."
With the presidential elections looming in November, a "victory" in Iraq still looks rather tenuous, and with recent polls showing Cheney's favorability rating at less than one-half of that of Bush – a mere 20 percent and falling – so might the vice president's claim to the No 2 spot on the Republican ticket.
[i]Jim Lobe writes on foreign policy for AlterNet, Foreign Policy in Focus, and TomPaine.com[/i].
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| For the First Time Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional |
| 01.28.04 (1:00 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Patriot Act is a dangerous and unconstitutional act that gives Dubya the power of an emperor. Conscientious conservatives, liberals and independents across the nation are calling for this tyrannical act to be repealed. Contact Congress http://www.congress.org to demand that it be repealed immediately![/b]
Thankfully, part of this [i]neo-fascist Patriot Act [/i]has just recently been ruled unconstitutional in what will hopefully be the beginning of the end of our nation's transformation into a[i] neo-nazi militaristic state[/i] by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i].
Consider "[b]For the First Time Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional[/b]" on http://www.democracynow.org/a... :
For the first time a federal judge has ruled portions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional. The Patriot Act was signed into law six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and has long been criticized by civil liberties groups. U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins ruled unconstitutional one provision that bans certain types of support for terrorist groups. The judge said the law was so vague that it risked running afoul of the First Amendment. The case was filed by the Humanitarian Law Project which gave "human rights" training to the Kurdistan Workers Party, which is designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government.
The group's attorney David Cole told the Washington Post, "Our clients sought only to support lawful and nonviolent activity, yet the Patriot Act provision draws no distinction whatsoever between expert advice in human rights, designed to deter violence, and expert advice on how to build a bomb."
[i]David Cole, professor at Georgetown Law School and author of the book "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedom in the War on Terrorism."[/i]
[b][i]Read the full transcript of the interview [/i]between Amy Goodman and David Cole[/b] on http://www.democracynow.org/a... .
[b]Also refer to "[i]Repeal The PATRIOT ACT[/i]!" [/b]on http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| Powell Says No Link Between Iraq & Al Qaida and Cheney Admits He's A Liar |
| 01.28.04 (12:46 pm) [edit] |
[b]There is no proven link between Iraq and Al Qaida [/b]... [b]Indeed there is increasing evidence that Saddam Hussein & Osama bin Laden hated each other and that Saddam Hussein ordered his military to have nothing to do with Al Qaida ...[/b]
Refer to "[b]No proof links Iraq, al-Qaida, Powell says[/b]" on http://msnbc.msn.com/id/39091... : - [i]Excerpt[/i] -
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell reversed a year of administration policy, acknowledging Thursday that he had seen no “smoking gun [or] concrete evidence” of ties between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.
[b]Of course[i] believing in fairy tales [/i]& them being true are quite different things ...[/b]
[b]Veep-N-Creep Cheney admits what we all know to be true: He Is A LIAR! ...[/b]
Refer to "[b]Cheney backs away from Iraq WMD claim[/b]" on http://news.ft.com/servlet/Co... : - [i]Excerpt[/i] -
Dick Cheney, US vice-president, on Tuesday defended the US decision to invade Iraq but, in a notable shift of emphasis, he left open the question of whether Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction - a claim he made repeatedly before the war.
[b]Of course, Dubya & Cheney will continue their propaganda [i]War-On-Us [/i]of lies, deceptions & falsehoods in their perpetual search for perpetual missing & elusive WMD ... and perpetual non-existent links between Iraq & Al Qaida ... and perpetual non-existent links between anyone that Dubya & Cheney don't like and 9/11 ... at least until after the November elections![/b]
[b]Remember Dubya's mind-numbing mantra: [i]9/11 ... Blame Clinton ... 9/11 ... Blame Clinton ... 9/11 ... Blame Clinton [/i]... repeated over and over and over again until the stupid among us are hypnotized into swallowing this imbecilic jingoism![/b]
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| Can Dubya Ever Really Be ELECTED President? |
| 01.28.04 (12:20 pm) [edit] |
[b]The following quite thought-provoking article makes one truly interested in today's political machinations stop, pause and reflect ...[/b]
In the presidential election of 2000, Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-fascist thugs & goons hijacked our government in a farcical, but tragic [i]banana republican coup d'etat [/i]... Dubya not only over-whelmingly lost the popular vote, but would have lost Florida too, had the Supreme Court of Fascists not intervened, stopped the counting of our citizen's votes ([i]our most sacred voice[/i]) and appointed their Corporate-Whore-N-Useful- Idiot-Dubya as payback to Poppy Bush for his insane appointments of the traitorous crook: Scalia & Thomas ...
Although there is much merit in the following article, we must not permit Dubya and his neo-con war-mongers-for-war-profi teers and corporate-take-all-crimin als to continue to rape, swindle, and con us and others for a second time in November 2004!
You decide ... "[b]Can George Ever Really Be [i]Elected[/i] President[/b]?" by [i]C. G. ESTABROOK[/i] on http://www.counterpunch.com/e... :
So what did happen to Mad Doctor Dean and the Democrat joy-boys, Kerry and Edwards, in the wild Midwest? The media had anointed Dean, the rural governor from Wall Street, as the Democratic front-runner, but that's not what the Iowa caucuses decided. Why not?
By the time Dean was delivering his "I have a scream" speech, a exit poll of caucus-goers had been compiled. It was conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, a cooperative arrangement of the for-profit media -- ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, Fox News and the AP. It showed that Democrats in Iowa didn't disagree with Dean about Iraq -- 75% of them opposed the Bush administration's invasion of that country. But less than 15% said that the war was the most important issue. (And only 3% said that terrorism was the most important issue.) Far more of those who attended the caucuses said that the economy and health-care were their main concerns.
The situation in New Hampshire is much the same. A Los Angeles Times poll after the last debate before the primary there showed that although some (20%) saw the war as the most important issue, slightly more (22%) said the economy was, and many more (36%) chose health care.
These results (which they surely paid close attention to) can't be encouraging to those who do George Bush's thinking for him. If the voters vote in November on the basis of domestic policies -- and can't be scared with a Terrorists-gonna-get-ya-m omma line, as they were from 9/11 through the 2002 elections -- the Republicans are in trouble. (Compare '92 and "It's the economy, stupid.") I think that that accounts for the curiously defensive State of the Union speech -- and for the fact that Bush rushed off to Ohio immediately afterward to "tout his job proposals," as the Wall Street Journal said. G. W. Bush is going to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end his term with fewer jobs in the American economy than when he began; Ohio is one of the handful of states where the difference between Bush and Gore was less than 5% -- and more Bush electoral votes came from that handful than Gore votes.
The Bush people are running scared, and that's dangerous, because it turns their attention to what saved them during this presidential term -- 9/11. They're capable of the Mother of all October Surprises -- bombing Iranian and/or North Korean reactors a la Osirik? invading Venezuela/Colombia/Bolivi a in desperate defense against "terrorism in our own backyard"? There are various possibilities. Jane's Intelligence Digest suggests that Rumsfeld is mulling attacks against targets in Somalia and Lebanon; Syria is high on the list of hate-objects for 2004, and our militarist client in the region, Israel, seems already to be implementing the plan.
It was said that the Reagan presidency proved (and Bush-2 confirmed) that in modern America, *anybody* can be president. We should keep that in mind when we say -- as I think we probably should -- that the mantra for this fall's election is, "Anybody but Bush." The crimes and pretensions of this unelected regime of course have to be rejected. In a more just world, Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest would be occupying adjacent cells in the Hague, awaiting trial on the Nuremberg principles, under which the German leadership was condemned for launching aggressive war more than two generations ago.
But here below it was not far wrong of the Bush administration to say, in response to former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's confirmation that the attack on Iraq had been planned from the beginning of G. W. Bush's presidency, that they were just continuing the policy of the Democrats. The Clinton administration had bombed Baghdad and -- by means of the sanctions, which they conducted under UN cover -- killed even more than the thousands of Iraqis who died in the invasion. Al Gore admitted, even while attacking Bush's handling of the invasion, that "regime-change" had been the Clinton policy, and that he supported it.
The policies of a new Democratic administration --- that of Kerry, Dean, or someone else -- will still be policies of imperialism abroad and exploitation at home, policies designed to benefit that small minority of the American population that presently controls wealth and power in the country. We must assume that as president, the Democrat who emerges from the uninspiring pack seeking to replace Bush will commit crimes not different in kind but only in degree from those of the Bush administration. But that difference in degree we can hope will -- however slightly -- lessen the sum of human misery to which the Bushies have contributed so much.
C[i].G. Estabrook teaches at the University of Illinois and writes the weekly News from Neptune column. He can be reached at: galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu .[/i]
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| WMD: Contradicting Explanations ... |
| 01.28.04 (7:18 am) [edit] |
[b]We are being bombarded with a plethora of neo-con, neo-fascist propaganda and mendacious rhetoric that bears no relationship to the [i]truth[/i] ...[/b]
No WMD in Iraq ... So the arrogant & imbecilic Dubya and his panic-stricken & corrupt spin-meisters are running around vomitting new screed propagated & regurgitated by their corporate-owned puppets in the media and press daily ... It is oh so important to seek out the [i]truth[/i] ...
Congress http://www.congress.org needs to call for impeachment hearings as the lunatic traitors in the White House have recklessly taken us into war based upon lies, deceptions and falsehoods, in order to grab power in their mad vision of a Global Corporate Empire and to enrich their corporate pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, etc. ...
Consider "[b]IRAQ:[i] Premises for War[/i][/b]" on http://www.americanprogress.o... :
This week, retired chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay concluded "after nine months of searching, that Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons," the original premise for war. The White House continues to insist the invasion was justified, but Bush administration officials have "promised further review of prewar intelligence." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... One question remains: was the Administration's case for war honest from the start? For background, see the American Progress review of past claims http://www.americanprogress.o... and recent studies that undermine them.
[u][b]PREMISE - IRAQ HAD WMD[/b][/u]: The Administration’s main premise for war in Iraq was the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, however, officials are slowly edging away from the White House assertions. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, "The White House backed off yesterday from its once-confident assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." When asked about Kay’s findings, "White House spokesman Scott McClellan http://www.philly.com/mld/inq... refused to repeat oft-stated assertions that prohibited weapons eventually would be found." Attorney General John Ashcroft http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... walked a fine line in Vienna, using "strong language" but being "careful not to explicitly assert that Saddam had possessed banned weapons before the war." And while last February, Secretary of State Colin Powell http://www.boston.com/dailyne...:.shtml "flatly told the Security Council that Iraq was making prohibited arms with a ‘conservative estimate’ of 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons on hand," he recently amended this statement, wondering aloud to reporters, "What was it? One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons?" According to the Boston Globe, "Zero tons, or close to it, was always a strong possibility in the eyes of experts who knew the record of U.N. inspections. But Bush administration officials, in their overtures to war, never acknowledged it."
[u][b]PREMISE – IT WAS A HUMANITARIAN EFFORT[/b][/u]: The White House has claimed we went to war in Iraq for humanitarian purposes, to save the people from Saddam’s regime of terror. But as Human Rights Watch http://www.boston.com/dailyne...:.shtml yesterday noted in its new report, while the war "ended the reign of a brutal government…coalition leaders are wrong to characterize it as a humanitarian intervention." According to the study, "While Saddam Hussein had an atrocious human rights record, his worst atrocities were committed long before the intervention." For a military action to be characterized as "humanitarian," Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth explains, "the motive for intervening should be primarily humanitarian; the danger of slaughter should be imminent and the scale of the killings massive; and all other options for preventing the slaughter should have been exhausted." He goes on to state flatly, "The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair…Saddam Hussein’s atrocities should certainly be punished, and his worst atrocities, such as the 1988 genocide against the Kurds, would have justified humanitarian intervention then. But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn’t be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."
[u][b]PREMISE – SADDAM HAD TIES TO AL QAEDA & 9/11[/b][/u]: The White House attempted to link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks to justify war by claiming a tie to al Qaeda. Just last week, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to push that line, claiming in an NPR interview that Hussein had "an established relationship with al-Qaeda, providing training to al-Qaeda members in…poisons, gases, and making conventional bombs." Is there any wonder that almost 70% of Americans http://www.washingtonpost.com...¬Found=true believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks? The plain truth is that all evidence is to the contrary. The U.S.-backed UN Security Council Monitoring Group on Sanctions against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Associates, http://www.un.org/News/briefi... and the Administration’s own 2002 National Intelligence Estimate http://www.un.org/News/briefi... both found no link. Colin Powell admitted coalition forces in Iraq have not discovered any "smoking gun [or] concrete evidence" of al Qaeda ties to Saddam. Even President Bush http://www.washingtonpost.com... finally reversed himself, saying there was no evidence that Saddam played a part in the 9/11 attacks. See an analysis of Vice President Cheney’s Saddam-Al Qaeda claims http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b][u]PREMISE – IT WAS PART OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM[/u][/b]: The White House has tied the war in Iraq to the larger war on terror. The truth is, however, that this war has taken precious resources that could have been used to combat actual terrorists. A survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) http://www.pipa.org/OnlineRep... found "seven out of ten Americans surveyed say they do not think that the war with Iraq has reduced the threat of terrorism." Stephen Kull, director of the study, stated, "It's becoming harder for the public to see how this is helping...They are seeing terrorist attacks in Iraq; the situation in Afghanistan isn't getting better." Jeffrey Record, http://www.americanprogress.o... a professor at the U.S. Army War College, criticizes the White House for "unnecessarily expand[ing] the war on terror against a state that was not at war with the U.S. and that posed no direct or imminent threat." This was done "at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the U.S. from a terrorist organization with which it was at war."
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]The Center for American Progress [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ALL DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES WOULD REDUCE DUBYA'S IRRESPONSIBLE DEFICITS ... |
| 01.27.04 (6:43 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Democratic Candidates would all reduce Dubya's irresponsible & reckless record-level deficits & debts, the highest in our nation's history ... by repealing the insane, immoral and neo-fascist tax cuts, tax loopholes & boondoggles for their corporate cronies and the filthy richest-of-the-rich![/b]
It will not be easy ... as the ruthless & criminal Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]are leaving a [i]MASSIVE MESS[/i] to [i]clean-up [/i]here at home and abroad ... Which is why Dubya, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the squalid & sordid neo-con, neo-fascist thugs & goons should be tried for treason, impeached and imprisoned ...
Consider [i]CNN Money's [/i]"[i][b]Democrats: Repeal some tax cuts[/b][/i]" on http://money.cnn.com/2003/09/... :
[b]NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The 10 Democratic candidates for President Bush's job agreed Thursday that some of the Bush tax cuts need to be repealed, but they disagreed on which cuts needed to go.[/b]
Most of the candidates in the debate at Pace University in New York City favored leaving in place tax cuts for the middle class and repealing those that favored the wealthy.
"We Democrats fought hard to put those [middle-class] tax cuts in place," said Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. "That wasn't George W. Bush's idea -- that was our idea."
The idea of at least rolling back cuts for the wealthy seems to be gaining in political popularity. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday showed 56 percent of respondents suggested paying for Iraq's reconstruction by canceling tax cuts for the wealthy.
At the urging of President Bush, Congress has passed tax cuts in each of the past three years that, combined with a recession, a bear market in stocks, terrorist attacks and wars, helped to turn a $127 billion budget surplus in 2001 into a projected budget deficit of more than $400 billion in fiscal 2003, which ends Sept. 30.
Bush and his fellow Republicans say the cuts have supported consumer spending during the long jobless recovery that has followed the 2001 recession, and promise the cuts will ultimately help create jobs.
Democrats, on the other hand -- including the 10 vying to take Bush's job in 2004 -- say the tax cuts have helped few but the wealthiest Americans, while ruining the federal budget and setting the stage for a far worse fiscal crisis in the future.
In fact, Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt and Al Sharpton favor repealing all of the tax cuts approved by Congress in the past three years.
"This plan has failed. We should not keep half of a failure or a quarter of a failure," Gephardt said. "Let's change the policy and do something else."
Dean disagreed with assertions by Kerry and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina that taxes for the middle class would be raised by thousands of dollars if all the tax cuts were rolled back.
"Sixty percent of Americans at the bottom [of the tax scale] got $325," Dean said. "Whatever they got out there in tax cuts, the majority of Americans saw property taxes go up and tuition go up because we had enormous tax cuts and no money going to the states."
Economists are divided about the economic impact of rolling back some or all of the tax cuts.
[i][b]Read on [/b][/i] http://money.cnn.com/2003/09/...
[b]Respected economists agree that Dubya's insane, irresponsible & reckless tax cuts, tax loopholes & boondoggles for gluttonous corporations and the filthy richest-of-the-rich are unsustainable.[/b]
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| Top Ten Responses To -- "I Love ... But ... " ... |
| 01.27.04 (4:34 pm) [edit] |
[b]We are often told that something is [i]IMPOSSIBLE[/i] particularly by powerful interests who [i]WANT IT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE [/i]for their own nefarious advantage by keeping their [i]BIG BOOT ON OUR NECK [/i]...[/b]
Let's show 'em that we do not give Dubya a mandate to wage illegal & immoral neo-con warfare to enrich his war-profiteers ([i]Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc[/i].) based upon lies, deceptions & falsehoods -- Let's show 'em that we do not give Dubya a mandate to rape us economically in order to re-distribute the swindled & looted U.S. Treasury & Working People's taxpayer dollars into the bulging pockets of gluttonous corporations & their vile oligarchs & putrid plutocrats -- Let's show 'em that we do not give Dubya a mandate to turn this nation into a fascist military[i] junta [/i]that bullies the world and transforms us into a neo-slave state where only the powerful and wealthy have an opportunity for a decent life.
[b]Some [i]food for thought[/i]:[/b] "[i][b]Top Ten Responses To -- "I Love Kucinich But He Can't Win[/b][/i]" by [i]Tad Daley [/i]on http://www.commondreams.org/v... :
How many times have you heard someone say: "I love Kucinich ... but I just don't think he's electable"? I often encounter staffers for other candidates out here in Los Angeles where I'm based, and even they often say these words to me. Saul Landau recently said on National Public Radio that Dennis's name has apparently been changed to the hyphenated 'Kucinich-ButHeCan'tWin.' The Congressman himself has been asked about the phenomenon repeatedly in the presidential debates.
Our campaign's overarching theme is 'Fear Ends / Hope Begins.' Over and over again, people say to us: "Dennis stands for so many of my hopes and dreams. But I so intensely fear George Bush's re-election ... that I will not vote for Dennis, or donate to Dennis, or volunteer for Dennis. I will support instead some other, lesser candidate who does not really reflect my aspirations for the human community, but who has a better chance of winning on November 2nd."
At the Kucinich campaign, we believe our single most effective strategy now to gain new votes is to move these individuals to change their minds.
Now that the cold primary season has commenced, there is little doubt that this as our most fertile garden to till. This is about mobilizing support from those who are already with us! These are votes that are already rightfully ours! This is about persuading people to defy their fears, and to vote their hopes and dreams.
[b]NUMBER TEN[/b]: [i][b]The Democratic Primaries Are Far From Over. The Nomination Could Still Be Seized By Anyone. [/b][/i]
The results in Iowa left the presidential race more muddled and uncertain that at any time in recent memory. Most normal Americans (i.e., those who don't obsess about politics as much as the people probably reading this essay) have just since the New Year started paying any attention to the Democratic presidential contest at all. All winter long, the polls forecast a Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt battle for victory ... only to have John Kerry and John Edwards emerge suddenly ascendant. All the remaining seven candidates have significant strengths that are bound to translate into significant vote totals. All have weaknesses ' a shortage of money and organization here, a shortage of experience or a shortage of charisma there. Many of the multiple February 3rd states, at least as they are polling today, are simply too close to call. It is difficult to imagine any alternative to numerous candidates garnering numerous delegates in the primaries over the next six weeks. We are not even close to a 'presumptive nominee' ' not even John Kerry if he wins New Hampshire as well as Iowa.
We at the Kucinich campaign would not wish ourselves to be so far behind today in money, endorsements, and poll numbers. But because that is where we find ourselves at the dawn of 2004, the 'expectations' for our candidacy among the pundits and the party establishment are extremely low. If we simply do 'better than expected' in Iowa and New Hampshire, it could unleash a tidal wave of new endorsements, new donations, and new voter support ' precisely from the 'I love Dennis but he can't win' crowd. The enormous amount of dormant support out there for Dennis is our secret weapon! If the first 7 or 8 primaries both see Dennis do 'better than expected' and leave the race quite muddled and uncertain, Dennis could emerge as no less than the new media darling of the presidential contest.
[b]NUMBER NINE[/b]: [i][b]Dennis Is The Most Electable Candidate In A Face-Off Against George Bush.[/b][/i]
We believe that Dennis may well be the candidate best equipped to ensure that George Bush emulates his father - and rides off into the sunset as another failed one-term president. What was the consensus verdict after the 2002 Congressional election debacle for the Democrats - That if Democrats run like Republicans, Republicans will surely win. That the Democrats need to present voters with a clear distinction, a clear choice, and a clear alternative vision. "It's Democrats above all who need big ideas," says former Clinton and Gore pollster Stanley Greenberg, "who need to create an election that is about something." The lesson of 2002 is that the candidate with the best chance to beat George Bush will be the candidate who offers the starkest contrast to George Bush. And no one can dispute that that candidate is Dennis Kucinich.
Is there any Democrat who would better motivate our liberal and progressive base in November 2004 - generating not just votes, but midnight oil and shoe leather? One of the central theses of both John Judis and Ruy Teixeira's 2003 book 'The Emerging Democratic Majority' and E.J. Dionne's 1997 book 'They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era' is that broad demographic, geographic, economic, and political changes are making us more and more a Democratic country. But historically among voters of color -- who become a greater proportion of the electorate with every election cycle -- the more progressive the candidate the greater the turnout on Election Day. Dennis, indeed, is the candidate who can best mobilize this "emerging Democratic majority."
In addition, no one could secure the allegiance of more Ralph Nader voters than Dennis Kucinich. Al Gore and Nader together received 3.5 million more votes than George Bush in November 2000. But not ALL those Nader voters will likely vote for ANY Democratic nominee in November 2004. Surely, more of them would turn out to support Dennis than they would any other Democratic candidate. And given how many states would have swung the other way but for the Nader candidacy (he received 99,000 votes in Florida), these voters could make absolutely the decisive difference in the 2004 election.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Dennis has a great many weapons to wield in the national security debate. Dennis can make a comprehensive case that George Bush's foreign policies have generated new foreign enemies. That George Bush's defense policies have weakened our defenses. That George Bush's responses to 9/11 have made future 9/11s far more likely to occur. (So much for Republicans being "strong on defense.") And our man has a comprehensive alternative to offer. Dennis Kucinich will accommodate rather than alienate, employ carrots far more than sticks, and dry up the swamps of hopelessness and humiliation that cause insecure youth to head down the terrorist road. Dennis Kucinich will be both tough on terror and tough on the causes of terror. In Dennis Kucinich's America our nation will abide by Lincoln's precept: "The only lasting way to eliminate an enemy is to make him your friend." And that is a winning message for the post 9/11 world.
Also contrary to the conventional wisdom that sees Dennis as 'too far left' to attract swing voters, Dennis has a history of winning votes from blue collar 'Reagan Democrats' - because no one better illuminates how Bush's policies favor the rich and leave them out in the cold. Dennis has a track record in building broad ethnic coalitions. And Dennis is an experienced and seasoned politician, having fought and won grueling political battles as a city council member, a mayor, a state senator, and a member of the U.S. Congress.
Finally, Dennis is from Ohio, a key Midwestern battleground swing state with 20 electoral votes. Dennis has defeated Republican incumbents three times in Ohio. No Republican in the history of this nation has ever been elected President without carrying Ohio. Dennis can win Ohio for the Democrats. And as Ohio goes, so goes the nation.
[b]NUMBER EIGHT[/b]: [i][b]If Voters Believe Dennis Truly Has 'No Chance Of Winning the Nomination' Then For Them There's No Danger In Voting For Him In The Primary![/b][/i]
When people say, 'Dennis cannot win,' they themselves are often unclear about what they mean. Do they mean Dennis cannot win the nomination? Or do they mean that if Dennis does in fact win the nomination, he cannot win the general election? These two very different propositions lead to very different conclusions.
If Voter Vanessa likes Dennis but believes Dennis would lose to George Bush on November 2nd, then a decision to vote for someone else in the primaries might make sense if Dennis was a frontrunner, if Vanessa believes that Dennis has a real shot at the nomination, if the pundits thought Dennis had any chance at all of becoming the Democratic candidate for president.
But they don't.
Most voters and most of the punditocracy have written off any possibility that Dennis can win the nomination. Here in my town the mighty Los Angeles Times never refers to our man as anything other than 'long shot candidate Dennis Kucinich.' Ted Koppel famously dismissed him as a 'vanity candidate.' If Vanessa believes that Dennis has no chance of emerging as the nominee, then a primary vote for Dennis carries no danger of anointing the wrong candidate to face-off against George Bush. For Vanessa, there is no risk that she will help choose a candidate who is going to get blown out in the general. There is no peril.
There is no worst-case scenario.
[b]NUMBER SEVEN[/b]: [i][b]Dennis Will Support The Nominee.[/b][/i]
Dennis is unalterably committed to supporting whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee for president, and to working tirelessly this fall to defeat George Bush. Dennis toiled arduously in 2000 to win Ohio for Al Gore. There is no 'Nader scenario' regarding Dennis Kucinich, because Dennis Kucinich is a Democrat, not a Green. A vote for Dennis in January or February or March will not take a single vote away from the Democratic nominee in November. How does a dollar or a day or a vote devoted to Dennis in early 2004 adversely affect the prospects of the eventual nominee in November 2004?
[b]NUMBER SIX[/b]: [i][b]The Nominee May Adopt Some Of Dennis's Ideas if Dennis Gets Enough Votes.[/b][/i]
The more support Dennis generates this winter and spring, the more likely it will be that the eventual nominee - if it is not Dennis - will choose to incorporate some of Dennis's important ideas. If Dennis does better than expected in money, in volunteers, and in votes, the Democratic candidate who emerges may conclude that there is indeed support for things like the abolition of nuclear weapons, a great crusade for economic justice, and the conviction that an expanded ethic of human unity will be no less than the Great Story of the 21st Century. The nominee, consequently, may embrace some of these ideas and explicitly campaign upon them.
This phenomenon has already played out in the campaign. For example, after Dennis strongly rejected Bush's request for $87 billion for Iraq, both John Kerry and John Edwards followed his lead. Dennis's unapologetic opposition to NAFTA and the WTO has caused all the candidates to talk more about fair trade.
And consider the other, bleaker scenario. If all the 'I love Kucinich -- but he can't win' crowd support someone else, the 2004 Democratic nominee AND the Democratic Party establishment AND the chattering classes will conclude that there is not much support for the things our candidacy is about. "Gee," they will say, "there's not much interest in withdrawing from NAFTA and the WTO, for putting the brakes on the PATRIOT Act, for creating a Department of Peace to stand alongside the Department of Defense, is there - After all, Dennis Kucinich ran for president on that stuff - and he never did better than 3%."
"Win or lose the nomination," says Kucinich endorser Ben Cohen, "his grassroots presidential campaign is the vehicle for expanding the party, moving it in a progressive direction, bringing in new voters, and reaching out in a serious way to bring back disaffected voters." The more votes Dennis receives this winter and spring, the more power progressives will exercise to shape the character of the Democratic platform in the summer of 2004, and of the Democratic Administration which we fervently hope will take office on January 20, 2005.
[b]NUMBER FIVE[/b]: [i][b]At A Brokered Convention, Dennis Could Play A Crucial Role.[/b][/i]
Several pundits have raised the possibility that 2004 might see the first brokered Democratic convention since 1960. That means that the Democratic primaries may not decisively settle on a candidate, and that the decision will have to be hammered out at the convention itself - with delegates as the currency of negotiation. And that means that Dennis's influence could be quite tangible and quite decisive.
Many factors point to a real possibility of the first brokered convention in a generation. The rise of proportional voting over the previous winner-take-all systems in state primaries. The importance of the nearly 800 party honcho 'super-delegates' (which means that a candidate cannot guarantee the nomination unless he wins more than 60% of the elected delegates). The accelerated front-loading of the process (which means that by the morning of March 3rd nearly half of the delegates will already have been chosen, making it simply mathematically more difficult for any presumptive frontrunner to achieve victory after that time).
If the brokered convention scenario does come to pass, every single vote cast for Dennis in January, February, and March will translate into delegates that Dennis will wield in Boston in July. Those delegates will enable Dennis to tangibly influence the platform and positions that the Democratic candidate adopts. Those delegates could enable Dennis to decisively influence who the Democratic candidate will be. And who knows' At a brokered convention, the Democratic Party just may conclude that the candidate with the best chance to defeat George Bush is the one who poses the most striking alternative to George Bush - Dennis Kucinich.
[b]NUMBER FOUR[/b]: [i][b]Electoral Outcomes In 10 Months -- Or A Better World In 10 Years?[/b][/i]
Mother Jones writer George Packer recently quoted D.H. Lawrence: "[i][b]The ideas of one generation[/b][/i]," wrote Lawrence in 'Making Love to Music', '[i][b]become the instincts of the [i][b]next[/b][/i]."[/b][/i][i][b]'There is something worse than losing[/b][/i]," continues Packer, "[i][b]and that is losing pointlessly[/b][/i]. ... The way for the party not to lose pointlessly is to proceed incautiously. The most attractive candidate will be the one who airs ideas that risk alienating ... because the ideas might be good ones, and might catch the public pulse ... and might make future victories possible."
Has there been any political candidate since Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy more capable of mobilizing the fires in the bellies of committed activists than Dennis Kucinich? If voters support Dennis with their money and their sweat and their votes, it will stoke the engines of social change - far beyond the fate of Kucinich for President.
"Victory," says the inestimable Jonathan Schell, "does not come through the ballot box alone. It sometimes comes by circuitous paths. ... Changing hearts and minds can at times be as important as changing the President. ... When in doubt, it's best to err on the side of speaking the truth."
Must we resign ourselves only to vote for a candidate who can rescue us from a dismal present? Or can we free ourselves to vote for a candidate who can lead us toward a brighter future? Are we concerned solely and exclusively about what is going to happen in America in 10 months? Or can we interest ourselves in the human condition and the fate of the earth in 10 years and beyond? There is much more at stake here than simply choosing a candidate for president. A vote for Dennis Kucinich is a vote for the American dream, for the promise of what America can become. As the poet Langston Hughes so eloquently put it: "America, you've never been America to me; and I swear this oath: you will be!"
[b]NUMBER THREE[/b]: [i][b]The Left, The Right, And The Center ... Can Change.[/b][/i]
We reject the notion that the American electorate is set in stone - e.g., 45% hard left, 45% hard right, and an all-coveted 10% "in the center." We know that the center has moved over time. A great many ideas and initiatives that were once considered hard left - women's rights, civil rights, human rights, gay rights, labor protections, environmental protections - are now much more in the mainstream, much more "moderate,'" much more "centrist." The anti-war, anti-corporate, and anti-globalization movements of recent years - manifesting in some of the largest demonstrations in history - are surely not far behind.
We believe that many Kucinich proposals now considered hard left will one distant day be similarly considered as mainstream, centrist, and broadly accepted by most of the right-thinking people of the time. One of the best vehicles for accomplishing that shift in the center of American politics is a liberal and progressive presidential campaign. And Dennis Kucinich is the most liberal and progressive candidate American voters have had the opportunity to embrace in quite a long time. A vote for Dennis Kucinich is a vote to shift the center of gravity of the American political debate. For 2004 and beyond.
[b]NUMBER TWO[/b]: [i][b]Living Up To Your Own Ideals.[/b][/i]
"If it feels good -- do it" said one of the mottos of the 1960s. While one might debate whether that guidance is optimal for all of life's scenarios, it certainly is for the great democratic act of voting. We believe that it simply feels better to walk out of the voting booth knowing that you were true to yourself, that you stood up for what you believe. Demonstrating support for the things you support is the essence of what voting is all about. We believe that the whole point of democracy is to vote for the world you aspire to create. Election Day is a day to let go of doubts and fears. Election Day is a day to reach for our hopes, to cleave to our dreams, and to stand up for the America we can become. That is the only way to be fully a citizen of any political community.
A vote for Dennis today is a vote for what the Democratic Party OUGHT to stand for at the dawn of the 21st Century. And it's a vote for what the Democratic Party CAN stand for - if only the people who believe in Dennis actually have the courage and integrity to vote for Dennis.
Especially now. There will be plenty of time to choose between the lesser of two evils in the general election. As the Texas sage Molly Ivins exhorts us: Vote with your head on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. But in the caucuses and primaries, vote with your heart.
[b]NUMBER ONE[/b]: [i][b]Moving History Forward - Like Other Noble Presidential Candidacies Of The Past.[/b][/i]
Presidential campaigns in American history have often been about much more than winning and losing. Presidential campaigns can be about driving the engines of history. Consider Bruce Babbitt and Jesse Jackson and Paul Simon in 1988, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson and Alan Cranston in 1984, John Anderson in 1980, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 (laying the groundwork for both John Kennedy and the 1960s), Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs in the first decades of the 20th century (without whom Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal would have been inconceivable), Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive campaign of 1912. None of these efforts resulted in triumph at the ballot box. Yet all of them broadened the public conversation. They pressured the structures of power. They inspired new generations of progressive activists. They were beacons in the political night. They served to generate debate, to inject new ideas into the public arena, and to accelerate our progress toward a brighter morning.
And so too will be the presidential candidacy of Dennis Kucinich. BUT NOT VERY MUCH ... unless those who believe in him actually vote for him.
Victor Hugo famously said: "[i][b]No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come[/b][/i]." Many of Dennis's ideas, we might admit, are ideas whose time has perhaps not quite yet come. Our job is to bring their time ever closer, to hasten their arrival in the train station of history. How will the time for such ideas ever come, if we do not choose to vote for those with the vision and integrity to articulate them? A vote for Dennis Kucinich is the quintessential exercise of what Thomas Jefferson liked to call "practical idealism." If politics, as every undergraduate knows, is the art of the possible, then a vote for Dennis Kucinich is a mechanism for expanding the parameters of political possibility.
[i]Tad Daley (tad@kucinich.us) is National Issues Director and Senior Policy Advisor to the presidential campaign of Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio[/i].
