Arguments4

10/25/2006

[*** -separates dates]

10/25/2006

It was on this day in 1854 that a British light brigade attempted to charge the Russian troops during the Battle of Balaclava. The cavalry commander led more than 600 men into the worst possible position. They were surrounded and roundly defeated.

Ah, now only 152 years later, we still mourn the deaths of those dying in vain at the alter of misguided, messianic, mendacious militarism.

“Hurrah! For The Life Of A Soldier”

The Charge of the Light Brigade

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1855

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not tho’ the soldiers knew

Someone had blundered:

Theirs was not to make reply,

Theirs was not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to the right of them,

Cannon to the left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell,

Rode the six hundred.

Flashed all their sabres bare,

Flashed as they turned in air,

Sab’ring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wondered:

Plunged in the battery smoke,

Right through the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the sabre-stroke

Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back, but not--

Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?

Oh, the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble Six Hundred!

**

“That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.”

- John Stuart Mill

“Not all of us can be born rich, handsome, and lucky, and that’s why we have a Democratic Party.”

-- Senator Zell Miller before he lost his mind

The current Congress has shown no inclination to investigate the Bush administration. Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison: when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only 12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

- Paul Krugman, The New York Times

http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/061006.html

THE PRICE OF STOCKS

The market is at record highs (sort of), and this is good. But in a world where most companies pay out little in the way of dividends - reinvesting their profits and/or using them to buy in their own shares - you’d sort of expect highs sooner or later. Even a 5% savings account will hit new highs every year.

Basically, as you know, the market got ridiculously overvalued in the late Nineties, peaking in early 2000, and has taken the last six years to catch up with itself.

But it’s not as caught up as it may appear.

Yes, the Dow has fully recovered - in dollars. But in euros, it is still only three-fourths what it was in 2000 - because back then a dollar bought 1.03 euros, whereas today it buys only about .78 of a euro. So to an Italian or a German or a Swede (do the Swedes use euros? I’m on the train, and I can’t remember), the Dow is about 25% lower today than it was six years ago. To a Canadian (I know they don’t use euros), same thing. In 2000, one of our dollars was worth $1.46 of theirs. Today, $1.12.

When the Dow peaked in March of 2000, it took roughly 40 ounces of gold (at $290 an ounce) to buy one unit of the Dow at 11750 or so. Today, with gold roughly double, a unit of the Dow is worth just 20 ounces.

And that’s the Dow.

The S&P 500 hit 1527 on March 23, 2000. Last night, it closed at 1353, or about 11% lower (or, in gold terms, less than half its value six years ago).

The NASDAQ hit 5048 on March 10, 2000. Last night, it closed at 2306, down 54% six years later in dollar terms, down 65% against the euro, down 77% versus having kept gold in a chest in the shed. (Who would think to look in a chest in the shed? That’s where I keep all mine.)

That the market is still not back to where it was in 2000 is good if you are a buyer, and good if you are no fan of overvalued markets (fearing the consequences when they return to earth).

The author of Dow 36,000, at which I poked a little fun when it was published seven years ago, still has a while left to wait.

And if the housing slump turns into a vicious cycle - dampening consumer spending, causing recession, dampening home prices and spending further, even as it sends the budget deficit sky-higher - it might be a long wait.

THE MARKET

The Dow broke 12,000 and (as noted in more detail a few days ago) - it is now just 15% shy of its level six years ago, adjusted for inflation. (The S&P is down about 25% from where it was, adjusted for inflation; the NASDAQ is down about 65% against the Canadian dollar or the Euro.)

**

Published on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 by Truthdig

It’s Good to Be the Richest of the Rich

by Molly Ivins

Oh, goody. According to the White House press office, President Bush will spend much of the next two weeks discussing what a swell economy we have. Did you know that the Dow Jones industrial average is at its highest point EVER? And the NASDAQ, ditto. Wow, breathtaking, huh? But the Dow is not a good indicator of how thing are really going for the majority of Americans.

I just love listening to the Bushies play with numbers. When Bush took over in 2001, he predicted a surplus of $516 billion for fiscal year 2006. Last week, the administration announced a 2006 deficit of $248 billion, missing its projection for this year by $764 billion. Bush said the numbers are “proof that pro-growth economic policies work” and are “an example of sound fiscal policies here in Washington.”

This is highly reminiscent of Dick Cheney’s recent observation about the Iraqi government, “If you look at the general, overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”

Bush’s main talking point on the budget is that he “cut the deficit in half”_that would be from 2004, the year the White House inflated the projected deficit for political reasons. Even conservatives disagree. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation said, “The White House has a track record of projecting budget numbers to be a lot worse than they end up, which therefore helps them defeat the gloomy expectations and declare victory.” If Bush does manage to make the tax cuts permanent, he will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. The federal budget would be virtually in balance if there had been no tax cuts.

Bush’s version of “doing remarkably well” includes a trade gap_now a record $69.9 billion_up 2.7 percent since July. “Short of a big correction in consumer spending, the best we can hope for is that the trade deficit stabilizes,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital, told Bloomberg.com.

Meanwhile, what we see in the economy as a whole is an immense shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich. It seems a little painful to have to point this out yet again after six solid years of it, but these are lies, damn lies and statistics.

Just to give you an idea of how dependable the Bush numbers are, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a press release a few weeks ago telling senior citizens they will have “new options with low costs” and that monthly premiums in ‘07 will be the same as in ‘06.

“The Medicare prescription drug benefit ... just keeps getting better,” burbled HHS. They seem to have been taking too much in the way of prescription drugs. Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the most singularly useful members of Congress, found that average premiums will actually increase by over 10 percent next year. And for the lowest-priced plans, average premiums will be up over 44 percent. “It is not merely confusing arithmetic, it is deceptive advertising,” said Waxman.

While lightening the tax burden for the rich, other parts of the Bush economic program continue to undermine the middle class in this country. As you may recall, in 2005 the credit industry successfully rammed a disgraceful bankruptcy reform bill through Congress. It’s working out just the way we expected it to: Middle-class families are borrowing more than ever to make ends meet. Most families go under if: (a) they lose a job or (b) they have a health emergency crisis.

One attorney sums up the legislation’s impact: “It’s designed to make life miserable for anybody who owes money. It’s a help-the-banks, squish-the-little-guy law.”

Bush’s remarkably good economy is good only for the richest; for the rest of us, incomes are stagnant and education and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. The Republican Congress blindly rubber-stamps policies designed to help only a few. Are you better off than you were six years ago?

**

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1024-31.htm

Published on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Truth and Arrogance

by Nancy Snow

Do a Google search in the last 24 hours on the word “arrogance” and you’ll find over 800 articles devoted to the remarks of a senior U.S. diplomat who dared to speak the truth about Iraq. A regular commentator on Al Jazeera, Alberto Fernandez, director of press and public diplomacy for Near Eastern Affairs, told the Arab-language network in a 35-minute interview: “We tried to do our best [in Iraq] but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq.”

Finally, a U.S. Government official stated the obvious. It is possible for the world’s sole superpower to be arrogant and stupid in its policy. What is refreshing, though improbable, is that these words were not those of Cindy Sheehan or the Dixie Chicks but came from a senior State Department official. For his astute frankness, Fernandez in short order had to backpedal from his earlier statement and declare his mea culpa: “Upon reading the transcript ... I realized I seriously misspoke by using the phrase ‘there has been arrogance and stupidity’ by the US in Iraq. This represents neither my views nor those of the State Department. I apologize.”

Blame it on poor translation, says the State Department. Fernandez, who has given dozens of interviews to Middle East media in Arabic, is suddenly showing a decline in his personal mastery of the language, despite what Reuters reports is an official whose “popularity with the Arab news media has been bolstered by his command of Arabic and his willingness to speak passionately about issues.”

We don’t expect our government spinmeisters to be all that frank and open. We expect them to blindly support the administration and speak from a text like bureaucratic news readers. Staying “on message” is how they hold onto their jobs. Fernandez’s very popularity with the Arab media and Arabic-speaking public was not just because of his ability to converse in the regional language. It was also because he could deliver the administration line with something akin to a pulse. One Iraqi Kurdish lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman, told the New York Times he wished that there more like Fernandez in the U.S. Government: “I have been expecting American officials - someday, last year, this year - to say something about this, that this policy has not worked. It has been a failure. They should admit it before it is too late.”

As an official who is tasked with bringing more understanding about the United States to the Near Eastern region, you would think that Fernandez would be given just a little more elbow room than usual to explain U.S. policy to a very skeptical public that is more likely to expect propaganda and spin than truth to come out of official Washington.

But official Washington cannot see the broader view, which is why for years I’ve advocated that we rescue public diplomacy from official speak. Get it away from the concentrated control of Washington, D.C. and into the civic society where people are freer to exchange their views with their overseas counterparts. Fernandez, the State Department guy who is popular in the Arab press, went too far, according to his superiors. He spoke the truth, which for the Bush administration is like playing not just with fire, but in a bonfire. It kills. In acknowledging a failed policy, Fernandez got burned, but he is unlikely to get sacked because we have so few Arabic speakers in government and State needs him to continue to present the U.S. point of view to the Middle East.

Were Fernandez free to speak openly and frankly, he would likely be the best official representative we have on public diplomacy in the Middle East. Because he cannot, we have no choice but to reach out and around the clutches of the State Department and Pentagon to continue to speak the unspun truth and confront the insanity one-by-one, citizen-to-citizen. An arrogant and stupid policy campaign in Iraq has failed us. Let’s do what we can now to stop the bleeding.

Nancy Snow was a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Information Agency and State Department from 1992-1994. Her latest book is The Arrogance of American Power: What U.S. Leaders Are Doing Wrong and Why It’s Our Duty to Dissent. Snow is Associate Professor of Communications at California State University, Fullerton and Senior Research Fellow in the Center on Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California. She edits a website on American persuasion, influence and propaganda at www.nancysnow.com.

***

10/25/2006

To be published in the November 2006 issue of The Progressive

Why War Fails

by Howard Zinn

I suggest there is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks are not only morally reprehensible but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

In the three years of the Iraq War, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, the United States has failed utterly in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. American soldiers and civilians, fearful of going into the neighborhoods of Baghdad, are huddled inside the Green Zone, where the largest embassy in the world is being built, covering 104 acres and closed off from the world outside its walls.

I remember John Hersey’s novel The War Lover, in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people, and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. George Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier, and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be an embodiment of the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine equally impotent.

The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel. Indeed, it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas, or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

That failure of massive force goes so deep into history that Israeli leaders must have been extraordinarily obtuse, or blindly fanatic, to miss it. The memory is not lost to Professor Ze’ev Maoz at Tel Aviv University, writing recently in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz about a previous Israeli invasion of Lebanon: “Approximately 14,000 civilians were killed between June and September of 1982, according to a conservative estimate.” The result, aside from the physical and human devastation, was the rise of Hezbollah, whose rockets provoked another desperate exercise of massive force.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations. Even though the United States dropped more bombs in the Vietnam War than in all of World War II, it was still forced to withdraw. The Soviet Union, trying for a decade to conquer Afghanistan, in a war that caused a million deaths, became bogged down and also finally withdrew.

Even the supposed triumphs of great military powers turn out to be elusive. After attacking and invading Afghanistan, President Bush boasted that the Taliban were defeated. But five years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country. Last May, there were riots in Kabul, after a runaway American military truck killed five Afghans. When U.S. soldiers fired into the crowd, four more people were killed.

After the brief, apparently victorious war against Iraq in 1991, George Bush Sr. declared (in a moment of rare eloquence): “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.” Those sands are bloody once more.

The same George Bush presided over the military attack on Panama in 1989, which killed thousands and destroyed entire neighborhoods, justified by the “war on drugs.” Another victory, but in a few years, the drug trade in Panama was thriving as before.

The nations of Eastern Europe, despite Soviet occupation, developed resistance movements that eventually compelled the Soviet military to leave. The United States, which had its way in Latin America for a hundred years, has been unable, despite a long history of military interventions, to control events in Cuba, or Venezuela, or Brazil, or Bolivia.

Overwhelming Israeli military power, while occupying the West Bank and Gaza, has not been able to stop the resistance movement of Palestinians. Israel has not made itself more secure by its continued use of massive force. The United States, despite two successive wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not more secure.

More important than the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time always results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a “war on terrorism” is a contradiction in terms.

The repeated excuse for war, and its toll on civilians-and this has been uttered by Pentagon spokespersons as well as by Israeli officials-is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is “accidental” whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (9/11, Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the ground that a “suspected terrorist” is inside (note the frequent use of the word “suspected” as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), it is argued that the resulting deaths of women and children is not intended, therefore “accidental.” The deaths of innocent people in bombing may not be intentional. Neither are they accidental. The proper description is “inevitable.”

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a “deliberate” attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of people dying inevitably in “accidental” events has been far greater than all the deaths of innocent people deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reconsider the morality of war, any war in our time.

It is a supreme irony that the “war on terrorism” has brought a higher death toll among innocent civilians than the hijackings of 9/11, which killed up to 3,000 people. The United States reacted to 9/11 by invading and bombing Afghanistan. In that operation, at least 3,000 civilians were killed, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee their homes and villages, terrorized by what was supposed to be a war on terror. Bush’s Iraq War, which he keeps linking to the “war on terror,” has killed between 40,000 and 140,000 civilians.

More than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by U.S. bombs, presumably by “accident.” Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the twentieth century and they do not equal that awful toll.

If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism.

And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, must reconsider their policies. When such practical considerations are joined to a rising popular revulsion against war, perhaps the long era of mass murder may be brought to an end.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

**

Published on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 by the Associated Press

Iraqis Were Better Off Under Saddam, Says Former Weapons Inspector

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on Wednesday described the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a “pure failure” that had left the country worse off than under the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein.

“Iraq is a pure failure,” Blix was quoted as saying. Blix said the situation would have been better if the war had not taken place.

“Saddam would still have been sitting in office. OK, that is negative and it would not have been joyful for the Iraqi people. But what we have gotten is undoubtedly worse,” he was quoted as saying.

Blix led the UN inspectors that searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. He came under heavy fire from Washington when he urged U.S. President George W. Bush to allow the weapons inspectors and the IAEA to continue their work as a way to stave off a war.

Ultimately a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and no weapons of mass destruction were found.

**

Published on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 by The Nation

Endgame in Iraq

by William Greider

The facts are so stark, even American military commanders are now speaking openly about an approaching climax for our bloody misadventure in Iraq. “To Stand or Fall in Baghdad,” the New York Times headline declared this morning. A show-down is here, the generals acknowledge. There are no more back-up strategies.

Learned policy experts from all sides are now debating the various alternatives for an exit plan. Preferably with honor, they hope, but getting out is becoming unavoidable, regardless. They would like to dream up a some sort of fig leaf that gives cover to our failed warrior president. Not that he deserves one, but they want a plan that will encourage Bush--finally--to accept reality.

***

11/7/06

Subject: voting

Election day, another chance to say no to something! I like the idea of voting all the Republicans out of office on the principle of rejecting what they have done and allowed to happen to the country. But I’ll vote for a local Republicans on the basis of their record, positions, and competence.

I think the pink slip should continue thru 08, and although not likely, am now most impressed with possible candidates like Obama, the governor of MT, or even Cordray (up for Ohio Treas).

It’s hard to keep up with the thousands of accurate analyses of current events, and I know there are the gaps in timely coverage, but thought a bit more political history would be interesting.

Common Sense:

TO THE INHABITANTS OF AMERICA

on the following interesting subjects

I. Of the origin and design of government in general, with concise remarks on the English Constitution.

II. Of monarchy and hereditary succession.

III. Thoughts on the present state of American affairs.

IV. Of the present ability of America, with some miscellaneous reflexions.

Philadelphia, Feb. 14, 1776.

INTRODUCTION

PERHAPS the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination of King George and his Corrupt Congress, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious or unfriendly, will cease of themselves, unless too much pains is bestowed upon their conversion.

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure, is

THE AUTHOR.

...

THOUGHTS OF THE PRESENT STATE OF AMERICAN AFFAIRS

IN the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves; that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day.

Every thing that is right or natural pleads for CHANGE. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘tis time to part.

by Thomas Paine

**

British Find No Evidence of Arms Traffic From Iran

Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans’ contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq.

**

US Troops Say Armed Forces Stretched Too Thin

A solid majority of American soldiers returning from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan say that US armed forces are stretched too thin.

**

Deeper and Deeper

“There is fresh evidence, if any more were needed, that excessive borrowing during the Bush years will make the nation poorer,” writes the New York Times.

**

Bush Signings Called Effort to Expand Power

President Bush’s frequent use of signing statements to assert that he has the power to disobey newly enacted laws is “an integral part” of his “comprehensive strategy to strengthen and expand executive power” at the expense of the legislative branch, according to a report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.

**

2005 - A Great Year for Whistleblowers

The year 2005 was a very good year for whistleblowers. According to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services, a grand total of $136,756,946 was awarded to whistleblowers who filed qui tam lawsuits on behalf of the Federal government under the False Claims Act. By contrast, in 2004 whistleblowers were awarded $82,867,287.

**

Published on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 by the “http://www.ap.org”

Retired Officer Says Flawed Policy Turned Iraqis against US

by Dinesh Ramde

MILWAUKEE - Senior military leaders instituted such a flawed strategy from the outset of the Iraq war that there no longer are any circumstances under which U.S. troops can pull out without seeing the situation deteriorate more, a retired Army general said Monday.

Retired Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard Jr. said the military turned Iraqis irreversibly against the U.S. because of policies that tolerated civilian casualties.

“The military adhered to its traditional doctrine of destroying the enemy with force, not defeating or neutralizing the enemy,” he told a group of about 100 people at a downtown church. “As the number of civilian deaths increased, we turned them against us.”

**

Published on Sunday, October 29, 2006

Bush’s Economic Policies: Don’t Look Behind the Curtain

By Robert Freeman

One of the most famous scenes in all of movie history is when Dorothy and her three companions stand before the Wizard of Oz. It is Toto who saves the day, scampering across the floor and pulling back the curtain. The “wizard” lamely tries to salvage his scam, bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” They do, of course, and the fraud is exposed for what it is.

President Bush is playing “wizard” with the nation’s economy. He says he hopes the November election will be about the economy but it is bluster, the economic equivalent of “Mission Accomplished.” What he really doesn’t want is for anybody to look behind the curtain. For, when they do, they find enormous problems lurking.

In five areas in particular - budget deficits, trade deficits, unfunded liabilities, oil, and China - the president’s policies have damaged the economy, in some cases grievously. Unless they are reversed, the nation’s economic future is in peril.

Robert Freeman writes on economics, history and education. He can reached at “mailto:robertfreeman10@yahoo.com”.

**

...Or You Get Stuck in Iraq

by Bill C. Davis

John Kerry said:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Clearly Kerry’s comment was directed toward a president who, according to the clumsy joke, did not study or do his homework and therefore became stuck in Iraq. But the comment evades the bigger truth. The war is not a result of miscalculation or lack of foresight or education, which does account for a good deal of what is wrong with the current state of affairs in American governance. But the perpetrators of the war knew what they were doing. This war is not an uneducated blunder. It’s a crime.

Bill C. Davis is a playwright. “http://www.billcdavis.com”

**

White House, Kerry Exchange Accusations
Oct 31 5:49 PM US/Eastern
By JENNIFER LOVEN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON

The White House and Sen. John Kerry traded their harshest accusations since the 2004 presidential race on Tuesday, with President Bush accusing the Democrat of troop-bashing and Kerry calling the president’s men hacks who are “willing to lie.”

At a hastily arranged news conference in Seattle, Kerry said: “I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and of his broken policy.”

Kerry said the comment in question was “a botched joke about the president and the president’s people, not about the troops ... and they know that’s what I was talking about.”

But Kerry called the criticism part of the “classic GOP playbook.”

“I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq.”

He further expressed disgust with “Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country.”

Kerry added that President Bush and Vice President Cheney “owe our troops an apology” because they “misled America into war.”

Bush and Cheney “have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it,” the senator said.

It came during a campaign rally for California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides. Kerry opened his speech at Pasadena City College with several one-liners, saying at one point that Bush had lived in Texas but now “lives in a state of denial.”

He then said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

That, Kerry said, was meant as a reference to Bush, not troops. Kerry said it is the president who owes U.S. soldiers an apology _ for “a Katrina foreign policy” that misled the country into war in Iraq, failed to adequately study and plan for the aftermath, has not properly equipped troops and has expanded the terrorist threat.

“I’m sick and tired of a bunch of despicable Republicans who will not debate real policy, who won’t take responsibility for their own mistakes, standing up and trying to make other people the butt of those mistakes,” he said. “It disgusts me that a bunch of these Republican hacks who’ve never worn the uniform of our country are willing to lie about those who did.”

“The White House’s attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable testament to their abject failure in making America safe,” the Massachusetts senator said. “It’s a stunning statement about their willingness to reduce anything in America to raw politics.”

Vietnam veteran and former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia defended Kerry and applauded the senator for showing “our party how to fight back with the truth.”

“John Kerry is a patriot who has fought tooth and nail for veterans ever since he came home from Vietnam. He has stood with his brothers in arms unlike this administration, which exploits our troops to make a political point and divide America,” Cleland said in a statement.

Kerry, who is not up for re-election this year, fired back at the White House and the GOP, saying he was not disparaging U.S. soldiers.

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy,” he said. “No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut-and-run policy in Afghanistan and a stand-still-and-lose strategy in Iraq.”

According to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the senator took the stage to roaring applause before regaling the crowd with one-liners, Bush barbs and tales of surfing at nearby Mission Beach.

He then said: “You know, education -- if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well.

“If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Comment ‘mangled in delivery’

A Kerry aide told CNN that the prepared statement, which had been designed to criticize President Bush, “was mangled in delivery.”

Kerry was supposed to say, “I can’t overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq.”

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BOTCHED JOKE, BOTCHED WAR

Tuesday, you get to decide which bothers you more.

A REPUBLICAN VIEW

Here is former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas:

How did we go from the big ideas and vision of 1994 to the cheap political point-scoring on meaningless wedge issues of today - from passing welfare reform and limited government to banning horsemeat and same-sex marriage?

The answer is simple: Republican lawmakers forgot the party’s principles, became enamored with power and position, and began putting politics over policy. Now, the Democrats are reaping the rewards of our neglect - and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

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Published on Thursday, November 2, 2006 by MSNBC

Bush Owes Troops Apology, Not Kerry

by Keith Olbermann

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Published on Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Could a New GOP Court Victory and Karl Rove’s Attack on Ohio 2006 Doom the Democrats Nationwide?

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

A major GOP federal court victory has plunged the Ohio 2006 election into the calculated chaos that has become the trademark of a Karl Rove election theft, and that could help keep the Congress in Republican hands nationwide.

Through a complex series of legal maneuvers, and now a shocking new 2-1 decision from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the GOP has thrown Ohio’s entire process of voting and vote counting into serious disarray. The mess is perfectly designed to suppress voter turnout, make election monitoring and a recount impossible, and allow the Republican Party to emerge with a victory despite overwhelming evidence the electorate wants exactly the opposite.

The disaster in Ohio began immediately after the theft of the presidential election here in 2004. Though the majority of Ohioans are registered Democrats, the gerrymandered state legislature is overwhelmingly Republican. Soon after John Kerry conceded, it passed House Bill 3, a draconian assault on voter registration drives, voting rights and the ability to secure reliable recounts of federal-level elections.

In brief, HB3 stacked a virtually impossible set of requirements onto the voter registration process. As elsewhere nationwide, voting has traditionally involved citizens coming to the polls and signing a poll book. Upon a signature check from a poll worker, a ballot has been given. A similar process has been in effect for absentee ballots. There is no recent evidence this method has encouraged significant voter fraud.

But the GOP’s HB3 has imposed a series of draconian requirements for voter ID, including the demand for certain documents very difficult to obtain by many poor, homeless, elderly or other largely Democratic demographic groups.

To further complicate matters, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is now in charge of the same election in which he is the GOP nominee for governor. He has added some additional, entirely arbitrary disqualifying factors of his own. Blackwell was the state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in the 2004 election, which he also ran while making the key decisions that gave Bush-Cheney a second term in the White House.

On all absentee ballots, HB3 demands an identifying driver’s license number, or the equivalent. But Ohio driver’s licenses have two codes on them. The “correct” one has two letters and six numbers. The “wrong” one is an eleven-number bureaucratic code that appears above the ID photo.

According to preliminary reports, as many as ten percent of those sending in absentee ballots so far have included the wrong code, thus disqualifying their vote. The process is so confusing that one Republican federal judge, in a court proceeding, has volunteered the fact that he actually put this same “wrong” number on an application for a rental car, temporarily nullifying his contract. Here in Columbus, Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder estimates that 5000 ballots would already be disqualified in Franklin County alone.

So far the wave of absentee ballots pouring into the county boards of elections indicate an extraordinary percentage of Ohioans will vote absentee this year. Many are likely hoping to avoid distrusted electronic voting machines, as well as the long, racially-biased lines that tainted the 2004 election.

In response to reports of large numbers of absentee dis-qualifications, a federal lawsuit has been filed by a Cleveland homeless advocacy group and the Service Employee’s International Union. The suit was then deemed to be a related action to the landmark King Lincoln civil rights filing that resulted in a September ruling preserving the ballots from Ohio 2004, and was sent to Judge Algernon Marbley, who made that decision.

Last week Judge Marbley threw out the HB3 drivers license requirement for the absentee ballots. On Wednesday, November 1, he will hold a hearing on whether to void all the HB3 requirements that are poised to disqualify tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters on election day.

Blackwell himself did not appeal Marbley’s ruling. He is trailing by as much as thirty points in some Ohio polls. He has been seriously hurt by the widespread belief that he stole the 2004 election, and is reluctant to be openly identified with yet another mass disenfranchisement of Ohio voters.

Instead, Ohio’s GOP Attorney General Jim Petro did the dirty work of appealing Marbley’s decision. And on Sunday, October 29, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Marbley’s suspension of the driver’s license number requirement on the absentee ballots, casting the entire process into deep confusion.

This ruling means that county boards of election that were telling voters they did not have to include the drivers license number on their absentee ballot after Marbley’s decision must now resume telling them they must include that number.

The decision sends a strong signal that if Marbley overturns the HB3 voter ID requirements for citizens coming to the polls, that too is likely to be appealed and then overturned by the Court of Appeals.

Indeed, if Marbley throws out the rest of the HB3 after the Wednesday, November 1 hearing, a final ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on all these procedures may not come until within hours of election time.

In other words, Ohio’s lame duck GOP Attorney-General, and the GOP-dominated federal court system, are now in the process of pitching the entire electoral process in the state of Ohio into a spiral of chaos. Over a single recent four-day period, the rules for casting a ballot in Ohio changed three times.

HB3 and Blackwell’s arbitrary directives have already devastated Democratic voter registration drives and caused thousands of mostly Democratic potential voters to wonder about their true eligibility to cast a ballot on November 7.

The mainstream media is portraying this latest episode as a blood feud between Petro and Blackwell. But the real winner is the Bush White House, which has every reason to suppress the vote November 7.

Blackwell is trailing so badly in the polls it’s hard to imagine a theft big enough to allow him to win. But the critical U.S. Senate race between the GOP’s incumbent Mike DeWine and U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown is very close. So are numerous Congressional races throughout the state, any one of which could help decide who controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

The tactics being tested and used here in Ohio are certain to surface in various forms around the U.S. HB3, for example, has quintupled the fees charged by the state for a recount. In Ohio 2004, the Green and Libertarian Parties obtained a flawed and ultimately worthless recount for about $120,000. A similar statewide recount for the 2006 U.S. Senate race would cost about $600,000.

But Blackwell has decimated even the previously feeble safeguards for such recounts, making them even more illusory than they were in 2004. HB3 has also removed any state recourse in the case of a contested election here for the U.S. Senate or House, or for the presidency.

So even if a recount showed a clear theft, the state courts are barred from jurisdiction. The only appeal now allowed would be a direct plea to the federal courts or Congress.

On the other hand, HB3 provides no special system for monitoring the electronic voting machines on which about half the state’s ballots will be cast. Though a paper receipt is now required for all electronic voting machines, there is no method by which the Diebold, ES&S, Triad and other touch-screen computers or electronic tabulators can be reliably protected from tampering.

Based on reports from the Conyers Congressional Committee, the Government Accountability Office, the Brennan Center, Princeton University and the Carter-Baker Commission among others, the vote count reported by Ohio’s voting machines could be flipped by J. Kenneth Blackwell or other election official---or even amateur hackers---in a matter of moments, with a few simple keystrokes.

In sum: there is no way such a manipulation could be definitively stopped, monitored, proven or reversed.

Thus Ohio enters the last week prior to this most critical mid-term election in recent memory in utter vulnerability and chaos. Tens of thousands of absentee ballots already cast are in limbo. Their ultimate status may not be determined until hours before election day, if then.

Ohio citizens are now uncertain about what, if any, forms of identification they will be required to include on their absentee ballots or to present at their polling stations. If the experience of 2004 is repeated, many of those polling stations will be incorrectly listed on the Secretary of State’s official web site.

A half-million Ohio citizens may also not know if they are actually registered to vote. All 88 of Ohio’s county boards of election are effectively controlled by Secretary of State Blackwell. Since 2000, without official notification, some 170,000 voters have been stripped from the registration rolls in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), 170,000 in Franklin County (Columbus), 105,000 in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and 28,000 in Lucas County (Toledo).

Overall nearly 500,000 registered voters are known to have been eliminated from the rolls in overwhelmingly Democratic districts in a state where 5.6 million people voted in 2004, and where George W. Bush won with an alleged margin of less than 119,000 ballots. There is no evidence similar eliminations have occurred in Republican areas.

While reports of widespread purges have not proved true, there is increasing evidence that county boards of elections used voter notification cards required by HB3 that were returned by the post office to flag hundreds of thousands of voters’ names at the polls throughout Ohio and force them to vote provisionally. An Erie County official placed the number of flagged voters at about 24% in his county.

Blackwell has further ruled that citizens who vote with provisional ballots at their correct polling place but in the wrong precinct (which may be housed in the same building) will not have their vote counted. Delayed provisional voters suffered extremely long lines in 2004, and many thousands of would-voters went home or to work without ever casting a ballot.

The safest place to cast a provisional ballot may be at the county board of elections. But even these votes are often disqualified because voters fail to check off a small affirmation box, or do not supply a date of birth or other requested technical information.

Ohio’s electoral process is thus once again sinking into a fog of confusion, disenfranchisement and theft perfectly designed to prolong the GOP control of the government. There is every reason to believe that in the week now remaining before the actual election, the GOP and its allies in the federal court system will use the escalating chaos to their advantage in attempting to keep control of the U.S. Congress, here and in other states.

The definitive question hovering over the future of American democracy thus remains: who will do what about it, and when?

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of What Happened in Ohio?, just published by The New Press. Fitrakis is of counsel and Wasserman is a plaintiff in the King-Lincoln lawsuit that has preserved the Ohio 2004 ballots. Fitrakis is an independent candidate for Ohio governor, endorsed by the Green Party; Wasserman is author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030.

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Published on Friday, October 27, 2006 by “http://www.tomdispatch.com”

Fiasco Then, Fiasco Now: Why Baghdad Will Keep Burning

by Tom Engelhardt

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Published on Friday, October 27, 2006 by the “http://www.ap.org”

UN Official: US Terror Law May Violate International Treaties

GENEVA -- Washington’s new anti-terrorism law could end up violating international treaties protecting detainees, with some provisions denying suspects the right to a fair trial, a key U.N. rights expert said Friday.

Martin Scheinin, the United Nations’ expert on protecting human rights in the fight against terrorism, said the Military Commissions Act signed into law earlier this month by U.S. President George W. Bush contains provisions “incompatible” with U.S. obligations to adhere to treaties on human rights and humanitarian law.

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Published on Friday, October 27, 2006 by “http://www.afp.com”

Confession That Formed Base of Iraq War was Acquired Under Torture: Journalist

An Al-Qaeda terror suspect captured by the United States, who gave evidence of links between Iraq and the terror network, confessed after being tortured, a journalist told the BBC.

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Published on Friday, October 27, 2006 by the “http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/local/15860319.htm” (Kentucky)

Ex-Diplomat: US Has Lost War
He Resigned to Protest Invasion in 2003, says Pullout Should Be Quick

by Art Jester

A former U.S. diplomat who resigned in protest of the invasion of Iraq said the United States has lost the war and “should pull out very fast.”

The U.S. has asked its military to do a political job it cannot do, “to go in and destroy an old dictatorial political regime and install a democratic government,” John Brady Kiesling said in an interview and a discussion with graduate students in the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

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Published on Monday, October 30, 2006

The Consequences of the Death of Empathy

by Robert Jensen

One of the most devastating consequences of unearned privilege -- both for those of us on top and, for very different reasons, those who suffer beneath -- is the death of empathy.

Too many people with privileges of various kinds -- based on race or gender, economic status or citizenship in a powerful country -- go to great lengths not to know, to stay unaware of the reality of how so many live without our privilege. But even when we do learn, it’s clear that information alone doesn’t always lead to the needed political action. For that, we desperately need empathy, the capacity to understand the experiences -- especially the suffering -- of others.

Too often in this country, privilege undermines that capacity for empathy, limiting the possibilities for solidarity.

It is in our plodding, I believe, that we can find hope for the future. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to keep trying to connect in a world that gives us many ways to disconnect if we choose.

Each day we struggle to empathize, we hold onto our humanity.

Each day we stay connected -- to ourselves and each other -- is another plodding step forward.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

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“http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/10/30/the-daily-show-in-_n_32871.html” |

The Daily Show In Ohio: We Tried To Get Ohio Politicians But They Are Preparing To “Leave Office...Or Go To Prison”...

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Turning the Corner Into Madness
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig

Tuesday 31 October 2006

The dire predictions President Bush is making about “cutting and running” from Iraq are almost identical to the horrifically inaccurate ones Presidents Johnson and Nixon made about Vietnam.

Every time I hear President Bush railing against those who would “cut and run” in Iraq instead of pursuing “victory,” as he does almost daily, I think back to similar claims being made for the Vietnam debacle when I reported from Saigon in the mid-’60s. Back then, the U.S. troop presence was lower and casualties fewer than now in Iraq, but the carnage, on all sides, would escalate for the next decade, as we waited miserably for the corner to be turned.

Then, as now, calls for setting a timetable for an orderly withdrawal were rejected as emboldening our enemy to attack America. Instead of a dignified withdrawal, we plunged ever deeper into the quagmire, leaving 59,000 U.S. troops and 3.4 million Indochinese dead as tribute to our stupidity. Finally, there was nothing to do but “cut and run” in the most ignominious fashion. With our U.S. personnel being lifted by helicopter from roofs near our embassy, it seemed like a low point for U.S. influence, and there were dire predictions of communism’s global dominance - just as there is today for the “Islamo-fascist” bogeyman the president has seized upon.

Those predictions, however, proved dead wrong. Communism did not advance as a worldwide force after our defeat in Vietnam. On the contrary, a victorious communist-run Vietnam soon went to war with the China-backed communists of Cambodia - overthrowing Pol Pot’s evil Khmer Rouge - and with communist China itself, in a bloody border war.

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Military Charts Movement of Conflict in Iraq Toward Chaos
By Michael R. Gordon
The New York Times

Wednesday 01 November 2006

Washington - A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.

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Published on Sunday, November 5, 2006

The Bush Economy: NOT an Election Winner for Republicans

by Robert Freeman

Iraq has blown up in their faces. Terrorism is a much greater threat than when they took office. Competence went south with Katrina. Integrity has been ground under the wheels of the Tom Delay-Jack Abramov-Randy Cunningham-Bob Ney corruption caravan. They’ve shredded the Constitution with the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts. Mark Foley and Reverend Ted Haggard are their poster children for family values. Fiscal discipline? They’ve increased government spending at a faster rate than even Lyndon Johnson. By more than 2-to-1 the public says the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

It’s no wonder the Republicans are thrashing about for something _ anything _ to try to salvage an election. So they thought they’d try for the economy.

It’s not going to work.

The economy under Bush is like that village the Russian minister constructed for the Tzar to ride by in a train: phony storefronts and fake houses in the distance. A movie set to convey the illusion of prosperity since the reality would have cost him his head. His name was Potemkin.

The Bush campaign claims the economy is doing great, that its tax cuts have spurred economic growth. The truth is that it’s all phony storefronts and fake houses, Potemkin posturing.

To be sure, there is some news that can be spun as “good.” Unemployment hit 4.5% in the third quarter, a respectable number. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average has topped 12,000. That’s about it.

But those numbers reflect nothing so much as the old adage that “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”

Unemployment is low because millions of people have dropped out of the workforce. The jobs that have been created have been overwhelmingly in low-wage domestic services like retail cashiers, bartenders, in-home medical assistants, and waitresses.

And the Dow is an index of just 30 stocks, hardly representative in a universe of more than 5,000 stocks. Indeed, the much broader NASDAQ is still 55% below its historic high.

But what about the bad news, the mad uncle in the attic they hope doesn’t get out before election day? Here is just some of the bad economic news, the reality behind the Potemkin façade that the Bush campaign doesn’t want you to see.

Real median hourly wages have declined almost 2% under Bush. And this, five years into what they call an economic “recovery”. Oops.

GDP growth is falling rapidly, down from 5.6% in Q1 to 2.6% in Q2 to 1.6% in Q3. Oops. Q4 will almost certainly be negative, the onset of a new recession.

The nation’s savings rate has fallen below zero, the first time since the Great Depression. Oops.

Home prices have just taken their biggest plunge in 35 years. Oops.

Two million more people are in poverty than when Bush took office. Oops.

Forty-eight million people have no health insurance, four million more than when Bush took office. Oops.

Three million high wage manufacturing jobs have been lost under Bush, sent to China so Bush’s wealthy backers can make more profits using Chinese slave labor. Oops.

The trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion a year, up from $377 billion in the last year of the Clinton administration. Oops.

