An angel in my pocket, and a Buddha dancing upon my walls...

This Blog Wordled

2008-09-25T23:41:00.005-04:00

title="Wordle: My Blogspot Blog Wordled"> src="http://wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/211268/My_Blogspot_Blog_Wordled"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">

That's an image called a "Word Cloud", and you can try having a bit of fun by going over to Wordle, and trying it out for yourself.

http://wordle.net

Or just click on the link on the top of this page, and you will be quickly redirected there in a flash.

You will need Java to work with it, however.

A Day In The Life - seeing Paul McCartney in Quebec

2008-07-21T15:16:00.009-04:00

Well, yesterday I decided to return to my hometown of Quebec City - to see Paul McCartney's free show on the Plains of Abraham - with around 200,000 other people similarly inclined.

Just some thoughts on that amazing experience to share with all of you.

Woke up, got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, i noticed i was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat

Sunday morning, I was a little late in leaving. My original intention had been to take the earliest bus possible, and spend some time sightseeing around the city. I haven't been back for around twenty years or so, so I was looking forward to seeing how both Quebec City and I had changed.

Get back, get back.
Get back to where you once belonged

I'd spent twenty one years there growing up, and had left there thirty years ago - knowing no one in Montreal.

It's about a two and a half hour bus ride there, and it's one I'd taken many times as a young man. The route there hasn't changed much, but Quebec City and I certainly both have.

There's this point where one sees the two bridges , the old and the new, that cross the mighty St. Lawrence river. If you grew up there, that's the moment you know you are home....or are leaving it.

And so crossing that bridge, at least in my case, is always a special moment. As a twenty one year old, it was like knowing it was not just a bridge to other places - it was also a bridge to a (what seemed at the time) a very uncertain future in front of me. In a deep recession (at the time), I was heading to a city where I knew no one.

So that bridge was one across a river of water, and river of time. The physical and metaphysical join into one, as it were.

Now, thirty one years later,it was a poignant moment for me.

There are places i'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends i still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life i've loved them all

Now the situation was reversed, and there was no one I knew there anymore. Thank's to Quebec's past political situation, everyone I'd grown up with had left to find their fortune elsewhere. A once thriving small English community, it's now vanished to almost zero.

So I watched with great interest as the bus started to wind it's way into the city, and it had changed quite a bit physically. Quebec's celebrating it's 400th birthday, and this was perhaps one of the highlights of that celebration.

It's a bit like meeting your first girlfriend again, three decades later, and you find out she looks different.....but she's still got it.

It's streets were PACKED with people, and all sorts of exhibits and shows are going on there. It was also the start of the annual construction holiday vacation,adding even more people. Now Quebec's a tourist town, and summers always a time to see it's streets fill as more people discover it's history, incredible history, and European charm.

I highly recommend a visit there to anyone who wants to go to Europe, while remaining in North America. Cobblestone streets, the French language and culture, it's all there to discover. I've traveled both coasts of North America, and it's still the most beautiful city I've come across - but then again I'm a bit biased in the matter as a hometown boy.

I'd planned to do a "stations of the cross" type of visit, and return to some of those special places in my life. I wanted to walk with those ghosts one last time, and embrace what they'd meant to me.

Seeing those crowds, I decided to leave that for another time.

Now Quebec City will never be confused with a pool table. One quickly discovers that one is seldom on a level piece of ground, it seems. One spends a lot of time walking either uphill or downhill, and (after my return) I'd say one needs a special set of muscles to live there.

One's that I no longer had, I might add.

So after scaling those hills, like some Edmund Hillary at fifty one, I found another of those iconic images that Quebec offers.

Dufferin Terrace and the Chateau Frontenac :

The Terrace runs along the river, and the view from there is one of those place that (to me) is always awe inspiring. It didn't disappoint me, and it never has. I spent a few moments just standing there, taking it all in.

That walk (right to left in that picture) along Dufferin Terrace leads one to the Plains Of Abraham, and that was where I was headed. As I started walking, I had another one of those strange meetings that can sometimes change your direction - in this case a very important one.

Normally, one finds street artists selling their artwork in one central area of the city, but I came across a solitary one set up selling a few of his works for a rather good price. I liked his original artwork, and had wanted to pick up a souvenir to bring home anyway.

I bought some of his work, talked with him a while, and then he revealed what was to be an important fact to me that perhaps changed my entire trip there. There were no signs posted there, but he warned me that they had blocked off the exit much further up - and that saved me a lot of time. He also warned me that the closest gate area was already filling up fast.

Knowing that, I cut across the Citadel area of Quebec, right behind us - and just in time to hear a sound check going on from the stage area that was hidden from my view.

Knowing the city, and that area well, I was able to take a shortcut that brought me right to the gate.....and tens of thousands of people. There we remained, in Quebec's July heat, jammed like sardines.

For roughly three hours.... Woodstock, on a cobblestoned street.

Then, at five PM, the gates opened, and we all started to head to the stage area. I'd like to say I walked, but it was far more like being caught in a river and surging forward in the current.

Just as we arrived at the second gate area, the line stopped for about fifteen minutes. Rumors started going around that they'd already reached capacity....

Not a good time to be a lifelong Beatle fan, and seeing yourself literally inches away from NOT completing this Lord Of The Rings type of quest. I think they did slightly less walking in Lord Of The Rings actually, but don't quote me.

And then, the crowd started up again....and my heart started to beat again.

It seemed they just wanted to get people in place , before allowing others.

I actually found myself in a pretty good position for the show. Not front row, but I hadn't been expecting that. I was to the right of the stage, roughly equal with the light/sound towers.

More than acceptable...

Soon after that, the Stills opened and were followed by The Pascal Picard band. Both good in their own right, and they provided a good start to get everyone into the mood.

And then, as the sun set, and darkness fell upon us....the main act.

So may I introduce to you,
The act you've known for all these years,

I'd first seen the Beatles, strangely enough, on Ed Sullivan while living in an apartment in Quebec City roughly a couple of miles away from that stage. Now, forty-five years later, our paths had crossed.

We share a few things, McCartney and I.

Were both left handed, born on the same day (not year) , and we both play guitar. That's pretty much it, in terms of sharing things, I might add.

He walks out, and suddenly.....

It's Paul McCartney, he's got THE HOFNER strapped on, and he's dressed in a suit.

Thanks, God, I now owe you one. Contact me and provide any details necessary.....

(By the way Paul, this more than makes up for the time I ought tickets from a scalper ,third row center, for that Montreal Olympic Stadium concert you canceled shortly afterwards. You are now officially forgiven, and I apologize for all those nasty things I said shortly after that. I was young stupid....and out about sixty dollars. The scalper wasn't nearly as willing to refund his part of the ticket as you were.)

It seems I wasn't the only one with some ghosts to revisit.

"My Love" was dedicated to Linda, "Something" (begun on a ukulele given to McCartney by Harrison) was dedicated to George, and "Day in the Life/ Give Peace a Chance" was dedicated to John.

Quite the show, and it was one of those special moments in my life, and it was....free.

He seems to have come face to face with those demons of the Beatle years, and made peace with them. He threw in some of his newer songs unapologetically, and they held up fairly well. I didn't see it as resignation, but as more acceptance of just how things are if you are Paul McCartney. Maybe the loss of Lennon and Harrison were reminders of what was missing, and that's somehow revitalized him as seeing their legacy together as some eternal flame that still flickers in the hearts of many of us. They are no longer "competitors" , and I'd frankly have considered you mad had you suggested that McCartney would someday sing "A Day In The Life" , or "Something" in one of his sets (outside of appearing in a tribute show for either of them) not so long ago.

A view from the crowd, during "Live and Let Die":

And then, the last of three encores.....

Every song a good Beatle fan could possibly expect - and more. A chance to see one of my musical idols, and also the chance to participate in one of the largest outdoor shows in this province's history - in my hometown on it's 400th birthday.

In McCartney's case, I'll have to admit that there was a certain aspect of being like a kid on Christmas Eve, sneaking downstairs and seeing Santa eating those cookies and drinking that milk - and only this time..... he's not your Dad.

Santa ?

Ho-Ho-Ho...

I mean I can now claim to have sung "Hey Jude", live with Paul McCartney, and just how cool is that.... man ?

Naaaaa-naaaa-naaa, NA-NA-NA, na-na-na, Hey Jude !

(waves arms in the air....)

All for free, did I mention that part yet ?

Merci beaucoup, Paul.

From me to you...... for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

And by the way, a special thanks to my co-worker Jerry (JRZ) , who filled in for me at work and allowed me to get to go and see the show.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Obama's new anti-smear site

2008-06-12T14:38:00.004-04:00

Well, it's time to spread the word about something that can eliminate a lot of the misleading stories so often used to scare people into not voting for Obama in November.

Now you can disagree with the man, or his platform - but at least get your facts straight while doing so.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fightthesmearshome

If you click on the link at the top of the page, you'll be directed right to it.

The Netherlands, Eurocup 2008

2008-06-12T12:28:00.006-04:00

Well, if you've read some of my past posts in this blog, you know how very much I love the Dutch. They are a people that are, based on my personal experience with them, who seldom exhibit that fervent national patriotism that we see in some nations.

Unless there's an international football game going on, with their team playing in it......

Then ?

Watch out...... :-)

That's right, the stands are filled with orange colored shirts, pants, faces, hair, and other parts of the human body best left unmentioned in polite company. Some nations wear their hearts on their sleeves, the Dutch dip themselves in orange.

All over the Netherlands, and worldwide, you can count on the Dutch to be glued to a TV screen at home, in a bar, or even (weather permitting) outside their houses on TV's dragged out for the occasion.

After their rather stunning upset of the French, I suppose some Dutch fans are perhaps only sobering up now....and ready to unfurl those orange battle flags again tomorrow - against France.

I'll be there watching them, here in Montreal, and proudly cheering them on.

One highlight not to be missed is the singing of the Netherlands national anthem, before the game. I think it's one of the best moments of the game, win or lose, actually.

When they strike up "Het Wilhelmus", with a few beers under their belts and at a soccer match - you'll never get a better example of how proud of being Dutch they are capable of being. Most of the rest of the year, you'd probably have to waterboard them to get it out of them.

Here's what I mean :

Now there are far better versions of that anthem at places like YouTube, but that's secondary to the issue being discussed here.

The Germans invaded the Netherlands in WW2. The Dutch returned the favor in 2006, at the World Cup in Cologne.

So, I'd like to extend my best wishes to the Netherlands, and to their team, Friday.

"Hup, Holland, Hup,"

Iranians' new love affair with the Great Satan

2008-06-08T09:10:00.001-04:00

I just read this article in the Montreal Gazette, over breakfast, a short while ago.

If you click on the link above, you can read it, too.

It's another of those fascinating articles which shows you a side of Iran never seen in US media, and that begs the question as to why ?

So, let's lift the curtain on Iran, and see how "The Great Satan" is actually seen :

Iranians' new love affair with the Great Satan

The average Iranian has an astonishing fondness for the United States and what it represents

AZADEH MOAVENI, The Gazette
Published: 1 hour ago

On a recent afternoon, while riding a rickety bus down Vali Asr Ave., Tehran's main thoroughfare, I overheard two women discussing the grim state of Iranian politics. One of them had reached a rather desperate conclusion. "Let the Americans come," she said loudly. "Let them sort things out for us once and for all." Everyone in the women's section of the bus absorbed this casually, and her friend nodded in assent.

Although their leaders still call the United States the "Great Satan," ordinary Iranians' affection for the United States seems to be thriving these days, at least in the bustling capital. This rekindled regard is evident in people's conversations, their insatiable demand for U.S. products and culture, and their fascination with the U.S. presidential campaign.

One can't do reliable polling about Iranians' views under their theocratic government, of course, but these shifts were still striking to me as a longtime visitor - not least because liking the United States is also a way for Iranians to register their frustration with their own firebrand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

t might startle some Westerners to realize that Iran has one of the most pro-U.S. populations in the Middle East. Iranians have adored the United States for nearly three decades, a sentiment rooted in nostalgia for Iran's golden days, before the worst of the shah's repression and the 1979 Islamic revolution. But today's affection is new, in a sense, or at least different.

Starting in about 2005, Iranians' historic esteem for the United States gave way to a deep ambivalence that is only now ending. President George W. Bush's post-9/11 wars of liberation on both of Iran's borders - in Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east - rattled ordinary Iranians, and Washington's opposition to Iran's nuclear program - a major source of national pride - added to their resentment. In early 2006, when I lived in Iran as a journalist, I had only to step outdoors to hear the complaints. Standing in line for pastry, I heard indignant matrons suggesting a boycott of U.S. products. The pious bazaar merchant who lived across the street grumbled that America was trying to "boss Iran around." On the ski slopes outside Tehran, I heard liberal college kids in designer parkas lionize Ahmadinejad for "standing up to the U.S. like a man." It was a time when Iranians of all ages and backgrounds united in their pique against the United States, turning their backs on its traditions and culture. A movement emerged to replace Valentine's Day (long celebrated here in satin-hearted American style) with Armaiti Day, a love festival in honour of an ancient Persian deity. DJs began playing homegrown Iranian rap at parties, instead of OutKast and Tupac Shakur. For the first time in years, millions sat at home in the evenings watching a domestic Iranian comedy, Barareh Nights, rather than bootleg DVDs of American films.

But on a recent two-week trip to Iran, I found the shift in sentiment palpable. This year, restaurants were booked solid for Valentine's Day months in advance. Heart-shaped chocolates and flower arrangements sold briskly enough to annoy the authorities, who reportedly began confiscating them on the street. American-style fast-food chains such as Super Star, seemingly modelled after the West Coast burger franchise Carl's Jr., are drawing crowds again. Walking through my old neighbourhood, I discovered people lining up at a grill joint called Chili's, bearing the same jalapeno logo as the U.S. chain. (The Iranian government shuns international trademark laws).

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id

=24cfd369-7958-42ee-ba6d-ad00a62fdaf9

That's just the start, there's MUCH more there to read.

I lived in Iran until last summer and experienced all the reasons why Ahmadinejad has replaced the United States as Iranians' top object of vexation. Under his leadership, inflation has spiked at least 20 per cent, according to non-government analysts - thanks to Ahmadinejad's expansionary fiscal policies, which inject vast amounts of cash into the economy. My old babysitter, for example, says she can no longer afford to feed her family red meat once a week. When I recently picked up some groceries - a sack of potatoes, some green plums, two cantaloupes and a few tomatoes - the bill came to the equivalent of $40.

Inflation has hit the real-estate market particularly hard. Housing prices have surged by nearly 150 per cent, according to real- estate agents. For most Iranians, previously manageable rents have become tremendous burdens. On one of my first evenings back in Iran, I watched Ahmadinejad on television as he addressed Iranians from the holy city of Qom. He blamed everyone - the hostile West, a domestic "cigarette mafia" - for the economic downturn, just as he had previously claimed that a "housing mafia" was driving up real-estate prices. Many Iranians who initially believed this kind of conspiracy talk now admit that the president's policies and obstinacy are actually at fault.

Another trend turning people against Ahmadinejad is the conspicuous affluence of wealthy Iranians. Instead of bringing the country's oil wealth to ordinary people's dinner tables, as promised, Ahmadinejad is presiding over an unprecedented rise in status display. New-model Mercedes-Benzes and BMW SUVs now whiz past the local clunker, the Iranian-produced Peykan, thanks to eased controls on car imports. Posh restaurants with menu items such as "risotto sushi shooters" are packed, while cartoons in newspapers bemoan the shrinking size of bread loaves. (The government controls bread prices but not loaf sizes, allowing for a de-facto cost increase.) This newly stark class polarization, together with the economic downturn of the past three years, is reinvigorating young Iranians' vision of America as a land of opportunity. "You can compete in the United States because it has a much fairer legal system than most countries," Ali Ghassemi, a struggling 34-year-old graphic designer, told me. He spoke proudly of the financial success of a cousin who immigrated to Orange County, Calif., while complaining that Iran reserved prosperity for the heirs of ayatollahs.

Strangely, the average Iranian seems to be motivated by many of the same things that Americans are motivated by.

High food prices, housing prices, a growing aristocracy, and a politician that's over the top and too extreme for them.

To add to Iranians' weariness, there are the interminable lines that have accompanied the government's new gas-rationing scheme. During the busy early evening, it takes an hour to fill up on gas, and policemen are required to direct the snarled traffic. Ahmadinejad has insinuated that the unpopular plan was a precaution against possible Western sanctions, but most people I spoke with considered it another instance of his administration's mismanagement.

Some things are indeed universal, it seems.

Beyond the new penury, Ahmadinejad has also resurrected unpopular invasions into Iranians' private lives. On the second day of my trip, newspapers announced that police would begin raiding office buildings and businesses to ensure that women were wearing proper Islamic dress. One of my girlfriends, an executive secretary, told me that as a precaution, her office had set up a coded warning message to be broadcast over the intercom. On the third day, police swept our street to confiscate illegal satellite dishes. I climbed to the roof to remove the coding device from my parents-in-law's dish. Such gadgets are costly to replace, unlike the dish itself, and the raids of recent months have made Iranians expert in such matters. "I'm going to miss American Idol," a neighbour sighed, fiddling with her satellite dish.

Invading their private lives ? American Idol ?

And this is why it's important to not rush to action and judgment in matters concerning Iran. Those people , that growing demographic of young Iranians, are the best hope for change there.

As you can see, when forces are placed against Iran, they inevitably result in Iranians moving towards defending their own self-interests and culture. That's totally normal.

Attack them, and they will go towards their only other option - the defense of their country, and into the arms of the hardliners.

14/12/2007

The Iranian opposition on Friday labeled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust "political adventurism," saying to unnecessarily harmed Iran's international standing.

"It was totally unnecessary political adventurism by the president, which harmed the country," Abdollah Nasseri, the spokesman of the Reformist Coalition Headquarters (RCH), told reporters in Tehran.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/934703.html

Conservatives Prevail in Iran Vote, but Opposition Scores, Too

April 27, 2008

Conservatives won nearly 70 percent of the seats in the voting, which concluded Friday. But that group includes many people who oppose Mr. Ahmadinejad’s economic policies. Reformists, who favor more political and social openness, also did relatively well.

Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the departing interior minister, said Saturday that 198 of the 290 seats went to the conservatives and 47 to reformist candidates, local news agencies in Iran reported. Reformists control 40 seats in the current Parliament.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/world/middleeast/27iran.html

Another great site for information is the blog " View From Iran" written by an American woman who spent many years there. She writes of things that might shock Americans, too long exposed to the media blitz of this administration, MEMRI, and CAMERA.

http://viewfromiran.blogspot.com/

Listen… Despite what you all might think, I love Iran. Yes, you read correctly. I love the country. That might be why both Keivan and I can be so critical sometimes. It is out of a kind of passion for what Iran is, was, and can become.

Iran is far from monolithic or doomed… It is diverse and delightful and filled with people who are unbelievably welcoming. Can you imagine Iranians traveling to America or Europe and being met with sincere kindness by 99.9% of the people they run across? Yet, when I travel Iran, I *am* met with kindness. Yes me. An American. I tell everyone who asks that I am American. Yes I do. I tell everyone. I tell the Revolutionary Guards and the soldiers and the police and the school girls and their mothers and brothers and fathers and friends. I tell cab drivers and business men and oil execs and refugees. Everywhere I go, I am met with kindness. When Iranians say to me, “It’s your government we hate, not you.” I say, “The government represents me. I may not have voted for it, but you must hold me and other Americans responsible for its actions.” Yes. They should, but they don’t.

The West sees images of Iranians throwing smoke bombs and burning flags and shouting down with America… You don’t see the 16-year old girl trying out her English with me. You don’t see the soldiers who greet me with jokes. You don’t see the families who have served me countless dinners. You don’t see any of this.

The West has chosen to demonize Iran. I don’t agree with Iran’s politics; I don’t agree with its legal system; I don’t agree with a lot of things here. Iran is flawed. Well aren’t we all…?

http://viewfromiran.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-heart-iran.html

There was this great story from her, which I can't find right now. As she traveled across Iran, discovering it's people, she met this one fellow that really scared her - the sole exception to her experience otherwise.

She asked some Iranians about him afterwards, and they said " He scares US, too ! "

So, on this Sunday, perhaps some of you will rethink your position on Iran based on some of the evidence brought forward here.

Some more Iranian blogs to discover :

http://globalvoicesonline.org/-/world/middle-east-north-africa/iran/

McCain's lobbyist connections - in detail

2008-06-06T16:05:00.003-04:00

Well, for a maverick, McCain has some very strong ties to lobbyists. They permeate his campaign, and tie him to all sorts of interesting things.

Here's one chart :

http://mediamattersaction.org/freeride/lobbyists/

Here's his ties to big oil :

At Least 15 Top McCain Advisers & Fundraisers Have Lobbied For Big Oil
John McCain has at least 15 people working for his campaign, either as top fundraisers or as senior campaign staff, that have lobbied for Big Oil.

http://mccainsource.com/corruption?id=0010

Some maverick.

151 Congressmen Derive Financial Profit From War

2008-05-31T09:06:00.001-04:00

151 Congressmen Derive Financial Profit From War

Blood money stains the hands of more than 25% of members of the U.S. House and Senate

By Ralph Forbes

Who profits from the Iraq war? More than a quarter of senators and congressmen have invested at least $196 million of their own money in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD) that profit from the death and destruction in Iraq.

According to the latest reports, 151 members of Congress invested close to a quarter-billion in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. These companies got more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to FedSpending.org, a website of the watchdog group OMBWatch.

Congressmen gave themselves a loophole so they only have to report their assets in broad ranges. Thus, they can be off as much as 160 percent. (Try giving the IRS an estimate like that.) In 2004, the first full year after the present Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers—both hawks and doves—invested between $74.9 million and $161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD. In 2006 Democrats had at least $3.7 million invested in the defense sector alone, compared to the Republicans’ “only” $577,500. As the war raged on, so did the billions of profits—and personal investments by Congress members in war contractors, which increased 5 percent from 2004 to 2006.

Investments in these contractors yielded Congress members between $15.8 million and $62 million in personal income from 2004 through 2006, through dividends, capital gains, royalties and interest. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who are two of Congress’s wealthiest members, were among the lawmakers who garnered the most income from war contractors between 2004 and 2006: Sensenbrenner got at least $3.2 million and Kerry reaped at least $2.6 million.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees which oversee the Iraq war had between $32 million and $44 million invested in companies with DoD contracts.

War hawk Sen. Joe Lieberman (IConn.), chairman of the defense-related
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had at least $51,000 invested in these companies in 2006.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who voted for Bush’s war, had stock in defense companies, such as Honeywell, Boeing and Raytheon, but sold the stock in May 2007.

Of the 151 members whose investments are tied to the “defense” (war)
industry, as far as we know, not one of them offered to donate their bloodstained profits to the national treasury to offset the terrible debt they have imposed. Has one of them even offered to donate one cent of their war profits to lessen the debt that increases more than $1 million a minute?

When our boys and girls are wounded the government bills them to return their reenlistment bonus. They have to return any pay they received while they were hospitalized. They have to pay for their helmets and uniforms that are destroyed in the hell of war. But they keep on fighting for these politicians’ right to keep their war profits.

• Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) $3,001,006 to $5,015,001
• Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) $250,001 to $500,000
• Rep. Kenny Ewell Marchant (R-Tex.) $162,074 to $162,074
• Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) $115,002 to $300,000
• Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) $115,002 to $300,000
• Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) $100,870 to $100,870
• Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) $65,646 to $65,646
• Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) $50,008 to $227,000
• Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) $50,001 to $100,000
• Rep. Stephen Ira Cohen (D-Tenn.) $45,003 to $150,000

Ready for a chase scene ?

2008-05-30T20:54:00.003-04:00

Typically, chase scenes feature someone running after a bad guy and trying to catch them.

Here's one where the tables get turned, and running away starts to look exceptionally good.

All I know, is I'm not chasing THIS guy if anyone asks me - I'm calling in sick that day.

Watch it, and you'll know why.

Crazy Escape Jumps - The funniest videos clips are here

The scandal you may never hear a word about in the USA

2008-05-30T08:19:00.002-04:00

If you click on the above link, you can read a rather interesting story that's not making it to public attention in the America.

It was published in the American Conservative, and written by a ex-CIA agent, that should raise some eyebrows.

It concerns some allegations, serious ones, that the third highest ranking person at the State Department has some rather interesting connections.

Found in Translation

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets.

by Philip Giraldi

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

Her allegations are not insignificant. Edmonds claims that Marc Grossman—ambassador to Turkey from 1994-97 and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-05—was a person of interest to the FBI and had his phone tapped by the Bureau in 2001 and 2002. In the third-highest position at State, Grossman wielded considerable power personally and within the Washington bureaucracy. He had access to classified information of the highest sensitivity from the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon, in addition to his own State Department. On one occasion, Grossman was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a cash bribe of $15,000 from an ATC contact. The FBI also intercepted related phone conversations between the Turkish Embassy and the Pakistani Embassy that revealed sensitive U.S. government information was being sold to the highest bidder. Grossman, who emphatically denies Edmonds’s charges, is currently vice chairman of the Cohen Group, founded by Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, where he reportedly earns a seven-figure salary, much of it coming from representing Turkey.

After 9/11, Grossman reportedly intervened with the FBI to halt the interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani operatives. According to Edmonds, Grossman was called by a Turkish contact who told him that the men had to be released before they told what they knew. Grossman said that he would take care of it and, per Edmonds, the men were released and allowed to leave the country.

Edmonds states that FBI phone taps from late 2001 reveal that Grossman tipped off his Turkish contact regarding the CIA weapons proliferation cover unit Brewster Jennings, which was being used by Valerie Plame, and that the Turk then informed the Pakistani intelligence service representative in Washington. It is to be assumed that the information was then passed on to the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network.

Edmonds also claims that Grossman was instrumental in seeding Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students into major American research labs by godfathering visas and enabling security clearances. She says that she reviewed transcripts in which the moles in the U.S. military and academic community involved in nuclear technology reportedly carried out several “transactions” involving the sale of nuclear material or information relating to nuclear programs every month, with Pakistan being a primary buyer. In the summer of 2000, the FBI recorded a meeting between a Turkish official and two Saudi businessmen in Detroit in which nuclear information stolen from an Air Force base in Alabama was offered: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000,” the wiretap allegedly recorded. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” Edmonds told the Times.

She further reports that beginning in 1999, the FBI was investigating senior Pentagon officials who were assisting agents of foreign governments, including Turkey and Israel. Edmonds has not publicly named names at the Pentagon, but a website linked to her appears to be a non-incriminating instrument for identifying suspects without doing so directly. Its “rogues gallery” includes photos of Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Perle was chief of the Pentagon’s prestigious Defense Policy Board when Edmonds was working at the FBI, and Feith was undersecretary of defense for policy. If either were being investigated, it would be a matter of record, as would any reasons for dropping the investigation. “If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” Edmonds told the Times.

Sibel Edmonds makes a number of accusations about specific criminal behavior that appear to be extraordinary but are credible enough to warrant official investigation. Her allegations are documentable: an existing FBI file should determine whether they are accurate. It’s true that she probably knows only part of the story, but if that part is correct, Congress and the Justice Department should have no higher priority. Nothing deserves more attention than the possibility of ongoing national-security failures and the proliferation of nuclear weapons with the connivance of corrupt senior government officials.
_________________________________________

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistrar

Now, let's look at Marc Grossman for a minute.

Plamegate

In Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on October 28, 2005, Grossman is the Under Secretary of State mentioned as giving information about Plame to Libby.

George W. Bush

Grossman was appointed by and served President Bush as Under Secretary for Political Affairs from 2001 to 2005. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 23, 2001 and sworn in as Under Secretary .

Douglas J. Feith

Grossman and Feith worked in cooperation as part of the Bush Administration, loyalist team.

General Mahmound Ahmad

General Mahmoud Ahmad was in the U.S. on September 11. He arrived on the 4th on a "routine visit." It was confirmed by news sources that Ahmad met with a number of U.S. officials including Grossman.

http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=5012&name=Marc-Grossman

That's a pretty interesting trail.

Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times with the story, "after reading about an al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey." That's a reference to this Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the career of a top al-Qaeda kingpin, one Louai al-Sakka, who claims to have trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp situated outside Istanbul in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.

Now that's curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country run by a fanatically secular military that would normally not tolerate such activities. As the Times puts it: "Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps. But they posed no threat to Turkey at the time."