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| The Deceiving of the Union ... |
| 01.27.04 (1:18 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Bush regime continues its pathetic track-record of of[i] neo-con, neo-fascist, neo-orwellian [/i]lies, deceptions and falsehoods ...[/b]
Read this assessment entitled "[i][b]The deceiving of the Union[/b][/i]" on http://www.madison.com/captim... :
It seems that President Bush cannot deliver a State of the Union address without deceiving the American people. Or, at the least, trying to deceive them.
A year ago, on the eve of the president's pre-emptive war against Iraq, Bush told the American people and their Congress that Iraq was busy trying to acquire materials from Africa to develop nuclear weapons. The suggestion was that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein either had or was close to obtaining the most threatening of all weapons of mass destruction.
By summer, it was clear that Bush had been wrong. And there was a good deal of evidence to suggest that the president, or at least his top aides, knew that his claims about weapons of mass destruction were inaccurate before they were inserted in his most high-profile address prior to the beginning of the war.
No one expected Bush to apologize for being wrong, let alone for lying, when he delivered this year's State of the Union speech. For Bush, being president means never having to say you're sorry. But there was a general assumption that he would try to address the embarrassing discrepancy between his statement of the previous year and reality.
And so he did.
In an elaborate twist of rhetoric, Bush declared, "Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." That was a reference to an interim report by David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq.
Unfortunately for Bush, Kay stepped down three days later and admitted that he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. Kay told the Reuters news service that he had concluded there were no stockpiles of WMDs to be found in Iraq and, more importantly, that he does not now believe they were produced in the first place. "I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."
On Sunday, Kay told National Public Radio that he had concluded that U.N. inspections "got rid of" weapons of mass destruction in Iraq long before the Bush administration began claiming that an invasion was necessary to eliminate the WMD threat.
Kay still cuts Bush some slack, suggesting that there was an intelligence breakdown. But it is notable that U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, opposed the fall 2002 congressional vote authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq. Graham said at the time that the intelligence data he had seen did not suggest that Iraqi WMDs posed a significant enough threat to justify a pre-emptive war. So it appears that the breakdown may have come when the White House decided to manipulate data to justify the war.
Several members of Congress, including U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, have called for an investigation of how intelligence was used - and misused - prior to the launch of the war.
That investigation should, of course, examine the dubious claims that George W. Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address. In light of Kay's statements of the past few days, investigators will also have to examine the dubious claims that Bush made in his 2004 State of the Union address.
[b]Well, I guess it's okay to wipe out Iraqis if it is done in the name of "freedom" and "democracy" ... Once we've wiped out millions of Iraqis, who will the country be "free" for? Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal & Big Oil, of course ...[/b]
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| Ever Wonder Why The NEWS Is Mis-Reported In The U.S.A.??? ... |
| 01.27.04 (11:07 am) [edit] |
[b]If you are reading this post ... you may well be one of a small percentage of Americans who research the news coverage and events across a wide spectrum of foreign and domestic news and media sites ... [/b]You also will have observed that[i] today's U.S. media & press [/i]pander shamelessly to the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i], and that they [i]mis-report, under-report or do not report [/i]upon the Bush regime's many, many, many crimes!
Have you ever wondered[i] why [/i]the NEWS is mis-reported in the U.S.A.? ... It is now corporate-owned ... Why do you think that the right-winged, neo-fascist [i]media & press [/i]have been out to destroy Howard Dean ([i]amongst other Democrats like Wes Clark, for example[/i]) as they will destroy any candidate who is not [i]in the pockets [/i]of the corporations and their fascist owners! It is no wonder that these [i]media & press corporate pimps [/i]are in love with the most corrupt and putrid regime in our nation's history: [i]their darling corporate sluts[/i]: Dubya, Cheney, Rice, Rove, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz-- all neo-con, neo-fascist liars, swindlers, embezzlers and war criminals who will do anything ([i]even destroy our nation[/i]) so long as they enrich themselves & their rapacious corporate paymasters!
Consider "[i][b]Singleton, Scaife Among Political Contributors[/b][/i]" on http://www.editorandpublisher... :
While their newspapers are busy covering the elections of 2004, owners and top executives of some of the country's largest papers and chains are busy contributing to candidates -- or at least their money-hungry political parties, according to campaign finance records filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Richard Scaife, the outspoken conservative publisher of the Tribune-Review (Click for QuikCap) in Pittsburgh tops the list with a $25,000 donation to the Republican National Committee last July, while also giving $2,000 to George Bush's re-election campaign and $4,000 to the U.S. Senate bid of Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Pat Toomey.
Across town, William Block Jr., chairman of Block Communications, which owns the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Click for QuikCap) and The Blade (Click for QuikCap) in Toledo, Ohio, offered two $250 contributions to the Democratic National Committee in 2003.
In other family newspaper finances, George R. Hearst, chairman of the board of The Hearst Corp. of New York gave $1,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, while his cousin, William R Hearst III -- grandson of William Randolph Hearst and former publisher of the San Francisco Examiner -- donated $2,000 to the Joe Lieberman for President campaign and another $2,000 to VenturePac, a political action committee supporting issues related to venture capital firms.
The Murdoch family showed its political leanings with a $2,000 donation to the Bush-Cheney campaign from Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., who also sent $2,000 to Sen. John McCain's 2004 re-election effort and the same amount to the campaign of California Republican Congressman Bill Thomas.
Wendi Murdoch, his wife, also donated $2,000 to Thomas, while his son, New York Post (Click for QuikCap) Publisher Lachlan Murdoch gave $2,000 to Bush-Cheney.
Also in New York, Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman and co-publisher of the New York Daily News (Click for QuikCap), granted $1,000 to the re-election coffers of California Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos.
William Dean Singleton, CEO and vice-chairman of MediaNews Group, who also serves as publisher of his flagship The Denver Post (Click for QuikCap), gave a $2,000 contribution to Bush-Cheney as well.
Other contributions from members of well-known newspaper families include Michael C. Copley, step-son of retired Copley Newspapers chairwoman Helen Copley, who provided $2,000 to the Bush-Cheney campaign; and William H. Scripps, great-grandson of news pioneer E.W. Scripps, who contributed $2,000 to the president's re-election campaign, as well as $2,500 to the Republican National Committee.
Even Roxanne Pulitzer, the infamous former wife of Herbert Pulitzer, son of newspaper legend Joseph L. Pulitzer, is in the act, giving $250 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
[b]These traitors should all be exposed for betraying the principles of journalism to remain independent and report honestly and accurately to We the People![/b]
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| Why NOW Dubya Should Be Impeached! |
| 01.27.04 (7:18 am) [edit] |
[b]Dubya should be impeached [i]NOW[/i]![/b]
The neo-con, neo-fascist right-wing hypocrites could hardly wait to impeach Clinton because he lied about a sexual liaison with Lewinsky ... Dubya is responsible for lies, deceptions & falsehoods leading to the horrific massacre of over 513 U.S. Soldiers & tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians-- Dubya's [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]are so much more heinous than anything Clinton did ([i]except to the traitorous neo-con, neo-fascists who are opposed to health care unless you are filthy rich[/i]) ...
Many U.S. citizens are writing to Congress http://www.congress.org demanding that Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-con, neo-fascist thugs & goons, liars & thieves, and war-mongers & war-profiteers-- all be impeached! I urge you to do so as well! Fight to take our nation back from the terrorists in the White House who have hijacked our country!
Consider "[i][b]Kay Testimony Impeaches Bush[/b][/i]" by [i]Robert Scheer[/i] on http://www.alternet.org/story... :
Can we [i]now[/i] talk impeachment?
The rueful admission by the chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them raises the prospect that the Bush administration is complicit in the greatest scandal in U.S. history. Yet, we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress.
In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance was so much at stake, in preserving both constitutional safeguards and national security. This egregious deception, which lead us to war on the basis of phony intelligence, overshadow previous scandals motivated by greed, such as Teapot Dome, or partisanship, such as Watergate. What is more, the White House continues to dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even as its lieutenants, one-by-one, find the courage to speak the truth.
A year after using his State of the Union Address to paint Iraq's allegedly vast arsenal of WMD as a grave threat to the U.S. and the world – and even citing forged documents in those "16 words" about African uranium sales – Bush spent this month's State of the Union defending the war because "had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." Bush said officials were still "seeking all the facts" about Iraq's weapons programs, but noted that weapons searchers had already identified "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."
Vice President Dick Cheney in interviews with USA Today and the Los Angeles Times echoed this rhetorical fudging – last year "weapons," this year "programs" – declaring that "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had WMD. Cheney declared, "I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence."
But a mere three days after the State of the Union Address, Kay quit and told the world what the Bush administration had been denying since taking office: That Saddam Hussein's regime was but a weak shadow of the semi-fearsome military force it had been at the time of the first Gulf War; that it had no significant chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs or stockpiles still in place; and that the U.N. inspections and Allied bombing runs in the 1990s had been much more effective than their critics had believed at destroying the remnants of these programs, which simply eroded into dust.
"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," Kay told the New York Times. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on. I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990's. Somewhere in the mid-1990's the large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated. The Iraqis say the they believed that [the UN inspection system] was more effective [than U.S. analysts believed it was], and they didn't want to get caught."
The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't needed – although his is a welcome, if belated, breath of honesty – David Kay to set the record straight. The evidence of the Bush administration's systematic abuse of the facts and its own intelligence has been out there for all who wanted to see it for nearly two years. That's why 23 former intelligence and foreign service employees of the United States government – including several who quit in disgust – have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The story they tell is one of an administration that decided to go to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, and then constructed a false reality in order to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offense?
After all, the President misled Congress into approving his preemptive war on the grounds that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened our very survival as a nation. If we hesitated and allowed the UN inspectors who were on the ground in Iraq to do their job, a mushroom cloud over New York – to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery – might well be our dark reward. Now David Kay – who, it should be remembered, originally defended the war and dismissed the work of the UN inspectors – has spent $900 million dollars and the time of 1400 weapons inspectors to discover what many in the CIA and elsewhere had been telling us all along. Are there to be no real repercussions for such a devastating official deceit?
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| Evidence Shows That Dubya Was A Cowardly 'Deserter' ... AWOL ... |
| 01.26.04 (4:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]Evidence indeed shows that Dubya was a cowardly 'deserter' ... AWOL ... [/b]Dubya isn't fit to send others to fight and die when he himself was stumbling about in a [i]drunken stupor [/i]and avoided service because his Poppy Bush was a rich Congressman with lots of connections and got him assigned to a reserve unit for [i]ne'er-do-well [/i]spoiled brats who would never be sent to war ... but Dubya couldn't even stick with duty in his Champagne Brigade unit-- not with all those parties to swill booze ... while better men went to fight and many died!
[i]Check out AWOLBUSH.com [/i]on http://www.awolbush.com/
[i][b]Where were you in '72? Most of us remember...Bush does not ...[/b][/i]
[b]Other sources:[/b]
"Questions About Bush's Military Service Linger Like A Stinking Stench" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
"It Is NOT FUNNY Because It IS TRUE!!! - Bush's Military Record Reveals Grounding and Absence for Two Full Years" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| Dubya's Fascist Patriot Act Unravelling:-- Ruling of Unconstitutionality!!! |
| 01.26.04 (12:25 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya's insane acts of fascism are finally beginning to unravel. A Federal Judge has just issued a ruling to confirm ([i]what most people with an iota of brain matter comprehend[/i]) that parts of the Patriot Act are unconstitutional ... But then Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-con, neo-fascist thugs & goons don't comprehend or respect the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights![/b]
Consider "[i][b]Part of Patriot Act ruled unconstitutional: Judge finds provision on giving aid or advice too vague[/b][/i]" by Associated Press on http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4... :
LOS ANGELES - A federal judge has declared unconstitutional the part of the USA Patriot Act that bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations.
In a ruling handed down Friday night but not made available until Monday, U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins said the ban on providing “expert advice or assistance” was impermissibly vague, in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments.
John Tyler, the Justice Department attorney who argued the case, had no comment and referred calls to the department’s press office in Washington. A message left there was not immediately returned.
The case before the court involved five groups and two U.S. citizens seeking to provide support for lawful, nonviolent activities on behalf of Kurdish refugees in Turkey.
The Humanitarian Law Project, a human rights advocacy group based in Los Angeles that brought the lawsuit, said the plaintiffs were threatened with 15 years in prison if they advised groups on seeking a peaceful resolution of the Kurds’ campaign for self-determination in Turkey.
The judge’s ruling said the law, which was enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, did not differentiate between impermissible advice on violence and encouraging the use of peaceful, nonviolent means to achieve goals.
“The USA Patriot Act places no limitation on the type of expert advice and assistance which is prohibited and instead bans the provision of all expert advice and assistance regardless of its nature,” the judge said.
David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington who argued the case on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project, declared the ruling “a victory for everyone who believes the war on terrorism ought to be fought consistent with constitutional principles.”
[b]© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.[/b]
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| Another Bush Neo-Con-Con:-- Not Only Phony WMDs ... But Phony HUMAN RIGHTS!!! |
| 01.26.04 (8:21 am) [edit] |
[b]Not only are the liars and thieves in the traitorous Bush regime swindling, plundering and looting the American working people out of hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, squandered ([i]transferred into the Bushies & their cronies bulging pockets[/i]) to enrich themselves, their corporate pimps, and the richest-of-the-rich plutocrats-- [/b]but, Dubya has [i]neo-con-conned [/i]us about phony WMDs as his mendacious [i]casus belli [/i]for his bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq ... And, now we come to find that Dubya & his corrupt cabal of neo-fascist thugs & goons have also [i]neo-con-conned [/i]us about phony Human Rights Violations!!!
Who said "Fool Me Once, Shame On YOU! Fool Me Twice, Shame On ME!"?
By the way, when Saddam Hussein was massacring his own people, Poppy Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were [i]aiding and abetting [/i]his crimes:-- indeed, they gave him the [i]'thumbs-up' [/i]to do it-- so Poppy Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should be [i]'in the dock' [/i]along with Saddam for [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i]! ([i]Dubya was in a drunken stupor at the time ... so he didn't and doesn't know what the hell is going on[/i]!)
Consider "[i][b]Ousting Saddam 'no cause for war'[/b][/i]" on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi... :
[b]A leading human rights group has said the US and UK are wrong to use the toppling of a brutal regime in Baghdad to justify going to war against Iraq.[/b]
The group, Human Rights Watch asked why George Bush and Tony Blair did not try remove Saddam Hussein much earlier.
Its report comes as the former US chief weapons inspector questioned the CIA's assessment of the threat from Iraq.
Tony Blair is also under pressure, awaiting the findings of an inquiry into the death of a UK weapons expert.
Mr Blair and Mr Bush have come under increasing pressure from critics of the war over their failure to produce convincing evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons of mass destruction.
In its annual World Report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch also said:
* Human rights are deteriorating in Afghanistan due to a reliance by US-led forces on warlords to defeat Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters
* The Bush administration uses threats to national security to justify putting executive action in the United States above the law
* Russian authorities justify the war in Chechnya as their contribution to the war on terror, while European and other governments ignore appalling human rights abuses there
* There was a "moment of hope" in Africa with African leaders trying to stop regional wars and the associated abuses, through bodies like the African Union
[b]Flawed justification[/b]
Human Rights Watch said Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not try to justify the war retrospectively as an effort to save human life.
"Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life in using military force for humanitarian purposes," it said.
"Brutal as Saddam Hussein's reign had been, the scope of the Iraq Government's killing in March 2003, was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention.
"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair."
In a US radio interview on Monday, the former chief US weapons inspector David Kay cast further doubt on the existence in Iraq of banned weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Kay said he thought the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) owed Mr Bush an explanation for warnings about the threat Iraq posed.
The issue is also stalking Mr Blair, whose political future depends on the findings of a report to be released on Wednesday which will examine claims he exaggerated the threat from Iraq.
- [i]BBC News[/i], http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi...
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| Questions About Bush's Military Service Linger Like A Stinking Stench |
| 01.26.04 (7:17 am) [edit] |
[b]Dubya is a coward who avoided serving in the military during Vietnam. Poppy Bush got Junior into a Champagne Brigade unit set-up for cowardly [i]ne'er-do-wells[/i] to avoid them getting scratched, while far, far better men were sent to fight and die ... But the funny thing is: Dubya was AWOL from his Champagne Brigade service too!!![/b]
Consider [b]"SPECIAL AFTERNOON MIS-LEAD: Questions About Bush's Military Service Linger [like a stinking stench]" [/b]on http://www.misleader.org/dail... :
Questions about President Bush's military service were raised at last night's Democratic debate by Peter Jennings who called charges of desertion from the Texas Air National Guard "reckless" and "not supported by the facts."1 However, meticulously collected evidence suggests that there are continuing questions.
ABC News anchor Peter Jennings questioned General Wesley Clark about whether he should have disputed supporter Michael Moore's assertion that President Bush was a "deserter" from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972. Mr. Jennings said, "At one point, Mr. Moore said, in front of you, that President Bush - he's saying he'd like to see you, the general, and President Bush, who he called a 'deserter.' Now, that's a reckless charge not supported by the facts. And I was curious to know why you didn't contradict him, and whether or not you think it would've been a better example of ethical behavior to have done so."2
Despite Mr. Jennings characterization, the facts relating to the president's military service, beginning in 1968, and abruptly ending in 1972 -- two years prior to his six-year commitment -- are not at all clear.
Investigative reporters with the Boston Globe looked into Bush's service during the 2000 presidential campaign, in an article that appeared on July 28th.3
A retired member of the Air National Guard has obtained several memos and official letters regarding Mr. Bush's military service, and provided an analysis of whether the president "did the duty necessary,"4 as he maintains.
A scanned copy of President Bush's request to be transferred to an inactive postal Reserve unit in Alabama (he requested the transfer to work on a U.S. Senate campaign) can be viewed here: http://users.cis.net/coldfeet...
A scanned copy of the denial of Bush's transfer order can be viewed here: http://users.cis.net/coldfeet...
A scanned copy of the memo confirming Bush's suspension from the Air National guard for "failure to accomplish annual medical examination can be viewed here: http://users.cis.net/coldfeet...
[b]The full analysis can be viewed here: [/b] http://democrats.com/display....
[b]Sources:[/b]
1. "New Hampshire Democratic Debate," 1/22/04.
2. Ibid.
3. "REPUBLICAN TICKET LETS A MILITARY CONNECTION SLIP," Boston Globe, 7/28/00, p. A1.
4. "BUSH DEFENDS GUARD RECORD, DISPUTES REPORT OF MISSING DUTY," Boston Globe, 5/24/00, p. A8.
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| Dubya Jr., A Fiscal Conservative??? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! |
| 01.25.04 (7:39 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya Jr., A Fiscal Conservative???
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
The Democrats would repeal the immoral and barbaric tax welfare embezzlement (tax cuts) for corporations & the richest-of-the-rich plutocrats-- whereas, Dubya Jr. just wantonly & recklessly [i]spends, spends, and spends [/i]us into an [i]economic fiasco [/i]on behalf of his corrupt corporate pimps, insane neo-con pre-emptive warfare and fraudulent unilateral neo-con scams!!! ... Dubya Jr. has created the largest deficits in our nation's history, squandered on Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil-- filthy rich campaign contributors-- and his sordid & squalid neo-fascist family.
At least the Democrats are committed to promoting the General Welfare of the Citizens of the U.S.A. as per the U.S. Constitution-- something Dubya Jr. doesn't even comprehend, as he lives in his [i]ne'er-do-well[/i] plastic bubble ... fit for the imbecilic & cowardly [i]'gin-soaked' [/i]AWOL deserter!!![/b]
Consider "[i][b]Bush's spending upsets conservatives in party[/b][/i]" on http://www.iht.com/articles/1... :
[b]They want more done to lower deficit[/b]
[b]WASHINGTON[/b] A day after President George W. Bush vowed to submit an austere budget and halve the deficit in five years, conservatives in his own party said they were not satisfied and stepped up their campaign to force the White House and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to do more to hold down the growth of government spending.
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A group of 40 Republican House members gathered on Wednesday to hash out how to press Bush and the congressional leadership to deal with spending increases that they say are running out of control and a deficit that is reaching alarming proportions.
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Their discomfort has been echoed and encouraged over the last few days and weeks by reports and statements from conservative researchers and commentators who support Bush on most issues, like the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, a political action committee, and The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
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"The president used the State of the Union to defend past spending increases and he made eight specific calls for new spending increases," said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "But he made zero calls for spending cuts. He merely said: Focus on priorities, cut wasteful spending and be wise with the people's money. That's not specific enough."
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After long blaming the recession and the war on terror for the sharp swing from budget surpluses to deficits, Bush is facing pressure not just from small-government conservatives in Congress and Democrats who say his tax cuts have plunged the government into a sea of red ink, but also from voters.
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Polls show that the widening deficit is of increasing concern to the electorate, and that Republicans are losing their advantage over Democrats on the issue. A poll this month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 51 percent of respondents called the budget deficit one of the top priorities for Bush and Congress. That was up from 40 percent a year earlier and 35 percent two years ago.
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Concern about the deficit was particularly evident among Democrats, 57 percent of whom identified it in the Pew poll as a priority issue, versus 44 percent of Republicans.
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The government ran a deficit of $374 billion in the year ended Sept. 30, and it is expected to be around $500 billion for this fiscal year. When Bush took office three years ago, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a surplus for the following decade of $5.6 trillion.
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In recent years, Republicans have focused less on the deficit than on the desirability of holding down spending and enacting tax cuts.
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In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Bush said he would send a 2005 budget to Congress next month that would hold the increase in discretionary spending to 4 percent, about what he proposed last year.
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According to calculations by the Heritage Foundation, government outlays for the current fiscal year will rise 9 percent, following increases of 13 percent in 2002 and 12 percent in 2003, which make the last few years one of the fastest growing periods of government spending since the 1960's. White House officials say Bush has spent money needed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to protect the United States from terrorism.
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But many conservatives said they were still irked by Bush's record, especially since he signed into law last year the overhaul of Medicare, a measure that amounted to the largest expansion of a federal entitlement program in a generation.
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"The Republican Party has long been the party of small government," said an aide to a senior Republican senator, "but the era of small government has ended for the Republican Party."
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Sixty-one senators voted to end the delay, or filibuster - one more than the 60 needed - so final passage of the bill appeared likely shortly. Only 32 senators voted to prolong the filibuster. The House approved the bill weeks ago.
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Democrats have objected to provisions they said would allow the Bush administration to threaten the overtime pay of millions of workers; relax media ownership rules; and delay a requirement that supermarket meat and produce carry labels identifying them by country of origin.
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Republicans had said that if Democrats continued to block the bill, which includes Social Security and Medicare, they would push through a resolution financing the affected departments at last year's levels.
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| 200,000 Iraqi's Stories ... |
| 01.25.04 (4:31 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Iraqi people are amongst the most well-educated in the Middle-East as they had outstanding public schools and opportunities open to all for university educations, irrespective of their economic backgrounds ... [/b]
"[i][b]Real democracy means real elections![/b][/i]" and "[i][b]Yes, yes to elections! No, no to occupation![/b][/i]". These have been some of the slogans of nearly 200,000 demonstrators marching in Baghdad today, as part of fast expanding momentum for democracy in Iraq, confirming IDAO's analysis of the new political polarisation in Iraq, see below. Resistance to the [U.S.] occupation is assuming much broader mass movement support, with Ayatollah Sistani's call for elections enjoying the support of most sections of the Iraqi society and across religious affiliations. http://www.idao.org/
[b]Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-con, neo-fascist goons & thugs have[i] NO RESPECT [/i]for our U.S. Constitution or our Bill of Rights ... Nor do these despicable warmongers and war-profiteers in the Bush regime have any respect for [i]real[/i] Democracy [/b]...
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| Panic-Stricken Hypocrites in the Bush Regime May Scrap Handover Plan in Iraq |
| 01.25.04 (3:06 pm) [edit] |
[b]The[i] panic-stricken[/i] hypocritical liars, thieves, swindlers and traitors [i](& incompetent buffoons[/i]) in the corrupt Bush regime may scrap their imbecilic handover plan that [i]Dumbo-Dubya, Corporate U.S.A. Inc.'s Useful Idiot, [/i]was smirking about in his putrid & ludicrous State of the Union screed ...[/b]
Consider "[i][b]Handover plan could be scrapped: US[/b][/i]" by [i]Robin Wright in Washington, Anthony Shadid in Baghdad, and Peter Slevin in Tbilisi[/i] on http://www.smh.com.au/article... :
The Bush Administration has produced a list of possible changes to its plan for Iraq's political transition as US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, conceded that Saddam Hussein's government may not have had weapons of mass destruction.
Some US and British officials acknowledge for the first time that the original plan to hand over power to the Iraqis could even be scrapped if the US is to preempt the growing clamour for elections.
During recent talks the US told United Nations representatives that everything is on the table except the June 30 deadline for handing over power to a new Iraqi government. "The United States told us that as long as the timetable is respected, they are ready to listen to any suggestion," a UN official said.
In a potential embarrassment for President George Bush, David Kay, the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, said on Friday that he believed Saddam had not stockpiled unconventional weapons for years.
Mr Powell told reporters on Saturday that his February 5 argument to the UN to endorse a preemptive war to strip Iraq of such munitions was based on "what our intelligence community believed was credible".
"What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go. And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?" Mr Powell said.
Mr Kay, who is resigning after nine months of unsuccessful searches for banned weapons in Iraq, said that he now believes Saddam did not stockpile forbidden weapons after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He also claimed that part of Saddam's secret weapons program was moved to Syria shortly before last year's invasion.
Mr Powell said in defence of the decision to go to war that the Bush Administration was not only concerned that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons and development programs, but also that Saddam had refused to answer UN questions about his government's activities on the subject.
"All they did was make statements without proving it to our satisfaction," he said. "This is a regime that never lost its intention to have such programs and have such weapons".
Mr Bush, too, has softened his rhetoric about Iraq's weapons programs, referring in last week's State of the Union address to materials hidden from the UN inspector and "weapons-of-mass-destruct ion-related program activities".
The US, meanwhile, is publicly talking tough about clinging to a "refined" variation of the November 15 accord signed with the Iraqi Governing Council that outlines the terms of a handover of power in Iraq.
These include expanding participation in 18 streamlined caucuses to select representatives for a national assembly, which would then pick a cabinet and head of state.
But the Administration has also begun to discuss abandoning the complex caucuses and even holding partial elections or simply handing over power to an expanded Iraqi Governing Council, officials say.
Ahmad Chalabi, a leading pro-US member of the Council [[i]and embezzler, thief and liar[/i]] on Friday called for direct elections before the July handover, urging Washington to give in to popular demand because its transition plan could destabilise the country. The Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a leader of the country's 15 million Shiites, has demanded direct elections of a new government.
[b]The Washington Post, Reuters[/b]
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| Pentagon and CIA See 'Little Point' in WMD Search in Iraq ... |
| 01.25.04 (7:48 am) [edit] |
[b]The Pentagon and CIA see "little point" in continuing the WMDs search in Iraq ... [/b]Uh-huh, yeah, they know they lied, deceived and falsified intelligence information in their [i]lust[/i] to wage their illegal and immoral war in Iraq. Why bother to continue a[i] photo-op search [/i]for non-existent WMDs when they know the whole thing was a phony scam ... a fraudulent con-game ... a putrid charade? We've been[i] played for fools [/i]for far too long!
Now is the time for Congress http://www.congress.org to call for the impeachment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the neo-con thugs & goons who have all committed treason-- betrayed their oaths of office-- lied & deceived the American people, Congress, the U.N. and the entire world in order to wage war ([i]a crime under the U.S. Constitution[/i])-- resulting in their heinous [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i], in order to enrich themselves and their sordid & squalid corporate pimps Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, etc.!
Consider "[i][b]'Little point' in WMD search[/b][/i]" by [i]Peter Beaumont[/i] on http://observer.guardian.co.u...,6903,1130804,00.html :
Pentagon and CIA officials appear to have accepted that there is little point in searching for weapons stockpiles in Iraq, and will now concentrate on auditing Iraqi claims of their destruction.
The sharp change in emphasis by the CIA-directed Iraq Survey Group follows the admission on Friday by its outgoing leader, Dr David Kay, that his 1,000-man organisation had not found evidence of stockpiles, and that he now believed they had never existed.
The CIA has announced that Kay will be replaced by Charles Duelfer, a former senior weapons inspector, who has said that in the past that the Bush administration's prewar allegations on Iraq's weapons were 'far off the mark'. 'My goal is to find out what happened on the ground. What was the status of the Iraqi weapons programme? What was their game plan? What were the goals of the regime? To find out what is the ground truth,' said Duelfer.
In a deeply embarrassing reverse for both the Bush administration and Tony Blair, Duelfer indicated on Friday that he regarded his primary task as attempting to reconstruct a 'complete, credible and openly demonstrable picture of what Iraq had, what their programmes were and where they were headed' before the war.
Although CIA and White House officials told the Washington Post that this did not represent a 'redirection of the search', officials with the UN's former Iraq weapons inspection agency believe it is nothing short of a return to the approach of Hans Blix and his pre-war UN inspection teams, who were pushed aside in the rush to war.
Duelfer has already laid out his stall, in the Washington Post in the autumn when he remarked on 'the apparent absence of existing weapons stocks'.
He wrote then that although he still considered the Iraqi regime as posing a theoretical future threat over WMD: that [i]'clearly this is not the immediate threat many assumed before the war'[/i].
[b]Other sources:[/b]
"Powell: Possible Iraq Had No Banned Arms" on http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
"Halliburton wins Iraq deal despite price gouging" on http://news.ft.com/servlet/Co...
"War Party Puts Syria in Its Sights" on http://antiwar.com/lobe/?arti...
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| "I Have A Nightmare!" ... It Is Life In Dubya's America! ... |
| 01.24.04 (3:07 pm) [edit] |
[b]"I Have A Nightmare"!
It is life in the corrupt Dubya's imbecilic, barbaric and neo-fascist America![/b]
[b]In Dubya's Global Corporate Empire [/b]-- if you've got lots and lots of power and money:[i] goodie for you[/i] because you'll be able to afford to buy your own police force, firemen, road construction crews, garbage men, teachers, doctors, [i]and the rest of those services that render life civilized [/i]... [b]For the rest of us:[/b] [i]Mexicali here we come! [/i]-- You'll be lucky if you can buy[i] a pot to piss in [/i]... and you can't depend upon[i] that [/i]working because there will be no regulations on corporations or big business to protect consumers, workers or the environment ... If you're[i] lucky enough to be a neo-feudal slave [/i]working for your neo-feudal lords & ladies, forget about worker's rights, minimum wage, retirement, health care coverage, etc.: [b]you're expendable![/b]
If you aren't aware that Dubya & his neo-con neo-fascist war-mongers already have launched their biggest pre-emptive strike in their [i]'Class War' [/i]on American workers, read the following--
Consider David Bacon's "[i][b]Class Warfare[/b][/i]" on http://www.thenation.com/doc.... :
he best labor studies programs like to think of themselves as activist-oriented--firmly grounded in the gritty world of workers. They don't usually find themselves at the center of high-profile political disputes. But in Sacramento cloakrooms, where lobbyists normally whisper blandishments into legislators' ears, the University of California's labor studies program is now being discussed in language once reserved for reds, and worse. The program, lobbyists say, not only organized meetings to stop the recall of then-Governor Gray Davis, but last summer "union thugs" supposedly even left those meetings to beat up recall petition circulators.
The accusations sound pretty wild, even considering California's usual election histrionics, but they're more than just overheated rhetoric. It's payback time in Sacramento. When newly elected Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger unilaterally imposed draconian budget cuts on the state just before Christmas, he wiped out this year's remaining funding for the Institute for Labor and Employment. If he does the same thing with next year's appropriation in March, the institute will be destroyed.
The current set of charges are the latest in a long effort to eliminate the ILE once and for all. Behind them is a political alliance between the state's Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC, the powerful lobby for nonunion construction companies) and the Pete Wilson wing of the state's Republican Party, which has retaken the governor's mansion.
The ABC in particular has been gunning for the ILE for two years, since it conducted a survey in 2001 of "project labor agreements" (or PLAs)--arrangements in which wages, benefits and union status are hammered out before work begins on major construction projects. The ILE published its findings in a working paper. This sounds pretty innocuous, but PLAs are a big roadblock to the growth of nonunion construction. Builders are so incensed about them, and so powerful, that the agreements were actually banned by President Bush as one of his first acts in office (facing Congressional opposition, he later allowed agreements for then-current projects to continue, but prohibited PLAs on new federal projects).
Labor studies programs around the country are watching what is happening to the ILE in California with trepidation. Conservative foundations have been orchestrating a national attack on labor studies. If the opponents of the ILE prevail, activist-oriented programs in Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri and other states will be next on the right-wing hit list.
The controversy raises a fundamental question about labor rights--should joining a union be protected and encouraged by law and public policy, or are unions just a narrow private interest? At the beginning of the builders' campaign in California, Steve Friar, executive director of the San Diego-Imperial County Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, wrote an op-ed in Riverside's North County Times in which he asked,"Unions are private organizations, so why are taxpayers required to cough up money for union propaganda to be filtered throughout the state?" Well, because encouraging collective bargaining has been public policy since 1936. Besides, the same university spends many times that tax money promoting the goals of another private institution--business.
Yet the question indicates how far public discourse has moved since the National Labor Relations Act became the nation's basic law giving unions legal status. The act's preamble holds that employees should (not can) band together to bargain. To accept Friar's argument, that social goal has to be deemed a "private" special interest. In fact, this change in public consciousness is one important objective of the attack on labor studies.
There's another, unspoken assumption as well. Every economic policy adopted by Congress, and by every state, assumes that the proper purpose of economic activity is the creation of private profit. In the current political climate, profit-making is even equated with democracy. Business schools treat increasing productivity--that is, the rapid and efficient accumulation of profit--not only as economically necessary but as a patriotic duty.
[i][b]For the rest of the article, click on [/b][/i]http://www.thenation.com/doc....
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| 'ALL FOR ME-ME-ME'-Dubya Had No Time To Eulogize Fallen In His SOTU Screed ... |
| 01.24.04 (2:20 pm) [edit] |
[b]Did you notice that "[i]All-for-ME-ME-ME[/i]" Dubya had no time to eulogize, in his imbecilic SOTU screed, those fallen soldiers ([i]over 510 to-date and no end in sight[/i]!) who have been ruthlessly massacred in Iraq, in order to enrich Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil etc.?[/b]
The [i]Useful Idiot [/i]and his criminal neo-con propagandists can't HIDE these hideous DEATHS even if they unconscionably SHOVE THE DEAD [i]under the covers [/i]and keep photographs from being taken of the COFFINS of their "cannon-fodder"!