With his record budget deficits, Bush has added $3 trillion to the national debt, more than any president in history. By the time his administration leaves office, it will have created more debt than all previous presidents COMBINED. Oops.

As a result of Bush’s record debts, the nation is forced to borrow almost $3 billion a day, most of it from foreigners. Not since before the Civil War has the U.S. been so dependent on foreign capital. Oops.

A full 70% of Bush’s $1.6 trillion in tax cuts went to the top 20% of income earners, those making an average of $190,000 per year. The bottom 40% of income earners, those making $14,000 a year, got a total of 5%.

A higher share of national income goes to corporate profits than at any time since 1948. Oops.

A lower share of national income goes to wages than at any time since 1947. Oops.

As a result of all of the above, income inequality_an inverse proxy for the vitality of democracy_is the greatest it’s been since the 1920s, just before the Great Depression. Oops.

The truth is that what vitality there is in the economy is due to the massive expansion of debt: $3 trillion in federal borrowing; a cumulative $3.5 trillion in trade deficits; and a staggering $11 trillion in home mortgage debt.

Any moron borrowing almost $18 trillion in five years can fake the illusion of prosperity. But even at that, Bush can still barely even muster the illusion. The façade is popping rivets like the Titanic just before it went down.

Usually, when times are “good” you pay down the debts that tided you through the last bad time. Bush has done exactly the opposite: used the “good” times to load the nation up to its neck with debt so as to create an illusion of prosperity that his policies cannot actually deliver.

To be sure, all that debt is a huge bonanza for Bush’s wealthy backers, those who loan all that money and at much higher interest rates than would be the case without all the debt. And they’ve got the American public conscripted to work it off for generations.

But trying to repay it all will be a disaster for our children who will suffer grievously diminished prosperity. It will be a catastrophe for future economic growth. Trillions of dollars that could have gone to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, for education, for research and development, will now go to fund interest payments for those who are already the most wealthy, Bush’s “base” as he calls them.

Bush’s “economy” gambit is as phony as that cheesy silver paint used to make cheap lamps look expensive. Tweak it just a little and it cracks, exposing the gaudy plastic beneath. Everything else Bush has done has turned into disaster. Scratch it just a little and you’ll see that the economy has too.

Robert Freeman writes about economics, history, and education. Email to: robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

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Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by McClatchy Newspapers

The Rich Are Getting Much Richer, Much Faster Than Everyone Else

by Kevin G. Hall

WASHINGTON - Over the past quarter-century, and especially in the last 10 years, America’s very rich have grown much richer. No one else fared as well.

In 2004, the richest 1 percent of households - 719,910 of them, with an average annual income of $326,720 - had 19.8 percent of the entire nation’s pretax income. That’s up from 17.8 percent a year earlier, according to a study by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.

The study, titled “The Evolution of Top Incomes,” also found that the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans - 129,584 households in 2004 - reported income equal to 9.5 percent of national pretax income.

However, median, or midpoint, family income rose only 1.6 percent between 2001 and 2004, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Federal Reserve. Median family real net worth - a family’s gross assets minus liabilities - rose only 1.5 percent during those four years.

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Published on Sunday, November 5, 2006 by the Progressive

Bush and Cheney and Their Disdain for Democracy

by Matthew Rothschild

Dick Cheney and George Bush could not be more dismissive of the American people when it comes to Iraq.

Cheney revealed the full length of his arrogance in his interview with George Stephanopoulos.

“It may not be popular with the public_it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

Bush and Cheney view the United States almost as a dictatorship that is authorized by a quadrennial plebiscite.

Amazingly, just days before an election in which the uppermost issue in the voters’ minds is Iraq, Cheney displayed uttered disdain.

“We’re not running for office,” he said, a line that is sure to make Republican House and Senate candidates gasp. Never one to be troubled by self-doubt, Cheney expressed no alarm at the house of horrors in Baghdad. “We’ve got the basic strategy right,” he said, and pledged “full speed ahead.”

That is not exactly the message that most Americans want to hear, and I’m sure many parents of soldiers in Iraq aren’t delighted by it, either.

But more than Cheney’s willful denial of reality, more than his insistence on a headlong rush right over the cliff of disaster, it his_and Bush’s_disregard for the wishes of the American people that is so disturbing.

This is not new for this power couple.

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Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by the New York Times

Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office

by James Glanz

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

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Published on Thursday, November 2, 2006 by truthdig

Keeping Our Eyes on the Ball

by Molly Ivins

I’m still worried sick. The R’s have seized the news cycle! Which says more about how dim American politics are than anything else I can think of.

Apparently, the Michael J. Fox affair didn’t have enough meat to it, and even Rep. Mark Foley is out of the game, so now we have the semi-hemi-demi-gaffe from John Kerry, who is not in fact running for anything.

If Kerry had been given as many breaks for misspeaking as George W. Bush has, he’d be a professor of grammar by now. And this all shows what the Bush regime has: attacks on Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy, Pelosi, liberals! ... but not any actual policies to help it.

The Great Wall of Republican ads is bearing down on us_race-baiting, scare tactics and sleaze-mongering. (Who knew so many people had signed up to “promote the homosexual agenda”? I don’t even know what it is. But apparently, you don’t have to sign up to support_you could be part of it and not even know!) The R’s are throwing distorting ads, funded by endless money, all over the place. Can the people see that, and ignore and punish them for it?

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Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by the Inter Press Service

98 Percent of Cluster Bomb Victims are Civilians

by Ann De Ron

Ninety-eight percent of registered victims of cluster bombs are civilians, Handicap International, a UK-based NGO said in a report published Thursday.

The report Fatal Footprint was launched in several countries ahead of an international conference on conventional weapons starting in Geneva Nov. 7

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Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by the Guardian / UK

British Believe Bush Is More Dangerous Than Kim Jong-il

· US allies think Washington threat to world peace

· Only Bin Laden feared more in United Kingdom

by Julian Glover

America is now seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbours and allies, according to an international survey of public opinion published today that reveals just how far the country’s reputation has fallen among former supporters since the invasion of Iraq.

The ICM poll ranks the US president with some of his bitterest enemies as a cause of global anxiety.

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Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by the Toronto Star / Canada

Canadians Believe Bush is a Threat to Peace: Poll

Many fear U.S. will launch strikes on Iran, N. Korea

Bin Laden still perceived as greatest danger

by Tim Harper

Canadians believe the world has become a more dangerous place since George W. Bush was elected U.S. president and a majority believe he will launch military strikes in Iran or North Korea before his term ends in 2008, according to a new Toronto Star poll.

Canadians also consider Bush more dangerous to world peace than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

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Published on Friday, November 3, 2006 by Bloomberg

Carter Says Claim That North Korea Cheated `Completely False’

by Judy Mathewson

The Bush administration claim that North Korea cheated or reneged on a 1994 agreement with the U.S. to freeze its nuclear program is ``completely false and ridiculous,’‘ former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said.

Carter, a Democrat who helped broker the agreement with the North Koreans on behalf of then-President Bill Clinton, said the pact was ``observed pretty well by both sides’‘ for eight years.

``It lasted until 2002 when the United States in effect abandoned that agreement and branded North Korea as an axis of evil,’‘ Carter, 82, said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend on ``Conversations with Judy Woodruff’‘ on Bloomberg Television. Carter also said the U.S. further undermined the agreement by condemning summit meetings that took place in 2000 between North Korea and South Korea.

President George W. Bush said on Oct. 11, two days after North Korea tested a nuclear bomb, that the 1994 agreement ``just didn’t work.’‘ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Oct. 10 said the North Koreans ``cheated’‘ on that agreement.

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Published on Sunday, November 5, 2006 by the Guardian / UK

Julius Caesar Had Gaul; Bush Just Has Gall

by Terry Jones

In 59BC, Julius Caesar declared he was so shocked by the incursions of the dangerous Helvetii tribe into Gaul, and the suffering of the Gaulish peoples, that he had himself appointed ‘protector of the Gauls’. By the time he’d finished protecting them, a million Gauls were dead, another million enslaved and Julius Caesar owned most of Gaul. Now I’m not suggesting there is any similarity between George W Bush’s protection of the Iraqi people and Caesar’s protection of the Gauls.

For a start, Julius Caesar, as we all know, was bald, whereas George W Bush has a fine head of hair.

In any case, George W Bush is not personally making huge amounts of money out of it. The money-making is all left in the capable hands of companies like CACI International, Blackwater Security and Haliburton.

It’s true that Vice-President Dick Cheney’s stock options in his old company, Haliburton, went up from $241,498 in 2004 to $8m in 2005 - that’s an increase of 3,281 per cent.

But then Dick Cheney is bald.

The point I’m trying to make is that there is absolutely no comparison to be made between Julius Caesar’s invasion of Gaul in 58-50BC and George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

I mean, Julius Caesar had the nerve to pretend that the Roman state was being threatened by what was going on in Gaul. He claimed he had to carry out a pre-emptive strike against the Helvetii in the interests of homeland security. In reality, his motives were political. He desperately needed a military victory to boost his standing in Rome and give him the necessary popular base to seize power.

George W Bush, on the other hand, was already in power when he invaded Iraq and, in any case, he didn’t need to boost his popularity, because the popular vote had nothing to do with his getting into power in the first place. Julius Caesar was also a very adroit propagandist who made damn sure that his version of events prevailed. He even wrote eight books about his wars in Gaul to make sure it did. George W Bush doesn’t need to go to such lengths. He has Fox News.

When Julius Caesar claimed his glorious victory over the Helvetii, he made it sound as if he had destroyed a vast army of ‘wild and savage men’. Julius Caesar reckoned he had slaughtered more than 250,000 ‘insurgents’. In fact, documents found in the remains of the Helvetii camp showed that out of 368,000 people, only 92,000 had been capable of bearing arms.

In other words, it wasn’t an army that Julius Caesar massacred, but a whole population including women, children, old and sick, which, I suppose, is one thing that George W Bush and Julius Caesar do have in common: pretending civilians are armed insurgents.

But there the similarity ends. One of the most fundamental differences between Julius Caesar and George W Bush is that Julius Caesar counted his dead, whereas George W Bush can’t be bothered. It seems that, as commander-in-chief, George W Bush instructed his soldiers not to count the enemy dead. So the fact that he still sticks to an estimate of only 30,000 dead Iraqis, even when a recently published study in the Lancet suggests he’s slaughtered at least 655,000, can only be the result of his extraordinary modesty.

Why else would he dismiss the study as pure guesswork or claim it had used a ‘methodology [that] is pretty well discredited’, even though the US government has been spending millions of dollars a year to train NGOs in this exact same methodology? Julius Caesar would have seized on the figures with alacrity.

And that is the biggest difference of all: Julius Caesar was an ambitious, vainglorious, would-be tyrant. George W Bush is a modest and self-deprecating one.

**

An Ideology of Lying
By Glenn Greenwald
Crooks and Liars

Monday 06 November 2006

It is not news to anybody that Bush followers lie repeatedly and aggressively. But what does continues to amaze is that there is literally no limit on their willingness to do so even when - especially when - it requires them to ignore and contradict even the most glaring facts which everyone can see, as clear as day, right in front of our faces.

It is from that rotted Stalinist root that the right-wing Ideology of Lying emerged, as embodied by the now-infamous warning issued to Ron Suskind by a Bush “senior advisor” after Suskind wrote an article about Karen Hughes which displeased the Leader: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

The authoritarian Bush movement is so Wise (in the case of neoconservatives) and so Good (in the case of the religious fundamentalists who are their loyal comrades) that everything, including the most blatant lies, is not only justifiable, but necessary. Reality can and must be fundamentally distorted for our own good. As Mona put it - and as the two posts linked above illustrate - “for neoconservatives [which has subsumed the so-called “conservative” movement itself], falsehood is a feature, not a bug.”

**

Revolt and repulsion comes even from the hard core right wing loyalists:

http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20061002-102008-9058r.htm

Resign, Mr. Speaker

TODAY’S EDITORIAL

October 3, 2006

The facts of the disgrace of Mark Foley, who was a Republican member of the House from a Florida district until he resigned last week, constitute a disgrace for every Republican member of Congress. Red flags emerged in late 2005, perhaps even earlier, in suggestive and wholly inappropriate e-mail messages to underage congressional pages. His aberrant, predatory -- and possibly criminal -- behavior was an open secret among the pages who were his prey. The evidence was strong enough long enough ago that the speaker should have relieved Mr. Foley of his committee responsibilities contingent on a full investigation to learn what had taken place, whether any laws had been violated and what action, up to and including prosecution, were warranted by the facts. This never happened.

-------

**

“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/31/AR2006103101218.html”

Washington Post | Al Kamen | November 1, 2006 11:02 AM

Fmr. Bush Adviser Richard Perle: “I Think We Have An Administration Today That Is Dysfunctional”...

Washington Post | Al Kamen | November 1, 2006 11:02 AM

**

“Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.”

- Pearl Buck

“We don’t care whether you’re white or black or brown or purple - you are welcome in the Democratic Party. We don’t care what religion you are or how big your bank account is - you are welcome in the Democratic Party. We don’t care whether you walked in here or rolled in here, whether you’re first generation American or a Mayflower descendant - you are welcome in the Democratic Party. And we don’t care what gender you are or what gender you like to hold hands with. So long as you like to hold hands, you are welcome in the Democratic Party.”

- Joe Andrew

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

-- Howard Aiken

“Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.”

-ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, prayer “For Success”

“This is not an election anymore, it’s an intervention.”

- Andrew Sullivan

“We’re not the cut and run crowd. We are the stop and think crowd.”

- Bill Clinton

***

11/14/06

Subject: THE GAME

Obligatory commentary from the unaccustomed joy of election results...

Wow! The chief guru agrees that the current batch of neo-hypocrites are losers:

http://www.dispatch.com/editorials-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/11/10/20061110-A15-00.html

Republicans were big losers because they lost their way

Friday, November 10, 2006

JONAH GOLDBERG

Philosophers and partisans will debate for years the question of whether Democrats deserved to win the 2006 elections, but let us agree that the Republicans deserved to lose.

Through its own crapulence, jobbery and malfeasance, the Grand Old Party lost...

Even Rush now admits that both he and the White House are eyeballs full of bull shit:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-derych/rush-tells-his-audience-_b_33690.html

11.08.2006

Rush Tells His Audience ‘I’m Full of Crap’...Seriously!

Failure always inspires naval-gazing. So I expected to hear the conservative media talking-heads do a little introspection after last night’s lopsided loss. What I didn’t expect was for Rush Limbaugh to come right out and say “I’m full of crap.” Check out the top of the third hour monologue from today’s show.

Here’s Rush at approximately 1:14 p.m. Central time today:

The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I’m going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, “Well, why have you been doing it?” Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country’s than the Democrat [sic] Party does and liberalism.

Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but doesn’t this sound like Rush telling his audience, right in front of God and everybody, that he’s been lying to them? Rush continues...

There hasn’t been in the ideology in the Republican Party, any conservatism for at least two to maybe four years.

Given the nature of my book, folks ask me all the time “do you think Rush really believes this crap?” And now the answer that I gave has been confirmed. No. He doesn’t believe what he says. He’ll say whatever he has to say to keep Republicans in power. You can not believe a word that comes out of his mouth.

Some may call this behavior ‘lying.’ And the first person to say so was Rush’s own producer-Mr. Bo Snerdly.

But beyond that is the admission of how long Rush has been lying. It’s one thing to say “yeah, this election I was really mad at my party but I didn’t want to say anything.” In fact, that’s exactly what I expected to see happen. But to have Rush say that this thing went off the rails 4 years ago, and that he’s been covering for it all this time is kind of shameful. I wonder what else Rush really wanted to speak out about, but didn’t? Did he REALLY think Abu Ghraib was just a fraternity prank, or was he carrying water? Does he really think there’s a liberal media, or does he just need to make the whole thing up to keep Republicans in power? Hell, maybe he thinks Donovan McNabb is really a great quarterback! We’ll never know, because we can never be sure of when Rush is telling us what he REALLY thinks, or when he’s telling us what he thinks we need to hear. I’ve never really known a pundit that was willing to come right out and say “I’m full of shit.” I always figured Carville would do it one day, but now I’m glad that when it actually DID happened it was Rush.

Other Republican partisans are now claiming they only defended Republicans to help the team win. On Hugh Hewitt’s blog today, Dean Barnett made this admission:

“In the closing weeks of the campaign season, I felt like I was a lawyer who had a bad client while writing this blog. That client was the Republican Party which had broken its Contract with America from 1994 and had become unmoored from its conservative principles. As its advocate, I couldn’t make a more compelling case for Republicans staying in power than the fact that the Democrats would be worse. I believed in that case, but when that’s all the party gave its advocates to work with, you can honestly conclude that Republicans got this drubbing the old fashioned way -- we earned it.”

andy@borowitzreport.com

Elsewhere, with the USS Intrepid mired in mud and unable to budge, officials were considering a variety of options, including renaming it the USS George W. Bush.

**

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sidney-blumenthal/how-bush-rules-and-how-s_b_32202.html

10.23.2006

How Bush Rules: And How Sonny Bono Predicted the Downfall of the GOP Congress (

As the fortunes of the Republican Party in the Congress collapsed, I found myself in the middle of a book tour in Palm Springs, California. Promenading down Palm Canyon Drive, I stopped by the larger than life statute of a smiling mustachioed man with an open collar sitting on the edge of a fountain in the center of town.

Sonny Bono, singer, songwriter and mayor, was perhaps the most unlikely person elected in the self-proclaimed Republican “revolution” of 1994.

To mark his rise to power, the new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, “held a mad celebration featuring people dressed as the cartoon Power Rangers and Rush Limbaugh,” as I write in “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.” “One new Republican member, Sonny Bono, who had fallen from grace as a celebrity, warned Gingrich to guard against hubris.”

Bono was the only one at the beginning to warn Gingrich that his arrogance and unchecked will to power would be his undoing. “You’re a celebrity now,” Bono said. “The rules are different for celebrities. I know it. I’ve been there. I’ve been a celebrity. I used to be a bigger celebrity. But let me tell you, you’re not being handled right. This is not political news coverage. This is celebrity status. You need handlers. You need to understand what you’re doing.”

Bono saw the dramatic events unfold before him through the prism of his own dimmed star. He had had it all with Cher and lost it, staging a recovery in the Palm Springs oasis as a politician, which to him was a secondary level of celebrity. Yes, the beat went on, but he had heard it before and louder. That was the insight he imparted to the new Speaker that was instantly ignored.

Gingrich gloried in his rhetoric about “the revolution.” He had little use for the experience of the older and wiser song-and-dance man. Instead Gingrich, a failed professor, described himself as a world-historical figure, leader of a universal transformation. It was befitting that one of his closest advisers, the lobbyist Grover Norquist, co-author of Gingrich’s political program, the Contract with America, hung a picture of Lenin on his wall. Gingrich was a self-styled Republican Lenin “determined to annihilate his enemies and extirpate the ‘counterculture,’ as I write in my column in Salon and The Guardian.

This Republican Lenin was followed by the Republican Stalin, “the ruthless consolidator and centralizer,” Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land, Texas exterminator. After Gingrich’s demise, DeLay put into place his puppet as Speaker, Dennis Hastert, the former small-town Illinois wrestling coach. When DeLay was indicted for corrupt campaign practices and resigned, the “revolution” was left in Hastert’s ham-fisted hands. Just as he had tried to cover-up DeLay’s ethical transgressions, he and his aides were implicated in the cover-up of Rep. Mark Foley’s sexual preying on teenaged pages. Hastert, the bewildered party boss, “transmuted from omnipotent Leonid Brezhnev into ghostly Konstantin Chernenko, presiding over the final decrepit stage.”

If only the Republicans had taken Sonny Bono’s advice, gleaned from Hollywood, they might not resemble the Soviet Union today.

**

Published on Thursday, October 26, 2006 by Truthdig <http://www.Truthdig.com>

A Campaign of Sleaze
Even by Limbaugh Standards, Recent Attack on Michael J. Fox is Several Levels Lower than Tacky

by Molly Ivins

It’s a race to the bottom. For misinformation and cruelty, not to mention plain old dreadful manners, it is so hard to beat Rush Limbaugh. We can only measure the Great Blowhard against himself.

Even by Limbaugh standards, his recent attack on Michael J. Fox, the actor, is several levels lower than tacky. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, has done some political ads favoring candidates who in turn support stem cell research.

“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told his listeners. “He is moving all around and shaking, and it’s purely an act. This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has.”

The reaction from Parkinson’s experts was swift and angry. “It’s a shameless statement,” said John Rogers of Parkinson’s Action Network. “It’s insulting. It’s appallingly sad, at best.”

So then Limbaugh, big-hearted guy, says while still on the air in the same broadcast: “Now, people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear in the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial. ... All right, then, I stand corrected. ... So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act ... .”

Then Limbaugh went on to say, “Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democrat politician.”

Exploiting his disease by pushing for a cure. Gee, I never thought of that. Do you think the late Christopher Reeve was faking it? Is Nancy Reagan exploiting her late husband?

**

http://andrewtobias.com/

But first, very briefly, from the DNC, and echoing the 2000 Time profile I borrowed from recently:

Washington, DC - The Democratic National Committee responded to news reports that John McCain is entering the 2008 presidential race today. “If the reports are correct, we welcome John McCain to the race,” said DNC Communications Director Karen Finney. “The question is, which McCain is running: the McCain who called right wing extremists like Jerry Falwell an evil influence, or the McCain who spoke at Liberty University as he attempted to cater to the far right in advance of a presidential run? Or the McCain who opposed overturning Roe vs. Wade or the McCain who said he would support South Dakota’s ban? As an opportunist who supports the Bush Administration’s failed policy in Iraq and changed his mind on tax cuts, a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her health care, and campaign finance reform, it’s hard to tell which John McCain will enter the race.”

JOHN McCAIN – FYI

Few who know the Senator fail to admire him. We share an editor who tells me he is a great guy and I don’t doubt it. I once tried to see for myself by bidding $10,000 on “lunch in the Senate dining room with John McCain” at a charity event. I was outbid, so I have to just take my editor’s word for it.

That said, the Senator is – to his credit or detriment – a conservative. From “http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996048-1,00.html”, during the 2000 primary:

Bush went after McCain’s reform credentials last week, pointing out that as Commerce chairman, McCain has been willing to milk the system he rails against. “The portrait McCain likes is the one of the plain-talking crusader who’s bucking the system,” writes Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity in his book The Buying of the President 2000. “The one many others see is that of a politician who rarely breaks ranks with the special interests that finance his campaign.” Many of McCain’s top fund raisers and advisers – Kenneth Duberstein, Vin Weber – are lobbyists who do business with his committee. And as the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, McCain is more apt to rail against corporate malfeasance than to sponsor legislation to rein it in. It’s the reverse of Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum – McCain speaks loudly and carries no stick. . . .

McCain’s record makes the Bush strategy of calling him a Clinton clone seem foolish. In the Senate, McCain has been a rock-solid vote on just about every core G.O.P. issue, winning high ratings from the Christian Coalition and other conservative groups. He supported every item in Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and voted to convict Bill Clinton on every article of impeachment. And his environmental record would make Teddy Roosevelt cringe. McCain has voted many times to cut funding for toxic-waste cleanups, he has supported subsidies for mining on public lands, and he favors reopening national forest lands to logging. (In 1998 the League of Conservation Voters gave him a zero rating.) He is a longtime friend of the National Rifle Association’s, voting against the Brady Bill in 1993 and the assault-weapons ban in 1994. He’s against the licensing and registration of handguns. He has repeatedly voted against minimum-wage increases and equal pay for women, and labor considers him a reliable anti-union vote.

Bush allies in South Carolina have been running TV spots questioning McCain’s commitment to the pro-life cause. Yet he took the pro-life position 82 times out of 86 votes cast in the Senate.

This is all either good or bad, depending on your point of view. Likewise, his standing against most things that GLBT Americans wish he would support. His Human Rights Campaign ratings over the past three Congresses have ranged from 14 to 33 out of a possible 100. (By way of comparison, conservative Democrat Joe Lieberman – who surely knows the Old Testament labels homosexuality and the eating of shellfish “abominations” – ranged from 88 to 100 over those same six years.)

My own hope is that a Democrat will win in 2008, and have the good sense to offer Senator McCain, who will then be 72 and out of a job if he resigns to run for the Presidency, an important ambassadorship. Lord knows, he deserves it and would represent our country with honor.
All hail our ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Happy Halloween.

**

Hope

Published on November 07, 2006

Hope is in the air.

As bleak as things are - bleaker I think than many realize (”The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it,” writes the Economist, paraphrasing the Comptroller General of the United States) - the tide may be turning.

This is still America - America - and as much tragic damage as has been done these last six years to our standing abroad, and by the erosion of our finances at home, we are still the nation that self-corrects better than any other, and that, for all its missteps, lurches generation after generation toward an ever more perfect union.

The missteps of late have been staggering. But . . . but . . .

The most obvious “but” is the hope that Congress will change hands and resume its heretofore suspended oversight function. (”Congress,” writes Garrison Keillor, “which once spent an entire year investigating a married man’s attempt to cover up an illicit act of oral sex, has shown no curiosity whatsoever about a war that the administration elected to wage that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands and led our own people to commit war crimes and squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and degenerated into civil war.”)

Nancy Pelosi, if we take back the House, will, I think, fight for a hike in the minimum wage - the first cost-of-living raise in nine years - and fight to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices, fight to restore trimmed college aid, fight for better treatment of our troops and veterans, and fight for verifiable elections.

(In America, we have to rely on the word of Diebold that our elections are tamperproof? With no way to recount the ballots? Have you seen Man of the Year? It’s much better - and more important - than you might have guessed from the ads.)

She will also fight, I think, to restore some measure of collegiality to the House.

Nor need a Democratic Congress, if we get one, alarm friends who disagree with us:

* GOD. Abortions went down under Clinton/Gore, have gone up under Bush/Cheney. Democrats and Republicans don’t come at it from exactly the same place, but we all wish there were fewer abortions . . . so that’s some common ground to build on. One example of tremendous progress we could make toward this end would be to allow over-the-counter sale of Plan B, “the morning after pill,” which prevents pregnancy and thus the need for abortion. It’s not the total abstinence that the other side would prefer; but it’s a heck of a lot better than abortion.

* GUNS. Jon Tester, who we hope will be the next senator from Montana, opposes most gun control - and so, for that matter, did DNC Chair Howard Dean, who had a consistent A-rating from the NRA throughout his decade-plus as Vermont Governor. Whereas Chuck Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee favors gun control. But so what? Senator Schumer represents New York. The gun situation in (say) the housing projects of Bedford Stuyvesant is different from (say) the situation in Vermont or Montana. One size need not fit all.

* GAYS. Experience thus far suggests that allowing GLBT Americans and their children equal rights and first-class citizenship does not wind up diminishing the rights - or breaking up the marriages - of everybody else. It’s important to respect the discomfort many people still feel with these topics . . . and to allow Kansas and Mississippi more time to chew this over than California and Massachusetts. But, increasingly, people see Rosie on “The View” or Ellen on “Ellen” or Barney Frank on Bill Maher, and simply welcome them as part of the American family.

I got this email from a reader tonight, and it left me wondering what proportion of America, in 2006, would still find it repugnant: “In 1962 after having just arrived in Los Angeles at 20, I met a young fellow, 21, who knocked my socks off. We stayed up all night in my tiny furnished apartment in Hollywood and talked until we both fell asleep. When I woke up, he was gone and I was disappointed. He showed up at my door two hours later with his bags packed and asked if he could move in. We’ve just celebrated the 44th anniversary of that night and his very presence still brightens any dark corners in my world. We’ve never been apart one night since then. For two guys with minimum education, we’ve managed to build a really good life together, and at 65 and 66 we are co-parenting two children, a boy aged 7 and a girl 2 1/2. They live three days a week with us and four days a week with their two moms. We have created a great family and when another boy asked our son how he had two moms and two dads, his reply was `I guess I’m just lucky.’” No question, some will find that repugnant or threatening. But I think by now a large proportion of the citizenry would actually find themselves rooting for these characters. Love and happiness are precious wherever they are found. Would Jesus really disagree?)

* TAXES. Taxes may go up on the wealthiest of us, as they did when Clinton took office. But boy were those ever good years for the wealthy - and for everyone else. We were all in it together.

The Republicans fear the economy will collapse if we push the long-term capital gains rate back up to 20% (even though it was 28% under Reagan and 36% under Eisenhower) or if we fail to eliminate the estate tax on billionheirs. But it’s more likely that, over time, the economy will collapse if we don’t act responsibly. And the social contract will tear if the yachts just keep getting bigger while the average family struggles to make ends meet, with little hope of attaining financial security for retirement.

* TERROR. Sixteen national intelligence agencies agree we have made things worse. We have done just what Bin Laden dreamed we would, greatly weakening ourselves in the process - and leaving him alive to make videotapes. Democrats don’t want to cut and run. As suggested yesterday, we want to stop and think. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are not doing a “fantastic job,” as President Bush believes. (Take 80 seconds to watch this video.)

Well, this was supposed to be a column about hope. But fear crowds out hope, so maybe it’s not entirely inappropriate to get that off the table first. Democrats will not take away your guns or go nuts on taxes - we don’t like paying them, either. Democrats will not force your daughters to have abortions or to marry lesbians. Democrats will not take the heat off terrorists.

And Democrats - I hope - will be respectful of your views and concerns, because we all need to do a better job of that.

So. All that said:

I find it hopeful that the House, and perhaps even the Senate, may be changing hands. And that the rest of the world may look at tonight’s results and surmise that we are beginning to get back on track - very rightly concerned with our security, but uncomfortable being a nation of torturers with a global chain of secret prisons.

I find it hopeful that the two spectacularly talented, decent frontrunners for the Democratic nomination in 2008 are . . . a woman and a black guy. Who says we don’t lurch, generation after generation, toward an ever more perfect union? We really do.

I find it hopeful that Rush Limbaugh has lost more than half his audience - at 13 million weekly, I’m told (I haven’t checked this), down from 30 million. America works best when citizens think for themselves. Dittoheads scare me.

I find it hopeful that we might yet embrace the promise of embryonic stem cell research that could save your parents or children (or, heck - you) from the misery Michael J. Fox and his family are going through or that Ronald and Nancy Reagan, or Christopher Reeve, endured.

I find it hopeful that DuPont (up 20% since it was suggested here last fall) managed to raise output nearly 30% in the last decade or so while cutting its energy consumption 7% and its greenhouse gas emissions 72% - and saving $2 billion for its shareholders.

I find it hopeful that everyone from Laura Bush and Rupert Murdoch to Barbra Streisand, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Warren Buffett came to the Clinton Global Initiative in New York a few weeks ago and, between them all, pledged more than $7 billion for innovative projects to help fix the world. Everything from planting trees in Africa to Wal-Mart’s commitment to take an estimated 213,000 trucks off the road by 2013 by leaning on its 60,000 suppliers to ship their goods with less wasteful, bulky packaging. You want to be inspired? Watch the video.

Hope is in the air.

It is in the wisdom and example and grace of Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank decades ago and launched the “microlending” model that has helped lift millions out of poverty. He was at the Clinton Global Initiative, and, just a week or two later, received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. “Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life,” wrote the Nobel Committee in announcing the award. “Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.”

It is in the work of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s Carter Center (”waging peace, fighting disease, building hope”), which has - among so many things - led the campaign to eradicate Guinea worm, cutting the number of cases by 99.5%, from 3.5 million in 1986 to 10,000 in 2005.

It is in Bono’s global Product Red campaign.

It’s in the blossoming of the Chinese and Indian economies that promise to move hundreds of millions out of poverty (and into line to buy American goods and services).

It is in the increasing willingness of some evangelical leaders to suggest - as many of their followers have doubtless already concluded - that Jesus might not have favored preemptive war, waterboarding, and massive tax cuts for the rich.

It’s in the terrific young candidates we have running for the House and Senate today like Tammy Duckworth in Illinois and Scott Kleeb in Nebraska and Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota and Kirsten Gillibrand in New York - and so many others.

It’s in two guys, 65 and 66, who met 44 years ago in Los Angeles and haven’t spent a night apart since; who are passing on their example of love and commitment to their two children, one of whom we already know feels he has lucked out.

It’s in Kerry Kennedy’s “Speak Truth to Power” that was performed last month in New York, celebrating the courage of astonishing people around the world who, at great peril to themselves, insist on justice . . . and recalling that most hopeful and famous of speeches, delivered by her father Bobby Kennedy, Jr., in Apartheid South Africa in 1966, in which he said: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

So there you have it.

I don’t know what will happen today, but I’m hopeful.

Don’t forget to vote!

**

Impeachment and the Table

t r u t h o u t | Editorial

Monday 13 November 2006

A compelling argument can certainly be made that, given all that the country now faces, an impeachment of George W. Bush by the new Democratic Congress would do more to further divide the nation than heal it. Ironically many of Mr. Bush’s critics have dubbed Mr. Bush himself “the great divider.” Whether you blame Mr. Bush for the social divisions in America or not, deep and abiding social divisions, particularly over the morass in Iraq, are undeniable, and healing those divisions should be of paramount importance to the new Congress. Equally undeniable are the political risks for a new Democratic Congress that would pursue impeachment shortly after taking back the gavel for the first time in over a decade.

However, in stating flatly that “impeachment is off the table,” incoming Speaker Pelosi and incoming Chairman Conyers appear to have erred rather substantially. Impeachment, of course, is a matter of Constitutional law, not personal discretion on the part of individual lawmakers. The pre-emptive nature of the decision by Pelosi and Conyers stands in sharp contrast to every principal of law enforcement. Congress - whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans - has a solemn duty to uphold and when necessary enforce the law.

If there is some reason that impeachment is not warranted in a given circumstance, it should be stated in that context. But for an individual lawmaker, any individual lawmaker, to presume to preclude impeachment regardless of the circumstances scoffs at the Constitution. The great danger is that individuals in official positions might choose to assume unto themselves the power of the law at their personal discretion. If the last six years have taught us anything, it is that such hubris leads to ruin.

White house attorneys have even gone so far as to argue that Mr. Bush is a “unitary executive,” and thus entitled to assume omnipotent legal power in all matters. Not at some point in the past, but this day. At the risk of seeing the day that such largess is the presumed entitlement of all elected officials, it is best that as a nation we chart a course back to the comparatively safe harbor of due process.

The Constitution provides impeachment as a remedy for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It is important to note that the category at issue is high crimes. We are mired in a military operation, with no end in sight and a human toll approaching catastrophic in proportion. Impeachment raises its head in this dialog because evidence exists that Mr. Bush and other White House officials may have deliberately misled the nation on the road to Baghdad. Deliberately. If true, the law itself mandates action under due process. Such action is expressly non-discretionary.

During the Iraq Resolution debate, a white-haired Robert Byrd of West Virginia stood on the floor of the Senate and argued with a haunting passion that the Congress did not, under Constitutional law, have the right to reassign war-making power to the president. It was, he implored, an abandonment of Congressional duty. Maybe that old man knew what he was talking about after all.

-------

“The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.”

-William Tecumseh Sherman

***

11/19/06

Subject: victory

We also honor another date for the serious history student:

In 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln got up in front of about 15,000 people seated at a new national cemetery and delivered the Gettysburg Address.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Of course definitions may vary some, but the task and cause before us now is a rebirth of freedom better seen in the will of the people on the 7th, and their support of Lincoln’s ideals of a democratic representative republic and the Constitution, not a defense of this current clown’s delusions of a wartime march to nebulous victory.

“http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=417121&in_page_id=1766&ito=1490”

Iraq Is a “Disaster” Admits Blair
By Tim Shipman
The Daily Mail

Friday 17 November 2006

Blair’s most frank admission yet over the war in Iraq came during an interview on the new Al Jazeera English television channel with Sir David Frost.

Tony Blair admitted that British intervention in Iraq has been a disaster last night - sending shockwaves through Westminster.

**

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-11-19-kissinger-britain_x.htm?csp=34

Kissinger: Military victory no longer possible in Iraq

Posted 11/19/2006 7:07 AM ET

LONDON (AP) — Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.

**

“http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_rob_kall_061117_clear_evidence_2006_.htm”

Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Elections Hacked
By Rob Kall
OpEd News

Friday 17 November 2006

Results skewed nationwide in favor of Republicans by 4 percent, 3 million votes.

A major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in US House and Senate races across the country is indicated by an analysis of national exit polling data, by the “http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/”, a national election integrity organization.

These findings have led EDA to issue an urgent call for further investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic election equipment.

“We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape,” said attorney Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, “so ‘the fix’ turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances.” Explained Simon, “When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure--of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7.

“The findings raise urgent questions about the electoral machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States,” according to Sally Castleman, National Chair of EDA. “This is a nothing less than a national indictment of the vote counting process in the United States!”

“The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on, just not enough to overcome the size of the actual turnout. The tide turned so much in the last few weeks before the election. It looks for all the world that they’d already figured out the percentage they needed to rig, when the programming of the vote rigging software was distributed weeks before the election, and it wasn’t enough,” Castleman commented.

**

Perhaps we can stop the Great Divider from making us scared of yet another bogeyman...

“http://www.afp.com/english/news/stories/061119034024.d010tlyg.html”

Hersh: CIA Analysis Finds Iran Not Developing Nuclear Weapons
Agence France-Presse

Sunday 19 November 2006

Washington - A classifed draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House, a top US investigative reporter has said.

Seymour Hersh, writing in an article for the November 27 issue of the magazine The New Yorker released in advance.

**

WATCH THIS!

Kathryn Lance: “This non-political “http://bonehead.oddballs.com/NobodyElse.html” is about the perception of beauty and shows how a rather ordinary-looking girl is transformed into a super-model. I found it amazing. And come to think of it, maybe it isn’t non-political after all.”

World famous advertising agency “http://www.ogilvy.com/press/showpress.php?ID=2841” shows you why nobody is more beautiful than you because the models they use on billboards are nobody. They don’t exist. Our perception of beauty is based on people who do not exist.

Watch this 1 minute 10 second video and see how the agency turns an ordinary everyday looking woman into a super model. The real surprise is toward the end.