Not a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists' target was the U.S. The al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by the top leadership of al-Qaeda – i.e., bin Laden – to carry out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That they were nurtured and steeled for their mission under the noses of our NATO allies in Ankara seems bizarre – until one begins to take Sibel Edmonds seriously. Then the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into place.

The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds' testimony. As Luke Ryland, the world's foremost expert on the Edmonds case, writes:

"The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four associates of key targets of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: 'We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can't afford for them to spill the beans.' Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

"Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI's investigation."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166

Here's the full story, as posted on Times Online :

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece

How do you say Chernobyl in Farsi ?

2008-05-30T07:54:00.005-04:00

If the neocons do get their way, and attack Iran soon, we all have something to look forward to:

The neo-conservatives for their part are plugging a new "shock and awe" in a slightly watered down version - the destruction of no less than 1,200 Iranian military/nuclear targets in a mere three days (no attacks on civilian infrastructure are mentioned).

The to-be-destroyed list certainly includes the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant; the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz; a heavy-water and radioisotope plant in Arak; the nuclear fuel unit in Ardekan; the uranium conversion and nuclear technology center in Isfahan; the Tehran Nuclear Research Center; the Tehran molybdenum, iodine and xenon radioisotope production plant; and the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories. No one of course is talking about "collateral damage", or the fact that hundreds of Russian experts may be obliterated in Bushehr (how about that as a declaration of war?), or the fact that hundreds of thousands of civilian residents of fabled Isfahan may become victims of radiation provoked by US mini-nukes.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/middle_east/ii07ak05.html

Russia backs Iran nuclear rights

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has offered qualified support for Iran's nuclear programme on a visit to Tehran.

Mr Putin told journalists that "peaceful nuclear activities must be allowed" and cautioned against using force to resolve the dispute over Iran.

But he was evasive when asked whether the Bushehr nuclear plant Russia is building would be finished on time or if Moscow would supply nuclear fuel.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7046258.stm

As for Russian shipments of fuel there ?

17 December 2007

Russia ships nuclear fuel to Iran

Russia has delivered its first shipment of nuclear fuel to a reactor it is helping to build at Bushehr in Iran.

The two sides reached agreement last week on a schedule to finish building the plant after years of delays.

The UN has demanded that Iran halt uranium enrichment but has approved the Russian nuclear fuel deliveries.

US President George W Bush supported the move, but said it proved "the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich" uranium for themselves.

'Threat to peace'

The Russian company building the Bushehr plant, Atomstroiexport, said the delivery of the enriched uranium fuel began on Sunday.

The head of Iran's atomic energy agency, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, later confirmed that the first delivery had arrived, according to Iran's state-run Irna news agency.

There are two pressurised water reactors at the Bushehr site, one of which is reportedly near completion and likely to be the first major Iranian reactor to begin generating electricity, possibly by mid-2008.

Russian officials have previously said the plant could be operational within six months of fuel being delivered.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7147463.stm

Hitting an operational nuclear reactor ? How do you say Chernobyl in Farsi ? That risks contaminating a vast area with radioactivity, and that should drive gas prices to about double what they are right now as a result. Bushehr is right on the Persian Gulf, and guess where all that oil has to go through ?

Bushehr (Bushir), a major city and one of Iran's chief ports, is located 400 kilometers south of Tehran, in south-eastern Iran on the Persian Gulf.

Check out where it is on this map :

http://www.maplandia.com/iran/bushehr

That plant's going to be operational very soon. Those fuel rods being shipped is a key indicator that it's almost online and it's reactor is ready to be used. There would be no need to ship them there so soon, otherwise.

Once Bushehr IS operational - then hitting it is going to cause one HELL of a mess.

When American Conservatives are Liberals ...

2008-05-30T03:59:00.003-04:00

Here's an interesting observation.

We've all heard about how liberals are getting in the way of winning the Iraq war by their opposition to it. They are denying the improving conditions there to suit their agenda.

Here's what's fascinating......

"The American Conservative" magazine, Pat Buchanan's baby, is against it too.

We will be different.

Many voices will appear in the pages of The American Conservative — often in disagreement with one another. We are of course in considerable part Buchananite—well disposed to the web of ideas that drew millions of voters during three Buchanan presidential bids. But our magazine’s mission is broader: to ignite the conversation that conservatives ought to have engaged in since the end of the Cold War, but didn’t.

We will question the benefits and point to the pitfalls of the global free trade economy; we will free the immigration debate from the prison to which it has been consigned. And we will discuss, frequently, America’s role in the world, turning a critical eye on those who want to cast aside every relevent American foreign policy tradition—from Robert Taft-style isolationism to prudent Dwight Eisenhower-style internationalism, in favor of go it alone militarism, where America threatens and bombs one nation after another, while the world looks on in increasing horror.

We believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in man’s taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God. We believe that true conservatism has a predisposition for the institutions and mores that exist. So much of what passes for contemporary conservatism is wedded to a kind of radicalism—fantasies of global hegemony, the hubristic notion of America as a universal nation for all the world’s peoples, a hyperglobal economy. In combination with an increasingly unveiled contempt for America’s long-standing allies, this is more a recipe for disaster.

Against it, we take our stand.

–The Editors

- Mission Statement
(from inaugural issue, October 7, 2002)

Tony Blankley, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A potentially important new political magazine - Pat Buchanan's the American Conservative - published its first edition this week. Vol.1, No.1 arrived in my mailbox yesterday. For those of us "movement conservatives" on the wrong side of 50 (as Mr. Buchanan's co-founding editor, Taki Theodoracopulos would say) both the timing and the mission statement of the new magazine strikes an ominous chord of memory. It was almost a half-century ago, at the high-point of American liberalism, that William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review for the purpose of standing astride a liberally-driven history and shouting "Halt." And, it is against the current high-tide of a history driven largely by the conservative forces Mr. Buckley precipitated that Pat Buchanan has formed...

And it's featured articles that have viciously attacked this war.....

May 5, 2008 Issue

Freedomland

Petraeus and Crocker pretend Iraq is a state. Everyone goes along.

by William S. Lind

In the second week in April, the world’s most elaborate kabuki theater, Washington, offered a stunning performance. America’s two consuls for Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan C. Crocker, gave Congress and the world their appreciation of the situation in that unhappy country. Senators and congressmen listened with rapt attention. The three presidential candidates, aka the three blind mice, postured and preened in the great men’s presence. The press hung on every word. Analysts and columnists parsed their meaning.

As with theater, none of it was real.

The defining reality in Iraq is that there is no state. Because there is no state in Iraq, there is also no government. Orders issued in Baghdad have no impact because there are no state institutions to carry them out. Government institutions such as parliament and positions such as cabinet minister have no substance. Power comes from having a relationship with a militia, not a government office. The “Iraqi Security Forces” are groups of Shi’ite militias, which exist to fight other militias. They take orders from militia leaders, not the government. Government revenues are slush funds for militia leaders to pay their militiamen. The whole edifice Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus described exists only as a figment of the Bush administration’s imagination.

Couldn’t a single member of Congress have found the courage to say, “Excuse me, consul, but you have no clothes”?

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_05_05/cover.html

March 10, 2008 Issue
Oil for War

After invading one of the most petroleum-rich countries on earth, the U.S. military is running on empty.

by Robert Bryce

Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach. That may have been true for his 19th-century force. But the modern American military runs on jet fuel—and lots of it.

Today the average American G.I. in Iraq uses about 20.5 gallons of fuel every day, more than double the daily volume consumed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2004. Thus, in order to secure the third-richest country on the planet, the U.S. military is burning enormous quantities of petroleum. And nearly every drop of that fuel is imported into Iraq. These massive fuel requirements—just over 3 million gallons per day for Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Energy Support Center—are a key reason for the soaring cost of the war effort.

Controlling Iraq’s oil has historically been a vital factor in America’s involvement in Iraq and was always a crucial element of the Bush administration’s plans for the post-Saddam era. Of course, that’s not how the war was sold to the American people. A few months before the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that the looming war had “nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” The war was necessary, its planners claimed, because Saddam Hussein supported terrorism and, left unchecked, he would unleash weapons of mass destruction on the West.

Another indication of the shift in power can be seen by looking at the new the Dubai Mercantile Exchange, which last June began trading the Oman Crude Oil Futures Contract. By getting into the energy futures business, Dubai is assuring that the crude oil coming out of the Persian Gulf has its own benchmark price—one that is not reliant on Western crude oil standards such as West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent. It also puts Dubai in competition with the traditional trading hubs in New York and London. In July 2006, Gary King, the CEO of the Dubai exchange, told me that the emergence of the exchange and the new futures contract indicates that the Persian Gulf is “the center of the world’s biggest hydrocarbon province. Most of the growth in oil consumption is in Asia-Pacific. So it’s a natural shift in gravity. Our timing is very opportune to be in that center of gravity.”

This change cannot be stopped or ignored. In today’s multi-polar world, economic interests, not military force, predominate. “It used to be that the side with the most guns would win,” says G.I. Wilson, a recently retired Marine Corps colonel, who has written extensively on terrorism and asymmetric warfare and spent 15 months fighting in Iraq. Today, says Wilson, the side “with the most guns goes bankrupt.”

Since World War II, America has held fast to the idea that controlling the oil flow out of the Persian Gulf must be assured at the point of a M-16 rifle. But the cost of that approach has been crippling. As the U.S. military pursues its occupation of Iraq—with the fuel costs approaching $1 billion per week—it’s obvious that the U.S. needs to rethink the assumption that secure energy sources depend on militarism. The emerging theme of the 21st-century energy business is the increasing power of markets. The U.S. can either adapt or continue hurtling down the road to bankruptcy.

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_03_10/cover.html

April 21, 2008 Issue

Surging to Defeat

Petraeus’s strategy only postponed the inevitable.

by Andrew J. Bacevich

The United States today finds itself with too much war and too few warriors. We face a large and growing gap between our military commitments and our military capabilities. Something has to give.

Although violence in Iraq has decreased over the past year, attacks on coalition and Iraqi security forces continue to occur at an average rate of 500 per week. This is clearly unacceptable. The likelihood that further U.S. efforts will reduce violence to an acceptable level—however one might define that term—appears remote.

Meanwhile, our military capacity, especially our ability to keep substantial numbers of boots on the ground, is eroding. If the surge is working as some claim, then why not sustain it? Indeed, why not reinforce that success by sending another 30 or 60 or 90,000 reinforcements?

The answer to that question is self-evident: because the necessary troops don’t exist. The cupboard is bare.

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_04_21/article1.html

March 24, 2008 Issue

The Right Choice?

The conservative case for Barack Obama

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives—and the state of the conservative movement—they could do worse.

Granted, when it comes to defining exactly what authentic conservatism entails, considerable disagreement exists even (or especially) among conservatives themselves. My own definition emphasizes the following:

a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;

a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;

veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation;

a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;

respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;

a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.

Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion. During the period since 1980, certain faux conservatives—especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire—have prospered. But conservatism as such has not.

Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama’s age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.

Whether conservatives will be able to seize the opportunities created by his ascent remains to be seen. Theirs will not be the only ideas on offer. A repudiation of the Iraq War and all that it signifies will rejuvenate the far Left as well. In the ensuing clash of visions, there is no guaranteeing that the conservative critique will prevail.

But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation’s heedless march toward empire will continue. So, too, inevitably, will its embrace of Leviathan. Whether snoozing in front of their TVs or cheering on the troops, the American people will remain oblivious to the fate that awaits them.

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

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_03_24/article.html

February 11, 2008 Issue

The Madness of John McCain

A militarist suffering from acute narcissism and armed with the Bush Doctrine is not fit to be commander in chief.

by Justin Raimondo

Yet the longer we stay in Iraq, the more hostility is directed at American soldiers. The majority of Iraqis now believe attacks on our troops are justified, a far cry from McCain’s prewar prediction that it is “more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness.”

McCain isn’t bothered by the failure of his prediction, just as the absence of WMD in Iraq didn’t phase him in the least. He is an actor following a script that was written years ago and cannot be altered because of mere facts: he is McCain the Conqueror, the fearless war hero, the commander in chief who will lead us to victory and stay in Iraq, as he told Mother Jones magazine, for “a thousand years, a million years” because American grit will tame those obstreperous Iraqis, just as we tamed the Koreans, the Bosnians, the Japanese, and the rest.

With the extreme rhetoric appearing to work, an emboldened McCain recently told a crowd of supporters in Florida: “It’s a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be over right away. There’s going to be other wars. I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars.”

If McCain finally makes it to the White House, the U.S. will surely start new wars, and not just in the Middle East. With the world as his stage, the persona McCain has created—given visible expression by what Camille Paglia trenchantly described as “the over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel (from Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety)”—will have every opportunity to act out his fantasies of soldierly greatness.

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_02_11/cover.html

January 14, 2008 Issue

No More Slam Dunks

A reality-based assessment of Iran’s nuclear capability

by Philip Giraldi

The bombshell National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program asserted with a “high degree of certainty” that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons in 2003 due to international pressure and as part of a negotiated agreement with the Europeans. The report stated that even if Tehran were to restart its program, it would not have enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon until 2010 at the earliest.

The NIE is widely seen as a decisive blow to the neoconservatives and Bush administration hawks who have been advocating a preemptive attack on Iran, depriving them of their principal casus belli. They have counterattacked, claiming that the report is based on flawed information or even Iranian disinformation, that the CIA has a history of poor analysis of proliferation issues, and that a politicized intelligence community is out to get the White House and/or Israel.

Both the Iraq NIE and the 2005 NIE on Iran suffered from White House staffers, mostly neoconservatives from Vice President Cheney’s office, participating in the review process. To deal with the problem of such political pressure, Director of Central Intelligence Michael Hayden and DNI Mike McConnell isolated analysts from policymakers and also took steps to deal with the groupthink problem. In the 2002 Iraq NIE, the consensus view that Saddam Hussein must have weapons of mass destruction influenced analysis, but proved to be untrue. The Iran NIE was instead constructed from the ground up with every assumption being challenged. The critics of the NIE curiously engage in their own groupthink when they claim that the CIA’s record of failures in the past mean that it has likely failed again. This time, however, the CIA has gotten it right.

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_14/article2.html

Iraq is a failure, the war was for oil, Obama's got some strong pluses, McCain's someone to be very worried about, Iran's not the threat we are being warned about.....

So an interesting question arises.

Here's a conservative magazine, run by a leading figure of American conservative thought, that's churning out essentially the same message as the "liberal media" is over at those well known sites that rise right wing blood pressure every time they are mentioned.

I don't see anyone labeling THEM as defeatist, or as trying to break the nation apart with their flawed commie rhetoric .

So why is this again, exactly ?

And Justice For All

2008-05-25T02:00:00.002-04:00

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.

Bill Clinton
42nd president of the United States

If any of you Obama supporters down there are disheartened, if anyone of you thinks you can't make a difference down there in America....

This one's for you.

The Passion Of The Crist ?

2008-05-25T01:40:00.004-04:00

What about the Bush/Republican/McCain/ neocon connection to Charlie Crist of Florida , and the impact on the divisions of the Democratic primary race ?

2008 presidential election

Crist campaigned frequently with John McCain during the Florida primaries and gave the Arizona Senator his endorsement. Crist has been mentioned by the media as a possible running mate for McCain and McCain himself has praised Crist.A McCain-Crist ticket may help McCain to secure the 27 electoral votes from the state of Florida. Perhaps heightening the speculation, Crist, along with Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and former contender for the GOP Presidential Nomination Mitt Romney, are scheduled to meet with McCain on Friday, May 23, 2008 at his home in Arizona, according to Republican familiars with the decision.

Crist has said that he is willing to support a do-over of Florida's Democratic primary in order to properly assign the delegates, so that they may be counted at the 2008 Democratic National Convention but opposes using Florida government funds to cover the expense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Crist

WMR has also learned that Crist's fraternity brother at Florida State was Brent Sembler, son of major Bush and Crist financial backer Mel Sembler. Sembler, who served as George W. Bush's ambassador to Italy and Daddy Bush's ambassador to Australia, was the brains behind the founding of SEED, Straight, Inc. and the Drug Free American Foundation (DFAF). Straight and SEED have been accused of abusing teens undergoing drug rehabilitation, including subjecting teens to brainwashing techniques. And what doctor served on the advisory board of SEED and approved of such techniques that subjected underage teens to brainwashing? None other than Dr. Charlie Crist, Sr., the father of the man who seeks to replace Jeb Bush and Governor of Florida. And why has Bernie McCabe, the State Attorney for Pinellas County, never brought charges against SEED, Straight, and DFAF for child abuse? It might have something to do with the fact that McCabe is a campaign contributor to Charlie Crist.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1315.shtml

After his Senate service, Governor Jeb Bush appointed him as Deputy Secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. In 2000, Crist became Florida’s last elected Commissioner of Education and in 2002, he became Florida’s first elected Republican Attorney General.

http://www.local10.com/politics/9945437/detail.html

The change was pushed through by Republicans, who hold a majority in both houses of the Legislature and will suffer less serious penalties. Under Republican National Committee rules, Florida will lose half its delegates to the Republican convention.

But State Representative Dan Gelber, the minority leader, said Democrats’ opposition would not have made a difference. Besides, he said, many of the state’s 4.25 million registered Democrats wanted an earlier primary."

So a Florida legislature , controlled by a Republican majority, and lead by someone with close ties to McCain (so much so he's a possible VP pick) , and to Jeb Bush, magically decides to alter the Florida primary date.

A decision that barely impacts the Republican primaries, but throws a major problem into the Democratic one.

Crist: Florida "more and more relevant" to Hillary

The Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, makes the case for his state's relevance to my colleague John Bresnahan Amie Parnes:

"It'’s almost ironic to me that-- in coming from a state like Florida on the Democratic side, where every vote must count, and was such a big deal in our state-- that you have this notion where just because you go a little bit earlier, that your delegates may not be seated at the convention whether it’s Denver or Minneapolis,he said, praising Senator Bill Nelson for pressing to have the state's delegation seated.

He added: "As you know, Sen. Clinton did very well in Florida and as things are moving forward, that becomes more and more relevant to her odds."

And guess who is fueling Hillary's divisive tactics with his support ?

Anyone else see anything wrong here ?

High Fuel Prices Got You Down ?

2008-05-24T14:58:00.005-04:00

Well, if you are like a lot of people, those high gas prices are digging into your pocketbook in a very serious way.

Well, with a bit of creativity, it doesn't have to be that way anymore.

That's right, you can get the fuel you need to run a car - for free.

Any diesel car can run it.

And Americans are throwing it away right now, and are paying for the disposal.

More info here, at Greasecar : http://www.greasecar.com

Grease is the word ? Who knew Frankie Valli was right all along ?

McCain's Tax Cuts , cashing in on America's future

2008-05-24T00:27:00.003-04:00

Well if you go over to McCain's website, you'll see a long list of tax cuts proudly pointed out.

It's right here, for you to see :

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/

So that's on his own website, and that's what he is proposing as a plan for the American people in his presidency.

So let's start to look at this platform, and do some analysis, shall we ?

Someone's actually started to do just that, so let's see what we are looking at.

The McCain Tax Cut Cost-o-Meter»

Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

thermoside3.gifJohn McCain wants to double the Bush tax cuts. But how does this erstwhile fiscal conservative plan to pay for it? An excellent question – and one his campaign has so far failed to answer.

McCain’s tax plan would cost a whopping $300 billion (to put that in perspective, we spend about $200 billion a year on the war in Iraq). According to our accounting, McCain has so far managed to offset a grand total of $33 billion, or 11% of his tax cut.

As we have chronicled on this blog, the other savings McCain claims are bogus. So where will this former budget hawk come up with the more than $250 billion he needs to pay for his plan?

In an effort to hold McCain accountable, The Wonk Room is introducing the Tax Cut Cost-o-Meter, which documents the gap between McCain’s tax cuts and the offsets he proposes to pay for them.

We’ll be updating our new thermometer as the McCain campaign finds ways to pay for its tax cuts — or doesn’t, as the case may be.

http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/04/23/mccain-thermometer/

So it looks like we are talking about 300 billion dollars to be given up by the government, if these figures are correct.

So let's see what one of McCain's own advisers says :

A Q&A With McCain Adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin

How does the state of the budget look to you?
If you look at the last full fiscal year, close the books on 2007, we raised 18.8 percent of GDP in [tax revenue] and spent a bit more than that, and we ran a modest deficit by postwar standards.... You roll the clock forward and you see the spending part of the budget explode, real pressures, and there is no way you can tax enough to meet those pressures—and if you tried, you would do such harm to the economy that it would ultimately fail. So the right approach is to take a comprehensive look at the spending commitments, undertake reforms in healthcare to slow the growth of Medicare, commit to solving the Social Security [solvency problem], which is a political problem more than anything else, deal with nondefense discretionary spending. That's the recipe.... Let's commit to getting the economy growing, and the revenue will be there. This is not a revenue problem; this is a spending problem.

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/4/14/
a-qa-with-mccain-adviser-douglas-holtz-eakin.html

A modest deficit, by postwar standards.....when the USA wasn't fighting a war with a cost like the one in Iraq, btw.

How much WAS that deficit ?

The deficit narrowed to $162.8 billion in the fiscal year that ended September 30, the third straight annual decline and lowest since $158 billion in 2002, the Treasury Department said yesterday in Washington.

Spending totaled $2.731 trillion for the fiscal year, compared with revenue of $2.568 trillion. While both figures were records, they fell short of White House projections. In July, Mr. Bush's budget office forecast 2007 revenue of $2.574 billion and spending of $2.779 billion.

http://www2.nysun.com/national/american-budget-deficit-falls-to-lowest-level/

So we are at (based on last year's figures) $ 163 billion negative.

Since September, the economy has changed quite a bit. I think we can all agree on that one.

We've had the sub-prime mess , which has cost a fortune:

* There will, as stated above, be 2 million foreclosures as the riskiest of the subprime adjustable rate mortgages reset to higher interest rates.

* Approximately $71 billion in housing related wealth will be destroyed by those 2 million foreclosures and another $32 billion will be lost because of the spillover effect of foreclosures in neighborhoods and communities. The report quoted a study on housing values in Philadelphia which found that an abandoned property lowered the value of homes located within 150 feet by an average of 10 percent and those within 450 feet declined in value by an average of 5 percent.

* Collectively the states stand to lose close to $1 billion in revenues as property tax assessments drop in value.

* Foreclosures aside, there will be a 10 percent decline in housing prices which will lead to a $2.3 trillion economic loss.

http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/10262007_Subprime_Cost.asp

This type of loss in the market is going to be partially supported by the government, and it will also impact on revenue the government can collect from taxes.

Let's commit to getting the economy growing, and the revenue will be there.

And it won't be, as the effects of all the forces in the market depress it.

So let's continue with McCain's spokesman :

How will you balance spending and the tax cuts Sen ator McCain has proposed?

It's not that complicated.... He wants to repeal the [alternative minimum tax]. That's about $60 billion in additional revenue losses. Fine. We have $60 billion in discretionary spending that was sourced to earmarks. He believes that should go away....

Someone checked those figures.

Holtz-Eakin says that money could be used to fix the repeal the alternative minimum tax. The problem is that virtually no one can find even a third that much money in the annual spending bills in earmarks.

The most credible effort at earmark accounting in recent years was completed recently by the Taxpayers for Common Sense. They did an exhaustive review of the 2008 spending bills and reported $18.3 billion in earmarks. The White House Office of Management and Budget scrubbed the twelve 2008 appropriation bills and came up with only $16.9 billion. Where does McCain’s other $41.7 billion come from?

There is virtually no explanation. Did Congress spend money in other areas that McCain is counting but neither Taxpayers for Common Sense for the White House counts? That seems to be a hard argument to make. For 2008, the President’s request totals $932.8 billion (not counting the pending supplemental.) The Congressional Budget Office scores the action taken by the Congress on the 2008 appropriation bills at $932.8 billion—exactly the amount requested.

There were some areas that Congress spent more than the President requested and other areas where Congress spent less than the request. But McCain would find it difficult in most instances to object to the judgments made by Congress, for instance the $3.8 billion to improve the quality of health care for returning veterans which was included in the final Military Construction—Veterans bill but not contained in the President’s request.

It is even difficult to imagine that McCain would want to get rid of all of the earmarks. $1.2 billion of which was for better housing and facilities for servicemen and their families at military installations around the world.

The disturbing point here, however, is that even by the loose rules of budget discipline used in Washington in recent years this accounting is completely off the wall. Revenue cuts that are offset by phony spending reductions simply add to the deficit and the nation’s long term debt burden. Senator McCain needs to detail his figures in a manner similar to the materials provided by OMB and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/04/16/earmarks-mccain-proposal/

So you drop 60 billion from the AMT , and replace that with.....16.9 billion ?

That's 41.7 Billion in the hole....to start.

And then the corporate tax breaks ,

The one that is going to be getting attention is if we cut the corporate income tax from 35 percent to 25 percent—which is a competitiveness must—you, in some static sense, lose $100 billion a year ballpark. That's real. But you can broaden the base.

- Ibid

OK, 100 billion plus that 41.7 billion = 147. billion dollars negative (so far)

How's that base going to broaden ?

There are $30 billion a year in rifle shots that you should go after. You can count on some economic feedback, some 30 percent. So that gets you to $60 billion. So the net loss is $40 billion, and we think we can get 40 more in spending.

- Ibid

Now the economy is depressed, that we know.

We also have to add on the loss from that '09 tax rebate that the government's giving US citizens right now. That's income that the government WON'T be getting next year.

So how much is that ?

$110 billion dollars, approximately.

So we are now at 147.1 billion + 100 billion = 247.1 billion dollars.

And it's not over....

Just here, without going any farther, we exceed the level of the existing deficit.

If the economy equaled 2007, in every way (which it won't) , the deficit would be the same (assuming all costs are the same, which they won't be either) but let's start there.

163 billion deficit 08 ( highly optimistic)
247 billion in additional money given away as tax cuts

310 billion total dollars, and we've not even finished with all of McCain's proposals yet.

Any gains to the economy by the injection of that cash into are not going to overcome those types of numbers. And those numbers are based on some incredibly optimistic numbers for this year's deficit - and we all know it's pretty much a slam dunk that they won't.

So any McCain supporters out there willing to explain how he's going to accomplish all of this ?

Doesn't this show you the base problem with electing McCain as president is going to be a staggering increase in the public debt - almost without doubt ?

There's been some argument over how to treat John McCain's policy ideas. Some folks hold that they're terrible and should be opposed. Others think they're terrible, but more than that, they and make no sense, and McCain clearly doesn't mean them so they should be ignored. This, I think, is the take of most of the media, which assumes that, on domestic policy, McCain is pandering to his base and shouldn't be taken seriously. But, at the end of the day, these are his policies, and she should be forced to stand by them. It's not for the media to decide that he's a) lying and b) that's okay.

Take McCain's tax policy, for one. He wants to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax ($430 billion in lost revenue over 10 years), cut the corporate tax rate from 34 percent to 25 percent ($995 billion lost over 10 years), and end taxation of corporate investment in technology and equipment ($745 billion over 10 years). In addition, he's going to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. We're now talking a revenue loss of over $3 trillion. How's he going to fund his wars?

What's even more remarkable, though, is how regressive McCain's cuts are. They're more regressive, by far, than the Bush tax cuts. The Center for American Progress just released a report showing how much of each set of cuts goes to each income quintile, and I've put the results into a graph for you. McCain is in blue, Bush is in red.

