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| ---> Love for Sale and Conservatives are Buying!!! |
| 01.27.05 (6:36 am) [edit] |
I'm herewith resigning as a member of the liberal media elite.
I'm joining up with the conservative media elite.
They get paid better.
First comes news that Armstrong Williams got nearly a quarter of a million from the Education Department to plug No Child Left Behind.
The families of soldiers killed in Iraq get a paltry $12,000. But good publicity? Priceless.
Mr. Williams helped out the first President Bush and Clarence Thomas during the Anita Hill scandal. Mr. Williams, who served as Mr. Thomas's personal assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when the future Supreme Court justice was gutting policies that would help blacks, gleefully attacked Professor Hill, saying, "Sister has emotional problems," and telling The Wall Street Journal "there is a thin line between her sanity and insanity."
Now we learn from media reporter Howard Kurtz that syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract from the Health and Human Services Department to work on material promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage marriage. Ms. Gallagher earned her money, even praising Mr. Bush in print as a "genius" at playing "daddy" to the nation. "Mommies feel your pain," she wrote in 2002. "Daddies give you confidence that you can ignore the pain and get on with life."
Genius? Not so much. Spendthrift? Definitely. W.'s administration was running up his astounding deficit paying "journalists" to do what they would be happy to do for free - just to be friends with benefits, getting access that tougher scribes are denied. Consider Charles Krauthammer, who went to the White House on Jan. 10 for what The Washington Post termed a "consultation" on the inaugural speech and then praised the Jan. 20th address on Fox News as "revolutionary," said Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group.
I still have many Christmas bills to pay. So I'd like to send a message to the administration: THIS SPACE AVAILABLE. I could write about the strong dollar and the shrinking deficit. Or defend Torture Boy, I mean, the esteemed and sage Alberto Gonzales. Or remind readers of the terrific job Condi Rice did coordinating national security before 9/11 - who could have interpreted a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" as a credible threat? - not to mention her indefatigable energy obscuring information undercutting the vice president's dementia on Iraq.
My preference is to get a contract with Rummy. It would be cost effective, compared with the latest $80 billion he needs to train more Iraqi security forces to be blown up. For half a mil, I could write a doozy of a column promoting Rummy's phantasmagoric policies.
What is all this hand-wringing about the 31 marines who died in a helicopter crash in Iraq yesterday? It's only slightly more than the number of people who died in traffic accidents in California last Memorial Day. The president set the right tone, avoiding pathos when asked about the crash. "Obviously," he said, "any time we lose life it is a sad moment."
Who can blame Rummy for carrying out policies of torture? We're in an information age. Information is power. If people are not giving you the intelligence you want, you have to customize to get the intelligence you want to hear.
That's why Rummy also had to twist U.S. laws to secretly form his own C.I.A. A Pentagon memo said Rummy's recruited agents could include "notorious figures," whose ties to the U.S. would be embarrassing if revealed, according to The Washington Post. Why shouldn't a notorious figure like Rummy recruit notorious figures?
I could write a column denouncing John McCain for trying to call hearings into Rummy's new spy unit, suggesting the senator is just jealous because Rummy's sexy enough to play James Bond.
The president might need my help as well. He looked out of it yesterday when asked why his foreign policy is so drastically different from the one laid out in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 by Ms. Rice - a preview that did not emphasize promoting democracy and liberty around the world. "I didn't read the article," Mr. Bush said.
Why should he? Robert McNamara never read the Pentagon Papers. Why should W. bone up on his own foreign policy?
Freedom means the freedom to be free from reading what you promise voters and other stuff. I could make that case - if the price was right. - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/0...
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| ---> 'Controlling the Oil in Iraq Puts America in a Strong Position to Exert Influence ...' |
| 01.25.05 (5:29 am) [edit] |
[b]Noam Chomsky: 'Controlling the Oil in Iraq Puts America in a Strong Position to Exert Influence on the World'[/b]
Given the impossibly high praise lavished upon him - "One of the finest minds of the twentieth century" (The New Yorker); "Arguably the most important intellectual alive" (The New York Times) - it is hard to know what to expect when Noam Chomsky enters the room, a beam of pure white light perhaps, or at least the regal swish of academic royalty. Or the whiff of sulphur. He has also been called a man with a "deep contempt for the truth" (The Anti-Chomsky Reader) and an appeaser of Islamic fascism (Christopher Hitchens), among some of the milder criticism.
So it is a surprise when a smiling, slightly stooped man with a diffident air strolls into his office in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, pours himself a coffee and apologises for keeping me waiting.
As has often been remarked, Professor Chomsky is modesty personified, quietly spoken and generous with his time, diligently answering the thousands of e-mails sent to him every week, a laborious task that eats up seven hours a day; usually signing off simply with "Noam". "He recognises no hierarchies," says Chomsky's long-time assistant, Bev Stohl. "He is what people who love him say he is, a man who cares deeply for others."
Of all that has been said about him, Bono's quip "rebel without a pause" fits as well as anything. At 76, and despite a recent struggle with cancer, Chomsky seems to have increased his prodigious output. Bookshelves across the world groan with his political writings, his voice can be heard in radio interviews every week and apart from e-mailing and extensive blogging he gives hundreds of speeches in dozens of cities every year.
"This is how it has been since 9/11," he says. "That had a complex effect on the U.S. which I don't think is appreciated abroad. The picture is that it turned everyone into flag-waving maniacs, and that is just nonsense. It opened people's minds and made a lot of people think, 'I'd better figure out what our role is and why these things are happening'."
Chomsky's views on America's role in the world are well-known, thanks to four decades of relentless political activity marked by his forensically detailed demolition of the U.S. official line. From the Vietnam War, which he argued was fought to halt the spread of independent nationalism, not communism, to the twin tower attacks, which he said were rooted in the "fury and despair" caused by U.S. policies, and his famous charge that every post-war American president would have been hanged under the Nuremberg Laws, Chomsky has been the acid in the belly of the U.S. beast, using what Arundhati Roy calls his "anarchist's instinctive mistrust of power" to eat at its swaggering self-assurance.
Still, he says, he is amazed at how the invasion of Iraq has turned out in what he believes "should have been one of the easier military occupations in history". He says: "I thought the war itself would be over in two days and that the occupation would immediately succeed. It was known to be the weakest country in the region. The U.S. never would have invaded otherwise. The sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands and compelled the people to rely on Saddam for survival, otherwise they probably would have overthrown him.
"The country is obviously going to fall apart as soon as you push it. And any resistance is going to have no outside support, a trickle but nothing significant. But, in fact, it is proving harder than the German occupation of Europe in the Second World War. The Nazis didn't have this much trouble in Europe. But somehow the U.S. has managed to turn it into an unbelievable catastrophe. And it is partly because of the way they are treating people. They have been treating people in such a way that engenders resistance and hatred and fear."
The long-awaited Iraqi elections are to be held next Sunday but Chomsky calls talk about a sovereign, independent, democratic Iraq a "poor joke". He says: "I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable. It will have a Shia majority. Probably as a first step it will try to reconstitute relations with Iran. Its not that they are pro- Khamenei [Iran's Supreme Leader], they'll want to be independent. But it's a natural relationship and even under Saddam they were beginning to restore relations with Iran.
"It might instigate some degree of autonomy in the largely Shia regions of Saudi Arabia which happens to be where most of the oil is. You can project not too far in the future a possible Shia-dominated region including Iran, Iraq, oil-producing regions of Saudi Arabia which really would monopolise the main sources of the world's oil. Is the U.S. going to permit that? It is out of the question. Furthermore, an independent Iraq would try to restore its position as a great, perhaps leading power in the Arab world. Which means it will try to rearm and confront the regional enemy, which is Israel. It may well develop WMD to counter Israel's. It is inconceivable that the U.S. and the UK will permit this."
Chomsky believes comparisons of Iraq and Vietnam are mistaken, primarily because Vietnam was not ultimately a defeat for American strategic aims. "Vietnamese resources were not of that much significance. Iraq is different. It is the last corner of the world in which there are massive petroleum resources, maybe the largest in the world or close to it. The profits from that must flow primarily to the right pockets, that is, U.S. and secondarily UK energy corporations. And controlling that resource puts the U.S. in a very powerful position to exert influence over the world."
One of the more surprising post-9/11 developments has been Chomsky's falling out with erstwhile left colleagues, notably the writer Christopher Hitchens, who accuses Chomsky of "making excuses for theocratic fascism" and exercising "moral equivalency" in his discussions of 9/11 and U.S. imperialism. "In some awful way, Chomsky's regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs," Hitchens said.
Chomsky says: "I don't care what sort of ranting and tantrums people have. What does that mean, to equate 9/11 with U.S. crimes? You can't even equate 9/11 with what they call the other 9/11 south of the border. In 9/11 1973, in Chile, the president was killed, the oldest democracy in Latin America was destroyed, the official number killed was 3,000 people. The actual number is probably double that. In per capita relating to the U.S. that's 100,000 people. It set up a brutal, vicious dictatorship, a virus that spread through much of the rest of Latin America and helped induce a tremendous wave of terror.
"How does that compare with 11 September, 2001? If you want to count numbers and social consequences it is much worse. But it doesn't make sense to compare them. They are atrocities on their own. And the ones we are concerned with primarily are the ones we can stop.
"When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has. This means they are again contributing to terror of the 9/11 variety which is likely to hit the US, which could be awesome. Sooner of later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous. So if we care about jihadist-style terror we don't want to be contributing to it."
Dealing with terror, Chomsky believes, requires a "dual programme" along the lines of "what the British did in Northern Ireland". He says: "The terrorist acts are criminal acts so you apprehend the guilty, use force if necessary and bring them to a fair trial. They want to appeal to the reservoir of understanding for what they're doing, even from people who hate and fear them. If they can mobilise that reservoir they win. We can help them mobilise that reservoir by violence or we can reduce it by dealing with legitimate grievances.
"Every resort to violence has been a gift to the jihadists. Respond with violence which hits civilians and you're giving a gift to Osama bin Laden; you're giving him the propaganda weapon he wants so he can say, 'We have to defend Islam against the Western infidels trying to destroy it. We're fighting a war of defence'.