Please show this to your daughters. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to make this a show and tell at school or girl scout meetings either.

**

“I hate with a murderous hatred those men who, having lived their youth, would send into war other youth, not lived, unfulfilled, to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.”

-- Mary Roberts Rinehart

“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”
-- Dwight Eisnehower

“O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!”

- Sir Walter Scott

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out. I am tired and sick of war. It’s glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

William Tecumseh Sherman

There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sep 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam’s goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them. He is unlikely to risk handing weapons to terrorists who would use them for their own purposes and leave Baghdad as the return address.

Brent Scowcroft, Ch, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board

Secrecy--the first refuge of incompetents--must be at bare minimum in a democratic society, for a fully informed public is the basis of self-government. Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.

US House Committee on Government Operations, 1960

The ideals of democracy, individual rights, legitimacy, accountability, and the rule of law suggest that even in times of acute danger, government is limited in the range of activities it may pursue. Terrorism presents its real threat in provoking democratic regimes to embrace and employ authoritarian measures that weaken the fabric of democracy, discredit the government domestically ass well as internationally, alienate segments of the population from their government thereby pushing more people to support the terrorist organizations and their causes and undermine the government’s claim to the moral high ground in the battle against the terrorists while gaining legitimacy for the latter. Terrorists win if the government becomes less democratic.

Oren Gross, “Chaos and Rules,” Yale Law Journal 112, Mar 2003

After each perceived security crisis ended, the US has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary. But it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along.

William J. Brennan, Jr., US Supreme Court Justice, 1987

Beware the awful dangerous seduction of sacrificing our freedoms for safety against this insidious threat of terrorism. We the people had better keep an eye on our government. Not out of contempt or lack of appreciation or disrespect, but out of a sense of guardianship.

-Richard Armey, Farewell address, National Press Club

“From no ethics in the world can it be concluded when and to what extent the ethically good purpose “justifies” the ethically dangerous means and ramifications.”

Max Weber

We must give notice to this President and other Presidents that deceit and deception over issues as grave as going to war and waging war cannot be tolerated in a constitutional democracy.

Elizabeth Holtzman, Debate on Articles of Impeachment, 1974

***

11/27/06

One of the best for dissecting how easily and completely people were Duped by the Dubya ...

The Greatest Story Ever Sold: Bush’s America from Mission Accomplished to Heckuva Job, Brownie

-Frank Rich

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/11/26/D8LKO10O0.html

U.S. Involved in Iraq Longer Than WWII
Nov 26 6:54 AM US/Eastern
By TOM RAUM

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON

The war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in the war that President Bush’s father fought in, World War II. As of Sunday, the conflict in Iraq has raged for three years and just over eight months.

Only the Vietnam War (eight years, five months), the Revolutionary War (six years, nine months), and the Civil War (four years), have engaged America longer.

**

Published on Sunday, November 19, 2006 by the”http://www.madison.com” (Wisconsin)

‘Cut and Run’ Must be First Step in Iraq

by William E. Odom

The United States upset the regional balance in the Mideast when it invaded Iraq. Restoring it requires bold initiatives, but “cutting and running” must precede them all. Only a withdrawal of all U.S. troops - within six months and with no preconditions - can break the paralysis that enfeebles our diplomacy. And the greatest obstacles to cutting and running are the psychological inhibitions of our leaders and the public.

Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president’s conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.

But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.

These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can’t be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.

The administration could recognize that a rapid withdrawal is the only way to overcome our strategic paralysis, although that appears unlikely. Congress could force a stock-taking. Failing this, the public, sooner or later, will see through all of the White House’s double talk and compel a radical policy change. The price for delay, however, will be more lives lost in vain.

Odom is a senior fellow at the “http://www.hudson.org” and a professor at Yale University.

**

Published on Sunday, November 19, 2006 by the “http://www.chieftain.com”

Vietnamization Didn’t Work Then, Won’t Work Now

by Juan Espinoza

I remembered the last years of the Vietnam War and talk of Vietnamization - the notion that the U.S. could pull out of Vietnam as soon as the South Vietnamese Army was able on its own to stand up to the North Vietnamese regulars. Meanwhile, talk radio hosts were ranting on about how that now the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress, Bush’s “Stay the course” policy would be traded for one of “Cut and run.”

Like in Vietnam, as a nation we’re determined to stay until the new Democratic government of Iraq can stand on its own and put down the insurgents. Since all the kings horses and all the kings men haven’t been successful in putting down the Iraqi insurgents on our watch, I doubt that anytime in the near future the propped-up government of Iraq will ever win that fight on its own.

We are not the cops of the world and should never have invaded Iraq in the first place. Bring the troops home now, beginning with the Reservists and National Guard units.

As Franti sings, “You can bomb the world to pieces but you can’t bomb it into peace.”

Juan Espinosa is a Chieftain night city editor..

**

“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15821138/”

Lessons From the Vietnam War
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown

Monday 20 November 2006

Keith Olbermann responds to Bush’s comparison between Vietnam and Iraq.

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.

And it is pathetic to listen to a man talk unrealistically about Vietnam, who permitted the “Swift-Boating” of not one but two American heroes of that war, in consecutive presidential campaigns.

But most importantly - important beyond measure - his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans.

And that is indefensible and fatal.

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

“One lesson is,” he said, “that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”

“We’ll succeed,” the president concluded, “unless we quit.”

If that’s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.

Or we need somebody else making the decisions about Iraq.

Mr. Bush, there are a dozen central, essential lessons to be derived from our nightmare in Vietnam, but “we’ll succeed unless we quit,” is not one of them.

The primary one - which should be as obvious to you as the latest opinion poll showing that only 31 percent of this country agrees with your tragic Iraq policy - is that if you try to pursue a war for which the nation has lost its stomach, you and it are finished. Ask Lyndon Johnson.

The second most important lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If you don’t have a stable local government to work with, you can keep sending in Americans until hell freezes over and it will not matter. Ask Vietnamese Presidents Diem or Thieu.

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. For decades we were warned that if we didn’t stop “communist aggression” in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep.

The war machine of 1968 had this “domino theory.”

Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as “the central front in the war on terror.”

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “peace With honor” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then ... Dr. Kissinger.

And the fifth crucial lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush - which somebody should’ve told you about long before you plunged this country into Iraq - is that if you lie your country into a war, your war, your presidency will be consigned to the scrap heap of history.

Consider your fellow Texan, sir.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson held the country together after a national tragedy, not unlike you did. He had lofty goals and tried to reshape society for the better. And he is remembered for Vietnam, and for the lies he and his government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who needlessly died there.

As you will be remembered for Iraq, and for the lies you and your government told to get us there and keep us there, and for the Americans who have needlessly died there and who will needlessly die there tomorrow.

This president has his fictitious Iraqi WMD, and his lies - disguised as subtle hints - linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and his reason-of-the-week for keeping us there when all the evidence for at least three years has told us we need to get as many of our kids out as quickly as possible.

That president had his fictitious attacks on Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, and the next thing any of us knew, the Senate had voted 88-2 to approve the blank check with which Lyndon Johnson paid for our trip into hell.

And yet President Bush just saw the grim reminders of that trip into hell: the 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese killed; the 10,000 civilians who’ve been blown up by landmines since we pulled out; the genocide in the neighboring country of Cambodia, which we triggered.

Yet these parallels - and these lessons - eluded President Bush entirely.

And, in particular, the one over-arching lesson about Iraq that should’ve been written everywhere he looked in Vietnam went unseen.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit”?

Mr. Bush, we did quit in Vietnam!

A decade later than we should have, 58,000 dead later than we should have, but we finally came to our senses.

The stable, burgeoning, vivid country you just saw there, is there because we finally had the good sense to declare victory and get out!

The domino theory was nonsense, sir.

Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.

Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.

And most importantly - as President Reagan’s assistant secretary of state, Lawrence Korb, said on this newscast Friday - we were only in a position to win the Cold War because we quit in Vietnam.

We went home. And instead it was the Russians who learned nothing from Vietnam, and who repeated every one of our mistakes when they went into Afghanistan. And alienated their own people, and killed their own children, and bankrupted their own economy and allowed us to win the Cold War.

We awakened so late, but we did awaken.

Finally, in Vietnam, we learned the lesson. We stopped endlessly squandering lives and treasure and the focus of a nation on an impossible and irrelevant dream, but you are still doing exactly that, tonight, in Iraq.

And these lessons from Vietnam, Mr. Bush, these priceless, transparent lessons, writ large as if across the very sky, are still a mystery to you.

“We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

No, sir.

We will succeed against terrorism, for our country’s needs, toward binding up the nation’s wounds when you quit, quit the monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq.

And in the interim, Mr. Bush, an American kid will be killed there, probably tonight or tomorrow.

And here, sir, endeth the lesson.

**

“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15750535/”

Has Fox News Gone Too Far?
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown

Thursday 16 November 2006

“Countdown” host Keith Olbermann talks to “Outfoxed” filmmaker Robert Greenwald about a Fox News memo that instructs staffers on who and where to spin the news. Keith Olbermann highlighted an alleged internal Fox memo sent to staff the day after Democrats took control of the Congress on his Nov. 15 show. He talked to documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who examined other similar memos put out by the network in his movie “Outfoxed.”

Transcription

One of the most ingenious aspects of the false charge of an intentional liberal bias in the news media is the unstated inference that if there is a liberal bias there by necessity cannot be an intentional conservative bias.

A new piece of hard evidence that there indeed a conservative bias in at least one quarter of the media, a Rosetta Stone of jaundiced journalism.

It’s apparently a printout of a channel’s daily editorial memo, marching orders e-mailed to key staffers on how and where to slant the news. And how to adjust the facts to match the political conclusions and not the other way around.

Dated November 9th, the morning after Democrats secured control of both houses, obtained by the huffingtonpost.com, it states:

“The elections and Rumsfeld’s resignations were a major event but not the end of the world. The war on terror goes on without interruption.”

Then it brings out the old, a vote for Democrats is a vote for terrorists chestnut:

“Let’s be on the lookout for any statements from the Iraqi insurgents who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled Congress.”

Then there’s another dig at the new majority:

“The question of the day and indeed for the rest of Bush’s term is what’s the Dem plan for Iraq? This could be a very short live shot for Jim Angle, but he’ll try.”

And finally a reiteration for the network to continue to try the scare the crap out of the American people:

“We’ll continue to work the Hamas threat to the U.S. that came hours after the election results. Just because Dems won, the war on terror isn’t over.”

The Columbia Journalism Review pointed out that hours after that memo was issued Fox News live desk host Martha McCallum reported from New York that there were,

“Some reports of cheering in the streets on behalf of the supporters of the insurgency in Iraq that they’re very pleased with the way things are going here and also with the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld.”

Now, that’s a coincidence.

**

Published on Friday, November 17, 2006 by the “http://www.seattlepi.com”

Neocons Blame Bush for Iraq Fiasco

by Helen Thomas

The mid-term elections sounded the requiem for the group of neoconservatives who helped design the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It’s over for them and their big dreams of pre-emptive wars and conquest of the Middle East. If anything, this group has left America weakened by the tragic military misadventure in Iraq. They convinced President Bush it would be a “cakewalk” to invade and occupy Iraq but it has turned out otherwise. Those power-driven ideologues have learned that the price for their dream was high -- too high.

So much for their calamitous “Project for A New American Century,” which laid out the agenda to transform several Arab nations to their liking. It also meant sending Americans to kill and die for reasons yet to be explained by the president.

The neocons now blame a dysfunctional Bush administration -- not their own ignorance of the history of the Arab world. They have belatedly learned that Iraqis -- like any other people -- will fight any foreign invader and occupier. History would have shown them that overcoming an insurgency in the form of internal resistance has been a losing proposition. Look at the experiences of such high-powered nations as the U.S. in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the French in Algeria.

Among the first of the Iraq war architects to bail out was Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy defense secretary, who now heads the World Bank. When he spoke several months ago at the National Press Club and was asked about Iraq, he replied: “That’s not my problem.”

Many top-strata Pentagon civilians close to Rumsfeld’s inner circle are expected to be getting pink slips when Rumsfeld departs after former CIA director Robert Gates is confirmed as his successor.

Another Iraq hawk who has departed is Douglas Feith, the former Defense Department official who set up a separate intelligence unit in the Pentagon to offset the more dovish CIA analysis of the mythical military threat by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Feith is now teaching at Georgetown University.

David Rose has written about the demise of the neocons in an article titled “Now They Tell Us” to be published in the January issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Rose quotes Richard Perle, who long advocated “regime change” in Iraq, as being shocked at the brutality of the war. “I underestimated the level of depravity,” Perle told Rose, adding that “an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic ‘failed state’ is not inevitable but is becoming more likely.”

And get this: Perle, former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, blamed Bush. “The decisions did not get made that should have been made,” Perle said. “At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible,” he said. In retrospect, Perle said, if he had the chance to do it again, he would not have advocated the invasion of Iraq.

Rose said he had expected to encounter disappointment among the neocons but instead found them to be despairing and angry over the incompetence of the Bush administration they once saw as “their brightest hope.”

Former White House speechwriter David Frum who coined the “axis of evil” slogan for Bush to single out Iran, North Korea and Iraq as dangerous, also blames Bush for the Iraq quagmire.

Rose quoted Frum him as saying that the insurgency has proved “it can kill anyone who cooperates” with the U.S. -- and the U.S. has “failed to prove it can protect them.” That situation, he added “must ultimately be blamed on failure at the center, starting with President Bush.”

With friends like the neocons, Bush needs no enemies.

There is an irony in the president’s diplomatic visit to Vietnam this week, evoking memories of another U.S. military misadventure. But he will also see a silver lining even in defeat, as old wounds are forgotten and new friends are made.

For that reason Bush should swallow his pride, acknowledge a colossal mistake, restore our moral image on the international stage and set the nation on a peaceful course in the 21st century.

It’s not too late.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: “mailto:helent@hearstdc.com”.

**

Published on Monday, November 20, 2006 by the “http://www.independent.co.uk” / UK

US and Britain Are in Denial over Failed Policy, Says Former Envoy

by Anne Penketh Iraq needs a new government to begin a process of national reconciliation leading to the withdrawal of foreign troops, because the US, Britain and Iraqi leaders are in a “state of denial” about their failed policy, a former UN envoy to the country says.

“There is a refusal to accept that the so-called process is not working. It collapsed a long time ago. They should sit down and put something else up. What we need is a serious attempt at national reconciliation that has never taken place,” said Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian diplomat who put together the first blueprint for the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

**

Published on Thursday, November 16, 2006 by truthdig <http://www.truthdig.com>

Farewell, Rummy

by Molly Ivins

There’s been so much in print about how Daddy 41’s people are back in the saddle, I was terrified when I saw a photo of Dan Quayle among the pack. If they’ve called back Dan Quayle to lend intellectual heft, we’re all dead ducks. Fortunately, it was just a file picture of Quayle with the old team.

It does seem that we may be going back to the typical modus operandi of Dubya. Poppy Bush has helped Junior out of the Vietnam War, his failures in the oil business and other efforts all of his “adult” life.

Unfortunately for us and for the world, the people from the first Bush administration who initially joined this administration were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Not exactly the most diplomatic, forward-looking, helpful people to be guiding Dubya.

During the first Gulf War, Bush 41 and his administration knew what it would be like if they tried to take Baghdad—and opted not to go in. Now, the more sober-headed people from that administration are moving in to try to clean up the mess Junior made in his Iraq excursion.

Meanwhile, let us bid farewell and adieu to Brother Donald Rumsfeld, who is so full of wisdom he does not seem to be able to apply it. As a parting gift, here are some of his classic quotes:

1. “If you develop rules, never have more than 10.”

2. “Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. As Charles De Gaulle said, the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.”

3. “Needless to say, the president is correct. Whatever it was he said.”

4. “I don’t do quagmires.”

5. “I don’t do diplomacy.”

6. “I don’t do foreign policy.”

7. “I don’t do predictions.”

8. “I don’t do numbers.”

9. “I don’t do book reviews.”

10. “Don’t divide the world into ‘them’ and ‘us.’ Avoid infatuation with or resentment of the press, the Congress, rivals or opponents. Accept them as facts. They have their jobs, and you have yours.”

11. “Don’t say, ‘The White House wants.’ Buildings can’t want.”

12. “If I know the answer, I’ll tell you the answer. And if I don’t, I’ll just respond cleverly.”

13. “I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it’s what I said.”

In fact, I’m rather going to miss Rumsfeld’s Zen-like nuggets of wisdom, the most famous of which is probably about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns:

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

According to Newsweek, Air Force Secretary Jim Roche went to Rumsfeld early on and said, “Don, you do realize that Iraq could be another Vietnam.”

Replied Rummy: “Vietnam? You think you have to tell me about Vietnam? Of course it won’t be Vietnam. We are going to go in, overthrow Saddam, get out. That’s it.”

I don’t know what happened to that excellent plan, but I would like to know who knew it was unknowable.

**

“http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003410658”

New Survey: Iraqis Want a Speedy US Exit - and Back Attacks on Our Forces
Editor and Publisher

Tuesday 21 November 2006

New York - Past surveys have hinted at this result, but a new poll in Iraq makes it more stark than ever: the Iraqi people want the U.S. to exit their country. And most Iraqis now approve of attacks on U.S. forces, even though 94% express disapproval of al-Qaeda.

At one time, this was primarily a call by the Sunni minority, but now the Shiites have also come around to this view. The survey by much-respected World Public Opinion (WPO), taken in September, found that 74% of Shiites and 91% of Sunnis in Iraq want us to leave within a year. The number of Shiites making this call in Baghdad, where the U.S. may send more troops to bring order, is even higher (80%). In contrast, earlier this year, 57% of this same group backed an “open-ended” U.S. stay.

By a wide margin, both groups believe U.S. forces are provoking more violence than they’re preventing - and that day-to-day security would improve if we left.

Support for attacks on U.S. forces now commands majority support among both Shiites and Sunnis. The report states: “Support for attacks on U.S.-led forces has grown to a majority position - now six in ten. Support appears to be related to widespread perception, held by all ethnic groups, that the U.S. government plans to have permanent military bases in Iraq and would not withdraw its forces from Iraq even if the Iraqi government asked it to. If the U.S. were to commit to withdraw, more than half of those who approve of attacks on US troops say that their support for attacks would diminish.”

The backing for attacks on our forces has jumped to 61% from 47% in January.

Among Iraqis overall, 77% percent prefer that a strong government get rid of militias, including 100% of the Sunnis polled and 82% of Kurds. But “the Shia population in Baghdad is more skeptical than elsewhere about the wisdom of disarming the militias,” a report by WPO states. In Baghdad, Shias say they want militias to continue to protect their security (59%).

The national survey reached 1,150 Iraqis. It was conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.

Nearly every opinion poll in the U.S. has shown that roughly 6 in 10 Americans also back a withdrawal within a year.

**

“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/20/AR2006112001101.html”

The Only Real Option: Leave Iraq Now
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post

Tuesday 21 November 2006

Good lord, if even Henry Kissinger now says that military victory in Iraq is impossible, pretty soon George W. Bush really will be left with just Laura and Barney on his side.

**

If in fact the President did issue false and misleading statements, engage in deception and concealment concerning a matter of such great importance to the country as the conduct of war in which thousands and thousands of Americans were killed, irrespective of how Americans now view that war, and then, in fact, he has committed an offense for which he is accountable. James Iredell, one of the Framers of the Constitution and US Supreme Court Justice, stated in 1787 that “The President must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.” If it should appear that he has not given them full information, but has concealed important intelligence which he ought to have communicated, and by that means induced them to enter into measures injurious to their country in which they would not have consented to had the true state of things been disclosed to them, in this case I ask whether an impeachment for a misdemeanor would lie.

Robert W. Kastenmeier, Debate on Articles of Impeachment, 1974

US Code Title 18, Sec 371, makes it a crime to conspire to cheat the government by improperly carrying out federal programs and laws or by denying it of the proper work by its employees. Political considerations were used in the letting of Government grants, contracts, and loans; the prosecution of legal and regulatory action; the making of administration personnel decisions; the determination of issues and programs to be stressed by administration; and the communications of administration activities to the voting public.

US Senate, Final Report on Presidential Activities, 1974

~Withholding vital business, consumer, health, and safety information from the public, with utter disregard for the human consequences of their actions.

US News, 12/03

200 major rollbacks of US environmental laws, weakening the protection of our county’s air, water, public lands, and wildlife. Deceived the public about plans to eliminate the nation’s most important environmental laws. Actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenetic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. With orders, directives, enforcement reversals, refusals to enforce.

RFK, Jr. Crimes against Nature

The Bush failure to tackle global warming is more serious than terrorism. He is exposing the entire world to the risk of hunger, drought, flooding, and debilitating diseases.

Sir David King, Science journal (Steve Connor, “Top Brit Scientist... Independent, 1/9/04

The American people do not and should not tolerate government by secrecy.

Phyllis Schlafly, conservative commentator

***

12/13/06

As we pass another anniversary, it’s tragically sad to think that our represented generation has failed the Pearl Harbor test we were faced with.

In always trying to be the optimist, I might give partial credit for one item on the positive side of the George WRONG Bush Ledger come Judgment Day: his rhetorical and financial support for world wide aids prevention programs would be steps in the right direction if it weren’t for the abstinence only/ no condom/ no family planning/ no abortion subtext he infuses into them.

As another literary suggestion, I agree that this book is a superb summary of incompetence and makes a perfect complement to Frank Rich:

Paul Krugman: Take a look at Thomas Ricks’s “Fiasco,” the best account yet of how the U.S. occupation of Iraq was mismanaged. The prime villain in that book is Donald Rumsfeld, whose delusional thinking and penchant for power games undermined whatever chances for success the United States might have had.

There is the reality-based flurry of many excellent headlines and editorial descriptions, but there comes a time in the course of human events when they become self evident...

“Evil is not enough. WMD is not enough. What the people need now is hard data that demonstrate that Saddam has WMD ready to use on the people of the US.”

-Peggy Noonan, 9/11/2002

“Who are you going to believe--me or your own eyes?”

-Groucho Marx

“We should not be seduced by the expectation of dancing in the streets.”

Sen. Chuck Hagel, Face the Nation, 8/4/2002

“The insurgency is strategically and operationally insignificant.”

-Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Army senior commander, 11/1/2003

“They have hijacked our security to fight an invented war.”

- Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, Jt Staff Dir of Operations

WOW! Those percentages keep dropping-- through the 30’s, 20’s, teens, and now, INTO THE ONE DIGITS!! There’s still 4 to 9% of the population that agrees with that dream of riding this Texas Brokeback Asshole to a job well done, victory, success and glory in Iraq:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061208/ap_on_re_us/iraq_ap_poll

Poll: Americans see no easy Iraq exit

By NANCY BENAC, Associated Press Writer

Fri Dec 8, 5:14 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Americans see no easy exit from Iraq: Just 9 percent expect the war to end in clear-cut victory, according to the latest AP-Ipsos poll.

The numbers evoke parallels to public opinion about the war in Vietnam four decades ago. In December 1965, when the American side of the war still had eight years to run, a Gallup survey found just 7 percent believed it would end in victory.

**

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/11/opinion/polls/main2247797.shtml

Dec. 12, 2006 5:51pm

Poll: Iraq Going Badly And Getting Worse

Majority In CBS News Survey Doubt U.S. Can Win; 62% Call War ‘A Mistake’

NEW YORK, Dec. 11, 2006

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

(CBS/AP)

Opposition to the war is now taking on historic proportions, with 62 percent saying it was “a mistake” to send U.S. troops to Iraq — slightly more than told a Gallup Poll in 1973 that it was a mistake to send U.S. forces to Vietnam.

Only 4 percent say the U.S. should keep fighting as it is doing now.

Just 8 percent think no changes in U.S. policy are needed.

IS THE SITUATION IN IRAQ…? Getting better 8%; Getting worse 52%

Just 21 percent approve of President Bush’s handling of the war, the lowest number he’s ever received

BUSH’S JOB HANDLING IRAQ: Disapprove 75%

Seventy-one percent say the war is going badly,

Only 15 percent of Americans — the lowest number ever — say the U.S. is currently winning the war.

Sixty percent think that Iraq will never become a stable democracy — the highest number ever — while 85 percent now characterize the situation there as a civil war.

By a 2-1 margin, Americans now say they have more confidence in congressional Democrats to handle the war than in the president.

Nearly six in 10 Americans want to see some kind of a drawdown in U.S. troop levels, including 25 percent who want all U.S. forces removed from Iraq.

**

Published on Wednesday, December 13, 2006 by Bloomberg

Americans Hit `New Level of Discontent’ Over Iraq, Poll Finds

by Heidi Przybyla

The American public has abandoned President George W. Bush on the Iraq war and is looking to Congress for a way out that includes a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops, according to a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll.

The national survey shows a disaffected public that has grown more sour about the conflict since September. By most measures, Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the situation in Iraq, with only 15 percent believing Bush’s claim that the U.S. is winning in Iraq.

More than half of Americans want to set a schedule to withdraw all troops, a significant change from September, when 44 percent said the U.S. should stay as long as it takes. ``There is a new level of discontent’‘ over the war, said Susan Pinkus, the Times polling director. ``It’s hurting the economy and it’s hurting other issues. This is all the president can concentrate on.’‘

**

Casualties in Iraq

And you didn’t think Bush could kill and hurt more Americans than bin Laden! 3287 and 24,709!!!! And probably much closer to 100,000 for total casualties!

The Human Cost of Occupation

Edited by Michael Ewens :: Contact American Military Casualties in Iraq

Date Total

American Deaths

Since war began (3/19/03): 2931

Since “Mission Accomplished” (5/1/03) (the list) 2794

Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 2465

Since Handover (6/29/04): 2065

Since Election (1/31/05): 1495

American Wounded Official Estimated

Total Wounded: 21778 22000 - 100000

Latest Fatality December 10th, 2006

Page last updated 12/11/06 10:12 am EDT

``

US Military Deaths - Afghanistan 356

Other Coalition Troops 239

**

Newt Gingrich: “It Was An Enormous Mistake”

Argus Leader | MONICA LABELLE |

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, told students and faculty at the University of South Dakota Monday that the United States should pull out of Iraq.

“It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003,” Gingrich said during a question-and-answer session at the school. “We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it.”

**

Published on Wednesday, December 13, 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle

America Loses Another War

Iraq: a shameful ass-whupping, or just a pathetic trouncing? Ugly disgrace? Choices, choices

by Mark Morford

The good news is, we’re all back in harmony. All back on the same page. No more divisiveness and no more silly bickering and no more nasty and indignant red state/blue state rock throwing because we’re finally all back in cozy let’s-hug-it-out agreement: The “war” in Iraq is over. And what’s more, we lost. Very, very badly.

**

http://www.lancastereaglegazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061209/OPINION02/612090310&SearchID=73265847799962&GID=eLPjvmjoYK58v/2zxdx0PmnIBQb5FmPY4cWqDx2cToo%3D

Afghanistan, not Iraq, is where we should focus our efforts

NOT only is there no path to victory in Iraq, as the Iraq Study Group (ISG) has made clear, but there is also very little chance of preventing disaster.

(Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.)

**

Published on Tuesday, December 12, 2006 by the “http://www.boston.com/news”

Bush’s Sinking Ship of Fools

by H.D.S. Greenway

“The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing,” said Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group. “Our ship of state has hit rough waters.” The seafaring metaphor has become the sine qua non of Iraq discussions. “Stay the course” and “cut and run” come to mind, the latter referring to the days when you might cut your anchor chain in order to save the ship. One is tempted to call the Baker-Hamilton condemnation of incompetence and bungling a shot across the bow of an Iraq policy that is dead in the water and sinking.

The one lifeline that both the Bush administration and the study group are clinging to is the concept that training an Iraqi army can provide enough security for the United States to withdraw without leaving utter chaos. But the record so far, as Iraqi president Jalal Talabani said, has been to “move from failure to failure.”

**

Published on Tuesday, December 12, 2006 by the Toronto Star

Bush `Domino’ Theory on Iraq Does Not Add up

by Richard Gwyn

Comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam have become commonplace ever since the publication last week of the report of the Iraq Study Group with its judgment that the situation is “grave and deteriorating.”

One important comparison has been overlooked, though: Just as president Lyndon Johnson used the excuse of the “domino theory” to justify keeping American troops in Vietnam, so President George W. Bush is now using the same tactic.

More and more these days, the White House is making the argument that if the U.S. pulls out of Iraq too quickly, the consequences to the region and to the war on terrorism will be disastrous.

This is uncannily similar to the arguments made some 30 years ago against a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. Then, the proposition went, a Communist victory in South Vietnam would be followed by a series of Communist takeovers in Southeast Asia, all the way down to Indonesia.

**

Two More Years

By Paul Krugman

The New York Times

Monday 04 December 2006

Even now, it seems, the wise men of Washington can’t bring

themselves to face up to two glaringly obvious truths.

The first is that Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq for no

reason.

It’s true that terrible things will happen when U.S. forces

withdraw. Mr. Bush was attacking a straw man when he mocked those who think

we can make a “graceful exit” from Iraq. Everyone I know realizes that the

civil war will get even worse after we’re gone, and that there will probably

be a bloody bout of ethnic cleansing that effectively partitions the country

into hostile segments.

But nobody - not even Donald Rumsfeld, it turns out - thinks we’re

making progress in Iraq. So the same terrible things that would happen if we

withdrew soon will still happen if we delay that withdrawal for two, three

or more years. The only difference is that we’ll sacrifice many more

American lives along the way.

The second truth is that the war will go on all the same, unless

something or someone forces Mr. Bush to change course.

During his recent trip to Vietnam, Mr. Bush was asked whether there

were any lessons from that conflict for Iraq. His response: “We’ll succeed

unless we quit.”

It was a bizarre answer given both the history of the Vietnam War

and the facts on the ground in Iraq, but it makes perfect sense given what

we know about Mr. Bush’s character. He has never been willing to own up to

mistakes, however trivial. If he were to accept the failure of his adventure

in Iraq, he would be admitting, at least implicitly, to having made the

mother of all mistakes.

So Mr. Bush will keep sending other men’s children off to fight his

war. And he’ll always insist that Iraq would have been a great victory if

only his successors had shared his steely determination.

Well, here’s a question for those who might be tempted, yet again,

to shy away from a confrontation with Mr. Bush over Iraq: How do you ask a

man to be the last to die for a bully’s ego?

**

Has He Started Talking to the Walls?

By Frank Rich

The New York Times

Sunday 03 December 2006

It turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to

understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be

consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of

Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while

Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam

to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior

of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely

untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq.

He doesn’t know what the truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is

primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week

before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene,

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in

Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at

all at the state level.” Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes

up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim

Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief

who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a

war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

**

Published on Sunday, December 3, 2006 by the Washington Post

He’s The Worst Ever

by Eric Foner

Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55

historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from “great” to “failure,”

such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the

American past.

Despite some notable accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy, Nixon

is mostly associated today with disdain for the Constitution and abuse of

presidential power. Obsessed with secrecy and media leaks, he viewed every

critic as a threat to national security and illegally spied on U.S.

citizens. Nixon considered himself above the law.

Bush has taken this disdain for law even further. He has sought to strip

people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta

in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers

and knowledge of evidence against them. In dozens of statements when signing

legislation, he has asserted the right to ignore the parts of laws with

which he disagrees. His administration has adopted policies regarding the

treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated

virtually the entire world. Usually, during wartime, the Supreme Court has

refrained from passing judgment on presidential actions related to national

defense. The court’s unprecedented rebukes of Bush’s policies on detainees

indicate how far the administration has strayed from the rule of law.

But somehow, in his first

six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership,

misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think

there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S.

history.

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University.

**

Published on Friday, December 1, 2006 by the Independent / UK

Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in Denial

by Robert Fisk

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military

debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of

Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How

does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that

the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete”? The “job” -

Washington’s project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel’s

image - is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their

hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course,

for their disaster.

History’s “deniers” are many - and all subject to the same folly: faced with

overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy,

dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback,

clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory - or

because they have themselves so often promised victory - that fate will be

kind.

**

Published on Friday, December 1, 2006 by the Nieman Watchdog

On Calling Bullshit

by Dan Froomkin

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly

irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The

threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what

journalists were put on this green earth to do.

What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so

refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those

so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it

is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.

Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to

comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the

substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning

is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political

battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy

choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

**

Published on Friday, December 1, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times

Abandon Iraq to Save It

The presence of troops will only make things worse; the U.S. should find

other ways to help.

by Rosa Brooks

Conditions in Iraq grow more appalling each day, and a substantial majority

of Iraqis now believe that the continued presence of U.S. troops is a major

cause of the ongoing carnage. Despite this, supporters of the Bush

administration continue to insist that if we withdraw U.S. troops, we’ll be

“abandoning” Iraq.

“Abandoning” Iraq to what, exactly? To civil war? Iraq already has that,

thanks in large part to us. Maybe things will get worse if we leave _ but

maybe our departure is the only thing that can save Iraq. The Iraqis think

they’ll be better off without us.

**

Published on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 by the Boston Globe

Bush’s Strategy of Wishful Thinking

by H.D.S. Greenway

America has been consumed by semantic silliness over whether the catastrophe in Iraq is a civil war. It has been clear for almost a year that a civil war between Shia and Sunni factions is in progress, but the White House remains in denial, just as it previously refused to admit there was an insurgency.

There are good reasons for not admitting to a civil war. The Bush administration wants to minimize Iraq’s struggles because insurgency and civil war spell failure. A burgeoning insurgency implied that “mission accomplished” had been nothing more than a chimera. A civil war suggests that the victory that President Bush still talks about may be just wishful thinking. Thus the president says the disintegration of the Iraqi state is simply a touch of Al Qaeda-instigated sectarian violence.

Wishful thinking and its hand-maiden, deliberate deception, have been the common denominators for the Bush administration’s failures -- starting with the original concept that imposing democracy by force could transform the Middle East.

**

Published on Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by Reuters

Iraq Report Sees “Grave and Deteriorating” Crisis

by Arshad Mohammed and Steve Holland

WASHINGTON - U.S. troops should begin withdrawing from combat and Washington should launch a diplomatic and political push to halt a “grave and deteriorating” crisis in Iraq, a high-level panel studying the war said on Wednesday.

**

Published on Friday, December 8, 2006 by the New York Times

They Told You So

by Paul Krugman

Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.

The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true.

And so it was with those who warned against invading Iraq. At best, they were ignored.

**

The Sunshine Boys Can’t Save Iraq

By FRANK RICH

Published on Sunday, December 10, 2006 by the New York Times

By prescribing placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn’t plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat.

THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war’s violence boiled over soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in our coalition of the willing — Thailand, the Philippines, Australia — had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training of South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on its performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men (from Dean Acheson to Omar Bradley) was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement.

But there the stories of Vietnam and Iraq diverge. Those wise men, unlike the Iraq Study Group, were clear in their verdict. And that Texan president, unlike ours, paid more than lip service to changing course. He abruptly announced he would abjure re-election, restrict American bombing and entertain the idea of peace talks. But as Stanley Karnow recounts in “Vietnam: A History,” it was already too late, after some 20,000 casualties and three years of all-out war, for an easy escape: “The frustrating talks were to drag on for another five years. More Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had died there previously. And the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.”

The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.

**

Losing the Good War

The New York Times | Editorial

Tuesday 05 December 2006

Afghanistan was supposed to be the good war - and the war America was winning. But because of the Bush administration’s inattention and mismanagement, even the good war is going wrong.

The latest grim news is that after years of effort - and more than $1 billion spent - Afghanistan’s American-trained police force is unable to perform even routine law enforcement work. According to an article in yesterday’s Times, investigators for the Pentagon and the State Department found that the training program’s managers did not even know how many police officers were serving, while thousands of trucks and other American-purchased police equipment have simply disappeared.

The failure to provide local security - or even a semblance of impartial justice - helps explain why so many Afghans have lost confidence in the pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai, and why a growing number are again turning to the Taliban for protection. The failure to stand up an effective police force also helps explain why opium cultivation rose by nearly 60 percent this year.

**

Published on Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by the Independent / UK

Iraq: One by One, They Tell the Truth

As Tony Blair flies out to meet George Bush, the latest admission of failure in Iraq has made the two leaders appear even more isolated.

Colin Powell

After telling the UN assembly in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the former Secretary of State admitted in May 2004 the claims were “inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading”.

Colonel Tim Collins

The Army colonel made a famous rousing speech to troops on the eve of battle. But in September 2005, he declared:

“History might notice the invasion has arguably acted as the best recruiting sergeant for al-Qa’ida ever.”

Paul Bremer

The former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq admitted in January 2006:

“It [the invasion] was a much tougher job than I think I expected it to be... we really didn’t see the insurgency coming.”

Zalmay Khalilzad

Contradicting the usually upbeat rhetoric, the US ambassador in Iraq said in March: “We have opened a Pandora’s box”. And unless the violence abated, Iraq would “make Taliban Afghanistan look like child’s play”.

Jack Straw

The former foreign secretary, one of the cheerleaders for the war, said in September: “The current situation is dire. I think many mistakes were made after the military action - there is no question about it - by the United States administration.”

Gen Sir Richard Dannatt

The British General admitted in an interview in October: “I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates [them].”

Richard Perle

Regarded as one of the intellectual godfathers of the war, Perle changed his tack in November, admitting that “huge mistakes were made” in the invasion of Iraq. “The levels of brutality we’ve seen are truly horrifying,” he added.

Ken Adelman

Last month, the noted neoconservative said: “The national security team... turned out to be among the most incompetent in the post-war era. Not only did each of them have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly.”

Donald Rumsfeld

A memo from the hardline former defence secretary revealed this week that he had been looking for a change of tactics. “In my view, it is time for a major adjustment... what US forces are doing in Iraq is not working well enough...”

Robert Gates

Yesterday, Mr Rumsfeld’s proposed successor was asked at a Senate hearing whether the US was winning the war in Iraq. “No, sir,” he replied. And he warned that the situation could lead to a “regional conflagration”.