On foreign policy, it's become common to say that McCain is like Bush, only more so. What's impressive is that he's proving that true on domestic policy, too. And yet despite the $3 trillion+ hole he's blowing in the deficit, the media regularly reports that McCain is a deficit hawk. Why? Because he doesn't like earmarks ($18 billion per year). Quite an age we live in, where fiscal responsibility is paying for about 1/20th of your spending. This guy is the Republican nominee for president. It's time the media began asking him how he's going to pay for all his spending. If he's going to cut Medicare and Social Security -- the only expenditures large enough to support this plan -- let him say so. That, supposedly, is the virtue of McCain, that he says stuff like that. But it's a bit dumb for the media to be all excited about a guy who answers your questions and then not actually ask him the hard questions.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=03&year=2008&
base_name=chart_of_the_day_john_mccain_w

McCain has consistently voted against mortgage protections and other steps to help consumers fight unfair credit terms. A look at his record:

– McCain voted against discouraging predatory lending practices. In 2005, McCain voted against an amendment prohibiting law-breaking high-cost predatory mortgage lenders from collecting funds from homeowners who are forced into bankruptcy court. [S. 256, 3/03/05]

– McCain failed to vote on bill to overhaul mortgage lending practices of FHA. In 2007, McCain failed to vote on passage of a bill that would overhaul the mortgage lending practices of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The bill would reduce the required minimum down payment for an FHA-insured loan and simplify its calculation, requiring a flat 1.5 percent of the appraised value of the home. [S. 2338, 12/14/07]

–- McCain failed to sign on to the Predatory Lending Consumer Protection Act. In 2003, McCain failed to add his name to this legislation, which was intended to “protect consumers against predatory practices.” The bill, which was endorsed by a host of civil rights and housing advocates, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, ACORN, and the Consumer Federation of America. [S. 1928, 11/21/03]

– McCain failed to sign on to Truth in Lending Act. Less than four months ago, McCain failed to sign on to this bipartisan initiative providing protection to consumers taking out home mortgage loans. Among other measures, it was designed to “establish new lending standards to ensure that loans are affordable and fair.” McCain also refused to co-sponsor this legislation in the 107th Congress as well. [S. 2452, 12/12/2007]

McCain’s primary solution to dealing with the flailing economy? Waiting it out. Also on ABC’s This Week on Feb. 17, when asked whether he was “open to helping homeowners,” McCain replied, “I am open to helping homeowners. I would rely to a large degree on the situation of time.”

http://www.realmccainblog.com/search/label/economy%20and%20taxes

His health care plan ?

McCain's Health Plan: Tax Benefits, Increase Costs. His plan would make employer-provided health benefits part of taxable income, essentially creating a new tax for working families. It undermines existing employer-based health care and pushes workers into the private market to fight big insurance companies on their own. It would reduce benefits, increase costs and leave many with no health care at all. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 4/5/06; Health08.org Forum, 10/31/07; Los Angeles Times, 11/20/07; The Commonwealth Fund, 6/20/05)

Anti-union ?

McCain on Rights: Oppose Freedom to Form Unions and Bargain. McCain voted to block the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level the playing field for workers trying to form unions and bargain with their employers for better pay and conditions. But he voted for a national "right to work" for less law that would cripple workers' unions. (H.R. 800, Vote #227, 6/26/07; S. 1788, Vote #188, 7/10/96)

Privatizing Social Security ?

McCain on Retirement Security: Privatize Social Security, Cut Medicare. McCain supports privatizing Social Security, putting our retirement at risk, and raising the Medicare eligibility age. (SCR 83, Vote #68, 3/16/06; SCR 18, Vote #49, 3/15/05; S. Amdt. 144 to SCR 18, Vote #47, 3/15/05; SCR 86, Vote #56, 4/1/98; SCR 86, Vote #77, 4/1/98; S. 947, Vote #112, 6/24/97; S. Amdt. 445, Vote #115, 6/25/97)

In 2000 he said:

“There’s one big difference between me and the others–I won’t take every last dime of the surplus and spend it on tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy.” [McCain campaign commercial, January 2000]

In 2003 he said:

“But when you look at the percentage of the tax cuts that–as the previous tax cuts–that go to the wealthiest Americans, you will find that the bulk of it, again, goes to wealthiest Americans.” [NBC’s “Today,” Jan. 7, 2003]

Now?

"Oh, yes, sure, the wealthy, the wealthy. Always be interested in when people talk about who the, quote, “wealthy” are in America. I find it interesting."

His voting record seems to back that up :

Then, as he contemplated another run for the presidency, McCain had another change of heart. The key provision of the 2003 tax cut bill that he had opposed was the tax cut for capital gains and dividends. But In 2005 he voted for the budget reconciliation bill that extended that very gift to the wealthy for an additional two years.

McCain had earlier complained that "repeal of the estate tax would provide massive benefits solely to the wealthiest and highest-income taxpayers in the country," but in 2006 he decided that repealing most of the estate tax was just fine by him. He voted that year for the bill to gut the estate tax, which won a majority of votes in the Senate but failed to obtain the 60 votes needed for passage.

But it's also astounding because even Bush's Treasury Department has admitted (in a report released in 2006) that tax cuts cannot possibly pay for themselves. Sure, lower taxes might create some incentive to work and invest, resulting in some more income and thus more tax revenue, but that will never make up for more than a small fraction of the cost of a tax cut.

Does McCain believe, contrary to almost every mainstream economist, the ludicrous proposition that we can raise revenue by cutting taxes? Or has he been altering his view to win over an extreme fringe within his party to win its nomination?

http://www.ctj.org/taxjusticedigest/2008/02/john-mccain-straight-talk-on-t.html

Holtz-Eakin also told FactCheck.org that the families to which McCain refers would save an average of $2,000 a year. That means some would save more and some would save less. Those in higher income groups pay much more of AMT taxes than do those with lower earnings, and they would reap more of the benefits of repealing the tax as well. About 90 percent of the tax benefits of doing away with the AMT in 2007, for instance, would have gone to households in the $100k and above group; 55 percent would have gone to households earning more than $200k.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/136986

The rich get richer....

This blog reveals McCain's BLACK relative

2008-05-24T00:20:00.002-04:00

That's right, and I'M not afraid to name names, either.

Her name is Lucy. We also have her picture :

That's right....

McCain has an ancestor from AFRICA,and this Arizona based anthropologist (and discoverer of Lucy) scientifically proves that, and McCain cannot deny it.

Johanson, the founder and chairman of the Institute of Human Origins in Arizona, told a standing-room-only crowd in the Ballroom of the William Pitt Union Wednesday night that he realizes Lucy is more popular than the man who discovered her 28 years ago.

But he said that stardom is not as important to him as finding more connections between man and ape. The one thing he is confident of is that the connection will be found somewhere in Africa.

Johanson said that while people all have their own beliefs as to how humans came into existence, "one inescapable conclusion is that we can trace all roots back to Africa."

http://media.www.pittnews.com/media/storage/paper879/news/2001/04/13/
News/Discoverer.Of.lucy.Says.Humans.
Originated.In.Africa-1793100.shtml

Or "Australopithecus afarensis" , who can directly be connected to McCain, 3.2-million-years ago. She can be traced to all of the rest of us, too.

Even Obama.

So the race now becomes one between two men with black blood in their veins and DNA.

I know, I'm as shocked as the rest of you are.

The only race we have is the human race.

McCain goes to Senate floor and demands that America withdraw its troops now

2008-05-23T23:09:00.006-04:00

One of the reasons why people are convinced, why many of these experts are convinced, that this situation is one which is increasingly difficult to solve, is because of the fact that we were there once before. The right course of action is to make preparations as quickly as possible to bring our people home. It does not mean as soon as order is restored to Haiti, it doesn't mean as soon as Democracy is flourishing in Haiti, it doesn't mean as soon as we've established a viable nation in John Haiti, as soon as possible means as soon as we can get out of Haiti without losing any American lives. Now there may be different interpretations of this Resolution on the other side but it is my view and I want to make it clear and I think the majority of the American people's view that as soon as possible means as soon as possible. Exactly what those words state. The Haitians were to police themselves but the cooperation that was to prevent mission creep has not materialized and U.S. troops have assumed a greater and greater responsibility for policing Haiti. We all see on CNN what they are doing. Day by day their mission expands. American military personnel have been tasked with preventing looting, stopping Haitian on Haitian violence, protecting private property and arresting attaches.

John McCain - 1994

Mr. President, there is no reason for the United States of America to remain in Somalia. The American people want them home, I believe that the majority of Congress wants them home, and to set an artificial date of March 31 or even February 1st, in my view, is not acceptable. The criteria should be to bring them home as rapidly and safely as possible. An evolution, which I think could be completed in a matter of weeks. Mr. President, our continued military presence in Somalia allows another situation to arise which could then lead to the wounding, killing, or capture of the of American fighting men and women. We should do all in our power to avoid that. Date certain, Mr. President, are not the criteria here. What's the criteria and what should be the criteria is our immediate, orderly withdrawal from Somalia. And if we don't do that, and other Americans die, other Americans are wounded, other Americans are captured, because we stayed too long, longer than necessary, then I would say that the responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States who did not excercise their authority under the Constitution of the United States and mandate that they be brought home as quickly and safely as possible. But the mission which the American people supported and this Congress supported, in an overwhelming resolution, has been accomplished. The American people did not support the goals of nation-building, peacemaking, law and order and certainly not warlord funding. For us to get into nation-building, law and order, etc, I think is a tragic and terrible mistake. But the argument that somehow the United States would suffer a loss to our prestige and our viability, as far as the No. 1 superpower in the world, I think, is baloney. The fact is, what can hurt our prestige, Mr. President, I'll tell you what can hurt our viability, as the world's superpower, and that is, if we inmesh ourselves in a drawn-out situation, which entails the loss of American lives, more debaucles like the one we saw with the failed mission to capture Aidid's lieutenants, using American forces, and that then will be what hurts our prestige. Look at the tragedy in Beirut, Mr. President, 240 young Marines lost their lives, but we got out. Now is the time for us to get out of Somalia, as rapidly and as promptly and as safely as possible.

McCain 1993

American combat deaths in Haiti ?

None.

American combat deaths in Somalia ?

29

American combat deaths in Iraq ?

4,081 ......and counting.

BRING THEM HOME (IF YOU LOVE YOUR UNCLE SAM)©
Studio version

If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

It will make the politicians sad, I know
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
They wanna tangle with their foe
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

They wanna test their grand theories
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
With the blood of you and me
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Now we'll give no more brave young lives
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
For the gleam in someone's eyes
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

(Hooo-hooo hooo-hooo)
(Hooo-hooo hooo-hooo)

The men will cheer and the boys will shout
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah and we will all turn out
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

The church bells will ring with joy
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
To welcome our darlin' girls and boys
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

We willl lift their voice and sound
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah, when Johnny comes marching home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

The Eden Project - a vision for a compassionate plan that benefits the world

2008-05-22T23:55:00.004-04:00

I thought I'd post an idea, to suggest some things that we might consider, that would logically achieve goals both beneficial to ourselves - and those in need around the world. If we are smart, that mentality can reduce human misery, and also help us with some of the problems Western society has.

It can be win/win, with some foresight.

In North America, we throw away hundreds of millions of automobile and truck tires per year. Those wind up in our landfills, and in tire dumps all across North America. They lay there, doing nothing, and polluting our landscapes.

Now, what if we were to consider using them to create Earthship housing for those most in need of it ? How many homes could we provide for people, while solving one of our own problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship

Those same tires, and the containers they would be shipped in, could provide the basic essentials for building strong structures that were efficient and cheap. Using the labor of those who would live in them ( like the Habitat model) , with our supplied materials and expertise, would benefit all involved.

One could even use students, in the same way the Peace Corps proposed, to learn and then teach others to pass along this knowledge.

Those houses could be powered using other things we throw away - like electronic parts we now throw away in our junked cars. Various elements used in them could provide a goldmine of parts for 12 volt power systems.

We could provide hand cranked items, like radios or lights, quite easily.

We could even use elements of the computers we throw away to provide a workable, and free, means of communication between those houses. Even a simple Pentium 2, worthless here, could be turned into such a system, using Linux - for free, or almost free.

That could provide a method of educating people, as well.

We could provide these same structures with facilities that could use the human waste generated by them to assist in the production of methane gas to be used in heating and cooking.

That waste could additionally, after such use, be used to turn infertile land into croplands with composting.

We could also add solar facilities that could produce drinkable water without much cost, using the sun's rays to purify it, or even desalinate it. We could even use that waste water from the communities as part of that process - as we do in spacecraft.

We could build pipelines to take the ocean's water, direct it to arid areas, and then use the sun to desalinate it. I think that may be indeed possible, and cost almost nothing to do in comparison with other alternatives.

Desalinate the water, and then simply water the ground though a buried structure of hoses, that would trickle water into the ground slowly, while using solid human waste to add to it's nutrient base.

Things that could be done for limited cost, that would involve the creative use of things that we already have, and throw away ?

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

Robert Kennedy

I even would suggest the following name for it - " The Eden Project"

It works in Arab countries, as well as "Jannat'Adn .

When God created the Garden of Eden, He created in it that which the eye had never seen before, that which the ear had never heard of before, and that which had never been desired before by man's heart.

- Abu Mohammed Mu'afa al-Shaibani

What I like about it is that it teaches a man to fish, by giving him our old fishing poles and tackle that we no longer need, nor use - and one that is cluttering up our closet anyway.

All we ask is for his help to build a better future together for the both of us.

The things the Third World have in abundance are time, and labor. All they need is some knowledge and basic resources to complete the process. We certainly have the latter.

It fits a model we know works, of building from the base up. It places the effort in the hands of the people benefiting, and that will empower them, and isn't a charity that robs them of their dignity. Once built, those houses and things becomes symbols of their work, and they reap the benefits.

Our ideological enemies cannot compete with us here, and cannot bring this type of improvement to the lives of those who need it most. Only we can do that, and if we do we will win the battle for those hearts and minds without any question.

If I'm right, it can be done for a remarkably low cost. Most of it, the important parts, are things we now throw away. All we are looking at is the cost of collection and transportation to accomplish it - and that's minimal, compared to any other type of aide I can imagine.

It's also something that is remarkably altruistic and selfish at the same time. It's a Yin Yang solution to problems on both sides of the ledger accomplishing the goals of both.

It's something that accomplishes a moral good, and yet is completely subversive at the same time. Instead of hooking people on continuing charity, or using them as a means towards profit, it frees them totally from those chains and truly liberates them.

At the end of it they have a free house, and the basic needs to live through the fruits of their own efforts. That effort forms a sense of community, and that community's creation stands out like a bright light against the poverty and despair that surrounds it.

It also accomplishes a reduction in pollution, something we all gain in. That human waste that is now the source of pollution and disease is transformed into fuel (methane) , clean water, and then finally safely returned back into the soil to provide nutrients for the future crops the people grow.

Anyone wants it as an idea, it's yours for free.

A rather interesting 1960 live rockabilly performance.....

2008-05-22T23:46:00.002-04:00

I just stumbled across a YouTube clip I had to share.

Ever see "Back To The Future" , and do you remember that funny scene where Micheal J. Fox plays guitar at the high school dance ?

This makes that look tame.

Before you watch the clip, let me set it up for you.

It's the Netherlands, 23rd January 1960. The Sixties just born, the country in the middle of a Dutch winter. There's one Dutch TV channel, and you are sitting in your living room watching a variety show.

There's this thing called rock and roll, and it's going on over on the other side of the Atlantic, with leather jacketed, T-Shirt wearing kids trying to channel James Dean.

And then suddenly..... THIS act comes on the old Phillips black and white.

The Tielman Brothers - Rollin' Rock

Can you imagine the reaction ?

"Honey.....call a PRIEST !"

Welcome to Dutch Indo-rockabilly.

Dutch-Indonesian rock ?

That's got to be one of the most dynamic stage show performances I've ever seen pulled off live, by the most unlikely of sources. It makes Little Richard look almost tame by comparison....

The interesting part ? The Tielman Brothers also go on to play in the same clubs in Hamburg that the Beatles were playing in. Can you imagine either group walking in on the others sets ? Might have been some interesting times...

In checking out their other music, it seems to be pretty average.

But it terms of a live rock and roll act ?

Pretty amazing, when placed against it's time period.

McCain / Phill Gramm and the silence of the lambs

2008-05-22T23:23:00.004-04:00

I figured we could start looking at McCain's economic expert, Phil Gramm, and ask the question as to why McCain would chose such a man as his economic guru.

McCain was caught up in the Keating Five scandal, and was lucky to escape without major political damage. Now , for those who don't remember the details of that scandal, let's get you up to speed.

It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp.

As federal auditors crawled all over Lincoln, Keating was not content to wait and hope for the best. He'd spread a lot of money around Washington, and it was time to call in his chits.Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with the regulators. The message: Get off Lincoln's back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting between five senators and the regulators. One of them was John McCain.

McCain knew Keating well. His ties to the home builder dated to 1981, when the two men met at a Navy League dinner where McCain was the speaker.

By 1987, McCain had received about $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.

McCain had also carried a little water for Keating in Washington. While in the House, McCain, along with a majority of representatives, co-sponsored a resolution to delay new regulations designed to curb risky investments by thrifts like Lincoln.

Despite the dust-up, McCain attended not one but two meetings with the regulators. McCain later explained that he thought it was the right thing to do, because Keating was a constituent.

McCain would live to regret it.

''Did you lean on regulators for Charlie Keating?''

''Did you get campaign contributions in exchange for your cooperation?''

''Why did you protect Keating?''

Together, the five senators had accepted more than $300,000 in contributions from Keating, and their critics added a new term to the American lexicon:

Keating Five.

As the S&L failure deepened, the sheer magnitude of the losses hit the press. Billions of dollars had been squandered. The Keating Five became shorthand for the kind of political influence that money can buy. The five senators were linked as the gang who went to bat for an S&L bandit.

S&L ''trading cards'' came out. The Keating Five card showed Charles Keating holding up his hand, with a senator's head adorning each finger. McCain was on Keating's pinkie.

As the Keating investigation dragged through 1988, McCain dodged the body blows. Most landed on DeConcini, who had arranged the meetings and had other close ties to Keating, including $50 million in loans from Keating to DeConcini's aides.

But McCain made a critical error.

In spinning his side of the Keating story, McCain adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was far more than a constituent to McCain, however.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.

McCain also did not pay Keating for the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.

On that score, McCain admitted he had fouled up. He said he should have reimbursed Keating immediately, not waited several years. His staff said it was an oversight, but it looked bad, McCain jetting around with Keating, then going to bat for him with the federal regulators.

Meanwhile, Lincoln continued to founder.

In April 1989, two years after the Keating Five meetings, the government seized Lincoln, which declared bankruptcy. In September 1990, Keating was booked into Los Angeles County Jail, charged with 42 counts of fraud. His bond was set at $5 million.

During Keating's eventual trial, the prosecution produced a parade of elderly investors who had lost their life's savings by investing in American Continental junk bonds.
'THE ULTIMATE SURVIVOR'
In November 1990, the Senate Ethics Committee convened to decide what punishment, if any, should be doled out to the Keating Five.

Robert Bennett, who would later represent President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case, was the special counsel for the committee. In his opening remarks, he slammed DeConcini but went lightly on McCain, the lone Republican ensnared with four Democrats.

''In the case of Senator McCain, there is very substantial evidence that he thought he had an understanding with Senator DeConcini's office that certain matters would not be gone into at the meeting with (bank board) Chairman (Ed) Gray,'' Bennett said.

''Moreover, there is substantial evidence that, as a result of Senator McCain's refusal to do certain things, he had a fallout with Mr. Keating.''

McCain, the ultimate survivor, had dodged another missile.

Among the Keating Five, McCain received the most direct contributions from Keating. But the investigation found that he was the least culpable, along with Glenn. McCain attended the meetings but did nothing afterward to stop Lincoln's death spiral.

Lincoln's losses eventually were set at $3.4 billion, the most expensive failure in the national S&L scandal.

In the end, McCain received only a mild rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising ''poor judgment'' for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Still, he felt tarred by the affair.

''The appearance of it was wrong,'' McCain said recently. ''It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.''

McCain noted that Bennett, the independent counsel, recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation.

''For the first time in history, the Ethics Committee overruled the recommendation of the independent counsel,'' McCain said. ''I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I was the only Republican of the five and the Democrats were in the majority (in the Senate).''

But McCain owns up to his mistake:

''I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment.''

http://www.wmsa.net/People/john_mccain/ariz-republic_chap_V_1999.htm

So McCain misses the hand of justice, by a hair.

Now, when the American economy is in dire straights, and McCain freely admits he's no real expert on the topic, who does he turn to ?

After Keating, you would think he learned a very important lesson - as did the American public.

And yet he turns to exactly the type of person that nearly cost him his political career.

I've posted before that Gramm and his wife had direct ties to Enron - and made a ton of money from that association, and helped set the stage for the abuses.

She was a member of the Enron's board's Audit Committee.

Gramm thinks the system works just fine. After all, she pocketed an estimated $2 million as an Enron director.

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/01/28/wendy_gramm/

He did the same thing with the sub-prime market, and tables legislation that was it's genesis.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act .

That act opened the doors for abuse on the market, with deregulation.

Gramm lobbies for UBS.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary.

Gramm then JOINS the Swiss Bank UBS :

Phil Gramm joins UBS Warburg
Texas Republican, who fought corporate reform act, to advise clients on corporate finance issues.
October 7, 2002

So it came as a relief Tuesday when UBS, the European bank hit hardest by the credit crunch, announced that it would sell $15 billion of subprime mortgage debt and cut 5,500 jobs as part of a massive cleanup.

Now UBS is digesting a net loss of $10.9 billion and write-downs on mortgage-backed securities of $19 billion in the first quarter, bringing the total to about $38 billion since the beginning of the crisis.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/06/business/ubs.php

38 Billion in losses ( ten times Keating's toll) , and the first loss in company history - and the biggest loss of all banks touched by this.

So this begs two questions:

1) After Keating, how bad is McCain's judgment to willingly choose a man who (together with his wife) have benefited from two of the largest financial rip offs in American history, after nearly losing his political career over his associations with Keating , and probably the third largest financial scandal in American history ?

“People like that appeal to me.”

–John McCain, on Charles Keating, in his memoir, “Worth Fighting For”

2) Why isn't this on every TV screen being talked about, and the headline in every major newspaper ?

Why McCain is too Bushed to ever be elected president

2008-05-22T22:26:00.008-04:00

Let's turn our attention now to the Bush-McCain connection. We have some people that are constantly reminding us about how McCain is so different from Bush. Let's see how we can tie Bush and McCain together, in some very concrete ways - shall we ?

To start, we have that comment from Bush himself that I've posted before when McCain showed up for the White House to be endorsed by Bush.

All I can say is that on the fundamentals and the principles of our Republican Party and most of the specifics of our shared conservative philosophy, President Bush and I are in agreement.

- John McCain

The President behind the scenes has told people for months that he thought McCain would be the nominee. Even during some of those dark periods he still thought he could win. And also that McCain would be the best to carry forth his agenda.

Time Magazine' s Mark Halperin
FOX TV
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/08/bush-mccain-will-best-carry-out-my-agenda/

So let's take a look at some of the people associated with McCain's campaign, and see where they fit in to all this.

As some of you might be aware, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) group is a neo-con institution, and many of it's members were key Bush players. That letter to Clinton from the PNAC in 1998 is the genesis point of the war in Iraq.

So if we could find PNAC members associating with McCain, that might be a warning sign that McCain and Bush might share a lot more than one might think.

Oh, and yes.....we CAN find them :

Randy Scheunemann - McCain's foreign policy adviser, neo con, PNAC member, and ex- President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

Robert Kagan - McCain's Middle East adviser, neo- con, co-founder PNAC, co-signer of that 1998 letter to Clinton.

James Woolsey - McCain's Middle East adviser, neo-con PNAC founding member and also a co-signer of that 1998 letter. Government consultant and adviser during the Bush administration.

Daniel McKivergan -John McCain for President: Campaign Staffer, neo-con , former deputy-director PNAC

Bill Kristal - Informal Foreign Policy Adviser -neo-con , Founder PNAC.

Gary Schmitt - Foreign Policy Adviser - neo-con, AEI Fellow and PNAC signatory. Co-author with Abram Shulsky (overseer of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans) of a book on the political though of Leo Strauss as applied to intelligence gathering.

John Vincent Weber - former Republican congressman from Minnesota who was an advisor to McCain's presidential campaign in 2000. PNAC member. George Bush campaign adviser. connected to Empower America.

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI)?

This is a strong right wing , neo-con think tank.

AEI has emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy. More than twenty AEI alumni and current visiting scholars and fellows have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions.

So does McCain have any AEI members on his staff ?

The abovementioned Gary Schmitt, an AEI Fellow, is one.

So are Dr. Charles Calomiris (McCain Finance Economic Adviser), and Dr. Kevin Hasset (McCain economic policy coordinator).

( They shared offices next to each other at AEI)

Let's see who else we can find, shall we ?

Dr. Doug Holtz Eakin - Senior Policy Advisor for John McCain

He was the director of the Congressional Budget Office (2003–05). He also served for 18 months as chief economist in the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush (2001–02) and for two years as senior staff economist in President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (1989–90).

Thomas Loeffler - ( just quit over Saudi Arabia connection)

McCain's National finance co-chair , He was an advisor to presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. According to The Loeffler Group Web site, Loeffler served as Texas Co-Chairman, Bush for President (1988); National Advisor to the 1992 Bush-Quayle Campaign; Co-Chairman, President's Dinner (1992, 2001, 2004 and 2005); and Texas delegate to the Republican National Conventions (1984, 1988 and 1992). He was the Texas Finance Co-Chairman, George W. Bush for Governor (1994); National Finance Chairman,National Finance Co-Chairman, George W. Bush for President (1999-2000); and South Texas Co-Chairman, Bush-Cheney ‘04, Inc. (2004).

In February 2005, he was asked by the Board of Regents to serve as Co-Chairman of a special ad hoc advisory committee to spearhead work on a proposal for the Presidential Library of President George W. Bush.

Sixty former Bush rangers or pioneers raised money for McCain.

Lisa Graham Keegan - McCain education adviser. Was considered for position of Secretary of Education under George Bush.

From 2001 to 2004, Ms. Keegan consulted with President George Bush, his domestic policy staff and Secretary Rod Paige on matters of education policy, as well as with the education leadership of 38 states. Significant policies and programs she helped implement during this time include No Child Left Behind Act, Following the Leaders School Implementation Program, American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, Washington DC School Choice Program. In 2003 she was a member of Education Secretary Rod Page's Title IX Commission.

Keegan’s original three year contract was extended to September 2004, after which she became an independent consultant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Graham_Keegan

Rich Bond served as RNC Chairman from 1992-1993. He previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House. National political director in Bush’s successful 1988 presidential campaign, Deputy Chief of Staff to Vice President Bush.

Jeb Bush - McCain education adviser.

Terry Neilson - former McCain Sr. Adviser (quit) - political director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign.

In early 2006, Nelson was hired as a "senior adviser" to Senator John McCain; in December 2006 McCain's presidential exploratory committee said that Nelson was McCain's pick to be his national campaign manager, should McCain choose to turn his exploring into a full-blown run for the White House.

On July 10, 2007, Nelson resigned as national campaign manager for Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. The sudden departure of both Nelson and longtime McCain adviser John Weaver came after months of increasing campaign problems. McCain, after first insisting that neither man had been fired, called their departure "a consensus decision."

Donald Bren - McCain's national finance co-chairman - Member George W. Bush for President Organization

2007 edition of "The 400 Richest Americans", ranked Bren as the wealthiest real estate owner in the US with an estimated net worth of $13 billion.

Eugene W. Hickok - McCain Education adviser

President George W. Bush nominated Hickok as his Under Secretary of Education on March 30, 2001 and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 10, 2001. Hickok served as both the Under Secretary of Education and Acting Deputy Secretary between July 2003 and November 3, 2003 when the President nominated him to become Deputy Secretary. The deputy secretary is the chief policy advisor to the Secretary. In this position, Hickok oversaw and managed the development of policies, recommendations and initiatives that help define a broad, coherent vision for achieving the President's education priorities, including the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

William D. Hansen - McCain Education adviser

He was formally nominated as deputy secretary by President George W. Bush on April 23, 2001, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate a month later on May 22. The president announced his intention to nominate Hansen, 42, who served as the Education Department transition team director for the Bush-Cheney Transition, on March 8.

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain who was once a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

William M. Evers - McCain education adviser

He was appointed to his federal post by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2007. Evers specializes in research on education policy especially as it pertains to curriculum, teaching, testing, accountability, and school finance from kindergarten through high school. From July to December 2003, he served in Iraq as senior adviser for education to Administrator L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Evers was an education policy adviser and a leader of education-community supporters during President George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, and he served as a member of the education advisory committee for the transition. From 2001 to 2007, Evers served as an appointee of President Bush on the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, which selects the nation's top high school seniors based on their achievement in academics and the arts.

Phil Gramm - McCain 's economic adviser, and probable Secretary of the Treasury, if elected.

Family: Wife: Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm, former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Presidents Reagan and Bush

Gramm was partly caught up in the Enron scandal when it emerged that his wife Wendy had in part written an exemption for Enron from federal oversight while she was serving on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She then accepted a directorship at Enron (for 1.85 million dollars). Phil Gramm was personally involved further when it came to light that he had helped to turn the exemption into law as well as push through the deregulation of energy markets that led in part to the Enron scandal. During this period Enron was a major contributor (actually the largest) to his campaigns.