"If you want to mobilise that constituency that is the way to intervene. But there is another way and that is to pay attention to the legitimate grievance. That's intervention too." - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ---> An Interesting Juxtaposition |
| 01.24.05 (6:32 am) [edit] |
I come late to the discussions of the Inaugural Speech, what with a school holiday, a dead car battery, a snow storm and now a sick kid, I've been playing catch-up to the words of our President and the responses thereto of the world.
In brief a couple of observations: the speech itself left me cold; no matter what observers say, I find Bush's speeches at best a series of platitudes. This one was especially tinny. On the matter of substance, I've found no review/critique that says it better than Eric Hobsbawm, http://www.commondreams.org/v... who puts the US understanding of democracy into its proper context of "megolamania and messianism derived from its revolutionary origins". Hobsbawm is a superb historian, a smart thinker and a very good writer. Reading this only reinforced my primary reaction to the week's events. I realize the inauguration has already been much discussed, but there was one thing that struck me, and I haven't seen anyone yet approach it... - http://www.dailykos.com
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| ---> The Misadventures of a Mental Midget |
| 01.23.05 (10:25 am) [edit] |
George W. Bush was sworn in and sworn at during his presidential inauguration Thursday, in a ceremony that mixed pomp and pageantry with police and protesters. As Bush swore once again to "faithfully execute the office of the President" and to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States;" the presidency, the Constitution and the United States are in deep, dire trouble at home and around the globe.
As Bush struts and swaggers his way once again through Washington and the world as a self-anointed "wartime president," many millions of Americans and more millions worldwide question the wisdom of the administration's killing and costly military misadventure in Iraq. While Bush and his corporate cronies in the oil and high-tech weapons industries cast a covetous eye on Iran as a possible military target during a second Bush term, pratfalls in the Iraq war make the current administration look more and more like "the gang that couldn't rule straight."
On three successive days recently, news stories painted a clear picture of a Bush League crew running aground on the leaking, creaking Ship of State.
On Jan. 13 came the big story that Americans not deluded by the administration's "weapons of mass distraction" knew all along: The phantom WMDs that were touted as a main justification for the American invasion of Iraq have not been found, despite an expenditure of billions of taxpayer dollars and the lives of nearly 1,400 American troops and thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Such a cruel waste of troops and treasure in pursuit of a chimerical campaign of carnage in Iraq should have brought some humility to the arrogant administration of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all the rest. Instead, their cocksure conceit continued unabated and unabashed. "Based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people," purred White House media mouthpiece Scott McClellan.
One wonders who will protect the American people from the militaristic machinations of the Bush administration as the war in Iraq makes this nation less safe and less free.
On Jan. 14, the day after the story about the futile search for Iraqi WMDs hit the news, The New York Times carried a small story saying that, since 1998, the military has discharged 20 troops with much-needed knowledge of Arabic. The GIs were gay and had run afoul of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policies from the Clinton administration. The misguided policy continues under the Bush team that rode to the White House on the pale horse of fear of gay marriage.
Also on Jan. 14, newspapers reported that America's wartime president told media scribes in the nation's capital that "I'm not a regretful person." That's easy for him to say. The mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters of those Americans and Iraqis killed and maimed in Bush's war no doubt have regret to spare. Whether for or against the war, they have lost a loved one for no more reason than a campaign for oil and empire.
The words of a Mississippi mother with twin sons in the Iraq war zone should be required reading for the no-regrets, "What, me worry?" denizen of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Writing in The Nation's Nov. 22 issue, Priscilla Ammerman said she e-mailed Mr. Bush, asking him to do a little "soul-searching" about the war: "I asked him to ask himself if he thought this war was worth the sacrifice of his twins, because I sincerely felt it was not worth the sacrifice of mine."
Ammerman's fears are not unfounded, but still the Bush administration heads heedlessly into a quagmire in Iraq. A Jan. 15 story in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailed the dilemma of a military that "is being stretched thin and worn out" by the war.
While the coronation of George Bush was greeted with both cheers and jeers on the streets of Washington, his continuing war in the Middle East is a reminder of the wise words of warning in an anti-war speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967 when he scorned "those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight." - http://onlineathens.com/stori...
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| ---> Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home!!! |
| 01.23.05 (7:04 am) [edit] |
We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.
It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain. A recent New York Times editorial sums up the situation accurately: ``Some 21 months after the American invasion, United States military forces remain essentially alone in battling what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of decisive success any time in the foreseeable future.''
And then, in an extraordinary non sequitur: ``Given the lack of other countries willing to put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be more American troops, and not just through the spring, as currently planned. . . . Forces need to be expanded through stepped-up recruitment.''
Here is the flawed logic: We are alone in the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing. There is no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let's send more troops? The definition of fanaticism is that when you discover that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your speed.
In all of this, there is an unexamined premise: that military victory would constitute ``success.''
Conceivably, the United States, possessed of enormous weaponry, might finally crush the resistance in Iraq. The cost would be great. Already, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have lost their lives (and we must not differentiate between ''their'' casualties and ''ours'' if we believe that all human beings have an equal right to life.) Would that be a ``success''?
In 1967, the same arguments that we are hearing now were being made against withdrawal in Vietnam. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years. During that time, the war killed at least one million more Vietnamese and perhaps 30,000 U.S. military personnel.
We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn't it clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only chaos, violence and death to that country, and not any recognizable democracy?
Can democracy be nurtured by destroying cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?
There is no certainty as to what would happen in our absence. But there is absolute certainty about the result of our presence -- escalating deaths on both sides.
The loss of life among Iraqi civilians is especially startling. The British medical journal Lancet reports that 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the war, many of them children. The casualty toll on the American side includes more than 1,350 deaths and thousands of maimed soldiers, some losing limbs, others blinded. And tens of thousands more are facing psychological damage in the aftermath.
Have we learned nothing from the history of imperial occupations, all pretending to help the people being occupied?
The United States, the latest of the great empires, is perhaps the most self-deluded, having forgotten that history, including our own: our 50-year occupation of the Philippines, or our long occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) or of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), our military intervention in Southeast Asia and our repeated interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Our military presence in Iraq is making us less safe, not more so. It is inflaming people in the Middle East, and thereby magnifying the danger of terrorism. Far from fighting ''there rather than here,'' as President Bush has claimed, the occupation increases the chance that enraged infiltrators will strike us here at home.
In leaving, we can improve the odds of peace and stability by encouraging an international team of negotiators, largely Arab, to mediate among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and work out a federalist compromise to give some autonomy to each group. We must not underestimate the capacity of the Iraqis, once free of both Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupying army, to forge their own future.
But the first step is to support our troops in the only way that word support can have real meaning -- by saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity. By bringing them home. - http://www.commondreams.org/v...
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| ---> The Traitorous Bushies Prepare for Neo-Imperial Military Coup d'Etat??? |
| 01.23.05 (5:51 am) [edit] |
[b]Commandos Get Duty on U.S. Soil as Antiterror Efforts Expand[/b]
Somewhere in the shadows of the White House and the Capitol this week, a small group of super-secret commandos stood ready with state-of-the-art weaponry to swing into action to protect the presidency, a task that has never been fully revealed before.
As part of the extraordinary army of 13,000 troops, police officers and federal agents marshaled to secure the inauguration, these elite forces were poised to act under a 1997 program that was updated and enhanced after the Sept. 11 attacks, but nonetheless departs from how the military has historically been used on American soil.
These commandos, operating under a secret counterterrorism program code-named Power Geyser, were mentioned publicly for the first time this week on a Web site for a new book, "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operation in the 9/11 World," (Steerforth Press). The book was written by William M. Arkin, a former intelligence analyst for the Army.
The precise number of these Special Operations forces in Washington this week is highly classified, but military officials say the number is very small. The special-missions units belong to the Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive command based at Fort Bragg, N.C., whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force.
In the past, the command has also provided support to domestic law enforcement agencies during high-risk events like the Olympics and political party conventions, according to the Web site of GlobalSecurity.org, http://globalsecurity.org/ a research organization in Alexandria, Va.
The role of the armed forces in the United States has been a contentious issue for more than a century. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts military forces from performing domestic law enforcement duties, like policing, was enacted after the Civil War in response to the perceived misuse of federal troops who were policing in the South.
Over the years, the law has been amended to allow the military to lend equipment to federal, state and local authorities; assist federal agencies in drug interdiction; protect national parks; and execute quarantine and certain health laws. About 5,000 federal troops supported civilian agencies at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City three years ago.
Since Sept. 11, however, military and law enforcement agencies have worked much more closely not only to help detect and defeat any possible attack, including from unconventional weapons, but also to assure the continuity of the federal government in case of cataclysmic disaster.
The commandos here this week were the same type of Special Operations forces who are hunting top insurgents in Iraq and Osama bin Laden in the mountainous wilds of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But under the top-secret military plan, they are also conducting counterterrorism missions in support of civilian agencies in the United States.
"They bring unique military and technical capabilities that often are centered around potential W.M.D. events," said a senior military official who has been briefed on the units' operations.
A civil liberties advocate who was told about the program by a reporter said that he had no objections to the program as described to him because its scope appeared to be limited to supporting the counterterrorism efforts of civilian authorities.
Mr. Arkin, in the online supplement to his book (codenames.org/documents.html), http://codenames.org/document... says the contingency plan, called JCS Conplan 0300-97, calls for "special-mission units in extra-legal missions to combat terrorism in the United States" based on top-secret orders that are managed by the military's Joint Staff and coordinated with the military's Special Operations Command and Northern Command, which is the lead military headquarters for domestic defense.
Mr. Arkin provided The New York Times with briefing slides prepared by the Northern Command, detailing the plan and outlining the military's preparations for the inauguration.
Three senior Defense Department and Bush administration officials confirmed the existence of the plan and mission, but disputed Mr. Arkin's characterization of the mission as "extra-legal."
One of the officials said the units operated in the United States under "special authority" from either the president or the secretary of defense.
