McCain & Ms.Whiplash || 'Secret' Mosque DEMOLITIONS

John McCain and Ms. Whiplash - Together At Last?: "Meanwhile, the major parties are allocated equal airtime on the national TV networks, based on previous proportion of votes received. Each is clearly prefaced. “The following is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Conservative Party”. No PACS, no swiftboating. Sure there’s insults and character slurs, but when they’ve only got five minutes a day, real issues take priority.

The public are unscrewed. They vote informatively. And the election has cost them nothing but a few extra Euros on sickbags."

[top]

Campaign Finance Reform - A View From Across The Pond

by Mark Lloyd

Comprehensive campaign finance reform is, I would contend, the single most important issue facing this country.

You think not? Think it’s Iraq, poverty, corruption, Medicare, Iran, the deficit, the idiots in the White House?

Well you know what? – all of these issues and ills facing the US can be traced to one root cause; the fact that your politicians are in debt to special interest groups.
Bought and sold at every election.

A lot of attention has rightly been focused on K Street and the outrageous takeover of the government and laws of this country by corporations and their interests. Oil industry lobbyists and Ken Lay writing energy legislation? My god!

Well what do you expect? Prez, Vice and a host of others elected with oil money. They OWE them. Come on! Why do you think you’re forking over $3 a gallon? Purleeeze!

Don’t forget that corporations are not interested in a politician’s stripe. They just want their agenda pushed through so they can make as much money as possible, pay as few taxes as possible, with as few rules and regulations constraining them as possible.

They are equal-opportunity bribers. If the Dems get in, they’ll court them in exactly the same way. Do you really believe that the Dems will resist and dismantle K Street just because they have higher principles than the Repugs? Don’t fool yourselves. K Street isn’t the cancer, it’s just the visible part of a much deeper tumor.

Taking back the government for the people will need a great deal more than faith, trust, and voting for one millionaire over another. It requires a return to office of politicians who believe in public service, who get into politics because they want to make a difference for the better, not to get rich.

These people are out there. But they will never get elected. They are unable to stand. Where are they going to get the millions they need to finance a campaign, to buy the TV ads? And even if they got it, who do they owe? How can they be impartial once elected?

It is a self-perpetuating system stacked outrageously in favor of big money and against politicians of principle and the people of America, except the very rich.

McCain-Feingold was a start but hopelessly, woefully inadequate.

In England, we have a different system. I’m not saying it’s perfect, it is very far from that, but it might be worth a look.

First, no candidate is allowed to accept donations from anybody, or any entity. All campaign donations must be sent to the party administrators.

Each candidate is given an amount of money, from party HQ, that they are allowed to spend on their local campaign. It is the same for everyone and regulated by law. This has to cover pamphlets, soapboxes, megaphones, ads in the local media, rental of the school hall, the works. It is a small amount of money. Certainly not enough to pay any salaries. Almost all campaign workers are voluntary. And spin-doctors never work for free as we know.

After the election each candidate has to provide an accounting. If they are a penny over, they’re in trouble.

Meanwhile, anybody can stand in any seat for a $5000 deposit. You get less than 5% of the vote, you lose it. More than 5%, you get it back.

This leads to a wonderful quadrennial spectacle; politicians standing on stage awaiting the announcement of the results, side-by-side with everyone who stood for the seat. It has become part of the culture that all the crazies come out of the woodwork and stand in the Prime Minister’s constituency. He is standing there, can’t help but have a smile on his face, surrounded by the hopefuls. The BBC cameras are poised.

.../...
And Tony Blair goes back to business – with a pretty good feel for his home town.

Meanwhile, the major parties are allocated equal airtime on the national TV networks, based on previous proportion of votes received. Each is clearly prefaced. “The following is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Conservative Party”. No PACS, no swiftboating. Sure there’s insults and character slurs, but when they’ve only got five minutes a day, real issues take priority.

The public are unscrewed. They vote informatively. And the election has cost them nothing but a few extra Euros on sickbags.

And yes, sometimes they still end up with representatives that are complete dicks. But they know one thing for sure – he’s not in hock to anyone. He’s their dick.

Hey America, I ain’t preaching. No system’s perfect. But I know what I’ll be thinking when the November campaign is in full swing.

When I’m watching the next Swiftboat ad authored by Rove and paid for by backdoor Exxon money siphoned through the Christian Coalition, I’ll be thinking of Screamin’ Lord Sutch tickling Joe Lieberman’s ribs with a feather duster.