Tony Blair ...

George Bush ...

**

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/alterman

the Liberal media | posted November 22, 2006 (December 11, 2006 issue)

Liar. ‘Liar?’

Eric Alterman

Once upon a time, only people with bad manners took note of the fact that George W. Bush was an inveterate liar. One such person, pundit Michael Kinsley, observed back in April 2002, “Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother.” Back then it was undeniable but all but unsayable in the mainstream media. Even when addressing himself to the very topic of Bush’s myriad lies six months later, Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank combed his thesaurus and came up with “embroidering,” “taken some flights of fancy,” “taken some liberties,” “omitted qualifiers,” etc. But even this artful linguistic circumlocution so infuriated Karl Rove & Co. that the White House pressured the Post to reassign the reporter. When asked to comment on an incontrovertible, unarguable, prime-time presidential lie--Bush publicly claimed that Iraq would not allow inspections, when in fact the UN inspectors had to be kicked out for his war to begin--on CNN’s Reliable Sources program, Milbank said, “I think what people basically decided was this is just the President being the President.” What, after all, is the big deal about lying about why you started a war?

Bush had been lying right from the start, of course, but just for fun, one assumes, he recently decided to double-down on his bet. On the day after the election, Bush explained to the media that the discrepancy between his insistence just a few days earlier to reporters that Donald Rumsfeld would stay in his job come hell or high water while, in fact, he had already started the process to replace Rumsfeld with Robert Gates could be explained by... well, heck, Bush just felt like lying about it. His exact words: “I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question, and to get you on to another question, was to give you that answer.”

**

Published on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Media Sham for Iraq War -- It’s Happening Again

by Norman Solomon

The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq has become notorious in the annals of American journalism. Even many reporters, editors and commentators who fueled the drive to war in 2002 and early 2003 now acknowledge that major media routinely tossed real journalism out the window in favor of boosting war.

But it’s happening again.

The current media travesty is a drumbeat for the idea that the U.S. war effort must keep going.

**

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seery/what-if-just-what-if-bu_b_35183.html

11.29.2006

What If, Just What If, Bush isn’t a Complete Idiot?

Suppose, for a minute, that Bush and his war advisers aren’t simply bullheaded boobs, feckless fanatics, or delusional dunderheads (the proposition strains credulity, I realize, but bear with me). Let’s go down this path, as a thought experiment.

Imagine that Bush well knows and privately concedes everything about the Iraq War that his critics, both Democrats and Republicans, are now screaming at him.

Maybe he knows that “victory” in the war is totally out of reach, even as he publicly insists upon it. Maybe he knows, looking at all of the data in front of him and hearing his advisers state the obvious, that Iraq has in fact descended into civil war or all-out chaos.

Maybe he isn’t oblivious to all the corruption, double-dealing, profiteering, ruthlessness, and murderousness now showcased on a daily basis throughout Iraq.

Maybe it has truly sunk into his Alfred E. Neuman “What, Me Worry?” persona that all of his previously stated goals for post-Saddam Iraq are now in shambles.

Consider, for a moment, that he might be pursuing an agenda beyond mere ego and arrogance and idiocy.

The U.S. military hasn’t been aggressively patrolling the streets of Baghdad of late. Recent reports suggest that they might be pulling out of al-Anbar province altogether. Sure doesn’t look as if the purpose of the U.S. troop presence is to “stabilize” the country anymore. Pull back, lay low, and bide our time. In the meanwhile, let the Shiites kill the Sunnis and vice versa (an official version of Rush Limbaugh’s recent call to let civil war proceed unabated). Let the bodies pile up. The Bush Doctrine at this point: Who cares? (Those dead Iraqis are but commas in the Book of History anyway.)

So why stay there? Sometimes you can tease things out by indirection, assuming that they do indeed follow and reveal some logic (a big if in this case, granted). Bush has never pledged that the U.S. would someday leave Iraq altogether, as an ultimate goal. Methinks those military bases are there to stay. “Completing the mission” and “achieving victory” are Bush code words for keeping a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, a base for future operations.

And for oil. Bush and Cheney, as wily and wangling ex-oil executives, aren’t simply going to walk away from those vast oil reserves without a fight.

Let’s face it: Bush has no intention of leaving Iraq, but he isn’t going public with his ulterior reasons. This is not now a War on Terror, if it ever was--and I suspect he and his advisers know that. This is U.S. imperialism--a geo-strategic land and oil grab. The War on Terror has been a pretext--all along. Shifting conditions on the ground have refuted our various claims for being in that country and exposed them, if after the fact, as false. We have no reason to be in Iraq anymore--the truth becomes bare--except for oil and military bases.

**

Monday October 2, 2006 9:16 PM

By JIM KRANE

Associated Press Writer

QALAT, Afghanistan (AP) - U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily .

Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida accompanying Frist on his trip, said negotiating with the Taliban was not ``out of the question’‘ ... ``A political solution is how it’s all going to be solved,’‘ he said.

``Approaching counterinsurgency by winning hearts and minds will ultimately be the answer,’‘ Frist said. ``Military versus insurgency one-to-one doesn’t sound like it can be won. It sounds to me ... that the Taliban is everywhere.’‘

**

True Blue Populists
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 13 November 2006

Senator George Allen of Virginia is understandably shocked and despondent. Just a year ago, a National Review cover story declared that his “down-home persona” made him “quite possibly the next president of the United States.” Instead, his political career seems over.

And it wasn’t just macaca, or even the war, that brought him down. Mr. Allen, a reliable defender of the interests of the economic elite, found himself facing an opponent who made a point of talking about the problem of rising inequality. And the tobacco-chewing, football-throwing, tax-cutting, Social Security-privatizing senator was only one of many faux populists defeated by real populists last Tuesday.

Ever since movement conservatives took over, the Republican Party has pushed for policies that benefit a small minority of wealthy Americans at the expense of the great majority of voters. To hide this reality, conservatives have relied on wagging the dog and wedge issues, but they’ve also relied on a brilliant marketing campaign that portrays Democrats as elitists and Republicans as representatives of the average American.

This sleight of hand depends on shifting the focus from policy to personal style: John Kerry speaks French and windsurfs, so pay no attention to his plan to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy and use the proceeds to make health care affordable.

This year, however, the American people wised up.

**

Richard Haass: “Iraq Is Not Winnable”
Interview by Georg Mascolo
Der Spiegel

Monday 13 November 2006

What happens next in the Middle East? Spiegel spoke to Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to find out. A widely respected foreign policy expert, Haass warns that the Middle East could become dangerous for years to come.

**

Top Marine: No Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq
By David Martin
CBS News

Monday 13 Novemeber 2006

General and superiors didn’t have plan for control of Iraqi cities.

There is no one on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has visited Iraq more often than Gen. Mike Hagee, whose term as Commandant of the United States Marine Corps ends Monday.

Hagee took over the Marine Corps just two months before the invasion of Iraq - and throughout his years as Commandant, he made a point of going there every two months to do a firsthand assessment of the battlefield.

I spoke exclusively with the general about conditions in Iraq. You can listen to an extended portion of that interview here.

As Commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force during the lead-up to the war, Hagee was in charge of planning for the Marines’ original push to Baghdad. So I asked him about one of the enduring mysteries of the invasion - why there was no real plan for running the country once Saddam Hussein fell from power.

Unfortunately, Hagee’s comments only deepen the mystery. He says he was deeply concerned about who would take charge of major Iraqi cities, like Najaf, as the Marines pushed through them on their way to Baghdad.

Hagee says he asked his boss again and again who would take charge of those cities. He wanted to know what the plan was for Phase IV - military terminology for the phase that follows the end of major combat operations. Phase IV is, in other words, what comes after “mission accomplished.” Hagee says that he sent his questions up the chain of command, as they say in the military - and never heard back.

**

Published on Saturday, November 25, 2006 by The Australian (Australia’s national daily newspaper)

Iraq a Moral Blunder, Says War Hero

by Patrick Walters

THE former SAS officer who devised and executed the Iraq war plan for Australia’s special forces says that the nation’s involvement has been a strategic and moral blunder.

Peter Tinley, who was decorated for his military service in Afghanistan and Iraq, has broken ranks to condemn the Howard Government over its handling of the war and has called for an immediate withdrawal of Australian troops.

**

Published on Friday, November 24, 2006 by the “http://www.suntimes.com”

What is the Point of Iraq Deaths?

by Andrew Greeley

I found myself pondering as I watched the heartbreaking Veterans Day ceremonies on television, what the government will tell the family -- parents, spouse, children -- of the last American to die in Iraq. Or the families of all the men and women who have died there. What was the point in their deaths? They fought bravely for their country. They did their duty. They will be missed. Their courage is an honor to their sacrifice. That should be enough and that’s all there is.

They died defending American freedom? But American freedom was never at issue. They died to protect the country from weapons of mass destruction, to create a democracy in the midst of the Arab world, to win a victory that would enhance American credibility, to keep faith with those who had already died, to get rid of Saddam Hussein, because the president said it was the right thing to do, because Iraq was the central front in the war or terror?

Or should they be told the real truth? Their young person died because of the arrogance and the ignorance of the American government, because of mistakes and blunders, because some of our leaders thought the war was a good thing, because it would take pressure off of Israel, because of Arab oil.

What can we say to the additional survivors between now and the day the last American dies there, all those lives erased in a lost war our leaders could not end? Should we tell them what Henry Kissinger said of Vietnam casualties after President Nixon took office -- they died in the name of American credibility?

Every time I hear on the radio of new casualties or see bereaved families on television, or open newspapers with massed photos of those who have died, I want to scream “all these losses, all this suffering, all these shattered families were unnecessary.” I sense from a great distance the pain and the grief.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney killed them.

Most Americans agree that the war was mistaken in its inception and mismanaged in its execution.

God forgive us for the war, especially those who voted for it in 2004, and especially the pundits, the commentators, the editorial writers who supported the war until almost the last moment and are still willing to accept more casualties so this country and its president can escape with some dignity.

It’s a shame there will be no war crimes trials.

**

Published on Friday, November 24, 2006 by the “http://www.ft.com”

US Hawk Judges ‘War on Terror’ a Mistake

by Guy Dinmore

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 — Fred Iklé, a Nixon-era arms control veteran and mentor to the current generation of nuclear “hawks”, has an apocalyptic vision of the future.

However, as a contrarian who confounds his neo-conservative admirers, he is also highly critical of the Bush administration’s handling of threats to the US, and calls the “global war on terror” a serious mistake.

**

Published on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 by “http://www.truthdig.com”

In the Shadow of Ho Chi Minh

by Robert Scheer

President Bush has said many dumb things in defense of his Iraq policy. Citing the Vietnam War as a model, however, is perhaps his most ludicrous yet.

This past week found the president sitting before a bust of the victorious Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, seemingly unaware that the United States lost its war with the Communist-led country. Having long and vehemently denied parallels between the invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, he nevertheless admitted now to seeing one.

“Yes,” Bush said. “We’ll succeed, unless we quit.”

Bush seems not to have noticed that we succeeded in Vietnam precisely because we did quit the military occupation of that nation, permitting an ideology of freedom to overcome one of hate. Bush’s rhetoric is frighteningly reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s escalation and expansion of the Vietnam War in an attempt to buy an “honorable” exit with the blood of millions of Southeast Asians and thousands of American soldiers. In the end, a decade of bitter fighting did not prevent an ignominious U.S. departure from Saigon.

Now, however, Vietnam is at peace with its neighbors and poses no security threat to the United States. The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.

**

Shafting the Vets
By Conn Hallinan
Foreign Policy In Focus

Friday 10 November 2006

“War is hell,” Union General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said 14 years after the end of the bloodiest conflict in US history. “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

Clearly the U.S. Civil War is not on the reading list of psychiatrist Sally Satel, a scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Indeed, Satel sees war less as hell than as a golden opportunity for veteran lay-abouts to milk the government by “ overpathologizing the psychic pain of war.”

Satel, whom the AEI trots out anytime the Bush administration needs cover for cutting veteran services and benefits, says the problem for former soldiers is not Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “The real trouble for vets,” she writes, is that “once a patient receives a monthly check based on his psychiatric diagnosis, his motivation to hold a job wanes.” Her solution? “Don’t offer disability benefits too quickly.”

The commentary makes an interesting contrast to a powerful piece in the October 2006 issue of the California Nurses Association’s magazine Registered Nurse titled “The Battle at Home” by Caitlin Fischer and Diana Reiss. They found that “in veterans’ hospitals across the country - and in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded psych and primary care clinics as well - Registered Nurses ... are treating soldiers ... and picking up the pieces of a tattered army.”

According to the authors, RNs across the country “have witnessed the guilt, rage, emotional numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq and Afghanistan,” as well as older vets from previous wars, “whose half-century-old trauma have been ‘triggered’ by the images of Iraq.”

**

Published on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 by the “http://www.washingtonspectator.com/”

Calling Nancy Pelosi: The People’s Case for Impeaching Bush

by Elizabeth Holtzman Editor’s note: With their party back in power for the first time since 1994, some senior House Democrats who will be rising to committee chairmanships are already planning to conduct investigations into wrongdoings of the Bush administration in everything thing from fraud and abuse in Iraq War contracting to illegal domestic surveillance and detainee interrogations. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders, however, are signaling that any investigations will be kept on a tight leash. They fear that scrutiny of the administration will make Democrats appear excessively partisan and cost the party votes in 2008. As for the possible impeachment of President George W. Bush, Pelosi has explicitly declared it to be “off the table.”

Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman is one wise legal thinker who says that, whether or not it would be a political liability for the Democrats, impeaching Bush is their constitutional duty. Holtzman served four terms in Congress, where she played a key role in House impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. Holtzman’s full brief on this subject can be found in “http://www.amazon.com/dp/156025940X?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim” (Nation Books), which she co- wrote with Cynthia L. Cooper.

Impeachment is an essential tool for preserving democracy. The framers of our Constitution, determined to provide protections against grave abuses of power by a president, created the impeachment process as a special procedure for citizens. Through their representatives, citizens would be able to remove a president run amok.

**

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/29/message_to_west_point.php

Message To West Point

Bill Moyers

November 29, 2006

This is an excerpt from the Sol Feinstone Lecture on The Meaning of Freedom delivered by Bill Moyers at the United States Military Academy on November 15, 2006.

**

Published on Monday, November 27, 2006 by Michael Moore.com

Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do ...

by Michael Moore

Tomorrow marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.

That’s right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in LESS time than it’s taken the world’s only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad.

And we haven’t even done THAT. After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole. No wonder the cab fare from the airport into Baghdad is now running around $35,000 for the 25-minute ride. And that doesn’t even include a friggin’ helmet.

**

Published on Monday, November 27, 2006 by the Guardian / UK

They Lied Their Way into Iraq. Now They Are Trying to Lie Their Way out.

Bush and Blair will blame anyone but themselves for the consequences of their disastrous war - even its victims

by Gary Younge

‘In the endgame,” said one of the world’s best-ever chess players, José Raúl Capablanca, “don’t think in terms of moves but in terms of plans.” The situation in Iraq is now unravelling into the bloodiest endgame imaginable. Both popular and official support for the war in those countries that ordered the invasion is already at a low and will only get lower. Whatever mandate the occupiers may have once had from their own electorates - in Britain it was none, in the US it was precarious - has now eroded. They can no longer conduct this war as they have been doing.

**

Published on Monday, November 27, 2006 by the New York Times

While Iraq Burns

by Bob Herbert

Americans are shopping while Iraq burns.

The competing television news images on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Sadr City — where more than 200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs — and the long lines of cars filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that had opened for business at midnight.

**

Published on Monday, November 27, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Impeachment Hearings for Bush & Co.? How about War Crimes Tribunals?

by Heather Wokusch

While Bush administration members have made a sport of breaking the law, both domestically and internationally, their intransigence will come back to haunt - one way or another.

The Bush Doctrine of taking “the battle to the enemy,” for example, is a direct repudiation of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of international force unless in self-defense (after an armed attack across an international border) or related to a UN Security Council decision. And that explains why Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy makes a point to “protect Americans” from “the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution” by the International Criminal Court “whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.”

**

Published on Tuesday, November 28, 2006 by TomDispatch.com

A Fraud Worse than Enron

by Elizabeth de la Vega

Elizabeth de la Vega, appearing on behalf of the United States. That is a phrase I’ve uttered hundreds of times in twenty years as a federal prosecutor. I retired two years ago. Obviously, as a private citizen, I cannot simply draft and file an indictment. Nor can I convene a grand jury. Instead, in the following pages I intend to present a hypothetical indictment to a hypothetical grand jury. The defendants are President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war--in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States. And all of you are invited to join the grand jury.

**

Published on Tuesday, November 28, 2006 by the “http://www.ipsnews.net”

Former Prosecutor Imagines Bush’s Judgment Day

by William Fisher

The scene is a U.S. federal grand jury room. There, impaneled ordinary citizens listen intently as a veteran federal prosecutor asks them to return an indictment unique in U.S. history.
The charge is conspiracy to defraud the United States. And the defendants are President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
On the first day of grand jury proceedings, the prosecutor addresses the jurors. “Please remember that you must decide the case based solely on the evidence that’s presented and applicable law, without regard to prejudice or sympathy. In other words, your politics, and any personal feelings you may have toward the defendants -- positive or negative -- should have no bearing on your deliberations.”
The prosecutor then passes out the indictment, reminding jurors, “don’t forget your reading glasses...”
The indictment charges that the defendants “did knowingly and intentionally conspire to defraud the United States by using deceit, craft, trickery, dishonest means, false and fraudulent representations, including ones made without a reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to their truth or falsity, and omitting material facts necessary to make their representations truthful, fair and accurate, while knowing and intending that their false and fraudulent representations would influence the public and the deliberations of Congress with authorisation of a preventive war against Iraq, thereby defeating, obstructing, impairing, and interfering with Congress’ lawful functions of overseeing foreign affairs and making appropriations.”
Over the next seven days, the grand jurors evaluate a 64-point case presented by the prosecutor. They hear compelling supporting testimony from three agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They battle their way through thousands of pages of documentation supporting the alleged crime.

**

Published on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 by TomDispatch.com

The Indictment

United States v. George W. Bush et al.

by Elizabeth de la Vega

**

Published on Friday, December 1, 2006 by TomDispatch.com

The Grand Jury Testimony

United States v. George W. Bush et al.

by Elizabeth de la Vega

**

Sarah Olson | Iraq Report: “A Giant Step Sideways”

Despite the mainstream media’s sound and fury, many analysts say the Iraq Study Group report has little to do with leaving Iraq any time soon. Instead, they fear the report’s diligent research and assiduous recommendations serve to obfuscate the depth of the US-created crisis, change the nature of the occupation, pave the way for multinational privatization of Iraq’s resources, and distract from increasingly stentorian calls for immediate withdrawal.

**

Torture Is at the Heart of America’s War on Terror

George Monbiot writes: “President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the ‘values of civilized nations’: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.”

**

Pinochet’s Death Spares Bush Family

Robert Parry writes: “General Augusto Pinochet’s death on December 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile’s notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush.”

**

Published on Wednesday, November 15, 2006 by Agence France Presse

Climate Change Is as Serious as WMD: Annan

by Bob Egelko

UN chief Kofi Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did to wars and to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan addresses delegates Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the U.N. conference on climate change Wednesday that it’s clear it will cost far less to cut greenhouse-gas emissions now ‘than to deal with the consequences later.’(AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo)

**

Published on Wednesday, November 15, 2006 by the “http://www.miami.com/mld” (Florida)

Global Warming: Don’t Ignore the Risks

by Joseph Stiglitz

The British government recently issued the most comprehensive study to date of the economic costs and risks of global warming. Written under the leadership of Sir Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics, who succeeded me as chief economist of the World Bank, the report makes clear that the question is no longer whether we can afford to do anything about global warming, but whether we can afford not to.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics.

**

Published on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 by the “http://www.ap.org”

Pace of Global Warming Causes Alarm
‘Very different and frightening world’ coming faster than expected, scientists warn

by Seth Borenstein

Animal and plant species have begun dying off or changing sooner than predicted because of global warming, a review of hundreds of research studies contends.
These fast-moving adaptations come as a surprise even to biologists and ecologists because they are occurring so rapidly.
At least 70 species of frogs, mostly mountain-dwellers that had nowhere to go to escape the creeping heat, have gone extinct because of climate change, the analysis says. It also reports that between 100 and 200 other cold-dependent animal species, such as penguins and polar bears, are in deep trouble.
“We are finally seeing species going extinct,” said University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, author of the study. “Now we’ve got the evidence. It’s here. It’s real. This is not just biologists’ intuition. It’s what’s happening.”
Her review of 866 scientific studies is summed up in the journal Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.
Parmesan reports seeing trends of animal populations moving northward if they can, of species adapting slightly because of climate change, of plants blooming earlier, and of an increase in pests and parasites.
Parmesan and others have been predicting such changes for years, but even she was surprised to find evidence that it’s already happening; she expected it would be another decade away.
Just five years ago biologists, though not complacent, believed the harmful biological effects of global warming were much farther down the road, said Douglas Futuyma, professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
“I feel as though we are staring crisis in the face,” Futuyma said. “It’s not just down the road somewhere. It is just hurtling toward us. Anyone who is 10 years old right now is going to be facing a very different and frightening world by the time that they are 50 or 60.”
**

Published on Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by the Financial Times

Richest 2% Hold Half the World’s Assets

by Chris Giles

Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth.

**

No Friend of Labor

“While President Bush points to low unemployment and a resurgent stock market as signs of a strong economy, most Americans don’t feel so bullish,” say Dmitri Iglitzin and Steven Hill. “Median incomes are flat, healthcare costs are soaring, pensions are being de-funded and corporate employers are threatening to shred the social contract with their employees that has prevailed for 60 years. The balance of economic power has become increasingly one-sided, and one reason is that a key institution _ the National Labor Relations Board, the country’s chief arbiter of labor disputes _ remains solidly in anti-worker hands.”

**

Top Ten Signs George W. Bush Is Depressed

10. Speaks wistfully of the days when his approval rating was 33%

9. Barely musters a smile when catching Cheney torture detainees

8. Smug, arrogant smirk replaced by smug, arrogant frown

7. Barely laughs anymore during “Happy Days” reruns

6. Falls asleep during intelligence briefings...actually, he always did that

5. No longer pretends he quit drinking

4. Sits in the Oval Office listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” over and over

3. When Rumsfeld left yesterday, Bush pleaded, “Take me with you”

2. At lunch with speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, he hardly touched his fish sticks

1. Asked Bubba if he still had the big chick’s phone number

Top Ten Reasons Donald Rumsfeld Is Resigning

10. Wants to try to salvage his marriage to Britney

9. Ordering the illegal torture of detainees is more of a young man’s game

8. Offered Bob Barker’s job on “The Price Is Right”

7. Wants to try screwing up the world in the private sector

6. Just demonstrating his exit strategy

5. For a complete list of reasons send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Bob Woodward

4. Congress wouldn’t fund his new weapon system: monkeys with jet packs

3. No point in trying to be the most evil guy in the room when you work with Dick Cheney

2. Wanted to go out while he was on top

1. Plans to become Secretary of Sitting on His Ass

Top Ten John Kerry Excuses

10. Lightheaded from too much Botox

9. Hasn’t been himself since he heard Bob Barker is retiring

8. Remark was an ill-conceived, careless blunder, kind of like the war

7. Just displaying that famous wit that cost him the 2004 election

6. Hoped saying something really stupid would make him seem more presidential

5. Too much Halloween candy

4. Relax, the election is months away

3. So I botched a joke -- Letterman does it every night

2. On the advice of his friend Mel Gibson, he’s blaming it on the Jews

1. “Hey, it was still funnier than most of the jokes on this list”

Top Ten Questions To Ask Yourself Before Voting For Schwarzenegger

10. “Do I feel comfortable having a governor who oils his chest?”

9. “Have I thoroughly considered Stallone, Van Damme and Seagal?”

8. “Is ‘Come on, it’ll be funny’ a good reason to vote for someone?”

7. “Has he done enough to make California a laughingstock?”

6. “How can I be sure he’ll be just as Schwarzeneggy this time around?”

5. “Can I bench-press more today than I could three years ago?”

4. “What would Predator do?”

3. “Will he cut taxes on steroids?”

2. “He won’t embarrass us, will he?”

1. “Have I lost my mind?”

Top Ten Surprises In Bob Woodward’s New Book

10. Bush financed the war by selling White House china on eBay

9. Instead of pursuing Al-Qaeda, CIA agents originally pursued Al Pacino

8. President’s military strategy based on reruns of “F Troop”

7. Bush’s plan: To fix this mess by the end of his third term

6. Says both Bush and Clinton could have done more to prevent the new Kevin Costner film

5. Frequent use of the word “Brangelina”

4. The nude fold-out of Donald Rumsfeld

3. Iraq insurgency began when local affiliates started broadcasting “Yes, Dear”

2. Book chronicles Condoleezza’s futile attempts to get laid

1. Bush lost focus on Iraq because Congressman Mark Foley wouldn’t stop sending him inappropriate e-mails

pro.gres.sive
adj.
Moving forward; advancing.
Proceeding in steps; continuing steadily by increments: progressive change.
Promoting or favoring progress toward better conditions or new policies, ideas, or methods: a progressive politician; progressive business leadership.
n.
A person who actively favors or strives for progress toward better conditions, as in society or government.

www.dictionary.com

“We are not inheriting the world from our parents; we are merely borrowing it from our children.”

-- Jim Henson

“We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we have stopped saying, ‘It got lost,’ and say, ‘I lost it.’ “

-Sydney J. Harris (b. 1917), U.S. journalist. On the Contrary, ch. 7 (1962).

Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic....

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), German mathematician, philosopher. Letter to Bertrand Russell. From Frege to Godel, p. 127, ed. J. van Heijenoort.

Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Erich Fromm (1900-1980), U.S. psychologist. “The Need for a Frame of Orientation and Devotion--Reason vs. Irrationality,” ch. 3, The Sane Society (1955).

The besetting sin of able men is impatience of contradiction and of criticism. Even those who do their best to resist the temptation, yield to it almost unconsciously and become the tools of toadies and flatterers. “Authorities,” “disciples,” and “schools” are the curse of science and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit than all its enemies.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), British biologist and educator. Reflection #372, Aphorisms and Reflections, selected by Henrietta A. Huxley, Macmillan (London, 1907).

“The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes “So much the worse for the facts: let them be altered,” instead of “So much the worse for my theory.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. (1895). The Sanity of Art, Major Critical Essays, Constable (1948).

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), British author, lexicographer. Rambler (London, April 13, 1751), no. 112.

Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which seemeth to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity--namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.

Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), U.S. founder of the Christian Science movement. Science and Health, ch. 14 (1875).

If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance.

Gordon W. Allport (1897-1967), U.S. psychologist, educator. The Nature of Prejudice, ch. 1, Beacon Press (1954).

***

1/5/07

A new year already? Another time for reflection and contemplation...

It’s curious to think of how poorly this well established thinking process has been used during the past six years:

Scientific Method

1. Problem, question

2. Hypothesis, unproved assumption

3. Test, experiment

4. Analyze, interpret for conclusion

Knowing of your deep abiding interest in scholarship and history, I would suggest, as the third member of an Iraq literary trilogy, that you consider:

Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, by Anthony Arnove

Most authorities seem to place death toll during Saddam’s reign for innocent Iraqis at between 300 and 400,000 (excluding the Iran war.) Evidence accumulates from Lancet and other sources that the total in just the last 4 years is still growing above 600,000:

According to a survey conducted by U.S. and Iraqi doctors for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in the British Lancet Medical Journal Oct. 11 this year, 654,965 Iraqis, or 2.5 percent of the entire population of the country, have died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

We can now deduce that Bush has personally not only killed more Americans than bin Laden, but also he’s killed more Iraqis than Saddam!! Given that Ford set the precedent of not requiring Chief Deciders be held accountable to the Rule of Law, I wonder in what world we will be seeing a kangaroo court and executions for the BushCo Mafia?

Class warfare continues: who in their right mind would pay anyone $2 billion in salary???

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0612/01/ltm.03.html

ALI VELSHI, CNN FINANCIAL CORRESPONDENT, AMERICAN MORNING: Good morning, Miles.
This is your rich guy update at 7:25 Eastern.

Dick Grasso used to run the New York Stock Exchange, you’ll remember him? He got a big fat pay package. He’s been asked to give back $112 million of that pay package. But now, a New York State appeals court -- a New York State court has halted the repayment, pending an appeal by another court. This one is not going to be settled for a little while.
And William McGuire, the outgoing CEO of UnitedHealth, the nation’s second largest health insurer. Central player in “optionsgate”, which can best be described as betting on a horse race after the race has happened. McGuire has not been charged with any crime, but at the end of 2005 had stock options worth almost $1.8 billion. But all this nasty news about the stock options has cut about 25 percent off the value of that. He is now going to have to hold off on those -- those assets have been frozen until this investigation goes further. New York attorney general for the United States, in New York, is investigating this. We’ll keep you updated on all of those cases -- Soledad.
S. O’BRIEN: Another story that keeps on giving. All right, Ali. Thanks.

As is often true, it’s easy to get drawn to subjects on the basis of small fragments. From these vital pieces of history are cited some values and principles of we who call ourselves Progressive (1) and hopeful for Peace (2):

(1)

http://www.ssa.gov/history/trspeech.html

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Before the Convention of the National Progressive Party

in Chicago, August, 1912

To you, men and women who have come here to this great city of this great State formally to launch a new party, a party of the people of the whole Union, the National Progressive Party, I extend my hearty greeting. You are taking a bold and a greatly needed step for the service of our beloved country. The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly what should be said on the vital issues of the day. This new movement is a movement of truth, sincerity, and wisdom, a movement which proposes to put at the service of all our people the collective power of the people, through their Governmental agencies, alike in the Nation and in the several States. We propose boldly to face the real and great questions of the day, and not skillfully to evade them as do the old parties. We propose to raise aloft a standard to which all honest men can repair, and under which all can fight, no matter what their past political differences, if they are content to face the future and no longer to dwell among the dead issues of the past. We propose to put forth a platform which shall not be a platform of the ordinary and insincere kind, but shall be a contract with the people; and, if the people accept this contract by putting us in power, we shall hold ourselves under honorable obligation to fulfill every promise it contains as loyally as if it were actually enforceable under the penalties of the law.

...

It seems to me, therefore, that the time is ripe, and overripe, for a genuine Progressive movement, Nationwide and justice-loving, sprung from and responsible to the people themselves, and sundered by a great gulf from both of the old party organizations, while representing all that is best in the hopes, beliefs, and aspirations of the plain people who make up the immense majority of the rank and file of both the old parties.

The first essential in the Progressive programme is the right of the people to rule.

...

The people should have power to deal with the effect of the acts of all their governmental agencies.

...

I am well aware that every upholder of privilege, every hired agent or beneficiary of the special interests, including many well-meaning parlor reformers, will denounce all this as “Socialism” or “anarchy”--the same terms they used in the past in denouncing the movements to control the railways and to control public utilities. As a matter of fact, the propositions I make constitute neither anarchy nor Socialism, but, on the contrary, a corrective to Socialism and an antidote to anarchy.

SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE TO THE WAGE-WORKERS

I especially challenge the attention of the people to the need of dealing in far-reaching fashion with our human resources, and therefore our labor power. In a century and a quarter as a nation the American people have subdued and settled the vast reaches of a continent; ahead lies the greater task of building upon this foundation, by themselves, for themselves, and with themselves, an American common wealth which in its social and economic structure shall be four square with democracy.

...

it behooves Americans to keep abreast of the great industrial changes and to show that the people themselves, through popular self-government, call meet an age of crisis with wisdom and strength.

The first charge on the industrial statesmanship of the day is to prevent human waste. The dead weight of orphanage and depleted craftsmanship, of crippled workers and workers suffering from trade diseases, of casual labor, of insecure old age, and of household depletion due to industrial conditions are, like our depleted soils, our gashed mountain-sides and flooded river bottoms, so many strains upon the National structure, draining the reserve strength of all industries and showing beyond all peradventure the public element and public concern in industrial health.

...

We hold that under no industrial order, in no commonwealth, in no trade, and in no establishment should industry be carried on under conditions inimical to the social welfare. The abnormal, ruthless, spendthrift industry of establishment tends to drag down all to the level of the least considerate.

The public needs have been well summarized as follows:

We hold that the public has a right to complete knowledge of the facts of work.

On the basis of these facts and with the recent discoveries of physicians and neurologists, engineers and economists, the public call formulate minimum occupational standards below which, demonstrably, work can be prosecuted only at a human deficit.

In the third place, we hold that all industrial conditions which fall below such standards should come within the scope of governmental action and control in the same way that subnormal sanitary conditions are subject to public regulation and for the same reason--because they threaten the general welfare.

To the first end, we hold that the constituted authorities should be empowered to require all employers to file with them for public purposes such wage scales and other data as the public element in industry demands. The movement for honest weights and measures has its counterpart in industry. All tallies, scales and check systems should be open to public inspection and inspection of committees of the workers concerned. All deaths, injuries, and diseases due to industrial operation should be reported to public authorities.

To the second end, we hold that minimum wage commissions should be established in the Nation and in each State to inquire into wages paid in various industries and to determine the standard which the public ought to sanction as a minimum

...

We pledge the Federal Government to an investigation of industries along the lines pursued by the Bureau of Mines with the view to establishing standards of sanitation and safety; we call for the standardization of mine and factory inspection by interstate agreement or the establishment of a Federal standard. We stand for the passage of legislation in the Nation and in all States providing standards of compensation for industrial accidents and death, and for diseases clearly due to the nature of conditions of industry, and we stand for the adoption by law of a fair standard of compensation for casualties resulting fatally which shall clearly fix the minimum compensation in all cases.

In the third place, certain industrial conditions fall clearly below the levels which the public today sanction.

We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living--a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age.

Hours are excessive if they fail to afford the worker sufficient time to recuperate and return to his work thoroughly refreshed. We hold that the night labor of women and children is abnormal and should be prohibited; we hold that the employment of women over forty-eight hours per week is abnormal and should be prohibited. We hold that the seven day working week is abnormal, and we hold that one day of rest in seven should be provided in law. We hold that the continuous industries, operating twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, are abnormal, and where, because of public necessity or of technical reasons (such as molten metal), the twenty-four hours must be divided into two shifts of twelve hours or three shifts of eight, they should by law be divided into three of eight.

Safety conditions are abnormal when, through unguarded machinery, poisons, electrical voltage, or otherwise, the workers are subjected to unnecessary hazards of life and limb; and all such occupations should come under governmental regulation and control.

...

The premature employment of children is abnormal and should be prohibited; so also the employment of women in manufacturing, commerce, or other trades where work compels standing constantly; and also any employment of women in such trades for a period of at least eight weeks at time of childbirth.

...

It is abnormal for any industry to throw back upon the community the human wreckage due to its wear and tear, and the hazzards of sickness, accident, invalidism, involuntary unemployment, and old age should be provided for through insurance. This should be made a charge in whole or in part upon the industries the employer, the employee, and perhaps the people at large, to contribute severally in some degree. Wherever such standards are not met by given establishments, by given industries, are unprovided for by a legislature, or are balked by unenlightened courts, the workers are in jeopardy, the progressive employer is penalized, and the community pays a heavy cost in lessened efficiency and in misery. What Germany has done in the way of old age pensions or insurance should be studied by us, and the system adapted to our uses, with whatever modifications are rendered necessary by our different ways of life and habits of thought.

Workingwomen have the same need to combine for protection that workingmen have; the ballot is as necessary for one class as for the other; we do not believe that with the two sexes there is identity of function; but we do believe that there should be equality of right; and therefore we favor woman suffrage.

...

No people are more vitally interested than workingmen and workingwomen in questions affecting the public health. The pure food law must be strengthened and efficiently enforced. In the National Government one department should be intrusted with all the agencies relating to the public health, from the enforcement of the pure food law to the administration of quarantine. This department, through its special health service, would co-operate intelligently with the various State and municipal bodies established for the same end. There would be no discrimination against or for any one set of therapeutic methods, against or for any one school of medicine or system of healing; the aim would be merely to secure under one administrative body efficient sanitary regulation in the interest of the people as a whole.

...

BUSINESS AND THE CONTROL OF THE TRUSTS

The present conditions of business cannot be accepted as satisfactory. There are too many who do not prosper enough, and of the few who prosper greatly there are certainly some whose prosperity does not mean well for the country. Rational Progressives, no matter how radical, are well aware that nothing the Government can do will make some men prosper, and we heartily approve the prosperity, no matter how great, of any man, if it comes as an incident to rendering service to the community; but we wish to shape conditions so that a greater number of the small men who are decent, industrious and energetic shall be able to succeed, and so that the big man who is dishonest shall not be allowed to succeed at all.

Our aim is to control business, not to strangle it--and, above all, not to continue a policy of make-believe strangle toward big concerns that do evil, and constant menace toward both big and little concerns that do well. Our aim is to promote prosperity, and then see to its proper division. We do not believe that any good comes to any one by a policy which means destruction of prosperity; for in such cases it is not possible to divide it because of the very obvious fact that there is nothing to divide. We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the business man is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals. But it is obvious that unless the business is prosperous the wage-workers employed therein will be badly paid and the consumers badly served. Therefore not merely as a matter of justice to the business man, but from the standpoint of the self-interest of the wage-worker and the consumer we desire that business shall prosper; but it should be so supervised as to make prosperity also take the shape of good wages to the wage-worker and reasonable prices to the consumer, while investors and business rivals are insured just treatment, and the farmer, the man who tills the toil, is protected as sediously as the wage worker himself.