Consider "[i][b]Empty Words for the War-Torn[/b][/i]" by [i]Colbert I. King [/i]on ttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4336 3-2004Jan23.html :
Since President Bush's State of the Union speech last year, thousands of Americans have experienced the emotional equivalent of a 9/11 event in their lives. Because the tragedies weren't collective, didn't occur in a single day or within the confines of a downtown city block, the devastation and pain may have been lost on the rest of us. But within the past year, more than 500 Americans have lost their lives, thousands have been maimed -- many for life -- and an untold number of U.S. families and communities have been shattered because of war in a far-off place called Iraq.
Last Tuesday night was an opportunity for George W. Bush to eulogize the fallen, a chance for him to tell their families what their sacrifices mean to the nation -- a time for the president to help heal broken hearts. That didn't happen.
Yes, in his long address to a joint session of Congress, Bush offered a few words of praise for the skill and courage of the men and women in the military. He delivered a line about "sorrow when one is lost," and shared a self-serving recollection of himself landing on the deck of a carrier in the Pacific Ocean and his Thanksgiving Day fly-in to Baghdad. There was also a pledge to supply the troops with all the resources they need to fight and win. But victims of the Iraq war, as well as their moms, dads, spouses, children, neighbors and friends, deserved more than what they got from the president.
Instead of a moment of silence for those who have paid the ultimate price, they heard presidential pitches for prescription drugs and a new immigration law, and a denunciation of steroids and gay marriage. Instead of hearing the president recognize the preciousness of young lives expended far from home, they got a plea to put Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts. Instead of telling the country why it should remember what the dead and dying stood for, Americans were given an earful on child tax credits, the death tax and cuts in taxes on capital gains.
Sure, the president had a right to use the State of the Union to defend his policies against his Democratic critics. And, yes, it was no surprise that he took advantage of the occasion to trot out his campaign themes.
But all the smiling and presidential bonhomie on display seemed ill-placed for a country still at war. Looking at the partisan cheering and all of the leaping-to-their-feet on the Republican side of the aisle, you wouldn't know that thousands of Americans are bearing the sorrows of armed conflict. You wouldn't know that the chief reason we went to war -- because Saddam Hussein allegedly had weapons of mass destruction and planned to use them -- has not been backed up by any credible evidence.
Tuesday was the time to tell U.S. families whose sons and daughters are losing their lives and limbs that their brave sacrifices still make sense -- even as we saw on the front page a photograph of able-bodied Iraqi men enjoying themselves at the horse races. Tuesday was the time to explain why the nation is straining under a growing budget deficit, and why the military is stretched to nearly the breaking point. The families needed an honest answer as to why young men and women in uniform are expected to fight and die in country dominated by clerics who want our protection as they vie for power and, once they get it, want us gone.
Instead, we got a Bush speech laying the groundwork for his quest for reelection.
This does not come from a Bush hater. He rallied the nation after Sept. 11, 2001, and set the right tone for a military response to al Qaeda. George W. Bush is not the ogre his critics make him out to be. But if ever the country needed a commander in chief who understands the horrors and wastes of war, it's now. That kind of president was not on display Tuesday night.
To know what it means to be in combat and to experience the trauma of war, we must look beyond this White House and the Pentagon's civilian war planners.
Perhaps that explains the appeal of public figures such as Sens. John F. Kerry and John McCain, retired general and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
I have just read an account of war by a recipient of three Purple Hearts for wounds, a holder of the Bronze Star and the Silver Star for gallantry in action. He was writing at the time to his future wife about the death of a friend in the service of America:
"I don't know really where to begin -- everything is so hollow and ridiculous, so stilted and so empty. I have never in my life been so alone with something like this before. I feel so bitter and angry and everywhere around me there is nothing but violence and war and gross insensitivity. . . . The world I am part of out there is so very different from anything you, I, or our close friends can imagine. It is filled with primitive survival, with destruction of an endless always seemingly pointless nature and forces one to grow up in a fast, no holds barred fashion."
He described the sight of a violent death.
"I didn't know his name. Nobody in the tent did, I think. He was completely nude and his bony, minute body was stretched out on the brown plastic mat covering the operating table." He watched as pints of blood were pumped into the man, whose neck was bleeding.
He described the blood pouring out of the man and how his own stomach began to twist, and sweat poured all over him -- how he sat down on the floor because he thought he was going to be sick.
Suddenly the man's right arm moved straight out, grasping toward the door. "He grunted desperately. . . . His toes, sticking out from the plastic splints, twinkled back and forth. He tried to raise his head and look -- perhaps ask something -- perhaps a last twinge of fight -- and then he was quiet. His right hand, still reaching, came down slowly onto his chest and his other arm, bandaged and absent, lolled over the side of the stretcher." The man, he said, was gone.
"No words. No cry," wrote then-Lt. j.g. John Kerry.
The account appeared in "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War," by Douglas Brinkley, excerpted in the December 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly.
A president who has been down in the trenches and seen people die would never have gone up to Capitol Hill in the midst of war and delivered the kind of State of the Union speech that the nation heard Tuesday night.
Last week's column, "Who Has an Answer for Craiyana?" drew responses from many readers with offers of assistance and advice. Many, many thanks. A fund has been established. The address is:
The Craiyana Henderson Fund
c/o Eric Grant
Community Relations Department
The Washington Post
1150 15th St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20071
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| Arm-Chair Chicken-Hawks Lust for War to Expand to Syria ... |
| 01.24.04 (8:28 am) [edit] |
[b]Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-con arm-chair chicken-hawks [i]lust for war[/i]-- oh boy do they [i]lust for war[/i] ... now these cowardly AWOL traitors want to invade Syria! [/b]([i]Of course this is not a surprise given that the Useful Idiot's neo-fascist propagandists tell us that their list includes Syria, Iran, N. Korea and anybody else who doesn't let Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc. enslave & impoverish their people, and rape and ravage their nations-- along with plundering the U.S. Treasury which many Americans seem oblivious to ...[/i]!)
It is surely time to demand that Congress put a halt to this insanity ... Ask Congress http://www.congress.org to pass a resolution barring the Mad King George and his neo-con, neo-fascist thugs & goons from launching more of their neo-hitlerian war-mongerings that place us at ever more risk and bankrupt us-- in order to enrich themselves and their corrupt corporate cronies!
Consider that Condi Rice has said that Syria has NO WMDs shipments from Iraq ... while you read "[i][b]US War on Terror May Spread to Syria, Report Says[/b][/i]" on http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewFo...%5CForeignBureaus%5Carchi ve%5C200401%5CFOR20040123 b.html :
[b](CNSNews.com)[/b] - A new report indicates that Syria may be the next target in the U.S. war on terror.
In a report released Friday by the London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as saying that the U.S. is considering "multi-faceted attacks," which could be conducted against Hezbollah positions in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, controlled by Syria.
According to the report, the U.S. move would "almost certainly involve a confrontation" between American Special Forces and Syrian troops.
The report highlights potential military action against Somalia as well as Syria. According to the Jane's report, "Covert U.S. forces have periodically infiltrated Somalia over the past two years to conduct surveillance and even potentially snatch suspects wanted for the November 2002 suicide bomb attacks in Mombassa, Kenya."
In near simultaneous attacks, al Qaeda terrorists bombed a hotel and attempted to bring down an Israeli airliner using a shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missile.
In addition, the Jane's report states that during the past six months, there has been an increased US military presence along the Syrian border with Iraq "and, on several occasions, [the U.S.] has sent special forces into Syrian territory or penetrated Syrian air space."
The report also detailed a running gun battle between Saddam loyalists and U.S. troops who crossed into Syrian territory, resulting in the deaths of dozens of people, including Syrian nationals.
The Syrian government has always maintained close ties with both Iraq and Iran, and has been a hotbed of Arab radicalism, allowing terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah to maintain offices in Damascus.
The ruling power in the Syrian government is the Baath Party, a secular and socialist-leaning political group headed by Syrian President Bashar Assad, the son of former Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad. Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party led Iraq before its fall to U.S.-led coalition forces.
Administration officials have expressed increasing frustration with Syria and have said the country "is on the wrong side in the war on terror."
Just last year, Congress adopted the Syrian Accountability Act, a comprehensive outline pledging sanctions if Syria does not halt its support for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, cease its illegal importation of Iraqi oil, and be accountable for its role in the Middle East.
Over the last three weeks, three high ranking Cabinet officials have made it clear that Syria needs to take immediate proactive measures to create stability in the Middle East.
While briefing reporters after President Bush's recent trip to Mexico, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice suggested that hundreds of millions of dollars - and maybe Iraqi weapons -- may have been smuggled into Syria.
"There are a number of issues that we'd like to discuss with the Syrians......including the borders with Iraq and what may have happened in the past there and what may be continuing to happen there," said Rice. [[i]Apparently Rice talks out of both sides of her lying mouth ... Refer to [/i] http://209.157.64.200/focus/f... ]
Earlier this week, an Israeli soldier was killed while clearing mines planted by Hizbullah at the Israel-Lebanon border, when Hezbollah terrorists fired anti-tank weapons. Israel responded by shelling Hizbullah positions during a raid by the Israeli Air Force in Lebanon.
The terrorist action launched from Syrian-controlled Lebanese territory drew a rebuke from Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"The deliberate action that [Hizbullah] took, which resulted in the loss of life, once again demonstrates the nature of that organization," Powell told reporters. "I would hope the Syrians would, once again, understand that any support (for terrorists) is destabilizing in the region and is not in the interest of peace."
The Jane's report said any U.S. action against Hezbollah in Lebanon could create a domino effect, creating immediate instability in an already unstable region.
"The political consequences of a U.S. attack against Lebanon...could result in the destabilization of a country that is still rebuilding its infrastructure a decade after a ruinous 15-year civil war and would also fuel Muslim and Arab hostility toward the US at a time when US-led occupation forces are fighting the ongoing insurgency in Iraq," noted the report. It also said any U.S. actions could lead to a regime change in Syria.
"However, given the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, it remains entirely possible that Washington will soon launch military strikes against Lebanon, regardless of the consequences for wider regional stability," the Jane's report said.
US objectives from a confrontation with Syria would include neutralizing Hezbollah and ending its presumed connections with al Qaeda; withdrawal of Syrian occupation forces from Lebanon; potential regime change in Damascus; and creating better coexistence between Israel and Syria.
With U.S. troops regularly patrolling the Iraq-Syrian border, and with a massive military presence in the region, the question of whether the war on terror would lead to Damascus is an ongoing topic of discussion in some quarters.
"Syria clearly needs to do more," said Jon Alterman, Director of Middle East Programs for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"While there are some in the office of the Secretary of Defense who may want to raise the options, raising the options doesn't mean the action is around the corner," he said.
"While the Syrians are looking into many avenues, including re-starting peace talks with Israel, it is clear the government can't keep doing what it has been doing."
Alterman, who was in Syria as recently as a month ago, says this is a time of confusion on the "Syrian street" as to what path their government will take in the post-9/11 world.
"The Syrian people do not know what role their nation should play in the world. They do know that with their ties to Iraq cut off, their world is changing," Alterman added.
Jim Besser, the Washington correspondent for The Jewish Week said he doubts U.S. military action against Syria is imminent: "I don't see this administration embarking on another military campaign while issues are still pending in Iraq, and before an election with successes already in hand," he said.
"There needs to be peaceful coexistence in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors, but without the terror groups reined in, the region will remain unstable."
According to Besser, although an imminent military move against Syria is unlikely, he believes the US-led war on terror will not end in Iraq.
"In the end, one thing that is for sure is there must be a focus on al Qaeda, and all groups with al Qaeda ties," he said.
[b]Other sources:[/b]
"Condi Rice: No Evidence Iraq Moved WMD to Syria" on http://209.157.64.200/focus/f...
"Power, Propaganda and Conscience in The War On Terror" by John Pilger on http://www.lewrockwell.com/or...
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| Log Cabin Republicans Reply ... |
| 01.23.04 (6:19 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Log Cabin Republicans reply to Dubya's SOTU ...[/b]
"... Log Cabin Republicans warn the President that engaging in a culture war is a recipe for defeat. ... State of the Union addresses should be used to unite all Americans around the nation's highest priorities. Americans are threatened by terrorism and job uncertainty - not gay and lesbian families." ... More http://www.lcr.org/press/2004...
- [i]Patrick Guerriero executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, responds to the president's Tuesday-night speech[/i].
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| Ex-Arms Hunter David Kay Says No WMD Stockpiles In Iraq |
| 01.23.04 (3:33 pm) [edit] |
[b]It comes as no surprise that the Bush regime's credibility is [i]shot [/i]... But this is the nail in their up-coming November [i]coffin[/i]:[/b]
In "[i][b]Ex-Arms Hunter Kay Says No WMD Stockpiles In Iraq[/b][/i]", David Kay ([i]who lusted after WMDs in Iraq prior to the war[/i]) contradicts the [i]liar and Veep-N-Creep [/i]Cheney, on http://www.washingtonpost.com... :
[b]David Kay stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq Friday and said he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons[/b].
In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.
"I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties," he said.
The CIA announced earlier that former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who has previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found, would succeed Kay as Washington's chief arms hunter.
Kay said he believes most of what was going to be found in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been found and that the hunt would become more difficult once America returned control of the country to the Iraqis.
The United States went to war against Baghdad last year citing a threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. To date, no banned arms have been found.
In his annual State of the Union Tuesday, President Bush insisted that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had actively pursued dangerous programs right up to the start of the U.S. attack in March.
Citing a report to Congress in October, Bush said Kay had found "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations."
"Had we failed to act," Bush said, "the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."
[b]Jury Still Out [/b]
And on Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States had not given up on finding unconventional weapons in Iraq. "The jury is still out," he said in a radio interview.
Kay said he left the post due to a "complex set of issues. It related in part to a reduction in the resource and a change in focus of ISG," he said referring to the Iraq Survey Group, which is in charge of the weapons hunt.
ISG analysts were diverted from hunting for weapons of mass destruction to helping in the fight against the insurgency, Kay said.
"When I had started out I had made it a condition that ISG be exclusively focused on WMD, that's no longer so," he said.
"We're not going to find much after June. Once the Iraqis take complete control of the government it is just almost impossible to operate in the way that we operate," Kay said.
"I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we're going to find," he said. "I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production and that's what we're really talking about."
Kay said he was going back to the private sector.
In a statement announcing Kay's departure, CIA Director George Tenet praised Kay for his "extraordinary service under dangerous and difficult circumstances."
Duelfer, 51, a former deputy executive chairman of the U.N. Special Commission that was responsible for dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, had previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found.
"I think that Mr. Kay and his team have looked very hard. I think the reason that they haven't found them is they're probably not there," Duelfer told NBC television earlier this month.
But in a statement included in the CIA announcement, Duelfer, who will be based in Iraq and as CIA special adviser to direct the WMD search, said he was keeping an open mind.
"I'm approaching it with an open mind and am absolutely committed to following the evidence wherever it takes us," he said.
[b]Yeah, the evidence should "[i]take us[/i]" to the International Court at the Hague, where Cheney, Dubya and the rest of these neo-con thugs & goons should be tried for [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i]![/b]
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| Center for American Progress: The Truth About Dubya's SOTU |
| 01.23.04 (8:09 am) [edit] |
[b]There have been several very well-researched analyses regarding Dubya's [i]State of the Union [/i](SOTU) ... [i]The Center for American Progress [/i]has produced some of the most thorough assessments ...[/b]It is necessary in today's neo-fascist, neo-orwellian world to carefully parse Dubya's fuzzy words and to examine the facts ... Dubya's so-called [i]"word" [sic][/i] just can't be trusted!
Consider [i]The Center for American Progress' [/i]report entitled "[b]Special Report: [i]President Bush made many claims in his State of the Union address. Experts from the Center for American Progress examine his speech to find out the truth[/i][/b]" on http://www.prospect.org/webfe... :
[b]What the president said about Afghanistan[/b]: "As of this month, that country has a new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women. Businesses are opening, health care centers are being established, and the boys and girls of Afghanistan are back in school. With help from the new Afghan Army, our coalition is leading aggressive raids against surviving members of the Taliban and al-Qaida. The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror and America is honored to be their friend."
[b]The facts[/b]: A November 2003 report issued by a U.N. delegation , including U.S. ambassador John Negroponte, said that Afghanistan starkly contrasts with the President's optimistic assessment. The U.N. delegation reported that "insecurity caused by terrorist activities, factional fights and drug-related crime remain the major concern of Afghans today." Throughout the nation "individuals and communities suffer from abuses of their basic rights by local commanders and factional leaders." The problems are exacerbated in many areas of the country "by terrorist attacks from suspected members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda."
[b]What the president said about Weapons of Mass Destruction[/b]: "We are seeking all the facts. Already the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."
[b]The facts[/b]: In nearly 10 months, " not a single item has been found in Iraq from a long and classified intelligence list of weapons of mass destruction." David Kay reported that we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook steps to build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material." He also said there has not been evidence of "mobile biological production efforts" and that "Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled chemical weapons program after 1991."
[b]What the president said about U.S. troops[/b]: "And the men and women of the American military -- they have taken the hardest duty…Many of our troops are listening tonight. And I want you and your families to know: America is proud of you…When you and your friends see a man or woman in uniform, say "thank you."
[b]The facts[/b]: The Administration has repeatedly tried to reduce basic services to men and women in uniform. It has tried to separation pay for the troops and fought efforts by Congress to allow military retirees to collect their full disability pay. Also, critical items, such as effective body armor, humvees, and helicopter anti-missile systems have been in short supply. The Administration also has launched an assault on military families, consistently trying to limit the benefits that military families and veterans receive from the government, announcing an intent to close commissaries, and considering closing schools.
[b]What the president said about international credibility[/b]: "For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America."
[b]The facts[/b]: American claims are very much in doubt, and the President is largely responsible. Last year, the President said that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The White House later admitted the claim was inaccurate. In fact, it was removed from a previous speech months earlier by the CIA because of concerns about its accuracy. The primary basis for the claim was a badly forged document.
[b]What the president said about the economy[/b]: "Because you acted to stimulate our economy with tax relief, this economy is strong."
[b]The facts[/b]: According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, without the tax cuts, "the economy would have still have had 6 percent real growth." Meanwhile, a new poll shows that more than 4 in 5 Americans said their tax burden had not been eased by Bush's tax cuts. And while the President says the economy is strong, wages are stagnating.
[b]What the president said about on jobs and wages[/b]: "Jobs are on the rise."
[b]The facts[/b]: While the unemployment rate dropped in December, it only did so because the economy was so bleak that 255,000 of the jobless simply stopped looking for work. Additionally, the jobs that are being created are lower-paying. As the Economic Policy Institute notes, over the past two years, "expanding industries paid $14.65 per hour, while contracting industries paid $16.92." Just last month, a U.S. Conference of Mayors report showed new jobs created during the 2004-05 period are forecast to pay an average of $35,855, much lower than the $43,629 average pay of jobs lost between 2001-03.
[b]What the president said about worker protections[/b]: "Our agenda for jobs and growth must help small business owners and employees with relief from needless Federal regulation."
[b]The facts[/b]: This agenda refers to the President's efforts to curb overtime pay , reduce workplace ergonomics protections, and starve the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of its funding.
[b]What the president said about job training[/b]: "I propose increasing our support for America's fine community colleges, so they can train workers for the industries that are creating the most new jobs."
[b]The facts[/b]: Over the last three years, Bush has proposed almost $1 billion in cuts to job training, including a $300 million (25%) cut to vocational education and community colleges and the total elimination of the $225 million Youth Opportunities Grants program. Congress obliged the President, eliminating the youth grants, and freezing the funding for federal job training and vocational education.
[b]What the president said about social security[/b]: "Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account."
[b]The facts[/b]: Under the Administration's current plan, "workers aged 35 today who retire at age 65 and do not choose the private accounts would have their Social Security benefits reduced 17%" from what they are promised now. Further, for someone born today, "benefits would be 41% lower compared to what current law" promises. Social Security privatization "is risky and involves trading some of today's inflation protected, lifetime guaranteed benefits for an account subject to market risk and not guaranteed to last a lifetime or keep pace with inflation."
[b]What the president said about taxes[/b]: "The tax relief you passed is working."
[b]The facts[/b]: The tax cuts are not meeting his own stated goals. In April 2003, the White House Counsel of Economic Advisors pledged that the President's "jobs and growth" package would create 1,836,000 new jobs by the end of 2003 as part of its pledge to create 5.5 million new jobs by 2004. But the economy added just 221,000 jobs, meaning the White House has fallen 1,615,000 jobs short of its mark. On top of that, recent growth in GDP is largely unrelated to tax cuts. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, without the tax cuts growth last quarter would still be around 6%. Meanwhile, "fewer than one in five Americans said their tax burden had been eased by Mr. Bush, who has made tax cuts the centerpiece of his economic program."
[b]What the president said about small business and taxes[/b]: "Unless you act, small businesses will pay higher taxes."
[b]The facts[/b]: Most small business owners felt little effect from Bush's 2003 tax cut. 82% of tax filers with small business income received less than $2000 in cuts. 55% got less than $500, 25% got no tax cut at all. Why is this the case? Less than 5% of those with small business income fall into the top two income brackets.
[b]What the president said about jobs and tax cuts[/b]: "For the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent."
[b]The facts[/b]: Since President Bush's first tax cut in March of 2001, the economy has shed more than 2 million jobs. He will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end his term with a net job loss record. Additionally, the White House Counsel of Economic Advisors pledged that the President's "jobs and growth" package would create 1,836,000 new jobs by the end of 2003 as part of its pledge to create 5.5 million new jobs by 2004. But the economy added 221,000 jobs since the last tax cut went into effect, meaning the White House has fallen 1,615,000 jobs short of their mark.
[b]What the president said about spending[/b]: "We should limit the burden of government on this economy by acting as good stewards of taxpayer dollars."
[b]The facts[/b]: The administration has been lavishing taxpayer dollars on Halliburton, a company which "may have overcharged the government $61 million on a contract to supply fuel for Iraq," and would have been "overpaid $67 million in another contract to operate U.S. military mess halls if auditors hadn't questioned the arrangement." The company has received $2.26 billion in no-bid contracts from the Federal Government for reconstruction in Iraq. But after these revelations surfaced, the White House stripped out a provision from an Iraq spending bill that would have subjected the company and other price gougers to criminal penalties.
[b]What the president said about the deficit[/b]: "We can cut the deficit in half over the next five years."
[b]The facts[/b]: The President's proposal to cut the deficit in half deliberately "omits a number of likely costs" such as the continued cost of Iraq and its own defense spending plans. All told, he is proposing roughly $3 trillion in new tax cuts and spending, including $1 trillion to make his tax cuts permanent, $1 trillion to privatize Social Security, $50 billion more for war in Iraq, $1.5 billion to promote marriage, and a Mars proposal that could cost $500 billion. The result is that the deficit is predicted to be "in the range of $500 billion in 2009" - not even near half of what it currently is.
[b]What the president said about the uninsured[/b]: "I ask you to give lower-income Americans a refundable tax credit that would allow millions to buy their own basic health insurance."
[b]The facts[/b]: The new tax breaks rely on savings, so "the very people who lack the decent health insurance are short of adequate earnings from which to take out savings." Thus, "most of the tax breaks will go to people who don't really need them, while those who rely on genuine help will come up short." And while the President is proposing $3 trillion in new tax cuts and spending, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson still insists that health care for all Americans by 2010 is not realistic."
[b]What the president said about health care costs[/b]: "We must work together to help control those costs and extend the benefits of modern medicine throughout our country."
[b]The facts[/b]: The President's health care plan provides additional government subsidies to private health insurers that charge unconscionable prices to those who are sick, or refuse to cover them at any price; allows private health insurers to avoid state regulation and have even greater latitude to discriminate against the sick; and guarantees an extra $400 billion of taxpayer money to the pharmaceutical industry while prohibiting the government from negotiating fair prescription drug prices.
[b]What the president said about drug discount cards[/b]: "Under the law you passed, seniors can choose to receive a drug discount card, saving them 10 to 25 percent off the retail price of most prescription drugs."
[b]The facts[/b]: Drug discount cards do not guarantee seniors a price discount. "Sponsors of drug discount cards will be allowed to change their prices - and the list of covered drugs - on a weekly basis." The administration stated, "we have chosen not to establish minimum threshold levels for price concessions."
[b]What the president said about health care savings account[/b]: "Millions of Americans will be able to save money tax-free for their medical expenses, in a health savings account."
[b]The facts[/b]: The creation of "Health Care Savings Accounts" provides an " incentive to shift more costs to workers, who may be asked to 'match' their employer's contribution to a HSA with its high deductibles and high co-payments." Workers "in the higher tax brackets would secure large deductions for deposits into HSAs." As a result, they will "weaken traditional employer-based insurance" and "place older and sicker workers at risk." Experts believe premiums for comprehensive employer-based health insurance could "more than double."
[b]What the president said about reimportation[/b]: "Any attempt to limit the choices of our seniors, or to take away their prescription drug coverage under Medicare, will meet my veto."
[b]The facts[/b]: The Medicare legislation bows to the interests of pharmaceutical companies and prohibits Medicare from using group purchasing power to negotiate the lowest prices for seniors. At the same time, the FDA refuses to allow seniors the right to reimport cheaper medication from Canada, claiming safety concerns. Critics accuse the agency of "overstating the health hazards of foreign drugs to help the drug industry defeat legislation legalizing the purchase, or 'reimportation,' of U.S.-made drugs from Canada."
[b]What the president said about No Child Left Behind[/b]: "I refuse to give up on any child and the No Child Left Behind Act is opening the door of opportunity to all of America's children."
[b]The facts[/b]: President Bush has repeatedly proposed budgets that drastically underfund his own No Child Left Behind Bill. While he recently announced his support for $2 billion in funding for disadvantaged and disabled children," this increase comes after he eliminated $1.6 billion in education programs for the poor. All told, Bush has proposed an education budget that leaves a $6.2 billion shortfall for Title I - the main program for disadvantaged students. At the same time, his budget has proposed to cut $400 million (40%) out of after-school programs, resulting in 485,000 children being thrown off these programs. He also proposed to freeze teacher training grants, meaning a loss of opportunity for 30,000 teachers.
[b]What the president said about Pell Grants[/b]: "I propose larger Pell Grants for students who prepare for college with demanding courses in high school."
[b]The facts[/b]: Using a new formula developed by the Department of Education to calculate eligibility for the Pell Grant " will eliminate 84,000 students from the Pell program - and will reduce Pell awards to another 1.5 million students." The President's last budget proposed cutting the maximum Pell Grant from $4050 to $4000. Today, "the average Pell grant...has gone from covering 77% of the cost of a four-year public college in 1980 to 40%."
[b]What the president said about civil liberties[/b]: "Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act are set to expire next year. The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule. Our law enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our citizens, you need to renew the PATRIOT Act."
[b]The facts[/b]: First and foremost, the Justice Department has not presented any evidence that the PATRIOT Act has lead to the successful prosecution of a single terrorist crime. Additionally, before Congress could responsibly extend the PATRIOT Act, it would have to know how it's been used. But Ashcroft himself - despite on multiple, explicit, bi-partisan requests from Congress - refuses to make straight-forward, unambiguous disclosures about the bill's use. Finally, the Justice Department's own Inspector General has already found 34 credible complaints of civil liberties violations connected with the Patriot Act. A federal advisory panel headed by Jim Gilmore (the Gilmore Commission), former Republican Party chairman and Governor of Virginia, issued a report early this morning that sharply criticized the Administration's anti-terror policies. The Gilmore Commission cautioned that "important civil liberties issues must be considered when evaluating measures for combating terrorism."
[b]What the president said about drug treatment[/b]: "In my budget, I have proposed new funding to continue our aggressive, community-based strategy to reduce demand for illegal drugs [including] an additional 23 million dollars for schools that want to use drug testing as a tool to save children's lives."
[b]The facts[/b]: In his FY04 budget, the President proposed cutting funding for the Safe and Drug Free Schools program by 25 million dollars.
[i]The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute based in Washington, D.C.[/i]
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| Conservatives Slam Dubya's Reckless Spending Spree ... |
| 01.23.04 (7:17 am) [edit] |
[b]Even conservatives are [i]coming out of the closet [/i]and slamming Dubya's insane reckless [i]spending spree [/i]... [/b]Of course, the fact is that Dubya is spending like a [i]drunken sailor [/i]on corporations, wealthy plutocrats, the richest-of-the-rich-- while leaving American working people bereft and facing rising inflation, the largest deficits and debts in our nation's history, as well as the highest job losses since the Great Depression!
Consider the ultra-conservative U.K. Telegraph's "[i][b]Bush under fire over 'runaway spending'[/b][/i]" by [i]Alec Russell [/i]in Washington on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...;$sessionid$HYRVBJHV5TTXH QFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/ news/2004/01/23/wbush23.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/ 23/ixworld.html :
[b]President George W Bush is facing mounting anger from the conservative Right who accused him of letting government spending run out of control[/b].
[i][b]Forty Republican Congressmen have formed a rebel group committed to curbing federal spending[/b][/i].
The move followed an attack on Mr Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress by six conservative think-tanks and pressure groups in Washington over the surge in spending projects.
They range from health care reforms costing $400 billion (£217 billion) signed into law last December to his attempt to send man back to the Moon.
The six organisations accused the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress of spending like "drunken sailors" and criticised Mr Bush for failing to rein them in.
"The Republican Congress is spending at twice the rate as under Bill Clinton and President Bush has yet to issue a single veto," said Paul Weyrich, the chairman of one group, Coalitions for America.
The federal deficit reached $374 billion (£203 billion) at the end of the last fiscal year on Sept 30. New figures next month are expected to project a deficit of $480 billion (£260 billion) in 2004.
A huge surplus was predicted when Mr Bush took office three years ago but the White house blames the swing on the cost of fighting the war against terrorism.
The Right's fury has been compounded by the details of a vast spending bill laden with an array of "pork barrel" projects shocking even by the blatant vote-buying standards of congressional politics.
The omnibus appropriations bill for 2004 was blocked by Democrats with some Republican support last year but was expected to be passed last night in good time for the campaigns for November's congressional elections.
"Members of Congress used to be ashamed about pork projects. They are now proud about bringing home the bacon. They see it as their job," said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think-tank.
"Republicans are dedicated to staying in power. The quest for re-election dominates all else. There are more than 8,000 pork projects in this bill, the most of any in the history of Congress."
Mr Bush's administration says the bill increases expenditure by only three per cent and in his State of the Union address he said the 2005 budget would keep the rise to four per cent.
But the Heritage Foundation ([i]neo-nazi 'think tank [sic]' that propagates mendacious propaganda on behalf of corporations[/i]) disputes the figures for this year, calculating that the increase is nearer to nine per cent and concluding that the past few years appear to have been the fastest-growing period of government spending since the 1960s.
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| CIA Officers Warn of Iraq Civil War, Contradicting Bush's Optimism |
| 01.22.04 (2:47 pm) [edit] |
[b]Similar to most of the mendacious neo-orwellian propaganda forced upon us by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]and their [i]neo-con right-wing media & press [/i]puppets, court-jesters and attack-dogs[/b]-- Bush uses lies, deceptions and falsehoods to perpetrate another [b]fraud [/b]upon us ... Bush and his arrogant gang of neo-con thugs & goons have fumbled, bumbled and stumbled us into a bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq ... and yet they try unconvincingly to persuade us that all is well ...
Today's headlines in the[i] foreign [/i]and [i]independent[/i] press reads "[i]Iraq women gunned down[/i]" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi... -- "[i]Guerrilla Attacks in Iraq Sunni Triangle Kill Nine[/i]" http://www.reuters.com/newsAr...;jsessionid=ADVDHJXN0ZEDA CRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&s toryID=4186180 -- "[i]Whose democracy? Women, academics, the media worry about their rights in a new Iraq[/i]." http://www.csmonitor.com/2004... -- [b]Do You Wonder [i]WHY[/i] the Iraqi People Who Have Been Slaughtered, Massacred & Maimed En-Masse by the Bush Regime, Aren't [i]THRILLED[/i] & [i]TICKLED-PINK [/i]To Be Occupied by [i]US[/i]?[/b] ...
[i][b]Dubya's putrid [i]wartime cheerleading and jingoism[/i], in his mendacious propaganda SOTU screed now sounds tinny, phony, arrogant and ugly ... If Iraq erupts into a bloody Civil War, then Dubya, Cheney, Rice, Rove, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the neo-con War Criminals must [u]without a doubt[/u], be tried at the International Court in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity ...[/b][/i]
Consider "[i][b]CIA Officers Warn of Iraq Civil War, Contradicting Bush's Optimism [/b][/i]" by [i]Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay [/i]on http://www.commondreams.org/h... :
WASHINGTON - CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.
The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.
The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.
Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.
"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before."
These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity.
Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.
Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit strategy after concluding that Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by June 30.
Bremer would then hand over power to the interim government.
The CIA hasn't yet put its officers' warnings about a potential Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior official said he expected a formal report "momentarily."
"In the discussion with Bremer in the last few days, several very bad possibilities have been outlined," he said.
Bush, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, insisted that an insurgency against the U.S. occupation, conducted primarily by minority Sunni Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein, "will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom."
"Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility for their own security and their own future," the president said.
Bush didn't directly address the crisis over the Shiites' political demands.
Shiites, who dominate the regions from Baghdad south to the borders of Kuwait and Iran, comprise some 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people.
Several U.S. officials acknowledged that Sistani is unlikely to be "rolled," as one put it, and as a result Bremer's plan for restoring Iraqi sovereignty and ending the U.S. occupation by June 30 is in peril.
The Bremer plan, negotiated with the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council, calls for caucuses in each of Iraq's 18 provinces to choose the interim national assembly, which would in turn select Iraq's first post-Saddam government.
The first direct elections wouldn't be held until the end of 2005.
In an interview with Knight Ridder on Wednesday, a top cleric in the Shiite holy city of Najaf appeared to confirm the fears of potential civil war.
"Everything has its own time, but we are saying that we don't accept the occupiers getting involved with the Iraqis' affairs," said Sheikh Ali Najafi, whose father, Grand Ayatollah Bashir al Najafi, is, along with Sistani, one of the four most senior clerics. "I don't trust the Americans - not even for one blink."
If the United States went ahead with the caucus plan and ended the military occupation, the interim government wouldn't last long, he said.