Meanwhile Enron had become Phil Gramm's largest corporate contributor—and according to Public Citizen, the largest across-the board donor in its industry. Between 1989 and 2001, the company tossed Gramm just under $100,000.

In 1998, Wendy Gramm cashed in her Enron stock for $276,912. There's nothing unusual about a Washington regulator quitting the government and going to work for a private company she was regulating. And people often get rich in the process. Wendy Gramm, whose office didn't return Voice calls, has told reporters she sold the stock expressly to avoid any hint of a conflict of interest.

A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS's new investment banking arm.

Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

Paul Krugman, this week wrote " I'd argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Mr. Gramm to make this crisis possible."

Tim Griffin

Indicating what lies ahead is the McCain campaign's plan to bring in Tim Griffin, a protege of Karl Rove, who is a leading practitioner of opposition research -- the digging up of derogatory information about political opponents. Although final arrangements have not been pinned down, Griffin would work at the Republican National Committee, as he did during Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/05/21/AR2008052102425.html

Steve Schmidt, Bush’s attack dog in the 2004 election

Ken Mehlman, who ran Bush’s 2004 campaign - now serving as an unpaid, outside adviser

Karl Rove is now informally advising the campaign. Rove refused to detail his conversation with McCain.

Dan Bartlett, former top aide in the Bush White House is onside with McCain.

Sara Taylor - Bush political adviser, ditto.

Karl Rove - Informal McCain adviser, and donor.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/20/why-wont-fox-reveal-analy_n_102591.html

Nicolle Wallace, formerly communications director for Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

Richard L. Armitage - adviser to presidential candidate John McCain

In 1998, Armitage signed "The Project for the New American Century" letter (PNAC Letter) to President Bill Clinton. The letter urged Clinton to target the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power in Iraq due to erosion of the Gulf War Coalition's containment policy and the resulting possibility that Iraq might develop weapons of mass destruction. The letter's intended purpose of removing Hussein was to protect Israel and other U.S. allies in the region, including oil-producing Arab countries.

During the 2000 Presidential election campaign, he served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice that called itself The Vulcans

The United States Senate confirmed him as Deputy Secretary of State on March 23, 2001; he was sworn three days later. A close associate of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Armitage was regarded, along with Powell, as a moderate within the presidential administration of George W. Bush.

There was some media speculation that President Bush would appoint him to a key security position such as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Director of National Intelligence or Defense Secretary. As of the start of July 2007, Armitage had not re-entered public service. On May 10, 2006, he was elected to the board of directors of the ConocoPhillips oil company.

On August 30, 2006, CNN reported that Armitage had been confirmed "by sources" as leaking Ms. Wilson's CIA role in a "casual conversation" with Robert Novak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Armitage

(Further topping off Armitage's investment interests in the war: He sits on the board of directors of ConocoPhillips, which is aiming to become a major player in Iraq's energy industry through a joint venture with Russia's Lukoil.)

http://www.salon.com/news/excerpt/2008/05/29/spies_for_hire/index.html

Ties to Bush, and oil, and Iraq.

Wayne Berman National Finance Co-Chairman

- ex-Bush Administration Commerce Department assistant secretary

Name: Wayne L. Berman
Occupation: Lobbyist & Owner, Berman Enterprises, Inc.
Industry: Lawyers & Lobbyists
Home: Washington, DC

Berman has lobbied for two other firms that won major investment contracts from Silvester. These firms are PaineWebber and the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group was started by top officials in the Bush seniors administration.

http://www.tpj.org/pioneers/wayne_berman.html

Frank Donatelli McCain Pick as Deputy RNC Chair

He also assisted Baker in the 2000 Florida recount on behalf of the Bush-Cheney team. Frank was a senior advisor to Bob Dole in 1996 and previously worked in the presidential campaigns of George Bush and Ronald Reagan.

http://www.mwcllc.com/people/individuals/donatelli_f.asp

Nancy Pfotenhauer - Adviser

Bush appointed Pfotenhauer to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women

Pfotenhauer served in Bush I's administration in various capacities

http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php
?id=654&name=Nancy-Pfotenhauer

Richard Hohlt - Fundraiser

Nomination of Richard F. Hohlt To Be a Member of the Board of Directors of the Student Loan Marketing Association

January 5th, 1990 - By President Bush Sr.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18012

Peter Madigan - Fundraiser

Peter Madigan
From SourceWatch

Peter Madigan is a powerful lobbyist with close ties to the Republican Party who has represented clients such as McDonnell Douglas Corp., Ford Motor Co. and the Distilled Spirits Council.

Madison worked in the presidential administration of George Herbert Walker Bush.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Peter_Madigan

Jack Oliver - Fundraiser

LIEUTENANT OF LUCRE: Bush's deputy finance chairman, Jack Oliver, at his Washington office

Bush has Oliver to thank for much of that success but rarely praises him in public. And that's how Oliver likes it. He's the financial wizard behind the curtain. It's a role Oliver played for Bush in 2000 and one he is reprising this year, having just moved from the Republican Party to be deputy finance chairman for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030707-461834,00.html

McCain can be directly tied to the PNAC , through the NCP.

New Citizenship Project (also New Citizenship Project, Inc.) is a non-profit organization funded by large right-wing foundations. Founded in 1994, NCP initiated the Project for the New American Century, one of the key behind-the-scenes architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. According to his senate biography, John McCain served as a president of NCP, "an organization created to promote greater civic participation in our national life."

McCain also served on the Council.

The John M. Olin Foundation, Inc. listed grants in 1997 show the subtitle for The New Citizenship Project as the "Project for the Next American Century." It clearly appears that the origninal 1994 PNAC concept has become the current Project for the New American Century.

"...the New Citizenship Project, an affiliate of the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative G.O.P. think tank founded by William Kristol."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=New_Citizenship_Project

More details on McCain's lobbyists :

The McCain-Lobbyist Connection
http://mediamattersaction.org/freeride/lobbyists/

More to follow , as research allows.

So the next time anyone tells you that a McCain presidency isn't really Bush III, you can ask them to explain why all these chickens are coming home to roost in support of Mccain.

Just a great film clip to share with you at Christmas

2007-12-26T00:19:00.000-05:00

Every year the Dutch hold an event called the Nijmegan March, You can read all about it if you click the above link.

Here's a great little clip showing a small Belgian child as the Canadian Forces team in that event passes by.

Do yourself a favor, and turn up the volume while you watch it.

2nd Platoon, Charlie 1-26 (Iraq) and the mutiny that never was

2007-12-15T06:17:00.000-05:00

I came across this story , and it's a revealing one if one realizes all of it's implications. For those of you that may think it's non-supportive of the troops, I'd suggest a moment's reflection before going there.

This is a story of how war effects the men fighting it, and it allows us to see the types of strain this involves on them - even in a well lead unit. It takes a surprising turn, although an understandable one, as that strain hits home.

Before you start to read the story, you should know who the men of US Army unit Charlie 1-26 were - and are.

The 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division — known as the “Dagger Brigade” — has sustained the greatest numbers of deaths of any Europe-based brigade; 56 troops have been killed in combat since the brigade deployed a year ago, mostly from roadside bombs. The hardest hit among Dagger’s battalions has been the 1-26 with a reported 27 losses.

During the year the 1-26 has been in Iraq, its soldiers have drawn dangerous assignments. They have rolled into, among other places, the heart of the eastern Baghdad sector of Adhamiyah, around the Abu Hanifa mosque, center of the extremist Sunni resistance in the area.

“Adhamiyah has been hot all year round,” Tharp said. “If you go into Adhamiyah and don’t fire your weapon, it’s a great day.”

“There’s every kind of attack you can imagine,” Tharp said. “I’ve seen machine-gun fire, precision small-arms fire (sniper attacks), large IEDs (improvised explosive devices), small IEDs, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), mortar attacks. We’ve taken everything they can throw at us.”

The 32-year-old from New Castle, Colo., estimates he has been hit by 14 makeshift bombs. The roadside attacks have damaged his vehicles and on occasions knocked him out.

“It’s been a very trying year. We’ve lost a lot of good men,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like we’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel just yet.”

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=55455&archive=true

These are good men, heroes all, and from what I've read they've been hit incredibly hard by unit losses, and fought in some of the toughest areas of Iraq bravely.

No one should question their dedication to the service to their country, nor the toll it took on them while trying to do it.

Such incidents belied the squared-away record Charlie 1-26 posted during its deployment to Iraq. In 15 months, they had one incident when two soldiers were caught with alcohol, Strickland said, but that was all.

“I think the performance comes from the level of discipline,” Strickland said. “And the discipline comes from the hardship. They’re a little bit more mature than a lot of other units.”

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/12/bloodbrothers3/

It got so tough for them that this unit refused to go out on patrol, not out of any cowardice, but simply because they realized they had become "dangerous". Refusal to follow orders is a serious offense in any military, especially in combat. For troops of this caliber , and experience, it's not a decision made lightly by any of them.

Though their commanders moved them from the combat outpost to safer quarters, members of 2nd Platoon would stage a revolt they viewed as a life-or-death act of defiance. With all they had done and all they had seen, they now were consumed with an anger that ate at the memory of the good men they were when they arrived in Iraq.

But when Strickland returned from a mission, he learned 2nd Platoon had failed to roll.

“A scheduled patrol is a direct order from me,” Strickland said.

“‘They’re not coming,’” Strickland said he was told. “So I called the platoon sergeant and talked to him. ‘Remind your guys: These are some of the things that could happen if they refuse to go out.’ I was irritated they were thumbing their noses. I was determined to get them down there.”

But, he said, he didn’t know the whole platoon, except for Ybay, had taken sleeping medications prescribed by mental health that day, according to Ybay.

Strickland didn’t know mental health leaders had talked to 2nd Platoon about “doing the right thing.”

He didn’t know 2nd Platoon had gathered for a meeting and determined they could no longer function professionally in Adhamiya — that several platoon members were afraid their anger could set loose a massacre.

“We said, ‘No.’ If you make us go there, we’re going to light up everything,” DeNardi said. “There’s a thousand platoons. Not us. We’re not going.”

They decided as a platoon that they were done, DeNardi and Cardenas said, as did several other members of 2nd Platoon. At mental health, guys had told the therapist, “I’m going to murder someone.” And the therapist said, “There comes a time when you have to stand up,” 2nd Platoon members remembered. For the sake of not going to jail, the platoon decided they had to be “unplugged.”

Ybay had gone to battalion to speak up for his guys and ask for more time. But when he came back, it was with orders to report to Old Mod.

Ybay said he tried to persuade his men to go out, but he could see they were not ready.

“It was like a scab that wouldn’t heal up,” Ybay said. “I couldn’t force them to go out. Listening to them in the mental health session, I could hear they’re not ready.”

At 2 a.m, Ybay said, he’d found his men sitting outside smoking cigarettes. They could not sleep. Some of them were taking as many as 10 sleeping pills and still could not rest. The images of their dead friends haunted them. The need for revenge ravaged them.

But Ybay was still disappointed in his men. “I had a mission,” he said. “The company had a mission. We still had to execute. But I understood their side, too.”

Somehow, the full course of events didn’t make it to Strickland. All he knew, the commander said, was his men had refused an order, and he was determined to get them to Apache.

“When you’re given an order, you’ve got to execute,” Strickland said. “Being told, ‘They’re not coming,’ versus, ‘They’re taking meds and went to mental health,’ are different things. It was just this weird situation where almost nothing connected.”
A revolt in the ranks

“They called it an act of mutiny,” Cardenas said, still enraged that the men he considered heroes were, in his mind, slandered. “The sergeant major and the battalion commander said we were unprofessional. They said they were disappointed in us and would never forget our actions for the rest of their lives.”

But no judicial action ever came of it.

“Captain Strickland read us our rights,” DeNardi said. “We had 15 yes-or-no questions, and no matter how you answered them, it looked like you disobeyed an order. No one asked what happened. And there’s no record — no article 15. Nothing to show it happened.”

After the members of 2nd Platoon had spent a year fighting for each other and watching their buddies die, battalion leaders began breaking up the platoon. Seven noncommissioned officers were told they were being relieved for cause and moved out of the unit. Three noncommissioned officers stayed at Old Mod. Two, including Sgt. Derrick Jorcke, would remain in Iraq for one month after 2nd Platoon went home in October because they had been moved to different battalions in different areas of Iraq.

“In a way, they were put someplace where they wouldn’t have to go out again,” Johnson said. “But as an NCO, they took these guys’ leaders away and put them with people they didn’t know and trust. You knew 2nd Platoon would die for you without a second’s hesitation. That’s what made them so great. These guys need each other.”

Then, they were all flagged: No promotions. No awards. No favorable actions.

“We had PFCs miss [promotion to] specialist for two months,” DeNardi said. “Bronze Stars and [Army Commendation Medals] were put on hold. You’re talking about heroes like Cardenas. These are guys who save lives and they can’t get awards.”

“I didn’t want to punish them,” Strickland said. “I understood what was going on. But they had to understand you couldn’t do something like that and have nothing happen.”

And things could not continue as they had. Strickland could not operate for three more months with a platoon that refused to go out.

“Within the company, we made some adjustments,” Strickland said. “They needed a fresh start. After looking into it, I didn’t feel the need to punish anybody.” However, he left the flags in place.

“If anything was going to be punishment, that was it,” he said. For at least one soldier, that meant going through a promotion board again. Jorcke lost his promotion table status, but Strickland signed a memo re-establishing it. “I’ve tried to fix those issues. Almost everybody else has been promoted except one guy.” Jorcke made his E-6 on Nov. 1.

Even after the “mutiny,” Strickland said, he had a great deal of admiration for his soldiers.

“I understood why they did what they did,” he said. “Some of the NCOs, I was disappointed in them because they failed to lead their soldiers through difficult times. They let their soldiers influence their decisions. But on a personal level, I applauded their decision because they stood behind their soldiers. I was disappointed, but I thought they had great courage. It was truly a Jekyll/Hyde moment for me.”

And though they were horrified at being torn away from each other, the soldiers themselves were conflicted about the outcome.

“For us being disbanded, now we definitely had unfinished business,” Jorcke said. “If we’d cleared Adhamiya, we could have said, ‘I left Iraq and my buddies didn’t die in vain.

“But in a way, the disbanding was good,” he said. “We — what was left of the platoon — got to come back home alive.”

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/12/bloodbrothers3/

There's another story I discovered about Charlie 1-26, one that might illustrate the type of pressure that unit was facing in battle.

If you search the DoD releases on combat deaths, there's a listing for one of it's officers.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 876-07
July 13, 2007
DoD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

1st Sgt. Jeffrey R. McKinney, 40, of Garland, Texas, died July 11 in Adhamiyah, Iraq, of injuries suffered from a non-combat related incident. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Schweinfurt, Germany.

The incident is under investigation.

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11126

That name is still on record, after investigation, as "non-hostile - accident".

3897 07/11/07 McKinney, Jeffrey R. 1st Sergeant 40 U.S. Army Non-hostile - accident Adhamiyah Garland Texas US

http://icasualties.org/oif/SearchByName.aspx

Here's the actual incident, as told by a member of the unit :

Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney, Alpha Company’s first sergeant, was known as a family man and as a good leader because he was intelligent and could explain things well. But Staff Sgt. Jeremy Rausch of Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, a good friend of McKinney’s, said McKinney told him he felt he was letting his men down in Adhamiya.

“First Sergeant McKinney was kind of a perfectionist and this was bothering him very much,” Rausch said. On July 11, McKinney was ordered to lead his men on a foot patrol to clear the roads of IEDs. Everyone at Apache heard the call come in from Adhamiya, where Alpha Company had picked up the same streets Charlie had left. Charlie’s 1st Platoon had also remained behind, and Rausch said he would never forget the fear he heard in McKinney’s driver’s voice:

“This is Apache seven delta,” McKinney’s driver said in a panicked voice over the radio. “Apache seven just shot himself. He just shot himself. Apache seven shot himself.”

Rausch said there was no misunderstanding what had happened.

According to Charlie Company soldiers, McKinney said, “I can’t take it anymore,” and fired a round. Then he pointed his M4 under his chin and killed himself in front of three of his men.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/12/bloodbrothers3/

That was on July 11th.

Five days later, an IED killed five more men in another company, after Charlie Company's orders where canceled , and Alpha Company took their place at the last minute.

But the mission was canceled. The medevac crews couldn’t fly because of a dust storm, and the Iraqi Army wasn’t ready for the mission. Second Platoon went to bed.

They woke to the news that Alpha Company had gone on the mission instead and one of their Bradleys rolled over the 500-pound IED. The Bradley flipped. The explosion and flames killed everybody inside. Alpha Company lost four soldiers: Spc. Zachary Clouser, Spc. Richard Gilmore, Spc. Daniel Gomez and Sgt. 1st Class Luis Gutierrez-Rosales.

“There was no chance,” said Johnson, whose scouts remained at Apache and served as the quick-reaction force that day. “It was eerily the same as June 21. You roll up on that, and it looked the same.”

The guys from Charlie Company couldn’t help but think about the similarities — and that it could have been them.

“Just the fact that there was another Bradley incident mentally screwed up 2nd Platoon,” Strickland said. “It was almost like it had happened to them.”

The battalion gave 2nd Platoon the day to recover. then they were scheduled to go back out on patrol in Adhamiya on July 18.

- Ibid

That's when the men refused to go out on patrol.

After the heavy losses this unit had previously taken, a suicide on patrol by a well respected 1st Sargent, and then coming this close to losing more men , I don't think any of us could blame then. They were smart enough to realize that they'd become a ticking time bomb, and professional enough to realize it wasn't going to take much to set them off.

As such, their refusal to go on patrol reflects far more on their strength as a unit, than it's weakness as one. For men this dedicated, that must of been a very difficult decision to make - and only one they would make when they could bear no more without snapping.

The sad part is that they were penalized, but off the record.

There's no Article 15 against any of them, no official record of it occurring, and yet all promotions and awards have been placed on hold. The unit itself was broken up, and dispersed.

These guys were heroes, both before and after this incident.

I Am A Romantic Bedouin

2007-11-24T20:28:00.000-05:00

I am a romantic Bedouin,
Walking across the endless desert of this lonely night,
These burning sands of time shifting slowly beneath my feet,
Dwarfed by this endless horizon of emotions,
Defining me while holding me in it's grasp.

My soul is parched, and yet each time when all seems lost,
Your love guides me like the bright crescent moon ever onward,
Just across the next horizon, hanging there,
So large and inviting I can almost reach out and touch it,
And cradle it softly in my hands.

Let me find the strength to reach that dream oasis of your love,
And find it's not again a mirage,
another empty disappointment,
Another crushing blow,
And to find shelter there, a chance to rest,
And swim gently in the deep calm water of your love,
A journey ended, and yet also just begun.

I am a romantic Bedouin.

11-24-07

Recycling shipping containers into homes

2007-11-24T07:52:00.000-05:00

Here's another example of how thinking outside the box, or perhaps in this case thinking about the box, can lead to some very interesting benefits.

Shipping containers.

It seems that some people are now turning them into houses, and they are not what you'd expect.

Shipping containers find new life as homes

Inexpensive and abundant, they’re turning into affordable housing

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - This takes a little inside- and a whole lot of outside-the-box thinking. What looks like and lives like a house is actually a shipping container.

"I call it my bunker," says Rosalynn Kearney of her container home.

Used to import almost everything we use and wear, shipping containers are now a new concept in affordable housing.

The containers are claimed to be hurricane-proof, fire-resistant, and there's not a termite to be found.

With America exporting so little, shipping companies face the dilemma of what to do with these 32,000-pound containers. Increasingly too expensive to ship back overseas empty, these steel boxes — which can be as large as 20-by-48-feet — are stacked high, sitting in ports around the country. There are as many as 300,000 containers, by some estimates. And they're cheap — ranging from $500 to $2,000 for an unused container.

In hurricane-prone Florida, more container houses are going up, though when finished you'd hardly know they're different from any other house.

"In the spirit of recycling, we're able to take a product that is just sitting idle and recycle it and put it to a use in a way that helps solve our country's affordable housing crisis," says Askia Muhammad Aquil of St. Petersburg Neighborhood Housing.

Atlanta wants 300 units of multistory housing using the containers, and California wants four stories of them for the elderly. In just one day, a crane and a welder can have a container house ready to finish. If time is money, builders say containers are both.

"We can build it for 65 percent of the buildout cost anywhere in the U.S., and it can be built in half the time," Soren Ludwig with Sustain our World says.

And containers don't have to look like boxes. They can be trendy or affordable, with or without "the look." In fact, the biggest hurdle in having one may be getting used to sleeping in the same box your imported pajamas were shipped in.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18475601/

Here's another site, showing some innovative design work :

http://www.fabprefab.com/fabfiles/containerbayhome.htm

This creative concept offers some amazing potential , where cheap housing is needed. It also provides a large range of possible housing, from the ultra inexpensive to the moderate range.

It could easily be used to assist Third World countries, as well as countries in the West. Indeed the fact is that these houses would actually be quite easy to transport, based on their origins. They could be made in a modular way, and could even be stacked on sites to provide multilevel housing , a critical concern in areas with high population density.

Amsterdam actually has an example of that type of project :

http://www.blablablog.nl/B1038127581/C115502288/E1586963213/index.html

Shipping containers are in many ways an ideal building material. They are strong and resistant to the elements while also being durable and stackable, simplifying construction. Structures made from them can be disassembled, moved, and then reassembled with ease. They are also quite common and relatively cheap in North America in general and the USA in particular. The relative cheapness is a result of the imbalance in manufactured goods in North American trade. The USA imports much more manufactured goods than it exports and those goods come and go in containers. As a result that country, and to a lesser extent its neighbors in North America, has more empty containers than it can fill and these empties are often made available for uses such as architecture.

The Nomadic Museum is composed of 152 shipping containers. It was constructed to house a photography exhibit in New York City in 2005, was dismantled, and was reassembled in Santa Monica, California in early 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_container_architecture

There's even a container city in London :

Containers are an extremely flexible method of construction, being both modular in shape, extremely strong structurally and readily available. Container Cities offer an alternative solution to traditional space provision. They are ideal for office and workspace, live-work and key-worker housing.

Container Cities do not even have to look like containers! It is a relatively simple matter to completely clad a building externally in a huge variety of materials.

Finally the benefits of Container Cities can truly be seen in short and medium term land use projects. Short-life sites can have Container Cities that simply unbolt and can be relocated or stored when land is required for alternative uses. To date this alternative method of construction has successfully created youth centres, classrooms, office space, artists studios, live / work space, a nursery and retail space.

http://www.containercity.com/index.php?id=1

The strange thing is that something like this is relatively unknown here, when it could offer so much potential to people all over the world. Small communities could be made, quite quickly and efficiently, to provide low cost housing for people.

That would also empty the current inventory of such containers that now lie around the country unused, and provide needed jobs and housing while doing so.

If a concentrated effort was made, these same communities could also provide the chance to recycle other materials now wasted, be environmentally friendly , and even become a self financing project - if done with architectural students, volunteers, and the home owners themselves (using the Habitat model) .

Since that could be done anywhere , and the product shipped anywhere, then it makes for a much more flexible model for affordable housing. Since the cost would be so low, it could easily be paid off by the homeowners with low mortgages, perhaps in it's own centralized fund. Even if that mortgage was defaulted on, the actual structure might easily be moved somewhere else and another owner could take over it.

So , anyone else out there see this as a brilliant idea just waiting to be capitalized on ?

"Overheard In New York"

2007-11-17T04:58:00.001-05:00

Today's topic of discussion is a fellow bloggers site "Overheard in New York ", which is often a good place to spend a few minutes of time if you are looking for some entertainment value.

It's a rather simple concept actually, where people send in notes of snippets of conversations they have overheard. Those can range from the profound to the profane - and sometimes both at exactly the same time.

Having been to New York once for the weekend, I still have distinct memories of just how wonderfully unique New Yorkers really are, when it comes to the way the express themselves. That, and the fact they aren't afraid to let the world know it.

If you check out this blog, you'll see this pretty clearly illustrated. It's like some Magic Eight Ball/Zen showroom exhibition of the human condition.

Some examples:

Really More of a Coat Hanger

Fashion suit: Please, help yourself to some breakfast.
Fashion editor-type: No, thanks, I'm not really a food-person.

--Fashion event, Midtown

Many New Yorkers Are So Rude They're Not Allowed to Travel

Tourist dad with family, bumping into another tourist family: Excuse us! Thank you!
Other family's tourist dad: Ugh! Rude New Yorkers!
Nearby cop, to both: You do realize you're both tourists, right?

--48th & 5th

No! Wait, Now I Have to Start Over.

Rambling six-year-old: ... And when she came home, there was a body, and blood was everywhere 'cause he didn't clean up after he murdered someone, and that's when she realized--
Bored mom playing with cell: --That her husband was a slob?

--2 train

Frantic woman: Please help me! I need double-stick tape and a whistle!

--K-Mart, 34th St

I Wouldn't Mind Giving Her a Shot of Syllogism Myself

Dude #1: Dude, that girl is looking at you like a fat girl looks at cake.
Dude #2: She is a fat girl.
Dude #1: Fine. She is looking at you like you are cake.

But, Most Importantly, I Bought an IPhone

Guy #1: I haven't seen you in a while. What have you been up to?
Guy #2: Well, I'm in the process of switching web hosts, and it's going to be saving me a few bucks a month. I just need to decide what Linux distribution to use. What about you?
Guy #1: I got married and we had a baby.
Guy #2: That's cool.

--Office, Midtown

Wait... a Squirrel?

Drunk guy: You know, in my next life time I want to be either reincarnated into a squirrel or into a tiny Mexican.
Drunk girl: What?! Why a tiny Mexican? Why not a tiny Asian or Caucasian?
Drunk guy: 'Cause tiny Mexicans are awesome! They're always funny, fit into small places, they work their asses off, and I can grow a cool mustache and get away with it! Why wouldn't you want to be a tiny Mexican?!

--53rd & 9th

Conductor: Ladies and gentlemen, I don't really care if we pull up to the station and your car door doesn't open. If you don't listen, I don't really care. Not my problem anymore, folks! I said it once and I ain't saying it again!

--LIRR, Jamaica station

Girl: We should spend less money on the war in Iraq and use it to help countries like Africa.

--Principles of Economics lecture, Columbia University

African man to African woman: I told you when you came to this country that you can't touch old people, you can't touch children, and you can't touch animals.

--Central Park, near W 63rd St entrance

Sad girl to friend: I'd feel better if I just had lemurs to talk to.

--Washington Square Park

Anyway, you get the idea by now....

Enjoy.

Bill Moyer's PBS documentary "Buying The War"

2007-11-16T02:50:00.001-05:00

Here's another documentary I suggest you watch, if you want to see another side of the news - the one you don't often get to see.

"Buying the War" examines the press coverage in the lead-up to the war as evidence of a paradigm shift in the role of journalists in democracy and asks, four years after the invasion, what's changed? "More and more the media become, I think, common carriers of administration statements and critics of the administration," says THE WASHINGTON POST's Walter Pincus. "We've sort of given up being independent on our own."

It's an eye opener.

Enjoy.

Bill Moyers' Journal Buying the War

If you use the menu function, at the bottom right of that media player while it's playing, you'll find the rest of the show there to watch.

A song for today

2007-11-15T11:04:00.000-05:00

I'd like to offer you a chance to listen to a song that I find quite enchanting. It's in French, but it's melody alone is worth the listen.

It's a song by a well known Quebec artist and songwriter named Michel Rivard, called Je voudrais voir la mer

In English,that phrase translates to "I want to see the sea".

Those French lyrics are quite poetic, and lyrical. If you are lucky enough to understand French, here they are.