Unfortunately, those dealing with the subject have tended to divide into two camps, each as unwise as the other. One camp has fixed its eyes only on the need of prosperity, loudly announcing that our attention must be confined to securing it in bulk, and that the division must be left to take care of itself. This is merely the plan, already tested and found wanting, of giving prosperity to the big men on top, and trusting to their mercy to let something leak through to the mass of their countrymen below--which, in effect, means that there shall be no attempt to regulate the ferocious scramble in which greed and cunning reap the largest rewards. The other set has fixed its eyes purely on the injustices of distribution, omitting all consideration of the need of having something to distribute, and advocates action which, it is true, would abolish most of the inequalities of the distribution of prosperity, but only by the unfortunately simple process of abolishing the prosperity itself. This means merely that conditions are to be evened, not up, but down, so that all shall stand on a common level, where nobody has any prosperity at all. The task of the wise radical must be to refuse to be misled by either set of false advisers; he must both favor and promote the agencies that make for prosperity, and at the same time see to it that these agencies are so used as to be primarily of service to the average man.

Again and again while I was President, from 1902 to 1908, I pointed out that under the Anti-Trust Law alone it was neither possible to put a stop to business abuses nor possible to secure the highest efficiency in the service rendered by business to the general public.

...

CONSERVATION

There can be no greater issue than that of Conservation in this country. Just as we must conserve our men, women, and children, so we must conserve the resources of the land on which they live. We must conserve the soil so that our children shall have a land that is more and not less fertile than that our fathers dwelt in. We must conserve the forests, not by disuse but by use, making them more valuable at the same time that we use them. We must conserve the mines. Moreover, we must insure so far as possible the use of certain types of great natural resources for the benefit of the people as a whole.

...

In the West, the forests, the grazing lands, the reserves of every kind, should be so handled as to be in the interests of the actual settler, the actual home-maker. He should be encouraged to use them at once, but in such a way as to preserve and not exhaust them. We do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many, nor do we intend to turn them over to any man who will wastefully use them by destruction, and leave to those who come after us a heritage damaged by just so much.

...

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

In international affairs this country should behave toward other nations exactly as an honorable private citizen behaves toward other private citizens. We should do no wrong to any nation, weak or strong, and we should submit to no wrong. Above all, we should never in any treaty make any promise which we do not intend in good faith to fulfill. I believe it essential that our small army should be kept at a high pitch of perfection, and in no way can it be so damaged as by permitting it to become the plaything of men in Congress who wish to gratify either spite or favoritism, or to secure to localities advantages to which those localities are not entitled.

...

CONCLUSION

Now, friends, this is my confession of faith. I have made it rather long because I wish you to know just what my deepest convictions are on the great questions of today, so that if you choose to make me your standard-bearer in the fight you shall make your choice understanding exactly how I feel--and if, after hearing me, you think you ought to choose some one else, I shall loyally abide by your choice. The convictions to which I have come have not been arrived at as the result of study in the closet or the library. but from the knowledge I have gained through hard experience during the many years in which, under many and varied conditions, I have striven and toiled with men. I believe in a larger use of the governmental power to help remedy industrial wrongs, because it has been borne in on me by actual experience that without the exercise of such power many of the wrongs will go unremedied. I believe in a larger opportunity for the people themselves directly to participate in government and to control their governmental agents, because long experience has taught me that without such control many of their agents will represent them badly. By actual experience in office I have found that, as a rule, I could secure the triumph of the causes in which I most believed, not from the politicians and the men who claim an exceptional right to speak in business and government, but by going over their heads and appealing directly to the people themselves. I am not under the slightest delusion as to any power that during my political career I have at any time possessed. Whatever of power I at any time had, I obtained from the people. I could exercise it only so long as, and to the extent that, the people not merely believed in me, but heartily backed me up. Whatever I did as President I was able to do only because I had the backing of the people. When on any point I did not have that backing, when on any point I differed from the people, it mattered not whether I was right or whether I was wrong, my power vanished. I tried my best to lead the people, to advise them, to tell them what I thought was right; if necessary, I never hesitated to tell them what I thought they ought to hear, even though I thought it would be unpleasant for them to hear it; but I recognized that my task was to try to lead them and not to drive them, to take them into my confidence, to try to show them that I was right, and then loyally and in good faith to accept their decision. I will do anything for the people except what my conscience tells me is wrong, and that I can do for no man and no set of men; I hold that a man cannot serve the people well unless he serves his conscience; but I hold also that where his conscience bids him refuse to do what the people desire, he should not try to continue in office against their will. Our Government system should be so shaped that the public servant, when he cannot conscientiously carry out the wishes of the people, shall at their desire leave his office and not misrepresent them in office; and I hold that the public servant can by so doing, better than in any other way, serve both them and his conscience.

Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are engaged. It little matters what befalls any one of us who for the time being stand in the forefront of the battle. I hope we shall win, and I believe that if we can wake the people to what the fight really means we shall win. But, win or lose, we shall not falter. Whatever fate may at the moment overtake any of us, the movement itself will not stop. Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness; and even though we who now lead may for the time fail, in the end the cause itself shall triumph. Six weeks ago, here in Chicago, I spoke to the honest representatives of a Convention which was not dominated by honest men; a Convention wherein sat, alas! a majority of men who, with sneering indifference to every principle of right, so acted as to bring to a shameful end a party which had been founded over half a century ago by men in whose souls burned the fire of lofty endeavor. Now to you men, who, in your turn, have come together to spend and be spent in the endless crusade against wrong, to you who face the future resolute and confident, to you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing what in that speech I said in closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.

(2)

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 5/29/1917 - 11/22/1963, US 35th president (1961-1963)

Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961.

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom, symbolizing an end as well as a beginning, signifying renewal as well as change.

To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom, and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required, not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far out-paced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support: To prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective; to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak; and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.

So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah to “undo the heavy burdens...(and) let the oppressed go free.” And if a beachhead of co-operation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty.

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation,” a struggle against the common enemies of man; tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort? [Crowd shouts approval]

I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what American will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.

**

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 5/29/1917 - 11/22/1963, US 35th president (1961-1963)

American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963.

I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived--yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

**

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 5/29/1917 - 11/22/1963, US 35th president (1961-1963)

September 14, 1960

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world’s history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

Tonight we salute Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman as a symbol of that spirit, and as a reminder that the fight for full constitutional rights for all Americans is a fight that must be carried on in 1961.

Many of these same immigrant families produced the pioneers and builders of the American labor movement. They are the men who sweated in our shops, who struggled to create a union, and who were driven by longing for education for their children and for the children’s development. They went to night schools; they built their own future, their union’s future, and their country’s future, brick by brick, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and now in their children’s time, suburb by suburb.

Tonight we salute George Meany as a symbol of that struggle and as a reminder that the fight to eliminate poverty and human exploitation is a fight that goes on in our day. But in 1960 the cause of liberalism cannot content itself with carrying on the fight for human justice and economic liberalism here at home.

And tonight we salute Adlai Stevenson as an eloquent spokesman for the effort to achieve an intelligent foreign policy. Our opponents would like the people to believe that in a time of danger it would be hazardous to change the administration that has brought us to this time of danger. I think it would be hazardous not to change. I think it would be hazardous to continue four more years of stagnation and indifference here at home and abroad, of starving the underpinnings of our national power, including not only our defense but our image abroad as a friend.

This is an important election -- in many ways as important as any this century -- and I think that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party here in New York, and those who believe in progress all over the United States, should be associated with us in this great effort. The reason that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson had influence abroad, and the United States in their time had it, was because they moved this country here at home, because they stood for something here in the United States, for expanding the benefits of our society to our own people, and the people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope.

I think it is our task to re-create the same atmosphere in our own time. Our national elections have often proved to be the turning point in the course of our country. I am proposing that 1960 be another turning point in the history of the great Republic.

**

Terrorism, use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create a climate of fear in a given population. Terrorist violence targets ethnic or religious groups, governments, political parties, corporations, and media enterprises. Organizations that engage in acts of terror are almost always small in size and limited in resources compared to the populations and institutions they oppose. Through publicity and fear generated by their violence, they seek to magnify their influence and power to effect political change on either a local or an international scale.

Terrorist acts date back to at least the 1st century, when the zealots a Jewish religious sect, fought against Roman occupation of what is now Israel. In the 12th century in Iran, the Assassins, a group of Ismailis (Shiite Muslims), conducted terrorist acts against religious and political leaders of Sunni Islam. Through the 18th century, terrorists generally acted from religious zeal. Beginning in the 19th century, terrorist movements acquired a more political and revolutionary orientation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anarchists in Italy, Spain, and France used terrorism. Prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the Russian revolutionary movement also possessed a strong terrorist element in its struggle against Russian royalty and aristocracy.

In the latter half of the 20th century acts of terror multiplied, driven by fierce nationalist and ideological motivations and facilitated by technological advances in transportation, communications, microelectronics, and explosives. The conflict between Arab nations and Israel following the end of World War II in 1945 produced successive waves of terrorism in the Middle East. In the 1970s and 1980s organized terror spilled into Western Europe and other parts of the world as supporters of Palestinian resistance to Israel carried their war abroad and as domestic conflicts gave birth to terrorist organizations in countries such as West Germany (now part of the Federal Republic of Germany), Italy, and Japan. In the United States, terrorism has chiefly consisted of attacks by isolated individuals who violently oppose state and corporate power.


II. Terrorism in the Middle East


In their struggle to bring an end to British rule over Palestine and to reclaim it for the Jewish people, radical Jewish groups such as the Stern Gang and the Irgun resorted to terrorist acts in the late 1940s. The most notorious of these attacks was the bombing of British government offices at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, which killed more than 100 people. Acts of terrorism by Israel’s Arab adversaries accelerated in the 1960s, especially following the Six Day War in 1967, which led to the Israeli occupation of territory populated by Palestinians. A succession of terrorist groups such as Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, loosely organized under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), conducted commando and terrorist operations both within Israel and in other countries. In 1972 a Palestinian splinter group called Black September took hostage and then killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. Although the PLO renounced terrorism in 1988, radical Palestinian groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad have continued to wage a campaign of terror against Israel and its allies. In 1996 a series of suicide bomb attacks in Israel by supporters of Hamas killed more than 60 Israelis and imperiled the fragile peace between Israel and the PLO.

Hostility to the support of the United States for Israel led to numerous acts of terrorism against American citizens by Palestinian radicals or their sympathizers. In 1983 attacks by Shiite Moslem suicide bombers on the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, and on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed nearly 300 people, most of whom were Americans. In 1988 a bomb destroyed Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board, including 189 United States citizens. In 1991 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency charged two Libyan terrorists with the crime. In 1996 a truck bomb exploded outside an apartment building housing U.S. military personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen.


III. Terrorism in Europe


Terrorism spread beyond the Middle East in the 1960s, particularly in nations such as West Germany and Italy, where transition from authoritarian rule to democracy after World War II had been rapid and traumatic. Inspired by Marxist and Maoist teachings, and supported by leftist sympathizers among the affluent middle classes, the terrorists aimed to bring about the collapse of the government by provoking its violent, self-destructive reaction.

During the 1970s, the West German Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, robbed banks, kidnapped and assassinated business and political leaders, and raided U.S. military installations. Members of this West German gang also cooperated with Palestinian terrorists, notably in the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. The Entebbe incident concluded when Israeli commandos raided an old terminal and rescued more than 100 passengers being held there as hostages. By the late 1970s, most activists of the Red Army Faction had been either imprisoned or killed.

In Italy, the Red Brigades launched a brutal wave of assaults on politicians, police, journalists, and business executives. The attacks culminated with the 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The Red Brigades subsequently disintegrated as police arrested and imprisoned members and supporters of the gang. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the Sicilian Mafia conducted a series of terrorist attacks in reaction to the Italian government’s prosecution of leading Mafia figures. The historic Uffizi Gallery in Florence was among the targets of a series of terrorist bombings in 1993 alleged to be the work of the Mafia.


IV. Terrorism in the United States


One of the most spectacular terrorist episodes in U.S. history was the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993 by Islamic radicals. This incident aroused anxiety about the threat posed by foreign residents from nations hostile to the United States. Six people died in the blast, which caused an estimated $600 million in property and other economic damage. Trials that followed convicted six people of carrying out the attack.

In addition to concerns about foreign-sponsored terrorism, the United States has an ample history of domestic terrorism. Early in the 20th century, labor leaders such as William Dudley (Big Bill) Haywood openly espoused a philosophy of revolutionary violence and a commitment to the destruction of government power. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the latter stages of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, left-wing groups such as the Weather Underground bombed buildings on university campuses throughout the country and at corporation headquarters and government buildings in New York City. Between 1978 and 1995, an anarchist and terrorist known as the Unabomber planted or mailed homemade bombs that killed 3 people and wounded 23 others in 16 separate incidents throughout the United States. The Unabomber, who claimed an allegiance with radical environmentalists and others opposed to the effects of industrialization and technology, targeted university professors, corporate executives, and computer merchants. In April 1996 federal agents arrested Theodore Kaczynski, a suspect they thought to be the Unabomber. Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated former math professor who became a recluse, pled guilty to 13 federal charges in 1998 in exchange for agreement that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty during sentencing. The court sentenced Kaczynski to four life terms plus 30 years and ordered him to pay $15 million in restitution.

In April 1995 a truck bomb exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring more than 500, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in United States history. Federal agents arrested two men for the crime, Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols. Both McVeigh and Nichols identified with the “patriot movement,” a loose alliance of extremist groups advocating resistance to national laws and political institutions. In June 1997 McVeigh was found guilty of murder in connection with the bombing and sentenced to death. Later in the year Nichols was convicted of the less severe charges of manslaughter and conspiracy, and he was sentenced to life in prison in June 1998. McVeigh was executed in 2001.

In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed antiterrorism legislation to strengthen the power of the federal government to anticipate and respond to both international and domestic terrorism. The law bars fundraising by foreign terrorist groups and provides for the death penalty in cases of international terrorism and for killing any federal employee because of the employee’s association with the federal government. The law also allows for the deportation of alien terrorists without the need to disclose classified evidence against them, and it authorizes expenditures of up to $1 billion on state and local antiterrorism efforts. Both the ACLU and the NRA opposed portions of the legislation that they claimed would provide the federal government with too much power, including an enhanced ability to wiretap and in other ways encroach upon the rights of citizens.
Contributed By:
Vojtech Mastny, Ph.D.
Professor of International Relations, Boston University. Author of Russia’s Road to the Cold War, 1941-45 and The Czechs Under Nazi Rule.

http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?z=1?pg=2&ti=761564344

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Published on Sunday, December 31, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun (Maryland)

An All-Consuming ‘War on Terror’

by Ian S. Lustick

The official mantra is that we fight in Iraq because it is the “central front in the War on Terror.” The exact opposite is the case.

We are trapped in fighting an unwinnable - even nonsensical - “war on terror” because its invention was required in order to fight in Iraq. After years of slaughter in Iraq, the neoconservative fantasy of a series of cheap, fast, neo-imperial victories is dead. But the war on terror lives on, stronger than ever.

How did the war on terror take on a life of its own and trap the entire political class, and most Americans, into public beliefs about the need to fight a global war on terror as our first priority, even when there’s little or no evidence of an enemy present in the United States? What accounts for $650 billion worth of expenditures, along with baseless cycles of “sleeper cell” hysteria and McCarthyist policies of surveillance and “pre-emptive prosecution” not seen in this country since the early 1950s?

Consider how Congress responded to the war on terror. In summer 2003, a list of 160 potential targets for terrorists was drawn up, triggering intense efforts by members of Congress and their constituents to find funding-generating targets in their districts. The result? Widening definitions of potential targets and mushrooming increases in the number of assets deemed worthy of protection: up to 1,849 in late 2003; 28,364 in 2004; 77,069 in 2005; and an estimated 300,000 in 2006 (including the Sears Tower in Chicago but also the Indiana Apple and Pork Festival).

Across the country, virtually every lobby and interest group recast its traditional objectives and funding proposals as more important than ever given the imperatives of the war on terror. The National Rifle Association declared that it means that more Americans should own and carry firearms to defend the country and themselves against terrorists. On the other hand, according to the gun control lobby, fighting the war on terror means passing strict gun-control laws to keep assault weapons out of the hands of terrorists.

Schools of veterinary medicine called for quadrupling their funding. Who else would train veterinarians to defend the country against terrorists using hoof and mouth disease to decimate our cattle herds? Pediatricians declared that more funding was required to train pediatricians as first responders to terrorist attacks, because treating children as victims is not the same as treating adults. Pharmacists advocated the creation of pharmaceutical SWAT teams to respond quickly with appropriate drugs to the victims of terrorist attacks.

Aside from swarms of consulting firms and huge corporate investments in counter-terrorism activities, universities across the country created graduate programs in homeland security, institutes on terrorism and counter-terrorism, all raising huge catcher’s mitts into the air for the billions of dollars of grants and contracts just blowing in the wind.

The same imperative - translate your agenda into war on terror requirements or be starved of funds - and its spiraling consequences surged across the government, affecting virtually all agencies. Bureaucrats unable to describe their activities in “war on terror” terms were virtually disqualified from budget increases and probably doomed to cuts. With billions of dollars a year in state and local funding, the Department of Homeland Security devised a list of 15 National Planning Scenarios to help guide its allocations. To qualify for Homeland Security funding, state and local governments had to describe how they would use allocated funds to meet one of those chosen scenarios.

What was the process that produced this list? It was, in part, deeply political, driven by competition among agencies, states and localities that knew funding opportunities would depend on exactly which scenarios were included or excluded (anthrax, a chemical attack on a sports stadium, and hoof and mouth disease were included; attacks on liquid natural gas tankers and West Nile virus were excluded).

Most instructive of all was the unwillingness of the government to define the enemy posing the terrorist threat. Al-Qaida is a tiny threat compared to the size of the enemy required by the thousands of interest groups crowding toward the counter-terrorism trough. For this reason, the enemy in these scenarios is referred to by the Department of Homeland Security as “the universal adversary,” present everywhere and capable of taking on any shape. Instead of responding to real threats posed by real enemies, we find ourselves preparing for an endless list of possible bad things that could happen, as if the devil himself were out to get us.

The dimensions of the war on terror are still expanding rapidly in the face of a small - if not entirely absent - domestic terrorist threat. But politicians, forced into playing Chicken Little to avoid seeming to suffer from a “pre-9/11 mentality,” can offer no break on spending or war-on-terror rhetoric. Neither have universities and the press. While universities rush to the counter-terror trough, it’s as good as it gets for the press. “Hurricane Osama,” the real storm of the century, is always just about to hit - and never goes away. Every false alarm of another 9/11 attack on the way sends the news media into paroxysms of sensationally foreboding, emergency-mode coverage, helping enliven the credibility of hundreds of TV episodes, films and potboiler novels with the same plot: maniacal, brilliant Middle Eastern terrorists poised to strike but for the heroics of a few bold souls operating within a generally incompetent government.

Americans have learned that the Iraq war was a disastrous mistake. But they have yet to be able even to imagine the truth about the war on terror more generally. As long as politicians and pundits justify alternatives to the present course in Iraq by invoking the need to fight the war on terror more effectively, the United States will remain, as Osama bin Laden observed in his November 2004 videotape, trapped in a maelstrom of waste, worry, and witch hunt that “bleeds America to the point of bankruptcy.”

Ian S. Lustick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of “Trapped in the War on Terror.”

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While You Were at War ...

By Richard A. Clarke

The Washington Post

Sunday 31 December 2006

Without the distraction of the Iraq war, the administration would have spent this past year - indeed, every year since Sept. 11, 2001 - focused on al-Qaeda. But beyond al-Qaeda and the broader struggle for peaceful coexistence with (and within) Islam, seven key “fires in the in-box” national security issues remain unattended, deteriorating and threatening, all while Washington’s grown-up 7-year-olds play herd ball with Iraq.

As the president contemplates sending even more U.S. forces into the Iraqi sinkhole, he should consider not only the thousands of fatalities, the tens of thousands of casualties and the hundreds of billions of dollars already lost. He must also weigh the opportunity cost of taking his national security barons off all the other critical problems they should be addressing - problems whose windows of opportunity are slamming shut, unheard over the wail of Baghdad sirens.

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Richard A. Clarke, former national coordinator for counterterrorism, is chairman of Good Harbor Consulting and author of Against All Enemies (Free Press) and Breakpoint (Putnam).

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Puppet Kills Puppet

By Marc Ash

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 01 January 2007

Shortly after Saddam Hussein was hanged at a US installation in Baghdad, the New York Times called him a “Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence.” The Washington Post dubbed Hussein an “Architect of ruthless Iraqi dictatorship.” President Bush said, “Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial.”

Curiously absent from US mainstream media accounts were a few additional details. Saddam was indeed a ruthless dictator, true, but specifically ruthless on behalf of his benefactors: US multinational petroleum and arms dealers and their patrons well-placed in Washington.

As long as Saddam obediently protected and facilitated the economic and territorial interests of the American (and European) colonialists who backed him, his ruthlessness was their profit, and clearly tolerable. When Saddam said he needed assistance to quell internal resistance, he got all the help he needed in the form of cash and training for his security forces. If that meant 143 Shiites received “red cards,” that was no problem for his backers.

In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries ousted the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and with him foreign corporate domination. He was replaced by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who hated the US. None other than Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad as Reagan’s “special envoy,” to make sure Hussein understood that he had a friend in Washington. Saddam reciprocated by promising to defeat the very same Iranian revolutionaries. What followed was a long, bloody, regionally devastating stalemate.

Saddam was less obedient than Reagan and Rumsfeld had hoped. Hussein dreamed of “reuniting Mesopotamia,” a plan not in keeping with the designs for the region held by his foreign partners. Saddam decided to hedge his bets and began accepting favors from the Soviets as well, which had a chilling effect on his relationship with Washington, to be sure. However vile and objectionable Saddam Hussein’s methods were, he clung to his dream of ridding his region of foreign domination. Saddam Hussein’s final words were, “Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.”

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Published on Saturday, December 30, 2006 by truthdig

Silencing Saddam

by Robert Scheer

It is a very frightening precedent that the United States can invade a country on false pretenses, depose its leader and summarily execute him without an international trial or appeals process. This is about vengeance, not justice, for if it were the latter the existing international norms would have been observed. The trial should have been overseen by the World Court, in a country that could have guaranteed the safety of defense lawyers, who, in this case, were killed or otherwise intimidated.

The irony here is that the crimes for which Saddam Hussein was convicted occurred before the United States, in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, embraced him. Those crimes were well known to have occurred 15 months before Rumsfeld visited Iraq to usher in an alliance between the United States and Saddam to defeat Iran.

The fact is that Saddam Hussein knew a great deal about the United States’ role in Iraq, including deals made with Bush’s father. This rush to execute him had the feel of a gangster silencing the key witness to a crime.

At Nuremberg in the wake of World War II the U.S. set the bar very high by declaring that even the Nazis, who had committed the most heinous of crimes, should have a fair trial. The U.S. and allies insisted on this not to serve those charged, but to educate the public through a believable accounting. In the case of Saddam, the bar was lowered to the mud, with the proceedings turned into a political circus reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials.

Robert Scheer is the editor of truthdig.com and author of “Playing President.” Email to: rscheer@truthdig.com.

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Published on Saturday, December 30, 2006 by the Independent/UK

A Dictator Created Then Destroyed by America

by Robert Fisk

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a “great day” for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi “government”, but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don’t gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn’t invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalized and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam’s shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam’s weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our “bunker buster” bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our “victory” - our “mission accomplished” - who will be found guilty of this?

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Published on Saturday, December 30, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times

So Long to ‘Our’ Tyrant

by Andrew Cockburn

Among the many ironies of Saddam Hussein’s execution is that, although his death seems certain to boost sectarian bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, he always posed as an Iraqi and Arab nationalist who could unite the rivalrous sects in his country — an attribute that initially recommended him to Washington.

Other qualities of the Iraqi dictator that appealed to U.S. policymakers included his sterling record in eliminating communists and his readiness to confront the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the militant Shiite leader of Iran.

Today of all days, the administration has no desire to be reminded of the era when the U.S. actively intervened on Iraq’s side in the Iran-Iraq war, supplying credit, intelligence, helicopters and, finally, active combat assistance from the U.S. Navy.

The key to the relationship between the U.S. and Hussein over the years was that they shared the same enemies. Hussein’s early political career was as a hit man for the Baath party. In 1961, he fled into exile in Egypt after botching an assassination attempt against the then-leader of Iraq, Abdul Karim Qassim. Qassim, a leftist general who ruled with the support of the Communist Party, was regarded with extreme disfavor in Washington.

In fact, Hussein’s exile ended in 1963, when his Baathist colleagues seized power with covert U.S. assistance. “We rode to power on a CIA train,” the party’s secretary general, Ali Saleh Saadi, admitted later.

Hussein was for a period the prime example of the traditional U.S. means of control in the Middle East: quiet support for a repressive leader respectful of U.S. interests. That approach has now apparently been replaced by one that induces civil discord and breakdown (deliberately or otherwise), as evidenced by recent events in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

Andrew Cockburn is the author of “Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy,” to be published by Simon & Schuster in February.

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In Search of a Criminal: Donald Rumsfeld’s Name Tops the List of Accused of War Crimes

By Alexia Garamfalvi

Legal Times

Monday 25 December 2006

No one thinks that Donald Rumsfeld will end his days in a German prison. Or that there is any real chance he will have to face trial in Germany over allegations that he authorized policies leading to the torture of prisoners at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But that doesn’t mean that a complaint filed in Germany last month won’t have some ripple effects. The complaint asks a federal prosecutor there to begin an investigation, and ultimately a criminal prosecution, of the former secretary of defense and other U.S. officials for their roles in the abuses.

“Rumsfeld is no longer untouchable,” says Wolfgang Kaleck, the German lawyer who filed the complaint along with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights. “He is now deeply connected with claims of abuses and torture. We have taken the first step to begin the legal discussion on his accountability.”

The “Pinochet precedent” energized the use of national courts to end impunity for the worst abusers, and cases against former dictators and generals, mostly from African and Latin American countries, followed.

Germany’s response to the Rumsfeld case will be an important test of whether the Pinochet precedent applies to the leaders of superpowers as well as leaders from weaker countries, Brody says.

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Stop the Presses; Press Ignores the Generals

By A. Alexander

The Progressive Daily Beacon

Friday 22 December 2006

The Joint Chiefs of Staff and practically every actively serving General strongly opposes George W. Bush’s proposed Iraq “Surge” Plan, but you’ve probably not heard too much about the Generals’ general discontent. The average American probably hasn’t heard about it, because the media only barely reported on the Generals’ mutiny. True to form, the press dutifully ignored the Generals’ concerns, but widely reported on the White House’s insistence that the Generals’ generally didn’t disagree with the President.... However, in the event that the Generals, who don’t disagree with the President, do decide to disagree with the President’s Iraq “Surge” Plan - the President doesn’t care, because he’s “The Decider.”

The presses ignoring of the Generals’ disagreement with “The Decider,” even continued when Rumsfeld’s very Rumsfeld-like “stay the course” replacement, Robert Gates, traveled to Iraq and was told by the “commanders” on the ground that they too, disagreed with “The Decider’s” Iraq “Surge” Plan. Indeed, these were very dark days for “The Decider” and his dream of escalating the Iraq War. Fortunately for “The Decider,” the press was mostly ignoring the Generals’ collective revolt.

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Carter: US “Prime Culprit” in Nuclear Proliferation

By Sherwood Ross

t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Friday 22 December 2006

Ex-President Carter warns: Bush betrays Reagan goals.

Former President Jimmy Carter says by “rejecting or evading almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the past 50 years, the United States has now become the prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation.”

In his book Our Endangered Values (Simon & Schuster), Carter leaves no doubt he has that Great Proliferator, George W. Bush, in mind -even though he doesn’t call him that or mention him by name. Just as damning, though, Carter quotes an article by ex-defense secretary Robert McNamara in last year’s May/June Foreign Policy: “I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous.” And that indictment can be laid at the feet of only one hombre.

President Bush voiced his “preventive war” doctrine in September 2002, and then gave the world a glimpse of first-strike by invading Iraq. He also poured billions into America’s ugly germ-warfare labs, morphing them into aggressive postures. And he’s the first man in Rome when it comes to renewing the dread nuclear arms race. You wonder where the outcry was from stalwart Republicans when Bush decided to resume nuclear arms development. After all, it was President Reagan’s noblest achievement to strike a deal with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to rid the planet of thousands of nukes.

As Reagan scholar Paul Lettow noted in a Heritage Foundation lecture: “He [Reagan] and Gorbachev signed the INF [Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty in 1987, which eliminated an entire category of nuclear weapons ... and he laid the foundation for President George H.W. Bush to complete the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.”

By contrast, Bush’s course is downright scary. As Carter writes, “American leaders have not only abandoned existing treaty restrictions but also assert plans to test and develop new weapons, including antiballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating ‘bunker buster,’ and perhaps some secret new ‘small’ bombs.”

Carter goes on to write of The Bushidos, “They have also reneged on past pledges and have reversed another long-standing policy, by threatening first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.” Reagan pledged to Gorbachev the US would never be the first to start an atomic war. Bush betrays that legacy by warning Iran the “nuclear option” is thinkable.

When Bush announced he would pull the US out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, not wishing to be left out, Moscow responded by announcing plans to upgrade its nuclear force. Again, after Bush scrapped the “no first use” policy, Chinese major general Zhu Chenghu responded that China was under internal pressure to do likewise. “If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” Chenghu said. The man’s right to worry. The Pentagon has been transferring missile-capable attack subs from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

You don’t have to be Chinese to be worried. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns, “The United States is on the verge of committing itself to churning out a new generation of nuclear weapons without fully vetting the consequences for itself and its efforts to halt and roll back proliferation worldwide.”

Although the “Bush Doctrine” called for the use of new, so-called “low-yield” nukes to dissuade hostile nations from acquiring WMD, the Bulletin states that “the new weapons concepts advanced to date seem to have little to do with deterrence of a nuclear (or other WMD) attack on the United States or its allies. Instead, they appear to be geared toward a warfighting role, which could ultimately undermine rather than enhance US security.”

Bush’s “preventive war” doctrine, the Bulletin adds, incites regional powers to get their own WMD, since their conventional forces can’t match the US’s. “If the [US] nuclear posture contemplates using nuclear weapons against such states, they may be further encouraged to build such weapons and ... the result may be more proliferation.”

Carter notes US proliferation “is an increasing source of instability” in the Middle East and Asia. US ally Israel’s “uncontrolled and unmonitored weapons status,” he adds, “pushes leaders in neighboring Iran, Syria, Egypt and other Arab nations to join the nuclear weapon community.”

Those opposed to impeaching Bush might do well to ask themselves, “Can I trust this man’s finger on a nuclear trigger that could ignite 6,000 warheads, enough to roast the planet and all creatures that dwell thereupon?” George Bush doesn’t have to be crazy to be dangerous. Just unscrupulous. And he’s proved that, lying to justify his invasion of Iraq, and scheming to get the Joint Chiefs to consider nuking Iran. (Reportedly, they don’t want any part of it.)

Americans want peace. They are tired of being misled into cockeyed wars to fight and bleed in far-off countries that pose no danger to them. And they have come to fear a man in the White House who threatens their liberties, renounces cherished treaties, tortures his victims, shovels billions into germ-warfare schemes, and stokes the furnaces of nuclear war. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was right when he told the UN he could smell the sulfur in the chamber after Bush spoke. Who says the devil has to live underground? George Bush is in the White House, and the whole world is feeling the heat.

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Sherwood Ross is an American-based columnist. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

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Published on Friday, December 22, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times

How Bush Can Make Iraq Disappear

It’s not as easy as ‘Presto!’ but the president just yet may be able to use his magic touch on Iraq.

by Rosa Brooks

NO ONE LOVES HIM.

His favorability ratings in the U.S. are lower than they’ve ever been, and our closest allies, the British, think he poses a greater danger to world peace than either President Kim Jong Il of North Korea or President Mamoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. His party has lost its congressional majority, the Iraq Study Group declared his Iraq policies a failure and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are reported to unanimously oppose his plan for a “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq. Rummy’s gone, the tabloids have claimed that Laura’s filing for divorce, and some say that even Barney the dog no longer wants to talk to him.

George W. Bush has a problem, and it’s called Iraq, the country that just won’t go away. There’s no satisfying way to solve this problem either. Withdraw? No good: too humiliating. Stay the course? More dead Americans and more dead Iraqis. Surge? We don’t have enough troops, and we don’t have a strategy for using them anyway.

So what’s a president to do?

W should take heart. This is hardly the first time his administration has faced seemingly intractable problems — and in the past, he’s always been able to make those problems … disappear.

The investigative reporting blog TPMmuckraker.com offers an excellent list of examples, compiled with the help of countless little blogospheric elves.

For instance, there was this. Problem: In 2005, a congressionally mandated annual State Department report on international terrorism showed that terrorism worldwide was on the rise. Solution: The administration announced that future editions of the report no longer would include statistics on international terrorism. See? Presto! Just like that, the problem went away.

And then there was this. Problem: In 2004, data released by the Department of Education showed that public charter schools, promoted by the administration as a solution to public school woes, were lagging regular public schools in performance. Solution: The administration decided to stop collecting data on charter school performance.

And this. Problem: Environmentalists complained that administration land-use plans for our national parks and forests could have long-term negative effects on the environment. Solution: The administration decided it no longer would conduct environmental impact studies to assess the potential consequences of its land-use plans.

See how easy it is to make a problem go away? When Congress started asking questions about FBI malfeasance exposed by whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, the administration retroactively classified congressional briefings on the subject. When it looked like lawyers representing Guantanamo detainee Majid Khan might make a fuss about the abusive “alternative” interrogation methods he had undergone in secret CIA prisons, the administration announced that Khan couldn’t meet with his lawyers to tell them about his treatment because his treatment was itself classified top secret.

Similar magic tricks have worked for the president before, so who’s to say they won’t work again with Iraq? The administration’s early ban on photos of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq was a good start, as was the Pentagon’s recent decision to classify statistics on the rising number of anti-U.S. attacks in Iraq this fall. But these are half-measures, not equal to bringing the current crisis to an end. The White House needs to go further. I have a few recommendations for making the president’s Iraq problems disappear.

Problem: The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously oppose a temporary surge in U.S. troops. Solution: Eliminate the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; reduce chiefs in rank by 10 pay grades.

Problem: Not enough troops exist for an effective surge, and negative media reporting on Iraq makes the problem all too obvious. Solution: Implement an emergency call-up of all journalists registered under the Selective Service Act. Confiscate their laptops and cameras and recorders and send them to Iraq as part of the surge. (Two birds with one stone!)

Problem: Iraq is patently not yet an oasis of stability on the Middle East map. Solution: Erase the word “Iraq” from all maps in the White House. Write in “Oasis of Stability.”

True, you have to believe in magic for these tricks to work. But magic is in the air this Christmas season, and W is full of “a sense of wonder and surprise,” as he put it in this year’s presidential Christmas message.

If you’re having trouble feeling the magic, urge the president to try one final trick.

Problem: The troops in Iraq are causing trouble, complaining about a lack of strategy, lack of equipment, lack of clue as to what they’re doing there and what they’re dying for. Solution: Make our troops disappear from Iraq — by bringing them home.

When it comes to solving the president’s problems, that last trick might actually work.

**

Dr. Bush’s Big Bottle of Testicular Extract: Good For What Ails You

by Steven Laffoley

Do you feel anxious about the Civil War in Iraq? Does your heart ache when yet another American is killed in Anbar province? Does your stomach feel queasy when more bodies turn up in Baghdad with gruesome signs of torture? Well, worry no more. The good Dr. Bush has a specially made salve at hand: Dr. Bush’s Big Bottle of Testicular Extract - good for what ails you.

Well, we twenty-first century folk like to think that the beliefs of those quaint, garlic garland wearing folk - those folk who intently listened to Snake Oil Salesmen selling their wares - have been left in the past, erased by modern science and progressive thinking. We like to think that scientific breakthroughs, qualitative additions to our thinking and understanding of the world, slowly and surely, push our culture, and our species, collectively forward.

But it doesn’t always work out that way.

Consider: in this Bush-born, Twenty-First Century Age of Unreason, it is precisely the progressive, rational thinking - the very stuff of modern science - that has been summarily erased. The signs are everywhere.

Two notable examples: despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, President Bush publicly rejects the scientific evidence of Global Warming, opting for ever-morphing, mystical explanations of Earth’s rising temperature. Similarly, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, President Bush publicly rejects the long-proven, scientific theory of Natural Selection, opting for a blind belief in Intelligent Design (which, ironically enough, has him all-but-espousing a firm belief in the un-science of Social Darwinism).

Stephen Colbert’s new Age-of-Unreason word, “truthiness” - the belief in something intuitively without any reference to logic or evidence or intellectual examination of the facts - would be wildly hilarious, if it didn’t accurately speak to this disturbing return of the Snake Oil Salesmen and their Supernatural Salves for What Ails Us.

Which brings me back to Dr. Bush’s Big Bottle of Testicular Extract.

Our resident President Snake Oil Salesman, Dr. Bush, tells us emphatically that he has the cure for our ailments. He tells us emphatically that he has the cure for our anxiety, for our heartache, and for our queasiness.

What is his unscientific, backward thinking, Snake Oil solution to an illegal, immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq gone terribly wrong? Why, just invade Iraq again - but this time with more troops. That this Snake Oil Salve - also sold by that equally emphatic, equally unscientific Snake Oil Salesman, the Good Dr. McCain - ignores logic, evidence, intellectual examination, relevant facts, and the truth is not the point. Dr. Bush’s Testicular Extract has “truthiness” to it - it feels good to “take the fight to the enemy.”

Doesn’t it?

Of course, the problem with Snake Oil Salves is this: the Doctor’s ‘cure’ can kill you. Dr. Bush’s Testicular Extract feels a bit like pouring gasoline on a raging fire. But then, maybe Dr. Bush has been into his own stuff lately. Either way, by the time the good Dr. Bush’s Big Bottle of Testicular Extract makes us ill, the good Dr. Bush will be well on his way to the next town, selling more of his Testicular Extract to the ignorant locals.

Meantime, to ward off future wars - given our present predilection for Snake Oil Salesmen - maybe we should start wearing garlands of garlic.