"The Iraqi people would know how to deal with those people," he said, smiling. "They would kick them out."
U.S. and British officials hinted Wednesday that they might bow to the demand for some kind of elections, after saying for weeks that holding free and fair elections in time for the handover of sovereignty would be impossible.
"We've always favored elections," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said after he and other top Bush aides briefed senators. "The only question is - the tension was, if your goal is to get sovereignty passed to the Iraqis so that they feel they have a stake in their future, can you do it faster with caucuses or can you do it faster with elections?"
Rumsfeld was responding to comments by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who opened the door Wednesday to elections in Iraq earlier than planned.
"The discussion, which has been stimulated by Ayatollah Sistani, is whether there could be an element of elections injected into the earlier part of the process," Straw said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"We have to work with great respect for him and similar leaders," he said. "We want elections as soon as it is feasible to hold them."
Shiite clerics have become more forceful in their denunciation of the caucus plan and have organized increasingly large, albeit peaceful, demonstrations demanding elections.
State Department officials said no changes to the Bremer plan are being formally considered. They said much depends on the findings of a U.N. assessment team that the Bush administration has asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send to examine the feasibility of elections.
One option being informally discussed is to delay the transfer of power until later in 2004, which might give the United Nations time to organize some sort of elections, said one official.
But that is almost certain to be opposed by White House political aides who want the occupation over and many U.S. troops gone by this summer to bolster Bush's re-election chances, the official said.
"It's all politics right now," he said.
Other options are to go ahead with the June 30 turnover as planned, whatever the fallout, or to accelerate it by handing over power to the Iraqi Governing Council in March or April, he said.
[i]Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Tom Lasseter in Najaf, Iraq, and Joseph L. Galloway and John Walcott in Washington contributed to this report[/i].
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| Republican Kevin Phillips on "What Powers the Bush Clan?" |
| 01.22.04 (7:44 am) [edit] |
[b]POLITICS: AMERICAN DYNASTY - ARISTOCRACY, FORTUNE, AND THE POLITICS OF DECEIT IN THE HOUSE OF BUSH [/b]by Kevin Phillips is one of the most highly discussed political books, taken seriously as the research is well-documented and un-disputed, and because it reveals the sordid and squalid nature of the Bush Clan in their wanton and ruthless scramble for infinite power and vast riches-- irrespective of whom they collaborate with or harm, in the process.
Consider "[i][b]What powers the Bush Clan?[/b][/i] by William O'Rourke on http://www.suntimes.com/outpu... :
[b]Kevin Phillips is no hotheaded bomb-thrower but a seasoned wise man with deep roots in the Republican party[/b]. Nonetheless, his new book on the Bush family is more incendiary than the Bill-Clinton-murdered-Vin ce-Foster books so popular during the '90s. Unlike them, however, [i]American Dynasty [/i]is not sensationalistic and its claims are historically verifiable.
Phillips' [i]The Emerging Republican Majority [/i](1969), was a bible for the party faithful that predicted the successful Sun Belt-dominated rise of the GOP. But, since 1990, with the publication of [i]The Politics of Rich and Poor[/i], Phillips has become more and more alarmed over the divergence of wealth and social position in the United States. His [i]Wealth and Democracy [/i](2002) was a clarion call, warning that democracy and economic polarization can't coexist.
[i]American Dynasty [/i]extends that analysis, centering on the family Phillips calls "the [i]House of Bush[/i]" and telling the story of four generations of Bushes from World War I up to the ongoing Iraq conflict.
Phillips examines at length the current president's grandfather Prescott Bush (and Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker). Prescott, Phillips writes, tried to duck his family's "aura of wealth" when he ran for the Senate: "He had tried to minimize the connotations of his rich-family, Wall Street resume by seeming less stuffy and emphasizing his involvement in charitable, educational, and civil rights causes."
And, Phillips makes clear, successive generations of political Bushes also masqueraded as the common man. For those who have paid keen attention to the career of George W. Bush, a lot of the facts in [i]American Dynasty [/i]are not news, however startling. But it is Phillips' training as a historian and the context he provides that makes his book so fresh and damning.
Phillips admits to being aghast at what he discovered: "In examining two Bush presidencies and a four-generation pursuit of national prominence and power through an unusual lens -- one that highlighted elite associations, recurring political practices, and dynastic ambitions -- I learned much more, and I admit to being shocked at some of what I found. The result is an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family (in power, not morality) that has built a base over the course of the twentieth century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing national security establishment. In doing so, [i]the family has threaded its way through damning political and armaments scandals and, since the 1980s, faint hints, never more, of acts that in another climate might have led to presidential impeachment[/i]."
Phillips seems most exercised by two things: the first being that the Bush family's wealth and power comes principally from the investment communities, oil being just a paper holding to them, not a tangible thing that produces something other than profit, and the second that this interest has been forever entwined with government intelligence work. The present Bushes, son and father, might live in Texas, but their family oil and business interests are in the Middle East and the Caribbean.
The combination of the intelligence community and international corporations produced what amounted to a government within a government, which is now becoming one and the same thing, Phillips writes. "[i]No previous presidential family has been so wholeheartedly involved with a single economic sector over two generations, yet with so little scrutiny of the resulting narrowness of its public policy views. If representing Texas for ten or twenty years stamped a senator's or congressman's view of the national agenda, what would have been imprinted on a presidential family by a century of working to increase the wealth of a small slice of Upper America[/i]?" Hence George W. Bush's need to eliminate the "death tax," the tax on dividends, etc.
The involvement of Prescott Bush and his father-in-law with [i]Nazi-era German holding companies [/i]became useful resources for the CIA during the Cold War. The interlocking directorships and the Bush contacts with the Yale graduates who made up a good part of the East Coast investment and political establishment, became, over time, a permanent power base. Phillips shows how "crony capitalism" is not new but has been the basis for business in the Bush family for nearly 100 years.
When George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, many Americans were unaware that he had been head of the CIA. Fewer understood that that method of ascendancy to the Oval Office was unheard of in American history. Most didn't give it much thought, but if they had, they would find troubling Phillips' recounting of the Bush family history and the history of the CIA. Phillips' examination of the personnel of the second Bush White House is proof of how small a world that is.
[i]American Dynasty [/i]revisits many national traumas through the direct involvement of the Bushes: the Kennedy assassination, Cuba, Nicaragua, the arms-for-hostages controversy, the Iran-Iraq war, the current Iraq conflict. This steady march of history and Phillips' marshaling of evidence has cumulative power. None of the other recent critical, liberal books about George W. Bush has this sort of sweep or impact.
Phillips doesn't neglect the simple fact that Bill Clinton impeded the rise of the[i] House of Bush [/i]and the 2000 election almost thwarted its restoration: "... Clinton's moral shortcomings and impeachment may have been a precondition for Bush's accession in 2000. Even so, the speed and seriousness of the family's efforts to make George W. Bush governor of Texas in 1994 and to likewise for his brother in Florida more than hinted at its higher goals."
Phillips points out how the anger that drove the impeachment of Bill Clinton may have worn the public face of rural congressmen and right-wing talk radio, but actually was fueled by the grievances of the Bush family and its circle of highly placed establishment figures. The Clinton destruction crew (the "vast right-wing conspiracy") was highly successful deceptive branding, letting the parochial members of Congress take the heat for the excesses of the Clinton-haters.
This deep-seated anger carried over to the contested 2000 election. The Republicans fought a no-holds-barred battle, feeding off eight years of rage at the Clinton usurpation; Al Gore did much less, feeling equivocal at best because of Clinton's failings and worrying about the legitimacy of the presidency being weakened if he protested too much.
But this issue is a sideshow to the main event, the depiction of the rise of the Bush dynasty and how dynasties are antithetical to democratic systems. [i]American Dynasty [/i]is so sober and steeped in learning that readers will wonder how President Bush, or any man's family, could stand this depth of exposure. Most likely Phillips will be attacked by the same machinery that so effectively pummeled Bill Clinton. [i]American Dynasty[/i] is as depressing as it is brilliant and important.
[i]William O'Rourke is a Sun-Times columnist and a professor at Notre Dame. His most recent book is Campaign America 2000[/i].
POLITICS: AMERICAN DYNASTY - ARISTOCRACY, FORTUNE, AND THE POLITICS OF DECEIT IN THE HOUSE OF BUSH BY KEVIN PHILLIPS Viking. $25.95.
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| GOP Hypocrisy On-Stage ... Yet Again ... |
| 01.21.04 (5:42 pm) [edit] |
[b]GOP Hypocrisy [i]On-Stage [/i]... Yet Again ...[/b]
[b]THEN:[/b]
"[i]Any appointment of a federal judge during a recess should be opposed[/i]."
- Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) opposing the appointment of an African American judge, December 2000 http://www.ajc.com/news/conte...
[b]NOW:[/b]
"[i]Judge Pickering's record deems this recess appointment fully appropriate[/i]."
- Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), 1/17/04 http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO...
Of course, the hypocritical Dubya cynically made his disgusting appointment of Judge Pickering ([i]to pander to his constituency of Religious Right Bigots[/i]) the day following his unpopular, exploitative photo-op at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s grave ... Refer to "[i][b]An Insult to Dr. King[/b][/i]" on http://www.americanprogress.o...%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/040120.HTM#5
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]Center for American Progress [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o...%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/040120.HTM#1
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| Dubya's Insane "Go-It-Alone" Stump Speech ... |
| 01.21.04 (8:21 am) [edit] |
[b]Dubya delivered another insane "[i]go-it-alone[/i]" stump speech last night ... [/b]It was embarrassing to watch this [i]cowardly arm-chair chicken-hawk [/i]who himself dodged military service ([i]Shrub was AWOL in a drunken stupor during Vietnam[/i]) while better men died-- tout the glories of warfare as the only solution to solving the world's problems! [i]Could this be because Dubya is too dumb to negotiate diplomatic solutions? Uh-huh[/i]! Brute force is the only way imbeciles recklessly try to resolve problems ([i]but end-up causing mayhem, misery and carnage, instead[/i])!
Moreover, Dubya's [i]corporations take-all [/i]economic policies are cynically devised to swindle, plunder & loot the American working people ... Furthermore, Dubya's [i]lack of understanding [/i]of the basic principle of the[i] separation of church and state[/i] is both pathetic and laughable ... For example, if Dubya considers the institution of marriage so sacred, why doesn't he propose a [i]Marriage Amendment Outlawing Divorce[/i]? Since, Gay Marriage ([i]or, Heterosexual Marriage for that matter is on the decline[/i]) is not as prevalent, nor as destructive to children as Divorce ... ([i]But then the right-wing hypocrites like Limbaugh, Gingrich, Reagan, etc. all of whom are divorcees would be in trouble[/i]!) Of course, government dictating whom we should marry and/or divorce is ludicrous!
Dubya has proven that he is unfit for office: The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]has bungled us into a bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq, costing us ([i]not him, nor his neo-con thugs & goons[/i]) precious lives and U.S. dollars ... What ever happened to Osama bin Forgotten? ... Additionally, Dubya has wrecked the economy of the U.S. with his [i]corporate-take-all [/i]rape on behalf of his corrupt corporate cronies ... What about the 9-15 million jobless, 3.5 million homeless, 45-85 million without health care, 25 million families living below the poverty line, etc.?... Dubya's squalid track-record is one of sordid skyrocketing deficits[i] run-up [/i]by his neo-fascist corporate paymasters, with[i] nothing to show for it [/i]but debt, debt, debt!
Consider "[i][b]Democrats slam 'go-it-alone' Bush[/b][/i]" on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/am... :
President Bush's Democratic critics have accused him of leaving the US isolated and worse off. House of Representatives Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi said resources had been stolen from education and health to pay for the Iraq campaign.
Candidates for the party's presidential nomination went on the attack after Mr Bush's State of the Union speech.
President Bush insisted that his foreign policies had made Americans - and the world - safer.
The State of the Union speech, the third of his presidency, is being seen as Mr Bush setting out his case for re-election in November, before a challenger emerges.
"America this evening is a nation called to great responsibilities. And we are rising to meet them," Mr Bush told a joint session of Congress watched on television by millions of Americans.
The BBC's David Bamford says that many Republicans have described the president's performance as effective and robust, but it will do little to unite the nation around a common purpose.
Ms Pelosi, in the Democrats' official reply to his speech, said Mr Bush had led the US into war in Iraq based on unproven assertions, and incurred huge costs now being met by American taxpayers.
"He has pursued a go-it-alone foreign policy that leaves us isolated abroad and that steals the resources we need for education and health care here at home," she said.
"America must be a light to the world, not just a missile," she added.
Wesley Clark, a leading presidential hopeful, compared the administration to the Axis of Evil, a phrase Mr Bush coined himself in a previous address to describe states threatening the US.
"It's an axis of fiscal policies that threaten our future... foreign policies that threaten our security... and domestic policies that put families dead last," he said in a statement.
Senator John Kerry meanwhile, fresh from a surprise victory in Monday's Iowa Democratic caucus, accused Mr Bush of doing nothing while the US lost more jobs than at any time since the Great Depression in 1929.
[b]Dividends[/b]
Mr Bush focused on the war on terrorism he launched following the attacks on New York and Washington, saying it was far from over.
"Twenty-eight months have passed since September 11, 2001 - over two years without an attack on American soil - and it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us," Mr Bush said. "That hope is understandable, comforting - and false."
The president urged Congress to renew controversial anti-terrorism laws that critics say damage civil liberties.
Mr Bush said the use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq had paid dividends elsewhere, persuading Libya to abandon its programme to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Taking a sideswipe at opponents of the Iraq invasion, Mr Bush said: "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country."
[b]Economy stronger [/b]
Mr Bush pledged that despite continuing attacks on US-led occupying forces in Iraq, they would remain in the country to oversee a transition to democracy.
Mr Bush also emphasised his domestic agenda, with an upbeat assessment of the strength of the US economy.
Much of his speech focused on policies such as trying to improve school standards, extending access to prescription drugs for senior citizens, and immigration reform.
He insisted that the US economy was growing stronger, partly as a result of his tax cuts.
Mr Bush also appealed to his conservative support base by urging sexual abstinence as a way of cutting sexually transmitted diseases among young people.
He signalled his support for a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, vowing to "defend the sanctity of marriage".
[b]Instead, I would like to see a constitutional amendment outlawing congenital stupidity and corruption in the White House: Dubya & his corrupt cabal of neo-con thugs & goons would be ousted in a flash![/b]
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| What Dubya Really Should Have Said in His State of the Union Address |
| 01.20.04 (6:10 pm) [edit] |
[b]What Dubya Really Should Have Said in His State of the Union Address[/b] on http://www.buzzflash.com/buzz... :
[i][b](If He Were Inclined to Tell the Truth for Once ...)[/b][/i]
I bungled 9/11. I shelved the Hart-Rudman Commission that warned of attacks on US soil. I stopped surveilance drones over Afghanistan. I stopped full Senate hearings on the Hart-Rudman commission. I ignored several threats telling of the attacks. I failed to warn Americans of the threats.
I am continuing stonewalling all 9/11 investigations.
I lied about Iraq having WMD, and 500 soldiers died because of my lies.
I lied about Iraq being tied to 9/11 and thousands of U.S. soldiers were injured because of my lies.
I lied about Iraq having biological weapons that could reach U.S. soil, and thousands of Iraqi civilians died because of my lies.
We didn't find any WMD, but we found lots of oil for my buddies.
We didn't find any WMD, but I was able to give lots of contracts worth billions to Halliburton and other companies that donated to my campaign.
[b]Out of respect for the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, I hereby submit my resignation and give myself up to the International Court at the Hague to be tried for [i]Crimes Against Humanity.[/i][/b]
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| Conservatives Against Bush: The Aftermath of the Iraq War ... |
| 01.20.04 (4:44 pm) [edit] |
[b]Many conscientious conservatives oppose the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] illegal and immoral neo-con warfare to enrich their neo-fascist war-profiteers.[/b] Neo-imperialism is not the American way in dealing in the world, and Dubya's insane doctrine of pre-emption is not the right way forward for our nation ...
[b]Conservatives Against Bush[/b], http://www.conservativesagain...
Consider "[i][b]Mired in a quagmire and not any safer, the aftermath of the Iraq war[/b][/i]" on http://www.conservativesagain... :
Last Tuesday [July 2003], Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defensively spurned accusations that Iraq was turning into a Vietnam like quagmire. He also denied that Iraq was becoming a guerrilla war, even after one reporter cited the Defense Department's own definition of guerrilla war, "military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular ground indigenous forces," which seems to fit the description of what is occurring in Iraq. W. Patrick Lang, former head of Middle Eastern Affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a former professor at the Virginia Military Institute, told the [i]Washington Post [/i]that the situation in Iraq is "exactly" what a guerrilla war looks like in its early stages. So why is the Secretary so defensive about the guerrilla label -- of course, it is because of the last guerrilla conflict the U.S. was involved in, Vietnam.
It goes deeper than this though. Since the end of World War II, nearly three quarters of all military conflicts have been low-intensity conflicts (LIC) (characterized by guerrilla warfare and terrorism, often they involve regular armies fighting guerrillas, terrorists, and even women and children. LICs involve mostly small arms on the part of the insurgent force).
Out of all these LICs, the conventional forces lost all but one time. The one success story is the British suppression of a communist insurgency in Malaysia. This was a special case, though. The communists were part of the Chinese minority in the country, and the British promised to leave immediately after defeating the insurgency, which they did. Every single other example of LIC was a victory for the insurgent forces, from the British in India, Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, the French in Indochina and Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Syrians in Lebanon, the Cubans in Angola, the Chinese in Vietnam, to the Vietnamese in Cambodia -- the list goes on.
Mr. Rumsfeld has a lot to fear from the guerrilla war label. Indeed, it would reveal the quagmire that this Administration has gotten us into. If these are Iraqis with even a modicum of popular support carrying out attacks on U.S. soldiers, the record does not bode well for the U.S. If LIC caused the U.S. to pull out of Iraq and institute democracy prematurely, the majority Shia country would very democratically elect a theocracy just like that other illiberal democracy, Iran. An Iraqi Islamic theocracy would surely make an authoritarian socialist secular state look attractive as an alternative.
But we had to go in and get Saddam because he would have given WMD to al Qaeda, right? Hardly. "The often postulated scenario of a state sponsor providing unconventional weapons to a terrorist group is unlikely to materialize," former deputy chief of the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA Paul Pillar asserts in his book, [i]Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy[/i]. "The state would lose control over the material, an uncontrolled use of it by a group would serve no plausible purpose of the state, and sophisticated unconventional agents might be more traceable to their origin than the more mundane forms of assistance that sponsors usually provide to client groups." It is likely that because of the U.S. invasion, Iraqi WMD were perhaps shipped to Syria, or even Libya.
So, the invasion of Iraq has led to a LIC that could at worst turn Iraq into an Islamic fundamentalist state, and at best be a persistent drain on U.S. resources that could be dedicated to the fight against al Qaeda, while it concomitantly sent WMD into who-know's hands. The U.S. may not be any safer because of the invasion, but hey, at least we got the oil, [i]right[/i]?
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| Cheney Says "The Jury's Still Out" On Iraqi WMDs ... Ha Ha Ha!!! |
| 01.20.04 (7:40 am) [edit] |
[b]Cheney says "[i]the jury's still out[/i]" on Iraqi WMDs ... [i]Ha ha ha[/i]! What? [/b]Perhaps he means that Halliburton hasn't had time to plant those fabricated phony plastic WMDs that Karl Rove plans to use in another hilarious photo-op with the laughable [i]Top-Gun Dubya[/i] stupidly prancing around dressed-up [i]halloween-style [/i]in military garb! Or, Perhaps he means that we all need to wait until [i]after[/i] the November 2004 elections, when they'll be forced to admit that they've [i]scammed[/i] and [i]neo-conned [/i]us [i]Big Time[/i] ([i]but it'll be too late [/i]...)! Or, perhaps the[i] Veep-N-Creep [/i]Cheney is simply the big fat callous liar, thug & thief, that is obvious to anyone with an[i] iota of brain matter[/i]!
Consider "[i][b]Cheney says it's too soon to tell on Iraqi arms[/b][/i]" by [i]Judy Keen[/i], USA Today, on http://www.usatoday.com/news/... :
LOS ANGELES — Vice President Cheney says he believes "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had the chemical and biological weapons that were the Bush administration's justification for war.
"I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence," Cheney said in an interview with USA TODAY and the Los Angeles Times.
In the nine months since the fall of Baghdad, David Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector heading the search for such weapons, has found no conclusive evidence of them.
Democrats have accused Cheney of exaggerating the weapons threat to justify the invasion, and former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who served on the National Security Council, says in a new book that he saw no evidence before the war that Iraq had chemical or biological weapons.
Cheney suggested that biological weapons are hard to find because they could be produced on short notice. "The stuff is perishable and doesn't last very long anyway," he said. But, he added, intelligence is "never perfect. It's rarely 100% complete."
In the interview, Cheney spoke publicly for the first time about O'Neill's criticism of the administration in The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind. In the book, O'Neill describes President Bush as detached and asserts that attacking Iraq was a priority even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
As Bush's Cabinet recruiter, Cheney brought O'Neill into the Bush administration. Cheney and O'Neill had known each other since they worked together in the Ford administration. Cheney fired O'Neill in December 2002 after the Treasury secretary objected to Bush's tax cuts and made several embarrassing public remarks.
"I was a big advocate of his, without question, and it's turned out to be a big disappointment," Cheney said. "We were friends. It's one of those things that happens periodically — you put a round peg in a square hole, and it didn't work."
Cheney said he thought O'Neill would do a good job because of his experience as deputy budget director under President Ford and his success as CEO of Alcoa.
"Why it failed? I don't know. I don't want to get into that," Cheney said. "Paul has had his say. I disagree with his analysis, obviously. But he's had his day. I feel badly for him, to some extent, that he has ended his career on this note. That's his choice."
In the rare, 30-minute interview in a hotel suite, Cheney also said:
• The Iraq invasion is helping the administration deal with other foreign policy hot spots. "If you do, in fact, use military force, as we did in Iraq, it makes your diplomacy more effective going forward, dealing with other problems."
• He believes Democratic presidential candidates are "having trouble" finding ways to attack Bush.
"They started out with an effort to try to use the economy against us. The economy's looking pretty good," he said. Progress in Iraq, particularly the capture of Saddam Hussein, has "to some extent taken the wind out of their sails."
• He's not worried about his image as the secretive sculptor of Bush policies as he takes a more public role in the campaign. "What's wrong with my image?" he asked with a laugh.
Cheney said he's effective working behind the scenes and doesn't believe voters will choose the next president based on running mates. "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" he said. "It's a nice way to operate, actually."
[b]Uh-huh, "[i]a nice way to operate [/i]..." Yeah, Cheney is "[i]operating[/i]" alright ... [i]Veep-N-Creep [/i]is operating a neo-orwellian scam, neo-con con-game and neo-fascist swindle of the American people![/b]
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| "Neo-Saddam" Chalabi Plays His "Ace of Clubs" ... |
| 01.19.04 (9:25 pm) [edit] |
[b]The[i] neo-con's puppet-run-amok[/i], installed in Iraq by Dubya's cabal of neo-fascists including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz:-- their "[i]neo-Saddam-Hussein[/i ]" embezzler, liar & thief, Ahmed Chalabi plays his "[i]Ace of Clubs[/i]"![/b]
[image]SamAdams_577077242 .jpg[/image]
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| Conservatives Against Bush: The Patriot Act |
| 01.19.04 (3:50 pm) [edit] |
[b]Conscientious conservatives are increasingly speaking out loudly against the neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] assault upon our most sacred freedoms and liberties.[/b] The neo-cons who support the imbecilic and corrupt Dubya have shown a dangerous contempt for our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights. Moreover, the fact that these right-wing neo-fascists do not condemn the neo-hitlerian Patriot Acts demonstrates their traitorous corruption, or blind ignorance, [i]or both[/i]!
[b]Conservatives Against Bush[/b], http://www.conservativesagain...
Consider "[i][b]The Patriot Act goes too far[/b][/i]" on http://www.conservativesagain... :
On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the [i]Patriot Act[/i], which has the cover of being a bill that will increase our ability to monitor and prevent terrorists. The bill gives the government broad authority to eavesdrop on multiple types of communications. According to the ACLU, the act covers so-called "'domestic terrorism' which could subject political organizations to surveillance, wiretapping, harassment, and criminal action for political advocacy." The act also gives law enforcement officers more power to conduct secret searches into personal records. Another power granted to law enforcement is the power to "investigate American citizens for criminal matters without probable cause of crime if they say it is for 'intelligence purposes.'" [i][b]The bill directly threatens the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution[/b][/i].
In essence, while aimed at protection against terrorism, the [i]Patriot Act [/i]goes too far and encroaches on and seriously erodes rights that this country was set up to protect. Some would venture to say that these types of laws, like terrorist attacks, threaten the very principles they advertise to protect. John Ashcroft touts "Our ability to prevent another catastrophic attack on the United States would be more difficult, if not impossible, without the [i]Patriot Act[/i]." It is very possible that the act makes the prevention of an attack easier, but on balance is this extra protection worth it in the face of such bold face constitutional violations? A report released by an investigator from the Department of Justice found that 762 immigrants detained in the year immediately following September 11, 2001, were held in unacceptable living conditions (for longer than the legally acceptable 90 days) without being properly notified as to what law they violated. These types of constitutional infringements are possible under the [i]Patriot Act[/i]. President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are interested in extending the [i]Patriot Act [/i]further with what has been dubbed the[i] Patriot Act II[/i]. This second bill erodes further checks and balances on government searches that were weakened by the first act.
We at [i]Conservatives Against Bush [/i]are not against effectively protecting ourselves against terrorists, but we do not feel that protection warrants the erosion of principles that make this country so great. We value the protection of ideals like freedom of speech, the press, and religion. Without these protections and many more, the United States might become more like something that it fought to liberate in Iraq: a dictatorship with limited personal freedoms.
As conservatives we believe in a limited government that does not encroach upon our personal freedoms. President Bush's [i]Patriot Act [/i]goes too far in trying to protect against terrorism. In speeches, he constantly talks about spreading and protecting the American ideal of freedom. How can he then support and propose these [i]Patriot Acts[/i], which seriously threaten this very ideal? We propose that these acts erode these freedoms, and do not meet their ultimate goal of preventing terrorism. We believe these acts could have the opposite effect of causing people to become apathetic or despise the United States and its principles.
We urge the repeal of the [i]Patriot Act[/i], and the continued protection of the ultimate American ideal of freedom, and not the Bush infringements upon it.
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| Neo-con Thugs & Goons Trash Anyone (Like Wes Clark) Who Isn't A Corporate Slut |
| 01.19.04 (1:09 pm) [edit] |
[b]The neo-con right-wing thugs & goons in the neo-fascist press & media, and in the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] are doing everything that they can to trash anyone ([i]like Wes Clark, Howard Dean, etc[/i].) who isn't a corporate slut ... like Shrub Dubya Shrub ... [/b]The mendacious traitors in the Bush regime are [i]scared silly [/i]of people like John McCain ([i]who unlike Shrub, actually served this nation[/i]) and Wes Clark ([i]who unlike Shrub, actually served this nation[/i])-- and who are better men than Shrub ([i]who unlike McCain & Clark, is a ne'er-do-well imbecile only good at whoring for his corporate pimps[/i]) ...
In 2000, the simple-minded Shrub Dubya and his brain-dead court-jesters, attack-dogs & puppets in the media said that McCain was [i]an insane man ready to press the nuclear button at any moment [/i]... when instead Dubya is the lunatic criminal who waged an illegal and immoral war based upon lies, deceptions and falsehoods ... The neo-fascist Bushies are already commencing their neo-orwellian propagandist trashing of Howard Dean and Wes Clark ... and anyone else who challenges the corrupt Shrub ... [i]Beware[/i] ... [i]All of the Democratic candidates are better men than the simple-minded, "corporate-bought-and-pai d-for" Shrub Dubya will ever be [/i]...
Read [i]Kevin Drum's [/i]excellent article entitled "[i][b]CLARK AND CONSISTENCY[/b][/i]" on http://www.calpundit.com/arch... :
There has been a minor internet storm recently over some of Wesley Clark's pronouncements on the war during 2002 and early 2003, but it's been so ridiculous that I just haven't had the heart to post about it. The nickel version is that Clark testified before Congress in 2002 that Saddam was a dangerous guy and it was appropriate to put a lot pressure on him. Then after the war was over he wrote an op-ed for the[i] London Times [/i]congratulating everyone involved for having fought a brilliant campaign.
(For more on the congressional testimony "controversy," read Mark Kleiman here http://www.markarkleiman.com/... and Josh Marshall here http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... and here http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... . Mark discusses the[i] London Times [/i]op-ed here http://www.markarkleiman.com/... .)
Even by normal campaign standards this little teapot tempest is almost Kafka-esque. It's painfully obvious that Clark could have agreed with the idea of passing the September war resolution as a way of pressuring Saddam, but that six months later he believed that the pressure was working and we shouldn't have gone to war. This, in turn, is also consistent with a belief that once we went to war he really wanted to see us win.
(What's more, this is consistent with everything we know about Clark. He's obviously no pacifist, but equally obviously he believes in multilateral military action used as a last resort. And he believes that once you've decided to fight, you fight to win. This is exactly how the Kosovo campaign went down.)
But the part I don't understand is why conservatives are crowing over this. Are they under the impression that having a moderate position on the war is an electoral loser? It seems just the opposite to me, even among Democrats.
But Mark brings up another point that I think is equally important: what this shows is simply that [i][b]Clark has some intellectual integrity[/b][/i] http://www.markarkleiman.com/... . He's willing to acknowledge that there are good arguments even for positions he opposes. Frankly, we could use more of that instead of the scorched earth tactics in which every possible argument from your opposites is deemed both absurd and fraudulent.
On balance, I support affirmative action even though I acknowledge that it has some ill effects. I just happen to think that the good outweighs the bad. Does that make me inconsistent? I hope not. And neither is Clark.
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| Dubya Is A Crazy Bungling Buffoon Too Dumb To Hide That He Is A Crazy Bungling Buffoon |
| 01.19.04 (12:06 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya is a crazy bungling buffoon, who is [i]too god damn dumb[/i] to even hide the fact that he is a crazy bungling buffoon. This is what comes from a spoiled [i]ne'er-do-well [/i]whose rise to power is because of his name and family connections-- but who was a failed drunkard, AWOL in Vietnam when better men died-- a failed businessman who was bailed-out by Poppy's corrupt corporate cronies-- a failed Texas Governor who left the state with the highest child poverty rate in the nation-- and, a failed president who has alienated the entire world, lied to our nation, massacring tens of thousands of innocent human beings to enrich his corporate pimps, and wrecked our economy. [/b]
Consider, for example, "[i][b]The Ruling Class: A family saga of secrecy, oil money and privilege[/b][/i]." by[i] Jonathan Yardley[/i] on http://www.washingtonpost.com... :
[b]AMERICAN DYNASTY: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, By Kevin Phillips [/b]
In this angry, devastating examination of "[i]the House of Bush[/i]," Kevin Phillips asks the question that seems to have occurred to no one else: How did these people get so entitled? How is it that a family in no way distinguished by genuine accomplishment, moral and/or political conviction or exceptional intelligence has managed to lay claim as a matter of right to the American presidency, and how is it -- this is the real puzzler -- that the American people seem to have acquiesced in this presumption? How did we manage to put ourselves in the hands of a family that clearly believes it has dynastic stature, with all the privileges and entitlements attendant thereto, and behaves accordingly?
Phillips, an experienced political strategist and former White House aide, is correct to say that what he calls the Bush "restoration" -- the election to the White House in 2000 of George W. Bush, only eight years after the public's emphatic repudiation of his father, George H.W. Bush -- is unprecedented in American history. The two Adams presidents were elected a quarter-century apart and represented different parties, the two Roosevelts were separated by two decades and came from different branches of the family, and any Kennedy dynastic aspirations were thwarted by bizarre twists of fate. Yet even though the first Bush presidency was by any reasonable standard a failure, the inner leadership of the Republican Party felt so beholden to the first George Bush that it anointed his callow son and namesake almost upon the moment he won the governorship of Texas and, hand in glove with the big-money interests to which the Bushes have always cozied up, effectively closed the 2000 nominating process to anyone else.
The Bushes were fortunate, Phillips readily acknowledges, in having an interregnum presided over by Bill Clinton, who corrupted the presidency almost beyond imagination and thus made the public inordinately receptive to the fundamentalist moralizing in which George W. specializes. Phillips also acknowledges that the present Bush presidency may well be an illegitimate one, given the half-million-vote plurality won by Al Gore in 2000 and the exceedingly suspect Supreme Court ruling that put George W. in the White House. If this is indeed a dynasty -- or, perhaps more accurately, a family with dynastic pretensions -- then it certainly looks as much like an accidental one as like one created by public demand.
Any number of things could turn the "Bush dynasty" into yesterday's news -- continued frustration in Iraq and the much-ballyhooed "War on Terrorism," continued economic stagnation, increased popular resentment over the appalling chasm between the super-rich few and the struggling many, more evidence of corruption among the Bush family's business cronies, not to mention events and/or catastrophes as yet unseen -- and it is regrettable that Phillips does not confront this more directly. We don't have an appointive presidency, and we don't have a royal succession, at least not yet. The American people are not nearly so stupid as the Bushes and their retinue obviously believe them to be, and they haven't delivered their final verdict.
So Phillips's study is valuable less for what it says about the altered American political landscape (though much of what it says about that is astute) than for what it says about the Bushes themselves. Tracing the family lineage through four generations -- beginning with the president's great-grandfathers, George Herbert Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush, moving along to his grandfather, Prescott Bush, then to his father and himself -- Phillips paints a portrait that can only be deeply disturbing to anyone concerned about how power is now gained and maintained in this country.
Apart from the differences already mentioned between the Bushes and the Adamses, Roosevelts and Kennedys, one stands apart from and above all others: The Bushes have nothing to commend them to the public save rank ambition. Other than accumulating a certain amount of money and achieving a measure of what passes for aristocratic social position in this country, the Bushes have achieved nothing of distinction and appear to believe in nothing except their own interests. "Duty and public service do make cameo appearances in the Bush saga," Phillips writes, "fulfilling the stern instructions on those New England [prep] school walls. However, so do vanity, ambition and pretentiousness." What Phillips mainly detects in the family's history is "consistent ambition, rarely ameliorated by a particular cause or issues agenda, [that] is hard to reconcile with the New England school mottoes of duty, public service, and noblesse oblige."