When I’m watching John McCain “interviewed” by some sycophantic rightwing talkshow host, I’ll be dreaming of him being crushed in congratulation to Ms Whiplash’s ample bosom on a crude hardwood stage in a crumbling school hall.

Film that Fox. It’s called democracy.
===========================


http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_john__mc_060427_bush_republicans_cov.htm
80 percent of oil and gas political contibutions go to Republicans

by John McDonald

With the price of a barrel of oil hovering at around $70 and a lot of pissed off voters paying more than three bucks a gallon at the pump, President Bush and his fellow Republicans are practically stumbling over each other as they seek to look tough on big oil and act to bring gas prices down before the November election.

But scramble as they may, there is no denying that the Republican majority and the Bush energy plan are bought and paid for by the Oil and Gas industry. According to data published by the Center for Responsive Politics, since 1990, the oil and gas industry has donated $140,870,847 to Republican candidates including the President and leading members of Congress. In the 2000 elections alone, in which George W. Bush was elected President, oil and gas companies gave more than $26 million to Bush and his fellow Republicans. A full 80 percent of oil and gas contributions, more than $20 million, went to Republicans during the 2004 election cycle.
.../...
Never mind that oil analysts say that a shortage of crude oil is not the problem. The effort to tie gas prices to the need to drill in the Alaskan Wilderness Refuge first surfaced in a research-strategy memo developed by the Council of Republican Environmental Advocates (CREA) suggesting that the Bush administration use higher gas prices to promote increased drilling and open the Alaskan National Wilderness Area to oil exploration. CREA is a pseudo environmental front group funded by oil, gas and other energy companies that the organization Republicans for Environmental Protections says has a Steering Committee that includes lobbyists for Amoco, Texaco, Shell Oil, Total Petroleum, Lion Oil and others. The research memo was paid for in part by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff who provided $250,000 in funds from his Indian tribe clients in support of the project. The memo was developed for the Department of Interior, then headed by CREA founder Gale Norton, and somehow apparently wound up in materials collected for Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive energy policy planning process. Imagine that.

But don’t worry, I hear that Senate Republicans are going to introduce legislation providing consumers with $100 tax rebates to help them deal with rising fuel prices. Let’s see, $100 for consumers, billions for oil companies. Sounds fair. As for me, I’m going to give my $100 to a Democrat.

www.rockthrower.blogs.com

John McDonald is a writer and consultant in Los Angeles. He writes a political blog called RockThrower.

=============

Why leftists mistrust liberals




Bashing the left to burnish credibility in mainstream circles is a time-honored liberal move, a way of saying “I’m critical of the excesses of the powerful, but not like those crazy lefties.” For example, during a discussion of post-9/11 politics, I once heard then-New York University professor (he has since moved to Columbia University) Todd Gitlin position himself between the “hard right” (such as people associated with the Bush administration) and the “hard left” (such as Noam Chomsky and other radical critics), implying an equivalence in the coherence or value of analysis of each side. The only conclusion I could reach was that Gitlin -- who is both a prolific scholar and a former president of Students for a Democratic Society -- either believed such a claim about equivalence or said it for self-interested political purposes. Neither interpretation is terribly flattering for Gitlin.
.../...
First, some definitional work: In the contemporary United States, I use the term “left” or “radical” to identify a political position that is anti-capitalist and anti-empire. Leftists fight attempts to naturalize capitalism, rejecting the assertion that such a brutal way to organize an economy is inevitable. Leftists also reject the idea that the United States has the right to dominate the world, refuting the assertion that we are uniquely benevolent in our imperial project. Liberals typically decry the worst excesses of capitalism and empire, but don’t critique the system at a more [most] basic level.
===================
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mike_whi_060427_slaughterhouse.htm

The civil war storyline is intended to divert attention from the bloody subjugation of the Iraqi people by a foreign military. This is the real story of the Iraqi conflict. The current malaise in Iraq is reducible to three bullet-points; occupation, occupation, and occupation. Any departure from this essential narrative is simply false. [um, except the BANNED word ZIONISM]

American Intelligence services are involved in every aspect of the current hostilities. Author Max Fuller (“Crying Wolf: Media disinformation and Deaths squads in Occupied Iraq”) has documented how CIA operatives have not only trained the Iraqi death squads operating in the Interior ministry, but created a high-tech facility with data banks of the names of potential targets for future attacks.

Does that sound like civil war or a massive counterinsurgency strategy designed to rip the country apart?