Steven Laffoley (stevenlaffoley@yahoo.ca) is an American writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of “Mr. Bush, Angus and Me: Notes of An American-Canadian in the Age of Unreason.”

**

Baghdad Burning | End of Another Year ...

From the Riverbend blogspot: “A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted. 2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No - really.”

**

Published on Friday, December 15, 2006 by the Independent/UK

Diplomat’s Suppressed Document Lays Bare the Lies behind Iraq War

by Colin Brown and Andy McSmith

The Government’s case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

A devastating attack on Mr Blair’s justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain’s key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, “at no time did HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] assess that Iraq’s WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests.”

Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been “effectively contained”.

**

Ghost Reading With the Prez

by Sean Gonsalves

Just in time for the traditional birthday of the Prince of Peace, President Bush says he’ll give us all a great big post-Christmas war gift sometime next month. He calls it “a new way forward” in Iraq.

In an interview with The Washington Post last week, he acknowledged the obvious: we are not winning in Iraq. He also dismissed the idea that the midterm elections meant voters wanted to see fewer U.S. boots on the ground. Predictably, he interpreted the election results to mean American voters are simply “not satisfied with the progress,” which means send more troops – even though, short of genocide, there is no military solution to a guerilla insurgency, a.k.a. a popular uprising.

Basically, the president went on to reiterate his belief that the continued occupation of Iraq in the name of “freedom and democracy” – despite the majority of “liberated” Iraqis who want an immediate end to the U.S. occupation – is somehow going to lead to an Iraq “that can govern, sustain and defend itself.”

Then comes the interesting part of the interview. The president said he couldn’t understand why so many people thinks he doesn’t read books. Honestly, I’m not making this up.

“Clad in a gray suit and red tie, Bush was relaxed and engaged during the 25-minute interview, going out of his way to say how much he enjoys his relationship with the media despite indications to the contrary. At the end, he talked a bit about recent books – he mentioned having just finished ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’,” the Post reports.

President Bush just finished reading “King Leopold’s Ghost”?! If you haven’t read Adam Hochschild’s riveting retelling of the Belgian genocide-for-rubber campaign in the Congo, you might want to check it out. Back then, Belgian society was cooking up more than just waffles.

The book explains how King Leopold convinced the undoubtedly “well-informed” people of Belgium of the need to liberate the backward but freedom-hungry black Africans from a bunch of crazy Arab slave traders and to expand “free-trade.” Sound familiar?

Anyway, as Hochschild tells it, a few brave Englishmen and a handful of courageous black Americans stirred up a nonviolent regime change movement that led to the downfall of the Belgian billionaire.

Though the book is insightful and inspiring, I think Zachary Karabell’s Salon review makes a good point. He points out how during King Leopold‘s rule of the “Free Congo State,” half the population was killed over a natural resource.

“While it would be reassuring to believe that Leopold’s violence stopped as a result of intrepid crusaders,…the violence started to ebb only when the population declined to the point that labor got expensive and killing people by intent or neglect meant less profit.

“Viewed through a less idealistic lens, the Congo’s history tells us that evil isn’t only banal; it can also be profitable, and it often goes unpunished... . Hitler committed suicide; the Japanese were routed after Nanking; but Leopold died in his bed, vastly enriched by the suffering of millions.”

Hmmm. Let’s see the president is reading a book about a foreign occupier using violence to “liberate” the occupied from Arabs and establish “free trade” in a land that just happens to overflowing with a coveted natural resource.

I don’t question whether the president reads. My question is: What lesson will he draw from the book? Who does he see as the liberating force – King Leopold or those who fought against him?

There’s reading and then there’s reading comprehension.

Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and a syndicated columnist.

**

Out of America: Bush: A Blow-up Santa Among Presidents

by Rupert Cornwell

But I mention Wilson and his Washington home for two other reasons. This Thursday, 28 December, marks the 150th anniversary of his birth. And this Christmas season marks a moment when Wilson is again a relevant and much scrutinised figure - indeed, some see him as a role model for the current occupant of the White House, now in the most difficult period of his presidency.

The two leaders were personally very different too. Wilson was an academic who had been president of Princeton University. He was the last US President to write his own speeches and the only one to hold a PhD - attributes inconceivable for Bush. Wilson the Democrat introduced income tax, while most in the current President’s Republican party would like nothing better than to abolish it.

But the similarities are no less striking. Both are stubborn individuals, convinced of their own rightness. Bush shares Wilson’s idealistic, interventionist approach to foreign affairs, convinced of America’s role as beacon to humanity, whose values of freedom and democracy should be exported to the world. At the end of the First World War, the leaders (if not the populations) of Europe were as dubious of Wilson’s proselytising as their counterparts are today of Bush’s ambitions to bring democracy to the Middle East. Both men were war Presidents who trampled on civil liberties. You may complain about secret wiretapping, prisoner abuse and other curtailments of personal freedoms under this President. But Bush’s Patriot Act has nothing on the Espionage and Sedition Acts pushed through by Wilson in 1917 and 1918, which made criticism of the war or the military an offence punishable by 20 years’ imprisonment, and for which 2,000 Americans were prosecuted. And for all his pious, almost saintly reputation, Wilson had an appalling record on race.

Wilson was a multilateralist, but Bush is the quintessential unilateralist, convinced that America can shape events anywhere to its will. The tragedy of Iraq, however, has shown the folly of that approach - which is why, while historians unfailingly put Wilson among the top 10 US Presidents, this Bush will surely be ranked among the very worst.

**

Where Are the Christians?

By William Fisher

Wednesday 27 December 2006

It’s not rocket science to understand why Republicans have gone into hibernation on the issue of Rep. Virgil Goode’s outrageous rant against his fellow Congressman, Keith Ellison - the first Muslim ever elected to either legislative house - who wants to take his oath on the Quran.

After all, Goode is one of their own. He’s from the same party that brought us George Allen’s “Macaca Moment” and the flirtatious “Call Me” tagline from a cute white blonde in a campaign commercial in the recent senate race against black Rep. Harold Ford.

Immigration? What has a single Muslim congressman got to do with immigration? Easy. If you’ve learned anything from Messrs. Bush and Cheney over the past six years, it’s that conflating wildly unrelated issues can get people so spooked that it works. The president and the veep did it with Iraq and 9/11. Goode does it with an unofficial swearing-in and dark visions of illegals pouring across our borders. If we don’t stop Rep. Ellison from taking his oath on a Quran, the numbers of illegal Muslim immigrants will become a tsunami.

**

Inside TV News: We Were Silenced by the Drums of War

By Jeff Cohen

Tuesday 26 December 2006

September 11th made 2001 a defining year in our country’s history. But 2002 may have been the strangest. It began with all eyes on Osama bin Laden and ended with Osama bin Forgotten - as the White House turned its attention to Iraq. Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union speech mentioned Saddam Hussein 17 times, but bin Laden not once.

Everything about my nine-month stint at cable news channel MSNBC occurred in the context of the ever-intensifying war drums over Iraq. The drums grew louder as D-Day approached, until the din became so deafening that rational journalistic thinking could not occur. Three weeks before the invasion, MSNBC Suits terminated “Donahue,” their most-watched program.

**

Lies and Obfuscations

By Eleanor Clift

Newsweek

Friday 22 December 2006

A look back at some of the biggest falsehoods of 2006.

**

When Resolve Turns Reckless

By John F. Kerry

The Washington Post

Sunday 24 December 2006

There’s something much worse than being accused of “flip-flopping”: refusing to flip when it’s obvious that your course of action is a flop.

**

Interior, Pentagon Faulted in Audit

By Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Scott Higham

The Washington Post

Monday 25 December 2006

Effort to speed defense contracts wasted millions.

The Defense Department paid two procurement operations at the Department of the Interior to arrange for Pentagon purchases totaling $1.7 billion that resulted in excessive fees and tens of millions of dollars in waste, documents show.

**

US intel report: Iraq’s Anbar province ‘politically lost’

Chief Marine analyst says region’s political vacuum being filled by Al Qaeda.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

In a report that some have said is the most negative yet filed by a senior military officer in Iraq, the chief of intelligence for the US Marine Corps in Iraq concluded that the possibilities of the US and Iraqi governments securing the troubled western Iraqi province of Anbar are remote.

The Washington Post reports that Col. Pete Devlin’s assessment, written in mid-August, also says that “there is almost nothing the US military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”

**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 29, 2006
12:52 PM

CONTACT: “http://www.mfso.org”
Ateqah Khaki, Riptide Communications, 509-301-5282
Nancy Lessin, Military Families Speak Out, 617-320-5301

Military Families Mourn 3,000th Troop Death, Participate in Nationwide Vigils and Call on Congress to End the Iraq War
Family Members of Fallen Soldiers and Families of Troops Currently Deployed in Iraq Available for Interview

**

Bush Extends Hand With Fingers Crossed

William Rivers Pitt responds to an editorial allegedly penned by Bush in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal: “In the final analysis, we see in this Bush editorial the same fantasies and empty rhetoric that have become the defining realities of this administration. He clings to the belief that we can ‘win’ in Iraq, even as the violence and chaos unleashed by his invasion makes any talk of victory a laughable exercise in fantasy. The hand he supposedly extends in bipartisan friendship comes with crossed fingers, carrying only the same fistful of failures and lies that inspired the November electorate to push him aside.”

Rudderless in Iraq

The New York Times | Editorial

Thursday 21 December 2006

Iraq Is Vietnam - And You’d Better Believe It

By John Graham

t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Tuesday 19 December 2006

Deteriorating conditions on the ground will soon force President Bush to accept this shift in mission strategy. It is Vietnamization in all but name. Its core purpose is not to win an unwinnable war, but to provide political cover for a retreat, and to lay the grounds for blaming the loss on the Iraqis. Based on what I saw in Vietnam, here’s what I think will happen next:

At home, political pressure to get out of Iraq completely will increase rapidly as the violence gets worse. The military force left behind to protect the US trainers will be drawn down to - or below - a bare minimum, further increasing the dangers for the Americans who remain. Military affairs commentator General Barry McCaffrey issued this sober warning in the December 18 issue of Newsweek: “We’re setting ourselves up for a potential national disaster in which some Iraqi divisions could flip and take 5,000 Americans hostage, or multiple advisory teams go missing in action.”

Nothing destroys troop morale faster than being in a war you know is pointless. At this same stage in Vietnam, drug use among Americans became a serious problem.

Our ultimatums and conditions won’t be met. As the situation gets worse, whatever remains of a central government in Baghdad will be even less able to make the compromises and form the coalitions necessary to control centuries of factional and tribal hatreds. The civil war will spiral out of control, giving us the justification we need to get out, blaming the Iraqis for the mess we’ve left behind. Then we will face the regional and global ramifications of a vicious civil war whose only winners will be Iran and al-Qaeda.

US leaders may decide, as they did 37 years ago, that we must again create a “decent interval” to mask defeat and that the PR benefits of that interval are worth the cost in lives and money. If they do, however, they should not - like the Iraq Study Group - lie to us that such a strategy has any military chance whatsoever of success.

Wrapped Around a Bullet

Kathy Kelly writes: “Although we have paltry financial means compared to the weapons makers who wield so much influence on Capitol Hill, we do have resources. We have our bodies. We have our determination. We have our compassion for Iraqi people and for US soldiers. We have our concern for future generations, who will not only have to live with the consequences of this violence, but who will also live on a planet spoiled by global warming, in no small part because we spent our resources on war instead of on developing clean energy sources. These are the grains of sand that will stop the cogs of war from turning. Now is the time for seriously strategizing about the best ways, in our hometowns, to engage in sustained civil disobedience at the offices of elected representatives, demanding that they vote against the supplemental spending bill.”

Powell Says US Losing in Iraq, Calls for Drawdown by Mid-2007

By Karen DeYoung

The Washington Post

Monday 18 December 2006

Exxon Mobil Cultivates Global Warming Doubt

Energy giant Exxon Mobil borrowed tactics from the tobacco industry to raise doubt about climate change, spending $16 million on groups that question global warming. “Exxon Mobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Published on Friday, December 22, 2006 by the “http://www.ipsnews.net”

Oceans Warming and Rising

by Julio Godoy

Ocean levels will rise faster than expected if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, a leading German researcher warns.
Using data from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of physics of the oceans at the University of Potsdam near Berlin estimates that sea level could rise 140 cm by 2100.
Rahmstorf, member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, is considered a leading European researcher on global warming and its effect on oceans.

Published on Thursday, December 21, 2006 by the London Times / UK

The Last Tide Could Come at Any Time.

Then These Islands at the End of the Earth Will Simply Vanish. Blame it on global warming or a submerged volcano. Either way, the low-lying atoll seems doomed - and it is not the only one.

by Richard Lloyd Parry on the Carteret Islands

Published on Thursday, December 28, 2006 by the International Herald Tribune (Paris)

The End of the West as We Know It?

by Anatol Lieven

Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting. The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism.

For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”

Guantanamo’s Cost to Our Humanity

“January 11, 2007, will mark the fifth anniversary of the first detainees to be imprisoned in the US military prison at the US Naval Base, Guantanamo, Cuba.” Ann Wright asks, “What are the costs to our own humanity when, after five years of imprisonment, only ten of 770 prisoners have been charged by the ‘Guantanamo process’ and most have suffered abuse at the hands of the American military and CIA?”

Special Comment About “Sacrifice”

Keith Olbermann states: “The former labor secretary, Robert Reich, says Senator John McCain told him that the ‘surge’ would help the ‘morale’ of the troops already in Iraq. If Mr. McCain truly said that, and truly believes it, he has either forgotten completely his own experience in Vietnam ... or he is unaware of the recent Military Times poll indicating only 38 percent of our active military want to see more troops sent ... or Mr. McCain has departed from reality.”

Bush Signing Statement Claims Power to Open Americans’ Mail

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant. The president asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on December 20, followed by a “signing statement.”

India’s PM Says West Is Environmentally Wasteful

Slamming the West for its “environmentally wasteful lifestyle,” Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called on Wednesday for industrialized nations to look at alterative energy sources to save the environment.

Shut Out of the Forests

“The (Bush) administration has decided to simply eliminate the bothersome environmental reviews previously applied to management plans for the 193 million acres of national forest,” writes the Baltimore Sun.

Unions Sue OSHA to Implement Safety Rule

The AFL-CIO and the United Food and Commercial Workers union sued the federal agency in charge of workers’ health and safety on Wednesday, saying it has failed to implement a rule that would require employers to buy protective equipment for their employees.

For America’s Sake

In an adaptation of remarks made by Bill Moyers to a December 12 gathering in New York sponsored by The Nation, “Everywhere you turn you’ll find people who believe they have been written out of the story. Everywhere you turn there’s a sense of insecurity grounded in a gnawing fear that freedom in America has come to mean the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions of Americans are dumped from the Dream. So let me say what I think up front: The leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.”

Bush Pushing War Loss to Next President

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Delaware), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will “be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof,” in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

CIA Immune System Still Working

“Lies have consequences. All those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression _ termed by Nuremberg ‘the supreme international crime’ _ have blood on their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same service in facilitating war on Iran,” write Ray McGovern and W. Patrick Lang.

Hurricane Center Chief Issues Final Warning

Frustrated with people and politicians who refuse to listen or learn, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield ends his 34-year government career today in search of a new platform for getting out his unwelcome message: Hurricane Katrina was nothing compared with the big one yet to come.

Bush “to Reveal Iraq Troop Boost”

President Bush intends to reveal a new Iraq strategy within days. The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq, rather than training Iraqi forces.

Coal Mine Deaths Spike Upward

Coal mining deaths soared to a 10-year high in 2006, reversing an 80-year trend of steadily falling fatalities and raising safety concerns as coal production reaches record levels.

Study Indicates Electronic Voting Systematically Flawed

Three advocacy groups created a report about last year’s midterm election that focuses on 1,022 complaints regarding electronic voting equipment from 314 counties in 36 states. The 23-page report concluded that “electronic voting in its current form is systematically flawed...”

Torture, Lies, and Videotape

Arlen Parsa writes: “Not long before Christmas Day 2002, a young man was being held in a US facility known as the Bagram Collection Point, in Afghanistan. Like many other Afghan nationals, he had only one name: Dilawar. He led a simple, quiet life. He had a wife, a young daughter, and one friend. He was 22 years old, and weighed only 122 pounds. Most of his captors believed he was not guilty of anything and had ‘simply driven his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.’ He died on December 10th. The incident was covered up by the Pentagon.”

FBI Details Possible Detainee Torture

Documents released Tuesday by the FBI offered new details about torture and the harsh interrogation practices used by military officials and contractors when questioning so-called enemy combatants. The documents were released in response to a public records request by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing Rumsfeld and others on behalf of former military detainees who say they were abused.

Security Firms Granted Full Police Power

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places - and trying to expand their terrain. The trend is triggering debate over whether the privatization of public safety is wise.

Iraq War Lie Detector Test

Dean Baker writes: “There has been no shortage of deceptions surrounding the prosecution of the Iraq war, beginning with the original justification - Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, supporters of the war continue to use deception to advance their agenda. The latest lie is that Congress doesn’t have the ability to end the war, because if they cut off funding they would jeopardize the safety of our troops.”

An Unbelievable Gift

Laurent Joffrin wonders why the US and Iraqi governments gave Saddam the unbelievable gift of martyrdom ...

America’s Holy Warriors

Chris Hedges, the former New York Times Mideast Bureau chief, warns that the radical Christian right is coming dangerously close to its goal of co-opting the country’s military and law enforcement.

Bush Silences a Dangerous Witness

“Like a blue-blood version of a Mob family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key witness to the important historical events that led the US military into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink of calamity,” writes Robert Parry. “The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be - as the New York Times observed - the ‘triumphal bookend’ to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.”

History of Bushes and Hussein Is Hard to Ignore

The history of animosity between the Bushes and Hussein is hard to ignore. The relationship actually began as one of pragmatic friendship in the 1980s, when Hussein was at war with the main US enemy in the region, Iran, and George H.W. Bush was vice president in an administration that offered him help. A 1992 New Yorker article suggested that Bush, through Arab intermediaries, advised Hussein to intensify the bombing of Iran. Hussein soon became too much to handle.

Poll: More Troops Unhappy With Bush’s Course in Iraq

The American military - once a staunch supporter of President Bush and the Iraq war - has grown increasingly pessimistic about chances for victory, according to the 2006 Military Times Poll. For the first time, more troops disapprove of the president’s handling of the war than approve of it. Barely one-third of service members approve of the way the president is handling the war.

The New York Times | The Rush to Hang Saddam Hussein

“Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.”

Defense Secretary Is Wary of Adding More Iraq Troops

With President Bush leaning toward sending more soldiers to pacify Iraq, his defense secretary is privately opposing the buildup.

Many Soldiers Call Troop Surge a Bad Idea

Many of the American soldiers trying to quell sectarian killings in Baghdad don’t appear to be looking for reinforcements. They say the temporary surge in troop levels some people are calling for is a bad idea.

Euro to Overtake US Dollar

The value of euro notes in circulation is this month likely to exceed the value of circulating dollar notes, according to calculations by the Financial Times. Converted at Wednesday’s exchange rates, the euro took the lead in October.

Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq

Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney - Ford’s White House chief of staff - and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

**

Published on Thursday, December 28, 2006 by The Progressive

Gerald Ford, Unsentimentally

by Matthew Rothschild

Sorry, but I refuse to let my tear ducts open over the death of Gerald Ford.

There’s something profoundly undemocratic and vaguely medieval about the almost mandatory salutes that we, the people, are supposed to offer when a former President dies.

The niceties of custom all too often reinforce the habits of blind obedience to the unworthy wielders of power.

Say no ill of the dead, we are told.

Hogwash. Let’s look at Gerald Ford’s record.

The first thing he did was to pardon Richard Nixon, even though ten days previously he had said that the special prosecutor should proceed against “any and all individuals” and a year before, he averred that “I do not think the public would stand for it.”

The pardon short-circuited the necessary prosecution of Nixon, which would have served as a salutary check on future inhabitants of the Oval Office. Instead, the pardon set a precedent for such flagrant lawbreakers as we have in the White House today.

If impeachment of Bush and Cheney may be just a remote possibility, prosecution and incarceration remain inconceivable. And so Bush and Cheney, thanks to Ford, can float comfortably above the law.

On domestic policy, Ford was a standard issue Republican, vetoing social spending bills, cutting food stamps and housing and education programs, infamously denying aid to New York City while all the while boosting Pentagon spending. And, in a move Bush and Cheney would have applauded, he proposed the nation’s first official secrets act to provide criminal penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of classified material.

On foreign policy, Ford was damnable.

He fronted for Pinochet in Chile, and kept aid flowing to that vicious strongman.

And on December 6, 1975, Ford and Henry Kissinger flew to Jakarta to meet with dictator Suharto and to give him a green light to invade East Timor.

According to a declassified State Department cable, here was part of their conversation.

Suharto to Ford and Kissinger: “We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.”

Ford: “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.”

Kissinger: “We understand your problem and the need to move quickly, but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned.”

Ford and Kissinger returned to the United States, and Suharto launched his invasion hours later.

Suharto’s invasion and occupation cost the lives of 200,000 Timorese.

But never mind. We’re not supposed to remember those things. Just that Jerry Ford was such a nice guy.

Reality Strikes Back

Timothy Garton Ash writes: “In the coming year, we should not abandon all idealism along with the dangerous illusions of the Bush era.”

Ten Simple Things You Can Do to Go Green

Laurie David, who produced Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” says saving the planet isn’t about everyone doing everything: “It’s about everyone doing something.”

First, Do Less Harm

Paul Krugman writes: “Universal health care, much as we need it, won’t happen until there’s a change of management in the White House. In the meantime, however, Congress can take an important step toward making our health care system less wasteful, by fixing the Medicare Middleman Multiplication Act of 2003.”

Bush May Oust Top Commander for Backing Troop Withdrawal

General Casey’s strategy in Iraq was to transfer responsibility for security to the Iraqis and begin a gradual withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Bush seems all but certain not only to reverse the strategy that General Casey championed, but also to accelerate the general’s departure from Iraq.

Bush to Replace Generals Who Opposed Escalation of War

Bush to replace Generals Abizaid and Casey, who have expressed reservations about the potential effectiveness of boosting troop strength in Iraq.

The Crucible Of Impeachment: If Not Now, When?

by Robert Weitzel

“When once a republic is corrupted there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption . . . every other correction is either useless or a new evil.”

- Thomas Jefferson

How is it possible that a member of Congress can say it is “a waste of time” to impeach a president who has lied—under oath of office—to justify invading a nonbelligerent country, conspired to torture prisoners and to strip them of their constitutional rights, illegally spied on American citizens, violated international treaties against aggressive war and treatment of POW’s, and, quite possibly, is complicit in treason and war profiteering? Think Valerie Plame and Halliburton!

Rabbi Hillel asked of a different time and circumstance, “If not now, when?”

Precisely. When?

What will it take short of fellatio in the Oval Office for politicians to show some spine and stop hiding behind self-serving excuses: “we don’t want to be seen as vindictive” or “it would be political suicide” or “let the electorate ‘impeach’ him at the polls” or “the country needs to move on” or “we need to do things for the country . . . blah, blah, blah?”

How much more egregious does the abuse of power have to be—can it be—before members of Congress take seriously their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic?”

A Parable For Our Times

by Bill Moyers

Political dynasties fall from negligent stewardship. One thinks of the upward redistribution called “tax relief”; of the Iraq invasion sold as critical to the “War on Terror”; of rising poverty, inequality, crime, debt, and foreclosure as America spews its bounty on war and a military so muscle-bound it is like Gulliver. It would be hard to imagine a more catastrophic failure of stewardship, certainly in the biblical sense of helping the poor and allocating resources for the health of society. Once upon a time these errant stewards boasted of restoring a culture of integrity to politics. They became instead an axis of corruption, joining corporate power to political ideology to religious self-righteousness.

This is the season to recall Walt Whitman. He wrote in Democratic Vistas, around 1870:

“The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or, indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property owners.”

How prophetic to see anything like that in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Whitman had volunteered as a nurse. But in a time of great upheaval, countered by popular mobilization after mobilization, the great poet’s took hold in the people’s imagination. Whitman’s liberalism had neither the cultural elitism of those identified with the term on the left, nor the laissez-faire extremism of the free-market “liberals” on the right. Liberalism meant “the safety and endurance of the aggregate of middling property owners.” Its consummation was the New Deal social compact we inherited from five presidents and from substantial voting majorities for a generation after the Great Depression, and the result was the prospect of a fair and just society—a cohesion—that truly made us a democratic people.

Ronald Reagan once described a particular man he knew who was good steward of resources in the biblical sense. “This is a man,” Reagan said, “who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provided nursing care for the children of mothers who worked in the stores.”

That man was Barry Goldwater, a businessman before he entered politics. It’s incredible how far we have deviated from even the most conservative understanding of social responsibility. For a generation now Goldwater’s children have done everything they could to destroy the social compact between workers and employers, and to discredit, defame, and even destroy anyone who said their course was wrong. Principled conservatism was turned into an ideological caricature whose cardinal tenet was of taxation as a form of theft, or, as the libertarian icon Robert Nozick called it, “force labor.” What has happened to us that such anti-democratic ideas could become a governing theory?

The War Is Already Lost

Ideological zealotry has helped destroy Iraq, revive the Taliban and increase the terror threat

by Tariq Ali

Once a war goes badly wrong and its justifications are shown to be lies, to insist that a “democratic” Iraq is visible on the horizon and that “we must stay the course” becomes a total fantasy. What is to be done?

In the US a group of Foggy Bottom elders was wheeled in to prepare a report. This admitted what the whole world (Downing Street excepted) already knew: the occupation is a disaster and the situation gets more hellish every day.

Asleep And Dreaming

by Todd Huffman

‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the White House, not a measure of reality was stirring, not even an ounce.

Incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates this week marked his swearing in ceremony by warning Americans that “failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come.”

Was he kidding us? Foretold by millions of Americans and people around the world in the run-up to war, Gates’ predicted calamity has already come to pass. Failure in Iraq is already a foregone conclusion. Now it is simply a matter of how many more soldiers and civilians will pay the ultimate price before Congress and the White House finally stop chasing more good lives after good lives.

But the quote most upsetting was given by President Bush in an “http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20004374,00.html” granted to People magazine, in which he remarked that he was sleeping much better than people would assume. If I were a solider, or the relative of one, I would be outraged by this comment.

No, sir, Mr. President, that answer is incorrect. The correct answer is “I spend every minute of every day concerned over our soldiers and their families, and over the millions of innocent Iraqi civilians who want nothing more than a peaceful country they can call their own. I will not rest easy until our troops are home safe to their families with the mission I’ve given them completed”.

The President’s statement, as much or more than any other he’s ever given, demonstrates how detached the man is from the whirlwind he has created. Mr. President, sir, the country is simply not put at ease knowing that its commander-in-chief is comfortably dreaming of sugar-plum fairies night in and night out while its sons and daughters are fighting and dying for a winless war, your war, one wholly unnecessary for and threatening to the security of our great nation.

US Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post

Wednesday 20 December 2006

Published on Friday, December 22, 2006 by the Inter Press Service

Iraqi Hopes Dim Through Worst Year of Occupation

by Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily

Despite promises from Iraqi and U.S. leaders that 2006 would bring improvement, Iraqis have suffered through the worst year in living memory, facing violence, fragmentation and a disintegrated economy.

“We cannot go to work, cannot go to pray in our mosques, and cannot send our children to schools,” young mother Um Rheem from the Shaab quarter in Baghdad told IPS. “Many Sunni men have been killed by Shia death squads who have the full support of the government and Americans.”

Such fears are common in many areas in Baghdad where the Sunnis are a minority. Other areas have other problems to live with.

“In areas where Sunnis are a majority, death squads attack in hundreds, taking advantage of curfews and using government police cars,” Mahmood Abdulla from the predominantly Sunni Jihad quarter of Baghdad told IPS. “When we defend ourselves and our homes, they shell us with mortars and Kaytousha missiles. All of this takes place under the eyes of Americans and Iraqi government officials.”

“We cannot open our shops for more than three to four hours a day,” a carpet seller on the volatile Rasheed Street told IPS. “Many of my colleagues have been abducted for ransom or killed for sectarian reasons on the way to work. We expect death every minute.”

The economic disaster is now an emergency. More than five million Iraqis are living below the poverty line, close to half of them in desperate conditions, according to a government study.

Iraqi officials and NGOs estimate the unemployment rate at more than 60 percent.

The cost of basic necessities soared during 2006, compounding the unemployment crisis. A report by Iraq’s central office for statistics cited by the NGO Coordination Committee for Iraq (NCCI) suggests 70 percent inflation from July 2005 to July 2006.

The World Food Programme said in a report ‘Food Security and Vulnerability in Iraq’ last May that if the situation in Iraq was not controlled, 8.3 million more people (31 percent of the population) would be rendered “food insecure” if they were not provided their monthly food rations.

“Those Americans take us all for terrorists,” the manager of a human rights NGO in Ramadi to the west of Baghdad told IPS.

Speaking on condition that he and his organisation remain unnamed for fear of U.S. military reprisals, he added: “Their (U.S. military’s) crimes in Fallujah in 2004 were exposed, but they have committed a lot more crimes in 2006, and the world is silent about them. There is moaning in every house in the western and northern parts of the city (Ramadi) for losing members of their families.”

A poll conducted by the well-respected group World Public Opinion last month showed that 61 percent of Iraqis support attacks against U.S. forces.

Happy Media Accountability Day!

Project Censored offers a list of stories the mainstream missed

by Molly Ivins

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 21, 2006
10:07 AM

CONTACT: “http://www.peer.org”Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

FDA Preparing to Close Laboratories Despite Budget Hike
San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City & Seattle Facilities on Chopping Block

WASHINGTON - December 21 - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is planning to close as many as half of its laboratories across the country, despite pending appropriation increases to expand this lab network to fight bio-terrorist attacks on our food supplies, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

FDA’s network of 13 laboratories operates to detect health hazards such as tampering with food and medicines. These labs also support investigation into public health threats, such as E.coli outbreaks as well as a host of agency compliance inspection and enforcement actions.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 15, 2006
3:07 PM

CONTACT: “http://www.earthjustice.org”
David Baron, Earthjustice (202) 667-4500
Janice Nolen, American Lung Association (202) 785-3355
Vickie Patton, Environmental Defense (720) 837-6239 - c; vpatton@ed.org Mark Wenzler, National Parks Conservation Association (202) 454-3335

Health, Environmental Groups File Court Challenge to EPA Particulate Matter Pollution Standard:
EPA maintains nearly decade old annual pollution levels that has been linked to thousands of deaths annually

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 14, 2006
2:47 PM

CONTACT: “http://www.citizen.org”
(202) 588-1000

Groups Charge Big Oil With More Than $2 Billion in Consumer Fraud: Hot Motor Fuel Pumps Less Energy
Petroleum Retailers Overcharge Motorists for Overheated Fuel and Pocket Taxes Paid by Consumers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 14, 2006
1:16 PM

CONTACT: “http://www.ombwatch.org”Brian Gumm, (202) 234-8494, bgumm@ombwatch.org

Americans Overwhelmingly Opposed to EPA’s Plans to Cut Back Toxic Reporting

Medea Benjamin | Let’s Toast to Ten Good Things About 2006

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122906N.shtml

Medea Benjamin writes: “As we close this year on the low of a devastating conflict in Iraq and a president contemplating sending yet more troops to fight and die in an unwinnable war, let us not forget that it was a year of many positive gains for the progressive movement. Here are just ten ...”

**

The Borowitz Report: Waste Someone’s Time: Forward to a Friend.

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor November 7, 2006

Breaking News

Florida Announces Election Results One Day Early

Gov. Bush Praises Efficiency of Electronic Voting Machines

The state of Florida made electoral history once again on Monday, announcing its election results a full twenty-four hours before the polls opened in the state.

The unprecedented speed with which Florida was able to report full election results, with one hundred percent of all precincts reporting, prompted Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to declare the milestone “a victory for Florida’s state-of-the-art electronic voting machines.”

While most Floridians were still in bed Monday morning, the state’s touchscreen voting machines began tallying their votes at a rate of one million votes a second, Gov. Bush confirmed.

“By nine A.M. on Monday, we had complete results,” Gov. Bush said. “I don’t want to sound cocky or anything, but once again it looks like Florida is leading the way, election-wise.”

Gov. Bush added that thanks to the voting machine’s record-setting reporting of its election results, Florida voters would be able to stay at home on Tuesday, saving the state’s residents millions of dollars in gasoline.

But even as Gov. Bush was crowing about his state’s unprecedented early tally of its electoral decisions, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean challenged the legitimacy of the vote, noting that Republicans had swept to victory in every single race reported by the supersonic voting machines.

For his part, the Florida governor welcomed Mr. Dean to take his complaints to the U.S. Supreme Court, but added, “According to our early tally, we have already won that case by a 5-4 margin.”

Elsewhere, the U.S. economy added 3 million jobs in October, most of them in the field of negative ad production.

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Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor November 8, 2006

Breaking News

Bush Asks For Do-Over

Offers to Fire Rumsfeld

In the wee hours of the morning after American voters swept his party from power, President George W. Bush made an extraordinary appearance on national television to ask the national electorate for a “do-over.”

Millions of viewers were tuned into televised Election Night coverage when Mr. Bush, using the nation’s Emergency Broadcasting System, interrupted those telecasts to make a direct appeal to the American people.

Looking unshaven and unsteady, and occasionally slurring his words, the president implored the American people to invalidate the results of last night’s election and vote again.

“I grew up with the great tradition of do-overs on the golf courses of Greenwich, Connecticut,” Mr. Bush told the American people. “And what’s good for golf is good for democracy.”

Mr. Bush said that if the American people would grant him a do-over, he would gladly fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, referring to his longtime Cabinet member as “that loser.”

Across the country, voters registered shock and astonishment at the unorthodox speech by Mr. Bush, many of them troubled by the president’s decision to appear on national television wearing only a stained undershirt.

One hour after the president’s address, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean delivered the official Democratic response: “He must be on crack.”

But minutes after Mr. Dean’s appearance, Mr. Bush interrupted the networks’ broadcasts once more, raising the ante in his bid for a do-over: “All right, I’ll fire Cheney’s ass, too, but that’s my final offer.”

Elsewhere, among the many who lost once-secure positions yesterday were Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn), Sen. Lincoln Chaffeee (R-R.I.), and Britney Spears’ husband Kevin Federline.

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor November 15, 2006

Breaking News

Bush’s Dad Asks For Keys to White House Back

Air Force One, President Grounded For Life

In yet another setback for President George W. Bush, his father, former President George H.W. Bush, appeared in the Oval Office today and demanded that his son give back the keys to the White House at once.

For the elder Mr. Bush, who has largely taken a hands-off approach during his son’s first six years in office, the decision to demand the keys to his erstwhile residence was regarded as extraordinary.

But according to witnesses to the unprecedented confrontation, the senior Mr. Bush also demanded the keys to Air Force One and informed his son that he was “grounded for life.”

After the 41st president reprimanded the 43rd president for invading Iraq, the younger Mr. Bush attempted to offer a defense for his unilateral action, telling his father, “All of my friends said that it was a good idea.”

“Oh, and if all your friends told you to go AWOL from the Alabama National Guard, would you do that, too?” his father thundered. “Okay, well maybe that wasn’t the best example, but you get the point.”

Speaking to reporters later, the 41st president said that he forbade his son from spending time with Vice President Dick Cheney, calling him “a bad influence.”

“I told George to spend the weekend mowing that big lawn in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he said. “I want him to think long and hard about what he’s done.”

Elsewhere, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group issued recommendations for winning the war in Iraq, including putting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the insurgents.

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor November 15, 2006

Breaking News

U.S. Bombards Insurgents With Negative Ads

‘Operation Relentless Smear’ Is Launched In Iraq

In a bold change of strategy in the war in Iraq, President George W. Bush announced today that the U.S. had begun bombarding Iraqi insurgents with negative ads in the hopes of bringing the insurgency to its knees.

At a White House briefing today, spokesman Tony Snow said that the new military campaign, called Operation Relentless Smear, would focus on attacking the personal missteps and hypocrisies of key Iraqi insurgents on a twenty-four-hour basis.

“This new strategy is playing to our strengths,” Mr. Snow told reporters. “The insurgents are good at blowing things up and creating chaos, but no one is better than we are at creating negative ads.”

According to Mr. Snow, Operation Relentless Smear will re-deploy thousands of negative ad producers, directors, and voiceover artists who were momentarily idle at the conclusion of the U.S.’s midterm election campaign.

Masterminded by the White House’s top political strategist Karl Rove, the bombardment of negative ads began at midnight Wednesday, interrupting all local Iraqi programming with a nonstop diet of half-truths, corrosive accusations and character assassination.

By Thursday morning, there were already signs that Operation Relentless Smear was working, as Iraqi insurgents in such key cities as Baghdad and Tikrit appeared worn out by the onslaught of slickly produced attack ads.

“The air strikes and the curfews were one thing,” said Hassan El-Medfaii, an insurgent who is based in Baghdad’s Sadr City district. “But this is messing with my TV.”

Elsewhere, US Airways made an $8 billion bid for Delta, including $4 billion in cash and $4 billion in lost luggage.

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor November 21, 2006

Breaking News

Lame Duck Pardons Turkey

Bush Makes a Case for Poultry Solidarity

Sending a message to the newly elected Democratic congress that he has no intention of acting like a lame duck for the remainder of his term in office, President George W. Bush took the bold step of pardoning a turkey on the front lawn of the White House today.

In what White House insiders were calling an act of “poultry solidarity,” the president said that he had decided to pardon the turkey months ago and was determined to “stay the course.”

“I’m the decider, and I have decided that this turkey is innocent,” Mr. Bush told the White House press corps.

While the president clearly chose to pardon the turkey as a way of showing Democratic leaders that he was still a force to be reckoned with, one aide acknowledged that Mr. Bush had a much bolder move in mind before his party’s “thumping” in the midterm elections: “He wanted to pardon Jack Abramoff.”