Civilian and uniformed military lawyers said provisions in several federal statutes, including the Fiscal Year 2000 Defense Department Authorization Act, Public Law 106-65, permits the secretary of defense to authorize military forces to support civilian agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the event of a national emergency, especially any involving nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
In 1998, the Pentagon's top policy official, Walter B. Slocombe, acknowledged that the military had covert-action teams.
"We have designated special-mission units that are specifically manned, equipped and trained to deal with a wide variety of transnational threats," Mr. Slocombe told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "These units, assigned to or under the operational control of the U.S. Special Operations Command, are focused primarily on those special operations and supporting functions that combat terrorism and actively counter terrorist use of W.M.D. These units are on alert every day of the year and have worked extensively with their interagency counterparts."
Spokesmen for the Northern Command in Colorado Springs and the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., the parent organization of the Joint Special Operations Command, declined to comment on the plan, the units involved and the mission.
"At any given time, there are a number of classified programs across the government that, for national security reasons, it would be inappropriate to discuss," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "It would be irresponsible for me to comment on any classified program that may or may not exist."
But the Northern Command document that mentions Power Geyser is marked "unclassified." The document states that the purpose of the Department of Defense's contingency planning for the inauguration is to provide "unity of D.O.D. effort to contribute to a safe and secure environment for the 2005 inauguration."
The Northern Command missions include deterring an attack or mitigating its consequences, and coordinating with the Special Operations Command.
In a telephone interview from his home in Vermont, Mr. Arkin said the military's reaction to the disclosure of the counterterrorism plan and its operating units reflected "the silliness of calling something that's obvious, classified."
"I'm not revealing what they're doing or the methods of their contingency planning," he said. "I don't compromise any sensitive intelligence operations by revealing sources and methods. I don't reveal ongoing operations in specific locales."
Mr. Arkin's book is a glossary of more than 3,000 code names of past and present operations, programs and weapons systems, with brief descriptions of each. Most involved secret activities, and details of many of the programs could not be immediately confirmed.
The book also describes American military operations and assistance programs in scores of countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The murky world of "special access programs" and other secret military and intelligence activities is covered in the book, too. Some code names describe highly classified research programs, like Thirsty Saber, a program that in the 1990's tried to develop a sensor to replace human reasoning. Others describe military installations in foreign countries, like Poker Bluff I, an electronic-eavesdropping collection station in Honduras in the 1980's.
Many involve activities related to the survival of the president and constitutional government. The book, for instance, describes Site R, one of the undisclosed locations used by Vice President Dick Cheney since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Site R is a granite mountain shelter just north of Sabillasville, Md., near the Pennsylvania border. It was built in the early 1950's to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack.
The book also describes a program called Treetop, the presidential emergency successor support plan, which provides survivors of a nuclear strike or other attack with war plans, regulations and procedures to establish teams of military and civilian advisers to presidential successors.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the continuity of government activities cited in the book.
People who advocate that the government declassify more of the nation's official documents said the book would fuel the debate over the balance between the public's right to know and the need to keep more military and intelligence matters secret in the campaign against terror.
"This is part of an ongoing tug of war to define the boundaries of public information," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "There has been a steady withdrawal of information from the public domain in the present administration, and a reluctance to disclose even the most mundane of facts." - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/0...
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| ---> The Bushies Scrap 'Coalition of the Willing' List (It Was A Bad Joke Anyway!) |
| 01.22.05 (7:13 am) [edit] |
[b]White House Scraps 'Coalition of the Willing' List (It Was A Bad Joke Used to Dupe the American Sheeple)[/b]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has scrapped its list of Iraq allies known as the 45-member "coalition of the willing," which Washington used to back its argument that the 2003 invasion was a multilateral action, an official said on Friday.
The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the White House replaced the coalition list with a smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq sometime after the June transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.
The official could not say when or why the administration did away with the list of the coalition of the willing.
The coalition, unveiled on the eve of the invasion, consisted of 30 countries that publicly offered support for the United States and another 15 that did not want to be named as part of the group.
Former coalition member Costa Rica withdrew last September under pressure from voters who opposed the government's decision to back the invasion.
On Friday, an organization from Iceland published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times calling for its country's withdrawal from the coalition and offering apologies for its support for U.S. policy.
The United States, backed by major allies, including Britain and Italy, invaded Iraq in March 2003 on the premise that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction, or WMD.
The Bush administration acknowledged this month that it has abandoned its search for WMD without finding any biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser to President Bush at the time of the invasion, told a Senate panel this week that the administration had made some bad decisions in Iraq.
Nearly 1,370 members of the U.S. armed forces have been killed and another 10,500 have been wounded in Iraq since the invasion.
Unofficial estimates put the civilian Iraqi death toll at between 14,000 and 100,000. - http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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| ---> Bush, Cheney Team Up to Soften American Dupes for War on Iran |
| 01.22.05 (6:42 am) [edit] |
Two very different messages about the future of U.S. foreign policy were broadcast to the world on Inaugural Day Thursday, and listeners everywhere could be forgiven for feeling confused about their import.
On the one hand, George W. Bush's lofty rhetoric about his administration's commitment to bring democracy, liberty and freedom to every country where tyrants rule naturally grabbed the most attention; after all, he is the president.
Even as the speech was much criticized by normally friendly critics – probably more than the White House had anticipated – as being hopelessly ambitious and unrealistic, the idealism that it expressed was widely praised and unquestioned.
On the other hand, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney's dark words of warning against Iran on MSNBC's "Imus in the Morning" television show conveyed something altogether different, both in tone and substance, even if they were relegated to the inside pages.
"You look around the world at potential trouble spots, (and) Iran is right at the top of the list," the vice president intoned, noting that Washington's chief concern with Tehran had less to do with democracy or even terrorism but rather with its "fairly robust new nuclear program."
And while Cheney stressed that Washington still hoped Europe's efforts to persuade Tehran to abandon any ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon would succeed, he grimly observed that Israel might well decide to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, presumably before the Bush administration, "and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."
"We don't want a war in the Middle East, if we can avoid it," he concluded as cheerfully as he could – at least until he was caught up short by the cowboy-hatted Imus, who reminded him that the U.S. already has a war there.
To former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cheney's remarks sounded "like a justification or even an encouragement for the Israelis" to carry out an attack.
He noted that, coinciding with Bush's idealistic address, they underlined that the administration was "really very unclear regarding its genuine strategic doctrine."
For neoconservatives, who have long used the velvet glove of pro-democracy rhetoric to hide the steel fist of what has consistently been a U.S.- and Israel-centered Machtpolitik, Cheney's warning came as the perfect topper to Bush's inaugural speech, much of which was borrowed from right-wing Israeli leader Natan Sharansky's new book, The Case for Democracy.
After biting their tongue about making Iran the next target of U.S. military power after Iraq through most of 2004 so as not to jeopardize Bush's re-election, they have been noisily pushing Tehran as the chief candidate for Public Enemy Number One in Bush's second term.
Just the day before the inaugural, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who doubles as chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), had told an audience at the neoconservative Hudson Institute that the administration considered Iran to be a much bigger threat than North Korea.
"I don't think George W. Bush thinks he got re-elected to preside over the theocratic regime getting nuclear weapons," he confidently asserted, although he also admitted that there were "big practical questions" as to how to stop it.
Both Cheney's and Kristol's remarks followed the publication earlier in the week of a much-noted article in the New Yorker magazine by prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, which maintained that Washington has been infiltrating Special Operations Forces (SOFs) into Iran from Iraq and Pakistan since last summer precisely to seek out Tehran's secret nuclear facilities and other weapons targets in preparation for possible combined air and ground strikes.
The article, which the Pentagon said was "riddled with errors" that it declined to further identify, also reported that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whose Middle East views accord closely with Israel's extreme right and whose office is widely blamed for corrupting the intelligence process leading up to the Iraq war, has been working with Israeli planners and consultants on a target list.
It asserted that he and other hard-liners in the Pentagon, Cheney's office and the White House fervently believe that a major military blow against Tehran will topple the regime.
"The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West," one unnamed Pentagon consultant told Hersh, "the Iranian regime will collapse" like the regimes in Romania, East Germany and the Soviet Union because of popular hatred for the ruling theocracy.
Hersh's article was greeted with unrestrained joy by neoconservative publications, such as the New York Sun, the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post, as evidence that the administration, hopelessly split over Iran policy during the Bush's first term largely because of the State Department's and the CIA's desire to gain Tehran's cooperation on Afghanistan and Iraq, has finally opted for confrontation.
For regional specialists, such as Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University, however, both the Hersh article and Cheney's grim mutterings are "deja vu all over again."
"In Iraq, we listened to the exiles who said we'd be greeted with flowers and candies so it would be 'cakewalk,' but it turned out not to be quite that way," said Sick, who served on the National Security Council under former President Jimmy Carter and later wrote a book, All Fall Down, about U.S. policy in Iran.
"I can't believe there are people who want to repeat that process now," he added.
Sick and other regional specialists insist that the assumptions apparently being made by administration hawks about the nature of the government, its goals in Iraq, and how a U.S. or Israeli military strike would affect internal Iranian politics are all deeply flawed.
"The ramifications of a military strike are going to be all negative," according to Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution, who supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He said it would likely rally the population behind the regime and provoke serious retaliation both in Iraq and beyond.
Even the "big practical questions" acknowledged by Kristol represent formidable hurdles to ensuring the destruction of Iran's ability to build a bomb, according to Pollack. Anticipating Cheney, he asserted at a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) forum last week that "we would all like the Israelis to take care of this problem, (but) they can't."
Central and eastern Iran, where most of the facilities are believed to be situated, is beyond the range of their fighter jets. So in order to reach their targets, the bombers would have to fly over U.S.-occupied Iraq, thus making Washington complicit.
Worse, "(a)ny bombing raid that tries to take out so many sites will be will be of no value unless it's followed up on the ground," Sick told IPS. "My guess is that neither Cheney nor anyone around him really looks forward to putting boots on the ground in Iran."
Moreover, while there is "quite a lot of real respect for the United States and for Bush in Iran today, if there were an American attack, all of that would just vanish overnight," he said, pressing a more hopeful view of Cheney's and the administration's intentions.