Je voudrais voir la mer
Et ses plages d'argent
Et ses falaises blanches
Fières dans le vent
Je voudrais voir la mer
Et ses oiseaux de lune
Et ses chevaux de brume
Et ses poissons volants

Je voudrais voir la mer
Quand elle est un miroir
Où passent sans se voir
Des nuages de laine
Et les soirs de tempête
Dans la colère du ciel
Entendre une baleine
Appeler son amour

{Refrain:}
Je voudrais voir la mer
Et danser avec elle
Pour défier la mort
Je voudrais voir la mer
Et danser avec elle
Pour défier la mort

Je voudrais voir la mer
Avaler un navire
Son or et ses canons
Pour entendre le rire
De cent millions d'enfants
Qui n'ont pas peur de l'eau
Qui ont envie de vivre
Sans tenir un drapeau

Je voudrais voir la mer
Ses monstres imaginaires
Ses hollandais volants
Et ses bateaux de guerre
Son cimetière marin
Et son lit de corail
Où dorment les requins
Dans des draps de satin

{au Refrain}

Je vis dans une bulle
Au milieu d'une ville
Parfois mon coeur est gris
Et derrière la fenêtre
Je sens tomber l'ennui
Sur les visages blêmes
Et sous les pas pesants
Que traînent les passants
Alors du fond de moi
Se lève un vent du large
Aussi fort que l'orage
Aussi doux qu'un amour
Et l'océan m'appelle
D'une voix de velours
Et dessine en mon corps
Le mouvant
Le mouvant de la vague

Je voudrais voir la mer
Je voudrais voir la mer

Je voudrais voir la mer
Se gonfler de soleil
Devenir un bijou
Aussi gros que la terre
Je voudrais voir la mer
Se gonfler de soleil
Devenir un bijou
Aussi gros que la terre

Je voudrais voir la mer
Je voudrais voir la mer

Here's an translation that does little justice to those wonderful French lyrics :

I want to see the sea
And its silver beaches
And it's white cliffs
Proud in the wind
I want to see the sea
And moon birds
And it's fog horses
And it's flying fish

I want to see the sea
When she is a mirror
Where going without being seen
Clouds of wool
And evening storm
In the wrath of heaven
Hear a whale
Calling his love

(Chorus:)
I want to see the sea
And dance with her
To defy death
I want to see the sea
And dance with her
To defy death

I want to see the sea
Swallow a ship
It's gold and its guns
To hear the laughter
From one hundred million children
Who are not afraid of the water
Who want to live
Without holding a flag

I want to see the sea
It's imaginary monsters
It's Flying Dutchmen
And its warships
Its marine cemetery
And it's bed of coral
Where the sharks sleep
In satin sheets

I live in a bubble
In the middle of a city
Sometimes my heart is gray
And behind the window
I feel falling boredom
On the blemished faces
And under the heavy footsteps
Which follow the passer's by
While the depth of me
Stirs a large breeze
As strong as the storm
As soft as love
And the Ocean calls me
In a voice of velvet
And my body in shape
The shifting
The movement of the wave

I want to see the sea
I want to see the sea

I want to see the sea
Inflate the sun
Becoming a jewel
As large as the earth
I want to see the sea
Inflate the sun
Becoming a jewel
As big as the earth

I want to see the sea
I want to see the sea

With all apologies to Michel Rivard, for the loss involved in that translation of those lyrics, which do them little justice.

To use an analogy, he's a bit like Quebec's version of John Lennon in terms of his impact on music here.

He used to be a member of Beau Dommage, one of the best known and loved Quebec bands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Dommage">

He then went on as a solo artist to continue to produce great music, as he continues to do even today.

http:///en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Rivard

He's one of our great artists.

I'd like to thank him here for his incredible body of work.

Merci Beaucoup, Michel

I trust you'll enjoy the song.

The Ghosts Of Nuremberg

2007-11-14T13:39:00.000-05:00

Just seven days away from the fifty second anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg Trials, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on the rule of law it was based on, and it's relevance to today's world.

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war.

Robert H. Jackson
Chief of Counsel for the United States
Nuremberg Trials
November 21, 1945

Some definitions :

Jus ad bellum

An international agreement limiting the justifiable reasons for a country to declare war against another is concerned with jus ad bellum. In addition to bilateral non-aggression pacts, the twentieth century saw multilateral treaties defining entirely new restrictions against going to war. The three most notable examples are the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy, the London Charter (known also as the Nuremberg Charter) defining "crimes against peace" as one of three major categories of international crime to be

prosecuted after World War II, and the United Nations Charter, which binds nations to seek resolution of disputes by peaceful means and requires authorization by the United Nations before a nation may initiate any use of force against another, beyond repulsing an immediate armed attack against its sovereign territory.

http:/

The UN Charter's prohibition of member states of the UN attacking other UN member states is central to the purpose for which the UN was founded in the wake of the destruction of World War II: to prevent war. This overriding concern is also reflected in the Nuremberg Trials' concept of a crime against peace "starting or waging a war against the territorial integrity, political independence or sovereignty of a state, or in violation of international treaties or agreements..." (crime against peace), which was held to be the crime that makes all war crimes possible.

A crime against peace, in international law, refers to the act of military invasion as a war crime, specifically referring to starting or waging war against the integrity, independence, or sovereignty of a territory or state, or else a military violation of relevant international treaties, agreements or legally binding assurances.

An important exception to the forgoing are defensive military actions taken under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Such defensive actions are subject to immediate Security Council review, but do not require UN permission to be legal within international law."Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations." (UN Charter, Article 51) The Security Council will determine if the action is legally the "right of individual or collective self-defence", or it may appoint another UN organ to do this.

The definition of crimes against peace was first incorporated into the Nuremberg Principles and later included in the United Nations Charter. This definition would play a part in defining aggression as a war crime.

May it please Your Honors, may the trial begin on this day with it's first witness.

Witness for the prosecution # 1 - Mr. Richard Pearle

"I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

- Richard Pearle , London, Nov. 2003

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".

Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

Witness for the prosecution #2 - Mr.Kofi Annan

In a BBC interview, Annan said the war was "not in conformity with the Security Council, with the U.N. charter." When asked, "It was illegal?," Annan replied: "Yes, if you wish," adding: "I have indicated it is not in conformity with the U.N. Charter; from our point of view and from the Charter point of view, it was illegal."

And the U.N. Charter does lay out specific conditions for hostile action; as Article 39 states, "The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken ... to maintain or restore international peace and security." The charter authorizes the use of force only if sanctioned by the Security Council, or if a country is attacked or threatened with imminent attack (Article 51): "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security."

Witness for the prosecution # 3 - Sir Tony Blair

The situation could not therefore be clearer. There is a duty on Saddam to co-operate fully. At present he is not co-operating fully. Failure to do so is a material breach of Resolution 1441.
Should Dr Blix continue to report Iraqi non-cooperation, a second Resolution should be passed confirming such a material breach. President Bush and I agreed we should seek maximum support for such a Resolution, provided, as ever, that seeking such a Resolution is a way of resolving the issue not delaying or avoiding dealing with it at all. I continue to believe the UN is the right way to proceed. There is an integrity in the process set out in 1441 and we should follow it.

- Tony Blair
Transcript of a statement given by British Prime Minister Tony Blair following his summit with President Bush in Washington, House of Commons, 2/3/2003

Submitted to the official court record, this published statement from three UNSC member nations from November 2002:

In a joint 11 November 2002 statement, Russia, China and France said, “Resolution 1441 (2002) adopted today by the Security Council excludes any automaticity in the use of force.”

Witness for the prosecution # 4 - Sir Jeremy Greenstock

We heard loud and clear during the negotiations the concerns about "automaticity" and "hidden triggers" -- the concern that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action; that on a decision so crucial any Iraqi violations should be discussed by the Council. Let me be equally clear in response... There is no "automaticity" in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required in paragraph 12. We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s
ambassador for the United Kingdom
1441 co-sponsor
8 November 2002
UNSC

Witness for the prosecution # 5 - Mr John Negroponte

“[T]his resolution contains no "hidden triggers" and no "automaticity" with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12.

John Negroponte,
ambassador for the United States ,
8 November 2002
UNSC

May the following news article be submitted into the court's official record.

The US and British governments will begin work today on a new United Nations resolution that will set an ultimatum for Iraq to cooperate fully by next month or face war.

The US president, George Bush, confirmed yesterday that the US would prefer a second resolution. "We don't need a second resolution. It's clear this guy [Saddam Hussein] couldn't even care less about the first resolution. He's in total defiance with 1441. But we're working with our friends and allies to see if we can get a second resolution."

A security council official said the resolution was unlikely to be tabled until after Mr Blix has reported on February 28.

The US and Britain have narrowed down half a dozen variations to an agreement that the draft resolution should take the form of an ultimatum to Iraq. They are considering a list of tests, such as destruction of the Samoud missiles and unrestricted interviews with Iraqi scientists. It is expected to be short and use some of the language of resolution 1441, passed unanimously in November.

Failure to comply by a fixed date would see the UN declare the inspections process "no longer meaningful", a UN official said. UK ministers and officials hope that President Saddam may yet back down.

Tony Blair seemed confident at his monthly press conference yesterday that the security council would provide the vital diplomatic cover for war, that the process still had weeks to run, and that sceptical voters would be won over in the end.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,898549,00.html

May the court also enter this official British government document into the official record :

27. In these circumstances, I remain of the opinion that the safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further resolution to authorise the use of force. I have already advised that I do not believe that such a resolution need be explicit in its terms. The key point is that it should establish that the Council has conduced that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity offered by resolution 1441, as in the draft which has already been tabled.

35. In short, there are a number of ways in which the opponents of military action might seek to bring a legal case, internationally or domestically, against the UK, members of the Government or UK military personnel. Some of these seem fairly remote possibilities, but given the strength of opposition to military action against Iraq, it would not be surprising if some attempts were made to get a case of some sort off the ground. We cannot be certain that they would not succeed.

British Attorney General's Advice to Blair
on Legality of Iraq War

March 7, 2003

http://

As well as this one :

Downing Street Memo

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

Witness for the prosecution # 6 - Mr Alan Greenspan.

"Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in the area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

"I thought the issue of weapons of mass destruction as the excuse was utterly beside the point,

-former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
September 17, 2007

Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to identify, told him, "Well, unfortunately, we can't talk about oil."

It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this Trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: “Say I slew them not.” And the Queen replied, “Then say they were not slain. But dead they are...” If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.

Robert H. Jackson
Chief of Counsel for the United States
Nuremberg Trials
Closing statement
July 26, 1946

A Pittance of Time

2007-11-10T23:31:00.000-05:00

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

With November 11th, 2007 almost upon us , let's not forget to spend a "Pittance Of Time" remembering those who lost their lives fighting for the freedom we now have.

Where ever you are on November 11th, at 11 am, I trust you will spend two minutes in quiet reflection.

Click on the link to see a great music video on this very subject.

A Pittance Of Time
Written by Terry Kelly © Jefter Publishing - SOCAN

They fought and some died for their homeland.
They fought and some died, now it's our land.
Look at his little child; there's no fear in her eyes.
Could he not show respect for other dads who have died?

Take two minutes, would you mind?
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls who went over.
In peace may they rest, may we never
forget why they died.
It's a pittance of time.

God forgive me for wanting to strike him.
Give me strength so as not to be like him.
My heart pounds in my breast, fingers pressed to my lips,
My throat wants to bawl out, my tongue barely resists.

But two minutes I will bide.
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls who went over.
In peace may they rest.
May we never forget why they died.
It's a pittance of time.

Read the letters and poems of the heroes at home.
They have casualties, battles, and fears of their own.
There's a price to be paid if you go, if you stay.
Freedom's fought for and won in numerous ways.

Take two minutes, would you mind?
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls all over.
May we never forget, our young become vets.
At the end of the line,
It's a pittance of time.

It takes courage to fight in your own war.
It takes courage to fight someone else's war.
Our peacekeepers tell of their own living hell.
They bring hope to foreign lands that hate mongers can't kill.

Take two minutes, would you mind?
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls who go over.
In peacetime our best still don battle dress
And lay their lives on the line.
It's a pittance of time

In peace may they rest,
Lest we forget why they died.
Take a pittance of time.

Thank you for our freedom, to every veteran - living or dead.

A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States

2007-02-16T10:41:00.000-05:00

I found a rather interesting article on the Harper's Magazine website, which proposes to do a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the USA. That's something the CIA cannot legally do, by the way.

This one is done by someone that has previously worked on them, so it carries some weight in it's tone. NIE's are a standard part of intelligence work in the USA, and I can easily imagine something like this might be found in the files of various other intelligence agencies in the world.

I think it addresses some very interesting topics for a thread discussion, and some of it touches on things we have skirted around or discussed in other threads.

A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States

Posted on Wednesday, February 7, 2007. Originally from January 2007. By Chalmers Johnson.

A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States

By Chalmers Johnson

KEY JUDGMENTS

The United States remains, for the moment, the most powerful nation in history, but it faces a violent contradiction between its long republican tradition and its more recent imperial ambitions.

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

Several factors, however, indicate that this course will be a brief one, which most likely will end in economic and political collapse.

Military Keynesianism: The imperial project is expensive. The flow of the nation's wealth—from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers—has created a form of “military Keynesianism,” in which the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.

The Unitary Presidency: Sustained military ambition is inherently anti-republican, in that it tends to concentrate power in the executive branch. In the United States, President George W. Bush subscribes to an esoteric interpretation of the Constitution called the theory of the unitary executive, which holds, in effect, that the president has the authority to ignore the separation of powers written into the Constitution, creating a feedback loop in which permanent war and the unitary presidency are mutually reinforcing.

Failed Checks on Executive Ambition: The U.S. legislature and judiciary appear to be incapable of restraining the president and therefore restraining imperial ambition. Direct opposition from the people, in the form of democratic action or violent uprising, is unlikely because the television and print media have by and large found it unprofitable to inform the public about the actions of the country's leaders. Nor is it likely that the military will attempt to take over the executive branch by way of a coup.

Bankruptcy and Collapse: Confronted by the limits of its own vast but nonetheless finite financial resources and lacking the political check on spending provided by a functioning democracy, the United States will within a very short time face financial or even political collapse at home and a significantly diminished ability to project force abroad.
DISCUSSION

Military Keynesianism

The ongoing U.S. militarization of its foreign affairs has spiked precipitously in recent years, with increasingly expensive commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. These commitments grew from many specific political factors, including the ideological predilections of the current regime, the growing need for material access to the oil-rich regions of the Middle East, and a long-term bipartisan emphasis on hegemony as a basis for national security. The domestic economic basis for these commitments, however, is consistently overlooked. Indeed, America's hegemonic policy is in many ways most accurately understood as the inevitable result of its decades-long policy of military Keynesianism.

During the Depression that preceded World War II, the English economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberal capitalist, proposed a form of governance that would mitigate the boom-and-bust cycles inherent in capitalist economies. To prevent the economy from contracting, a development typically accompanied by social unrest, Keynes thought the government should take on debt in order to put people back to work. Some of these deficit-financed government jobs might be socially useful, but Keynes was not averse to creating make-work tasks if necessary. During periods of prosperity, the government would cut spending and rebuild the treasury. Such countercyclical planning was called “pump-priming.”

Upon taking office in 1933, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, with the assistance of Congress, put several Keynesian measures into effect, including socialized retirement plans, minimum wages for all workers, and government-financed jobs on massive projects, including the Triborough Bridge in New York City, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a flood-control and electric-power-generation complex covering seven states. Conservative capitalists feared that this degree of government intervention would delegitimate capitalism—which they understood as an economic system of quasi-natural laws—and shift the balance of power from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions. For these reasons, establishment figures tried to hold back countercyclical spending.

The onset of World War II, however, made possible a significantly modified form of state socialism. The exiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki attributed Germany's success in overcoming the global Depression to a phenomenon that has come to be known as “military Keynesianism.” Government spending on arms increased manufacturing and also had a multiplier effect on general consumer spending by raising worker incomes. Both of these points are in accordance with general Keynesian doctrine. In addition, the enlargement of standing armies absorbed many workers, often young males with few skills and less education. The military thus becomes an employer of last resort, like Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, but on a much larger scale.

Rather than make bridges and dams, however, workers would make bullets, tanks, and fighter planes. This made all the difference. Although Adolf Hitler did not undertake rearmament for purely economic reasons, the fact that he advocated governmental support for arms production made him acceptable not only to the German industrialists, who might otherwise have opposed his destabilizing expansionist policies, but also to many around the world who celebrated his achievement of a “German economic miracle.”

In the United States, Keynesian policies continued to benefit workers, but, as in Germany, they also increasingly benefited wealthy manufacturers and other capitalists. By the end of the war, the United States had seen a massive shift. Dwight Eisenhower, who helped win that war and later became president, described this shift in his 1961 presidential farewell address:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Eisenhower went on to suggest that such an arrangement, which he called the “military-industrial complex,” could be perilous to American ideals. The short-term economic benefits were clear, but the very nature of those benefits—which were all too carefully distributed among workers and owners in “every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government”—tended to short-circuit Keynes's insistence that government spending be cut back in good times. The prosperity of the United States came increasingly to depend upon the construction and continual maintenance of a vast war machine, and so military supremacy and economic security became increasingly intertwined in the minds of voters. No one wanted to turn off the pump.

Between 1940 and 1996, for instance, the United States spent nearly $4.5 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear weapons alone. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,000 deliverable bombs. None of them was ever used, which illustrates perfectly Keynes's observation that, in order to create jobs, the government might as well decide to bury money in old mines and “leave them to private enterprise on the well-tried principles of laissez faire to dig them up again.” Nuclear bombs were not just America's secret weapon; they were also a secret economic weapon.

Such spending helped create economic growth that lasted until the 1973 oil crisis. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan once again brought the tools of military Keynesianism to bear, with a policy of significant tax cuts and massive deficit spending on military projects, allegedly to combat a new threat from Communism. Reagan's military expenditures accounted for 5.9 percent of the gross domestic product in 1984, which in turn fueled a 7 percent growth rate for the economy as a whole and helped reelect Reagan by a landslide.

During the Clinton years military spending fell to about 3 percent of GDP, but the economy rallied strongly in Clinton's second term due to the boom in information technologies, weakness in the previously competitive Japanese economy, and—paradoxically—serious efforts to reduce the national debt. With the coming to power of George W. Bush, however, military Keynesianism returned once again. Indeed, after he began his war with Iraq, the once-erratic relationship between defense spending and economic growth became nearly parallel. A spike in defense spending in one quarter would see a spike in GDP, and a drop in defense spending would likewise see a drop in GDP.

To understand the real weight of military Keynesianism in the American economy today, however, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. The “defense” budget of the United States—that is, the reported budget of the Department of Defense—does not include: the Department of Energy's spending on nuclear weapons ($16.4 billion slated for fiscal 2006), the Department of Homeland Security's outlays for the actual “defense” of the United States ($41 billion), or the Department of Veterans Affairs' responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion). Nor does it include the billions of dollars the Department of State spends each year to finance foreign arms sales and militarily related development or the Treasury Department's payments of pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics). Still to be added are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed defense outlays. The economist Robert Higgs estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.

Even when all these things are included, Enron-style accounting makes it hard to obtain an accurate understanding of U.S. dependency on military spending. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that “neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing” or “details on how the appropriated funds are being spent.” Indeed, the GAO found that, lacking a reliable method for tracking military costs, the Army had taken to simply inserting into its accounts figures that matched the available budget. Such actions seem absurd in terms of military logic. But they are perfectly logical responses to the requirements of military Keynesianism, which places its emphasis not on the demand for defense but rather on the available supply of money.

The Unitary Presidency

Military Keynesianism may be economic development by other means, but it does very often lead to real war, or, if not real war, then a significantly warlike political environment. This creates a feedback loop: American presidents know that military Keynesianism tends to concentrate power in the executive branch, and so presidents who seek greater power have a natural inducement to encourage further growth of the military-industrial complex. As the phenomena feed on each other, the usual outcome is a real war, based not on the needs of national defense but rather on the domestic political logic of military Keynesianism. As U.S. Senator Robert La Follette Sr. observed, “In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for war, it insists on making war.”

George W. Bush has taken this natural political phenomenon to an extreme never before experienced by the American electorate. Every president has sought greater authority, but Bush—whose father lost his position as forty-first president in a fair and open election—appears to believe that increasing presidential authority is both a birthright and a central component of his historical legacy. He is supported in this belief by his vice president and chief adviser,****Cheney.

In pursuit of more power, Bush and Cheney have unilaterally authorized preventive war against nations they designate as needing “regime change,” directed American soldiers to torture persons they have seized and imprisoned in various countries, ordered the National Security Agency to carry out illegal “data mining” surveillance of the American people, and done everything they could to prevent Congress from outlawing “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” treatment of people detained by the United States. Each of these actions has been undertaken for specific ideological, tactical, or practical reasons, but also as part of a general campaign of power concentration.

Cheney complained in 2002 that, since he had served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff, he had seen a significant erosion in executive power as post-Watergate presidents were forced to “cough up and compromise on important principles.” He was referring to such reforms as the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires that the president obtain congressional approval within ninety days of ordering troops into combat; the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which was designed to stop Nixon from impounding funds for programs he did not like; the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, which Congress strengthened in 1974; President Ford's Executive Order 11905 of 1976, which outlawed political assassination; and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which gave more power to the House and Senate select committees on intelligence. Cheney said that these reforms were “unwise” because they “weaken the presidency and the vice presidency,” and added that he and the president felt an obligation “to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them.”

No president, however, has ever acknowledged the legitimacy of the War Powers Act, and most of these so-called limitations on presidential power had been gutted, ignored, or violated long before Cheney became vice president. Republican Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire said, “The vice president may be the only person I know of that believes the executive has somehow lost power over the last thirty years.”

Bush and Cheney have made it a primary goal of their terms in office, nonetheless, to carve executive power into the law, and the war has been the primary vehicle for such actions. John Yoo, Bush's deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, writes in his book War By Other Means, “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts laws, the President enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch.” Bush has claimed that he is “the commander” and “the decider” and that therefore he does not “owe anybody an explanation” for anything.

Similarly, in a September 2006 press conference, White House spokesman Tony Snow engaged in this dialogue:

Q: Isn't it the Supreme Court that's supposed to decide whether laws are unconstitutional or not?

A: No, as a matter of fact the president has an obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. That is an obligation that presidents have enacted through signing statements going back to Jefferson. So, while the Supreme Court can be an arbiter of the Constitution, the fact is the president is the one, the only person who, by the Constitution, is given the responsibility to preserve, protect, and defend that document, so it is perfectly consistent with presidential authority under the Constitution itself.

Snow was referring to the president's habit of signing bills into law accompanied by “statements” that, according to the American Bar Association, “assert President Bush's authority to disregard or decline to enforce laws adopted by Congress.” All forty-two previous U.S. presidents combined have signed statements exempting themselves from the provisions of 568 new laws, whereas Bush has, to date, exempted himself from more than 1,000.

Failed Checks on Executive Ambition

The current administration's perspective on political power is far from unique. Few, if any, presidents have refused the increased executive authority that is the natural byproduct of military Keynesianism. Moreover, the division of power between the president, the Congress, and the judiciary—often described as the bedrock of American democracy—has eroded significantly in recent years. The people, the press, and the military, too, seem anxious to cede power to a “wartime” president, leaving Bush, or those who follow him, almost entirely unobstructed in pursuing the imperial project.

Congress: Corrupt and indifferent, Congress, which the Founders believed would be the leading branch of government, has already entirely forfeited the power to declare war. More recently, it gave the president the legal right to detain anyone, even American citizens, without warrant, and to detain non-citizens without recourse to habeas corpus, as well as to use a variety of interrogation methods that he could define, at his sole discretion, to be or not be torture.

The Courts: The judicial branch is hardly more effective in restraining presidential ambition. The Supreme Court was active in the installation of the current president, and the lower courts increasingly are packed with judges who believe they should defer to his wishes. In 2006, for instance, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed a suit by a thirty-five-year-old Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who in 2002 was seized by U.S. government agents at John F. Kennedy Airport and delivered to Syria, where he was tortured for ten months before being released. No charges were filed against Arar, and his torturers eventually admitted he had no links to any crime. In explaining his dismissal, Trager noted with approval an earlier Supreme Court finding that such judgment would “threaten ‘our customary policy of deference to the President in matters of foreign affairs.’”

The Military: It is possible that the U.S. military could take over the government and declare a dictatorship. That is how the Roman republic ended. For the military voluntarily to move toward direct rule, however, its leaders would have to ignore their ties to civilian society, where the symbolic importance of constitutional legitimacy remains potent. Rebellious officers may well worry about how the American people would react to such a move. Moreover, prosecutions of low-level military torturers from Abu Ghraib prison and killers of civilians in Iraq have demonstrated to enlisted ranks that obedience to illegal orders can result in their being punished, whereas officers go free. No one knows whether ordinary American soldiers would obey clearly illegal orders to oust an elected government or whether the officer corps has sufficient confidence to issue such orders. In addition, the present system already offers the military high command so much—in funds, prestige, and future employment via the military-industrial revolving door—that a perilous transition to anything resembling direct military rule would make little sense under reasonably normal conditions.

The People: Could the people themselves restore constitutional government? A grassroots movement to break the hold of the military-industrial complex and establish public financing of elections is conceivable. But, given the conglomerate control of the mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing the United States' large and diffuse population, it is unlikely. Moreover, the people themselves have enjoyed the Keynesian benefits of the U.S. imperial project and—in all but a few cases—have not yet suffered any of its consequences.

Bankruptcy and Collapse

The more likely check on presidential power, and on U.S. military ambition, will be the economic failure that is the inevitable consequence of military Keynesianism. Traditional Keynesianism is a stable two-part system composed of deficit spending in bad times and debt payment in good times. Military Keynesianism is an unstable one-part system. With no political check, debt accrues until it reaches a crisis point.

In the fiscal 2006 budget, the Congressional Research Service estimates that Pentagon spending on Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom will be about $10 billion per month, or an extra $120.3 billion for the year. As of mid-2006, the overall cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since their inception stood at more than $400 billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize‒winning economist, and his colleague, Linda Bilmes, have tried to put together an estimate of the real costs of the Iraq war. They calculate that it will cost about $2 trillion by 2015. The conservative American Enterprise Institute suggests a figure at the opposite end of the spectrum—$1 trillion. Both figures are an order of magnitude larger than what the Bush Administration publicly acknowledges.

At the same time, the U.S. trade deficit, the largest component of the current account deficit, soared to an all-time high in 2005 of $782.7 billion, the fourth consecutive year that America's trade debts set records. The trade deficit with China alone rose to $201.5 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with any country. Meanwhile, since mid-2000, the country has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs. To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Congress raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $9 trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office that the limit had to be raised. Had Congress not raised it, the U.S. government would not have been able to borrow more money and would have had to default on its massive debts.

Among the creditors that finance this unprecedented sum, two of the largest are the central banks of China ($854 billion in reserves of dollars and other foreign currencies) and Japan ($850 billion), both of which are the managers of the huge trade surpluses these countries enjoy with the United States. This helps explain why the United States' debt burden has not yet triggered what standard economic theory would predict, which is a steep decline in the value of the U.S. dollar followed by a severe contraction of the American economy—the Chinese and Japanese governments continue to be willing to be paid in dollars in order to sustain American demand for their exports. For the sake of domestic employment, both countries lend huge amounts to the American treasury, but there is no guarantee how long they will want or be able to do so.

CONFIDENCE IN KEY JUDGMENTS

It is difficult to predict the course of a democracy, and perhaps even more so when that democracy is as corrupt as that of the United States. With a new opposition party in the majority in the House, the country could begin a difficult withdrawal from military Keynesianism. Like the British after World War II, the United States could choose to keep its democracy by giving up its empire. The British did not do a particularly brilliant job of liquidating their empire, and there were several clear cases in which British imperialists defied their nation's commitment to democracy in order to keep their foreign privileges—Kenya in the 1950s is a particularly savage example—but the people of the British Isles did choose democracy over imperialism, and that nation continues to thrive as a nation, if not as an empire.

It appears for the moment, however, that the people of the United States prefer the Roman approach and so will abet their government in maintaining a facade of constitutional democracy until the nation drifts into bankruptcy.

Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system, or for military rule, revolution, or simply some new development we cannot yet imagine. Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of the current American standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptional compared with other nations. The American people will be forced to learn what it means to be a far poorer nation and the attitudes and manners that go with it.

http://www.harpers.org/RepublicOrEmpire.html

Particularly in regards to it's reference to "military Keynesianism " , I think it strikes a rather valid target. If one spends a hefty percentage on one's budget on preparations for war - war will be the inevitable result (in the long run).

The amount of money injected into the "war machine" certainly adds to the GDP of the country. If the economy is in a sorry state today, one can only imagine what it might be without the billions of dollars going to US corporations thanks to things like the war in Iraq.

We have a President (Eisenhower) who , as a last gift to the nation, warned it of the implications of the military-industrial complex. That aspect of the US economy is orders of magnitude greater than it was then Eisenhower gave that speech.

That type of thinking also leads, as this author suggests, to an executive that sees itself as all powerful. Instead of serving the people, it serves it's own selfish interests. Any attempt at the population to take power back is seen as a threat. Thanks to the money rolling into the system (and both parties coffers) , it makes elected officials far less likely to complain - since they are in fact gaining directly from this industry.