The Bushes seem to have come away from all those years of privileged schooling with two things: "a state of permanent adolescence" -- viz., the fondness of both Bush presidents for "pranks, initiations, oaths of secrecy, inner sanctums and other rites of loyalty far into middle age" -- and a "penchant for secrecy and apparent elimination of records and documents." This last was learned on the campus of Yale and in the hallowed chambers of Skull and Bones, that incubator of preppy silliness, clubbiness and secrecy. Yale and Skull and Bones were primary breeding grounds for the OSS, the spy agency of World War II, and the CIA that supplanted it, and Phillips correctly argues that the Skull and Bones world view is essential both to the Bush psyche and to the family's history in public life, from George H.Walker right through to George W.
"Over the years," Phillips writes, the family has had an intimate involvement "with the mainstays of the twentieth-century American national security state: finance, oil and energy, the federal government, the so-called military industrial complex, and the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the intelligence community." Every effort is made to avoid accountability. The Bush culture is one in which public action is decided in private and conducted with as much secrecy as possible, with no real consultation with the public and as little as possible with its representatives on Capitol Hill: "to script arms sales, launch missile strikes, and order invasions from Panama to the Persian Gulf." As Phillips writes:
"It is an extraordinary record. If there are other families who have more fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence of the U.S. military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national security state and the 21st-century imperium, no one has identified them. Certainly no other established a presidential dynasty."
The Bushes have always depended upon the kindness of others. Phillips's description of the young George H.W. Bush makes the point nicely: "lithe, athletic, handsome, personable, and ambitious -- always seeking friends and striding purposefully toward the approval of authority figures able to bestow his next nomination or appointive office." Bushes are "deal-makers, rain-makers, or, in the most recent generations, influence brokers." They deal not in making things but in letting money make money. "Investment drove the economy" is what seems to be the closest they have to a familial conviction, "and what fueled investment was tax advantage." This is "primarily the product of upper-class bias rather than the expression of a coherent ideology." Having (somewhat uncharacteristically) a bit of fun, Phillips writes:
"All in all, if presidential family connections were theme parks, Bush World would be a sight to behold. Mideast banks tied to the CIA would crowd alongside Florida S&Ls that once laundered money for the Nicaraguan contras. Dozens of oil wells would run eternally without finding oil, thanks to periodic cash deposits by old men wearing Reagan-Bush buttons and smoking twenty-dollar cigars. Visitors to 'Prescott Bush's Tokyo' could try to make an investment deal without falling into the clutches of the yakuza or Japanese mob."
It is a gloomy, even frightening picture: "global oil ventures, national security, sophisticated investments, arms deals, the Skull and Bones chic of covert operations, and committed support of established business interests," now compounded by the "religious impulses and motivations" that the born-again George W. brings to the mix. It operates not in the free market its rhetoric prattles about, but in "crony capitalism" that gives every advantage to the cronies with enough capital to buy their way into the game. Crony capitalism has turned the funding of American elections into both a joke and a menace, and has made the public's business a matter of private interest.
That this powerful argument has been made by Kevin Phillips should be a measure of how seriously it should be taken. He is not an ideologue of the left -- to the contrary, he has been identified with the Republican Party for some three decades, though he now calls himself an independent -- and he is not a conspiracy theorist; indeed he makes plain at the outset that "we must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into . . . conspiracy theory." It is true that in some instances his argument rests on circumstantial evidence and in others (mostly involving the family's engagement with espionage and secret arrangements) on conjecture. It is also true that at times reading his dense prose can be an uphill battle. But American Dynasty is an important, troubling book that should be read everywhere with care, nowhere more so than in this city. •
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| Conservatives Against Bush: The Ashcroftian Assault on Liberty |
| 01.18.04 (2:04 pm) [edit] |
[b]Conservatives are increasingly coming out against the neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] assault upon our liberties.[/b] It is most surprising that the [i]right-wing conservatives[/i] have not been[i] even more forceful and virulent [/i]in speaking out against the Bushies' [i]treading and trampling [/i]on the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights-- as they [i]claim[/i] to be the [i]torch-bearers who safeguard our basic rights as citizens[/i]:-- But is their claim really factual? ... [b]Hmmm ...[/b]
[b]Conservatives Against Bush[/b], http://www.conservativesagain...
Consider "[i][b]The Ashcroftonian assault on liberty presses[/b][/i]" on http://www.conservativesagain... :
Last week [[i]June 2003[/i]] the Justice Department scored a major victory with the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris, a naturalized U.S. citizen whom the Justice Department says plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. What many do not know though, is that the Government did this the old fashioned way -- without expanded police power. He was not jailed indefinitely as an "enemy combatant."
Despite this success, the Attorney General continues to propound that he can detain any U.S. citizen without due process -- that is, without formal charges, the right to a hearing or legal counsel. Whether an individual is captured in the United States or not, the Justice Department says "A court's inquiry should come to an end once the military has shown ... that it has determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant. The court may not second-guess the military's enemy-combatant determination." In other words, the Executive Branch can detain anyone without any oversight and without any respect for a U.S. citizen's Constitutional rights.
Whether John Ashcroft has exercised good judgment thus far with this new power or not is irrelevant, this power is downright un-American and is a bouleversement to U.S. civil liberties. Even the 1942 Supreme Court case that the Attorney General is basing his indefinite detentions on, which allowed military trials of German saboteurs arrested in the U.S., affirmed the defendants' right to appeal their status in federal court. The court did not allow for indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, nor did it deny them counsel. Every American should be able to see how parlous this policy is. I cannot emphasize this enough: if the designation of U.S. citizen's as enemy combatants stands, any American could be detained indefinitely on simply the Executive Branch's word. This is not a liberal caviling, but a conservative that is genuinely concerned.
Former conservative Congressman Bob Barr, who currently chairs the civil liberties committee at the American Conservative Union, has even said that the government is "reaching too broadly and gaining too much power." Privacy concerns over Ashcroft's Patriot Act have caused ACLU membership to increase thirty percent since September 11, 2001, the largest increase in the organization's history. Librarians and booksellers are also rankled by the Patriot act because it eliminated the need for a court order to obtain records from libraries and booksellers.
"Libraries are very local and we're hearing about this every day. People don't want the government snooping on them," Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "People understand when their rights are being thrown away and they aren't going to stand for it."
Not all of the Ashcroftonian assault is terrorism related either. As reported in this week's Economist, The Justice Department is prosecuting Brett Bursey, a veteran protester, for holding up a sign saying "No War For Oil" at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Ironically, Bursey was arrested thirty-three years ago for the same thing, only then against Vietnam and Richard Nixon. That case was dropped when the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that anti-war demonstrators could not be charged with trespassing on public property. This time around, the government has decided to prosecute him under an obscure law that allows the Secret Service to deny access to places where the President is visiting. According to prosecutors, Bursey should have been in a designated "free-speech zone," which was about a half a mile from the hangar where the President landed. Bursey rightly averred that all of America was a free-speech zone. It should be noted that Bush proponents were not confined to the designated "free-speech zone."
This petty persecution of an American who was simply exercising his first amendment right is yet another example of the Attorney General's assault on our most basic freedoms. New leadership is desperately needed in the Justice Department, before even more of cherished rights are taken away from us.
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| State-by-State Breakdown of U.S. Soldiers Deaths in Iraq |
| 01.18.04 (6:46 am) [edit] |
[b]Two more U.S. citizens were slaughtered today in Dubya's illegal & immoral bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq.[/b] Dubya and Cheney should be tried for [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i], as they are responsible for their insane blood-letting in their grab for OIL, building contracts and the swindle, plunder & looting of the US Treasury & Iraqi businesses, in order to enrich their blood-thirsty war-profiteers: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc.
It is important to remind ourselves that real human beings are being ruthlessly massacred by the corrupt Bush regime in their barbaric grab for power and riches. Please visit the CNN web-site of U.S. casualties listing the pictures and a short biography of each soldier killed, on http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2... .
Forty-nine (49) U.S. states and two (2) U.S. protectorates have lost young men and women in Iraq. Moreover, more Americans have died in Iraq than in the [i]FIRST FOUR YEARS OF VIETNAM [/i] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin... ... (... [i]No one has gone to fight from the un-patriotic families of the corrupt Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, & their other neo-con thugs & goons-- their corporate cronies-- & their rich plutocratic robber-barons[/i]) ... Meanwhile Dubya has recklessly squandered over $96+ Billion in taxpayer dollars-- contributing to his historical record-level deficit, the highest in our nation's history, with nothing but horrific atrocities, blood-shed and misery to show for it.
Consider "[i][b]State-By-State Breakdown of Iraq Deaths[/b][/i]" on http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
Breakdown of U.S. casualties in Iraq by state, according to Department of Defense records or family members:
Alabama - 13
Arizona - 13
Arkansas - 3
California - 55
Colorado - 8
Connecticut - 5
District of Columbia - 2
Delaware - 3
Florida - 16
Georgia - 15
Hawaii - 1
Idaho - 4
Illinois - 20
Indiana - 16
Iowa - 9
Kansas - 5
Kentucky - 4
Louisiana - 5
Maine - 2
Massachusetts - 9
Maryland - 5
Michigan - 20
Minnesota - 3
Mississippi - 10
Missouri - 10
Montana - 1
North Carolina - 13
North Dakota - 3
New Hampshire - 1
New Jersey - 10
New Mexico - 1
New York - 21
Nebraska - 6
Nevada - 3
Ohio - 15
Oklahoma - 7
Oregon - 8
Pennsylvania - 28
Rhode Island - 3
South Carolina - 12
South Dakota - 4
Tennessee - 12
Texas - 40
Utah - 4
Virginia - 13
Vermont - 5
West Virginia - 1
Washington - 7
Wisconsin - 9
Wyoming - 4
American Samoa - 2
Puerto Rico - 7
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| THE REAL MAN ... |
| 01.17.04 (4:48 pm) [edit] |
[b]THE REAL MAN: Thomas Jefferson ...[/b]
[image]SamAdams_876052201 .jpg[/image]
"[b]The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them[/b]." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:57 -- [i]Jefferson [u]did not mean[/u] that corporations and corporate rapists should replace our government in order to ruthlessly exploit, impoverish and rape the people senseless-- Jefferson had seen robber-barons brutally exploit the people in the barbaric feudal Europe run by corrupt and imbecilic monarchs (e.g. the Mad King George) who were yesteryear's corporate rapists. Jefferson believed in accountability of rulers and the rich to "We the People"[/i].
"[b]Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light[/b]." --Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart. 1799 -- [i]Jefferson knew that only if people have a free press that reports the truth, will they be able to judge responsibly. The corrupt Bushies are treading and trampling on the press, having installed their whorish court-jesters and sluttish attack-dogs in the media to propagate their lies, deceptions and falsehoods. Moreover, they punish those in the press who refuse to be their idiot lap-dogs, and who ask probing questions[/i].
"[b][This is] a country which is afraid to read nothing, and which may be trusted with anything, so long as its reason remains unfettered by law[/b]." --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan, 1816. ME 14:463 -- [i]Sadly, America has become a slavish nation run by corporate-take-all tyrants and dictators, who only want us to read their sordid lies, deceptions & falsehoods, that Dubya's squalid puppets in the press are regurgitating[/i].
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| CORPORATE ELITE BILL OF RIGHTS |
| 01.17.04 (1:14 pm) [edit] |
[b]CORPORATE ELITE BILL OF RIGHTS
Capitalistic ([i]S[/i])Creed[/b]
"[b][i]WE[/i], the corporate elite of the United States[/b], in an attempt to suck as much money as possible from the pockets of the working people, in an attempt to promote a quiescent and politically weak work force, fatten the pockets of shareholders and CEOs, and secure the blessings of vast wealth to ourselves (and ONLY ourselves) and to avoid sharing any of the benefits of America's economic boom with terminally whiny people who just won't be satisfied working harder than others and still falling behind, give you the bill of OUR RIGHTS (only applicable to US--to see what your rights are, see the BILL OF NO RIGHTS)."
[b]ARTICLE I[/b] -- [i][b]Only WE[/b][/i] have the right to certain luxury material goods, such as decent, safe and secure housing. Paying for public housing would interfere with our tax cuts, and the rest of you are expendable anyway (especially the darker-skinned ones, who we believe to be our genetic inferiors).
[b]ARTICLE II [/b]-- [i][b]Only WE [/b][/i]have the right to health care. In a market-driven system, doctors, hospitals and pharmacies exist to put profit in our pockets, not to cure illness and suffering. If you are sick and have no money to pay stop whining and die already! You are costing us money.
[b]ARTICLE III [/b]-- [i][b]Only WE [/b][/i]have the right to be free from crime. If crime is driven by vast social inequalities, then bring on the crime wave! Prisons are profitable for us, too. Anyway, we have the money to hire security guards, get alarm systems, and build private gated communities to live in. If any of the rest of you are victimized by criminals created from poverty and desperation and you don't know what to do about it, see ARTICLE II.
[b]ARTICLE IV [/b]-- [i][b]Only WE [/b][/i]have the right to kill people. If you don't believe it, just read some newspaper stories about toxic chemical waste, and what it does to people's bodies. Or ask yourself whether the onslaught of chemicals we manufacture and profit from have caused the huge increase in breast cancer. And let's not even talk about the deaths we caused with dangerous products, like breast implants, poorly engineered cars that explode in minor crashes, etc., etc. If you had killed as many people as we have, you'd be on death row right now waiting for them to stick a needle in your arm. But we're out on our yachts, enjoying the sunshine. If you don't like it, see ARTICLE II.
[b]ARTICLE V[/b] -- [i][b]Only WE [/b][/i]have the right to profit from our labor. The rest of you can just work harder. If your wages are too low, blame yourselves. Maybe you are a "professional couch potato" who works only two full-time jobs. Or maybe you were laid off when we moved our company overseas to employ "non-whiners" who will work happily for fifty cents an hour. Anyway, I have to go almost time to tee off!
[b]ARTICLE VI [/b]-- [i][b]Only WE [/b][/i]have the right to elect people who will act on our behalf and serve our interests. Remember that when you go to the polls and are unable to decide whether the Democratic or Republican candidate will screw you over worse. It is important that you keep concentrating on "Whiners" and "Welfare Cheats" because, if you ever really focused on how badly we are eroding democracy here and destroying your lives in every conceivable way, you'd do more than just not vote for us. You'd probably drag us out of our luxury cars and up to a guillotine, screaming "off with their heads!" To make sure that day never comes, we will keep on brainwashing you.
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| Conservatives Against Bush: Wolfowitz, the Neo-cons, and Imperialism |
| 01.17.04 (11:32 am) [edit] |
[b]Conservatives are increasingly coming out against the neo-imperial Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]rape of America, Afghanistan & Iraq, designed to enrich their corporate paymasters ... [/b]and fulfill some insane phantasm that neo-con thugs & goons like Wolfowitz and the other neo-con "crazies" are imposing unwillingly upon the rest of us.
[b]Conservatives Against Bush[/b], http://www.conservativesagain...
Consider "[i][b]Calling a spade a spade: Wolfowitz, the neo-cons, and imperialism[/b][/i]" on http://www.conservativesagain...
"[i]Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy[/i]." - John Quincy Adams
During the administration of the first President Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, the then third-ranking civilian in the Defense Department, made major waves when his annual review of Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) articulated a doctrine of ensuring American preeminence at all costs and was leaked to the press. Democrats had a field day deriding the draft DPG as un-American, and an embarrassed Bush administration disowned the document, saying it had no official sanction.
This document just would not go away, though. Wolfowitz continued to promote the idea of American preeminence and called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s. Both of these neo-con ideas had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism aimed at the U.S. They did not then and they do not now, but after 11 September 2001, Wolfowitz, now the Deputy Secretary of Defense, dusted off his preeminence doctrine and got the President to sign off on it. This doctrine was publicly articulated in the President's National Security Strategy published in September of 2002. Bush was also convinced by the neo-cons that the U.S. should invade Iraq, and according to the Washington Post, he decided to do so on 17 September 2001, well before U.N. inspectors failed in their mission in Iraq.
For Wolfowitz, Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, at least terrorism against the U.S. It did not really even have to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD); as he told Vanity Fair, WMD was just a "bureaucratic reason" that "everyone could agree on." Indeed, he asserted that a "huge" reason was to remove U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia. The U.S. presence on "sacred" Saudi soil if often cited by Al Qaeda as one of the main grievances with the United States. Wolfowitz had also hoped for the construction of an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel. Of course, the grand scheme to democratize the Middle East, beginning with Iraq, is routinely attributed to the neo-cons in the Administration. A plan to turn the Middle East into a region of democratic republics in the American tradition sounds remarkably like the avowed mission of the British Empire, "to make the world England."
This is the kind of thinking that is forming our foreign policy -- not as much a concern for U.S. security and beating Al Qaeda as what Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich called, "a fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik...the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke."
Certainly Saddam Hussein's human rights record could not be the cause of the war either -- the list of authoritarian regimes with human rights violations contains much worse offenders than Saddam Hussein, and he was just as much an offender when he was our ally in the 1980s.
It is time to stop mincing words and call Wolfowitz and his ilk what they are -- imperialists. Some may chortle at this accusation, but the appellation fits. The Incas and Aztecs ruled their empires through subordinate tribal chiefs outside of their capitals. Rome governed its empire through hundreds of autonomous city-states and even client-kings. The threat of force is what kept the periphery in line for these empires. Now Wolfowitz has the United States doing the same thing and calling it "preeminence." Saddam Hussein's real crime, apparently, was not complying with the wishes of the U.S. government, and now the neo-cons have sent a message -- comply or else. This is a radical and dangerous upset to the Westphalian nation-state system of sovereignty. Wolfowitz wants an American Empire, but empires enrage so many. In an age when individual terrorists will decide to go to war against the U.S. and not heads of state, it shows how parlous Mr. Wolfowitz's imperial designs are.
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| British Versus American Language |
| 01.17.04 (10:37 am) [edit] |
[b]British Versus American Language[/b]
Americans have different ways of saying things:
They say "[i]elevator[/i]", we say "[i]lift[/i]" ...
They say "[i](car) trunk[/i]", we say "[i]boot[/i]" ...
They say "[i]semi-trailer[/i]", we say "[i]lorry[/i]" ...
They say "[i]President[/i]", we say "[i]stupid psychopathic git[/i]."
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| Over 18,000 Americans Die Each Year Because USA Lacks Universal Health Care |
| 01.17.04 (9:07 am) [edit] |
[b]Last night, Bill Moyers reported on [i]NOW with Bill Moyers[/i], that over 18,000 Americans die each year in the USA, because we lack a Universal Health Care system![/b]
The U.S.A. is the only 1st-tier nation that lacks a National or Universal Health Care system. In fact, between 45 and 85 million citizens in the USA, the richest country in the history of our planet-- are unable to get care if they fall ill. They either die, live in miserable pain, or go bankrupt and lose everything, in order to enrich the [i]obscene top-dog CEOs & fat-cat executives [/i]in the Health Insurance Scam Industry, HMOs and other so-called "[i]providers[/i]" who immorally and unethically [i]rake-in [/i]$300+ million/year embezzlement pay-packages and goodies, starving millions of people out of getting health care.
Instead of proposing Universal Health Care, the insane Dubya wants to enrich Halliburton & Bechtel, by wasteful space lunacies that the entire world considers a [i]laughing stock[/i] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sc... ... Dubya should be tried for[i] Crimes Against Humanity[/i]-- as even Iraq has Universal Health Care, but Dubya is turning the USA into a 3rd world impoverished nation by neglecting crucial problems here on [i]terra firma [/i]...
Although the majority of Americans consistently demand a Universal Health Care System for all -- if the whorish Dubya & Cheney's corporate pimps ([i]Health Care Insurance Con-Artists, HMO Scams, and other corporate rapists[/i]) don't want it-- we won't get it ... 'cause we don't have a democracy anymore ... We are run by corrupt fascist tyrants in the pockets of corporate robber-barons!
[b]Contact Congress and demand Universal Health Care NOW [/b]on http://www.congress.org .
[b]Sources:[/b]
"Majority of Americans Support National Health Insurance" on http://www.pnhp.org/news/2003...
"The Solution on Health Care" on http://www.commondreams.org/v...
NOW with Bill Moyers, aired on PBS, Friday, 16 January 2004, http://www.pbs.org/now/scienc...
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| Conservatives Against Bush: Dubya's Fiscal Irresponsibility |
| 01.16.04 (12:31 pm) [edit] |
[b]Conservatives Against Bush[/b]
Even conscientious conservatives are coming out against Dubya's reckless fiscal policies ... http://www.conservativesagain...
([i]While the conservative view of spending (tax cuts, loopholes, subsidies & boondoggles) on corporations and the rich, while depriving the working people, poor & vulnerable of a share in their collective efforts is wrong-headed, immoral & corrupt, it is interesting to note, that even some right-wingers are concerned about the wanton greed & foolhardy nature of Dubya's fiscal irresponsibility[/i]!)
Read "[i][b]President Bush promised fiscal responsibility, but instead has delivered a budget rife with profligate spending[/b][/i]" on http://www.conservativesagain... :
The Republican Party took control of Congress with the 1994 Republican Contract with America on the idea that government "is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money." Almost a decade later, with control of the White House, the Republicans in power have turned around and created the largest budget and deficits this county has ever seen. At a time when this country needs a sound fiscal policy, President Bush has led the path away from fiscal conservatism, and Republicans in Congress and across the country have followed. Conservatives have blindly followed Bush away from what used to be one of their pillars, low government spending and a balanced budget.
During the Clinton years, federal spending as a percentage of the nation's total economic output dropped from 22% at the start of his first term to below 19% at the end of his second. Huge deficits were replaced with record surpluses while the Republican Congress kept his spending in check. Regulatory costs also declined steadily throughout Clinton's presidency, according to a study released by Americans for Tax Reform, a group that favors lower taxes.
Under Bush, government spending is up 12.4% over the past three years, record deficits have returned and regulatory costs are up 8.4%. The $2.2 trillion budget is the most of any budget in United States' history. This number does not include the $74 billion spending bill already past to pay for the war in Iraq, nor does it include the further supplemental appropriations that will be needed for the increasingly expensive occupation of Iraq.
It used to be the Republicans who would start an outcry on spending increases, but for now, they are content spending away, creating the big government they supposedly abhor. If the Federal Government needs to increase its spending this much, a tax cut to boost the economy is not prudent. Making sure the war and the government can be paid for is a more pertinent issue.
There was also little opposition from Republicans on Bush's tax plan. A large $330 billion tax cut that, if Bush got his way, would have been closer to $750 billion. Bush now faces the largest deficits in the history of the Federal Government, estimated at $455 billion. Republicans and fiscal conservatives had believed for quite some time that a balanced budget was a good policy, but now that they have control, they believe they can do whatever they want with the public's money. Some economists agree that the tax cut will give the economy a boost, but the economic conditions are not bad enough that such a boost is needed when expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought.
Blaming the higher budgets on the "war on terror" stretches credulity too. As The Economist put it, "Federal spending has increased by 18% in Mr Bush's first two years--far more than the forecasts allow for in the future. The non-military component has been rising by more than 6% a year, which makes blaming it all on the war on terror seem strange. And the forecasts do not include the costs of war in Iraq, which are unpredictable."
President Bush and the self-proclaimed "conservatives" in Congress are showing they have no discipline when they are in control of the money. Bush and many of the Republicans have turned on their roots that won them control of Congress and are now blazing a trail back to the big government and big money that they were suppose to destroy.
[b]Yes, Dubya has given us MASSIVE GOVERNMENT, BY CORPORATE ROBBER-BARONS, OF CORPORATE ROBBER-BARONS & FOR CORPORATE ROBBER-BARONS ... and, to hell with the rest of us![/b]
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| Oil Glutton Dubya is a Moral and Intellectual Dry Hole! |
| 01.16.04 (11:11 am) [edit] |
[b]Dubya is a proven neo-con oil glutton[/b], who invaded Iraq neo-hitlerian style, in order to rape American taxpayers and the Iraqi people, on behalf of his sordid & squalid family and cronies, rapacious & neo-fascist corporations, and immoral & corrupt campaign contributors!
[b]Dubya has also proven himself to be a "moral and intellectual DRY HOLE"! Dubya has no respect for the rule of law that led to civilization, but instead is a childish tyrant who [i]luvs[/i] brute power ... Dubya is a despicable traitor to the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights! [/b]
Consider "[i][b]The Dry Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc.[/b][/i]" by [i]John Chuckman [/i]on http://www.counterpunch.com/c... :
[b]Thinking people aren't surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole.[/b]
Bush's halting words come from a mouth so long smugly-set it can scarcely form the shapes of vowels, but enormous ignorance also manages to come through. Still, it never hurts to have a first-hand account, expert testimony, to reinforce even our strongest perceptions, and former Bush Cabinet-member Paul O'Neill has now supplied that in spades.
As to the moral portion of Bush's substance, it is an interesting phenomenon that a President who claims Jesus as mentor thinks nothing of lying, enjoys bloody revenge, and shows little tolerance for those who disagree. Not that any of that matters to his spiritual advisors, all CEOs of major fundamentalist conversion-operations: their bond to him is not one respecting truth but knowing what's good for business. You can only stage profitable theatrics like tears running down your cheeks for the boys battling damned heathens with a man of Bush's caliber in office. He is good for collection-plate take.
Paul O'Neill, in interviews to publicize a new book, offers candid snapshots of a President who doesn't even discuss policy with some of his highest officials. It is interesting that O'Neill got himself sacked as Treasury Secretary for voicing sound and traditional conservative views on two Bush economic policies, the imposition of import tariffs against steel and a gigantic, irresponsible tax-cut.
Bush's tariff against foreign steel violated basic economic understanding and the rules governing international trade, and it was repealed after the WTO declared it illegal. While those rules permit tariffs as a response to dumping (selling a product abroad below its domestic production cost ), often what is called dumping by the United States is not dumping at all, but simply lower-cost, more efficient production. So it was with foreign steel, and one does not expect sound conservatives to support tariffs under these circumstances.
It does not take an education in economics to understand how irresponsible Bush's monstrous tax cuts are at the very time American military spending is exploding. The economic mumbo-jumbo of the Reagan era that tax-cut induced growth generates a revenue greater than the lost taxes has been thoroughly discredited by Reagan's legacy of gigantic deficits. No so-called "tax and spend" liberal ever produced such astonishing piles of debt.
I would add, that at a time when economic disparity in America is growing vigorously (in good part owing to the effects of globalization on employment and wages for those with the least skills), it is poor public policy to reduce the tax burden on the well-off, especially when that burden already was low by world standards. These taxes finance many forms of needed redistribution including education and healthcare, services already starved of funds, but this kind of thinking is social and could not be expected to carry weight with most Republicans.
Many contemporary Republicans seem to reject classical economics, and balanced budgets with sound accounting have evaporated as fitting national responsibilities. Tax cuts have become a form of buying votes, an inverted form of what liberals were long accused of when they promised new programs. And just as with careless promises of new spending, the tax cuts are never done with sound accounting. Voters are not told what services should be cut as the price for reduced taxes - only the vision of lower taxes is dangled before them. Perhaps voters should know better, but they are conditioned to slick promises of gain twenty-four hours a day on television, including from Bush's spiritual advisors.
To a considerable degree, taxes cut at the federal level since Reagan's time have had to be made up by local communities, the very political entities with the least flexibility and wherewithal to increase taxes since they depend largely on property taxes. Maintaining even a token sense of equal opportunity across a large nation in basic services like education and healthcare can only be done with transfers from higher levels of government. But what is true for many communities, whether blighted or small, is true also of states with unfavorable ratios of resources and obligations.
You might think a Treasury Secretary with a successful background in international business (quite unlike the President's failed Podunk drilling company, failed, that is, for investors but not for Bush who bailed out with handsome profits) worth listening to on such matters, but Paul O'Neill tells us that this President engages in little discussion, sitting mainly in silence at high-level meetings. O'Neill felt in one-on-one meetings as though he were having a conversation with himself.
One suspects from what O'Neill relates that Bush's modus operandi consists of having his eminence grise, Dick Cheney, tell him in a private conference after any meeting of experts what in fact the policy should be. That is not the kind of consultation he would want to share with others.
O'Neill forcefully comments on the invasion of Iraq, telling us that despite seeing high-level intelligence on Iraq as a member of the National Security Council, there was never evidence of dangerous Iraqi weapons. The President simply was determined from the start to topple Hussein. Indeed, Bush began his first National Security Council meeting with a demand that those around the table find a way to get rid of Hussein.
Bush was fixated on his father's failed policy in Iraq, perhaps attributing to it his father's failure to be re-elected - something Bush pere is known to have taken very hard. If you add Hussein's purported assassination plot against Bush pere, the stain on the family escutcheon must have been troubling, although I still do not believe personal matters motivated the invasion. The neo-con institute crowd had been whining and puking about Iraq for years, despite all the horrors inflicted on that country by the First Gulf War, including tens of thousands poor draftees and civilians incinerated by American bombing, but there is never enough war and death to satisfy these grasping, manipulative people.
O'Neill's revelations imply three years of dissimulation by Bush. They imply also months of intense and steady lying as non-existent weapons were talked up, and, of course, Bush's lying to this day about Hussein's non-existent connections to terror. But they imply something more profound that goes to the very meaning of democracy. Bush never submitted the prospect of a conflict to voters. Had he done so, I doubt he could have successfully argued his case, something he hasn't done to this day.
O'Neill's account of the first National Security Council meeting has been confirmed by another official who attended but remains anonymous. Bush's lying about Iraq's weapons has been confirmed by a study of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which concluded that the threat from Iraq had been systematically misrepresented. The stupidity of Bush's invasion has been confirmed by the observations of a professor at the Army's War College who characterized it as a costly, pointless distraction.
One of the White House's immediate responses to the press about Paul O'Neill was along the lines of, "Nobody ever listened to him when he was in office. Why would anyone listen to him now?" Snotty, eighth-grade stuff, nothing to do with facts, having about the same moral tone as candidate Bush's calling a New York Times reporter "asshole"
Bush's smarmy White House isn't content with efforts to insult O'Neill, he is to be investigated for inappropriately using Treasury material marked "secret." This from the same crowd who revealed the secret identity of a CIA agent, the wife of someone else whose honest words they scorned. Watch your back, Paul.
[i]John Chuckman lives in Canada. He can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org.[/i]
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| While Dubya Regurgitates Poppy's Space Lunacy, Inner-City Kids Get Sicker & Sicker ... |
| 01.16.04 (8:04 am) [edit] |
[b]Instead of setting great goals for our nation, here on [i]terra firma[/i], Dubya wants us to look out towards space ([i]so we're not looking as his insane & immoral bloodletting in Iraq & Afghanistan, nor his bloodthirsty economic rape of America[/i]) ... Send Dubya & Congress an e-mail http://www.congress & ask them about these citizens here on earth: 45+ million without health care, 9-15+ million without jobs, 3.5 million homeless, 25+ million families living below the 1960s defined poverty-line, etc. ... How about our environment, that Dubya doesn't give a damn about? ... Why should we believe Dubya gives a damn about space when he doesn't give a damn about our planet? ...[/b]
Consider [b]". . . But First, an Earthly Idea[/b]" by [i]E. J. Dionne Jr. [/i]on http://www.washingtonpost.com... :
"Why the moon? Why Mars?" asked President Bush. "Because it is humanity's destiny to strive, to seek, to find and because it is America's destiny to lead."
Nothing like a proposed new venture into space to inspire soaring rhetoric. Thus those stirring words, offered not by the current President Bush but by the first President Bush back on July 20, 1989.
It makes you wonder why anyone should take Bush's election-year Mars gambit seriously.
The suspicion that this is a retread idea deepens when you read through the coverage from 15 years ago. The Page One headline on a Washington Post follow-up story five days later: "Bush Proposes Lofty Goals, But Not Financing For Them; Budgeting for Space, East Europe Criticized."
Here is William J. Broad, writing in the New York Times on July 30, 1989: "Although skeptics dismissed the speech as political oratory with no firm commitment of dollars, White House officials say the plan is real, and in recent days some experts have said the odds on success are not as long as they first seemed."
Rudolph Penner, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told The Post's David Hoffman back then: "It's not that we're not a rich enough society to do a lot more of these kinds of things. It's simply that the American people don't want to pay for them."
But that is the beauty of this administration's approach: It's not asking current taxpayers to finance this adventure. It is going to keep cutting taxes and is putting only modest new sums into NASA. The big stuff happens later -- "our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020," Bush said on Wednesday. No date was set for the actual journey to Mars. Maybe it will happen when Sens. Chelsea Clinton and Karenna Gore Schiff face off in Iowa's Democratic caucuses.
No, there is nothing wrong with setting big goals, since "a dream to be realized by future generations must begin with this generation." Yes, that was also the first President Bush back in '89. But let's defend Bush 41 here. At least he was willing to bear the burden of financing the government through those tax increases that helped doom his chances for reelection in 1992. The current president, by contrast, is leaving behind a trail of IOUs: his tax cuts, a Medicare drug plan whose full costs won't be felt for years to come and now a promise of the moon and Mars for his successors to keep.
As Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt put it: "Mr. President, there's no such thing as a free launch." Gephardt said that back in 1989, when he was the House majority leader.
I am not one of those who say we should scrap the space program and put all the money into, say, health insurance. A wealthy and creative country should be able to pursue several important goals simultaneously.
But I could not help noticing that the day before the president proposed to make a small patch of the moon habitable, about 800 people gathered at a Baltimore church to urge the federal government to do more to redevelop blighted neighborhoods. The event's organizers, the Industrial Areas Foundation-East and Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, said cleaning up low-income neighborhoods was not a matter of aesthetics but a health care emergency.
How many Americans know -- I didn't -- that the percentage of children with asthma has more than doubled since 1980, from 3.6 percent to 8.7 percent; that deaths from asthma have increased by more than 75 percent; that 25 percent of all children in central Harlem have asthma? These numbers come from an IAF paper that, I warn you, makes for gruesome reading: "The explosion of asthma and other respiratory problems has been triggered by the overwhelming presence of roach droppings and rat urine in the projects and tenements that house these children." When these hazards are "combined with the harsh pesticides and cleaning agents often used to remove pests . . . you have the polar opposite of an oxygen tent in a sanitized hospital room."
So here's an offer: We'll forget that this President Bush is being a copycat on his Mars endeavor if he begins an experimental program to make our inner cities more habitable for the humans who live there. Who knows what technological spinoffs could result?