"I think this is actually a campaign to intimidate Iran," he said. "It's holding out a palpable threat that if you don't cooperate this is what is going to happen to you." - http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?...
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| ---> Bush's Inaugural Obscenity |
| 01.21.05 (11:56 am) [edit] |
It goes without saying that the Internet will quickly be filled with incisive, appropriately critical assessments of George Bush's Inaugural sham.
How could it be otherwise?
Sure, there are gullible simps and brain-laundered propaganda patsies among us, but we're not a nation of fools.
Too many Americans have been shafted, in one painful way or another, by Dubya's corporate/financial, elitist masters. Despite constant neo-con efforts to smokescreen that exploitative abuse, each day brings greater popular clarity about where our common citizenry's steadily worsening status originates.
Seniors understand that Big Pharma's vile greed intolerably bilks them with outrageously overpriced prescription drugs.
Parents from coast to coast angrily appreciate that a private-profit medical/insurance hierarchy prices them out of affording adequate healthcare for their dangerously jeopardized children.
Workers see wages stagnate, benefits disappear, and safe and clean shop floor conditions vanish as union-busting policies that comprise the ruthless heart of rightwing Republicanism run rampant under Bush administration aegis.
Women watch with growing alarm as their basic reproductive rights are threatened with disastrous extinction. They understand, too, that any redress of longstanding unfairness between the sexes -- particularly in the realm of equal pay for equal toil -- becomes a virtual impossibility while reactionary, patriarchal "values" promulgated by the Bush White House prevail.
Gays, racial minorities, believers in faiths other than fundamentalist Christianity, the foreign born, principled dissidents, etc., all have warranted basis for fearing witch-hunting pogroms that shape the secret, sinister dreams of ultraconservatives looking for any excuse -- real or completely fabricated -- to get tough with their "enemies".
In Everytown, USA, grievously sad funerals are held for young soldiers returned in aluminum caskets from Iraq. Even as their heartbroken family members accept folded flags and pious "gratitude" for their sacrifice, a potentially revolutionary consciousness asserts that their deaths were entirely without valid justification.
No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Bush lied; they died. For oil, and for global Wall Street hegemony.
Bush's Inaugural address reputedly went through fourteen editings, and yet it emerged as a completely insipid mishmash of contrivance and cliches.
Its poisonous centerpiece was an Orwellian deceit involving repeatedly substituting the word "freedom" for U.S. imperialism's profiteering desire to force its self-serving will on peoples abroad preemptively characterized as terrorists or tyrants for the resistance their sovereign self-determination will necessarily compel them to mount.
Bush's duplicitous words uttered while shamefully evoking both God and goodness were a complete mockery of right and wrong. As if moved by the darkest black magic, righteousness and evil totally traded places before a grandiose lectern in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2005.
Think about this:
American "liberators" get blown to bits in unarmored Humvees scurrying about Iraqi roadways. Meanwhile, the man responsible for that debacle parades down Constitution Avenue in a limousine bearing enough bulletproof glass and metal to qualify as a wheeled battleship.
Nothing more graphically symbolizes the travesty of the poor having to fight and die in rich men's dirty wars while the latter suffer no untoward consequence.
At least until the entire house of bloody cards collapses, ala Vietnam, and as Iraq will likewise inevitably do.
George Bush presides over a nation where nothing is as claimed.
And where very nearly everything is soul-devouringly wrong.
Steadily worsening social and economic injustice permeates our land, bringing a world record gap between haves and have-nots. The rural heartland is utterly devoid of opportunity for graduating high school classes. In urban cores, countless kids don't graduate at all.
The American Dream is fast becoming the Nightmare on Main Street.
Rust weakens the rivets and bolts of our former greatness.
Against this backdrop of decay, no remedial attempt that serves public welfare and the common good is even perfunctorily made.
America under George Bush is analogous to the Titanic steaming headlong toward an iceberg.
Every aspect of the political Right's agenda is geared for saving the upper crust luxuriating in first-class privilege, while we the masses in steerage are to be set cruelly adrift, buffeted by cold, stormy inequity.
A myopic helmsman who also will not listen commands our ship of state.
Who can rationally argue that a mutiny -- a re-assertion of government of, by and for the people -- is not called for at this perilous moment?
Who dares claim it wouldn't be the greatest, most imperative patriotism imaginable? - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| ---> Nobody With Brains Likes Or Respects Bush (i.e. Most of the World) |
| 01.20.05 (9:00 pm) [edit] |
[b]Bush Bad for Global Peace, US Image, World Believes [/b]
As George W. Bush prepares to be sworn in for his second term as U.S. president, a strong majority of the world's people are concerned his tenure is likely to produce more setbacks to the cause of world peace and security, according to a major international poll released Wednesday.
The survey of nearly 22,000 people in 21 countries, conducted by GlobeScan with the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), found that pessimists about Bush's impact on global security outnumbered optimists by more than a two-to-one margin.
”The research makes very clear that the re-election of President Bush has further isolated America from the world,” said Doug Miller, GlobeScan's president. ”It also supports the view of some Americans that unless his administration changes its approach to world affairs in its second term, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs.”
Fifty-eight percent of the respondents predicted that Bush's re-election would be bad for international peace and security, compared to only 26 percent, concentrated primarily in India (62 percent), the Philippines (63 percent), and Poland (44 percent), who insisted it would be good.
The mammoth poll, which was conducted in each country during December, also found that 42 percent of respondents worldwide said Bush's re-election had made them feel worse about the U.S. public, compared to 25 percent who said it made them feel better, and 23 percent who said it made no difference.
Global sentiment also appeared to be overwhelmingly negative about U.S.-led military operations in Iraq.
Overall, 70 percent of respondents said they were opposed to their countries contributing troops to the operation. In no country -- including those, like Poland, that are in fact contributing troops in Iraq -- did either a majority or plurality of respondents say they thought their country should contribute troops.
”This is quite a grim picture for the U.S.,” said PIPA director Steven Kull, who noted that overwhelming sentiment against sending troops to Iraq suggested not only that Bush was highly unlikely to sign up any new volunteers for his dwindling ”Coalition” in Iraq, but also that ”in the future the prospects for getting foreign participation in any U.S.-led military operations that is not sanctioned by the United Nations or some other multilateral body are very poor.”
The poll, which covered Washington's closest allies in Western Europe and East Asia, as well as several South American countries, Mexico, South Africa, Lebanon, Russia, Turkey, Australia, South Africa, China and India, comes amid indications of growing concerns about Iraq, in particular, at home.
The Los Angeles Times Wednesday released its own poll that found that the percentage of U.S. citizens who believe Iraq was ”worth going to war over” has sunk to a new low of 39 percent, down from 44 percent last October, one month before the presidential elections. Fifty-six percent now believe the war was a mistake.
Consistent with the findings of the international poll, the Times survey also found that nearly twice as many people now believe that the war in Iraq ”destabilized” the Middle East than those who believe the region has been stabilized, and that two-thirds of the public believe that the image of the U.S. has been ”hurt” by the U.S. intervention.
Only 10 percent said Washington image had improved, while the remainder either had no opinion or said it had no impact.
The Globescan-PIPA poll was generally consistent with another survey the two groups released last September on global attitudes about the U.S. presidential election.
Carried out in 35 countries in July and August, that poll found that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was favored over Bush by pluralities or majorities in 30 countries and by an average of 46 to 20 percent.
Consistent with latest poll, Kerry was favored by the greatest margins in Europe, predominantly Muslim countries, and South America, while Bush actually bested Kerry in only three countries -- Philippines, Poland, and Nigeria. In India, Bush and Kerry were virtually tied.
In the latest poll, the countries that felt most negative about Bush's impact on global security included Turkey (82 percent), Argentina (79 percent), Brazil (78 percent), Germany (77 percent, France (75 percent), Indonesia (68 percent), although the survey was carried out before U.S. relief operations after last month's tsunami, Canada (67 percent), Lebanon and Britain (64 percent), and Chile (62 percent).
Asked whether Bush's re-election made them feel worse about the U.S. public, respondents from Turkey (72 percent), France (65 percent), Brazil (59 percent), and Germany (56 percent) were the most negatively affected, while only in the Philippines (78 percent) and India (65 percent) did majorities say it made them feel better.
Anti-U.S. attitudes, however, generally trailed behind the negative attitudes expressed for Bush in the new poll.
Asked whether they felt ”mainly positive” or ”mainly negative” about U.S. influence in the world, Filipino respondents were by far the most positive -- 88 percent, while majorities ranging from 52 percent to 56 percent also described U.S. influence as ”mainly positive” in Poland, India, South Africa, and South Korea.
On the other hand, majorities in 12 countries -- ranging from 50 percent in Chile and Britain to 64 percent in Germany and 65 percent in Argentina -- described U.S. influence as ”mainly negative, while pluralities in Lebanon, China, and Japan agreed.
”I'm quite confident that there's never been any period where you could find such high levels of negative feelings towards the U.S. in polling data,” Kull told IPS, noting, however, that the combined polls do not yet show that a majority worldwide sees the U.S. as having a negative influence on the world.
”That suggests there may be some underlying openness to repairing relations with the U.S.,” he added.
Italy was found to be the most pro-U.S. Western European country, with nearly half of respondents insisting that Washington's influence was still mainly ”positive”.
In Britain, Washington's closest ally, the margin was 44 percent positive versus 50 percent negative; in Australia, it was 40-52, only slightly more positive than France where the margin was 38-54.
Overall, the poll found that those with higher education and income levels tended to be somewhat more negative about Bush's re-election and to feel worse about U.S. influence. Muslims were much more likely to be negative on both counts than Christians.
In addition to the 21 countries surveyed, a poll of 1,000 U.S. respondents was also carried out. Fifty-six percent of Americans considered Bush's re-election positive for world security, and 71 percent assessed the U.S. as having a mainly positive influence.
Countries least eager to contribute troops to Iraq included Mexico where no respondent favored the idea, Russia (2 percent), Argentina (3 percent), Turkey (6 percent), and France, Lebanon, and Chile (9 percent). Support for troop contributions ran highest in countries that have contributed troops: Australia (37 percent), Philippines (36 percent), South Korea (34 percent), Britain (31 percent) and Italy (28 percent).