The fact that this current "war on terror" cannot ever be declared over (in realistic terms) means that there is no limit to this feedback loop. One cannot defeat an enemy that has no territory.

The worst aspect of this is that we've seen that all this money and technology seems not to be able to produce it's desired geopolitical effect when exerted. In the case of Iraq, a nation the size of California and with 26 million citizens (seven million less than California), a "superpower" cannot ensure success on the ground.

So what we are faced with here is a situation where the internal American dynamics of the mix of economics and politics produce a **stard child of militarism that is occasionally unleashed against some third party. That no longer seems to be able to make the changes needed to ensure success, as originally set out in the concept of going to war.

Which leads us to a question :

Is this the best way to ensure a more peaceful world, or does it condemn America to being a causative part of a more violent one ? There is far more money to be made through fear and war in the current system.

The Sins Of The Father - Iraq/America Relations (1980-1992)

2007-01-26T09:43:00.000-05:00

One of the more interesting parts of the political discussion is how Democrats are often referred to as assisting terrorists, or working against the best interests of the USA. What makes that type of language all the more fascinating, not to mention deeply ironic, is how much icons of American Republican political power were the main source of Saddam's rise to power.

The recent history of Iraq/America relations starts with the severing of diplomatic relations with Iraq in 1967, after the Six Day War.

Into the Eighties, Iraq was on the list of countries that were supporting terrorism, thus blocking any possibility of foreign aid. That was changed, as the ripples from the 1979 Khomeni lead revolution in Iran (and the embassy hostage crisis) caused American politicians to review Iraq's place in that new area of concern.

Washington's supportive policy toward Iraq began in 1982. Hussein was in the second year of his war with Iran and the conflict was not going well for Baghdad. The Reagan Administration, while officially neutral, decided to help Iraq as a means of containing the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The State Department responded by removing Iraq from the terrorism list in February, 1982, an action opposed by some within the Administration. Four former officials said in interviews that there was no evidence that Iraq's support of terrorists had waned.

"All the intelligence I saw indicated that the Iraqis continued to support terrorism to much the same degree as they had in the past," said Noel Koch, then in charge of the Pentagon's counterterrorism program. "We took Iraq off the list and shouldn't have. . . . We did it for political reasons."

The assertion was supported by a secret 1988 memo in which Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead wrote, "Even though it was removed from the terrorism list six years ago, (Iraq) had provided sanctuary to known terrorists, including Abul Abbas of Achille Lauro fame."

http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg00776.html

And so the die was cast, which leads us to todays headlines.

What followed was massive support to a well known tyrant. The leading supporter of Saddam's rise to power in the era was the father of the current President. Cheney, Baker, and others were also in key positions.

Almost immediately after Iraq was dropped from the list, Washington provided loan guarantees to enable it to buy such American commodities as rice and wheat through the Agriculture Department's Commodity Credit Corp.

Two years later in 1984, Bush personally pressed the federal Export-Import Bank to guarantee $500 million in loans so that Iraq could build a controversial oil pipeline, according to classified government documents.

And throughout much of the period from 1982 to the end of the Reagan Administration, efforts were made to funnel arms as well as economic aid to Baghdad -- sometimes through the Pentagon and sometimes through U.S. allies in the Middle East. Some of the specific arms plans failed to work but government sources said that significant quantities of arms did reach Baghdad as a result of U.S. efforts.

At one point in 1982, for example, a proposal was put forward to trade four American-made howitzers to Iraq for a Soviet T-72 tank, according to classified documents. The T-72 was of particular importance according to a secret July, 1982, report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, because it was protected by a new type of armor, which might prove invulnerable to American firepower. A second plan in 1983 would have allowed Iraq to buy $45 million worth of 175-millimeter long-range
guns and ammunition in exchange for turning over a Soviet tank.

Pentagon officials also reported to then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger "that Iraqi officials said it might be possible to exchange a (Soviet Hind) helicopter for permission to buy 100 Hughes helicopters" equipped with TOW missiles, according to a secret Pentagon memo.

For various reasons, each of these deals fell through. The helicopter transaction was scrapped after the late Richard Stillwell, a retired general who was then deputy undersecretary of defense, objected to working with an Iraqi-sponsored arms trafficker with a reputation for questionable
dealings.

"While I fully recognize the value to the U.S.A. of obtaining an MI-24 HIND, I recommend against pursuing this particular deal because . . . the potential for causing embarrassment to the U.S. government is too great," Stillwell wrote in a top-secret memo for Weinberger in 1983.

In a recent interview, Weinberger refused to discuss any of the proposed exchanges. Although low-level Pentagon operatives saw the arms swaps or sales to Iraq as a means to obtain Soviet technology, two officials say that Weinbeger saw it as a pretext to begin covert and direct arms shipments to Iraq. But Weinberger did acknowledge being part of a faction in the Reagan Administration that favored Iraq over Iran. "Many of us thought it would be better if Iraq won," said Weinberger, now a lawyer in private practice.

A number of classified State Department cables also describe proposals in 1982 and 1983 by William Eagleton, the senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad, to funnel arms to Iraq through allies in the Middle East. "We can selectively lift restrictions on third-party transfers of U.S.-license military equipment to Iraq," he said in an October, 1983, cable.

Although initially rejected, other documents and interviews with former U.S. officials indicate that the policy was pursued on a covert basis with Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait and that arms were transferred to Iraq.

"There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship U.S. arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact," said Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the National Security Council in the Reagan Administration. "It was a policy of nods and winks."

While the American rationale was that Hussein was a buffer against Iran, classified records show U.S. support for his regime continued unabated after the official cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War was signed in August, 1988, and after Iraq's chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish villages on July 19, 1988.

In fact, in August, 1988, Deputy Secretary of State Whitehead recommended in a secret policy memo that "there should be no radical policy changes now regarding Iraq."

The pro-Iraq strategy was embraced by Bush when he became President. His Administration continued to encourage the transfer of U.S.-supplied arms to Iraq from Arab allies, according to interviews
and classified documents.

In NSD 26, he said, "Access to the (Persian) Gulf and the key friendly states in the area is vital to U.S. national security." Included among those states was Iraq, and Bush ordered federal agencies to expand political and economic ties with Baghdad.

NSD 26 came at the height of attempts by the Agriculture Department and other agencies to slash the largest U.S. aid program to Iraq -- the commodity loan guarantees.

Set up to help U.S. farmers increase exports, the program guarantees repayment of bank loans to foreign governments for purchases of American commodities. If the foreign government defaults on the loan, U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab.

Regulations require the Agriculture Department to allocate guarantees on the basis of the receiving country's agricultural needs, its market potential and the likelihood that the loans will be repaid. Classified documents show, however, that foreign-policy considerations played a decisive role in allocating credits to Iraq.

The Iraqis themselves raised the idea of U.S. guarantees for food aid in 1983, a time when U.S. officials feared that Hussein might be overthrown because of food shortages caused by the Iran-Iraq War.

Before the year was out, the first $402 million in Agriculture Department loan guarantees was approved for Iraq. In 1984, the amount rose to $513 million and it eventually reached $1.1 billion in 1988.

As the guarantees increased, so did concerns. The primary forum for airing these anxieties was a little-known, interagency organization called the National Advisory Council.

Advisory Council documents show that beginning in 1985, a number of members representing the Federal Reserve Board, Treasury Department and the Export-Import Bank counseled or voted at different times against increases of aid to Iraq. They feared that Iraq was not credit-worthy and would not be able to repay the billions owed.

Their concerns intensified when on Aug. 4, 1989, FBI and Customs Service agents raided the Atlanta branch of an Italian bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, and uncovered $4 billion in unauthorized loans to Iraq, including $900 million guaranteed by the Agriculture Department program.

Nevertheless, top Bush Administration officials, including Secretary of State Baker, discounted the protests in the interagency group and sought another $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq in the fall of 1989, to be given in two installments.

- Ibid

There's James Baker again, a close family friend and fixer of the Bush family, front and center when Iraq needed aid. By this point the Iran/Iraq war was over, yet the push to support Hussein continued unabated.

Saddam was, without any doubt, as brutal a leader then as he was in 2003.

The gassing of the Kurds had occurred from 1987-1989. Pictures of the Halabja massacre were already headline items.

Strangely enough, concerning Halabja, US military intelligence had discounted Iraq as being the source of those gas attacks.

...immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

Pelletiere, "A War Crime, or an Act of War?" The New York Times, January 31, 2003

The official U.S. government reaction to Halabja? At first the government downplayed the reports, which were coming from Iranian sources. Once the media had confirmed the story and pictures of the dead villagers had been shown on television, the U.S. denounced the use of gas. Marlin Fitzwater told reporters, "Everyone in the administration saw the same reports you saw last night. They were horrible, outrageous, disgusting and should serve as a reminder to all countries of why chemical warfare should be banned." But as Power observes, "The United States issued no threats or demands." The government's objection was that Saddam had used gas to kill his own citizens, not that he had killed them. Indeed, subsequently State Department officials indicated that both sides--Iraq and Iran--were responsible perhaps for the gassing of civilian Kurds.

On August 20, 1988 Iran and Iraq ended their war. Within days Iraq again gassed the Kurds. A front-page story in the New York Times summed up the purpose of the latest assault: "Iraq has begun a major offensive [meant to] crush the 40-year-long insurgency once and for all." After a delay of weeks Secretary of State George Shultz condemned the assaults. But the United States again failed to act, even as hundreds of thousands of Kurds were being uprooted from their homes and forced into the mountains, tens of thousands killed. By 1989, says Powers, 4,049 Kurdish villages had been destroyed.

Why had the United States not acted? That was what William Safire and a few other columnists in the media wanted to know. Years later James Baker explained:

Diplomacy--as well as the American psyche--is fundamentally biased toward "improving relations." Shifting a policy away from cooperation toward confrontation is always a more difficult proposition--particularly when support for existing policy is as firmly embedded among various constituencies and bureaucratic interests as was the policy toward Iraq."

Domestic special interests had a stake in the survival of Saddam. Exports to Iraq of American agricultural products were large: 23 percent of U.S. rice exports went to Iraq; a million tons of wheat. When members of Congress threatened to pass a sanctions bill against Iraq, the White House opposed the measure.

http://hnn.us/articles/862.html

U.S. intelligence was worried about his potential as a regional threat.

Rumsfeld shook his hand.

By early 1990, Iraq had used the first $500 million and was asking for the second installment. The NSC and the State Department pressed to have the aid released.

Again there was resistance. Iraqi officials had been implicated more deeply in the growing Banca Nazionale affair and government analysts were more skeptical about Iraq's ability to repay its growing foreign debt because it was spending so much on arms.

"In the worst-case scenario, investigators would find a direct link to financing Iraqi military expenditures, particularly the Condor missile," Paul****rson, head of the Agriculture Department program that aided the Iraqis, wrote in a Feb. 23, 1990, memo to his superior.

Condor was an Iraqi effort to develop an intercontinental missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. While****rson later told a congressional committee that he was only speculating about the Condor, his warning reflected growing evidence that the Agriculture aid had gone for military
uses.

Then on March 27, 1990, the U.S. Customs Service thwarted an effort by Iraq to obtain American-made triggers for nuclear weapons. And in a speech that same month, Hussein issued his threat to "burn half of Israel." Publicly, at least, President Bush promised a crackdown on exports to Iraq, saying that "nuclear proliferation . . . continues to pose serious threats to U.S. interests, as well as the interests of our friends in the region."

Pretty strong stuff. Long range missiles, nuclear triggers, "burning Israel"....

At the same time, there was an economic benefit to certain US industries, which seems to have been the overriding concern.

In 1989 President George Herbert Walker Bush took power and ordered a review of United States policy toward Iraq. According to Power:

The study ... deemed Iraq a potentially helpful ally in containing Iran and nudging the Middle East peace process ahead. The "Guidelines for U.S.-Iraq Policy" swiped at proponents of sanctions on Capital Hill and a few human rights advocates who had begun lobbying within the State Department. The guidelines noted that despite support from the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and State Departments for a profitable, stable U.S.-Iraq relationship, "parts of Congress and the Department would scuttle even the most benign and beneficial areas of the relationship, such as agricultural exports." The Bush administration would not shift to a policy of dual containment of both Iraq and Iran. Vocal American businesses were adamant that Iraq was a source of opportunity, not enmity. The White House did all it could to create an opening for these companies"Had we attempted to isolate Iraq," Secretary of State James Baker wrote later, "we would have also isolated American businesses, particularly agricultural interests, from significant commercial opportunities."

http://hnn.us/articles/862.html

Dollars, and the the corporations, were the source of the push towards enabling Saddam and Iraq.

On April 16, 1990, CIA Director Robert M. Gates, then deputy national security adviser, chaired an interagency meeting to discuss Iraqi policy. At that meeting, Commerce Undersecretary Dennis Kloske presented a variety of proposals to restrict licenses of high-tech technology with potential military uses to Iraq. The proposals were rejected.

On June 8, Kloske also sent a classified memo to Gates recommending a limited proposal to tighten up controls of exports to Iraq for technology with ballistic-missile applications. That proposal was rejected as well.

Hussein had also begun his campaign of overt threats against Kuwait, accusing his tiny neighbor of economic warfare and vowing to retaliate.

Yet as late as July 9, 1990, April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, assured Iraqi officials that the Bush Administration was still trying to get the second $500 million released, according to a classified cable.

Only on Aug. 2, 1990, did the Agriculture Department officially suspend the Agriculture Department guarantees to Iraq -- the same day that Hussein's tanks and troops swept into Kuwait.

- Ibid

What's strange is that there is no tactical need for Iraq in the region at this time. The war with Iran is over. All sorts of red lights are being seen as to Saddam's increasing desire to get WMD's , and delivery systems. The "Phantom of Saddam" (2006), was no comparison to the "Reality of Saddam (1990). Again, his brutality is by this point not only well known, it's a historical fact.

At the top levels of the US intelligence services, these signs are being interpreted properly. In the White House, under Bush Sr. and Cheney, political pressure is being applied to ignore the threats - and assist Iraq with billions of US dollars.

This is part of a long continuing process, started in the Reagan White House. One of it's strongest proponents was President George Bush Sr.

1984
* June: Vice President Bush telephones the president of the Export-Import Bank and helps persuade him to approve $500 million in loan guarantees so Iraq can build an oil pipeline.

1987
* Late February: Vice President Bush telephones the new president of the Export-Import Bank and successfully lobbies for Iraq to receive $200 million in new loan guarantees from the federal agency.

* March 2: Vice President Bush meets with Iraqi ambassador Nizar Hamdoon and tells him that two requests by Iraq for sensitive American technology had been approved over objections from the Defense Department.

1988
* Aug. 19: Iraq and Iran sign official cease-fire ending 8-year war.

1989
* Early October: President Bush signs a secret national security directive ordering U.S. agencies to expand political and economic ties with Iraq.

* Oct. 31: Secretary of State James A. Baker III telephones Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter and persuades him to reverse Agriculture's position and approve $1 billion in new loan guarantees to Iraq.

* Nov. 8: The $1 billion is approved despite concerns by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve about a growing scandal involving Iraq and the Agriculture credits.

1990
* April 19: White House National Security Council thwarts efforts by Commerce Department to stem the flow of U.S. technology to Iraq.

* July 9: April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, assures officials in Baghdad that the Bush Administration is still trying to obtain the release of the second $500 million of the $1 billion approved in November.

* Aug. 2: Iraq invades Kuwait and the Agriculture Department officially ends loan guarantees to Iraq that have amounted to $5 billion since 1983.

- Ibid

"Our administration's review of the previous Iraq policy was not immune from domestic economic considerations."

- James Baker

This seems to be the one constant in the history between Iraq and the USA.

So the next time an extreme right winger, or the President, points out how much the Democrats are against the country, or how Democrats are friends with the enemy, perhaps a review of history will remind all of us that the same group of people that assisted Saddam on the way up are still around. They were all Republicans.

Many of them are still in power, or were until recently. Over the course of the last twenty years or so, one can trace direct links to these people, and to American foreign and economic policy on Iraq. They are deeply intertwined, like a stubborn vine clinging to a chain link fence.

Bush Jr (the son of the elder that was Iraq's biggest supporter) , Cheney, Rumsfeld, Baker....

The same people that empowered him, for economic and political reasons, are still making money as he lies dead in that grave in Tikrit.

None of them were Democrats.

Martin Luther King Day - January 15th, 2007

2007-01-14T08:07:00.000-05:00

I think it's only fitting to take some time to remember Martin Luther King, seeing as how this holiday is now only hours away.

One of the great things about being my age is being able to say I was around to hear people like King (and Robert Kennedy) speak on TV. Compared to pretty much anyone around today, those two were giants. We, sadly, now live in a time where midgets are looked up to.

I remember the day he was shot, and I was eleven years old. I remember hearing RFK's speech to an African-American crowd - who had no idea of what had happened. That speech is still one of the best moments in american rhetoric, in my opinion.

You can see him give that speech here:

Remember, the crowd has no idea that King has just been murdered. The police have warned Kennedy that they cannot promise him protection. He gets up on a flatbed trailer, wearing a his brother John's coat - and talks from his heart, and not a piece of paper.

Now, back to Martin Luther King.

This was a man who spoke of peace and of love. Unlike others that opposed segregation, he could not hate those that opposed him. He solution to the problem was not violence, but civil disobedience.

Although threatened and attacked, he chose to respond in a most Christlike manner. He refused to let his heart be blackened by the same disease that infected others. He remained true to those things that were the most important, and directed his efforts towards making life better for those most in need of that assistance.

His speeches, and his written thoughts, are all that we have left now.

Here is his " I Have A Dream " speech:

Many of those words are still as true today, as they were when he first gave them to us. Their power, and their relevance, are timeless.

Here is his final speech, the night before he was murdered:

His words and actions helped to change a nation for the better, and that torch is still carried by others today.

So, in the spirit of this day, let's remember Martin Luther King and his legacy to all of us worldwide.

I think that the best eulogy for any man is how the world was made better by his actions while living in it.

Thank you, Martin Luther King, for what you tried to teach us and for what you stood for while you were alive.

Another documentary on the Iraq War I recommend

2007-01-13T13:07:00.001-05:00

If you click on the link above, you can watch the documentary on Google Video.

It's called "Real War On Terror - America's Secret Shame" ,but that title is quite misleading. It gives us a chance to see the soldiers, and their families, that fight this war.

This documentary is a bit tough to watch at times. It shows badly wounded troops, and speaks with the families of the dead. It's the reality of war, and it should not be hidden from our view. Looking away won't make it go away.

In speaking with the injured, you see just how good these people really are. They miss their units, their brothers-in-arms, and wish that they could return back to them.

Sometimes, with lost limbs.

And they still think they can give more.

"No matter what you think about the war, never disrespect the warrior"

This is a side of the war is all too often hidden from us, by design.

If this war concerns you, and it should, then I suggest you take a look at it.

Some other parts of the same series :

Real War On Terror - Iraq The Reckoning : again, a warning. In this documentary you will see people blown up and shot dead. This too is the face of war.

It mainly speaks of why this sectarian violence exists today. How both American and British politicians both neglected to address the post-war dynamics of Iraq. Those dynamics were predictable, and the failure to address them then is the reason we see what we see now.

Real War On Terror - Kidnap And Torture American Style

This is on the subject of extraordinary rendition of suspects to countries that torture.

You can find both on the same site.

2007-01-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

Due South

2007-01-07T20:54:00.000-05:00

Bored, with nothing to do ?

Here's the pilot episode of "Due South" , which is still one of the best looks at the differences in culture between Canada and the USA.

It featured some great writing, some insider jokes that only Canadians could truly get, fantastic music, and..... a deaf wolf.

What's not to love ?

Enjoy....

And....some Due South bloopers to enjoy :

Thank you kindly, YouTube.

Why War ? The Military Industrial Complex examined.

2007-01-07T18:08:00.000-05:00

Perhaps were we to make war a non-profit affair, the world might be a safer place to live. Without profit, much of the incentive for war would disappear. It would then be used only when truly called for.

Let's take a look at some of the corporations involved in this military industrial complex, and see what we can discover about their ties to government.

Lockheed Martin

CEO: Robert J. Stevens
Military contracts 2005: $19.4 billion
Total contributions for the 2004 election cycle: $2,212,836*

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=9

Bruce P. Jackson - Lockheed Martin Corp.: Vice President for Strategy and Planning, 1999-2002; Director of Global Development, 1997-1999; Director of Defense Planning and Analysis, 1995-1997

Martin Marietta Corp.: Director for Strategic Planning, Director for Corporate Development Projects, 1993-1995

Lehman Brothers (investment bank): 1990-1993

Not to mention :

Project for the New American Century: Board of Directors

Committee for the Liberation of Iraq: Founder, Chairman of the Board

Republican National Convention: Chair of Platform Subcommittee on Foreign Policy, 2000 Presidential Campaign

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1233

Former Lockheed Martin Vice-President Bruce Jackson was a finance chair for the Bush for President campaign; Vice-Presidential spouse Lynne Cheney is a former board member of Lockheed Martin, and used to receive $120,000 per year from the company for attending a handful of semi-annual board meetings.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/updates/081203.html

Jackson, a long-time proponent of NATO expansion, had considerable success lobbying Eastern European countries to support U.S. policy in Iraq. He helped draft a declaration for the so-called Vilnius 10 countries in February 2003 rebuking French President Jaques Chirac’s position on Iraq. He then convinced the Vilnius Ten countries to sign the declaration, saying that it would help win the U.S. Senate’s approval of their membership into NATO. Said the declaration, "The newest members of the European community agree that we must confront the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and that the United Nations must now act."

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1233

According to the Arms Trade Resource Center, Lockheed Martin gets $105 from each U.S. taxpayer and $228 from each U.S. household. In 2002 the company was effectively taxed at 7.7% compared to an average tax rate for individuals of 21-33%.

1995-2005 annual growth rate % 9.6

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/snapshots/799.html

Northrop Grumman

CEO: Ronald Sugar
Military contracts 2005: $13.5 billion
Campaign contributions in 2004: $1.68 million (defense related)
$1.77 million (total)

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=11

And the company is politically savvy as well, having given $8.5 million in federal campaign contributions from 1990-2002, which has paid off over the years in spades. In December 2003, Northrop Grumman and partner Raytheon won a contract potentially worth more than $10 billion with the Pentagon for a missile defense system. It’s now the third largest “defense” company in the US, after Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Former Northrop Grumman Electronics Systems chief James Roche served as George Bush's Secretary of the Air Force for two years.

Now based in Fairfax, Virginia, the company has been controlled in the past through a web of interlocking ownership by a partnership that included James A. Baker III and Frank Carlucci, former U.S. secretaries of state and defense under Presidents George Bush senior and Ronald Reagan respectively.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=11

Boeing

CEO: Jim McNerney
Military contracts 2005: $18.3 billion
Total contributions for the 2004 election cycle: $1,659,213*

The lobbying efforts of Boeing, and the revolving door between the US government and the Chicago-based giant, are legendary. But Boeing’s influence-peddling finally turned sour in December 2003 when Boeing CEO Philip M. Condit was forced to resign in the wake of revelations of that the company negotiated the hiring of top Air Force procurement official Darlene Druyun while Druyun was setting up a lucrative $27.6 billion leasing deal of Boeing’s 767 air-refueling aircrafts over a period of ten years. The deal, which went through despite controversy, will cost taxpayers up to $10 billion dollars more than if the Air Force has purchased the aircrafts outright.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has sharply limited the information he is willing to let Congress see on a controversial defense contract that is the focus of multiple investigations.

Rumsfeld took a hard line even with fellow Republicans who want information from him about a proposed $23 billion deal for the Air Force to buy and lease 100 Boeing 767 aerial refueling tankers. Rumsfeld's refusal to give senators all the materials they requested could provoke a rare congressional subpoena.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11366

But Boeing still has a lot of well-connected people looking out for its interests. John Shalikashvili, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is on the Boeing board. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Rudy de Leon heads up Boeing's Washington office.

After September 11th Boeing beefed up its political connections by hiring former Senator Bennett Johnson (D-LA) and former Rep. Bill Paxon (R-NY).

Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Boeing's senior vice president for international relations, uses his forty years of experience to generate business for Boeing with foreign governments and corporations.

Richard Perle, former Chairman and current member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, is another important Boeing ally within the corridors of power. So it should come as no surprise that Boeing has provided Perle’s venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, with $20 million.

Two other Defense Policy Board members also work as consultants for Boeing: the Air Force’s General Ronald Fogelman and former Navy Admiral David Jeremiah.

Boeing ranks number sixty six in the Center for Responsive Politics’ list of the 100 biggest political donors since 1989. Over the nineties, Boeing handed out $7.6 million in Political Action Committee (PAC) and soft money contributions. During the 2002 election year, Boeing gave $909,134 in PAC contributions and $700,482 in soft money donations and its contributions added up to more than $1.5 million during the 2000 elections.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=10

General Dynamics

CEO: Nicholas D. Chabraja
Military contracts 2005: $10.6 billion
Total contributions in the 2004 election cycle: $1,437,602*

The Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, is a former General Dynamics executive. The Boston Globe noted at the time of his nomination that "Gordon England had no military experience, but he had just the right qualification to become President Bush’s pick for secretary of the Navy: Two decades in the corporate world."

Former Pentagon and military officials populate General Dynamic’s Board of Directors, including Jay L. Johnson, Chief of Naval Operations in the U.S. Navy, Paul G. Kaminski, Under Secretary of U.S. Department of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, and George A. Joulwan, former U.S. Army Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had an interest in the company as well. He received $1 million of stock in General Dynamics, as well as more than $20 million in other corporate investments, when he joined the board of America Online.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=12

General Electric

CEO: Jeffrey R. Immelt
Military contracts 2005: $2.2 billion
Defense-related contributions in the 2004 election cycle: $220,950*

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=16

General Electric has been involved in so many cases of fraud that in the 1990s the Pentagon's Defense Contract Management Agency created a special investigations office specifically for the company, which indicted GE on 22 criminal counts and recovered $221.7 million. In one case, in 1992, GE entered a guilty plea to criminal and civil charges for defrauding the Pentagon in a case where money was funneled to the Israeli military. GE was fined $69 million for violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

GE’s financial division has been another area ripe for fraud. GE was fined $100 million for trying to get bankrupt creditors to pay without informing the bankruptcy courts, in effect paying debts that they no longer legally owed. Not surprisingly, General Electric is the financial backer of WorldCom, the telecom company whose massive fraud and creative accounting led to the largest bankruptcy in US history.

The company has been involved in countless scandals, but strangely enough, they don’t seem to affect General Electric’s ability to win government contracts – but then, this is typical of all military contractors. According to a survey by the Center for Public Integrity, from 1990-2002, 30 of the US government’s top contractors were found guilty of fraud in 400 cases, leading to settlements and fines amounting to at least $3.4 billion. General Electric paid $982.9 million for 63 cases in this period.

Such repeated behavior and continued contracts wouldn’t be possible without friends in high places, of which General Electric. GE spent more than $31 million in 2001 and 2002 lobbying lawmakers; in 2000 it spent $16 million.

Reigning CEO Jack Welch had enormous influence and was consistently ranked CEO of the Year by the slavish business press; he was major Republican donor as well.

GE director Sam Nunn was senator for Georgia for 27 years, and also sits on the boards of ChevronTexaco.

GE’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel and Secretary, Benjamin W. Heineman, used to work for the US government’s Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

General Electric's defense sector gave $221,200 to political campaigns in the 2004 election cycle, with 50 percent going to Democrats and 50 percent to Republicans.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=16

Halliburton

CEO: David J. Lesar
Military contracts 2005: $5.8 billion
Oil and gas-related contributions in the 2004 election cycle: $221,249*

The biggest windfall in the invasion of Iraq has most certainly gone to the oil services and logistics company Halliburton . The company, which was formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, had revenue of over $8 billion in contracts in Iraq in 2003 alone. And while Halliburton ’s dealings in Iraq have been dogged everywhere by scandal – including now a criminal investigation into overcharging by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root for gas shipped into Iraq – Vice President Cheney manages to be doing quite well from the deal. He owns $433,000 unexercised Halliburton stock options worth more than $10 million dollars.

But Halliburton ’s history of benefiting from government largesse goes back a ways. From 1962 to 1972 the Pentagon paid the company tens of millions of dollars to work in South Vietnam, where they built roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta. The company was one of the main contractors hired to construct the Diego Garcia air base in the Indian Ocean, according to Pentagon military histories.