But moments after Mr. Bush released the turkey from captivity, incoming speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi blasted the president’s decision as “unilateral” and “extrajudicial,” adding that congress was prepared to subpoena both Mr. Bush and the turkey.

The controversy over the president’s decision ended abruptly, however, when White House spokesman Tony Snow announced later in the day that Vice President Dick Cheney had accidentally shot the turkey to death.

“Apparently, the vice president mistook the turkey for a quail,” Mr. Snow said. “At least he’s getting closer.”

Elsewhere, Rupert Murdoch announced that he would author a new book about O.J. Simpson’s book, entitled “If I Cancelled It.”

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor November 27, 2006

Breaking News

Bush: US Committed to Finding New Synonyms for Civil War

Launches Operation Noble Euphemism

President George W. Bush said today that he would not allow a civil war in Iraq to erupt on his watch, and said that in order to prevent that from happening the United States would aggressively search for new synonyms for the phrase “civil war.”

In order to seek out the most sanitized alternatives to that phrase, the president announced that he was launching an ambitious new mission called Operation Noble Euphemism.

Showing his trademark steely resolve, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House that the US was prepared to hunt down every last thesaurus on Earth and would not quit until the job was done.

As if to demonstrate the high priority he was placing on finding new synonyms,

Mr. Bush said that the government would spend $12 billion, most of which had been previously earmarked to find Osama bin Laden.

But critics of Operation Noble Euphemism were skeptical of its outcome, particularly after the White House unsuccessfully launched a slogan contest last month to replace the phrase “stay the course.”

That contest, which was announced with much fanfare, was abandoned after a leak revealed that the top contender was “slog through the mire.”

White House spokesman Tony Snow attempted to quiet those critics today, saying that “the United States is committed to finding a lasting euphemism for civil war in

Iraq.”

Mr. Snow refused to say which if any euphemisms were under consideration, but did say that the White House had already ruled out “Shiitepalooza.”

Elsewhere, getting obese children to exercise can improve their sleep habits, according to a study published today in “Yeah, That’ll Happen” magazine.

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor December 10, 2006

Breaking News

Iraq Study Group Report to be Filmed as Sequel to ‘Dumb and Dumber’

Studio Seeks Jim Carrey for Bush Role

Just days after its official release, the report of the Iraq Study Group has attracted the attention of Hollywood, where New Line Cinema has acquired the rights to adapt the report as a sequel in the “Dumb and Dumber” film series.

The report, which indicates that the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating, did not seem at first glance to be the raw material for a Hollywood comedy blockbuster, but in announcing the new movie, tentatively titled “Dumberer and Dumberest,” executives at New Line begged to differ.

“For the past few years, we’ve been pulling our hair out trying to come up with another sequel to ‘Dumb and Dumber,’” said studio spokesperson JoBeth Krantz. “We believe that in the Iraq Study Group’s report we have a ‘Dumb and Dumber’ sequel that will write itself.”

The studio confirmed that it had outbid several other production entities for the movie rights to the Iraq Study Group’s report, including Paramount Pictures, who had hoped to adapt the document as a sequel to “Jackass.”

But New Line’s plan to land Jim Carrey for the role of President George W. Bush may have hit an unexpected snag, as the actor today said he had “no interest” in playing the part.

“I just finished reading the Iraq Study Group’s report,” Mr. Carrey told reporters. “I can play dumb, but not that dumb.”

Elsewhere, actor Nicholas Cage said he planned to cut back on acting, while actor Ben Affleck said he had started cutting back on acting several films ago.

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor December 11, 2006

Breaking News

Insurgents Form Own Study Group

War ‘Going Great,’ Report Says

Just days after the Iraq Study Group issued their downbeat assessment of the war on Iraq, Iraqi insurgents announced that they have formed their own study group and have released their own report, one that offers a much rosier picture of the Iraqi conflict.

The Insurgents Study Group, a collection of ten elder insurgents charged with the duty of assessing the war from the insurgents’ point of view, today issued a 147-page report which became an instant bestseller among insurgent readers across Iraq.

“The war in Iraq is going great and is improving every day,” the Insurgents Study Group’s report begins.

In contrast to the Iraq Study Group’s report, which advocates that the United States and its allies change their strategy in Iraq, the Insurgents Study Group recommends “not changing a thing.”

“As insurgents, our strategy could be summarized in three words,” the report concludes. “Stay the course.”

In addition to its upbeat assessment of the war in Iraq, the Insurgents Study Group report reserves some choice barbs for its American rivals, the Iraq Study Group.

“The Iraq Study Group’s report suggests that Iran and Syria might somehow help the U.S. out,” the report says. “With so-called brilliant ideas like that, they don’t deserve the name Study Group.”

In response, Iraq Study Group co-chair James A. Baker III said, “Oh yeah? I’d like to see their Study Group say that to my Study Group’s face.”

Elsewhere, according to close associates of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died over the weekend at age 91, his last words were, “I knew I shouldn’t have gone to Taco Bell.”

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor December 12, 2006

Breaking News

Bush Refuses to Set Timetable for Reading Study Group Report

Finishing Report Would Send ‘Wrong Message’ to Enemies, President Says

In a press conference at the White House today, President George W. Bush flatly refused to set a timetable for reading the Iraq Study Group’s report, telling reporters that doing so “would send the wrong message to our enemies.”

When the Study Group issued its report last week, many in Washington assumed that the president would move the book to the top of his reading list, but today’s press conference left little doubt that Mr. Bush has no intention of being pressured into finishing the 160-page volume.

“If I were to announce that I planned to finish reading this book by summer of ’07, or early ’08, or some other artificial deadline, that would be giving our enemies exactly what they want,” Mr. Bush told reporters. “And so I am going to stay the course and finish the book I am currently reading: ‘Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog.’”

According to Professor Davis Logsdon, who teaches a course in the president’s reading habits at the University of Minnesota, anyone who expects Mr. Bush to finish reading the Iraq Study Group’s report any time soon will be “sorely disappointed.”

“When President Bush says he’s going to take his time reading something, he means it,” Dr. Logsdon said. “Remember how long it took him to finish ‘My Pet Goat.’”

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor December 29, 2006

Breaking News

President Bush Issues New Year’s Resolutions for ‘07

Vows to Invite Hugo Chavez to Lunch at Taco Bell

In an unprecedented televised address to the nation last night, President George W. Bush announced a list of his New Year’s resolutions for 2007, telling the American people, “I am a big believer in abiding by resolutions, as long as they don’t come from the United Nations.”

The following is a list of the president’s New Year’s resolutions:

“I resolve to pay close attention to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group’s report, as soon as it comes out on a books-on-tape version.

“I resolve to make sure that by the end of 2007, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki gets to spend more time with his family.

“I resolve to tell John Kerry that I thought his joke was hilarious and he should keep ’em coming.

“I resolve to learn how to use the Internets, especially the Google.

“I resolve to invite Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to a peacemaking lunch at Taco Bell.

“I resolve to organize a hunting trip for Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi.

“I resolve to expand the search for Osama bin Laden to include MySpace.

“I resolve to clear all of the brush at my Crawford ranch, except for that patch I use to hide from Cindy Sheehan.

“I resolve to continue my opposition to gay parents, unless one of them is named Cheney.

“I resolve to improve relations with Latin America by building a 700-foot fence around Barb and Jen.

“And finally, my fellow Americans, I resolve to announce an exit strategy, in which I will withdraw all of our troops from Iraq – through Iran.”

**

Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor January 3, 2007

Breaking News

Bush to Announce Exit Strategy from Reality

Plans Complete Withdrawal from His Senses by Year End

President George W. Bush has been working around the clock to put the finishing touches on a speech to the American people in which he will announce a comprehensive exit strategy from reality, White House aides confirmed today.

When reports emerged that the president was considering deploying an additional “surge” of troops in Iraq against the advice of military experts and overwhelming public sentiment, many in Washington suspected that the move was part of a larger plan to withdraw from reality entirely.

But not until spokesperson Tony Snow addressed reporters today did the White House officially confirm that the president was about to announce an exit strategy from the land of rational thought.

“The president never intended to occupy the world of reality indefinitely,” Mr. Snow told reporters. “He is planning a new way forward, and that way forward is a one-way ticket to fantasyland.”

Moments after Mr. Snow announced Mr. Bush’s plan to unveil an exit strategy from reality, members of the press corps started peppering him with questions about a deadline by which the president will have totally taken leave of his senses.

The White House spokesperson said that the president refused to set a formal timetable for his withdrawal from reality, but added that it was realistic assume that Mr. Bush’s exit from the real world would be complete by year’s end: “It helps that he’s ninety percent of the way there already.”

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TMZ has learned that Katie Rees, Miss Nevada USA 2007, has been stripped of her title after racy photos emerged of her kissing other women and exposing ...

www.tmz.com/2006/12/21/naughty-miss-nevada-stripped-of-her-title/ - 67k -

“If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.”

- Felix Frankfurter

“It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.”

- James William Fulbright

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

Aldo Leopold

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

Thomas Henry Huxley, 5/4/1825 - 6/29/1895, English biologist, educator; letter from 9/23/1860

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1/14/07

Another birthday celebration due today:

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Albert%20Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer, M.D., OM, (January 14, 1875 – September 4, 1965) was a German Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. He was born in Kaysersberg, Alsace-Lorraine, Germany (now in Haut-Rhin, Alsace, France). He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for founding the Lambaréné Hospital in Gabon, west central Africa.

Philosophy

Schweitzer’s worldview was based on his idea of reverence for life (”Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben”), which he believed to be his greatest single contribution to humankind. His view was that Western civilization was in decay because of gradually abandoning its ethical foundations - those of affirmation of life.

It was his firm conviction that the respect for life is the highest principle. In a similar kind of exaltation of life to that of Friedrich Nietzsche, a recently influential philosopher of the time, Schweitzer admittedly followed the same line as that of the Russian Leo Tolstoy. Some people in his days compared his philosophy with that of Francis of Assisi, a comparison he did not object to.

Life and love in his view are based on, and follow out of the same principle: respect for every manifestation of Life, and a personal, spiritual relationship towards the universe. Ethics, according to Schweitzer, consists in the compulsion to show toward the will-to-live of each and every being the same reverence as one does to one’s own. Circumstances where we apparently fail to satisfy this compulsion should not lead us to defeatism, since the will-to-live renews itself again and again, as an outcome of an evolutionary necessity and a phenomenon with a spiritual dimension.

Schweitzer advocated the concept of reverence for life widely throughout his entire life. The historical Enlightenment waned and corrupted itself, Schweitzer held, because it has not been well enough grounded in thought, but compulsively followed the ethical will-to-live. Hence, he looked forward to a renewed and more profound Renaissance and Enlightenment of humanity (a view he expressed in the epilogue of his autobiography, Out of My Life and Thought). Albert Schweitzer nourished hope in a humankind that is more profoundly aware of its position in the Universe. His optimism was based in “belief in truth”. “The spirit generated by [conceiving of] truth is greater than the force of circumstances.” He persistently emphasized the necessity to think, rather than merely acting on basis of passing impulses or by following the most widespread opinions.

Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. [...] humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.

Respect for life, resulting from contemplation on one’s own conscious will to live, leads the individual to live in the service of other people and of every living creature. Schweitzer was much respected for putting his theory into practice in his own life. He was, for instance, a well-known cat lover, who, although left-handed, would write with his right hand rather than disturb the cat who would sleep on his left arm.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 5/29/1917 - 11/22/1963, US 35th president (1961-1963)

American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963.

“When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.” And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights--the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation--the right to breathe air as nature provided it--the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both.

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough--more than enough--of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on--not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.

Recurring themes-- it’s easy to note (and quote!) that the strategic aim of the new Bush “strategy” is a surge in insanity, to catapult the same old propaganda, to feed the PR machine, to change public opinion:

Bush to Send 20,000 More Troops to Iraq

By Jennifer Loven

The Associated Press

Wednesday 10 January 2007

Washington - President Bush will tell the nation Wednesday night he will send more than 20,000 additional American forces to Iraq, acknowledging that it had been a mistake earlier not to have more American and Iraqi troops fighting the war, a senior administration official said.

Seeking support for a retooled strategy to win support for the unpopular war, the president also will acknowledge that the rules of engagement were flawed, White House counselor Dan Bartlett said.

**

Troop Splurge

All signs point to an escalation of the war, with between twenty to fifty thousand more troops to be sent to Iraq to achieve . . . well, no one really knows. The on-the-ground generals who advised against a “surge” have been replaced. The “Iraq is a disaster and we must disengage” recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are already gathering dust on the War President’s bookshelf, as thoroughly discredited “let’s remake the Middle East” neocons still write the script. The recent election results and continuing polling that shows large majorities of the American people in favor of ending the war NOW apparently count for nothing.

The new Congress did show some backbone, sending Bush sternly worded objections to any escalation of hostilities or increase in troop levels. But their only power is to cut off funding for the war, and Democrats are unwilling to do anything that could translate politically into non-support of the troops.

So, assuming he can muster fresh and able fighting forces — no simple task, according to mostly muted voices within the military — Bush will have another round of shock-and-awe. Tens of thousands more Iraqis will die, while too many others will be forced to join the more than two million refuges who have already fled the country.

The American death toll will likewise increase, though at a rate that the neocons consider reasonable. “War isn’t easy,” they never tire of telling us. Nor is it cheap: we are currently spending $6 billion a month to “remake” the Middle East, and that’s a Pentagon figure; since honest accounting has never been a hallmark of the American war machine, we are likely spending way, way more.

The eternally painful and depressing irony is that, while waging war is never easy or cheap, making peace is.

With $6 billion a month over the past four years to spend, we the peaceful could have created world-class universal healthcare for all Americans; could have rebuilt all of the nation’s essential infrastructure — its roads, bridges, waterways, and communication systems; could have blanketed the country with super-fast internet access; could have brought all of our schools up to A+ levels; could have sparked an entrepreneurial revolution in safe, clean, renewable energies; could have led the world out of climate-change dangers; could have done all this and more, and still had money left for pressing global issues.

And, all of this money would have flowed into the pockets of ordinary people doing good work.

Really, nothing could be easier than world peace.

Don’t let a handful of self-serving, over-fed, war-addicted fools tell you otherwise. More troops means more war and more war will never bring peace to the Middle East or anywhere else.

Michael Sky | January 7, 2007

**

Published on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 by the Miami Herald

Continuing the Flight from Reality

by Joseph L. Galloway

President Bush tonight will present the results of his painful monthlong examination of the options for continuing his mistaken adventure in Iraq, but there’s little evidence that he’s discovered any new way forward.

The word in the halls of the Pentagon and inside the Beltway is that The Decider will choose some sort of temporary bump in the numbers of American troops currently assigned to fight a war without end and without purpose.

Does anyone, including the president, really believe that an additional 10,000 or even 30,000 soldiers and Marines on top of the 140,000 now in Iraq are somehow going to make Baghdad more secure, or clean up the Sunni insurgents who control much of Anbar province?

This isn’t a new way forward, nor is it a recipe for the victory that the desperate architect of an unnecessary and costly war seems to believe is waiting out there to rescue his legacy. It’s no more than a continuation of Bush’s urgent flight from reality.

**

Rising Regional Anger: Middle East Shaking Its Head

By Megan K. Stack and Ken Ellingwood

The Los Angeles Times

Friday 12 January 2007

Bush sees a regional solution in his plan for Iraq. But Arab states say the problem is the US.

Cairo - In ordering more American troops into Iraq, President Bush said he was sending a message of hope to millions of Arabs and Afghans trapped in violence. But to many on the ground in the Mideast, the speech spoke volumes of a gaping disconnect between high-flown U.S. promises and a deadly, turbulent reality.

After long years of war and political disillusionment, Bush would have been hard-pressed to come up with any message that would please the Arab world. Analysts say public opinion of the United States has sunk to an unprecedented low, with no end in sight to the bloodletting in Iraq or the Palestinian territories.

Many here, long mired in bloodshed and sinking deeper into sectarian tensions, hold America squarely to blame for both.

Rather than sowing political progress, they say, the U.S. presence in Iraq has poisoned the mood so thoroughly that secular and moderate activists now stay silent for fear of being tarred as American agents.

“What the United States did for the region is destruction for the forces who believe in democracy, rule of law and human rights,” said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City. “We are the real victims.”

**

Published on Wednesday, January 10, 2007

A Troop Surge Can’t Win a Victory from a Bad Decision for War

by Carl Conetta

The impasse in Iraq is not due principally to a lack of resources, but rather to the mission and the strategy informing the war.

From the outset, the US goals in Iraq have been overly ambitious and intrusive. This is the heart of the problem there. No amount of troop presence will suffice to stabilize the nation in the way the Bush administration intends.

Success in counter-insurgency efforts does not principally hinge on troop numbers, nor, for that matter, does it hinge on the methods or techniques of counter-insurgency and population control – as the US Army and Marine Corps’ feverish search for an effective counter-insurgency doctrine might imply.

The play of insurgency and counter-insurgency involves a three-sided relationship between government forces, anti-government ones, and the citizenry. A key aspect is the relative “rootedness” and standing of the insurgent and counter-insurgent forces vis a vis the values, culture, and aspirations of the general populace.

In this contest, foreign occupiers suffer a distinct structural disadvantage – by virtue of being both “foreign” and “occupiers”. In this regard, the most disconcerting data from Iraq concerns popular attitudes toward US forces. The percentage of Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia, desiring US withdrawal within a year or less has steadily increased as has the percentage who support attacks on US troops.

A foreign occupier’s presence is dependent, ultimately, on coercive power. Overcoming this disadvantage in the contest for “hearts and minds” depends on their being relatively modest in aims and discrete in methods – assuming that the mission permits it. Unfortunately, the American mission does not.

What the Bush administration has sought to do, at the point of a gun, is thoroughly reinvent Iraq – its public institutions, legal system, security structures, economy, and political order. This is a revolution as profound as any, but foreign in origin, design, and implementation. The desired end state is a friendly and pliable Iraq – wide-open to American influence, dependent on American power, and supportive of US interests and aims in the region.

It should not be surprising that our efforts – which have flooded the country with nearly 300,000 foreign handlers – have bred resentment and resistance, both active and passive. Nor should it be surprising that, when the experiment’s democratic trappings actually work, they work against us – bringing to power parties at odds with the American purpose.

The strategy that led us into Iraq and that continues to guide American efforts evinces two fundamental errors. The first is a naive optimism regarding the utility of military force. The second, an underestimation of the power and dynamics of identity politics – nationalism, tribalism, and religious communalism. Together, these errors blinded the war’s architects to the likely effects of American presence and combat operations – beginning with a failure to appreciate the chaos that war would unleash.

Thus, what began as an American conceived and controlled operation to depose a dictator and his clique became, step by step, a centrifugal communal conflict that the United States could no longer control. Ironically, public opinion polls show that Iraqi Sunni and Shia do strongly agree on one thing: their disdain for Americans and their desire to have us leave.

Many critics have derided the Bush national security team for incompetence in the post-invasion stability and reconstruction efforts, but the more consequential incompetence has to do with thinking that this enterprise was practicable in the first place.

Carl Conetta is the co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, http://www.comw.org/pda/. This piece is adapted from More troops for Iraq? Time to just say “No” by Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Memo #39, 10 January 2007. http://www.comw.org/pda/0701bm39.html

**

The Headless Horseman of the Apocalypse

By Norman Solomon

t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Thursday 11 January 2007

President Bush may be a headless horseman. But the biggest problem is what he rode in on.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a good name for it 40 years ago: “The madness of militarism.”

We can blame Bush all we want - and he does hold the reins right now - but his main enablers these days are the fastidious public servants in Congress. They keep preparing the hay, freshening the water, oiling the saddle, even while criticizing the inappropriately jocular rider. And when the band plays “Hail to the Jockey,” most of the grown-up stable boys and girls can’t help saluting.

The people who actually live in Iraq have their own opinions, of course. UPI reported at the end of December that a new poll, conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, found that “about 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the US-led invasion than it is today.” Meanwhile, according to a CNN poll last month, 11 percent of Americans support sending more US troops to Iraq.

**

Promising Troops Where They Aren’t Really Wanted

By Sabrina Tavernise and John F. Burns

The New York Times

Thursday 11 January 2007

Baghdad - As President Bush challenges public opinion at home by committing more American troops, he is confronted by a paradox: an Iraqi government that does not really want them.

**

The Real Disaster

The New York Times | Editorial

Thursday 11 January 2007

President Bush told Americans last night that failure in Iraq would be a disaster. The disaster is Mr. Bush’s war, and he has already failed. Last night was his chance to stop offering more fog and be honest with the nation, and he did not take it.

Americans needed to hear a clear plan to extricate United States troops from the disaster that Mr. Bush created. What they got was more gauzy talk of victory in the war on terrorism and of creating a “young democracy” in Iraq. In other words, a way for this president to run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one.

**

“My own country I lament is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Martin L. King, Jr., Nobel Prize speech, 4/4/1967, “The cruel hoax of racism, materialism, and militarism”

**

A Risky Game of Risk

By Maureen Dowd

The New York Times

Saturday 13 January 2007

I feel good about the new war with Iran.

How can you not have confidence in the crackerjack team that brought you Operation Iraqi Freedom, which foundered and led to Operation Together Forward, which stumbled and led to Operation Together Forward II, which collapsed and was replaced by The New Way Forward, the Surge now being launched even though nobody’s together and everything’s going backward?

I say, bring it on. If a pre-emptive war in Iraq doesn’t work, why not try a pre-emptive war on Iran in Iraq?

It’s impossible to know what W. was really thinking as he stiffly delivered his fantasy scheme in the White House library. The whole capital was fraught, but the president may simply have been musing to himself: “I’m hungry ... I wonder what time the game starts on ESPN? ... Has anybody read all these books?”

W. always acts like he’s upping the ante in a board game where you roll the dice and bet your plastic army divisions on the outcome. This doesn’t surprise some of his old classmates at Yale, who remember Junior as the riskiest Risk player of them all, known for dropping by the rooms of friends, especially when they were trying to study for exams, for extended bouts of “The Game of Global Domination.”

Junior was known as an extremely aggressive player in the venerable Parker Brothers board game, a brutal contest that requires bluster and bluffing as you invade countries, all the while betraying alliances. Notably, it’s almost impossible to win Risk and conquer the world if you start the game in the Middle East, because you’re surrounded by enemies.

His gamesmanship extended to sports - he loved going into overtime and demanding that points be played over because he wasn’t quite ready.

As Graydon Carter recollects in the new Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy wrote an article for the magazine about W. that made this point: “Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn’t lose. He’ll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him.”

Iraq?

**

Bush’s Legacy: The President Who Cried Wolf

By Keith Olbermann

MSNBC “Countdown”

Thursday 11 January 2007

Olbermann: Bush’s strategy fails because it depends on his credibility.

Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.

Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me” - only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran.

Only this president could extol the “thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group,” and then take its most far-sighted recommendation - “engage Syria and Iran” - and transform it into “threaten Syria and Iran” - when al-Qaida would like nothing better than for us to threaten Syria, and when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to be threatened by us.

This is diplomacy by skimming; it is internationalism by drawing pictures of Superman in the margins of the text books; it is a presidency of Cliff Notes.

And to Iran and Syria - and, yes, also to the insurgents in Iraq - we must look like a country run by the equivalent of the drunken pest who gets battered to the floor of the saloon by one punch, then staggers to his feet, and shouts at the other guy’s friends, “Ok, which one of you is next?”

Mr. Bush, the question is no longer “What are you thinking?” but rather “Are you thinking at all?”

“I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended,” you said last night.

And yet - without any authorization from the public, which spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November’s elections - without any consultation with Congress (in which key members of your own party, including Senators Sam Brownback, Norm Coleman and Chuck Hagel, are fleeing for higher ground) - without any awareness that you are doing exactly the opposite of what Baker-Hamilton urged you to do - you seem to be ready to make an open-ended commitment (on America’s behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran.

Our military, Mr. Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq that even a majority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissatisfied with your prosecution of the war.

It is so weary that many of the troops you have just consigned to Iraq will be on their second tours or their third tours or their fourth tours - and now you’re going to make them take on Iran and Syria as well?

Who is left to go and fight, sir?

Who are you going to send to “interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria?”

Laura and Barney?

The line is from the movie “Chinatown” and I quote it often: “Middle of a drought,” the mortician chuckles, “and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.!”

Middle of a debate over the lives and deaths of another 21,500 of our citizens in Iraq, and the president wants to saddle up against Iran and Syria.

Maybe that’s the point - to shift the attention away from just how absurd and childish this latest war strategy is (strategy, that is, for the war already under way, and not the one on deck).

We are going to put 17,500 more troops into Baghdad and 4,000 more into Anbar Province to give the Iraqi government “breathing space.”

In and of itself that is an awful and insulting term.

The lives of 21,500 more Americans endangered, to give “breathing space” to a government that just turned the first and perhaps the most sober act of any democracy - the capital punishment of an ousted dictator - into a vengeance lynching so barbaric and so lacking in the solemnities necessary for credible authority, that it might have offended the Ku Klux Klan of the 19th century.

And what will our men and women in Iraq do?

The ones who will truly live - and die - during what Mr. Bush said last night will be a “year ahead” that “will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve?”

They will try to seal Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad where the civil war is worst.

Mr. Bush did not mention that while our people are trying to do that, the factions in the civil war will no longer have to focus on killing each other, but rather they can focus anew on killing our people.

Because last night the president foolishly all but announced that we will be sending these 21,500 poor souls, but no more after that, and if the whole thing fizzles out, we’re going home.

The plan fails militarily.

The plan fails symbolically.

The plan fails politically.

Most importantly, perhaps, Mr. Bush, the plan fails because it still depends on your credibility.

You speak of mistakes and of the responsibility “resting” with you.

But you do not admit to making those mistakes.

And you offer us nothing to justify this clenched fist toward Iran and Syria.

In fact, when you briefed news correspondents off-the-record before the speech, they were told, once again, “if you knew what we knew … if you saw what we saw … “

“If you knew what we knew” was how we got into this morass in Iraq in the first place.

The problem arose when it turned out that the question wasn’t whether we knew what you knew, but whether you knew what you knew.

You, sir, have become the president who cried wolf.

All that you say about Iraq now could be gospel.

All that you say about Iran and Syria now could be prescient and essential.

We no longer have a clue, sir.

We have heard too many stories.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the director of national intelligence over to the State Department because he thought you were wrong about Iran.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly useful in an air war next door in Iran.

Your assurances, sir, and your demands that we trust you, have lost all shape and texture.

They are now merely fertilizer for conspiracy theories.

They are now fertilizer, indeed.

The pile has been built slowly and with seeming care.

I read this list last night, before the president’s speech, and it bears repeating because its shape and texture are perceptible only in such a context.

Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said nation-building was wrong for America.

Now he says it is vital.

He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control.

Last night he promised to embed them in Iraqi units.

He told us about WMD.

Mobile labs.

Secret sources.

Aluminum tubes.

Yellow-cake.

He has told us the war is necessary:

Because Saddam was a material threat.

Because of 9/11.

Because of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaida. Terrorism in general.

To liberate Iraq. To spread freedom. To spread Democracy. To prevent terrorism by gas price increases.

Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.

Because - 439 words in to the speech last night, he trotted out 9/11 again.

In advocating and prosecuting this war he passed on a chance to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

To get Muqtada al-Sadr. To get Bin Laden.

He sent in fewer troops than the generals told him to. He ordered the Iraqi army disbanded and the Iraqi government “de-Baathified.”

He short-changed Iraqi training. He neglected to plan for widespread looting. He did not anticipate sectarian violence.

He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. He gave jobs to foreign contractors, and not Iraqis. He staffed U.S. positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.

He and his government told us: America had prevailed, mission accomplished, the resistance was in its last throes.

He has insisted more troops were not necessary. He has now insisted more troops are necessary.

He has insisted it’s up to the generals, and then removed some of the generals who said more troops would not be necessary.

He has trumpeted the turning points:

The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam. A provisional government, a charter, a constitution, the trial of Saddam. Elections, purple fingers, another government, the death of Saddam.

He has assured us: We would be greeted as liberators - with flowers;

As they stood up, we would stand down. We would stay the course; we were never about “stay the course.”

We would never have to go door-to-door in Baghdad. And, last night, that to gain Iraqis’ trust, we would go door-to-door in Baghdad.

He told us the enemy was al-Qaida, foreign fighters, terrorists, Baathists, and now Iran and Syria.

He told us the war would pay for itself. It would cost $1.7 billion. $100 billion. $400 billion. Half a trillion. Last night’s speech alone cost another $6 billion.

And after all of that, now it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Democrats, Republicans, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November and the majority of the American people.

Oh, and one more to add, tonight: Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Mr. Bush, this is madness.

You have lost the military. You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost most of the Iraqis. You have lost many of the Republicans. You have lost our allies.

You are losing the credibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself.

And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones. You are guaranteeing it!

This becomes your legacy, sir: How many of those you addressed last night as your “fellow citizens” you just sent to their deaths.

And for what, Mr. Bush?

So the next president has to pull the survivors out of Iraq instead of you?

**

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

By Greg Palast

GregPalast.com

Thursday 11 January 2007

George W. Bush has an urge to surge. Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix: let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.

Been there. Done that. In 1965, Tom Paxton sang,

Lyndon Johnson told the nation

Have no fear of escalation.

I am trying everyone to please.

Though it isn’t really war,

We’re sending 50,000 more

To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.

Four decades later, Bush is asking us to save Iraq from the Iraqis.

There’s always a problem with giving a junkie another fix. It can only make things worse. Our maximum leader says that unless he gets to mainline another 21,000 troops, “Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” and terrorists “would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people.”

Excuse me, but didn’t we hear that same promise in 2003? Nearly four years ago, on the eve of invasion, this same George Bush promised, “The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed.”

Instead of diminishing the threat from terrorists, Bush now admits, “Al Qaeda has a home base in Anbar province” - something inconceivable under Saddam’s rule.

Four years ago, Bush promised us, “When the dictator has departed, [Iraq] can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.” Just send in the 82d Airborne and, lickety-split, we’d have, “A new Iraq that is prosperous and free.”

Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Here’s my question: Who asked the waiter to deliver this dish? Who asked for the 21,000 soldiers?

We know the US military didn’t ask for the 21,000 troops. (Outgoing commander General George Casey called for a troop reduction.)

We know the Iraqi government didn’t ask for the 21,000 troops. (Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is reportedly unhappy about a visible increase in foreign occupiers).

So who wants the occupation to continue? The answer is in Riyadh. When the King of Saudi Arabia hauled Dick Cheney before his throne on Thanksgiving weekend, the keeper of America’s oil laid down the law to Veep: the US will not withdraw from Iraq.

According to Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi who signals to the US government the commands and diktats of the House of Saud, the Saudis are concerned that a US pull-out will leave their Sunni brothers in Iraq to be slaughtered by Shia militias. More important, the Saudis will not tolerate a Shia-majority government in Iraq controlled by the Shia mullahs of Iran. A Shia combine would threaten Saudi Arabia’s hegemony in the OPEC oil cartel.

In other words, it’s about the oil.

So what’s the solution? What’s my plan? How do we get out of Iraq? Answer: the same way we got out of ‘Nam. In ships.

But can we just watch from the ship rail as Shia slaughter Sunnis in Baghdad, Sunnis murder Shia in Anbar, Kurds “cleanse” Kirkuk of Turkmen and so on in a sickening daisy-chain of ethnic atrocities?

No. There’s a real alternative. And it isn’t more troops, George.

Let’s imagine that somehow we could rip away the strings that allow Cheney and Rove and Abdullah to control our puppet president and he somehow, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly grew a brain. His speech last night would have sounded like this:

“My fellow Americans. Iraq is going to hell in a handbag. So the whole shebang doesn’t collapse into mayhem and madness, we need to send in 21,000 more troops. So I’ve just wired King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and told him to send them.”

“My missive to the monarch reads: Dear Abdullah. It’s time your 16,000 princelings got out of their Rolls Royces and formed the core of an Islamic Peacekeeping Force to prevent mass murder in Iraq. The American people are tired of you using the 82d Airborne as your private mercenary army. It seems like the Saudi military’s marching song is, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’”

“Well, King Ab, we’re out of here. We’re folding tents and loading the wagons. For four years now, Saudis have been secretly funding the berserkers in the Iraqi ‘insurgency’ while the Iranians are backing the crazies in the militias. Well, we’re telling you and the Persians: you’re going to have to stop using your checkbooks to fund a proxy war and instead start keeping the peace. It’s time you put your own tushies in the line of fire for a change.”

“If the African Union nations, poor as they are, can maintain a peacekeeping force to stop killings in Sudan and Senegal, you Saudis, with all the military toys we’ve sold you, can certainly join with your Muslim brothers in Jordan, Iran and Turkey to take responsibility for your region’s peace.”

“And when you get to Fallujah, don’t forget to drop us a postcard.”

Well, that’s my fantasy. But instead, War Junkie George will get his fix of another 21,000 American soldiers.

It reminds me far too chillingly of a Pete Seeger tune written when LBJ was saving Vietnam from Vietnamese. It was based on the true story of a US platoon in training, wading into the rising Mississippi, whose commander ordered them to keep going, deeper and deeper - until they drowned.

“We’re waste deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.”

---------

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. His reports on Iraq and oil for BBC-TV and Harper’s Magazine can be viewed at www.GregPalast.com.

**

Waist Deep In The Big Muddy

Well, I’m not going to point any moral;

I’ll leave that for yourself

Maybe you’re still walking,

You’re still talking

You’d like to keep your health.

But every time I read the papers

That old feeling comes on;

We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

Pete Seeger, 1963

**

Although there’s probably not going to be a big resurgence of meaningful, satirical folk music in popular culture, the Foremen have done a good job of carrying on the tradition. As usual, text is a poor substitute for listening to the lyrics in the songs! A couple examples are here as well as the url.

http://www.royzimmerman.com/lyrics/best_future.html

Music about Ignorance, War, Greed

Building for the Future
words and music by Roy Zimmerman
© 1994 Watunes
(From “Sing it Loud!”, “Folk Heroes” [Reprise] and “The Best of the Foremen”

When the call of the dove can be heard ‘cross the land,
You’ll be there, you’ll be there.
When the day of deliverance is finally at hand,
You’ll be there, you’ll be there.
When the bells of tyranny ring their last,
And the long dark night of oppression has passed,
And the foghorn of freedom has blown its big blast,
You’ll be there, buddy, you’ll be there.

When the hammer of justice rings out all around,
You’ll be there, you’ll be there.
When a genderless pronoun has finally been found,
You’ll be there, you’ll be there.
When all men have homes and jobs and food,
And an optimistic attitude,
And this nation’s no longer completely f.u.’d,
You’ll be there, buddy, you’ll be there.

Building for the future
Building for the future

When there’s chicken in every pot and two phones in every car,
You’ll be there, yes, you’ll be there.
When there’s Kinko’s and Starbucks wherever you are,
You’ll be there, you’ll be there.
And when they make that movie of your life,
And you play yourself and Kim Basinger plays your wife,
And she’s running right at you, and she doesn’t have a knife,
You’ll be there, buddy, you’ll be there.

Building for the future
Building for the future

And when they make any movie just as good as the book,
You’ll be there, yes, you’ll be there.
When the French are polite and the British can cook,
You’ll be there, yes, you’ll be there.
When the hopeless hordes have found their voice,
And a priest can marry the man of his choice,
And no one plays bagpipes, or quotes from James Joyce,
You’ll be there, yes, you’ll be there.

Building for the future
Building for the future

And when our lifestyle is none of Big Brother’s concern,
You’ll be there, yes, you’ll be there.
When Doctor Kevorkian treats Howard Stern,
You’ll be there, yes, you’ll be there.
When compassion reigns from sea to sea,
And we coexist in peace and dignity,
And intolerant people are guillotined immediately,
You’ll be there, yes, you’ll be there.

‘Cause we are building for the future,
We are building for the future,
Building prisons for the future,
You’ll be there, buddy, you’ll be there.

**

What Did You Do on Election Day?
words and music by Roy Zimmerman
© 1996 Watunes (BMI)
(From “What’s Left?”

What did you do on election day,
Oh, dear brother of mine?
What did you do on election day,
My darlin’ brother?

I kicked the pamphlets off the porch an’
Read the latest Forbes and Fortune,
Went to work on my tan,
Felt distinctly disenfranchised,
Threw my Bee Gees records away.

That’s what I did on election day.
That’s what I did last Tuesday.

What did you do on election day,
Oh, dear sister of mine?
What did you do on election day,
My darlin’ sister?

I met the girls at the courts,
Wrote a note to Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Caught up on my soaps,
Pinched my cheeks and dashed my hopes,
Threw my sample ballot away.

That’s what I did on election day.
That’s what I did last Tuesday.

What did you do on election day,
Oh, dear father of mine?
What did you do on election day,
My darlin’ daddy?

I cashed my check and cleaned my gun,
Read Cal Thomas and the funnies,
Made a payment on my plot,
Thought a thought I’ve since forgotten,
Threw my recycling buckets away.

That’s what I did on election day
That’s what I did last Tuesday.

What did you do on election day,
Oh, dear cousin of mine?
What did you do on election day,
My distant cousin?

I voted! — “What?!”

I voted Yes on A-B-C
No on W-X-Y-Z
Tore my stub, drove home and then,
Back to the polls and voted again...
And again, and again...

Once for everyone who stayed away,
That’s what I did last Tuesday.
Otherwise a real slow news day.

**

Everyman (for Himself)
words and music by Roy Zimmerman
© 1995 Watunes (BMI)
(From “Folk Heroes”)

(spoken)
On November 9th, 1994, the morning after the election, I returned to my polling place to find the mangled remains of the American liberal buried under a conservative landslide. Male or female or black or white, I couldn’t tell. But I knew it was a liberal because the heart was still on the sleeve and the knees were still jerking. Well, now the ashes have been scattered, though not as scattered as the liberal when he was alive... and the conservatives have come to power and things are changing. There’s a new show on PBS called “Mister Rogers’ Gate-Guarded Community.” And the conservatives themselves are changing... they’re morphing. They’re the Mighty Morphin Power Brokers. And they’re wearing the power ties, and they’re taking the power lunches, but you know, the one thing that they’ve been missing up to this point, is a power ballad...