With the exception of the Philippines (500), Brazil (800), and Poland (943), more than 1,000 respondents were surveyed in each country. Nation-wide polls were conducted in all of the industrialized nations polled, while polling was combined to urban centers in Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Turkey. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...
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| ---> OAF OF OFFICE |
| 01.20.05 (7:41 pm) [edit] |
Watching John Kerry lip-synch the oath of office, I couldn't help wondering, 'what if.'
Here on stage in Washington was the winner-class warmed and protected by cashmere and tax cuts against the strange, nipple-chilling cold. Hell had frozen over.
Our President said, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation." Well, no, it isn't.
Our President said, "We will widen retirement savings and health insurance." No, he won't.
Our President said, "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains." Yes, he will.
Our President said, "And our country must abandon all the habits of racism." Oh, sure.
He doesn't believe a single word he's saying. And all over America, everyone knows he's lying and America is truly relieved.
America doesn't want to give up the habit of racism. Karl Rove doesn't. Jeb Bush doesn't. If not for challenging hundreds of thousands of voters in Black precincts of Ohio and other swing states, if not for purging thousands more from voter rolls for the crime of voting while Black, you wouldn't be president now, would you, Mr. President?
You won't "pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains," unless they are chained by your buck-buddies in Saudi Arabia.
You'll "support democratic movements" so long as the citizens of Venezuela don't get carried away and decide that democracy means they can choose a leader you don't like.
And you'll "widen Social Security and health insurance"? Who are you kidding? I just got a doctor bill for $5,200 … should I send it to you at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
You said, "You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs." What you meant was, "Courage is fragile and real evil triumphs." Indeed your entire campaign was about American cowardice: "they" are coming to get us. Americans, scared for their lives, soiled their underpants and waddled to the polls crying, "Georgie, save us!"
Franklin Roosevelt said in his inaugural, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But he didn't have Dick Cheney creating from his bunker a government which is little more than a Wal-Mart of Fear: midnight snatchings of citizens for uncharged crimes, wars to hunt for imaginary weapons aimed at Los Angeles, DNA data banks of kids and grandmas, the Chicken Little sky-is-falling social security spook-show, and shoe-searches in airports. Fear is your only product.
In another world, in which all votes are counted, J.F. Kerry would have gathered most of those arcane chits called "electoral votes" and would have taken that oath today.
But, dear Reader, there's one cold statistic Kerry voters must face. The fact that Republicans monkeyed with the votes in swing states doesn't wash away that big red stain: 59 million Americans marched to the polls and voted for George W. Bush.
If Osama doesn't scare you, THAT should.
Because if 59 million Americans agreed with George Bush that every millionaire's son, like him, shouldn't have to pay inheritance taxes; that sucking up to Saudi petrocrats constitutes a foreign policy; that killing Muslims in Mesopotamia will make them less inclined to kill us in Manhattan; that turning over social security to the casino operators that gave us Enron, WorldCom and world depression is smart economics; then, fine, Mr. Bush deserves the job. But most Americans, bless'm, don't actually believe any of that hokum. YET MOST STILL VOTED FOR HIM!
What we witnessed on November 2, 2004 was a 59-million strong army of pinheads on parade ready to gamble away their social security so long as George Bush makes sure that boys kill each other, not kiss each other; who feel right proud that our uniformed services can kick some scrawny brown people in the ass in some far off place when we're mad and can't find Osama; who can't bring themselves to vote for a guy with a snooty Boston accent who's never been to a NASCAR tractor pull and who certainly thinks anyone who does is a low-Q beer-burping blockhead. And they are.
Today we witnessed more than the coronation of some privileged little munchkin of mendacity. It is the triumphal re-occupation of our nation by nitwits who think Ollie North's a hero not a conman, who can't name their congressman, who believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were going steady, who can't tell Afghanistan from Souvlaki-stan. Bloated with lies and super-size fries, they clomped to the polls 59 million strong to vent their small-minded little hatreds on us all.
When I looked today at the oaf of office, I could not shake the feeling that this election was an intelligence test that America flunked. - http://www.gregpalast.com/det...
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| ---> The Crowning of Bush: The Lavish Inaugural Will Cost You a Lot ... |
| 01.19.05 (1:25 pm) [edit] |
[b]... as if it's any of your business ...[/b]
Next Thursday's lavish inauguration is payback time for the people and corporations that financed Bush's re-election campaign. Companies and executives contributed 96 percent of the $17.8 million collected as of late last week to pay for the festivities, according to a new study by Public Citizen. The inauguration has a reported price tag of $40 million.
Wall Street is the largest contributor, with $5 million so far. The finance and securities industry, which has already given Bush $21.7 million for his presidential campaign, is eagerly awaiting the green light for the enormous new business of managing individual accounts under a new Social Security setup. Wall Street would get to tailor a mutual fund for every person in the country and extract management and brokerage fees from each one.
The energy industry's $2.3 million is the second-biggest contribution. It gave Bush $5.2 million for his election campaign last year. The energy business looks forward to incentives for drilling for more oil and gas on the outer continental shelf, along the eastern front of the Rockies, and in Alaska. And under Bush it has seen profits leap ahead with sky-high prices for natural gas and gasoline.
Much of the cost of next week's binge will be borne by the citizens of the District of Columbia. Their taxes will pay for $11.9 million of the cost of the event. Included will be $8.8 million in overtime pay for 2,000 D.C. police officers, $2.7 million for out-of-town cops brought in to help out, $3 million to build reviewing stands, and $2.5 million for public works, such as health care, transportation, and firefighters.
The money for these things will come out of Homeland Security funds that were meant to increase hospital capacity and better equip firefighters. During last summer's political conventions, Congress paid both New York and Boston for local security costs.
Taxpayers across the country will foot a bill of around $66 million, the cost of giving federal workers in the capital area a day off on Thursday. It's unclear how much the government pays for half a day off before the inauguration, when it wants to clear the city so it can begin closing off streets for security purposes.
"It's an unfunded mandate of the most odious kind," a spokesman for Republican Tom Davis, chair of the House Government Reform Committee, which oversees D.C. affairs, told The Washington Post. "How can the District be asked to take funds from important homeland security projects to pay for this instead?"
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[b]If you're going (crazy) . . .
Some great package deals at the inaugural[/b]:
"Candlelight dinner," at Union Station, the Washington Hilton, or the National Building Museum: $2,500.
"Underwriter" package: Two tickets for a lunch banquet with the president and vice president, plus 20 tickets to one of the three candlelight dinners: $250,000.
"Sponsor" package: 10 candlelight dinner tickets, for a total of $100,000.
Bleacher seats on Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the parade: $15, $60, or $125 each.
A seat, at the Capitol's East Front, for the swearing-in: $250.
Mementos: "Medallion Collection," $1,190; silver cuff links, $95; crystal ice bucket and flute set, $84.95; crystal paperweight, $42.95; key chain, $7.95; button, $3.
Jefferson Hotel package: For $1 million, guests get 24-hour limousine service, spa treatments, his-and-her gold Presidential Rolex watches, fashions by the couture designer of choice, Tiffany diamonds, and for those interested, a trip to Chicago for a private tour of "Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years," a Field Museum exhibit.
Sofitel Lafayette Square package: For $75,000, the "Don't Mess With Texas" package treats guests to a suite filled with yellow roses, and you get sterling silver spurs bearing the inaugural logo.
Black Tie and Boots gala: For as much as $1,455 per ticket, each attendee gets to be photographed on a bull. (Sorry, but this is already sold out.)
Items banned from the inaugural for security reasons: packages, bags or backpacks; vacuum bottles; coolers; food, alcohol, and other beverages; firearms, knives, or pocket tools; explosives or fireworks; umbrellas (ponchos are permitted); strollers; animals (except service animals); laser pointers; Mace or pepper spray; pole-mounted posters or signs. Signs made of cardboard, poster board, or cloth, no larger than 20 inches by 36 inches, are allowed. Cameras are allowed but not tripods or large equipment bags. - http://villagevoice.com/news/...,mondo1,60126,6.html
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| ---> Support for War in Iraq Hits New Low ... |
| 01.19.05 (11:59 am) [edit] |
[i]Most no longer back the administration's basis for invading, but a majority say U.S. troops should stay longer to assist with stabilization[/i].
Support for the war in Iraq has continued to erode, but most Americans still are inclined to give the Bush administration some time to try to stabilize the country before it withdraws U.S. troops, the Los Angeles Times Poll has found.
The poll, conducted Saturday through Monday, found that the percentage of Americans who believed the situation in Iraq was "worth going to war over" had sunk to a new low of 39%. When the same question was asked in a similar poll in October, 44% said it had been worth going to war.
But when asked whether the United States should begin withdrawing troops after Iraq's election Jan. 30, 52% said the administration should wait to see what the new Iraqi government wanted. More than a third, 37%, said the United States should begin drawing down at least some of its troop strength.
Americans are almost evenly divided over how long U.S. forces should stay in Iraq, the poll found: 47% said they would like to see most of the troops out within a year, while 49% say they could support a longer deployment — including 37% who say the troops should remain "as long as it takes" to secure and stabilize the country.
The results suggest that while Americans have grown more pessimistic about the chances for success in Iraq, most are willing to give President Bush some time to try to turn the operation into a success.
"We are seeing lower support for the war, but I would have expected it to be even lower … given that the main rationale for the war — the weapons of mass destruction — turned out not to be there," said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University who is an authority on wartime public opinion.
Mueller noted that support for the war had been falling gradually since the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, but that the erosion had not produced a majority in favor of early troop withdrawals.
"Support for this war is now lower than support for the Vietnam War was at the Tet offensive," Mueller said, citing the 1968 battles that were a turning point in U.S. public opinion then. "But in Vietnam [after Tet], the war continued for several years, and many people continued to support it through enormous casualties."
In Iraq, he noted, the number of U.S. casualties has been far lower than in Vietnam, a probable reason that public pressure for withdrawal has not mounted higher.