In the early 1990s the company was awarded the job to study and then implement the privatization of routine army functions under then-secretary of defense Dick Cheney. When Cheney quit his Pentagon job, he landed the job of Halliburton 's CEO, bringing with him his trusted deputy David Gribbin. The two substantially increased Halliburton 's government business until they quit in 2000, once Cheney was elected vice president. This included a $2.2 billion bill for a Brown and Root contract to support US soldiers in Operation Just Endeavor in the Balkans.

After Cheney and Gribbin departed, another confidante of Cheney, Admiral Joe Lopez, former commander in chief for U.S. forces in southern Europe, took over Gribbin's old job of go-between for the government and the company, according to Brown and Root's own press releases.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=15

Science Applications International Corporation

CEO: Ken Dahlberg
Military contracts 2005: $2.8 billion
Campaign contributions in 2004: $781,410 (defense related)

SAIC, awarded control of the Iraqi Media Network, was not able to spin US propaganda in Iraq and ended up being forced to withdraw. But their financial prospects remain solid as supplier of surveillance technology to US spy agencies.

SAIC was given the contract to run the Occupational Authority’s Iraqi Media Network, including television stations, radio stations and newspapers. But even as propaganda goes, the network was such a flop – no Iraqis would watch it – that SAIC lost the contract this January.

But SAIC's biggest source of income is surveillance especially for the United States spy agencies: it is reportedly the largest recipient of contracts from the National Security Agency (NSA) and one of the top five contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some 5,000 employees (or one in eight employees) have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country. "We are a stealth company," Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer, told a magazine named Business 2.0. "We're everywhere, but almost never seen."

Today two of SAIC's most valuable products are: TeraText and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) data-mining programs that are used by intelligence agencies to sift the immense volumes of data they now collect by monitoring phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and other types of electronic communications.

SAIC became home to former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay who went to SAIC as a vice president from 1993 to 2002. Last year he was hired by the CIA to return to Iraq and head the search for weapons of mass destruction.

Critics note that the company has a revolving door with the spy agencies: NSA veteran William B. Black Jr. retired from the intelligence agency in 1997, went to SAIC for three years and returned to the NSA as deputy director in 2000. Two years later, SAIC won the $282 million job of overseeing the latest phase of Trailblazer, the most thorough revamping in the agency's history of its eavesdropping systems.

SAIC has dozens of other government contracts: it trains air marshals for the Federal Aviation Administration, works with Bechtel to run the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada on Western Shoshone traditional lands (despite major protests from the Native Americans), The Army hired the company to destroy old chemical weapons at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the National Cancer Institute uses SAIC to help run its research facility in Frederick, the Transportation Security Administration asked it to dispose of scissors and pocket knives confiscated from air travelers and SAIC's unmanned Vigilante helicopters, equipped with Raytheon's low-cost, precision-kill rockets, are to undergo testing by the Army.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=17

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Bechtel Group Inc.

Because Bechtel is a private corporation, however, the total number of its branches and affiliated companies is not publicly disclosed. From 1990 to fiscal year 2002, the company received more than $11.7 billion in U.S. government contracts—the sixth largest amount received by any of the approximately 70 companies with contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Along the way, company executives built strong relationships within the Arab world, including with Bin Laden Construction, owned by the Saudi family whose estranged son Osama became the symbol of international terrorism. The New Yorker magazine has reported that Bin Laden Construction holds a $10 million stake in the Fremont Group, formerly known as Bechtel Investments, a subsidiary of Bechtel until 1986.

By far the most influential hire, however, was George P. Shultz. After leaving the Nixon administration in 1974, where he served as Treasury secretary, Shultz joined Bechtel as its executive vice president. Shultz suspended his association with Bechtel when appointed secretary of state by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. In 1983, Shultz dispatched diplomatic envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to advocate for construction of a pipeline running from Iraqi oilfields to Jordan's port of Aqaba. According to documents recently obtained by the Institute for Policy Studies, Hussein was afraid Israel would bomb the pipeline, so an investor in the project—whom Bechtel claimed was not on its payroll—reportedly tried to arrange a deal through the U.S. Attorney General's office by which Israel would receive some $70 million per year not to bomb the pipeline. Critics accused Shultz of intervening on behalf of Bechtel, which he denied. Shultz rejoined Bechtel in 1989 as a member of its board of directors after retiring from the State Department. Upon returning, he learned that the company had assumed a $2 billion contract for project management of an Iraqi petrochemicals complex that manufactured ethylene oxide, a chemical used in the production of plastics. U.S. chemical experts pointed out, however, that the chemical was also a precursor to mustard gas. On Shultz's recommendation, Bechtel pulled out of the project. Shultz currently serves as a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In 1998, Bechtel hired former Marine four-star general Jack Sheehan as senior vice president in charge of project operations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Sheehan served as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic and Commander in Chief U.S. Atlantic Command before his retirement in 1997. After leaving active duty, Sheehan served as Special Adviser for Central Asia for two U.S. defense secretaries. He also sits on the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon-appointed board that advises it on defense issues.

Other hires from the federal rolls include Charles "Chuck" Redman, who joined Bechtel in 1996 after a 22-year career in the State Department that included posts as ambassador to Sweden and Germany and special envoy to Haiti and Yugoslavia (he also worked as a spokesman for Schultz); Richard Helms, now deceased, who consulted on Iranian and Middle Eastern projects in 1978 after serving as CIA director and ambassador to Iran, becoming embroiled in the assassination attempt on Fidel Castro and overthrow of Chilean leader Salvador Allende; and J. Bennett Johnston, board member of Nexant Inc., the energy consultancy branch of Bechtel, who served as U.S. Senator from oil-rich Louisiana from 1972 to 1997, and authored the Energy Policy Act of 1992.

Bechtel's government influence has also worked in the other direction, where company officers have served or consulted in government capacities.

CEO Riley Bechtel was appointed in February 2003 to the President's Export Council, which advises the president on programs to improve trade.

Former Bechtel Energy Resources President Ross Connelly left the company in 1995 and in 2001 was appointed executive vice president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which provides financing and insurance for U.S. companies operating in other countries.

Daniel Chao, Vice President of Bechtel Enterprises Holdings Inc., was appointed a member of the Advisory Committee for the Export-Import Bank in August 2002. The Export-Import Bank provides loans, loan guarantees and other financial support for U.S. companies abroad, and has enjoyed a good relationship with Bechtel. In addition to awarding the company several loans, it was headed from 1977 to 1982 by former Bechtel vice president John L. Moore, and former Bechtel CEO Stephen D. Bechtel sat on its advisory committee from 1969 to 1972.

In addition, the Clinton administration appointed Bob Baxter, former president of Bechtel's Civil Global Industry Unit, to the Advisory Committee to the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection in 1998, and former Bechtel Technology & Consulting manager Larry Papay to the Panel on Energy R&D of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology in 1997.

http://www.public-i.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=6

This type of close connection, under both democratic and republican administrations, is troubling. This intermarriage of government and corporations can contaminate foreign policy decisions.

If the government and corporations begin to blur, and blend together, then there is a risk that decisions will be made based on financial motivations. Clearly, for many of these companies, war is good business. Unlike the private market, many times bids are done behind closed doors.

The record for many of these companies, in regards to integrity, is also not a good one. All too often you will find some of these names also listed in connection with scandals.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the world about the consequences of such a military industrial complex when he left office.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

What would he say now ?

If you are in the mood to see some great photography, and graphic artists online

2007-01-07T07:34:00.000-05:00

I discovered this online quite by accident, after reading another blog. If you click on the above link, you'll see the rest of the works of various people there.

There is also Zen and photography , another worthy site featuring a variety of photographers collections of found images.

Happy New Year.

Independant media in a time of war

2006-11-24T00:06:00.000-05:00

Here's another documentary to take in, if you are interested. It presents a rather different look at what modern media is capable of, in a time of war.

James Miller's Death in Gaza

2006-11-18T14:14:00.000-05:00

If you click on that link above you'll see a rather sad and unsettling look inside the world of the Palesinian children of the Gaza strip.

The filmaker wanted to do a story covering both Israeli and Palestinian children, but was shot to death before he could complete that task.

It's a tough look at how the children of that part of the world are it's first victims.

November 11th, 2006 - A Time To Remember

2006-11-11T03:34:00.000-05:00

If you click on the above link, you'll find a short film I did last year to thank those men and women all over the world that served, and fell, in WW2 fighting against the greatest tyranny this century has ever seen.

Through their noble effort, many millions of people live in freedom today.

Common people, doing uncommon things.

A sincere thank you, for the greatest gift of all.

Today, men and women from many countries are engaged in protecting us all over the world. They, like their predecessors, deserve our appreciation - not for just one day a year, but every single day of the year.

If you see a veteran today (or any other day), or some serviceman or servicewoman, remember what they represent, and take a minute to thank them for their service to your country.

A member on a forum site I am a member of brought this video to my attention. I'd like to share it with you, in the spirit of the day.

"On November 11, 1999 Terry Kelly was in a Shoppers Drug Mart store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. At 10:55 AM an announcement came over the store’s PA asking customers who would still be on the premises at 11:00 AM to give two minutes of silence in respect to the veterans who have sacrificed so much for us.

Terry was impressed with the store’s leadership role in adopting the Legion’s “two minutes of silence” initiative. He felt that the store’s contribution of educating the public to the importance of remembering was commendable.

When eleven o’clock arrived on that day, an announcement was again made asking for the “two minutes of silence” to commence. All customers, with the exception of a man who was accompanied by his young child, showed their respect.

Terry’s anger towards the father for trying to engage the store’s clerk in conversation and for setting a bad example for his child was channeled into a beautiful piece of work called, “A Pittance of Time”. Terry later recorded “A Pittance of Time” and included it on his full-length music CD, “The Power of the Dream”.

In the interest of creating a greater awareness of the sacrifices that have been made and are still being made on our behalf, “A Pittance of Time” has been adapted to the French language and titled “C’est si peu de temps”. Music videos for both audio tracks too were produced in support of the campaign and a musical/theatrical concert production, “Two Minutes of Silence – A Pittance of Time”, was written for the stage."

Bush as Macbeth

2006-11-10T04:04:00.000-05:00

The one strange thing about Bush is this almost Shakespearean aspect of all this. Here's a fellow that spends most of his life not working in any direction towards a political future, much less the White House.

It becomes a bit like Bush doing a mangled summer stock version of Macbeth, if one looks at they way it all went.

I bear a charmed life.

Macbeth, 5. 8

He gets picked, and groomed, by the neocons/theocons as their candidate. He takes power under a black cloud, and generally doesn't impress anyone for the first nine months of his presidency.

Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding.

Macbeth, 3. 1

The neocon vision is failing, and there is little hope or indication on the horizon that Bush and the others will be anything more than a footnote in the history books.

Then 9/11 happens, and Bush is handed one of those one in a lifetime opportunities to take the helm and lead decisively. The neocons/theocons realize this is the chance of a lifetime, and use this new wind in their sails to launch their agenda. Bush's popularity goes through the roof (as would be expected in such a difficult time), and he decides to go into Afghanistan.

Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.

Macbeth, 4. 1

He rides a wave of strong public support, and seems almost untouchable.

That war goes well, relatively, and up to that moment (except for not getting Bin Laden) he's at least going in a direction most Americans see as a positive thing. The great irony is that, at the exact same time, the neocons plans of attacking Iraq (proposed in 1999,and decided in March 2001) become the entire focus of this "war on terror".

Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.

Macbeth, 3. 2

That's where the wheels start to fly off the wagon. Deception and lies take center stage for it's rationale, and the war is badly run right from it's first moments of planning. Decision after decision (especially in regards to Bremer) pile up the odds against the troops. Although the war is won, the peace is soon lost.

The ghost of Soviet era Afghanistan appears, and walks the ramparts of the castle walls. Those insurgents in Iraq use essentially the same tactics used by the "freedom fighters" trained by the Pakistanis, and funded by the Americans.

Like in Macbeth, violent storms arrive , as if to indicate the heavens themselves are in some strange discord with events.

The Weather

As in other Shakespearean tragedies, Macbeth’s grotesque murder spree is accompanied by a number of unnatural occurrences in the natural realm. From the thunder and lightning that accompany the witches’ appearances to the terrible storms that rage on the night of Duncan’s murder, these violations of the natural order reflect corruption in the moral and political orders.

http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/macbeth/themes.html

Those in power feverishly try to wash the blood from their hands, and decry how Iraq has taken over the agenda, and blown them off their glorious course and onto the rocks and shoals of destiny.

“Out, damned spot; out, I say . . . who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

As they get deeper and deeper into the quagmire, they refuse to see reality. They've bought their own propoganda, and are blinded to the facts on the ground. They have come to believe their own lies, and it ends their reign.

Screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.

Macbeth, 1. 7

Even though the majority of Iraqis and Americans both want the US forces out of Iraq - they continue blindly onward towards their fate.

Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.

Macbeth, 1. 7

Then, just before this election, the neocons come out with their night of the long knives, and savagely attack their former leader.

They lose the election, as the trees march towards the castle walls.

Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.

Macbeth, 4. 1

Hours after defeat, Rumsfeld becomes the first casuality of an Informed Electorate going Democratic. Within three days, those two men who shook hands share a fate neither expected. Saddam and Rumsfeld, once a mighty king and prince, both fall from a great height.

Even within the court itself, treachery runs deep.

When President George W. Bush lobbed a barb at Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, at his press conference, "I was obviously working harder on this campaign than he was," there were notable "oohs" from the audience at the public slapdown.

"Nobody thinks that Karl is in charge of the occupation of Iraq," said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, who has close ties to Mr Rove. "I haven't heard any complaints about him. In a conference call with conservative groups no one faulted the turnout effort."

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15645686/

But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears.

Macbeth, 3. 4

Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

Macbeth, 5. 2

The very seed that destroyed him was planted and nurtured by the man himself, and his court. It was there from the very start, and were it not for 9/11, it would have probably never sprouted forth and captured him in it's thorns.

It's root comes from that 1999 PNAC letter to Clinton, the one signed by all those that are now in the spotlight. Seven years after being written, it's conclusion has finally been reached.

The Neocons, Beware The Ides Of November

2006-11-04T13:12:00.000-05:00

Just how bad is the war in Iraq getting ? Just how badly is it being run ?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq now says dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy there into a disaster.

Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.

"I probably would have said, 'Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,"' he told Vanity Fair magazine in its upcoming January issue.

Asked about the article, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "We appreciate the Monday-morning quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to succeed in Iraq and we are going forward with it."

Other prominent conservatives criticized the administration's conduct of the war in the article, including Kenneth Adelman, who also served on the Defense Policy Board that informally advised Bush. Adelman said he was "crushed" by the performance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Adelman also said that neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world," has been discredited with the public. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell."

The critiques come as growing numbers of Republicans have criticized Bush's policies on Iraq. The war, unpopular with many Americans, has become a top-tier issue in next week's congressional elections.

Perle said "you have to hold the president responsible" because he didn't recognize "disloyalty" by some in the administration. He said the White House's National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly.

A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam's military power and liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." But he told the magazine he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's national security team.

"They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," he said. "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/03/iraq.critics.ap/index.html

Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon advisers before the war, Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, were among the neoconservatives who recanted to Vanity Fair magazine in an article that could influence Tuesday's battle for the control of Congress. The Iraq war has been the dominant issue in the election.

He too takes back his public urging for military action, in light of the administration's performance. "I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked 'can't do'. And that's very different from 'let's go'."

Mr Adelman, a senior Reagan adviser at cold war summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, expressed particular disappointment in Mr Rumsfeld, who he described as a particular friend. "I'm crushed by his performance," he said. "Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."

Mr Adelman said the guiding principle behind neoconservatism, "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world", had been killed off for a generation at least. After Iraq, he told Vanity Fair, "it's not going to sell".

Michael Rubin, who worked on the staff of the Pentagon's office of special plans and the coalition provisional authority in Baghdad, accused Mr Bush of betraying Iraqi reformers.

The president's actions, Mr Rubin said, had been "not much different from what his father did on February 15 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did".

Mr Frum, who as a White House speechwriter helped coin the phrase "axis of evil" in 2002, said failure in Iraq might be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them". The blame, Mr Frum said, lies with "failure at the centre", beginning with the president.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/s...1939472,00.html

The timing of this act (and the language used), right before a critical election, is even more fascinating. Here are some of the top people in the neo-con movement, and they've now turned into Brutus and his fellow assasins in the Roman Senate.

Tillius with both hands caught hold of his robe and pulled it off from his shoulders, and Casca, that stood behind him, drawing his dagger, gave him the first, but a slight wound, about the shoulder. Caesar snatching hold of the handle of the dagger, and crying out aloud in Latin, "Villain Casca, what do you?" he, calling in Greek to his brother, bade him come and help. And by this time, finding himself struck by a great many hands, and looking round about him to see if he could force his way out, when he saw Brutus with his dagger drawn against him, he let go Casca's hand, that he had hold of, and, covering his head with his robe, gave up his body to their blows. And they so eagerly pressed towards the body, and so many daggers were hacking together, that they cut one another; Brutus, particularly, received a wound in his hand, and all of them were besmeared with the blood.

- Plutarch

"Et Tu, Richard ?"

The Best War Ever !

2006-11-02T23:28:00.000-05:00

If you are interested in the war in Iraq, here's an interview you should listen to.

It's with John Stauber, the author of "The Best War Ever" .

“Lies got us into this war. Only the truth will get us out.”

The Best War Ever, by the best-selling authors of Weapons of Mass Deception, is a vital account of why America is losing in Iraq and the Middle East. We have met the enemy—and it's our own PR machine. One of the most tragic consequences of the Bush administration's reliance on spin, the authors argue, is its disdain for realistic planning. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, policymakers dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts, choosing instead to promulgate their own version of the war through conservative media outlets and PR campaigns. And as the book reveals, they're still doing it—as the people who sold us the war in Iraq are now trying to sell an expansion into Syria and Iran.

Why You Should Read The Best War Ever

* Offers the most compelling and complete study to date of the propaganda campaign that led us to war, and which continues to trap the Bush administration within a “mirrored echo chamber” of its own “message consistency”—with catastrophic consequences for the United States and the world.

* Provides meticulous accounting of the polling and spin-doctoring of GOP and administration officials in laying out language to obscure the reality of this unilaterally-declared war of choice, and occupation.

* Details how the Bush administration has aimed its propaganda not at a tactical deception of enemy combatants, but at the American people themselves. This violates long-standing and important American political traditions dating back to the Smith-Mundt Act, which was first passed by Congress in 1948 after lawmakers saw the harm that propaganda had done during Hitler's reign in Germany.

* Gives necessary context and background on the administration's use of leaked information and ad hominem attacks to discredit their critics. It examines the case of CIA analyst Valerie Plame and her husband Joseph Wilson, showing how the administration's eagerness to discredit a critic came at the cost of sacrificing important policy goals, including preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

* Is the first book to compile and compare various accountings of Iraqi and U.S. casualties as a result of this conflict. Why is there no official U.S. count of Iraqi dead? And why have pro-war pundits engaged in smear campaigns against respected research journals such as the Lancet for conducting their own research into the number of casualties?

* As support for the war dwindles, Rampton and Stauber predict a next round of propaganda that will likely be aimed at rationalizing the failures to bring stability and democracy to Iraq. They also warn that the same officials who misled us into war with Iraq are now gearing up to argue for war with Iran. The authors urge all Americans to understand the lies that were told, and to hold accountable those responsible for creating and disseminating them.

“More than a book—it's a call to action.”

Here's an excerpt from the book.

http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/docs/tbwe_intro.pdf

In their new book titled "The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq [1]" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), which goes on sale Thursday, co-authors John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton assert that television reporters "actually underplayed rather than overplayed the negative" in their reporting from Iraq, while "newspaper coverage during the subsequent occupation has also been sanitised."

Stauber and Rampton cite a study by researchers at George Washington University that analysed 1,820 stories on five U.S. television networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News, as well as the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, and found that "all of the American media largely shied away from showing visuals of coalition, Iraqi military, or civilian casualties. Despite advanced technologies offering reporters the chance to transmit the reality of war in real time, reporters chose instead to present a largely bloodless conflict to viewers even when they did broadcast during firefights."

Print journalists didn't perform much better. A May 2005 review by Los Angeles Times writer James Rainey of the coverage of a six-month period -- when 559 U.S. and Western allies died in Iraq -- by six major U.S. newspapers and two popular newsmagazines found that "readers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Washington Post did not see a single picture of a dead serviceman."

"Rumsfeld's complaints are an interesting twist of the truth since the reality is that the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on media campaigns that have been spectacularly ineffective," Rampton told IPS in a telephone interview. "That the enemy has been more effective in communicating its message to the world is not so much a reflection of their media savvy as it is on the ineffective message of the United States."

"You can't expect a better messaging strategy to compensate for the fact that the underlining policy is based on falsehoods and deliberate deception," Rampton said.

As the occupation of Iraq proved unmanageable and the total number of dead and wounded U.S. military personnel mounted, stories about the revamping of schoolhouses and the building of soccer fields were given a backseat by the media.

With things continuing to spiral out of control in Iraq, the Bush administration has once again decided that it's a public relations problem; a question of propaganda not policy. Around the same time that Rumsfeld was on the road railing about anti-war appeasers and confused critics that were enabling terrorism, and how much better the terrorists were in handling the media, the Washington Post reported that "U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, 20-million-dollar public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq."

According to the Post's Walter Pincus, the "contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a programme to provide 'public relations products' that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal."

Pincus pointed out that the proposal "calls in part for extensive monitoring and analysis of Iraqi, Middle Eastern and American media, [and] is designed to help the coalition forces understand 'the communications environment.' Its goal is to 'develop communication strategies and tactics, identify opportunities, and execute events... to effectively communicate Iraqi government and coalition's goals, and build support among our strategic audiences in achieving these goals,'" according to a statement publicly available through the FBO Daily's Web site.

"From what I've seen, the thing about this proposal that most concerns me is the component calling for the monitoring of the media, especially when journalists will be rated as to how favourable they are toward U.S. policy objectives," Rampton pointed out.

"Monitoring journalists and maintaining a database of their stories raises a number of serious questions: Who knows where that database will wind up in two years or five years from now? What kind of retribution might be exacted against those reporters whose work is seen as unfavourable to U.S. policy?"

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/634/print

All book sales benefit the Center for Media and Democracy, a 501(C)3 non-profit whose programs include PRWatch.org, Sourcewatch.org, Congresspedia.org, the No Fake News campaign, the Weekly Spin, and PR Watch quarterly.

Spread the word.

No Matter What You think About The War, Never Disrespect The Warrior

2006-11-01T18:38:00.000-05:00

Here's a pretty well written reason why that quote is so true. I created that phrase to honour military men and women, when the Iraq war was starting. Those that are against this war, as I am, should never be against the troops fighting it.

This letter pretty well sums up why...

The Warrior's Code Of Honor (WWII, Korea, Viet Nam)

"I offer these poor, inadequate words – bought not taught – in the hope that they may shed some small light on why combat veterans are like they are. It is my life desire that this tortured work, despite it’s many defects, may yet still provide some tiny sliver of understanding which may blossom into tolerance – nay, acceptance – of a Warrior’s way of being from doing his duty under fire."

By By A Purple Heart Medal recipient who made a promise to remain an unknown soldier.
October 29, 2006

As a combat veteran wounded in one of America’s wars, I offer to speak for those who cannot. Were the mouths of my fallen battle brothers not stopped with dust, they would testify that life revolves around honor. In war, it is understood that you give your word of honor to do your duty -- that is -- stand and fight instead of running away and deserting your friends. When you keep your word despite desperately desiring to flee the screaming hell all around, you earn honor.

Earning honor under fire changes who you are. The blast furnace of battle burns away impurities encrusting your soul. The white-hot forge of combat hammers you into a hardened, purified warrior willing to die rather than break your word to friends -- your honor. Unbeknownst to civilians, some things are worth dying for.

Combat is scary but exciting.

You never feel so alive as when being shot at without result.

You never feel so triumphant as when shooting back -- with result.

You never feel love so pure as that burned into your heart by friends willing to die to keep their word to you. And they do.

The biggest sadness of your life is to see friends falling. The biggest surprise of your life is to survive the war. But although you are still alive on the outside, you are dead inside -- shot thru the heart with nonsensical guilt for living while friends died. The biggest lie of your life torments you that you could have done something more, different, to save them. Their faces are the tombstones in your weeping eyes, their souls shine the true camaraderie you search for the rest of your life but never find.

You come home but a grim ghost of he who so lightheartedly went off to war. But home no longer exists. That world shattered like a mirror the first time you were shot at. You live a different world now. You always will.

Your world is about waking up night after night silently screaming, back in battle.

Your world is about your best friend bleeding to death in your arms, howling in pain for you to kill him.

Your world is about shooting so many enemies the gun turns red and jams, letting the enemy grab you.

Your world is about struggling hand-to-hand for one more breath of life.

You never speak of your world. Those who have seen combat do not talk about it. Those who talk about it have not seen combat.

People you knew before the war try to make contact. It is useless. Words fall like bricks between you.

The hurricane winds of war have hurled you as far away as Mars, and you can never go back home again, not really.

Your terrifying – but thrilling – dance with death has made your old world of babies, backyards and ballgames seem deadly dull. Serving with warriors who died proving their word has made prewar friends seem too untested to be trusted – thus they are now mere acquaintances.

Doing your duty under fire has made you alone, a stranger in a strange land. The only time you are not alone is when with another combat veteran. Only he understands that keeping your word, your honor, whilst standing face to face with death gives meaning and purpose to life. Only he understands that spending a mere 24 hours in the broad, sunlit uplands of battle-proven honor is more satisfying to a man than spending a whole lifetime groveling in the vast wasteland of civilian life.

Although you walk thru life alone, you are not lonely. You have a constant companion from combat -- Death. It stands close behind, a little to the left. Death whispers in your ear: “Nothing matters outside my touch, and I have not touched you...YET!”

Death never leaves you -- it is your best friend, your most trusted advisor, your wisest teacher.

Death teaches you that every day above ground is a fine day.

Death teaches you to feel fortunate on good days, and bad days...well, they do not exist.

Death teaches you that merely seeing one more sunrise is enough to fill your cup of life to the brim -- pressed down and running over!

Down thru the dusty centuries it has always been thus. It always will be, for what is seared into a man’s soul who stands face to face with death never changes.

Author’s Note:

This work attempts to describe the world as seen thru the eyes of a combat veteran. It is a world virtually unknown to the public because few veterans talk about it. This is unfortunate since people who are trying to understand, and make contact with combat veterans, are kept in the dark.

I offer these poor, inadequate words – bought not taught – in the hope that they may shed some small light on why combat veterans are like they are.

It is my life desire that this tortured work, despite it’s many defects, may yet still provide some tiny sliver of understanding which may blossom into tolerance – nay, acceptance – of a Warrior’s way of being from doing his duty under fire.

By A Purple Heart Medal recipient who made a promise to remain an unknown soldier.

Dedicated to absent friends in unmarked graves.

If you ever meet a serviceman or woman, please remember these words, and thank them for what they do every single day.

One brave soldiers march across Utah

2006-10-31T20:16:00.000-05:00

Journey across Utah: Iraq vet's 'stunt' turns to solace

Marshall Thompson: Protest walk from state's northern border to southern brings out hundreds of admirers in even 'reddest' area

It was a stunt, he said. Just a way to get people to pay attention to a war many seemed content to brush aside.

Army journalist Marshall Thompson, recently returned from the Iraq war, publicized his trek across Utah as a means to encourage those in the nation's "reddest" state to talk about ways to bring his fellow service members home.But for the 28-year-old veteran from Logan, it was a journey more personal than he'd ever admitted.

Even to himself.

He had always been a dove, albeit one in Army fatigues.So as his nation lurched toward war in Iraq, Marshall Thompson was wary.The Logan soldier had joined the Army Reserves, enlisting as a journalist, upon returning from a church mission in Europe during which he felt immense appreciation for his country. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Thompson had been raised to believe in the justness of military service.

He understood his church's scriptures to permit war - as a last resort. The son of a politician, Thompson believed his nation's leaders shared his values.But as the Iraq invasion approached, Thompson concluded he had been wrong. As an invasion-sized legion of U.S. troops moved into Kuwait, he joined protesters in Logan to demonstrate against the attack. In doing so, he found it was not just political leaders who wanted to go to war.

"We were met by so many counter-protesters," Thompson said. "And they were so angry. The police had to come and stand between us, to protect us."As the Army called him into active service, Thompson couldn't even convince his own father - then Logan's mayor - that war was a wrong course.