In that great 1989 speech, the first President Bush quoted William Jennings Bryan: "Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for."
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| The end of Bush and Blair's friendship? |
| 01.16.04 (7:24 am) [edit] |
[b]Is it the end of Bush and Blair's friendship?[/b] Probably, since friendship also demands relatively balanced intellects, and although Blair is corrupt ([i]as is Dubya[/i]) he is so much smarter than the imbecilic [i]useful idiot [/i]Dubya that it must be painful to have to sit and listen to Bush's[i] mind-numbing [/i]screed!
Consider "[i][b]Bush and Blair[/b][/i]" by William Pfaff on http://www.iht.com/articles/1... :
The Hutton Inquiry report on the death of the British scientist David Kelly, dealing with Downing Street's claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is scheduled to be released later this month. As the date approaches, the infatuation of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain with President George W. Bush seems to be waning.
One cannot call the Blair-Bush relationship a love affair, because love affairs are reciprocal, and on George's side this affair seems to have been a heartless flirtation. Tony was useful while he was useful; and now, as the Hank Snow song has it, George has moved on.
For Tony it was the real thing. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, his instructions to his government have been to stick tight to the United States in support of everything it does.
This was justified politically as a measure of strategic realism: The United States is the superpower. As Winston Churchill said, Britain - if it has to choose - must choose the seas, not the European Continent.
Blair's commitment, nourished by speeches to the U.S. Congress and by weekends at Camp David, first began to falter on practical matters. Now, according to The Daily Mirror, "the diplomatic temperature is in the deep freeze."
The latest blow suffered by Blair was self-inflicted, but had to do with the prime minister's total support for Bush on the weapons issue. It came when Blair, during his New Year's visit to his troops in Iraq, told them that U.S. forces looking for weapons had found laboratories "irrefutably proving" that weapons of mass destruction had existed.
An unscrupulous but enterprising journalist quoted the statement to L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, without sourcing it, and Bremer called it ridiculous - "a red herring" probably invented by someone "who wanted to undermine the coalition."
A fundamental problem has been that Washington never kept Blair's government in the picture. U.S. policy was driven by highly unpredictable domestic political developments, and by parochial interests not readily comprehensible outside Washington. This put the British in the position of following without knowing where they were going.
Blair also has had to take account of the annoyance of his military and political people in Iraq with American tactics in the guerrilla war.
The choice in December of still more massive shock-and-awe attacks on neighborhoods or tribal areas suspected of being the source of attacks reflected what the British military consider a naïve notion that shows of force - and they were shows preceded by warnings - can intimidate a nationalist insurgence.
Experience suggests the opposite. The British military is better at counterinsurgency, much more attentive to civilian interests and more apprehensive about the long-term consequences of what they do.
Some British military sources also complain that they are not kept properly informed on U.S. intelligence concerning guerrilla plans and movements potentially affecting the security of British forces.
This is generally attributed to the total self-absorption of the U.S. coalition authorities and the American military. Americans are reproached for ignoring the interests and needs of the British in Iraq except when they want something from them - and then they take for granted total cooperation.
The most important recent development in the relationship, however, is not a result of indifference. The Foreign Office and Downing Street have recognized that the Bush administration is exploiting Britain's position in Europe in a way that is destructive of Britain's interests.
They believe that Washington deliberately announced that Germany and France would get no reconstruction contracts in Iraq - a perfectly gratuitous announcement, since no one was so foolish as to think they would - on the eve of the EU summit meeting in Brussels in December so as to envenom relations between Britain and the French and Germans.
This, London officials assume, was meant to undermine British cooperation in a common European security policy - seen in Washington as a threat to the United States.
The neoconservative camp in Washington has decided that Britain can be used to undermine the European Union, now known as "Superpower Europe," according to a recent anti-European Union "Wake up America!" issue of the once-liberal New Republic magazine.
The Europeans' common security policy is currently so feeble that this might be called pre-emptive paranoia. But whatever it is, it puts Tony Blair on the spot. It is one thing to choose the sea rather than the Continent when survival is at stake. But to choose the neoconservatives over Europe risks the ridiculous.
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| How Neo-Cons Change the World: Army's Suicide Rate in Iraq Higher Than Usual |
| 01.15.04 (1:02 pm) [edit] |
[b]The neo-con thugs & goons are changing the world ... for the worse, at home & abroad.[/b] It is no wonder that many ex-Generals, Veterans & Pentagon officials denounce the corrupt neo-con "crazies" and their obscene [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i].
Consider "[i][b]Army's Suicide Rate in Iraq Higher Than Usual, Official Says[/b][/i]" on http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking... :
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Army's suicide rate in Iraq has been about a third higher than past rates for troops during peacetime, the Pentagon's top doctor said Wednesday.
Also, the military still has about 2,500 troops waiting for medical care after returning from overseas, said Dr. William Winkenwerder, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. The Pentagon is preparing for even more soldiers on "medical extension" after tens of thousands of troops are rotated home from Iraq this spring, Winkenwerder said.
The issue of suicides so worried the military that the Army sent an assessment team to Iraq late last year to see if anything more could be done to prevent troops from killing themselves. The Army also began offering more counseling to returning troops after several soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., killed their wives and themselves after returning home from the war.
Winkenwerder said the military has documented 21 suicides during 2003 among troops involved in the Iraq war. Eighteen of those were Army soldiers, Winkenwerder said.
That's a suicide rate for soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000, Winkenwerder said. During recent peacetime years, that number for the Army has hovered around 10.5 to 11 per 100,000, Winkenwerder said.
"We don't see any trend there that tells us that there's more we might be doing," Winkenwerder told a breakfast meeting of Pentagon reporters.
The military has nine combat stress teams in Iraq to help treat troops' mental health problems, and each division has a psychiatrist, psychologist and social worker, Winkenwerder said. He said between 300 and 400 troops have been medically evacuated from Iraq for mental health problems.
The military prefers to treat mental health problems such as depression by keeping troops in their regular duties while they get counseling and possibly medication, Winkenwerder said. Less than one percent of the troops in Iraq are treated for mental issues during an average week, he said.
Winkenwerder said he had no specifics on the number of troops being treated for battlefield stress, although the military is focused on treating that problem.
"We believe they are being identified, they are being supported," Winkenwerder said.
The military also is working to solve the issue of soldiers awaiting medical care. Since November, about 1,900 of the 4,400 troops waiting for medical care have been treated, Winkenwerder said.
But the military expects more problems when tens of thousands of troops are rotated in and out of Iraq this spring, Winkenwerder said. Many of those troops may have to wait at various bases for medical treatment such as physical therapy for injuries, he said.
The Army is working to sign contracts with civilian medical providers and bringing in more staff from the Navy, Air Force and Department of Veterans Affairs to help, Winkenwerder said.
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| Like Governor ... Like President ... |
| 01.15.04 (11:27 am) [edit] |
[b]People don't really change that much ... Most people don't radically change their behavior as adults ... And, the track-record of a Governor will likely reflect upon his/her behavior as a President ... [/b]
Dubya was a[i] Corporate WHORE [/i]to his [i]Corporate PIMPS[/i] as an incompetent & corrupt Governor ... Dubya is a[i] Corporate WHORE [/i]to his [i]Corporate PIMPS[/i] as an incompetent & corrupt President ... As the[i] former[/i], he [i]raped Texan taxpayers [/i]who were swindled, plundered & looted to pay for his boondoggles ([i]baseball teams & stadiums[/i]) ... As the[i] latter[/i], he[i] rapes American taxpayers [/i]who are swindled, plundered & looted to pay for his boondoggles ([i]war-mongerings for war-profiteers[/i]) ...
[i][b]Like Governor ... Like President ...[/b][/i]
Consider "[i][b]Required Reading On Dean[/b][/i]", by [i]David S. Broder[/i], on http://www.washingtonpost.com... :
America likes to elect governors and ex-governors to the presidency and, by and large, that is a healthy habit. Of the past five presidents, all but the elder George Bush prepped for the job in statehouses in Georgia, California, Arkansas and Texas. State executives learn valuable lessons about budgeting and about working with legislators. By and large, they are closer to the problems of everyday life -- and more accountable for dealing with them -- than senators or representatives, federal bureaucrats or generals.
One lesson I have learned -- from ignoring it too often in the past -- is the importance of listening to the journalists who have covered these candidates in their state capitols. It is particularly important to heed the critics and to take note of the shortcomings the state executives have displayed at home. Those problems are likely to recur if and when they reach the White House.
Reg Murphy described vividly Jimmy Carter's fractured relationship with the Georgia legislature, an accurate forecast of the difficulties he ran into with a Democratic Congress. My former colleague Lou Cannon portrayed Ronald Reagan's rather offhand way of managing his subordinates in Sacramento -- a clue to the wide powers he delegated in Washington, not always wisely.
A host of Little Rock reporters described Bill Clinton's vivid private life and the evasions that earned him the nickname "Slick Willie." And Molly Ivins, though hardly a dispassionate observer, gave plenty of evidence about the buddy-buddy relationship of George W. Bush and the corporate power structure in Texas.
That is why I strongly recommend a little paperback published by a team of reporters for the Rutland (Vt.) Herald titled "Howard Dean: A Citizen's Guide to the Man Who Would Be President." The publisher is Steerforth Press.
The nine contributors have covered Dean during the span of years that he held office in Vermont -- as legislator, lieutenant governor and governor. Their views are balanced -- closer to the Lou Cannon model on Reagan than any of the other examples I have cited -- and I could detect no personal bias in any of their individual chapters.
The Dean who emerges from these pages is a more complex and interesting politician than the man on the stump this past year -- less strident and in many respects more impressive.
The chapter on his environmental record, titled "Green and Not Green," by Hamilton E. Davis, the former managing editor of the Burlington Free Press, is a model of balance. "A clear fault line runs down the center of Howard Dean's stewardship of Vermont's environment," Davis writes. "On one side is his strong support for the purchase of wild land that might otherwise be subject to development; during his 11 years as governor, the state bought more than 470,000 acres of such land. . . .
"On the other side of the fault, however, is Dean's record on the regulation of retail and industrial development. His critics charge that his preference for the interests of large business over environmental protection sapped the vitality from the state's regulatory apparatus, especially Act 250, Vermont's historic development-control law, and from regulations pertaining to storm water runoff and water pollution."
Even more intriguing than the analysis of his record in vital policy areas are the insights into his governing style. Davis's take begins with the observation: "Say this about Howard Dean; he is his own man.
"He tends to think through problems himself, rather than work them out in consultation with others. Dean often spoke on an issue before receiving advice from his staff. . . . Dean would listen politely to opposing points of view when the conversation involved people he cared about, but he could be testy and confrontational when challenged on policy by people he didn't know. He had a reputation for being impulsive and occasionally arrogant.
"His staff and his small cadre of friends, however, saw him differently. They liked him enormously, and they were extremely loyal to him."
Similar contradictions and complexities emerge in almost every chapter, and it helps that editor Dirk Van Susteren has not tried to smooth everything into a single broad perspective. Some of the lessons I draw from it are cautionary, but it does not diminish Dean's stature or make his quest of the presidency seem absurd.
[i][b]The country has much it needs to learn about this man, and this book is a great place to start.[/b][/i]
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| Karl Rove's Nightmare ... |
| 01.15.04 (11:18 am) [edit] |
[b]Can Karl Rove paint everybody else challenging dumb-bunny Dubya, they way that [i]he [/i]([i]Bush's Brain & America's Joseph Goebbles[/i]) painted McCain in 2000? ... [/b]
Consider "[i][b]Karl Rove's Nightmare[/b][/i]" by [i]Richard Cohen[/i] on http://www.washingtonpost.com... :
DALLAS -- Karl Rove had a bad moment here the other night. It came as Wesley Clark was speaking to a packed hotel ballroom, when the retired general derided the president of the United States for what was supposed to be his supreme, cinematic moment: landing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. "I don't think it's patriotic to dress up in a flight suit and prance around," Clark bellowed. The men had been separated from the boys.
For Clark, it was a monster evening. His campaign raised upward of $300,000, and the once-stiff speaker brought his audience out of their chairs several times. He was forceful and occasionally eloquent. But what really mattered was that Clark was prepared to go at President Bush in the one area where he once seemed unassailable: his leadership as a wartime president.
That was the moment I imagined Rove took notice. Of all the other Democratic presidential contenders, only John Kerry has the military credentials to challenge Bush. But being a wounded and decorated Vietnam vet is not the same as being both that and a retired four-star general. Anyway, Kerry is easily caricatured as a Massachusetts liberal.
Not so Clark. He is a "duty, honor, country" guy -- the West Point mantra he recites constantly. His themes are patriotism and leadership, and his credentials are unimpeachable. He was wounded in Vietnam. He rose to command NATO and made war in the Balkans. Four invisible stars glitter from his shoulders.
Wes Clark does not like what George Bush has done with Wes Clark's Army. Make no mistake: It's his Army. He can hardly go a sentence without mentioning the military -- and how, in his mind, Bush has abused it. He sent it to war precipitously and then used its men and women as "props," he says. Clark's sincerity on this point is patent. In a conversation on his campaign plane, he suddenly turned intense, a kind of growling, low-grade rage that lifted my nose from my note-taking. His Army has been abused.
In a way, Clark is this season's John McCain. As did McCain in 2000, he makes a special appeal to veterans -- asking them to stand at his speech here, for instance. His themes are similar, too, but where McCain ran to the left of Bush, Clark runs to the right of the Democratic field. That assessment has nothing to do with his actual positions, some of which are downright liberal -- he has no problem with civil unions or marriage for gays, for instance -- but rather with his military record and his Southern roots.
Whatever the reason, the general is on the move. Polls show him second to Howard Dean in New Hampshire -- Dean moving down, Clark moving up, with what his campaign says are approval ratings in the high 70s. Some of that can be explained by a palpable desire for "none of the above" and some by his record and some by the fact that on occasion he has delivered a good speech -- one, incidentally, that does not disparage his Democratic opponents.
But Clark has a way to go. When he talks about patriotism, leadership, the military and his own remarkable life, he can be moving and persuasive. But when he gets into domestic programs, you hear a "voice mail" recitation -- no passion, little inflection and often a comparison to some military program, as if the Army is just civilian life with worse food. He lacks the politician's ability to morph with his audience.
Still, the Clark I saw in New Hampshire and Texas has come a long way from the Clark I saw months ago. At the earlier event, people fell asleep. No more. On his campaign plane, he seemed relaxed -- and so, importantly, did his staff. I could dig up only one story about him losing his temper, but it was not recent and not important. You and I should be as disciplined.
At the fundraiser here, Clark stood before a huge American flag like George C. Scott in "Patton." And when he talked about Bush and the war in Iraq, it was not as some Democrat who could be caricatured as a peacenik, but as a warrior who felt that the president had fought the wrong war at the wrong time -- and then pranced all over a flight deck reserved for Clark's genuine heroes, "the men and women who serve."
[b][i]Karl Rove, call your office.[/i][/b]
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| Official Corroborates O’Neill’s Account That Saddam Was Bush’s Focus Before 9/11 |
| 01.14.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
[b]Another official in the U.S. government corroborates O'Neill's account that Saddam was Bush's focus before 9/11 ... Thus, we have evidence that:[/b]
1. Dubya lied ([i]and is therefore guilty of treason under the U.S. Constitution[/i]), because he told Americans that he wanted to disarm Iraq ([i]one amongst many, many lies about phony WMDs, phony Niger uranium yellow cake sales, phony non-existent links between Iraq & Al Qaida, etc[/i].), because of the imminent dangers posed to the USA in the aftermath of 9/11;
2. Dubya did not pursue Osama bin Laden or Al Qaida, either before 9/11 ([i]when Dubya & Condi had been warned by Clinton & Berger that bin Laden posed the gravest threat to the USA[/i]), or after 9/11-- instead the traitorous criminal Bush went after Saddam Hussein in order to enrich his oil cronies & corrupt [i]corporate-take-all [/i]rapists: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc.;
3. Dubya led America into a neo-con, neo-fascist bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq unnecessarily, costing the lives of nearly 500 U.S. Soldiers & tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, in order to enrich his sordid family & his squalid corporate pimps!
The mendacious Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] cynically exploited the 9/11 tragedy & the misery of 9/11 victims' families, in order to pursue its own private war-profiteering! Contact Congress http://www.congress.org and demand that impeachment hearings be called for Dubya & Cheney, and the resignations of the liars & criminals: Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Feith & the other neo-con traitors in the corrupt Bush regime. Dubya & Cheney should then be [i]shipped-off [/i]to the Hague and tried in the International Criminal Court for their heinous [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i].
Consider "[i][b]Corroborating O’Neill’s Account: Official Confirms Claims That Saddam Was Bush’s Focus Before 9/11[/b][/i]" on http://abcnews.go.com/section... :
President Bush ordered the Pentagon to explore the possibility of a ground invasion of Iraq well before the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, an official told ABCNEWS, confirming the account former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill gives in his new book.
The official, who asked not to be identified, was present in the same National Security Council meetings as O'Neill immediately after Bush's inauguration in January and February of 2001.
"The president told his Pentagon officials to explore the military options, including use of ground forces," the official told ABCNEWS. "That went beyond the Clinton administration's halfhearted attempts to overthrow Hussein without force."
In The Price of Loyalty, O'Neill says that from the very start of his administration, Bush was focused on ousting Saddam. Bush says that his policy at the time was merely a continuation of the Clinton administration's stance. White House aides have suggested O'Neill, whom Bush fired in December 2002, is merely trying to sell books.
Both the official who spoke to ABCNEWS and O'Neill have acknowledged that Bush had not yet made up his mind for a ground invasion at the start of his administration, but they say officials were told to find ways to get rid of the Iraqi leader.
"Getting Hussein was now the administration's focus, that much was already clear," O'Neill says in his book.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld disputed O'Neill's account today. "I don't know what meetings he could have been in," Rumsfeld told reporters during a Pentagon briefing.
[i][b]Classified Documents?[/b][/i]
A briefing paper for O'Neill — and obtained exclusively by ABCNEWS — directed him to work on "keeping Saddam's finger off the trigger" by stopping imports of military technology. The Treasury Department is now investigating whether O'Neill took classified documents for the book. He says he did not.
"I don't honestly think there's anything that's classified in those 19,000 documents," O'Neill said on NBC's Today Show today.
Regardless of whether the book uses classified documents, it has been a headache for the White House. O'Neill insists he did not intend to cause the president any embarrassment.
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| Tax Cuts Don't Stimulate The Economy If They End Up in the Pockets of Robber-Barons! |
| 01.13.04 (7:52 pm) [edit] |
[b]Tax cuts don't stimulate the economy, if they simply end-up in the pockets of the filthy rich robber-barons & corporate rapists ... [/b]Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay's ability to buy 20 mansions, 200 yachts & 2000 diamond tiaras for his greedy wife, [u][i]ain't[/i][/u] going to benefit the working people of America or the quality of life for all of our people! ([i]Just ask the Enron employees who lost their jobs, their pensions & their benefits-- as well as, 45+ million citizens without health care, 9-15+ million citizens without jobs-- and, 3.5+ million homeless people & 25+ million families who live in poverty, etc[/i].) Dubya's insane, immoral (& [i]possibly illegal[/i]) boondoggles, tax loopholes & tax cuts for the rich & corporations are not beneficial for the Middle-Class, Working People and the Poor & Elderly; nor, for the health of our nation!
The Middle-Class, Working People and the Vulnerable in our country are all being scammed by the neo-con court-jesters & attack-dogs who are willing to sell this nation [i]down the river [/i]on behalf of their [i]corporate-take-all pimps[/i]:-- the Bushies & their corporate [i]rapists-in-arms[/i]!
In "[i][b]With BC-Bush-O'Neill[/b][/i]" on http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin... :
"There's been too much gaming of the system until it is broke. Capitalism is not working! There has been a corrupting of the system of capitalism." -- Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking of mounting corporate scandals during a February 2002 meeting of the president's working group on corporate governance.
"If you can't do the right thing when you're at 85 percent approval, then when can you do the right thing? I think it's time to say no." -- Mitch Daniels, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, arguing unsuccessfully at a Feb. 11, 2002, White House meeting that the administration should reject requests by the steel industry for protective tariffs.
[b]Even Alan Greenspan and Mitch Daniels ([i]as well as, conservative Paul O'Neill[/i]) recognize that Dubya's rapacious grab for his squalid family, hyper-rich plutocrats & greedy corporate campaign contributors, is sheer insanity, ruthless and reckless, and damaging to our nation![/b]
Moreover, refer to Warren Buffet's article entitled "[i][b]Dividend Voodoo[/b][/i]" ([i]published on 20th May 2003, in the Washington Post[/i]):--
The annual Forbes 400 lists prove that -- with occasional blips -- the rich do indeed get richer. Nonetheless, the Senate voted last week to supply major aid to the rich in their pursuit of even greater wealth.
The Senate decided that the dividends an individual receives should be 50 percent free of tax in 2003, 100 percent tax-free in 2004 through 2006 and then again fully taxable in 2007. The mental flexibility the Senate demonstrated in crafting these zigzags is breathtaking. What it has put in motion, though, is clear: If enacted, these changes would further tilt the tax scales toward the rich.
Let me, as a member of that non-endangered species, give you an example of how the scales are currently balanced. The taxes I pay to the federal government, including the payroll tax that is paid for me by my employer, Berkshire Hathaway, are roughly the same proportion of my income -- about 30 percent -- as that paid by the receptionist in our office. My case is not atypical -- my earnings, like those of many rich people, are a mix of capital gains and ordinary income -- nor is it affected by tax shelters (I've never used any). As it works out, I pay a somewhat higher rate for my combination of salary, investment and capital gain income than our receptionist does. But she pays a far higher portion of her income in payroll taxes than I do.
She's not complaining: Both of us know we were lucky to be born in America. But I was luckier in that I came wired at birth with a talent for capital allocation -- a valuable ability to have had in this country during the past half-century. Credit America for most of this value, not me. If the receptionist and I had both been born in, say, Bangladesh, the story would have been far different. There, the market value of our respective talents would not have varied greatly.
Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would receive $310 million in additional income, owe not another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge to 3 percent.
And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly. Let me repeat the point: Her overall federal tax rate would be 10 times what my rate would be.
When I was young, President Kennedy asked Americans to "pay any price, bear any burden" for our country. Against that challenge, the 3 percent overall federal tax rate I would pay -- if a Berkshire dividend were to be tax-free -- seems a bit light.
Administration officials say that the $310 million suddenly added to my wallet would stimulate the economy because I would invest it and thereby create jobs. But they conveniently forget that if Berkshire kept the money, it would invest that same amount, creating jobs as well.
The Senate's plan invites corporations -- indeed, virtually commands them -- to contort their behavior in a major way. Were the plan to be enacted, shareholders would logically respond by asking the corporations they own to pay no more dividends in 2003, when they would be partially taxed, but instead to pay the skipped amounts in 2004, when they'd be tax-free. Similarly, in 2006, the last year of the plan, companies should pay double their normal dividend and then avoid dividends altogether in 2007.
Overall, it's hard to conceive of anything sillier than the schedule the Senate has laid out. Indeed, the first President Bush had a name for such activities: "voodoo economics." The manipulation of enactment and sunset dates of tax changes is Enron-style accounting, and a Congress that has recently demanded honest corporate numbers should now look hard at its own practices.
Proponents of cutting tax rates on dividends argue that the move will stimulate the economy. A large amount of stimulus, of course, should already be on the way from the huge and growing deficit the government is now running. I have no strong views on whether more action on this front is warranted. But if it is, don't cut the taxes of people with huge portfolios of stocks held directly. (Small investors owning stock held through 401(k)s are already tax-favored.) Instead, give reductions to those who both need and will spend the money gained. Enact a Social Security tax "holiday" or give a flat-sum rebate to people with low incomes. Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same $310 million in my pockets.
When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a "break" requires -- now or down the line -- that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party.
Supporters of making dividends tax-free like to paint critics as promoters of class warfare. The fact is, however, that their proposal promotes class welfare. For my class.
[i]The writer is chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a diversified holding company, and a director of The Washington Post Co., which has an investment in Berkshire Hathaway[/i].
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| Bush Twice Tries to Mislead America About the Economy in 24 Hours |
| 01.13.04 (3:28 pm) [edit] |
[b]Is Dubya just a poor liar or just plain stupid?[/b] [i][b]I suspect he is guilty of both, which is why he continues to spew absolute nonsense, [u]including lies, deceptions & falsehoods[/u], day in and day out![/b][/i]
An example, in "[i][b]Bush Twice Tries to Mislead America About the Economy in 24 Hours[/b][/i]" on http://www.misleader.org/dail... :
Within a span of 24 hours, President Bush twice attempted to mislead the American people about the economy and his tax policies. On Friday, the president said, "Unemployment dropped today to 5.7% [which] is a positive sign that the economy is getting better."1
But the president didn't add that the unemployment drop occurred not because the economy was getting better, but because continued weak job growth led 309,000 people to stop looking for work.2 As one nonpartisan economist said, "Most of these dropouts would still be in the labor force working or trying to work if the economy were doing better," The president made no mention that only 1,000 total jobs were created in December - a "shockingly low number," where most economists had expected job growth to be around 100,000 to 150,000 for the month.3 33 months after the beginning of the recession, this recovery is distinguished from all previous cycles of job contraction and resumed growth since 1939, according to the Economic Policy Institute, for not having fully recovered job levels to those above the pre-recessionary peak within 31 months from its start.
The following day, the president touted the same economic policies that helped create the unemployment crisis. Despite the bad economic news, he said, "Tax relief has got this economy going again," and bragged, "every American who pays income taxes got a tax cut."4 His use of the phrase "income tax," however, was tailored to divert attention from the millions of low-income American taxpayers (who pay payroll tax but not income tax) who received nothing. Bush's 2001 tax cut completely excluded 31% of all families in America.5 Similarly, Bush's 2003 tax cut completely excluded 31% of all taxpayers6 - including one million children of military families.7
[b]Sources[/b]:
1. President Speaks with Women Small Business Owners on the Economy, 01/09/2004.
2. "Falling jobless figure deceptive", Baltimore Sun, 01/10/2004.
3. "Changes in U.S. work force make accurate data elusive", International Herald Tribune, 01/13/2004.
4. President's Radio Address, 01/10/2004.
5. Bush Tax Plan Offers No Benefits to One in Three Families, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 02/07/2001.
6. Bush 2003 Tax Plan a Big Fat Zero for a Third of Nation’s Taxpayers Percentages with no tax cut are much higher in poorer states, Citizens for Tax Justice, 01/27/2003.
7. One Million Military Children Left Behind by Massive New Tax Package, Children's Defense Fund, 06/06/2003.
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| Dubya Should Be Held Accountable For U.S. Mass-Graves |
| 01.13.04 (7:41 am) [edit] |
[b]Dubya should be held accountable for the U.S. mass-graves of over 496 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and 100 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan ([i]as well as the tens of thousands of innocent Afghanistanis & Iraqis that the Bush/Cheney junta has slaughtered[/i])-- [/b]The Bush regime's neo-con massacre was devised to enrich the corrupt & whorish Bush family, Cheney family, and their corporate pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc.
Consider "[i][b]U.S. Mortuary Sees No Let-Up from Iraq War Dead[/b][/i]" on http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... :
DOVER, Del. (Reuters) - Nearly a month after Saddam Hussein's capture, American war dead from Iraq continue to arrive with somber regularity at the wind-swept Air Force base in Delaware that is home to the world's largest mortuary.
The remains of the fallen, wrapped in body bags and encased in ice-laden metal transfer cases, descend from the sky aboard gray military planes or white civilian Boeing 747s. They are met at the airstrip by an honor guard, chaplain and small motorcade of blue vans.
The chaplain prays while the honor guard drapes a flag over each coffin and escorts it to the vans, which ferry the dead on a two-mile trek to the 70,000-square-foot Dover Air Force Base Port Mortuary.
There, at the U.S. military's only stateside mortuary, the remains are identified, autopsied, embalmed, clothed in dress uniforms, placed in coffins and shipped to grieving relatives in the company of military escorts.
The bodies of nine soldiers who died aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed near Falluja on Thursday were expected to arrive this weekend.
"That will put us over 500 for Iraq," said Karen Giles, an Air Force Reserve lieutenant colonel who heads a permanent eight-member staff supplemented by FBI (news - web sites) fingerprint experts, pathologists and other specialists.
"We'll probably have 50 or 60 people working here over the weekend," Giles said.
[b]500 DEAD[/b]
According to Pentagon statistics released on Friday, 494 military personnel have died in Iraq. The mortuary also handles U.S. civilian dead, including contractors.
Mortuary services began at Dover in 1955. But their current home, a facility built with $30 million allocated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, opened in October with an enhanced capacity to house hundreds of bodies.
The mortuary has been empty only twice since U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March. "The last time was in October," Giles told Reuters during a tour of the facility.
Saddam Hussein's capture on Dec. 13 raised hopes that attacks on U.S. forces would ebb as American authorities pursued new intelligence leads and stepped up counterinsurgency tactics.
But the pace of casualties has not changed despite apparent U.S. success at reducing daily attacks, policy experts say.
Thirty Americans have died in hostile action during the 27 days between Saddam's capture and Friday, according to a Pentagon official. In comparison, 41 died in hostilities the month before Saddam's capture, from Nov. 13 through Dec. 13.
"Since the mid-summer time period, we've seen a fairly steady pace of around 30 to 40 Americans killed per month, and I don't anticipate that number changing quickly," said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.
[b]MORE THAN FIRST THREE YEARS OF VIETNAM[/b]
In November, U.S. casualties in Iraq surpassed the number of Americans killed in the first three years of the Vietnam War, according to a Reuters analysis of Pentagon statistics.
For a time, growing casualties threatened President Bush's public approval ratings as he prepared for re-election amid fears that Iraq could turn into a quagmire for American forces.
But Bush's ratings surged after Saddam's capture and have stayed aloft.
Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst James Carafano said casualties appear to have become less of an issue for the public and the media since Saddam's capture.
"The American people will accept casualties as long as they see progress toward the setting up of a legitimate government in Iraq," Carafano said.
"Look at the headlines. Casualties were on page one every day. Now they're drifting back to page four or page five."
Back at Dover Air Force Base, the media are not allowed to see silver caskets arrive on the tarmac because of a Pentagon blackout first implemented in 1991 under Bush's father, former President George Bush. It was reissued in March.
Pentagon officials say the policy is meant to protect the wishes and privacy of the soldiers' families.
But policy experts say military officials are also driven by fear that news images of American casualties -- at Dover or in Iraq -- will erode public support for U.S. policy.
"The general assumption is that if people see the casualty visually, they will not any longer support the war," said retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, a vocal critic of the Bush administration.
"The fear of images is a left-over Vietnam thing. However, the notion of controlling them is a modern thing."
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| Bush Regime Reveals Itself As A Gaggle of Hypocritical Goons! |
| 01.12.04 (7:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]Number of days [/b]between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: [i][b]74 days[/b][/i].
[b]Number of days [/b]between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: [i][b]1 day[/b][/i].
[i][b]Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons ... priceless![/b][/i]
[b]Sources:[/b]
TalkingPointsMemo by Joshua Micah Marshall on http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
"White House Probed Over Leak" on http://www.cbsnews.com/storie...
"Treasury Seeks Probe Into Papers Taken by O'Neill" on http://www.nytimes.com/reuter...
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| Dubya Said 'Find Me A Way To Invade Iraq' -- Let's 'Find A Way To Oust Dubya' |
| 01.12.04 (7:21 am) [edit] |
[b]Within days of taking office in 2001, long before 9/11, Dubya told his staff "[i]Find me a way to invade Iraq[/i]" -- Dubya lied, maliciously and intentionally made dupes out of the American people: for the Mad King George kept telling us well into the invasion that he had not considered war with Iraq until after we were attacked on 9/11!
Let's [i]'Find a way to oust Dubya' [/i]... [/b]a [i]sorry excuse [/i]for a corrupt president-- and a [i]pathetic excuse[/i] for a despicable human being-- Dubya should be frog-marched off to jail in hand-cuffs. He clearly isn't fit to serve as president ... he clearly isn't fit to wipe toilets in WalMart for a living ([i]he'd probably steal the toilet paper[/i]!)
Consider [b]"Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?" [/b]on http://www.commondreams.org/h... :
A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.
Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run.
Entitled "The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.
But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
[b]Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made[/b].
Will this be seen as a “kiss-and-tell" book?
“I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure somebody will say all of that and more,” says O’Neill, who was George Bush's top economic policy official.
In the book, O’Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.
At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."
This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: “I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening … As I recall, it was mostly a monologue.”
He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.
O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind – and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.
Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book – including several cabinet members.
O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration – Donald Rumsfeld - warned O’Neill not to do this book.
Was it a warning, or a threat?
“I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned,” says Suskind. “Understandably, because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president. They said, ‘This could really be the one moment where things are revealed.’"
[b]Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents[/b].
“Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank you" notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive,” says Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings. “You don’t get higher than that.”
And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.
He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.
[b]Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth[/b].
He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.
“It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil in Iraq.”
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."
“The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ‘X’ during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ‘Y,’” says Suskind. “Not just saying ‘Y,’ but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.”
The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.
“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says, ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.’ … O'Neill is speechless.”
”It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society,” says O’Neill. “And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction.”
Did he think it was irresponsible? “Well, it's for sure not what I would have done,” says O’Neill.
The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O’Neill.
[b]Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill[/b]. He was becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major damage control.
Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with the Irish rock star Bono.
“Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show,” says Suskind. “He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, ‘You know, you're getting quite a cult following.’ And it clearly was not a joke. And it was not said in jest.”
Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.
The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team.
“It's a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there,” says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.
He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged.
“He asks, ‘Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again,’” says Suskind.
“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’” Now, his advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.’ And the president kind of goes, ‘OK.’ That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again. ‘Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to say, ‘You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?’"
But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.
“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says Suskind. “Don’t waver.”
In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.
With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he was in the right.
But look at the economy today.
“Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was terrific,” says O’Neill. “I think the tax cut made a difference. But without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors for, against more tax cuts.”
[b]While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush[/b], he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering. “Hmmm, you really think so,” asks O’Neill, who says he isn’t joking. “Well, I’ll be darned.”
“You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O’Neill. “And they're going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because he was fired.”
“I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be hard put to,” says O’Neill.
Is he prepared for it?
“Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O’Neill. “Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
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| Dumb Dubya Wants To Be Churchill-- But He Ain't Even As Smart As The 1st Mad King George! |
| 01.11.04 (7:53 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dumb Dubya wants to be Churchill ... but he [i]ain't[/i] even as smart as the 1st Mad King George, who lost the colonies ... Bush's corporate pimps may [i]rig[/i] the election of 2004 ([i]as they did in 2000[/i]), but their whores in the Bush regime are going to lose real Americans who truly love freedom for all ([i]and not just corporate sluts[/i]) for a second time ... [i]in good time[/i]![/b]
Consider [b]"Ex US-Treasury Chief: Saw No Evidence of Iraq WMDs"[/b] on http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... :
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said he never saw any evidence that Iraq (news - web sites) had weapons of mass destruction -- President Bush (news - web sites)'s main justification for going to war -- and was told "deficits don't matter" when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.
In a new book chronicling his rocky two-year tenure and in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" aired on Sunday, O'Neill said removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was a top priority at Bush's very first National Security Council meeting -- within days of the inauguration and eight months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
O'Neill, fired in a shake-up of Bush's economic team in December 2002, told CBS the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later and that he was given internal memos, including one outlining a "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq."
"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," O'Neill told Time magazine in a separate interview. "There were allegations and assertions by people... To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else."
O'Neill also raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency.
O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) that growing budget deficits -- expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone -- posed a threat to the U.S. economy.
Cheney cut him off. "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due."
A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.
The vice president's office had no immediate comment, but John Snow, who replaced O'Neill, insisted that deficits "do matter" to the administration. "We're not happy about the size of these deficits. They're larger than they should be," Snow told ABC's "This Week," adding that Bush was committed to cutting them in half over the next five years.
Democrats seized on the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, "The Price of Loyalty," in which O'Neill charges that Bush entered office intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it.
"What Paul O'Neill says... is what a lot of other people are beginning to conclude -- that there was an overstatement by the Bush administration of the weapons of mass destruction part of the argument for going to war against Saddam Hussein," Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, told "Fox News Sunday."
[b]'BLIND MAN'[/b]
In the CBS interview, O'Neill likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people." When he went in for his first one-on-one meeting with Bush "with a long list of things to talk about..., I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening. As I recall ... it was mostly a monologue," O'Neill said.
Democratic presidential hopeful Richard Gephardt, a U.S. congressman from Missouri, said he had a similar impression of Bush, telling CBS' "Face the Nation" program: "He is a nice man. And he's a smart man. But he doesn't have experience. He doesn't have knowledge. And he has no curiosity."
The White House defended Bush (ha ha ha).
"I know how he leads, I know how he manages.... He drives the meetings, tough questions, he likes dissent, he likes to see debate," Commerce Secretary Don Evans told CNN's "Late Edition."
Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida accused O'Neill of taking "a Shakespearean approach to advance his career and his book sales. Not since Julius Caesar have I seen such a blatant stab in the back. Et tu, Mr. O'Neill?"
[b]Ha ha ha ... Yeah, O'Neill exposes the liar & buffoon, Dubya-- and they are trying to character-assassinate him!!! [i]Hope O'Neill has body-guards[/i]!!![/b]
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| The Top Ten Conservative Idiots |
| 01.11.04 (7:42 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Top Ten Conservative Idiots [/b]on http://www.democraticundergro...
So, do you still believe that the Iraq war was about WMDs, al Qaeda, and 9/11? How 2003 of you. Last week we learned that George W. Bush (1,3) and his administration had been planning to attack Iraq since January of 2001, only days after taking office. Meanwhile, Colin Powell (2) pretty much admitted that the the whole Saddam-bin Laden axis was all a pack of lies as well. But don't you worry about all that Iraq war mumbo-jumbo, because Dubya is sending us to the Moon! And speaking of the heavens, God told Pat Robertson (4) that Bush was going to win in a landslide. We've got the Governor of Connecticut (5) on the verge of impeachment, we've got a moronic Judge (7) with stone-age views toward women, and we've got a shady GOP front group (10) meddling in the Democratic primary. Happy New Year, and don't forget the key!
[b]Read on ... [/b]on http://www.democraticundergro...
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| Amnesty International Calls for Closure of U.S. Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp |
| 01.11.04 (6:34 am) [edit] |
[b]Amnesty International calls for the closure of the American Concentration Camp at [i]Guantanamo Bay[/i]-- [/b]where human beings ([i]guilty or not, of we know not what[/i]) are shipped-off and have no rights of [i]habeus corpus[/i], legal defense, or contact with the outside world.
That Americans are not outraged at this disgraceful retrograde violation of human rights, is itself a sign that as a people-- we have tragically not learnt the lessons of history.
Refer to "[i][b]Guantanamo Bay: Two years too many[/b][/i]" on http://observer.guardian.co.u...,6903,1120508,00.html :
[i][b]A US diplomat has hinted that British prisoners in Camp Delta may soon be repatriated. That's too little too late for human rights campaigners. As the Guantanamo Bay detention centre marks its second anniversary Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK, calls for immediate closure[/b][/i].
Today marks the second 'anniversary' of Guantanamo Bay, the moment the world first discovered that fighting the 'war on terror' would mean setting up unaccountable and inaccessible military prisons and filling them with hundreds of prisoners from all over the world.
This is two years too many. From the moment images of manacled and blindfold men kneeling in submission in orange boiler suits flashed around the world, the USA's prestige took a nosedive.
In letter after letter to both the White House and Downing Street, Amnesty International has made the point that legal representation and fair trials should be the bottom line not just for the nine Britons in Guantanamo Bay, but for all 650-plus detainees held in Camp Delta without charge or trial.
With some of the Guantanamo prisoners now entering their third year of captivity without access to lawyers, and without charge or trial, the need for urgent moves to end this travesty of justice could not be clearer.
As a former lawyer himself, Prime Minister Tony Blair for one must surely realise that Guantanamo Bay is nothing short of a disgrace and that basic human rights need to be restored.
However, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has rejected concern about Guantanamo as "based on the shrill hyperventilation of a few people who didn't know what they were talking about."
Actually it is Mr Rumsfeld's waspish remark that fails to convince. Did the United States really think that it could set up a modern gulag in defiance of decades of international legal standards and escape censure? In placing prisoners in the legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay's 'no-place' - neither American soil nor Cuban jurisdiction - the American administration appears to have made the rash wager that legal untouchability would equal moral inviolability.
They have been proved staggeringly wrong. Criticism has poured in from such not especially shrill sources as the UN high commissioner for human rights, the Council of Europe, the Pope, a British law lord and countless people who have contacted Amnesty International. The Red Cross has taken the unusual step of going public about the deterioration in mental health it has witnessed among many of the Guantanamo detainees as a result of the indefinite and isolating incarceration regime.
Aside from how it may play in the United States itself, this has been disastrous human rights public relations for a country that has regularly promoted itself as a "beacon" for democracy, justice and the rule of law.
Ripping up the rulebook was hardly the right response when confronted by the grisly acts of a disaffected minority of extremists like al-Qaeda, who in any case recognise no rules. One can easily suppose that they have relished the sight of Muslims incarcerated in the Guantanamo dungeon, knowing that it provides them with fresh 'evidence' of what Osama bin Laden is pleased to call the "crusader-Zionist onslaught."
Setting up Guantanamo Bay in January 2002 might have looked reasonable to some (it wasn't), but the folly of disregarding human rights is now plain to see.
How to undo the damage?
This year the US Supreme Court is set to examine whether it should have jurisdiction over what takes place at Guantanamo Bay, a strip of land leased to the United States by Cuba.
If now the US belatedly sees fit to ensure that Guantanamo prisoners are either charged with recognisable criminal offences or released, that legal counsel is provided to all inmates (and interrogations meanwhile suspended), then much of the damage can be mended.
If instead the US intends to defy criticism and ignore court rulings, then its reputation can only sink further into the hole it has dug for itself.
Is America a big enough country to say that it was wrong on Guantanamo Bay?
• [i]Kate Allen is director of Amnesty International UK[/i]
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| Before You Celebrate The Neo-Con Vulture's Crowing ... |
| 01.11.04 (6:15 am) [edit] |
[b]Before you celebrate the neo-con vulture's crowing[/b], in their neo-orwellian propaganda campaign to be launched this week, please read the following:
"[b]Suspect shells examined in Iraq[/b]", published by the [b]BBC [/b]on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi... :
[i][b]Coalition experts are examining dozens of mortar shells found in southern Iraq which could contain chemical weapons[/b][/i].
Danish troops who found them said they showed traces of blister gases - compounds which include mustard gas.
However, US officials played down the find, saying the [u]shells were probably left over from Saddam Hussein's 1980-88 war with Iran[/u].
The coalition has yet to uncover proof that Iraq was still developing weapons at the time of the war last spring.
The 36 120mm shells appear [u]to have been buried for at least 10 years[/u], the Danes said.
Results of more extensive tests should be available in about two days, they said on an official website quoted by the Reuters news agency.
The Danish troops, who serve with the US-led coalition in Iraq and are supported by Icelandic munitions experts, will continue searches for any more weapons buried at the same site, north of Basra.
US military spokesman Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt said of the shells: "Most were wrapped in plastic bags, and some were leaking."
"We're doing some preliminary tests... to be sure that if they do contain any kind of blistering agent they will be disposed of," he said.
The former regime of Saddam Hussein used blister agents against Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war.
Chemical weapons were also used to kill about 5,000 Kurds in the northern city of Halabja in 1988.
[b]War-time use [/b]
Before the US-led war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Iraq said it had destroyed all its chemical weapons, but the alleged continuing threat from weapons of mass destruction were cited by the US and UK leaders as a key reason for the war.
But a nine-month search for stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear arms has found no proof of an ongoing weapons programme which could have been used against coalition forces.
On Thursday, a 400-strong team of weapons disposal experts was withdrawn from Iraq but US administration officials insisted their job had been completed.
Blister agents, such as mustard gas, were developed and first used by the Germans in World War I. Italy and Egypt have also used such chemical weapons against enemies.
The agents burn skin, eyes and lungs as they are absorbed, causing large blisters on skin and inside lungs and windpipes.
Effects are delayed for up to 12 hours after exposure, which can allow the agent to cause severe damage before it is detected.
[b]Who knows what the neo-con's rhetorical hooligans will make out of this?!?!?[/b]
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| Another Bush LIE Exposed: No Evidence That Iraq Moved WMDs to Syria |
| 01.10.04 (7:24 am) [edit] |
[b]One of the Bush regime's "excuses" for not finding or "coming-up" with WMDs in Iraq-- has been, their bizarre propaganda ploy that the tons of massive stockpiles of WMDs had been [i]"sneaked" across the border[/i] of Iraq into Syria ([i]a laughable neo-orwellian scam, that only their brain-dead sheep were 'lapping up'[/i]!) ... Consider ... How can tons of WMDs be "sneaked" very far with satellite photos that can practically read the license plate number on your car?!?!?[/b]
Indeed, the neo-cons used this [i]LIE [/i]to push their lust for wars with Syria ([i]and Iran & North Korea[/i]) ... The neo-cons want [i]perpetual wars for perpetual peace [/i]([i]ooopppsss[/i], not [u]peace[/u]-- but [i]a [u]piece[/u] of the action [/i]for their corporate paymasters: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Bechtel, etc ...)
Compare these two news items, the first from 29th October 2003 & the second from 9th January 2004:
[b]1. UPI press release on 29th October 2003:--[/b] [i][b]U.S. says WMD went from Iraq to Syria[/b][/i] on http://209.157.64.200/focus/f...:
[b]WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 (UPI)[/b] -- U.S. intelligence officials Wednesday released an assessment that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been transferred to neighboring Syria.
The officials, in the first assessment of its kind, said the transfer occurred during the weeks prior to the U.S.-led war against the Saddam Hussein regime.
Middle East Newsline reported the U.S. assessment was based on satellite images of convoys of Iraqi trucks that poured into Syria during February and March. U.S. intelligence officials say the trucks contained missiles and WMD components banned by the U.N.'s Security Council.
Copyright 2003 by United Press International.
[b]2. Guardian Unlimited U.K. on Friday 9th January 2004:--[/b] [i][b]Rice: No Evidence Iraq Moved WMD to Syria [/b][/i]on http://www.guardian.co.uk/wor...,1280,-3606884,00.html :
[b]WASHINGTON (AP)[/b] - The United States has no credible evidence that Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria early last year before the U.S.-led war that drove Saddam Hussein from power, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Friday.
Rice said, ``Any indication that something like that happened would be a very serious matter.
``But I want to be very clear: we don't, at this point, have any indications that I would consider credible and firm that that has taken place, but we will tie down every lead,'' she said at a White House briefing about Bush's trip Monday to a hemispheric summit in Mexico.
In nine months, arms control experts in Iraq have failed to find a single item from a long list of weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration cited an alleged weapons stockpile in Iraq as a primary reason for launching the war against Saddam's government.
``We're going to follow every lead on what may have happened here,'' Rice said. ``I don't think we are at the point that we can make a judgment on this issue. There hasn't been any hard evidence that such a thing happened.
``But obviously we're going to follow up every lead,'' she said, ``and it would be a serious problem if that, in fact, did happen.''
Rice said the United States talks with Syria about a number of issues, ``including the borders with Iraq and what may have happened in the past there and what may be continuing to happen there.'' Mainly, she said, the United States opposes Syria's support for terrorism, particularly its support for anti-Palestinian groups Hezbollah and Hamas.
...
[b]How can we believe anything that comes "[i]out of the mouths[/i]" of Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-con thugs & goons? ...[/b]
[b]Sources:[/b]
"U.S. says WMD went from Iraq to Syria", 29th October 2003, on http://209.157.64.200/focus/f...
"Rice: No Evidence Iraq Moved WMD to Syria", 9th January 2004, on http://www.guardian.co.uk/wor...,1280,-3606884,00.html
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| What Has UnRegulated Capitalism Run Amok Done to Our Families? |
| 01.09.04 (9:38 am) [edit] |
[b]Often times, the neo-fascist propagandists are propagating dishonest neo-orwellian fantasies about Government[i] BAD [/i]... Corporations [i]GOOD [/i]... an overly-simplistic & stupidly dangerous mantra--[/b] these corporate puppets have conveniently "forgotten" to tell us all about the horrific atrocities and human tragedies caused ([i]not only throughout history, but in recent times-- from Reagan onwards [/i]...) by big business plutocrats & corporate robber-barons run amok-- who rapaciously exploit workers, consumers, investors & the environment!
Unregulated capitalism run amok has permitted corporations to ruthlessly rape, swindle, plunder & loot our families ... Today we live in a society that is moving towards a [i]3rd world style [/i]tyranny ([i]not only because the ruthless Bush/Cheney Inc. junta install such ghoulish Big Brother schemes as the insane Patriot Acts ... Government should be transparent & accountable to the people, for protecting the people, by the rule of the people ... but, the Bush regime is the most dangerously secret & corrupt in modern times! [/i]...)-- because these [i]traitors-in-office [/i]serve corporations who are responsible for ruthlessly harming our families ...
Just ask the Enron folks & others throughout [i]our fruited plains [/i]about the "joys [sic]" of unregulated capitalism, who have lost their jobs, their pensions, their worker's protections, etc.-- while the [i]corrupt top-dogs & fat-cats[/i] are getting filthy richer & filthy richer & filthy richer ... Meanwhile, Bush's buddy, Kenny-boy ([i]Enron[/i]) Lay is at large, having raped thousands of employees out of their pension funds ... swindled investors ... plundered consumers & looted the American Taxpayers ...
Corporations are now, not paying anywhere near their fair share in taxes ... the neo-fascist Bushies have awarded them massive, immoral [i](& possibly illegal[/i]) tax loopholes, boondoggles & tax cuts-- creating the largest deficits in our nation's history, and the largest job losses since the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, the gap between the top 1% richest Americans who are grabbing over 90% of the nation's wealth, and working families who are struggling & a diminishing middle-class-- is growing at a rate unseen in over 75 years ...
* Poverty is skyrocketing as over 25 million families live under the poverty line established in the 1960s ... it is much, much worse than the official statistics reveal ...
* Those with jobs, haven't seen their pay keep up with the rate of inflation over the past few decades, while the already obscenely obese executive pay packets have risen over 300% ...
* Unemployment is still high as 9-15 million citizens who are without work [i](& Bush wants to give illegal immigrants permission to work here in order to create a slave labor class ... and destroy worker's rights[/i]) have either simply given up looking for work or are struggling in miserable conditions while jobs are being farmed-out where corporate rapists can pay slave labor wages ...
* Health care is a scandal with between 45-85 citizens lacking the means and the ability to get care if they fall ill ...
* Over 3.5 million citizens are homeless ([i]and it is worse, since the unchristian Bushies refuse to allow a census count of the homeless in America[/i]) ...
* Our food is being poisoned because corporations that go unregulated feed cows offal (for example), & become diseased -- and then are put into the food-chain for us to consume ...
* Our educational system is being allowed to deteriorate, in order that the corporate rapists can persuade poor dumb slobs to privatize education-- which will be the death of public education-- in order to create a [i]slave labor class [/i]of [i]dumb sheep [/i]who will blindly follow the corporate crooks ...
* Our environment is being ravaged as corporate crooks are allowed to emit poisons & toxins into our air & water, and allowed to destroy natural habitats-- these crimes are "allowed" in order that corporations & their corrupt executive swindlers can become fabulously wealthy ...
[b]This isn't freedom in action -- this represents a corporate rape [/b]... Unregulated capitalism is the worst form of tyranny disguising itself as "free enterprise" -- uh-huh, free in the same way that slavery meant that slave owners could be free to sit on their porches & drink mint julips, while others were treated with an immoral & unconscionable brutality and barbarity-- that should have been abolished over 100 years ago ... But slavery still exists-- only today it is not based upon race, it is based instead upon economic class.
An article of interest entitled "[i][b]Free Trade But [/b][/i]. . . " by Michael Kinsley http://www.washingtonpost.com... -- indicates that free trade might work if the corrupt Bush regime kept Americans from being screwed ...
[b]But, [i]unregulated capitalism [/i]run amok is simply a [i]pretty-sounding [/i]term for a [i]slave labor [/i]state![/b]
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| Powell Admits the Obvious: Bush/Cheney LIED About Non-Existent Links Between Iraq & Al Qaida |
| 01.09.04 (9:10 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] should be tried for [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i], [/b]as they led the U.S.A. into an illegal & immoral war against Iraq ... based upon lies ([i]a crime under the U.S. Constitution[/i] ) ... and morover, made false claims, not only about WMDs ([i]that haven't existed since the 1990s inspection process where most were destroyed[/i]) ... but, they also made false pronouncements about phony, non-existent links between Iraq & Al Qaida ...
Now, the cowardly Colin Powell, finally admits the obvious to anyone who has studied the intelligence reports made public over the past few months ... that Bush & Cheney [i]LIED[/i] about non-existent links between Iraq & Al Qaida ([i]the former under Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the U.S.A. ... the latter run by Osama bin Laden are purportedly responsible for the attack on 9/11 ... and Osama bin Laden is still at large & al Qaida is growing [/i]...)-- as the [i]inept & corporate-take-all[/i] Bush regime have embroiled the U.S.A. in a bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq, in order to enrich their corporate cronies: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc ... and, meanwhile, [i]'We the People' [/i]of America are no safer ... in fact, we are in more danger of terrorism and attacks than ever before!
Refer to "[i][b]Powell Admits No Hard Proof in Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda[/b][/i]" on http://www.commondreams.org/h... :
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.
"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted — and something administration officials have done little to discourage.
Mr. Powell offered a vigorous defense of his Feb. 5 presentation before the Security Council, in which he voiced the administration's most detailed case to date for war with Iraq. After studying intelligence data, he said that a "sinister nexus" existed "between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."
Without any additional qualifiers, Mr. Powell continued, "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants."
He added, "Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible."
On Thursday, Mr. Powell dismissed second-guessing and said that Mr. Bush had acted after giving Mr. Hussein 12 years to come into compliance with the international community.
"The president decided he had to act because he believed that whatever the size of the stockpile, whatever one might think about it, he believed that the region was in danger, America was in danger and he would act," he said. "And he did act."
In a rare, wide-ranging meeting with reporters, Mr. Powell voiced some optimism on several other issues that have bedeviled the administration, including North Korea and Sudan, while expressing dismay about the Middle East and Haiti.
But mostly, the secretary, appearing vigorous and in good spirits three weeks after undergoing surgery for prostate cancer, defended his justification for the war in Iraq. He said he had been fully aware that "the whole world would be watching," as he painstakingly made the case that the government of Saddam Hussein presented an imminent threat to the United States and its interests.
The immediacy of the danger was at the core of debates in the United Nations over how to proceed against Mr. Hussein. A report released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan Washington research center, concluded that Iraq's weapons programs constituted a long-term threat that should not have been ignored. But it also said the programs did not "pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region or to global security."
Mr. Powell's United Nations presentation — complete with audiotapes and satellite photographs — asserted that "leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option." The secretary said he had spent time with experts at the Central Intelligence Agency studying reports. "Anything that we did not feel was solid and multisourced, we did not use in that speech," he said Thursday.
He said that Mr. Hussein had used prohibited weapons in the past — including nerve gas attacks against Iran and Iraqi Kurds — and said that even if there were no actual weapons at hand, there was every indication he would reconstitute them once the international community lost interest.
"In terms of intention, he always had it," Mr. Powell said. "What he was waiting to do is see if he could break the will of the international community, get rid of any potential future inspections, and get back to his intentions, which were to have weapons of mass destruction."
The administration has quietly withdrawn a 400-member team of American weapons inspectors who were charged with finding chemical or biological weapons stockpiles or laboratories, officials said this week. The team was part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has not turned up such weapons or active programs, the officials said.
The Carnegie report challenged the possibility that Mr. Hussein could have destroyed the weapons, hidden them or shipped them out of the country. Officials had alleged that Iraq held amounts so huge — hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles — that such moves would have been detected by the United States, the report said.
The Washington Post this week reported that Iraq had apparently preserved its ability to produce missiles, biological agents and other illicit weapons through the decade-long period of international sanctions after the Persian Gulf war, but that their development had apparently been limited to the planning stage.
On North Korea, he said he had received "encouraging signals" from his Asian counterparts that the North might be close to agreeing to another round of six-party talks. But he said the administration would not yield on its insistence that the North first state its willingness to bring its nuclear program to a verifiable end.
Mr. Powell was equally hopeful about a peace agreement to end a grueling civil war in Sudan. "The key here is that after 20 years of most terrible war, Sudanese leaders have come together and are just one or two steps short of having a comprehensive peace agreement," he said.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said the United States and the three other nations promoting peace talks had expected more movement ending hostilities and establishing a Palestinian state. "They are as disturbed as I am that we haven't seen the kind of progress that we had hoped for," he said.
Turning to Haiti, where a decade ago Mr. Powell took part in a delegation that sought to persuade plotters in a military coup to step down, he voiced frustration at the failure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to reach agreement with his political foes. Violence has flared in recent days as anti-Aristide protesters demanded an end to a political deadlock that has paralyzed the government. The country's Catholic Bishops Conference has tried to broker a new agreement.
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| Dubya Misrepresented Threat Posed by Iraq's Non-Existent WMDs |
| 01.09.04 (9:02 am) [edit] |
Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-con arm-chair chicken-hawks (Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Feith-- [i]all of whom should be tried for treason and frog-marched off to jail, where they all belong [/i]...) misrepresented the threat posed by Iraq's non-existent WMDs ...
A new report http://www.guardian.co.uk/int...,3604,1118419,00.html by weapons proliferation experts at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace detail Bush's misrepresentation of the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. Researchers say no evidence of a threat existed strong enough to justify war.
[b]Sources:[/b]
War on Iraq News Log, AlterNet.org on http://www.alternet.org
"Carnegie group says Bush made wrong claims on WMD" on http://www.guardian.co.uk/int...,3604,1118419,00.html
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| Bush's Death Toll in Iraq Rises, His Bloody Guerrilla Quagmire Sours |
| 01.08.04 (6:48 am) [edit] |
[b]Bush's death toll in Iraq rises, on almost a daily basis, with no end in sight ... [/b]The capture of Saddam Hussein has not alleviated the anger & hatred that Iraqis feel ([i]another of Dubya's many, many lies[/i]) at having the U.S. occupying their country-- stealing their oil-- and swindling & looting their businesses ... Meanwhile, the kids of the poor & middle-class in the U.S. military & innocent Iraqis are being massacred to enrich Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc ... But not to worry, the corrupt Bushies & their [i]corporate-take-all [/i]war-profiteers, are not at risk, and neither are their loved ones!
Today's NY Times published "[i][b]U.S. Helicopter Crashes in Iraq, Killing at Least 8[/b][/i]" on http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... :
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 8 — An American military helicopter crashed in Iraq today killing all eight people on board, the American military said.
The helicopter, a UH-60 Black Hawk, came down south of Falluja, a city 35 miles west of Baghdad that has been the scene of heavy resistance to the American-led occupation.
"We do not have any information on the cause of the crash at this time," a military spokeswoman, Spc. Nicci Trent, said.
The helicopter, which was carrying four crew members and four passengers, was on a medical evacuation mission when it crashed, Specialist Trent said, though she provided no further details about the mission.
Insurgents have shot down several American military helicopters, most recently on Jan. 2 when they downed an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, also near Falluja, killing one crewman. In November, rebels committed a rash of downings, destroying four helicopters and killing more than 40 soldiers.
The crash came a day after insurgents fired six mortar rounds at a United States military camp about 50 miles northwest of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding 33 in an area used for living quarters, the military said today.
The military originally announced 35 casualties in the attack, but lowered the number to 34 today. The Associated Press reported that a civilian was also wounded in the barrage, which would account for the 35th casualty.
The military provided no further details on the severity of the injuries.
A Pentagon spokesman quoted by The Associated Press, Lt. Col. James Cassella, said some of the wounded returned to duty shortly after the attack, while others remained in the hospital.
The attack came at 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday, another day of fluctuating events for civilian and military authorities.
In Baghdad on Wednesday, the chief United States administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, formally announced a plan to free about 500 of the 9,000 Iraqis held in American camps in Iraq, beginning with an initial release of about 100. Adnan Pachachi, current chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, the provisional government-in-waiting, said the releases would begin today.
But American plans to formally return sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 were jarred by a statement questioning the American plan by the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Mr. Sistani said the plan to install a transitional government by June, to be followed by indirect elections next year to choose delegates to a constitutional convention, would not "ensure in any way the fair representation of the Iraqi people."
The reclusive cleric said he preferred that elections be held before the transfer of sovereignty in June. But he said he had been told by the Americans that this was not feasible — a stand that Mr. Bremer has explained by saying there is not time to prepare accurate and comprehensive voter rolls in Iraq, which has 25 million people and no history of free elections.
There had to be "another solution that is honest to the Iraqi people's demands," the cleric said.
Mr. Sistani's statements have been closely watched by Americans for signs whether Iraq's Shiite majority, roughly 60 percent of the population, will accept the longer political process favored by the Bush administration, which endeavors to win wide assent to a constitution that guarantees minority rights.
The Americans' fear is that Shiite clerics will push for a quick transition to majority rule, heightening the risk of violent clashes, even a civil war, between Shiite militants and the Sunni Muslim minority.
The United States command in Iraq said the mortar attack Wednesday night occurred at Logistical Base Seitz, near Balad. The city is the site of a Iraqi air base that has been converted into the largest American air base in Iraq.
The attack appeared to be similar to one on Saturday at another American camp near Balad, in which an American soldier standing at the door of his living quarters was struck and killed by a mortar fired from outside the base.
Such attacks reflect a changing pattern in the war, senior American officers say. After major offensives since mid-November with much of the powerful weaponry available to the United States command, including sustained artillery barrages, aerial bombing and airborne assaults with large numbers of helicopters, American commanders have reported an increasing tendency to attack "soft" targets.
Mortars have been an increasingly favored weapon, commanders say, because they allow the attackers to remain five to seven miles from the targets. Mortar shells can inflict severe shrapnel injuries, often to the lower part of the body.
Nearly 500 American soldiers have died from war wounds or accidents since United States forces invaded Iraq in March, but several thousand have been wounded, many of them severely, according to Pentagon statistics.
Overall, American commanders have begun to sound far more upbeat about the conflict since the capture of Saddam Hussein near Tikrit on Dec. 13.
The most confident assessment yet was offered at a news conference on Tuesday by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. General Swannack's operational area includes a swath to the west and south of Baghdad, including some of the hottest trouble spots in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where more than 90 percent of all attacks on American troops have occurred.
The general, a large, imposing figure renowned among his troops for his no-nonsense ways, began his remarks by reminding the reporters that he had appeared in Baghdad six weeks ago, about the time of the insurgents' Ramadan offensive, and had said he believed in his area were "turning the corner."
Now, he said, "I'm here to tell you that we've turned that corner."
"I can also tell you that we are on a glide path towards success, as attacks on our forces have declined by almost 60 percent over the past month," he continued.
He said the success had flowed from an offensive strategy of going after "former regime elements, extremists, foreign fighters and criminals," by generating jobs for military-age males and by destroying more than 22,000 tons of leftover weapons and ammunition from Mr. Hussein's military machine.
A few hours after General Swannack's appearance in Baghdad, a unit of the 82nd Airborne on patrol in Falluja, 35 miles to the west, became embroiled in one of the more criticized incidents in recent weeks.
A division statement said the unit had come under "indirect fire" in the town at about 9 p.m. on Tuesday, and had responded with grenades and small-arms fire.
At daylight, enraged neighbors said the Americans had killed a married couple and orphaned their five children. The American statement said only that "civilians in the area reported two dead personnel were taken to a nearby hospital."
[i]John F. Burns contributed reporting from from Baghdad for this article and Kirk Semple contributed from New York.[/i]
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| Why The Right Hates Public Education |
| 01.08.04 (6:35 am) [edit] |
[b]The right-wingers want to eliminate public education [/b]in order to create a neo-slave class of [i]dumb sheep [/i]who will serve their neo-feudal plutocracy-- and be willing to work for slave labor wages & live in miserable [i]3rd world style [/i]conditions ...
Consider also "[i][b]Why the Right Hates Public Education[/b][/i]" by Barbara Miner, on http://www.progressive.org/ja... :
In an article about education, it's appropriate to start with a pop quiz. Today's question: Republican strategists want to privatize education because:
[i]a) Education is a multibillion dollar market, and the private sector is eager to get its hands on those dollars.
b) Conservatives are devoted to the free market and believe [[u]wrongly[/u]] that private is inherently superior to public.
c) Shrinking public education furthers the Republican Party goal of drastically reducing the public sector.
d) Privatization undermines teacher unions, a key base of support for the Democratic Party.
e) Privatization rhetoric can be used to woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party.
f) All of the above[/i].
OK, I admit it, the answer's obvious: [i]all of the above[/i]. But in the debates over education policy, the Republican political agenda (see [i]d[/i] and [i]e[/i]) is often invisible.
Occasionally, Republican strategists let the cat out of the bag and admit that vouchers--which divert public dollars to private schools--are about politics, not education.
Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and one of the most influential Republican strategists in Washington, has long recognized the partisan value of vouchers, sometimes euphemistically referred to as "choice." "School choice reaches right into the heart of the Democratic coalition and takes people out of it," he said in a 1998 interview with Insight, the magazine of the conservative Washington Times.
Norquist and others see great political benefit in going after the teachers' unions. During the last thirty years, as private sector unionism has declined, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) have grown in strength. Today, the 2.7 million-member NEA is the country's largest union. The AFT has one million members, mostly in education but also in health care and the public sector.
While both teacher unions overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, conservatives especially hate the NEA. It is larger, more geographically diverse, with members in every Congressional district in the country, and more likely to push a liberal agenda that includes social issues such as gay rights.
As the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation complained this fall, the NEA is "the nation's largest, most powerful, and most political union."
The teacher unions back up their support for the Democratic Party with money and grassroots organization. After all, public schools exist in every municipality and county in the nation. Unlike manufacturing, teaching cannot be outsourced to Mexico, China, or Bangladesh.
In mainstream publications, conservatives tend to muffle their partisan antagonism toward teacher unions. Not so in conservative publications and documents.
The issue comes down to "a matter of power," said Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and co-author of the book Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, in an interview with the Heartland Institute in Chicago this summer.
The NEA and AFT "have a lot of money for campaign contributions and for lobbying," he said. "They also have a lot of electoral clout because they have many activists out in the trenches in every political district. . . . No other group can claim this kind of geographically uniform political activity. They are everywhere."
School vouchers are a way to diminish that power. "School choice allows children and money to leave the system, and that means there will be fewer public teacher jobs, lower union membership, and lower dues," Moe explains.
For those in the thick of the debate, it's long been obvious that vouchers are an attack on teacher unions. Even Wisconsin State Representative Annette "Polly" Williams, an African American who helped start the Milwaukee voucher program, the country's first, now admits as much. "The main motivation of some of the choice supporters was to weaken public education unions," she wrote in a letter this summer to Governor Jim Doyle.
Eliminating public education may seem unAmerican. But a growing number of movement conservatives have signed a proclamation from the Alliance for the Separation of School and State that favors "ending government involvement in education." Signatories include such Washington notables as David Boaz and Ed Crane of the Cato Institute; conservative author Dinesh D'Souza; Dean Clancy, who is an education policy analyst for House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert; and Howard Phillips, president of the Conservative Caucus.
Wisconsin State Representative Chris Sinicki, who was a Milwaukee School Board member when vouchers began in Milwaukee in 1990, says there is no doubt that vouchers "are a Republican strategy to take down public education and the unions. This is partisan politics, completely."
Which brings us back to our pop quiz and, in particular, to Answer e: Privatization rhetoric can be used to woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party.
In the 2000 Presidential election, Bush garnered only 8 percent of the African American vote and about 35 percent of the Latino vote. (Overall, less than 10 percent of Bush's votes came from minorities.) The following year, Republican strategist Matthew Dowd outlined a plan to boost African American support to 13-15 percent and Latino support to 38-40 percent for the 2004 election.
While universal vouchers remain the goal, for tactical reasons conservatives have wrapped vouchers in the mantle of concern for poor African Americans and Latinos. Indeed, voucher supporters are fond of calling school choice the new civil rights movement. This plays well not only with voters of color but also with liberal suburban whites who, while they may be leery of allowing significant numbers of minorities into their schools, nonetheless support the concept of equal rights for all.