On the other hand, public support for increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq — a proposal Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and several other members of Congress have made — is negligible, the poll found. Only 4% of respondents said they would favor increasing American forces after the Iraqi election.
Respondents to The Times poll were downbeat about the results of the war in Iraq on several counts.
Asked which side — the United States or the anti-American insurgents — was winning the war or if it was a stalemate, 58% said that neither side appeared to have the upper hand, while 29% said they believed the United States was winning and 10% said the insurgents were winning.
Respondents were divided on whether the Jan. 30 election was likely to be a turning point leading to a significant improvement in Iraq's stability: 31% said they thought it would have a positive effect, 34% said they expected no significant effect, and 27% said they thought the election would actually lead to more violence.
Respondents also were divided on whether the election would help advance democracy in the Middle East, one of the Bush administration's main goals: 47% said it would probably advance democracy, but 45% said it probably would not.
But 59% said they favored holding the election on schedule despite fears of violence on election day. Over a third, or 35%, said the vote should be postponed.
Almost half, or 45%, said they believed the war had destabilized the Middle East; 24% said they thought it had a stabilizing effect. In April 2003, 52% thought that military action against Iraq would stabilize the situation in the Middle East.
And a large majority, 65%, said they believed the war in Iraq had harmed the United States' image around the world. Only 10% said the U.S. image had been helped.
The Times poll, supervised by polling director Susan Pinkus, surveyed 1,033 adults. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. - http://www.latimes.com/news/n...,0,7592168.story
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| ---> The Scoop About Condosleezy Rice: Future Liar of the Bush State ... |
| 01.18.05 (9:56 pm) [edit] |
[b]Condi Rice gets a free-pass: a wave-n-hand-shake, a bow & a rubber-stamp. She knows going into these whitewashed hearings, that she's a "shoe-in". Do the toadies in the Senate really intend to scrutinize her lousy track record? Of course not. Barbara Boxer is the only Senator with balls-- and they shut-Boxer-up so that Bush's Best Buddy gets to fuck-up State...[/b]
"The story is going around Washington that Senate Foreign Relations chairman Richard Lugar handed Condoleezza Rice a list of names of “neocons” he wanted blacklisted from the Department of State – and that Rice assented."
[b]From Crooks and Liars[/b]: http://www.crooksandliars.com...
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| ---> The Bush Kingdom: No Accountability Rule ... |
| 01.18.05 (2:56 pm) [edit] |
"[Saddam Hussein] had a lot of time to move stuff, a lot of time to hide stuff."
– Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, 6/24/04, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
Officials "familiar with the search" say "US authorities have found no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein transferred WMD or related equipment out of Iraq."
– AP, 1/18/05, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5...
[b]IRAQ – MISSING THE MOMENT:[/b] Calling November's election an "accountability moment," President Bush said last week there was no need to reprimand any administration officials responsible for the mistakes and misjudgments in planning for the Iraq war and its aftermath. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq," President Bush said, "and they looked at the two candidates and chose me, for which I'm grateful." Exit polls from Nov. 2 showed that those who cited Iraq as the most important election issue actually voted overwhelmingly for President Bush's opponent, John Kerry. Also, a University of Maryland study from October found that the vast majority of Bush supporters incorrectly believed that WMDs or a major weapons program had been found in Iraq, and that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda. Moreover, 58 percent of Bush supporters said the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq "if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al Qaeda." - http://www.americanprogressac...
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| ---> The Mad King George & his Neo-Con Nazis Lust for More Abortions... |
| 01.18.05 (10:58 am) [edit] |
[b]The hypocritical right-wing neo-con Nazis in Bush's New World Order lust for more abortions of innocent human beings on an extravagant scale:[/b]
Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later, Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders who they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, "you are with us or against us."
What happens when Americans wake up to their betrayal? It is too late to be rescued from catastrophe in Iraq, but perhaps if Americans can understand how such a grand mistake was made, they can avoid repeating it. In a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, [i]The New American Militarism[/i], http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... Andrew J. Bacevich writes that we can avoid future disasters by understanding how our doctrines went wrong and by returning to the precepts laid down by our Founding Fathers, men of infinitely more wisdom than those currently holding reins of power.
Bacevich, West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, and soldier for 23 years, is a true conservative. He is an expert on U.S. military strategy and a professor at Boston University. He describes how civilian strategists – especially Albert Wohlstetter and Andrew Marshall – not military leaders, transformed a strategy of deterrence that regarded war as a last resort into a strategy of naked aggression. The resulting "marriage of a militaristic cast of mind with utopian ends" has "committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale."
The greatest threat to the U.S. is not terrorists but the neoconservative belief, to which President Bush is firmly committed, that American security and well-being depend on U.S. global hegemony and impressing U.S. values on the rest of the world. This belief resonates with a patriotic public. Bacevich writes, "In the aftermath of a century filled to overflowing with evidence pointing to the limited utility of armed force and the dangers inherent in relying excessively on military power, the American people have persuaded themselves that their best prospect for safety and salvation lies with the sword."
If Americans persist in these misconceptions, America will "share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny. We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize."
Bacevich understands that the problem is not how to deal with terrorism but how to deal with the hubris, laden with catastrophe, that America is God's instrument for bringing history to its predetermined destination. Being assigned such an exalted role creates the delusion that America's virtue is unquestionable and its use of preemptive coercion is infallible, a delusion that led to the "cakewalk war" that would entrench democracy in the Middle East and have the troops home in 90 days.
American hubris, which flows so freely from President Bush's mouth, explains why half the U.S. population yawns over the U.S. slaughter of Iraqi civilians and communist-style torture of Iraqi prisoners. The "cakewalk war" is now almost two years old and has claimed 10 percent of the U.S. occupation force as casualties. Yet, the delusion persists that the U.S. is prevailing in Iraq.
The new American militarism would be inconceivable, Bacevich writes, "were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals." Books written about "militant Islam" could equally describe militant evangelical Christianity. How did a Christian doctrine of love and peace become an apology for war?
Bacevich explains that evangelicals, aghast at Vietnam era protests of America's war against "godless communism," turned to the military as the repository of traditional American virtues. For evangelicals, end-times doctrines converged eschatology with national security. Prophecies merged America's fate with Israel's. Islam inherited the role of godless communism and became the target of the war against evil. America emerged with the "same immensely elastic permission to use force previously accorded to Israel."
America's security and the well-being of the world are threatened by America's unwarranted belief in the efficacy of force. War is ungovernable: "The shattered reputations of generals and statesmen who presumed to bring it under control litter the 20th century. On those rare occasions when war has yielded a seemingly decisive outcome, as in 1918 or 1945, it has done so only after exacting a staggering price from victor and vanquished alike. Even then, in resolving one set of problems, 'good' wars have fostered resentments or created temptations, leading as often as not to further conflict."
The new American militarism has abandoned the Founding Fathers, deserted the Constitution, and unrestrained the executive. War is a first resort. Militarism is inconsistent with globalism and with American ideals. It will end in abject failure.
The world is a vast place. The U.S. has demonstrated that it cannot impose its will on a tiny part known as Iraq. American realism may yet reassert itself, dispel the fog of delusion, cleanse the body politic of the Jacobin spirit, and lead the world by good example. But this happy outcome will require regime change in the U.S. - http://www.antiwar.com/robert...
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| ---> Forget the War, Bush Wants a Party!!! ... |
| 01.17.05 (10:11 am) [edit] |
[b]Thursday's inauguration for President Bush feels more like a coronation, writes Michael Gawenda[/b].
It is possible that the inauguration speech that George Bush gives on Thursday will match the speeches given by the three other second-term presidents sworn in while the US was at war - Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, and Richard Nixon during the war in Vietnam.
All three - yes, Nixon as well - spoke of the sacrifices made by Americans, particularly the military, in the service of freedom and democracy. They were speeches designed to heal and comfort and inspire.
They could make such speeches because each was inaugurated when the wars being fought were almost over - the civil war had been won by the unionists and, in January 1945, Roosevelt knew the war against Japan and Germany was virtually over. Nixon knew his war - started by his Democrat predecessors - was lost and was on the brink of an agreement with North Vietnam that would allow him to pull out of Vietnam without explicitly admitting defeat.
The war that Bush presides over - or rather the two wars that his Administration has conflated - is, by his own admission, far from over.
The war on terrorism has only just begun, and in a candid moment several months ago Bush told a reporter that he was not sure it could be won. It remains unclear just what sort of war this is and what exactly would represent a victory.
So will Thursday's inauguration be a sombre event at a time when the US is involved in wars that could yet be lost and when the President, despite his clear if narrow victory in November, has a 43 per cent approval rating, the lowest for any re-elected president in the past 60 years?
Not a bit of it. The theme is "Celebrating Freedom and Honouring Service", and it's going to be the most expensive in US history, with most of the $US40 million ($52.6million) being spent on ... well, partying. This does not include $14 million for security.
The security is understandable, but with most of central Washington closed to traffic and in many cases pedestrians, the inauguration, which is meant to be a celebration of democracy, will be open only to those who have paid big bucks to attend one of the nine inaugural balls or the intimate dinner parties or the rock concert hosted by the Bush twins, Jenna and Barbara.
There are tickets for several rows of wooden seats set up on Pennsylvania Avenue for Thursday's parade, but that's about it for ordinary folk.
Certainly the busloads of protesters due in Washington today will get nowhere near any of the major events.
Still, given that 90 per cent of the good citizens of Washington DC voted for John Kerry and given that we can assume that the vast majority of them, at best, think Bush has been a disastrous president, they may not be too concerned that they are going to be left out of the inauguration parties. Indeed, it seems that many are so unenthused by this inauguration that they plan to leave town for the four days of celebrations.
There are some members of Congress who have complained that the $US40million party is unseemly at a time when the country is at war and so soon after the tsunami disaster that has claimed so many lives. But most of them are Democrats who know they have little support for their views in most of the country - even Bill Clinton has said that the inauguration celebrations are OK and that Bush and his supporters deserve to party.