So far, there have been three separate incidents where occupation forces have been either caught or connected to bombings in Iraq. This suggests that America is conducting a clandestine “dirty war” similar to campaigns they executed in El Salvador and Nicaragua under the very same leadership. [Negroponte, in case you are quite lost and perhaps unworthy of your toob-feeding in the fake modern world]

The first was the famous incident in Basra
where two British paramilitaries were caught
disguised as Arabs
with a truck-full of explosives in their vehicle.
Panicky British forces
destroyed the Basra jail
to release the two captured SAS soldiers
clearly afraid that
their involvement in setting off bombs would be exposed.

Another report that appeared in Reuters “American arrested with weapons in Iraq” confirmed that an American “security contractor working for a private company, possessed explosives which were found in his car.” He was arrested by Iraqi security guards.

The bombing of the Golden-domed mosque also suggests links to occupation forces. The AFP reported that the bombing “was the work of specialists” and the “placing of explosives must have taken at least 12 hours”. The report continues:

“Construction Minister Jassem Mohammed Jaafar said, “Holes were dug into the mausoleum’s four main pillars and packed with explosives. Then charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance.” [wtchoax, how many times daily, folks, do you slurp up the same toxic emesis from penta gon tools when EVERY time the 'military intelligence' amounts to premeditated "(deliberate) incompetence" That mantra is the 'EXCUSE' for EVERTHING since 2000. Brain much?/js]

Clearly the bombing was not carried out by rogue elements in the disparate Iraqi resistance but highly trained saboteurs executing a precision demolition to incite sectarian violence. The blast bears all the hallmarks of a covert Intelligence agency operation. Eyewitness accounts verify that American troops and Iraqi National Guard were active in the area throughout the night and that their cars could be heard running “the whole night until next morning”. People living around the mosque were told “to stay in your shop and don’t leave the area”.

At 6:30 AM the American troops left, just 10 minutes before the bombs went off.

Since the bombing, the media has faithfully reiterated the same narrative from every soapbox; that the destruction of the mosque was the “catalyzing event” which put Iraq on the path to civil war.

No independent investigation of the bombing has ever been conducted by occupation forces. That hasn’t stopped the media from promoting their Pentagon-friendly view of the incident.

The media spin on the bombing is just as suspect as earlier fabrications about WMD or al Zarqawi. In fact, the one journalist from Al Arybiya who was interviewing people who lived around the mosque was conveniently killed by occupation troops.

Let’s summarize: The rationale leading up to the war was a lie. The justification for the ongoing occupation as a fight against terrorism (al Zarqawi) was a lie. The fairy tale about an Iraqi civil war is a lie. And, presumably, all the future stories diverting attention from America’s bloody occupation will be lies. [Untill somebody confronts the treachery of 32% of 'Americans' ACTUALLY WORSHIPPING THE destruction of the world, being dupes and hijacked Zionists, absurdly convicted to 'help' "Israel " infest the Holy Land. Egads, these EXTREMIST Jihad terds BELIEVE this foisted dispensational crock and think G-d needs their help... despite them and their churches [with clandestine doctrines] looking normal on the outside.] [this offer is for a limited time only, and void where thinking humans dwell]

In an article by Dirk Adriaensens “The Assassination of Iraqi Academics” (Brussels Tribune) the author recounts the macabre details of the present campaign to liquidate academics, intellectuals, scientists and other members of the Iraqi middle class — “a class that has largely resisted the US occupation of Iraq and refused to be co-opted by the so-called “political process” or Iraq’s US-installed puppet government.” [oh, Joseph Wilson & Valerie Plame, on a vast and ... exterminating scale]

Why would Sunnis or Shiites choose to target people who represent the intellectual foundation of Iraqi society?

There is a much more sinister plan afoot; a plan to destroy the very platforms of Iraqi identity, a plan to obliterate the monuments, the mosques, the museums; a plan to remove any trace of Iraqi nationalism from the collective memory; a plan to crush any potential threat to the new order.

This is cultural genocide.

As Adriaensens says, “What we are witnessing is the result of a carefully planned US campaign to liquidate every Iraqi who opposes the occupation of his country, the so-called “Salvador option”. In fact, since 1945 the U.S. developed counterinsurgency policies based on the model of Nazi suppression of partisan insurgents that emphasized placing the civilian population under strict control and using terror to make the population afraid to support or collaborate with insurgents

The waves of violence that have subsumed Iraq radiate directly from the White House. Don’t blame the Iraqis. The world’s oldest civilization is being systematically reduced to rubble to feed the insatiable greed of Washington warlords and corporate kingpins.

Iraq is America’s slaughterhouse [slaughterhouse-5]; the Iraqi people have no part in this crime.

Don’t call it civil war.

Mike is a freelance writer living in Washington state.