(sung)
When your heart is heavy
When the night has been too long
When every road you choose
Muddies up your shoes
And leads you wrong

When you’re cold and lonely
When your rope is at its end
When darkness clouds the skies
And tears fill your eyes
When you just need a friend

Don’t look at me
Wipe your own damn nose
And if I’ve kept you down or made you cry
Or trampled all your hopes and dreams
Well, that’s the way it goes

In heaven there’s no hate or war
In heaven no one’s hungry or poor
In heaven they hold hands evermore
But we’re on earth
And here on earth
It’s everyman for himself

When you’re a Black, Chicano, Native-American, Jewish lesbian folk singer
And this morning when you woke up you hit your head on the steering wheel
You’re shoulder deep in shit
And you just wanna quit
I know how you can get a handgun without the usual background check

Get off my lawn
Pay your rent on time

And if I hire illegals to build a wall around my property
It’s just ‘cause I’m
Tough on crime

In heaven there’s no fear or need
In heaven no one’s rabid with greed
In heaven you get laid guaranteed
But we’re on earth
And here on earth
It’s everyman for himself

‘Cause there’s a hot wind a’blowin’
Can’t you feel it?
It’s blowin’ hard!
So, where’s your national pride, brother?
Where’s your national I.D. card?

(spoken)
And even as we send the American liberal off to the great society in the sky, we await the day when he’ll be joined by his friends, the literate and the tolerant... when all the frivolous arts and sciences are replaced by nationwide network of publicly-funded putting greens... the government at the people, and above the people, and in spite of the people shall not perish, but that certain people shall... and until then, my friends...

(sung)
It’s every man for himself!

**

Ain’t No Liberal
words and music by Roy Zimmerman
© 1993, 1995 Watunes (BMI)
(From “Folk Heroes” [Metaphor], “Folk Heroes” [Reprise] and “The Best of the Foremen”)

I saw a blinding flash of light
So I pulled over to the first church on the right

And I feel so good, ain’t no doubt
Wanna laugh and shout about it
‘Cause I once was a liberal
But I ain’t no liberal no more

I saw a bum on the curb today
Well, I hit the gas and covered him with gutter spray

And I feel so good, ain’t no doubt
Wanna laugh and shout about it
‘Cause I once was a liberal
But I ain’t no liberal no more

My heart is jumpin’ and my head is swimmin’
I feel like I could take the vote away from women

And I feel so good, ain’t no doubt
Wanna laugh and shout about it
‘Cause I once was a liberal
But I ain’t no liberal no more

On that joyful day, yes on that glorious day
The day I threw my Birkenstocks away
The angel told me, “Oh, ye man of sin,
Open up your bleeding heart and let Pat Buchanan in!”

I saw a starving third world nation
So I exploited its underprivileged population

And I feel so good, ain’t no doubt
Wanna laugh and shout about it
‘Cause I once was a liberal
But I ain’t no liberal no more

Now, I support all my neighbors of color
And their attempts to make that color a little duller

And I feel so good, ain’t no doubt
Wanna laugh and shout about it
‘Cause I once was a liberal
But I ain’t no liberal no more

Oh, on that joyful day, yes on that glorious day
The day I burned up all my macramé
The angel told me what is good for GM
Is good for me, and me, and me
And the hell with the rest of them

I used to be so paranoid
But now I’m — what?!

I feel so good, ain’t no doubt
Wanna laugh and shout about it
‘Cause I once was a liberal
But I ain’t no liberal
And I once was a peacenik
But I bought stock in Lockheed

And I once was a union man
But I got me this nice office

And I once was a feminist
But I just don’t understand women

And I once supported rent control
But I inherited some property

And I once was anti-censorship
But I don’t have time for fiction

And I once hated racism
But I figure, why fight it?

And I once had compassion
But I ain’t no liberal no more

**

Published on Monday, January 8, 2007 by the New York Times

Quagmire of the Vanities

by Paul Krugman

The only real question about the planned “surge” in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks they’re cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be “the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.”

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they’re delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

Of course, such gambling is easier when the lives at stake are those of other people’s children.

Well, we don’t have to settle the question. Either way, what’s clear is the enormous price our nation is paying for President Bush’s character flaws.

I began writing about the Bush administration’s infallibility complex, the president’s Captain Queeg-like inability to own up to mistakes, almost a year before the invasion of Iraq. When you put a man like that in a position of power — the kind of position where he can punish people who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, and base policy decisions on the advice of people who play to his vanity — it’s a recipe for disaster.

**

Published on Thursday, January 11, 2007 by the Toronto Star

What Bush Didn’t Say in His Speech

The president’s ‘new way forward’ is designed to pass the stigma of defeat to his successor

by David Olive

In the latest of his high crimes and misdemeanors, U.S. President George W. Bush gave false hope last night to Americans and the world that stability can be achieved in Iraq and the Middle East using the same methods that have repeatedly failed in the past.

**

Published on Saturday, January 13, 2007 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Have You No Decency Mr. President?

by Tony Norman

President Bush is fond of making comparisons between his governance of the nation during the war and Lincoln’s stewardship of the republic during the Civil War.

He believes history will treat him better than his contemporaries who are, after all, bedeviled by the excruciating reality of the here-and-now.

His grudging acknowledgment that “mistakes were made” is the kind of Nixonian passive construction that points to an intense desire to escape responsibility for his own policies.

At the lowest point of his presidency, Mr. Bush refuses to even fake the kind of self-criticism that other presidents have routinely resorted to in their search for redemption.

Lincoln is our greatest president because he told himself the truth about what his decisions meant for the country.

By comparison, Mr. Bush has yet to exhibit anything resembling deep empathy or soul-searching regarding the Iraq war.

Mr. Bush’s rationale for an expansion of our military commitment is built upon the kind of abstraction that sent us searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction in the first place.

The blood spilled every day in Iraq isn’t abstract. While most citizens are too polite to say it, Mr. Bush’s preemptive “war against terror” killed more Americans than al-Qaida did on Sept. 11.

The best barometer of whether Mr. Bush believes his own rhetoric would be his announcement that his twin daughters have enlisted for a tour of duty in Iraq.

Say what you will about King Agamemnon’s barbaric sacrifice of his daughter in Euripedes’ “Iphigenia at Aulis,” no one doubted his commitment to victory in the war against Troy. Can George Bush say that?

If former Sen. Rick Santorum is serious about tracking down “America’s enemies” for the think tank that just hired him, he need look no further than the office of the President of the United States.

There, a feckless man with as little imagination as one can legally get away with in this life, is pushing our military into the spinning teeth of a bloody buzz saw.

In a quote that has always been attributed to Mr. Lincoln, the great man once said a thing or two about belief in the eternal gullibility of the masses: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

Are you listening, Mr. President? We don’t believe you. This war is over. We lost.

**

With Iraq Speech, Bush to Pull Away From His Generals

By Michael Abramowitz, Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks

The Washington Post

Wednesday 10 January 2007

When President Bush goes before the American people tonight to outline his new strategy for Iraq, he will be doing something he has avoided since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003: ordering his top military brass to take action they initially resisted and advised against.

Bush talks frequently of his disdain for micromanaging the war effort and for second-guessing his commanders. “It’s important to trust the judgment of the military when they’re making military plans,” he told The Washington Post in an interview last month. “I’m a strict adherer to the command structure.”

**

Published on Saturday, January 13, 2007

‘Taxes Are What We Pay for Civilized Society’

by Christopher Brauchli

‘Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.’

-- Oliver Wendell Homes, Compañía de Tabacos v. Collector

It’s time for one of our periodic looks at the Internal Revenue Service. In July it announced it was eliminating one-half of the IRS personnel who were responsible for auditing the tax returns of the wealthiest Americans who made gifts or had died.

Although the IRS and the Department of the Treasury have both said that estate and gift tax auditors are among the more productive of IRS auditors, generating on average $2,200 per hour for each hour spent auditing returns, the IRS says it makes more sense to audit income tax returns of wealthy Americans. The money saved by firing estate and gift tax auditors will be used to hire more income tax auditors.

Some of the auditors whose jobs are being eliminated said that the IRS was doing this to help people with political connections. I find that hard to believe. These steps are nothing more than an example of a more compassionate George Bush who has a friendly approach to collecting taxes. The fact that the new approach benefits only the rich is of no moment.

**

DON’T SELL YOUR OIL STOCKS

“http://www.newsforreal.com/” January 8 blog entry by Stephen Pizzo reviews the situation country by country – Kurdistan and Turkey, too – and concludes:

[E]veryone seems to be talking about how Iraq will be George W. Bush’s legacy, and that’s just plain wrong. Iraq will be part of George W. Bush’s legacy, but only part. The rest of his legacy will play out in the years and decades after Bush leaves office. Because, when he invaded Iraq he didn’t free the Iraqi people, as he likes to now claim. He freed a thousand years of ethnic/religious/tribal demons. And while these demons may not be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it’ll sure feel like they are.

One hopes it is wildly too pessimistic. But I’m not selling my North American energy stocks.

PROPERLY RATED

“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/05/AR2007010501801.html?referrer=emailarticle” the Washington Post, Saturday:

PRESIDENT BUSH wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday that “it is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues.” The claim about fueling record revenue is flat wrong, and it is shocking that the president should persist in making such errors. After all, tax cuts are the central plank of his domestic policy. How can he fail to understand the basic facts about them?

“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/05/AR2007010501801.html?referrer=emailarticle” In a period when it was run by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, another economic conservative who worked in Mr. Bush’s White House, the CBO estimated the extent to which a 10 percent reduction in personal taxes might pay for itself. On the most optimistic assumptions it could muster, the CBO found that tax cuts would stimulate enough economic growth to replace 22 percent of lost revenue in the first five years and 32 percent in the second five. On pessimistic assumptions, the growth effects of tax cuts did nothing to offset revenue loss.

It’s evident to almost all that on matters of foreign and military policy the Republican strategy has been a disaster. This is mostly the fault of Bush/Cheney and their team, but it was certainly not challenged by the Republican Congress.

It’s less evident – but I think equally true – that in its economic priorities, primarily to lower taxes on the rich at the expense of everyone else, the Republican agenda has dramatically weakened the country as well.

No, no, they argue – there is no piper ever to be paid; tax cuts lead to more tax revenue. Well, they did when Kennedy cut Eisenhower’s top marginal rate from 90% to 70% (which was still wildly too high). But after a point, obviously, lowering tax rates lowers tax revenues, thus plunging us ever deeper into debt.

The Bush years have been a positively grand time to be rich and powerful in America. But we will have amassed $10 trillion of National Debt by the time the White House changes hands – of which $8 trillion, accumulated since 1776, will have been racked up under just three presidents: Reagan, Bush, and Bush. The annual interest on that debt already consumes 40% of all the personal income taxes we pay. And that’s with the forbearance of our foreign creditors, who thus far have not demanded higher rates to compensate for the falling dollar.

The Washington Post editorial cites two other sets of data (one from President Bush’s own Treasury Department) that put the lie to the notion that Bush’s tax cuts pay for themselves in economic growth.

It concludes:

Mr. Bush’s op-ed included nice statements about bipartisan cooperation. But the Democrats would be more likely to cooperate with the president if he stopped making things up.

http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/070108.html

**

Blood and Oil: How the West Will Profit From Iraq’s Most Precious Commodity

The Independent UK

Sunday 07 January 2007

The ‘IoS’ today reveals a draft for a new law that would give Western oil companies a massive share in the third largest reserves in the world. To the victors, the oil? That is how some experts view this unprecedented arrangement with a major Middle East oil producer that guarantees investors huge profits for the next 30 years.

So was this what the Iraq war was fought for, after all? As the number of US soldiers killed since the invasion rises past the 3,000 mark, and President George Bush gambles on sending in up to 30,000 more troops, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Iraqi government is about to push through a law giving Western oil companies the right to exploit the country’s massive oil reserves.

**

Published on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times

Record Warmth (Again) in 2006

Experts say the increase offers further evidence of climate change.

by Robert Lee Hotz

On the fever chart of rising temperatures, 2006 was the warmest year on record for the 48 contiguous states, pairing a lethal summer heat wave with a winter so mild that in some places daffodils bloomed out of season and bears forgot to hibernate, government climate experts reported Tuesday.

Based on an analysis of readings from 1,200 weather stations around the country, the average annual temperature in the Lower 48 states last year was 2.2 degrees higher than the mean temperature for the 20th century and fractionally warmer than in 1998, which previously held the temperature record, the researchers reported.

Seven months last year were much warmer than average, concluded the scientists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“We are breaking warm records all over the place,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who was not involved in the NOAA analysis.

Overall, annual temperatures in the U.S. and around the world are one degree higher than a century ago and the rate of warming has accelerated threefold in recent decades. Eight of the last 10 years are the warmest on record worldwide. Climate experts at the British Meteorological Office last week predicted that this year could easily become the warmest year globally on record.

If global temperatures continue to rise as projected, melting icecaps could raise sea level worldwide by up to 3 feet by 2100, swamping coastal communities that are home to millions of people, according to estimates from the United Nations. At the same time, rising temperatures could fuel more powerful storms, while disrupting subtle seasonal patterns of plant growth and animal habitats around the world.

“Global warming is pushing these temperatures ever upward,” said meteorologist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. “We are loading the dice.”

The rising temperature trends of recent years appear to closely track the general predictions of computerized climate models analyzing the effects of greenhouse gases on global climate patterns, several scientists said.

“It looks pretty much like what the climate models of global warming expected,” said Penn State University climate analyst Richard Alley, who was not part of the research effort. “We have turned up Earth’s thermostat.”

Rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which can trap heat in the atmosphere, were a key factor in the warming trend, the climate center researchers said. The rate at which carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere has doubled since than 1990s, Australian researchers recently reported, with 7.85 billion tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere in 2005 alone.

**

Published on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 by PilotOnline.com / Hampton Roads.com

Bill Moyers Has Harsh Words for President, Christian Right

by Steven G. Vegh

Television journalist Bill Moyers slammed President Bush on Tuesday for “mind-boggling” contempt for proof of global warming and blamed what he called Bush’s dependence on conservative Christians and multinational corporations.

“Without the Christian right, the corporations that now control Washington would not have had the votes to eviscerate our environmental protections,” Moyers said in a Chrysler Hall speech hosted by The Norfolk Forum.

**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JANUARY 9, 2007

1:52 PM

CONTACT: Nuclear Information Resource Service

Mary Olson, NIRS Southeast Office 828-675-1792

Kevin Kamps, 301-270-6477

100+ Groups Call on Congress to Oppose High-Level Radioactive Waste Dumping Plan in Ohio

WASHINGTON - January 9 - In a letter delivered to congressional leaders, 106 national and grassroots organizations expressed opposition to any temporary centralization of irradiated fuel from commercial nuclear power operations in the United States, specifically focusing concern on the Piketon, Ohio site where apparently preparations are already underway for an “interim” dump.

**

Nuclear Power Not Clean, Green or Safe

By Sherwood Ross

t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Wednesday 10 January 2007

In all the annals of spin, few statements are as misleading as Vice President Cheney’s that the nuclear industry operates “efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions,” or President Bush’s claim that America’s 103 nuclear plants operate “without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases.”

Even as it refuses to concede global warming is really happening, the White House touts nuclear power as the answer, as if it were an arm of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry’s trade group.

In reality, not only are vast amounts of fossil fuels burned to mine and refine the uranium for nuclear power reactors, polluting the atmosphere, but those plants are allowed “to emit hundreds of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year,” Dr. Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear authority, points out in her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (The New Press).

**

Published on Wednesday, January 10, 2007 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington)

US Health Care Puts Profit over People

by Joanna Garritano

Though elected officials and experts alike are perplexed about how to solve the current health care crisis, it isn’t difficult to recognize the health care problems facing Americans. The 47 million Americans without health care coverage are not the only ones who confront tremendous barriers to health in this country. Businesses, families, workers and people of all ages are finding U.S. health care too expensive and unresponsive to their needs.

**

Published on Friday, January 5, 2007 by truthdig

Stop This War, Now!

by Molly Ivins

The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck—so it’s up to us. You and me, Bubba.

I don’t know why Bush is just standing there like a frozen rabbit, but it’s time we found out. The fact is we have to do something about it. This country is being torn apart by an evil and unnecessary war, and it has to be stopped now.

This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it’s doubly wrong for him to send 20,0000 more soldiers into this hellhole, as he reportedly will announce next week.

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn’t supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

It’s a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people with what they are charged if they’re arrested. This administration has done away with rights first enshrined in the Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago, and we’ve let them do it.

This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I’ll write about this war until we find some way to end it. STOP IT NOW. BAM! Every day, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.

So let’s take a step back and note, for example, that before the war one of the architects of the entire policy, Paul Wolfowitz, testified to Congress that Iraq had no history of ethnic strife. Sectarian and ethnic strife is a part of the region. And the region is full of examples of Western colonial powers trying to occupy countries, take their resources and take over the administration of their people—and failing.

The sectarian bloodbath we see daily completely refutes Wolfowitz. And now Bush has given him the World Bank to run. Wonder what he’ll do there.

And let’s keep in mind that when the Army arrived in Baghdad, we, the television viewers, watched footage of a bunch of enraged and joyous Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein, their repulsive dictator, in Firdos Square. Only one thing was wrong. The event was staged. Taking down the statue was instigated by a Marine colonel, and a PSYOP (psychological operations) unit made it appear to be a spontaneous show of Iraqi joy.

When we later saw the whole square, only 30 to 40 people were there—U.S. military people, press and some Iraqis. And a U.S. tank pulled the statue down with a cable. We, the television viewers, saw the square being presented as though the people of Iraq had gone into a frenzy and spontaneously pulled down the statue. Fake images and claims have been a part of this fiasco from the beginning.

We need to cut through all the smoke and mirrors and come up with an exit strategy, forthwith. The Democrats have yet to offer a cohesive plan to get us out of this mess. Of course, it’s not their fault—but the fact is we need leaders who are grown-ups and who are willing to try to fix it. Bush has ignored the actual grown-ups from the Iraq Study Group and the generals and all the other experts, who are nearly unanimous that more troops will not help.

So, as I said, it’s up to you and me, Bubba. We need to make sure that the new Congress curbs executive power, which has been so misused, and asserts its own power to make this situation change. Now.

**

Published on Sunday, January 7, 2007 by the New York Times

The Imperial Presidency

Editorial

Observing President Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.

That year, the White House used the fear of terrorism to scare American voters into cementing the Republican domination of Congress. Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney then embarked on an expansion of presidential power chilling both in its sweep and in the damage it did to the constitutional system of checks and balances.

In 2006, the voters sent Mr. Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions.

The administration’s assault on some of the nation’s founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.

**

Rev. Bob Edgar:

History Always Teaches, But Not Everyone Learns

**

“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”

James Thurber, 1894-1961, US humorist

***

1/23/2007

morning trivia

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

- Thomas Jefferson

http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-01-23T000442Z_01_L22768120_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-USA-IMAGE-POLL-COL.XML&archived=False

U.S. image around world sharply worsens: BBC poll

Mon Jan 22, 2007 7:04 PM EST

LONDON (Reuters) - The image of the United States has deteriorated around the world in the past year because of issues such as Iraq and prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to a poll by the BBC World Service released on Tuesday.

The proportion of people believing the United States has a mainly positive influence in world affairs dropped seven points from a year ago -- to 29 percent from 36, the results from 18 countries that were also polled the previous year showed.

Fifty-two percent thought U.S. influence was mainly negative, up from 47 percent a year ago, the poll found.

The survey, released on the day President George W. Bush gives his State of the Union speech to Congress, found sharp disagreement with U.S. policy on Iraq which is ravaged by violence nearly four years after the U.S.-led invasion.

In all, 26,381 people were questioned in 25 countries. Almost three in four people disapproved of U.S. policy on Iraq, while two-thirds disapproved of U.S. handling of terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba.

“The U.S. administration’s recent decision to send more troops to Iraq is at odds with global public opinion ... This policy is likely to further hurt America’s image,” Doug Miller, president of pollsters GlobeScan, said.

Sixty-five percent disapproved of U.S. policy on last year’s war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas, 60 percent of its handling of Iran’s nuclear program, 56 percent of its stance on global warming and 54 percent of its policy on North Korea’s nuclear program.

More than two-thirds believed the U.S. military presence in the Middle East provoked more conflict than it prevented and only 17 percent thought U.S. troops there were a stabilizing force.

The poll found that the American public also seemed to have serious doubts about U.S. foreign policy. Majorities of Americans polled disapproved of how the United States was handling the war in Iraq (57 percent) and global warming (54 percent) while half disapproved of U.S. policy on Guantanamo and Iran.

Fifty-three percent of Americans said the U.S. military presence in the Middle East “provokes more conflict than it prevents,” the survey said.

The poll found U.S. policy was regarded poorly in Britain, Bush’s closest ally in Iraq. A majority (57 percent) of the British public saw U.S. influence in the world as mainly negative and 81 percent disapproved of U.S. actions in the war in Iraq, the BBC World Service said.

The poll, carried out between November 3 and January 9, covered Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United States.

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

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Published on Monday, January 22, 2007 by the Baltimore Sun (Maryland)

Speaking Out Now against the Iraq Disaster is Too Little, Too Late

by Cynthia Tucker

With President Bush’s decision to send more U.S. troops to Iraq, it becomes clear that Gen. Eric K. Shinseki was right all along.

In February 2003, weeks before the invasion began, General Shinseki, then the U.S. Army chief of staff, testified at a Senate hearing that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to pacify Iraq after the early rounds of combat. For his candor, he was attacked, defamed and denounced by Bush administration officials, retiring with his reputation in tatters.

Only in the movies, it turns out, do the good guys - the courageous, self-sacrificing types - get the glory. In the real world, they get hammered.

That helps explain why General Shinseki was such a lonely voice back then. If last spring’s “generals’ revolt” was any indication, there were plenty of military men who saw trouble in Donald H. Rumsfeld’s pared-down war plans. But they cowered before the condescending secretary, afraid to question his assumptions even in private meetings.

Retired Maj. Gen. John Baptiste, who once commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said last fall that Mr. Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next person who mentioned postwar plans. So they shut their mouths to keep their jobs. There were many officials - military officers, intelligence experts, strategic thinkers - who doubted the rationale for the war in Iraq or the planning for it. But few were willing to risk their careers by speaking up.

Intelligence professionals knew there were no close links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Military strategists knew that postwar operations demanded contingency planning and expertise that the Bush administration resisted. But most kept their doubts to themselves.

That includes then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who sold the war to a wary public in a speech before the United Nations in February 2003. He has since voiced regrets about that speech, but it’s too late.

The same goes for all those Democratic senators who seem to want do-overs on their war votes. The record cannot be retracted or erased; the invasion cannot be recalled.

And therein lies our profound difficulty. There is no chance for “victory” or “success” in Iraq at this late date, and little chance for even averting disaster. What is done cannot be undone. There is no “way forward.”

The U.S. invasion of Iraq fractured a fragile society, set off a cycle of retribution that may go on for years and emboldened Iran. We cannot fix the mess we’ve made. The best we can hope for is that the rest of the Middle East is not sucked into the maelstrom.

The moment for political courage came and went. Those who could not summon it then, those who failed to speak out when their nation most needed them, find that there is nothing they can do to make up for that failing.

In retrospect, it’s not clear that President Bush could have been pushed back from his disastrous insistence on toppling Mr. Hussein, even if he had met firmer opposition. Given his continued resistance to reality, it’s unlikely.

Still, wouldn’t Sen. John Kerry, a combat veteran, have better served his nation if he had given a rousing speech on the floor of the Senate denouncing the invasion and then voted against it? The Massachusetts Democrat would have been called a coward and worse. But he could have plainly made the case that needed to be made: Invasion was not in the national interest.

And wouldn’t Mr. Powell have done more good if he had resigned rather than give that speech to the United Nations? He was perhaps the most trusted member of the Bush administration at the time; his resignation would have spoken volumes about the folly of invasion.

But maybe that sort of thing makes grand movies because it is so very rare.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her column appears Mondays in The Sun.

Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun

**

WHY SO MUCH SPACE DEVOTED TO CFLs?

Heck, we’re just talking about a few lightbulbs, right? Well, it may be more important than you’d initially assume.

Carol Vinzant: “If you liked the Times’ January story on Wal-Mart’s push for CFLs, you’ll love the Fast Company story by Charles Fishman they seemed to have based it on.”

F I do. In small part:

Sitting humbly on shelves in stores everywhere is a product, priced at less than $3, that will change the world. Soon. It is a fairly ordinary item that nonetheless cuts to the heart of a half-dozen of the most profound, most urgent problems we face. Energy consumption. Rising gasoline costs and electric bills. Greenhouse-gas emissions. Dependence on coal and foreign oil. Global warming. . . .

Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.

What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. . . .

Swirl bulbs don’t just work, they pay for themselves. They use so little power compared with old reliable bulbs, a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months. Screw one in, turn it on, and it’s not just lighting your living room, it’s dropping quarters in your pocket. The advantages pile up in a way to almost make one giddy. Compact fluorescents, even in heavy use, last 5, 7, 10 years. Years. Install one on your 30th birthday; it may be around to help illuminate your 40th.

Frank: “I think LEDs last longer than CFLs, are more luminance-efficient, and do not contain mercury. But cost even more. Click here. [“The latest LED light bulbs now produce about the same amount of light per watt as compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL). However, unlike incandescent bulbs and CFLs, which splash light in all directions, LED bulbs are directional. They drive their light in one direction, so that you have light exactly where you want it. This directional lighting equals savings in yet another fashion. LEDs don’t waste light (energy) on areas you don’t need illuminated, which is also why they’re perfect task lights.”] Lowest price I can find: here.”

THE BEST POSSIBLE NEWS

(the partnering part, not the extinction part)

On Wednesday [writes my friend Alan Farago in the Orlando Sentinel], the nation’s leading scientists and evangelicals joined in Washington, D.C., to urge action to reverse rapidly escalating environmental problems, including global warming and species extinction.

“We are glad to be partnering with our friends in the scientific community. They have the facts we need to present to our congregations; we have the numbers of activists that will work through churches, government, and the business community to make a significant impact,” said the Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Longwood.

“We agree that our home, the Earth, which comes to us as that inexpressibly beautiful and mysterious gift that sustains our very lives, is seriously imperiled by human behavior. The harm is seen throughout the natural world, including a cascading set of problems such as climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and species extinctions, as well as the spread of human infectious diseases, and other accelerating threats to the health of people and the well-being of societies.

“Each particular problem could be enumerated, but here it is enough to say that we are gradually destroying the sustaining community of life on which all living things on Earth depend. The costs of this destruction are already manifesting themselves around the world in profound and painful ways. The cost to humanity is already significant and may soon become incalculable. Being irreversible, many of these changes would affect all generations to come.”

F Amen.

**

Gold-Plated Indifference

By Paul Krugman

The New York Times

Monday 22 January 2007

President Bush’s Saturday radio address was devoted to health care, and officials have put out the word that the subject will be a major theme in tomorrow’s State of the Union address. Mr. Bush’s proposal won’t go anywhere. But it’s still worth looking at his remarks, because of what they say about him and his advisers.

On the radio, Mr. Bush suggested that we should “treat health insurance more like home ownership.” He went on to say that “the current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance.”

Wow. Those are the words of someone with no sense of what it’s like to be uninsured.

Going without health insurance isn’t like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It’s a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don’t need an “incentive” to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

Most people without health insurance have low incomes, and just can’t afford the premiums. And making premiums tax-deductible is almost worthless to workers whose income puts them in a low tax bracket.

Of those uninsured who aren’t low-income, many can’t get coverage because of pre-existing conditions - everything from diabetes to a long-ago case of jock itch. Again, tax deductions won’t solve their problem.

The only people the Bush plan might move out of the ranks of the uninsured are the people we’re least concerned about - affluent, healthy Americans who choose voluntarily not to be insured. At most, the Bush plan might induce some of those people to buy insurance, while in the process - whaddya know - giving many other high-income individuals yet another tax break.

While proposing this high-end tax break, Mr. Bush is also proposing a tax increase - not on the wealthy, but on workers who, he thinks, have too much health insurance. The tax code, he said, “unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise, and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need.”

Again, wow. No economic analysis I’m aware of says that when Peter chooses a good health plan, he raises Paul’s premiums. And look at the condescension. Will all those who think they have “gold plated” health coverage please raise their hands?

According to press reports, the actual plan is to penalize workers with relatively generous insurance coverage. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about the wealthy; we’re talking about ordinary workers who have managed to negotiate better-than-average health plans.

What’s driving all this is the theory, popular in conservative circles but utterly at odds with the evidence, that the big problem with U.S. health care is that people have too much insurance - that there would be large cost savings if people were forced to pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket.

The administration also believes, for some reason, that people should be pushed out of employment-based health insurance - admittedly a deeply flawed system - into the individual insurance market, which is a disaster on all fronts. Insurance companies try to avoid selling policies to people who are likely to use them, so a large fraction of premiums in the individual market goes not to paying medical bills but to bureaucracies dedicated to weeding out “high risk” applicants - and keeping them uninsured.

I’m somewhat skeptical about health care plans, like that proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that propose covering gaps in the health insurance market with a series of patches, such as requiring that insurers offer policies to everyone at the same rate. But at least the authors of these plans are trying to help those most in need, and recognize that the market needs fixing.

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is still peddling the fantasy that the free market, with a little help from tax cuts, solves all problems.

What’s really striking about Mr. Bush’s remarks, however, is the tone. The stuff about providing “incentives” to buy insurance, the sneering description of good coverage as “gold plated,” is right-wing think-tank jargon. In the past Mr. Bush’s speechwriters might have found less offensive language; now, they’re not even trying to hide his fundamental indifference to the plight of less-fortunate Americans.

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Your MasterCard or Your Life

By Bob Herbert

The New York Times

Monday 22 January 2007

Americans are increasingly living in a house of cards - credit cards.

A disturbing new report shows that with health care costs continuing their sharp rise, low- and middle-income patients are reaching for their credit cards with alarming frequency to cover treatment that they otherwise would be unable to afford.

This medical debt, to be paid off in many cases at sky-high interest rates, is being loaded onto consumer debt that is already at dangerously high levels. Many families have been crushed by the load, driven from their homes, forced into bankruptcy, and worse.

The report, released last week, was jointly compiled by Demos, a public policy group in New York, and the Access Project, which is affiliated with a health policy institute at Brandeis University and is trying to broaden the availability of health care in the U.S.

Imagine for a moment the seriously ill patient who needs to be hospitalized. In the cold new world of health care, the primary message to such patients is often “Show me the money!”

In many instances, of course, the patient does not have the money. What the report found is that even people with health insurance are being drained by health care costs to the point where the credit card seems the only option.

“As deductibles and co-payments increase,” the report said, “hospitals are finding more patients unable to pay their medical bills. Some hospital management analysts are expecting an increase in self-pay patients and are bracing for higher levels of bad debt.

“In recognition of the evolving payment landscape and the risk of hospital bad debt, health care providers are more aggressively seeking upfront collection of co-pays and deductibles. A component of this strategy is to encourage patients to use third-party lenders such as credit cards to pay for medical expenses they cannot afford, which families frequently do to meet high medical bills.”

It’s one thing to reach for your Visa or MasterCard to pay for a Barbie doll or flat-screen TV. It’s way different to pull out the plastic because you’ve just learned you have cancer or heart disease, and you don’t have any other way to pay for treatment that would prevent a premature trip to the great beyond.

A society is seriously out of whack when legalized loan sharks are encouraged to close in on those who are broke and desperately ill.

This medical indebtedness is hardly surprising. Health care costs continue to rise much faster than family income and inflation, and Americans (who have stopped saving altogether) were already mired in staggering amounts of personal debt. Some families have been putting their groceries on credit cards. Many have taken the financially disastrous step of using home equity loans to bring down credit card balances.

A serious illness for people already in shaky economic circumstances can be the final push into bankruptcy.

According to the report, called “Borrowing to Stay Healthy,” about 29 percent of low- and middle-income families with credit card debt reported using their credit cards to pay medical expenses - in most cases for major medical problems.

Over all, a full 20 percent of low- and middle-income families with credit card debt said they had used their cards to cover major medical expenses over the prior three years.

This indebtedness - subject to monthly late fees and penalties, and interest rates that can reach 30 percent - only adds to the trauma of serious illness.

It’s believed that 29 million Americans are burdened with medical debt of one form or another. Individuals who are already saddled with medical bills that they can’t pay are much more likely to avoid further medical treatment and to leave drug prescriptions unfilled. Such decisions often have life-threatening consequences.

There is an epidemic of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. and medical factors are believed to play a role in as many as half of them.

These are problems that cry out for reform - of the American health care system and the American way of debt, both of which seriously threaten the American way of life. At the very least, in the short term, we need to protect financially vulnerable patients from a credit card universe in which there are no legal limits on fees or interest, and where the abuse of customers is the norm.

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“The Big Push”: Mired in the Trenches of the Iraq Fiasco

By Adam Hochschild

TomDispatch.com

Sunday 21 January 2007

If we needed more evidence that those surrounding President George W. Bush have a tin ear for the lessons of history, it came ten days ago when National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley referred to increasing the number of American troops in Iraq as “the big push” that would bring victory closer.

“The Big Push” is a phrase that came into the language with another troop surge that was supposed to bring another war to victory. For months beforehand, the Big Push was how British cabinet ministers, propagandists, generals, and foot soldiers talked about the 1916 Battle of the Somme. (It is even the title of a later book on the subject.)

The First World War had been in a deadly stalemate for the better part of two years. A string of horrific battles had revealed the huge toll of trench warfare: Defenders could partially protect themselves by building deeper trenches, concrete pillboxes, and reinforced dugouts far underground. But when you went “over the top” of the trench to attack, you were disastrously vulnerable - out in the open, exposed to deadly, sweeping machine-gun fire as you clambered slowly across barbed wire and bypassed water-filled artillery-shell craters.

So, what did the Allies do? They attacked. At the time, in numbers of men involved, it was history’s largest battle. The plan was to break open the German defense line, send the cavalry gloriously charging through the gap, and turn the tide of the war. The result was a catastrophe.

The British army lost nearly 20,000 killed and some 40,000 wounded or missing on the first day alone. German machine gunners, after waiting out the long preliminary bombardment in their fortified bunkers underground, returned to the surface in time to mow down the advancing soldiers. After four and a half months of fighting, British and French troops had suffered more than 600,000 casualties. The Big Push had gained them roughly five miles of muddy, shell-pocked wasteland.

Like the Big Push of the Somme, the Big Push in Iraq is a reapplication of tactics that have already proven a calamitous failure. As the outspoken retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, puts it, it’s like finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper.

Every piece of evidence from these past nearly four bloody years makes clear that many Sunnis and Shiites alike are driven to rage by the very presence of American soldiers walking Iraqi streets, barging into Iraqi homes, and arresting or killing people who may or may not be insurgents. Furthermore, the people arrested or killed, however unsavory, are sometimes the only force protecting their communities against attacks from the opposite side in an extremely bitter civil war. Therefore, as sociologist Michael Schwartz explained the matter some six weeks ago, a previous joint U.S.-Iraqi counterinsurgency drive in Baghdad, of exactly the type now being planned, actually increased civilian casualties.

There are huge differences, of course, between the First World War and the current fighting in Iraq. But, even beyond the optimistic talk of the Big Push, there is another eerie resemblance between the two conflicts. In both cases, a great power was itching to launch an invasion, and seized on a handy excuse to do so. For the Bush administration, of course, the excuse was September 11th. From a long string of insider revelations, we know that its top officials were hungry to invade Iraq, looked eagerly for the most far-fetched connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and - even then not finding them - invaded anyway, while continuing to vaguely imply the connections were there.

Something remarkably similar happened in 1914. Austria-Hungary was a shaky empire of restless ethnic minorities ruled by a German-speaking elite in Vienna. Nearly half the population was Slavic, including many Serbs. As a result, the imperial rulers in Vienna felt threatened by the very existence on their border of the independent nation of Serbia, small though it was. They were determined to invade it, possibly partition it, and so stamp out pan-Slavic and Serb nationalism once and for all.

They drew up detailed invasion plans. Then, most conveniently, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, the Emperor’s nephew and heir to the throne, was assassinated while on a visit to the provincial city of Sarajevo. Like the White House after 9/11, the imperial palace in Vienna promptly began an eager search for a connection to the Serbian government. Frustratingly, however, the Archduke had been killed on Austro-Hungarian soil by Gavrilo Princip, an Austro-Hungarian citizen. The assassin, an ethnic Serb, had indeed had help from a shadowy secret organization of Serb nationalists, but no connection to the government of Serbia was ever proved. No matter. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia anyway. Other countries quickly jumped in on both sides, and a conflagration began that remade the world.

Part of that remaking, ironically, was the post-war cobbling together of three provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire into what was first a British protectorate and then, after 1932, independent Iraq.

There is a final resemblance between the present bloodshed there and the First World War. Both conflicts were fought for a curiously shifting set of noble-sounding goals. With Iraq, the Bush administration has tried on for size finding weapons of mass destruction, liberating the Iraqis, combating Islamist terrorism, and installing democracy in the Arab world. In the First World War, the Allies initially talked of coming to the defense of innocent, invaded little Belgium, then of defeating German militarism and defending the British and French way of life. Once Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the conflict, he spoke of “the war to end all wars.”

It didn’t. The humiliation of the losers and the catastrophic loss of life on both sides did nothing to end all wars and much to light the fuses of later ones - especially the Russian Civil War and the Second World War. The longer the war in Iraq goes on, and the more American troops are planted by Big Pushes in a highly combustible part of the world, the more we will continue to stoke a widespread humiliation and anger whose consequences are already guaranteed to haunt us for decades to come.

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Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of six books including Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, a finalist for the National Book Award, and King Leopold’s Ghost. He is writing a book on the First World War.