Leaving his new wife - pregnant with their first child - was tough enough. Doing so without his father's understanding was dispiriting."It broke my heart when we didn't see eye to eye," Thompson said.

Coming home: Stationed on a large, often-attacked base in northern Iraq, the Army propagandist traveled all over Iraq on orders to seek uplifting stories about fellow troops. Yet Thompson's experiences only further confirmed his fears.

Among U.S. troops he found low morale, brutal tactics and a dehumanizing distance from the people whose country they occupied. Among Iraqis he found anger, fear and distrust of the American occupation.

His superiors allowed him to write about none of those things."We wrote in code," Thompson said. "Like, when we would write, 'This soldier has overcome many obstacles', it meant he pretty much complained about his job during the entire interview."
He returned home on July 24 - Pioneer Day in Utah. The blasts of exploding fireworks left him anxious and jumpy.

In Utah, where polls indicate support for the Iraq war runs higher than in any other state, Thompson found many who wanted to hear the kind of news he had been assigned to find in Iraq."I felt so alienated," he said. "What people wanted to hear was not what I was able to tell them."

Before returning home, Thompson and his wife, Kristen, discussed how they could help make the case for a withdrawal of U.S. troops. A few weeks after his return, they decided: From Idaho to Arizona, he would walk across the "reddest" state in the nation. He could do it in a month - roughly a day of walking for every 100 service members killed in the war.

The stunt, as Thompson called it on his Web site - www.soldierspeace.com - had its intended effect: Media attention drove thousands to his site before he had taken a single step.The journey began early on the morning of Oct. 2. Approaching Logan that afternoon, Thompson braced himself for a spiteful response, akin to what he had tasted during the prewar protest.

Instead, more than 150 people gathered to walk by his side. Among the ranks was Thompson's father - who in the months since his son's return had come to the conclusion that the war in Iraq needed to end.Over the next month, Doug Thompson would spend many days walking with his boy."It was as if I was finally home," Marshall Thompson said.

Support and sorrow: Thompson logged 25 miles in his first day. Brutally sore the following morning, he found encouragement in the companionship of a Vietnam vet from Oregon, who had learned of the protest on the radio.Doug Firstbrook hadn't planned on making the entire trek. But he saw something in Thompson that was painfully familiar.

"We had similar jobs," said Firstbrook, a former Army journalist. "We both saw, firsthand, how information was manipulated and suppressed by the military. We both had a part in it."The gray-bearded carpenter decided to stay by Thompson's side, logging an average of 20 miles each day through wind and rain and snow.

In Salt Lake City - a blue dot on a very red map - about 100 people turned out to walk. But the real surprise came as he marched into Provo, past Ephraim, and through Richfield. In every town he had written off as "too red" for his message, Thompson found flocks who agreed.But as he moved farther south, the initial euphoria of his successes faded away. Greater distances separated smaller towns. And even with Firstbrook and sporadic others at his side, the miles were quiet and lonely.

Then, two weeks in, Kristen called with some frightening news: Their infant daughter, Eliza, had a lump on her neck. Doctors feared cancer, maybe leukemia.Sitting alone in a hotel in Panguich, Thompson was awash in doubt.

"I thought: Is it worth it? I mean, it was just a stunt," he said. "We were having a family crisis and here I was in the middle of Nowhere, Utah - walking for peace."But Kristen turned down her husband's offer to return home.

"We'll be OK," she told him. "We made it through a year with you in Iraq. We'll get through this."For Kristen, the walk had become more than a stunt. With each passing mile, she could see her husband was changing. And she wanted him to continue.

Dealing with the dreams: Marshall Thompson wasn't unrecognizable to his wife when he returned home from Iraq - but he was different.By his own admission, he angered easier and had less patience - symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He slept fitfully. And, on at least one occasion, Kristen had to wake her husband from a dream so real and terrifying that he was sobbing in his sleep.

But as he walked, connecting with fellow veterans, his father, and others "who love and accept me just for the fact that I came home alive," Thompson felt his symptoms melting away."Every symptom of PTSD, and especially the anger, just disappeared completely," he said. "For the first time since coming home I felt very in control and very normal."

And with that came the ability to deal with things once hidden.

There is a lot of time to think in 500 miles. And as he walked, Thompson's thoughts turned often to a night he spent on a dark highway near Balad, Iraq.His truck, separated from its convoy, was waiting on the side of the road when a civilian vehicle pulled up and flashed its lights. The driver waited a moment, then flashed again.

On a night which began with small arms fire and included several close calls with roadside bombs, the commander of Thompson's truck was nervous the civilian driver might be signaling an attack. He ordered Thompson to point his rifle at the driver of the car."He said, 'If he flashes his lights again, kill him.' "

For three hours, Thompson trained his sights on the driver's head. Seated on the gravel side of Utah's Highway 89, a day's walk south of Hatch, last week, Thompson cried at the memory."It's so horrible, because you have this guy - can you imagine how terrified he must have been?"Implied in the truck commander's order was a moral decision difficult for Thompson to accept: That the life of the car's driver - most likely a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time - was worth less than his own.

And yet Thompson knew how he would have reacted had the lights flashed again. He had been given three hours to think it over and he was certain."I would have killed him," he sobbed. "Just a man. An innocent person. How can you possibly square that with what you believe?"

A soldier's peace: Doctors plan to perform a biopsy on the lump on Eliza Thompson's neck later this week. Because she's shown no other signs of sickness, they are hopeful it is not cancerous, but the little girl's father still worries.He wants to be near his daughter. He misses his wife. He pines for his bed. His feet are tired and, even as he moves farther south, the days are growing darker, colder. And so the soldier is eager for his walk to end as planned on Wednesday, even if the journey has helped him in ways he couldn't have comprehended.

When he began, on the Idaho border, Thompson called his trek a stunt. But now, as he approaches Arizona, he's more apt to call it penance."I think that maybe I've known that from the beginning," he said. "But I didn't want to say it. When you say something like that, I think, it's hard for people to understand."And yet understanding, he has come to realize, is not so hard to find.

Even for a dove in Army fatigues. Even in Utah.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_4573237

If you click on the link above, you'll get to see Sgt. Thompson's website. It's a good place to spend some time.

Here is his website:

http://www.asoldierspeace.com/

Here is his journal of the trip :

http://www.asoldierspeace.com/journal.htm

Keep marching, soldier.....

Four days to go, twenty four days done already.

"No matter what you think about the war, never disrespect the warrior."

The Sermon Of The Key, And Of The Chains.

2006-10-29T15:15:00.000-05:00

If you are ever going through some tough times, here's a little thought from me that might help to make that journey a little easier.

One day, in that darkness of the darkest night of the soul, he had put his hand out in front of him, fist clenched, and palm up.

When he slowly opened up his fist, he noticed something there that he'd never ever seen before, something that had been there all that time, but unnoticed and hidden to his view.

Now it was revealed to him, a tiny golden key that fit perfectly into every lock, on every chain, that had ever held him. He realized that he'd actually placed them all on himself (quite willingly, if the truth be told) , and that he had always had that key.

Once freed of those chains, he was forever also free of making the same mistake ever again. It had taken a long time, but one sometimes has to pay a heavy price to learn a valuable lesson.

And thus endeth the sermon of the Key and of the Chains, on a rainy and cold Sunday Montreal evening....

Waterboarding - a video demonstration

2006-10-29T14:47:00.000-05:00

I thought it might be a good idea to show the world what waterboarding really looks like.

Current TV has done a couple of video clips demonstrating the types of techniques used today by American interrogators.

The uncut version :

America, this is what is being done in your name.

After WW2 this was considered a war crime by American prosecutors - and now it's official US government policy.

Huxley's Ultimate Revolution

2006-10-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

Aldous Huxley gave a speech on March 20, 1962 at Berkeley Language Center. There are both audio recordings of that speech, as well as transcripts. It was called "The Ultimate Revolution", and went into some of the same areas we see in the novel 1984. In fact, Huxley even mentions that work by Orwell during his talk.

Here is an excerpt from that speech :

In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially
aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.

Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate
revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his
fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature.

The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have
employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty,
sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.

But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do
everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.

It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.

A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems
to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.

And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another
parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty-
Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the
Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.

Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild
dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.

That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.

But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more
concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.

And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.

And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.

In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Seargent's) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.

Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's no
doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.

http://www.libertythink.com/Huxleytranscript.txt

I see TV as a large part of the problem. It's very nature makes it's audience passive. In a way, it allows for an almost perfect opportunity to lull people into belief. It's not unlike an electronic pulpit, where one sits there and listens - and never speaks back to the "voice of authority."

That can be CNN or FOX , but the essential dynamic is the same.

Don't forget that when the first movies were shown, people reacted in a rather fascinating way. We've all seen those early black and white films, that were quite primitive.

I remember reading a story where people ran out of a theatre in fear , in those first days of movies, when they saw a train coming on the screen.

Now, for us, that seems impossible to have happened. A grainy black and white film, a theatre, and yet....terror ? That's how much we've changed as a visual society.

Occasionally today, when we are involved with certain video games or modern day films, we can be exposed to an almost "real" sensation of fear, in much the same way.

We sit there on our sofas and chairs, and we absorb messages that are delivered to us, and they are repeated and reinforced in waves upon us. It's very much like a hypnosis of sorts, where people sit in dark rooms, relaxed, and are "programmed" by what they hear.

A film that really should be reviewed is "Network", which was to me a visionary movie. It speaks of some of the things I am trying to argue here.

Now if you take people and constantly show them horrific visual images, and endlessly fabricate apocolyptic visions of the future, and you keep doing that over and over again - you have projected this fear almost into their DNA structure.

If at the same time you offer a vision of strength, visual icons of power, and direct ties to God - one cant start to increase the control over the population. It is a Pavlovian process of creating a deep programing by using a psychological base of stress to assist you.

The more fear you create (and that can be on many levels, including economic ones) , the more mistrust you generate amongst your believers about everyone else in the world - the more power you have over them.

In a very real sense, modern media can be manipulated almost in the same manner that a cult leader's pulpit can be.

The War For Oil And Profit

2006-10-18T10:12:00.000-04:00

In case you are still one of those people that thinks that democracy or security were the root causes of the Iraq war - here's some more "oil on the fire". This is a two part story, well researched , that will end any doubt of the real reasons behind this war - and it's deceptions.

Joshua Holland has done some great work, and he should be commended for telling the story that the mainstream American media is too afraid to address.

I strongly suggest people read these two articles, and understand the implications of the factual evidence presented.

Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 16, 2006.

Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as "the prize."

Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set.

The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue.

Iraq's energy reserves are an incredibly rich prize. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq contains 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the second largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia), along with roughly 220 billion barrels of probable and possible resources. Iraq's true potential may be far greater than this, however, as the country is relatively unexplored due to years of war and sanctions." For perspective, the Saudis have 260 billion barrels of proven reserves.

Iraqi oil is close to the surface and easy to extract, making it all the more profitable. James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, points out that oil companies "can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1, including all exploration, oilfield development and production costs." Contrast that with other areas where oil is considered cheap to produce at $5 per barrel or the North Sea, where production costs are $12-16 per barrel.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43045/

That's part one, and here is part two :

The Bush administration has co-opted the compassionate language of debt relief to ensure that Big Oil gets its way in Iraq.

With 140,000 U.S. troops on the ground, the largest U.S. embassy in the world sequestered in Baghdad's fortified "Green Zone" and an economy designed by a consulting firm in McLean, Va., post-invasion Iraq was well on its way to becoming a bonanza for foreign investors.

But Big Oil had its sights set on a specific arrangement -- the lucrative production sharing agreements that lock in multinationals' control for long terms and are virtually unheard of in countries as rich in easily accessible oil as Iraq.

The occupation authorities would have to steer an ostensibly sovereign government to the outcome they desired, and they'd have to overcome any resistance that they encountered from the fiercely independent and understandably wary Iraqis along the way. Finally, they'd have to make sure that the Anglo-American firms were well-positioned to win the lion's share of the choicest contracts.

And that's where the most common -- almost ubiquitous -- tool of neocolonialism, debt, came into play. In this case, massive, crushing debt run up by a dictator who treated himself and his cronies to palaces and other luxuries, spent lavishly on weapons for Iraq's war with Iran -- fought in part on behalf of the United States -- and owed Kuwait billions of dollars in reparations for the 1990 invasion.

To put Iraq's foreign debt in perspective, if the country's economy were the size of the United States', then its obligations in 2004, proportionally, would have equaled around $55 trillion, according to IMF figures (and that doesn't include reparations from the first Gulf War).

Clearly, that amount of debt was unsustainable, and the Bush administration launched a full-court press to get creditor nations to forgive at least part of the new government's debt burden. Former Secretary of State James Baker, long the Bush family's "fixer," was dispatched on a tour of the world's capitals to cut deals on behalf of the Iraqis.

The administration raised eyebrows in the NGO community when it adopted the language of debt-relief activists to frame their pitch. Bush, and Baker, called it "odious" debt, debt that financed the whims of a brutal dictator and used against the interests of the Iraqi population. Under international law, "odious" debt, in theory at least, doesn't need to be forgiven; it's written off as a dictator's illicit gains. As one might expect, wealthy creditor nations have long resisted the concept.

Debt-relief activists Basav Sen and Hope Chu wrote that the move "seemed inexplicable at first." But it soon became clear that Iraq's debt-relief program was, in fact, a way of locking in Iraq's economic transformation.

The largest chunk of debt, $120 billion, was owed to the Paris Club, a group of 19 industrialized nations. Baker negotiated a deal whereby the Paris Club would forgive 80 percent of Iraq's debt, but the catch -- and it was a big one -- was that Iraq had to agree to an economic "reform" package administered by the International Monetary Fund, an institution dominated by the wealthiest countries and infamous across the developing world for its painful and unpopular Structural Adjustment Protocols.

The debt would be written off in stages; 30 percent would be cancelled outright, another 30 percent when an elected Iraqi government accepted an IMF structural reform agreement and a final 20 percent after the IMF had monitored its implementation for three years. This gave the IMF the role of watchdog over the country's new economy, despite the fact that its share of the country's debt burden was less than 1 percent of the total.

Among a number of provisions in the IMF agreement, along with privatizing state-run companies (which resulted in the layoffs of an estimated 145,000 Iraqis), slashing government pensions and phasing out the subsidies on food and fuel that many Iraqis depended on, was a commitment to develop Iraq's oil in partnership with the private sector. Then-Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mehdi said, none too happily, that the deal would be "very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies." The Iraqi National Assembly released a statement saying, "the Paris Club has no right to make decisions and impose IMF conditions on Iraq," and called it "a new crime committed by the creditors who financed Saddam's oppression." And Zaid Al-Ali, an international lawyer who works with the NGO Jubilee Iraq, said it was "a perfect illustration of how the industrialized world has used debt as a tool to force developing nations to surrender sovereignty over their economies."

The icing on the cake is that the deal James Baker negotiated with the Paris Club refers to Iraq as an "exceptional situation"; no precedent was set that would allow other highly indebted countries saddled with odious debt from their own past dictators to claim similar relief.

The deadline the Iraqi government must meet for the completion of its final oil law in December is a "benchmark" in the IMF agreement.

In an investigation for the Nation, Naomi Klein discovered that Baker had pursued his mission with an eye-popping conflict of interest. Klein discovered that a consortium that included the Carlyle Group, of which Baker is believed to have a $180 million stake, had contracted with Kuwait to make sure that the money it was owed by Iraq would be excluded from any debt-relief package. When Baker met with the Kuwaiti emir to beg forgiveness for Iraq's odious debt, he had a direct interest in making sure he didn't get it.

Another major creditor was Saudi Arabia. The Carlyle Group has extensive business dealings with the kingdom and Baker's law firm, Baker Botts, was representing the monarchy in a suit brought by the families of the victims of 9/11.

The most recent IMF report (PDF) shows how successfully he failed: "While most Paris Club official creditors have now signed bilateral agreements, progress has been slow in resolving non-Paris Club official claims, especially those of Gulf countries," it says. It's likely that Iraq, a country occupied for three years, devastated by 12 years of sanctions and with a per capita GDP of $3,400, will end up paying reparations to Kuwait, a country with a per capita GDP of over $19,000, for the five months Saddam occupied his neighbor in late 1990 and early 1991.

Iraq will still face a mountain of debt even if it meets all of the "benchmarks" required of it -- the IMF expects the country's debt service to equal five percent of its economic output in 2011 and warns that even a minor price shock in the oil market "would require significant borrowing from the international markets to close the financing gaps."

"Sovereign" debt is transferable between governments; if a new strongman arises or Iraq becomes a loose federation, the debt will remain on the books and defaulting on it, while a possibility, has serious long-term consequences.

All of this is about bringing different forms of pressure onto Iraq's nascent government, not controlling it, and it's an important distinction. Before and since the "handover" to Iraq's government, the Green Zone has been overrun with "advisers" from Big Oil. Aram Roston wrote, "It's clear that there is not just the one Iraqi Oil Ministry, but a parallel 'shadow' ministry run by American advisers." In business, that's known as "positioning."

Phillip Carroll, a former chief executive with Royal Dutch/Shell and a 15-member "board of advisors" were appointed to oversee Iraq's oil industry during the transition period. According to the Guardian, the group "would represent Iraq at meetings of OPEC." Carroll had been working with the Pentagon for months before the invasion -- even while the administration was still insisting that it sought a peaceful resolution to the Iraq crisis -- "developing contingency plans for Iraq's oil sector in the event of war." According to the Houston Chronicle, "He assumed his work was completed, he said, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called him shortly after the U.S.-led invasion began and offered him the oil adviser's job." Carroll, in addition to running Shell Oil in the United States, was a former CEO of the Fluor Corp., a well-connected oil services firm with extensive projects in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and at least $1.6 billion in contracts for Iraq's reconstruction. He was joined by Gary Vogler, a former executive with ExxonMobile, in Iraq's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

After spending six months in the post, Carroll was replaced by Robert E. McKee III, a former ConocoPhillips executive. According to the Houston Chronicle, "His selection as the Bush administration's energy czar in Iraq" drew fire from congressional Democrats "because of his ties to the prime contractor in the Iraqi oil fields, Houston-based Halliburton Co. He's the chairman of a venture partitioned by the … firm."

The administration selected Chevron Vice President Norm Szydlowski to serve as a liaison between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Now the CEO of the appropriately named Colonial Pipeline Co., he continues to work with the Iraq Energy Roundtable, a project of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, which recently sponsored a meeting to "bring together oil and gas sector leaders in the U.S. with key decision makers from the Iraq Ministry of Oil."

Terry Adams and Bob Morgan of BP, and Mike Stinson of ConocoPhillips would also serve as advisors during the transition.

After the CPA handed over the reigns to Iraq's interim government, the embassy's "shadow" oil ministry continued to work closely with the Iraqis to shape future oil policy. Platform's Greg Muttit wrote that "senior oil advisers -- now based within the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO) in the U.S. Embassy ... included executives from ChevronTexaco and Unocal." After the handover, a senior U.S. official said: "We're still here. We'll be paying a lot of attention, and we'll have a lot of influence. We're going to have the world's largest diplomatic mission with a significant amount of political weight."

The majors have also engaged in good, old-fashioned lobbying. In 2004, Shell advertised for an Iraqi lobbyist with good contacts among Iraq's emerging elites. The firm sought "a person of Iraqi extraction with strong family connections and an insight into the network of families of significance within Iraq." According to Platform, just weeks after the invasion, in a meeting with oil company execs and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in London, former British Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind promised to personally lobby****Cheney for contracts on behalf of several firms, including Shell.

Meanwhile, major oil firms were positioning themselves so that they'd have the best contacts in the new government. According to the Associated Press, "The world's three biggest integrated oil companies" -- BP, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch/Shell -- "struck cooperation or training deals with Iraq" in 2005. "It's a way to maintain contact and get the oil officials to know about them," former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam Chalabi told the AP. And it seems to have worked; in May, Iraq's current oil minister, Husayn al-Shahristani, said that one of his top priorities would be to finalize an oil law and sign contracts with "the largest companies."

Washington has its hands all over the drafting of that law. Early on, in 2003, USAID commissioned BearingPoint, Inc. -- the new name for the scandal-plagued Arthur Anderson Consulting -- to submit recommendations for the development of Iraq's oil sector. BearingPoint was the firm that designed the country's economic transformation under a previous USAID contract, so it was no surprise that its report reinforced the preference for PSAs that "everybody [kept] kept coming back to" during meetings of the State Department's "Future of Iraq Project."

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43077/

It's quite a revealing look into the root causes of this war, the REAL reasons, and the picture it draws is quite clear. As early as March 2001, the first meetings of the NSC decided that the war in Iraq was on - and that the oil fields were being divided up.

Those documents have been released under the Freedom of Information Act - and are irrefutable.

Couple this with the close industry ties with this administration ( who were also drawing up plans for energy with the Cheney Task Force group at the same time) , who gave the energy industry almost a carte blanche ability to set American national policy ( and to even write some regulations ), as well as them doing exactly the same to enslave the Iraqis under regulations that reduce their soverignty - it's pretty clear that " freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose " if you were an Iraqi national.

What we see here is a clear and undeniable economic colonialism in place, which most benefits a small group of people , and the corporations they run.

Those oil field PSA's are a theft of the natural resources of Iraq, and rob Iraqis of control of their own future and their own wealth.

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

- Bruce Cockburn

-- Call It Democracy --
November 1985. Toronto, Canada.

http://cockburnproject.net/songs&music/atcid.html

Tommy Emmanuel - The best guitarist you've never even heard of.....

2006-10-15T10:08:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm a huge fan of acoustic guitar. One of the most underrated practioners of that lost art today is Tommy Emmanuel.

Let me try and convince you of that, with a few clips.

Ever seen an solo acoustic guitarist do a "drum solo " ? Turn it up....

Rock and roll on an acoustic ?

Who needs a Stat and a Marshall stack anyway ?

Beatles anyone ?

How about a little mini concert of some guitar pickin' for a Sunday morning ?

Want a lesson from him ?

Or on the other hand , you may just want to go and smash your acoustic guitar into little pieces....

If that last lesson doesn't do that for you, this one might :

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.............

And in concert.....live....Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....

Angelina - a really nice guitar piece :

Since We Met : ( one of my favorites)

( I just love the middle eight on that one.... )

Just to finally discourage everyone totally....if you aren't by now....

If you click the link at the top of this post, you'll be directed to Tommy Emmanuel's website.

So , I hope you enjoyed learning about Tommy Emmanuel's work here, and hat's off to Australia's master of the guitar. We are not worthy....

I'm off to smash mine ..... ( just kidding)....( I think).....

Keith Olbermann, taking a stand

2006-09-29T20:58:00.000-04:00

Just when you thought that American journalism was unable to stand up and ask the questions that must be asked, that the "talking heads" had all been bought off, and that there was no hope of anyone ever changing that....

Then...along comes Keith Olbermann, from MSNBC.

Check out these video reports, and see that there may indeed still be some hope for the future.

This one takes a look at the Bush administration's pre-911 actions toward terrorism, and looks at the warnings the transitional Clinton team gave them.

A brave broadside directly at the President :

How about Rumsfeld ?

He's not really one to mince words, as you can see in this clip on the recent Clinton bashing.

I trust someone puts him up for an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Perhaps it's never been a better time to refer back to some thoughts from George Orwell :

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Conspiracy of Silence - the documentary you never got to see.

2006-09-29T17:40:00.000-04:00

I accidently came across a documentary, which was produced and about to be shown on TV on May 3rd, 1994. It was listed in TV Guide, and then it inexplicably vanished...

It was produced by British television, and the Discovery Channel.

It has come to light since then that a rather large sum of money was paid by unknown parties, and that an agreement was made to destroy all copies of it. Strangely, no court challenge was involved to stop it. This was done "off the radar".

It concerns the very troubling story of the Franklin Credit Union scandal in Omaha, Nebraska, and a pedophelia/prostitution ring that existed which extended from Nebraska to Washington. That scandal prompted a state investigation, and that is where this documentary begins.

Not all copies of this documentary were destroyed however.

One remaining copy, a pre-production one (not high quality, nor a finished version) was secretly sent to state officials in Omaha. That copy is now available online at Google video. :

Conspiracy of Silence

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=359924937663867563

This is what someone didn't want you to see, and now you can.

It touches on a child prostitution ring (some children involved were as young as ten , some very high profile people (including a leading Black Republican political supporter, Lawrence King), and some very troubling allegations of serious crimes and abuse of young children by some very high ranking people, both Democrats and Republicans.

John De Camp, an ex-Vietnam vet, former Republican Senator, and now a lawyer in Omaha has been leading the investigation on this for years - and has been blocked at every turn.

Born in Neligh, Nebraska, DeCamp joined the United States Army during the Vietnam War. He was later assigned to serve as an aide to William Colby, the Deputy Ambassador to Vietnam at the time. Beginning his campaign for election while still stationed in Vietnam, DeCamp was elected and served four terms as a Nebraska state senator, from 1971 to 1987. In the May 2006 election, he was rebuffed in his attempt to return to the Legislature. He is currently a practicing attorney in Lincoln, Nebraska.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeCamp

Laurence King had direct connections with both Boys Town (of Father Flannagen fame) , and with the top levels of the Republican party. He served time in prison on fraud charges, and was sentenced to fifteen years....only on the fraud charges.

One lead investigator of the pedophile ring investigation was killed in a plane crash, which is still remains a mystery. The wreckage of his light plane was scattered over a wide area, and his briefcase was missing when investigators reached the site. His eight year old son was also killed in that crash.

Craig Spence commited suicide four months after the story broke.

When the story broke, it was covered briefly by the mainstream media, like the New York Times - and then it too vanished....

Here's proof :

http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stu...restedsmall.gif

http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stu...idkingsmall.gif

The two main suspects in the child ring were Craig Spence and Lawrence E. King Jr. Both were involved in the Republican party. King sang the National Anthem at two republican national conventions during the 1980s. He served time in jail for bank fraud and is now living somewhere on the east coast. Spence was an important republican lobbyist, who eventually committed suicide. Several of his partners went to jail for being involved in the adult part of the homosexual sex ring.

http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stu...news2/boystown/

When some new revelations came out, Hunter Thompson committed suicide on the same day. Thompson, one of my favorite political journalists, was accused by a witness as being present during the production of a "snuff film". This is a scandal that touches the aristocracy, and it's not (as I said) limited to Republicans in any way.

William Colby, a supporter of John DeCamp (and a friend from his Vietnam days), who is recorded as part of that documentary , suddenly winds up dead while kayaking soon afterwards, under some very strange circumstances.

On April 27, 1996, Colby died in a supposed boating accident near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. He reportedly did not mention any canoeing plans to his wife, nor was it normal for him to go boating at night. Colby had left his home unlocked, his computer on, and a partly eaten dinner on the table.

Colby's body was eventually found, underwater, on May 6, 1996. The life jacket his friends said he usually wore was missing. The body was found 20 yards from the canoe, after the area had been thoroughly searched multiple times. The subsequent inquest found that he died from drowning and hypothermia after collapsing from a heart attack or stroke and falling out of his canoe. There is no evidence that Colby went canoeing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Colby

One girl who was abused and tried to testify about it gets warned not to, then charged and prosecuted to the full extent of the law for perjury - and gets sentenced to twenty five years in jail. Clearly, as you can see from the documentary, a message was sent.

Laurence King got only fifteen years for his financial fraud, and was never prosecuted on any charge related to the pedophelia ring.

Witnesses were intimidated by the FBI, and are on tape in that documentary testifying to that. They were told that they too would be charged with perjury, if they proceeded any further.

Death threats were made against many people involved in the investigation, including state officials. They testify to that fact on video in that documentary. The state case was presented to federal prosecutors - and it was never followed up on.

In short, this entire story has some very strong and rather strange elements of truth to it. There is a rather unlikely convergence of things that seek to silence it, and that provoke many questions, and very few answers.

Three people involved in that pedophile ring were charged and convicted - but no clients ever were. Financial records that tied clients into the ring were immediately taken as evidence by the FBI, withdrawn from the public record, and never acted upon afterwards.

This was a major child prostitution ring, running in Nebraska and Washington, and it's existence is almost unknown, and none of it's clients were ever prosecuted for any cases of pedophelia.

In watching that documentary, the one you never got a chance to see ( because someone paid somebody off) , you'll find yourself asking some questions about how this could ever happen in America.

It's not high quality, it's not a finished product, and parts of it involve some rather strong language - and some very stunning allegations.