At George Washington's inauguration in 1789 - the first inauguration of a president - he wanted to wear a suit covered in gold leaf with a special cape and ride to the ceremony on a white horse escorted by an honour guard on white horses. Like a coronation. He was talked out of this and instead wore a brown suit with gold buttons and rode to Federal Hall in New York on a brown horse. The president of the new republic was not a king.
Still, this inauguration - like most of the others before it - feels, to an Australian, more like a coronation than the swearing-in of an elected president. - http://www.smh.com.au/news/Op...
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| ---> U.S. Lowers Expectations for Once-Heralded Iraq Vote!!! Surprised??? |
| 01.16.05 (4:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]So, the Bushies lied about WMDs-- lied about Saddam Hussein-Al Qaeda links-- lied about 9/11-- lied about everything. Now the Bushies lied about how the elections were going to be a cake-walk!!! Surprised??? How many lies before Americans wake-up???[/b]
Unable to deliver on its lofty goal of bringing democracy to Iraq (news - web sites) through the Jan. 30 elections, the Bush administration is pressing a damage-control campaign to lower expectations for the vote.
With fears for a low voter turnout among Sunni Arabs due to a boycott and insurgents' intimidation, the administration no longer touts the elections as a catalyst to spread democracy across the Arab world.
Instead, U.S. officials now emphasize the political process that will follow the vote.
"Clearly, we don't see the election itself as a pivotal point," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told NPR on Friday. "It's the beginning of a process, the process where Iraqis will write a constitution and at the end of the year will actually vote for a permanent government."
Almost two years after Operation Iraqi Freedom, a raging insurgency across mainly Sunni areas forced the White House this week to prepare the American public for elections it called "less than perfect."
For months, the Bush administration has been steadily lowering expectations over the vote, beginning with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in September warning violent areas of the country might be excluded.
And with just two weeks to go, the administration acknowledges that despite military offensives meant to provide security for the vote, the fear of bullets and bombs will keep many for the 20 percent Sunni minority away from the ballot box.
Rather than ushering in Iraq's first free and fair national elections for decades, the Bush administration has now limited its ambition for a vote it refuses to postpone.
"I think a successful election will be an election where most of the population has gotten a chance to vote, and even though we may not get the same kind of numbers in the Sunni area, we're going to have to go forward and use the results of this election to build on," Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) told PBS.
Powell has lobbied the Shi'ites, who were oppressed under former President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) by the dominant Sunnis, to include the disenfranchised Sunnis in the government after they overwhelmingly win the skewed vote.
But the top U.S. diplomat acknowledged such maneuvering also risked inflaming the insurgency.
"The insurgency is not going away as a result of this election. In fact, perhaps, the insurgents might become more emboldened," Powell said.
GIVING DEMOCRACY A BAD NAME
Critics of the administration's Iraq policy complain the elections for a 275-member assembly that should draw up a constitution and pick a transitional government are so flawed they will be illegitimate -- and counterproductive for democracy in the region.
"These elections are a joke," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan.
"The Bush administration has created the worst possible advertisement for democracy because the perception across the Middle East is that democracy means you get a country where everything is out of control," he said.
Before the vote, the administration "has definitely gone into damage-control mode," Stephen Zunes, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco said.
"Once their original rationale (to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction) fell apart, they created very high expectations for democracy to be able to justify their takeover," he said. "Now that they have ended up with a not particularly good demonstration of democracy, they are forced to lower the public's expectations for these elections." - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
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| ---> The Bush Zone (with Apologies to Rod Serling) |
| 01.15.05 (10:03 am) [edit] |
[b]There is a fifth realm beyond known reality. It is a realm as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground of haze and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies at the pit of man's fears. This is the realm of the unimaginable. It is an area we call "The Bush Zone."[/b]
Meet Mr. and Mrs. America, faithful believers in the one true nation. They arise each morning and stand before the mirror reciting their daily mantra: "It's a grand old flag! Leader of the free world! We're no. 1!" Their iconic reflection smiles back, a warm and homemade apple pie image of the best of everything, the best medical care, the most powerful military, and the best political system of any country in the world. The mirror never lies.
But this morning, Mr. And Mrs. America, discover a warped mirror that casts a disturbing and twisted funhouse reflection of their former selves. Daily slogans are powerless against this distorted likeness, and all that they once held sacred now ripples across the glass in a deformed and misshapen wave of elongated ugliness. Mr. And Mrs. America just stepped through the looking glass and into the Bush Zone.
Submitted for your consideration: citizens of the wealthiest country in the world seek salvation via the free-market system. They organize bake sales and eBay auctions to raise money for medical therapy not covered by their profit-driven corporate HMOs, only to discover that some of that money is also needed to purchase body armor the Pentagon failed to provide to their sons and daughters in Iraq. War is never cheap, but always profitable in the Bush Zone.
Further submitted for your consideration: a President insists on free elections in his combat arena despite the risk to life and limb for Iraqis, even as his own political party strains the boundaries of legality and decency to suppress the vote of Americans at home. Democracy is only for the righteous few required to guide the many along the sacred path of destiny and empire in the Bush Zone.
This is Alberto Gonzales, lawyer on his way up, salt of the earth, minority makes good story. He is, as you have perceived, a purveyor of partisan loyalty, one of a breed who substitutes smiles for substance, venom for value, and noise for nobility. His skill is the ability to turn the objectionable into the tolerable, the illegal into legal, and define it all with the phonetics of patriotism. Mr. Gonzales sits before his inquisitors, speaking in tongues while saying nothing. He has no fear because he knows Democrats are willing ghosts without power in the Bush Zone.
Picture of a campaign paid for by $600 million dollars of private funds, a cacophonous symphony of slander, mendacious media, and clanging garbage cans of innuendo and falsehood. The prize? A lavish gala held at the picturesque white house residence of the owners of America. Attendance is by invitation only.
The Bush Zone hosts a cast of characters, who like children's fertile imaginations, have no attachment to reality. A surreal traveling Medicine Show comprised of peddlers of faith and fear, sellers of superstition, martyrs and moguls who line their pockets with the lives of the innocent and faithful, all united to market the elixirs of corporate conformity and passivity, for the price of one thin nickel plus your soul. No waiting.
Picture of a Nation gazing into a warped mirror, its reflection, a blemished garden of atrophied freedoms, the acne of cowered silence, and once bright eyes dulled by corporate greed and the focus group political entertainment of talk television. In a little while, the face in the mirror will be permanently etched into the glass unless the Nation can avert its eyes from the hypnotic glare and focus on its people, principles and Constitution.
There is a way out for all of us, albeit through a locked door.
You unlock this door with the key of democracy. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of peace and prosperity, a dimension of free speech and civil rights, a dimension of tolerance and enlightenment. You're moving out of the land of haze and shadow, and into the wondrous journey of the people, by the people and for the people.
You've just stepped out of - the Bush Zone.
That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the real America!
------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----
[b]John Cory is a Vietnam veteran. He received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V device, 1969 - 1970[/b]. - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ---> MR. BUSH AND THE LURE OF PSEUDO-REALITY |
| 01.14.05 (2:00 pm) [edit] |
Germany's defeat in World War II was greatly accelerated by Hitler's refusal—especially in the final two years—to accept any bad news, and to accuse those trying to present such news of disloyalty, defeatism, or stupidity. Enemy forces were invariably underrated, own strength overestimated, and self-deceptions believed with such firmness that, by mid-1944, Field Marshal Rommel felt compelled to conclude that the Fuehrer was living in a [i]Wolkenkuckucksheim[/i] ("cloud cuckoo land").
Is it conceivable that the atmosphere in the White House is beginning to resemble that at Rastenburg? One of the best informed political commentators in Washington, Chris Nelson, thinks so. His influential newsletter, [i]The Nelson Report,[/i] has been keenly read inside the Beltway for the past 20 years because his information is usually reliable. In its January 3 issue Nelson wrote of the rising concern amongst senior officials that President Bush "does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information":
[i]Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear "bad news." Rather, Bush makes clear that all he wants are progress reports, where they exist, and those facts which seem to support his declared mission in Iraq . . . building democracy. "That's all he wants to hear about," we have been told. So "in" are the latest totals on school openings, and "out" are reports from senior US military commanders (and those intelligence experts still on the job) that they see an insurgency becoming increasingly effective, and their projection that "it will just get worse[/i]."
Especially alarming is the insistence of Nelson's sources that this "good news only" directive comes from Bush himself, and that it is not the result of senior officials around him trying to mislead or insulate him. Nelson concludes that "whether self-imposed, or due to manipulation by irresponsible subordinates, the information/intelligence vacuum at the highest levels of the White House increasingly frightens those officials interested in objective assessment, and not just selling a political message."
Similar warnings about Mr. Bush have been heard before, and the disturbing signs—such as his tendency to a messianic outlook—have been apparent for years. His belief that "history has called America and our allies to action" was stated with great firmness in his first State of the Union address three years ago. The conclusion, that he sees himself as an anointed agent of divine providence, seems inescapable.
The notion that one is on the right side of "history" is dangerous in a President, however, not only because it breeds irrational belief in the correctness of one's own intuitive judgment, but also because it prompts megalomaniacal decisions and policies inimical to the political and constitutional tradition of the United States. Abraham Lincoln waged his war against the South with similar convictions as Mr. Bush wages his current global crusade, and with similar consequences. As Eric Foner has noted in his review of two recent books on Lincoln, both Presidents assumed powers that went well beyond what the Constitution seems to allow; in both cases, thousands of people suspected of assisting the enemy were arrested and held without charge and military tribunals were established to circumvent civilian courts:
[i]Leading members of both Administrations described the military conflict as an epic struggle between good and evil, inspired by the country's divinely ordained mission to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world. The Bush Administration's cavalier disregard for civil liberties has directed attention to the permissible limits on the rule of law in wartime[/i].