Conservatives and their front groups in the African American and Latino communities have not been shy about comparing voucher opponents to Southern segregationists. During the Congressional push for vouchers in Washington, D.C., this fall, groups such as D.C. Parents for School Choice launched a particularly vicious campaign against prominent Democrats. "Forty years ago, politicians like George Wallace stood in the doors of good schools trying to prevent poor black children from getting in," one ad said, comparing voucher opponents like Senator Edward Kennedy to Wallace.
Virginia Walden-Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, was vague in explaining to the Washington community newspaper The Common Denominator how her group financed the ads. She did admit that over the years her group had received money from the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and Children First America--all prominent conservative organizations supporting vouchers. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group, provided media support. So did Audrey Mullen, a signer of the Separation of School and State proclamation.
Even if Republicans fail to woo African Americans and Latinos to the Republican Party, they may dampen African American and Latino voter turnout--a neutralization strategy, as it were.
"The strategy is to get young black people not to vote," says Michael Charney, editor of The Critique, the newspaper of the teachers' union in Cleveland, which also has a voucher program. "These radio commercials are aimed at the hip-hop generation. The goal is to discredit Democrats and breed cynicism."
The commercials, he continues, "are part of a conscious strategy by the most advanced elements in the electoral Republican machine. It's smart from their view, even if it is disgusting."
David Sheridan, an analyst for the NEA, agrees it will be tough for the Republicans to win over African American voters. "But I think it's different with the Hispanic audience," he says. "I think they see this as a major effort to get more Hispanic voters into the Republican camp."
The Republican emphasis on vouchers runs the risk of alienating moderate Republicans who support public education. Such support is strong not only in rural areas where public schools are a vital part of the community and private schools are few, but also in suburban communities with strong, well-funded public schools.
Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, cautions his Republican colleagues that they shouldn't even use the word "vouchers," which he refers to as "the deadly V-word."
"In my state, it's a pretty divisive word," he warned them in a speech on the Senate floor this fall.
But that won't stop conservatives like Norquist, who view vouchers as a key ingredient in their effort to "downsize" government services. "The problem is that the federal government hands out billions of dollars, and people will lie, cheat, steal, or bribe to get it," Norquist said in an interview with Reasononline, the website of the libertarian Reason Foundation. "If you have a big cake, and you put it under the sink and then you wonder why the cockroaches are in your kitchen, I don't think any sprays or blocking the holes in the walls are going to get rid of the cockroaches. You've got to throw the cake in the trash so that the cockroaches don't have something to come for."
The American people do not view public schoolteachers and students as cockroaches. The overwhelming majority strongly support public schools. They don't want them dismantled; they just want them to work better.
The attack by Norquist and his ilk is nothing less than a highly partisan attempt to undermine teacher unions and the Democratic Party, destroying our American tradition of public education in the process.
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| WMDs:-- A Saddam Fantasy ... The Bushies Fantasy Too! |
| 01.08.04 (6:30 am) [edit] |
[b]WMD, a Saddam fantasy[/b]
An exhaustive article in the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com... based on interviews with some of the key figures in Saddam's weapons development programs, reveals that Iraq simply did not have the resources to pose a "grave and gathering danger" to anyone.
[i]More [/i] http://www.alternet.org/waron...
[b]Looks like it was the corrupt Bushies fantasy too![/b]
[b]Source:[/b]
War on Iraq News Log, AlterNet.org on http://www.alternet.org
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| Right-Winged Hypocrites Say the Little People Can't Steal-- But It's Okay for Corporate Fraudsters |
| 01.07.04 (6:43 am) [edit] |
[b]IN THE DOCTRINE according to the hypocritical right-wingers, the "[i]little people[/i]" can't steal ... [/b]but it's okay for corporate fraudsters to swindle the investors-- defraud consumers-- embezzle & mistreat workers-- and, plunder & loot the U.S. Treasury!
There are laws in our nation that prohibit the "[i]little people[/i]" from committing theft, robbery, embezzlement, etc... But watch the Feds go after corporations who ruthlessly rape investors, harm consumers, abuse workers & con the U.S. taxpayers-- and the [i]corporate-owned whores [/i]on the right [i]scream & screech [/i]that it's an infringement upon the "[i]freedom[/i] [sic]" of corporations!
Corporate malfeasance has nothing to do with "[i]freedom[/i]" --- Good governance, laws, accounting practices, regulations and controls to ensure that corporations do not steal from us-- poison us-- injure us-- exploit us-- pollute our environment, etc. are NECESSARY-- and the "[i]freedom[/i]" for corporate robber-barons to TAKE ALL, and leave the rest of us bereft and in misery-- IS A CON-GAME DEVISED BY CORPORATIONS that results in a SORDID & SQUALID SWINDLE LEAVING THE REST OF US heinously violated & impoverished.
There is no such thing as total [i]"freedom"[/i] for either individuals, corporations, small businesses, or government to do whatever they want to do ... That leads to crime, abuse and barbaric economic rape. These hypocritical right-wingers who condemn [i]government intrusion [/i]into our lives ought to take a good look at the [i]corporation intrusion [/i]into our lives that is far more heinous, pernicious and destructive under the corrupt Bush regime.
Sometimes government does a damn good job ([i]e.g. when the police stop someone from raping your daughter, or murdering your husband, or stealing your money[/i]) ... and sometimes corporations steal, swindle, embezzle, plunder & loot-- and such corporate criminals need to be arrested, tried & prosecuted if found guilty ... Sometimes government officials ([i]e.g. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, etc.[/i]) commit crimes & need to be held accountable, also ...
Thank goodness, however, for good government ([i]which itself needs to be held accountable ... as do corporations who cannot be allowed to run over us in their zeal for unbound corrupting power & ill-gotten stolen riches[/i])!
For more background on "[i][b]Corporate Malfeasance[/b][/i]" refer to http://www.creativeinvest.com...
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| "Resist the New Rome" by Osama bin Laden |
| 01.06.04 (6:23 pm) [edit] |
[b]Resist the New Rome [/b]by [i]Osama bin Laden[/i]
My message is to urge jihad to repulse the grand plots hatched against our nation, such as the occupation of Baghdad, under the guise of the search for weapons of mass destruction, and the fierce attempt to destroy the jihad in beloved Palestine by employing the trick of the road map and the Geneva peace initiative.
The Americans' intentions have also become clear in statements about the need to change the beliefs and morals of Muslims to become more tolerant, as they put it.
In truth, this is a religious-economic war. The occupation of Iraq is a link in the Zionist-crusader chain of evil. Then comes the full occupation of the rest of the Gulf states to set the stage for controlling and dominating the whole world.
For the big powers believe that the Gulf and the Gulf states are the key to global control due to the presence of the largest oil reserves there. The situation is serious and the misfortune momentous.
The west's occupation of our countries is old, but takes new forms. The struggle between us and them began centuries ago, and will continue. There can be no dialogue with occupiers except through arms. Throughout the past century, Islamic countries have not been liberated from occupation except through jihad. But, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the west today is doing its utmost to besmirch this jihad, supported by hypocrites.
Jihad is the path, so seek it. If we seek to deter them with any means other than Islam, we would be like our forefathers, the Ghassanids [Arab tribes living under the Byzantine empire]. Their leaders' concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula's Arabs.
Such is the case of the new Ghassanids, the Arab rulers. Muslims, if you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem and Iraq, they will defeat you. They will also rob you of the land of the two holy places [Saudi Arabia].
Today they have robbed you of Baghdad and tomorrow they will rob you of Riyadh unless God deems otherwise. What is the means to stop this tremendous onslaught? Some reformers maintain that all popular and government forces should unite to ward off this crusader-Zionist onslaught.
But the question strongly raised is: are the governments in the Islamic world capable of pursuing their duty to defend the faith and nation and renouncing all allegiance to the United States?
The calls by some reformers are strange. They say that the path to defending the homeland and people passes though the doors of those western rulers. I tell those reformers: if you have an excuse for not pursuing jihad, it does not give you the right to depend on the unjust. God does not need your flattery of dictators.
The Gulf states proved their total inability to resist the Iraqi forces [in 1990-1]. They sought help from the crusaders, led by the United States. These states then came to America's help and backed it in its attack against an Arab state [Iraq in 2003].
These regimes submitted to US pressure and opened their air, land and sea bases to contribute towards the US campaign, despite the immense repercussions of this move. They feared that the door would be open for bringing down dictatorial regimes by armed forces from abroad, especially after they had seen the arrest of their former comrade in treason and agentry to the United States [Saddam Hussein] when it ordered him to ignite the first Gulf war against Iran, which rebelled against it.
The war plunged the area into a maze from which they have not emerged to this day. They are aware that their turn will come. They do not have the will to make the decision to confront the aggression. In short, the ruler who believes in the above-mentioned deeds cannot defend the country. Those who support the infidels over Muslims, and leave the blood, honour and property of their brothers to their enemy in order to remain safe, can be expected to take the same course against one another in the Gulf states.
Indeed, this principle is liable to be embraced within the state itself. And in fact the rulers have started to sell out the sons of the land by pursuing, imprisoning and killing them. This campaign has been part of a drive to carry out US orders.
Honest people concerned about this situation should meet away from the shadow of these oppressive regimes and declare a general mobilisation to prepare for repulsing the raids of the Romans, which started in Iraq and no one knows where they will end.
· [i]This is an edited extract of a recording believed to have been made by the al-Qaida leader, transmitted by al-Jazeera and translated by the BBC Monitoring Service [/i] on http://www.guardian.co.uk/com...,3604,1116855,00.html
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| American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush |
| 01.06.04 (7:09 am) [edit] |
[b]One of the great lies perpetrated by the corrupt Bush regime [/b]is the stupidly ignorant notion that Dubya is a 'common-ordinary-guy' ([i]true, Dubya isn't a bright man ... he is in fact, rather stupid ... and is 'propped-up', only due to his name & family connections [/i]... [i]Dubya's Texan swaggering & cowboy talk simply betray his imbecilic fantasies, childish temperment & half-witted mentality [/i]...) ... Dubya comes from the plutocracy-- the hyper-wealthy families who have hijacked our nation-- produce spoiled brats with mediocre minds & no loyalty to our nation, who are bred to take-over and turn the rest of us into their miserable neo-slaves who serve their neo-feudal slave state.
A new book entitled "[i][b]American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush[/b][/i]" is recently published by Viking Press and is reviewed by Professor Douglas Brinkley on http://www.motherjones.com/ar... :
Over the past year a cottage industry of anti-Bush diatribes has exploded onto the best-seller list. Many have unforgettable titles like Molly Ivins' Bushwhacked or Hunter S. Thompson's Kingdom of Fear or Al Franken's Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them). These books are brimming with nasty one-liners and parlor jokes portraying George W. Bush as a dangerous dunce, an aristocratic oil brat unfit for the Oval Office. The Bush Cabinet fares no better: Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, has been characterized as an utterly corrupt stalking horse for Halliburton, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has become Dr. Strangelove incarnate.
Given this left-liberal publishing phenomenon, where evil Bushies lurk around every civic bend dismantling our constitutional rights, it is with welcome relief that political commentator and one-time GOP strategist Kevin Phillips has stepped into the fray. Unlike the recent spate of anti-Bush books, Phillips' American Dynasty -- an erudite manifesto on the dangers of cronyism, hereditary privilege, "paper entrepreneurialism," and tax shelters -- is devastating due to its analytical fair-mindedness. Essentially, he traces how four generations of Bushes corrupted U.S. foreign policy through international business ventures that benefited the family. The most recent two George Bushes aren't evil people, Phillips argues, just greedy and ambitious Ivy League Texans. The Bush family has brought the American political system to a "perilous state," he believes, due to their cunning brand of petro-politics. "The family's ties to oil date back to Ohio steelmaker Samuel Bush's relationship to Standard Oil a century ago, while its ultimately dynastic connection to Enron spanned the first national Bush administration, the six years of George W. Bush's governorship of Texas, and the first year of his Washington incumbency," he writes. "No other presidential family has made such prolonged efforts on behalf of a single corporation."
With great skill, Phillips illuminates how the "Bush Dynasty" has long used such old-boy organizations as Yale's Skull and Bones, the CIA, Dillon Read, and most recently the Carlyle Group to further its main objective: political-economic power. He delineates the family's ethically questionable dealings with such companies as Enron, Zapata Petroleum, and Halliburton. We even learn that Prescott Bush, George H.W.'s father and a U.S. senator from Connecticut, had investment dealings with Nazi Germany in the 1930s while working for the banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman.
A major motif that Phillips develops throughout American Dynasty is the influence of Texas machismo on modern political culture. In his view, the Lone Star State has "an ego to match its acreage." Phillips sees the Dallas-Houston-Waco-Austi n- Midland way of doing things as detrimental -- even menacing -- to the world at large. Cleverly, the Bush Dynasty, with its deep New England roots, shifted its operations to Texas after World War II to a land where the law could be more easily manipulated, he claims. Instead of sipping sherry at the Century Club in New York, the Bushes, by the time the Astrodome was built in the mid-1960s, were plopping their cowboy boots on the velvet sofas at the Petroleum Club in Houston. Phillips, however, makes clear that the genius behind the Bush Dynasty is its ability to be from both the Permian Basin and Wall Street. He quotes University of Pennsylvania professor John J. DiIulio -- who had been the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives -- as deeming this dynastic synergy the rise of "Mayberry Machiavellianism."
There is nothing new about Texans rising to the top in American politics. Dwight Eisenhower hailed from Denison and Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, and Phillips has no beef with either of them. Neither of these national leaders, however, was a religious fundamentalist like George W. Bush. It's the certitude of our current president's born-againism that disturbs Phillips the most. Somehow his descriptions of oil greed or CIA intrigue or Beltway manipulation are less alarmist than the long chapter devoted to Bush's evangelism. "George W. Bush's early emergence in national politics, between 1986 and 1994, tapped religious forces akin to those promoting Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and fueling the rise of Islamic parties in Pakistan, Turkey, and elsewhere," Phillips writes. While this assertion may not be provable, Phillips does a credible job of connecting Protestant fundamentalism in Dixie with similar movements in the Middle East and East Asia. His exposé on the history of Armageddon as an influential concept in American foreign policy is simultaneously humorous and scary.
Most of American Dynasty is not based on primary research. Phillips borrows ideas throughout the book -- always with scrupulous accreditation -- from dozens of secondary sources. He relies, at times quite heavily, on two workmanlike books from the 1980s: Nicholas King's George Bush: A Biography and Fitzhugh Green's George Bush: An Intimate Portrait. In graceful original prose, he incorporates geopolitical notions first explored by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, historian Daniel Yergin in his magisterial book The Prize, and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. But the syn- thesis is pure Phillips: He is a deep thinker extraordinaire, who does a masterful job of connecting the military-industrial dots right up to the conduct of the Iraq War and the postwar reconstruction.
While his subheads and chapter titles are too cutesy for my liking -- e.g., "Indiana Bush and the Axis of Evil," "The Not-Quite Royal Family," and "George H.W. Bush: Man in the Brooks Brothers Trench Coat? -- Phillips has, nonetheless, created a searing indictment of the Bush Dynasty. In American Dynasty, he has provided an informed, nigh-genetic basis for understanding our current president. What do you think? on mailto:backtalk@motherjon es.com?subject=Backtalk: All in the Family .
[i]Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies and professor of history at the University of New Orleans[/i].
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| US Fakes Casualty Numbers in Iraq to Blunt Bad News |
| 01.06.04 (6:50 am) [edit] |
[b]The Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] war-mongering neo-cons & neo-fascist corporate cronies have no respect for the rule of law ... [/b]they have no respect for the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... they have no respect for the American or Iraqi peoples ... and, they have no respect for the truth ... Their only priority is to "[i]win at all costs[/i]" irrespective of what sordid & squalid crimes they must commit to do so ...
The US is faking the casualty numbers in Iraq, in order to blunt the bad news coming back ... this heinous crime is reminiscent of the[i] bad ole' days [/i]of Vietnam ... Consider "[i][b]Iraq Diaries: Conflicting numbers and a surreal press conference[/b][/i]" on http://electroniciraq.net/new... :
Yesterday, in Controlling what we hear from Iraq, I reported on an attack upon a US Humvee patrol in Al-Dora, Baghdad, which is in the Al-Rashid district.
However, statements taken from three boys and five men who witnessed the US military clean-up and medical evacuations all reported the same story: The US military flew in medical choppers to air lift 2 wounded soldiers from the scene. They all witnessed at least five bodies loaded into US vehicles and driven from the scene.
These statements were taken from some scene of the incident the day after it occurred, as well as taken from several men from other areas of Al-Dora.
A phone call from the scene of the incident to the Coalition Public Information Center (CPIC) provided information that the US military reported two dead and three wounded soldiers.
This is confirmed by accessing the following information:
According to press release 04-01-03C on 2 January, US Cent Com reports 2 dead, 3 injured Task Force 1st Armored Division Soldiers Killed in Ambush in Al Rashid district at about noon when their convoy was struck by an IED, then the soldiers taking small arms fire after the explosion. (Source)
The same press release can be found on the Combined Joint Task Force Seven website, release #040103g, with the same dead and injured count. (Source)
Thus, the usual conflict in the number of US soldiers killed and injured rests between the many Iraqis who witnessed the scene during the US cleanup and medical evacuations, and the figures given by CENTCOM and Combined Joint Task Force 7.
The US military in Iraq has been under constant scrutiny for under-reporting US casualty figures from attacks throughout Iraq. The effect of this is to give the impression to both the media and people of Iraq, as well as people in the US that the degree of loss of life by US military personnel in Iraq is lower than it may actually be.
Thus, the sense of urgency the US military is faced with in Iraq isn't being conveyed to the public. For example, I just moments ago returned from a CIPIC press conference by General Kimmitt where he stated there are 25 attacks per day on coalition forces.
Nor are people being allowed the opportunity to grasp the seriousness of the mounting US casualties in Iraq as a result of the occupation.
This being an election year in the US only brings more doubt about the actual figures being reported by the military here as compared to the numbers provided by Iraqis witnessing the attacks and/or the medical operations which ensue.
Virtually every investigation I've conducted on events of this nature has provided a disparity in the numbers of US dead and wounded between those reported by CPIC and Iraqi witnesses; be they civilians, hospital staff, or figures from the morgue.
This point is further underlined by the incident in Samarra at the end of November when the US military claimed a convoy came under attack by a highly organized group of Fedayeen fighters and responded by killing 54 of them. Upon further investigation by myself and several other journalists at the hospital, morgue, and several interviews in Samarra, the highest Iraqi body count recorded was 8. The US military never adjusted their figures to reflect this, despite the fact that no more than 8 bodies have ever been found as a result of this battle.
Not only has the US casualty rate in Iraq continued unabated since the capture of Saddam Hussein, it has increased.
On a daily basis US soldiers are dying here, as well as being severely wounded. When one looks at a general headline on a news website and reads: 1 US soldier killed, 2 wounded, it is not shown the degree to which these soldiers are wounded. Many have suffered permanent brain damage, loss of feet, legs, hands, arms. There lives are changed forever by permanent disabilities; rather than the impression the mainstream media leaves of injured by cuts and bruises.
The system of information control runs deep in Iraq today. The CPA has recently released a law stating that no public demonstrations are allowed without their approval and consent. If a demonstration occurs without said, the people will be detained promptly.
During the aforementioned press conference this evening, attended not only by media but the additional 15 US soldiers in the room, I paid close attention to the words used by General Kimmitt and the very uptight man in the suit standing next to him assisting him in answering questions posed by the media.
After laughing and looking at one another while smiling on two different occasions while giving a press conference while reporting attacks on US troops resulting in them dying and being wounded, the two men at the podium used interesting terms in order to avoid the term "resistance."
Resistance fighters are thus referred to as "anti-coalition fighters", "anti-coalition suspects" (detainees), and of course the mainstay, "terrorists."
We are shown a slick video taken by military personnel of a raid conducted on the Ibn Taimiyah Mosque last Thursday. This raid brought great scrutiny on the CPA for disrespecting the traditions and culture here, due to the fact that US soldiers raided it wearing their combat boots and wielding weapons. They rolled up the pray rugs while looking for tunnels hiding weapons caches, and coming up empty on the tunnels.
While the raid did yield many weapons, TNT, and grenades, the method in which it was conducted may be more detrimental to the occupiers efforts than the fruits it yielded.
They arrested its prayer leader, Shaikh Mahdi Salah al-Sumaidi, a member of the Supreme Council for Religious Guidance, along with 20 of his assistants. General Kimmitt went out of his way to point out in the video, how the Sheikh was bound and handled as fairly as all the other detainees.
My Iraqi friend sitting next to me holds her hand to her forehead, holding her head and shaking it slowly while watching the bound Sheikh, as well as the soldiers wearing boots in the mosque, carrying weapons, and rolling up the rugs. She is in disbelief.
While US soldiers may need to conduct raids on mosques, wouldn"t a better policy be to let IPs (Iraqi Police) or Iraqi Civil Defense personnel handle this culturally sensitive operation?
In addition, General Kimmitt went out of his way to stress that IPs and ICDCs were "fully integrated" in the force that raided the mosque. If so, why didn"t these men conduct the raid? Why were only US soldiers seen in the mosque on the video?
During the rattling off of statistics of numbers of raids, detainees, and weapons caches found, there is never any mention of Iraqi civilian casualties.
Instead, they discuss a "whole new group" of Iraqis stepping forward to help the coalition since the capture of Saddam Hussein. They divide these two groups into the "Hopefuls" (those who want to help now that he is gone) and the "Fearfuls" (those who were too afraid to help while his shadow was still at large).
After the carefully conducted press conference comes to a close, I walk out of the surreal atmosphere of the CPIC in the fancy conference hall, back into the insecure streets of Baghdad to return home. The usual sporadic gunfire from various parts of the city echoes off the buildings as night falls over the land of the "Hopefuls" and "Fearfuls."
[i]Dahr Jamail is a freelance journalist and political activist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has come to Iraq to bear witness and write about how the US occupation is affecting the people of Iraq, since the media in the US has in large part, he believes, failed to do so[/i].
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| Bush Refuses To Co-operate With FBI To Find White House Felons |
| 01.06.04 (6:33 am) [edit] |
"[b]White House press secretary [/b]Scott McClellan declined to say Monday whether President Bush thinks his aides should sign forms that would release reporters from any pledges of confidentiality regarding the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame." ... Of course, what would Bush do with Cheney, Rice & Rove in jail? ... Who would be there to tell Bush what to do & what to say?
[b]Source:[/b] "No Word From Bush On Forms in Leak Probe - FBI Tactic Encourages Reporters to Talk" by Mike Allen, Washington Post, on http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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| America: The Real Danger Lies Within |
| 01.05.04 (11:39 am) [edit] |
[b]The real danger lies within[/b], as citizens of the U.S.A. ([i]a supposedly "free" [sic] country[/i]) [u]attack[/u] other citizens who criticize the insane neo-fascist Bush regime! Doesn't anyone study history anymore? Don't people comprehend that we were founded by brilliant men who saw how a tyrannical & corrupt government could destroy a people? When will Americans wake-up to the fact that a corrupt cabal of neo-con thugs & goons, with loyalty only to their own lust for infinite power & riches, have hijacked our nation?
Consider "[i][b]America: The Real Danger Lies Within[/b][/i]" by Eric Margolis on http://www.commondreams.org/v... :
The year 2003 dramatically and dolefully illustrated Lord Acton's famous dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
An almighty United States, unrestrained by any rival, international body, or world opinion, bestrode the globe, a belligerent colossus determined to monopolize global oil reserves and use its vast military power to crush lesser nations or malefactors that disturbed the Pax Americana.
For America's hard right - a curious farrago of Armageddon-seeking southern Protestants; neo-conservative supporters of Israel's right-wing Likud party; and the military-industrial-petro leum complex - the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy of world domination, and utter contempt for international laws and old allies, marks a new era of national greatness. President George Bush, who vowed his foreign policy would be "humble" and "compassionate," has turned out to be the most radical president in modern U.S. history.
But for those Americans whose primary loyalty was to their country, rather than to religious cultism, foreign nations, or financial profit, the rapid emergence of the U. S. as an imperial power waging two hugely expensive colonial wars in Asia was a disaster, both for America's democratic system and for the rest of the world.
Bush's vow to bring "democracy" to the Mideast rang as hollow as pious assurances by 19th century European colonialists they were gobbling up Africa and Asia to bring the blessings of Christianity and civilization to benighted savages. Pillaging resources, not enlightenment, were - and remain - the true colonial motivation.
Bush's claims to hold the mandate of heaven to wage global warfare against the nebulous forces of "terrorism" sounded as dangerous and nonsensical as old Chairman Leonid Brezhnev's drunken claims it was the Soviet Union's "sacred internationalist duty" to launch military adventures anywhere on Earth where socialism was threatened.
Columnist Georgie Anne Gayer put it perfectly when she recently wrote that whereas America used to lead the world as champion of democracy, personal freedom and human rights, today, under Bush, it instead seeks to dominate the world through raw military and monetary power.
[b]Carte blanche [/b]
In 2003, we saw an abject, cowardly Congress violate its duty as the republic's premier political organ by disgracefully handing the barely elected president carte blanche to wage an unprovoked war against Iraq that was justified by a torrent of ludicrous lies worthy of Dr. Goebbels. Lies and propaganda that were packaged in the best tradition of Soviet agitprop as news, then force-fed by a servile media to an ill-informed public shockingly deficient in any sense of history, geography, or foreign affairs.
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and sundry military adventures around the globe, were made possible by a steady drumbeat of warnings from the White House and its neo-con trumpets that the U.S. was in dire national peril from "terrorists" and "rogue states." Paranoia again swept America during the holiday season as planes were grounded and orange alerts flashed at a populace that responded to these synthetic alarms with well-trained Pavlovian reflexes.
Though the mighty United States, with only 5% of world population, accounts for nearly 50% of total global military spending, the continuing Orwellian message from Washington was of fear and vulnerability. Vague threats of terrorist attack and menacing Muslims were used to curtail American civil liberties, and expand the government's powers of repression and intrusion. The public barely noticed this sinister, proto-totalitarian campaign.
The so-called "war on terrorism" was a hoax used to mask and justify the long-planned expansion of U.S. military power around the globe. What were in reality a series of police actions waged against tiny anti-American groups was no more a war than the farcical "war on drugs." But invoking war trumped criticism and dissent - and justified a real war of aggression against oil-rich Iraq.
The very term "terrorism" is a nonsense designed for propaganda effect; a damning label applied by the administration to groups or states strongly opposing U.S. policy.
A "war on terrorism" makes no more sense than waging war on evil.
Those who opposed Washington's surging imperial and totalitarian impulses were branded "leftists" and "anti-Americans." The French thinker Regis Debray, writing about past colonial powers, answers thus: "The free man is not anti-American, but anti-imperial. America (now) revisits the time of colonizers drunk on their superiority, convinced of their liberating mission, and counting on reimbursing themselves directly."
Criticizing U.S. foreign policy run-amok and George Bush does not equal anti-Americanism. It is the citizen's birthright, and the friend's duty.
This writer has witnessed nine colonial wars and saw how they corrupted the armies, and then the nations, that waged them, brutalizing conquered and conqueror alike. Iraq is the latest.
Mankind's three worst scourges are religious fanaticism, nationalism and imperialism. Each of these three evils has been whipped up by the Bush administration to justify domination abroad, repression of dissidence at home and, of course, re-election.
Those who truly love and respect the United States, like this writer, a conservative and U.S. Army veteran, see the very qualities that made America a beacon to the world - its very soul - now under heavy assault by a cabal of religious fanatics, foreign-leaning ideological extremists, and self-enriching Enron-Republicans. That is a danger considerably greater than al-Qaida.
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| Don't Buy The New Neo-Con Con-Game ... War Ain't Peace |
| 01.04.04 (7:13 am) [edit] |
[b]Don't buy the new neo-con con-game ... War [u][i]Ain't[/i][/u] Peace ... [/b]It's another scam conjured up [i]in the bowels [/i]of the corrupt Bush regime to fool yet again, the sleepy headed American public in 2004!
Remember that Dubya ran in 2000, on a cynical, [i]phony & "sexed-up" [/i]platform of:-- the "compassionate" conservative, bringing people together, integrity in government, and, humble foreign policy-- Instead we've gotten an insane neo-con, neo-fascist cabal of goons & thugs, in diametric opposition to the Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] mendacious neo-orwellian propaganda:--
* Instead of a "compassionate" conservative, we've been[i] saddled with the most callous & corrupt conservative [/i]in dumb Dubya, in the history of our nation;
* Instead of integrity in government, we've got [i]felons, war-mongers and embezzlers [/i]in the neo-fascist Bush regime;
* Instead of bringing people together, we've got a [i]barbaric, strong-arm, thuggish mafioso-style [/i]regime who uses coercion, threats, bribes & god-only-knows what other forms of [i]brutish punishment [/i]on their political opponents here at home and abroad: The Bushies have made the world more divisive and dangerous than ever before;
* Instead of a humble foreign policy, the neo-hitlerian Bush regime has [i]illegally & immorally invaded other sovereign nations[/i]-- using lies, deceptions and falsehoods-- and has treated the rest of the world like their own private royal domaine, to exploit, plunder & loot at their unlawful whim.
Now, the corrupt Bush regime is trying to portray the Mad King George as a "[i]man of peace[/i]" ... Uh-huh! Come 'on folks ... Surely, we [i]ain't[/i] that easily neo-con conned, are we? ... We had better learn how to [i]Connect-the-Dots [/i]... and we had better learn quickly!
[b]The Mad King George's neo-con arm-chair chicken-hawks are already planning for ever more wars in Syria, Iran & N. Korea http://www.tblog.com/template... , following the 2004 elections[/b]!
Consider "[b][i]Rebranding Bush as man of peace[/i][/b] on http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa...,12271,1115330,00.html :
The White House has retreated from its doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive military action and is returning to traditional diplomacy in an effort to repackage George Bush as a president for peace.
Signs of the new strategy that have emerged in the past few weeks include:
· North Korea, where authorities yesterday agreed to allow US inspectors to visit its nuclear complex next week.
· Iran, where the US proposed, through UN channels, sending a high-level humanitarian mission after last week's earthquake - although Tehran last night asked for any visit to be delayed.
· Libya, where the US welcomed Muammar Gadafy's surprise decision to give up weapons of mass destruction.
· Iraq, where the Bush administration is pressing for greater involvement from the international community.
· Palestine, where US peace envoy John Wolf may be sent to try to restart talks.
The signs of a thaw in US relations with these and other countries point to a different approach emerging in Washington. It emphasises cooperation, dialogue and diplomacy in place of the policies that have characterised the Bush administration's thinking to date. While Mr Bush publicly asserts Washington's right to defend its interests by any means, in practice he is increasingly pursuing a collaborative approach.
"There is a definite shift in US policy in everything but words," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms control expert. "The official doctrine has not changed but all our actions have, and the result is a shift away from military action towards diplomatic engagement. First with Iran, then with Libya and now with North Korea, we see a much greater effort to affect changes in regime behaviour rather than changes of regime."
Analysts in Washington say the Bush administration has little choice if it is to fulfil a highly ambitious election year agenda that seeks to disarm "rogue states" such as North Korea while advancing towards a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, encouraging conflict resolution in Sudan, and achieving credible transformations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
All these objectives are complicated and to some degree hindered by the "war on terror" against a resurgent al-Qaida, and by America's failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.
Despite notable successes in overthrowing and capturing Saddam Hussein and toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, White House hopes of bringing democratic governance in Iraq and Afghanistan hang in the balance amid continuing violence and discord.
Iraq is crucial to the administration's policy shift - either because, as conservatives argue, leaders of other rogue regimes learnt a lesson from Saddam's fate, or, as others say, because the conflict has so extended the military, Washington cannot contemplate the opening of a new front.
"It's just the force of reality, the consequences of Iraq which has made them change," said Anatol Lieven, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Even by their standards it is not rational to think that America can run another war."
With elections 11 months away, Mr Bush does not want to be vulnerable to claims that he has presided over a warmongering strategy that has left Americans little safer than September 11 2001. His shift follows an established pattern in Washington of politicians moving to the centre during an election year.
But Mr Bush has an additional consideration with Iraq. He is keenly aware that the electorate's judgment of his performance depends heavily on events there. Despite a rally in his popularity after Saddam's capture two weeks ago, opinion polls suggest overall attitudes towards the war have not fundamentally changed. Public concern at American casualties in Iraq has continued to rise and, ominously for Mr Bush, the violence in Iraq has not lessened.
White House policy is also being influenced by Washington's allies, notably Britain. After the chasms over Iraq, the US and the Europeans seem to have reached an understanding about the right mix of diplomacy and force - particularly during negotiations with Iran and Libya.
Britain's influence is particularly strong. British government sources were reluctant to talk about the US change of tack last night for fear of giving any impression of gloating. But any signs that Mr Bush is moving back to a multilateral foreign policy will be welcomed in London - if only in private - as a vindication of Tony Blair's strategy of dealing with the president. Friends describe this as "complete solidarity in public, and complete candour in private".
Sources say Mr Blair's relationship with Mr Bush is so strong that an informal weekly video conference has now become a regular fixture in their diaries.
The conferences are primarily designed to discuss Iraq, though the two leaders have also discussed other issues such as Iran. Sensitive issue, such as Libya, are discussed on more secure lines.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the prime minister's chief foreign policy adviser, talks on an almost daily basis with Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser. Sir David Manning, the British ambassador in Washington, meets Dr Rice regularly.
The change in direction is also a result of the constant struggle for influence between pragmatists and hawks that has been a defining feature of the Bush administration. The neo-conservatives appear to be losing ground, with speculation about upcoming bureaucratic reshuffling.
"The state department pinstripes have replaced the department of defence bluster," Mr Cirincione said.
The move to negotiated, diplomatic solutions is unlikely to be welcomed by the vice president, Dick Cheney, the most influential of Washington's hawks, who have often dominated policy making.
But in an interview published this week, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, seemed to suggest the policy battle was finally going his way. Mr Powell acknowledged that the administration's top priority in the coming months would be cooperative peace making, rather than war making.
"I'm going to work very hard in making clear to our friends in Europe and elsewhere in the world that America is a partner - spend more time with them, spend more time listening to them and finding ways what we can cooperate together," Mr Powell told the Washington Post.
On Iraq, Mr Powell indicated that a switch in US policy was required. He said the UN and Nato had essential roles to play and the US needed to persuade other countries to forgive or reschedule Iraq's $120bn (£67bn) foreign debts.
[b]Another Source:[/b]
"Neo-Con Arm-Chair Chicken-Hawks Lust For Wars in Syria, Iran & N Korea" on http://www.tblog.com/template...
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