The historicist fallacy that "history" is an entity on a linear march has bred gnostic ideologies that find it easy to murder those who are deemed to be on its "wrong" side. Sooner or later this mindset results in the destruction of the over-expanded, over-extended bearer of the divinely appointed task. IBD's Washington bureau chief Brian Mitchell has diagnosed the "twin faults" of this mindset leading in the same self-destroying direction. The first is "a gnostic belief in our own anointing as a nation, a belief without any foundation in scripture or tradition, chosen merely because it flatters us." The second is an undeserved confidence in our ability to know and reason, which makes it easy
[i]to pass judgment on others and bear the sword against them, accounting ourselves blameless for the destruction we cause . . . We all know how well men rationalize their nonrational preferences, yet after doing our just-war calculations and obtaining an answer in favor of war, we then proceed with a clear conscience to commit ghastly acts[/i].
Reality is always more complicated than we imagine, he warns, and the farther the reality is from our own experience the less we can understand it. This is the moral basis for nonintervention, for the original refusal of the American Republic to get involved in arranging other peoples' lives.
To deal with the terrorist threat effectively and on the basis of leadership willingly accepted by those who are led, the United States should discard the pernicious notion of its exceptionalism. But instead of realizing that the threat to America is enhanced by the policy of global hegemony, President Bush is turning that hegemony into a divinely-ordained, morally mandated, open-ended and self-justifying mission of this country for decades to come. The winners are the neoconservatives, of course, who can easily tailor their long-term scenarios to fit into Mr. Bush's universe. Their mendacity—apparent in the misrepresentation of the Iraqi crisis to the American people—is now coupled with the chief executive's propensity to hear only "those facts which seem to support his declared mission." It will make the job easier for those around him who subscribe to the Straussian dictum that deception is justified, that there is no morality, and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior. - http://www.chroniclesmagazine...
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| ---> The "Point" (for the Brain-Dead) Re WMDs Is: Bush LIED & Should Be IMPEACHED!!! |
| 01.14.05 (12:47 pm) [edit] |
[b]Bush's [i]casus belli [/i]for invading Iraq was to disarm Saddam Hussein who supposedly (we were told) had massive stockpiles of WMDs that posed an imminent threat to our national security: this was a bald-faced lie. Now, the Bushies should be held accountable. They should be impeached![/b]
For months before and after the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials insisted that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
"There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us," Vice President Cheney said in August 2002. Six months later, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the case, including satellite photos, to the United Nations. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scoffed that even "a trained ape" knew it was true.
This week, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. has quietly ended its search for the weapons. Inspectors scoured Iraq and interviewed Iraqi scientists for months. They spent millions of dollars — the amount remains classified. The result was unchanged from the searchers' previous reports: They found nothing. No nuclear program. No stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons.
The end to the search puts a coda on one of the biggest intelligence failures in the nation's history, and it appears to extinguish the lingering possibility that something would turn up somewhereinside Iraq. Polls show that the administration's pre-war campaign was so effective that about 40% of Americans still believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded.
The most obvious and urgent lesson is this: The Bush administration needs to rethink the doctrine of pre-emption that justified the Iraq war. The U.S., according to that doctrine, doesn't have to wait for an attack like Pearl Harbor to defend itself. It only needs evidence that one is being planned.
That made more sense in the aftermath of 9/11 than in the cold new light of the Iraq war.
Not that the Bush administration was alone in its mistaken belief about Iraq's weapons stockpiles. Other intelligence agencies around the world reached similar conclusions.
In the 1980s, Saddam used chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds in his own country. The U.N. said it could not be sure that Saddam had destroyed stockpiles of deadly weapons as he claimed after the first Gulf War. Saddam himself was making the inspectors' job difficult by leaving the impression that he was hiding something, apparently in an effort to deter Iran from thinking he was weak.
Still, cautionary voices, including within the CIA, were dismissed in the rush to war.
The fallout is already plain and getting more painful by the day. More than 1,350 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The war has cost the United States more than $100 billion and has strained relations with allies. Iraq could descend into civil war.
While it tries to salvage the situation in Iraq, the U.S. faces challenges from Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. Information about weapons programs inside these secretive regimes is at least as sketchy as it was about Iraq.
Approaches such as diplomacy, intense negotiations and weapons inspections are no panacea. But used together, with other countries, they can be valuable. The weapons debacle in Iraq shows the proper place for pre-emptive war: as a last resort, and only with rock-solid evidence. - http://www.usatoday.com/news/...
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| ---> Why We Need Social Security |
| 01.13.05 (6:20 am) [edit] |
For nearly three-quarters of a century, Americans have taken Social Security for granted. Now we had better learn how it works, what it has done, and what the true facts are regarding its future -- or else we are going to lose it.
Superficially, Social Security resembles traditional employer pensions: Americans pay into the system during their working years and receive a monthly pension during retirement. But the differences are fundamental. Social Security benefits are based on a balancing of two principles: equity and adequacy. Equity means that what you put in is related to what you get out; in other words, workers with higher wages, who pay more into the system, receive higher benefits later on. But under the principle of adequacy, the Social Security benefit formula overlooks years of low earnings (for example, when a worker may have been disabled or unemployed), and it replaces a higher proportion of earnings for the poor than for the rich. That’s why it’s our most successful anti-poverty program. In addition, Social Security benefits are indexed against inflation and protected from the ups and downs of the economy and financial markets. That’s why the program provides security for the middle class.
Privatization would do away with the idea of guaranteeing a minimally adequate income for the elderly who have worked all their lives. From their own earnings, low-wage workers would be unlikely to generate enough funds in an individual account to maintain a decent standard of living in retirement. Even middle-class workers would be at greater risk of poverty in old age. It’s intrinsic to financial markets that they yield unequal returns; many of those who did badly with their individual accounts wouldn’t have enough from other sources to live on. And markets fluctuate: Some generations would retire during one of the long downturns that periodically hit the markets, when their investments would be convertible only into paltry annuities. Those who lived into their 80s or 90s would be especially likely to outlast their individual accounts, or, if they had bought annuities at retirement, see those annuities severely eroded by inflation.
The elderly used to be an age group with an especially high rate of poverty. One of the signal achievements of Social Security, hardly noticed today, is that poverty has fallen dramatically among Americans over age 65 to just 10 percent, lower than the 12-percent rate for the population as a whole. For millions of the elderly who would otherwise be poor, Social Security is the single biggest source of income, the financial bedrock of their lives. Indirectly, their working-age children are beneficiaries of the program because the elderly no longer have to move in with them. People under age 65 also benefit from two other elements of Social Security that often get forgotten: benefits during long-term disability and survivor benefits for dependents if a worker dies before retirement. These are also important anti-poverty programs that don’t carry the stigma of welfare.
Social Security was never expected to be the sole source of retirement income for the middle class, who ideally also have employment-based retirement plans and personal savings. But if one thinks of these various sources of income as making up a “portfolio” of retirement assets, Social Security’s distinct value is even clearer. While other assets typically erode or become exhausted with advanced age, Social Security pensions keep their value because they have an annual cost-of-living adjustment. Moreover, as many employers convert from pension plans with a defined benefit to 401(k) and other plans with uncertain payouts, workers are already bearing more risk for retirement. In that context, Social Security provides a valuable hedge against the financial markets.
But what’s wrong with voluntary and partial privatization -- giving people the option of holding back 3 percent or 4 percent of their Social Security contributions to deposit in individual accounts? Although we haven’t yet seen the details of the Bush plan, these proposals typically come with sharp reductions in future benefits for younger workers who opt to remain in the system. These are really proposals to cut Social Security in which the individual-account option is an eye-catching decoy. Voluntary in appearance, these proposals would make Social Security such a bad deal that they’d trigger a run on the system: Workers, especially those with higher earnings, would likely not only opt for private accounts but demand that the entire program become optional.
Social Security works because it is a compact that extends across income groups. If the affluent leave the system, it would become a welfare program, shorn of the political clout that comes from universal participation. The result would be a self-reinforcing cycle of decline.
Social Security also works because it has been a rolling compact across generations. For decades, the basis of the program was entirely pay-as-you-go -- the taxes paid by workers went to pay for current retirees. When those workers retired, they depended on the next generation to support Social Security. Then, in 1983, Congress raised payroll taxes above the level needed for immediate benefits in order to accumulate savings for the baby-boom generation’s retirement.
These funds have been invested in Treasury bonds -- that is, the federal government itself has borrowed from the trust funds. Though opponents of the program question this practice, it’s no different from individuals investing in Treasury bonds. Ever since the founding of the republic, the federal government has paid off its debts; it must fulfill these obligations to the elderly no less than its debts to bondholders in Japan. But what this highlights is that future Social Security beneficiaries, like previous ones, ultimately depend on the next generation of workers to pay taxes and keep the system going for themselves and their children.
Republicans opposed Social Security when it was introduced, Barry Goldwater suggested making it voluntary in 1964, and ever since the 1980s, conservative think tanks have sponsored proposals to shift from Social Security to individual retirement accounts. The opponents’ biggest resource in this effort has been public skepticism about government. When a 1981 opinion survey asked how much money out of $100 in Social Security taxes went to administration, the median answer was $52, though the real figure that year was $1.30. Today, Social Security continues to deliver benefits with overhead at a fraction of what private accounts would cost, but few people understand that in this case the government enjoys a huge edge in efficiency.
President Bush and others have also sought to fan distrust in Social Security by contrasting a grim picture of the system’s future solvency with bright prospects for individual investment accounts. Their game here involves using two sets of assumptions: The Social Security projections invoked by Republicans assume a 1.7-percent future growth rate for the economy; the investment returns look back to a 7-percent historical growth rate for the stock market. But if the economy grows at 1.7 percent, the stock market can’t grow at 7 percent. And if economy grows as smartly as is being assumed for private accounts, there will be no crisis in Social Security.
The ultimate consideration is this: Social Security protects people against a variety of risks to ensure them a basic floor of income in old age and to enable many people who have struggled all their lives to look forward to a decent standard of comfort and dignity when they retire. It would be a crime to take that away from them. - http://www.prospect.org/web/p...
[b]Also refer to The Center for American Progress' site listing more information on Social Security[/b]: http://www.americanprogress.o...%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&output=xml_ no_dtd&c=biJRJ8OVF&site=c ap&oe=UTF-8&client=cap_fr ontend&proxystylesheet=ca p_frontend&b=180521&q=Soc ial+Security&btnG=Search& imageField.x=4&imageField.y=3
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