Sunday 30 April 2006

$9 Shotgun-Face SQUELCHED Gilligan's FUNERAL-GATE Outrage || AIPAC is THE Puppet-Meister [shhh!]

No way to treat the dead or the living - Opinion - smh.com.au: "Back in 1999, when George War Jr. was beginning his run for the White House, SCI was embroiled in a grisly scandal known as Funeralgate. A whistleblower accused the company of 'recycling' graves. Old corpses had been removed and replaced by new ones. At two Jewish cemeteries in Florida, bodies were exhumed and dumped in the woods to be eaten by wild hogs. *

// http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/no-way-to-treat-the-dead-or-the-living/2006/04/28/1146198346140.html

LOSING Private Kovco was not a good look. The Prime Minister was desperately sorry and very sad. It was just one of those incredibly unfortunate things.

The Defence Minister announced that it was a terrible, unacceptable mistake.

The Chief of the Defence Force was very upset. Everything was being done to establish the facts.

And on it went. A Government which so efficiently sends live soldiers to war should have devised a foolproof system for bringing dead ones home again, but not so. The Kovco family had every right to give John Howard an earful.

In fairness, the blunder is probably the fault of the American contractor hired to transport the casket from Kuwait to Australia, a firm named Kenyon International.

Here the plot thickens. Kenyon's parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), boasts that it is "the dominant leader in the North American death care industry". It is based in Houston, Texas. You will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that SCI's billionaire founder, one Robert Waltrip, is an old buddy of the Bush family and a big-money donor to the two Georges. //

*I am not making this up. The scandal ran through the Texas courts, reaching all the way to, yep, Governor George W. Bush. There were uncomfortable questions about the donations he had accepted from SCI.

Happily, the whistleblower was paid off and everything smoothed over in time for Dubya to win the Republican presidential nomination. SCI later paid compensation of $US100 million to its victims' relatives.

And who fixed this? Why, none other than Harry Whittington, the Texas lawyer shot by Deadeye Dick Cheney on that famous hunting trip in February.

This is the crew handling our fallen soldiers. I don't suppose anyone told John Howard any of this. They never do.

THE truly appalling blunder, though, is home-grown. Last Saturday, Brendan Nelson told us Jacob Kovco had shot himself. The soldier had been "simply handling his weapon, and maintaining it as soldiers are required to do", he said. "For some unexplained reason, the firearm discharged, and a bullet unfortunately entered the soldier's head."

Come last Thursday, that story had changed. "He wasn't in fact cleaning his weapon," Nelson revealed. "It was near him … and he made some kind of movement which suggests that it discharged."

The Government's confusion is unforgivable. Talk about going off half-cocked. Private Kovco's family knew him to be a skilled handler of firearms, and not only through his army sniper training. A country boy, he had been around guns since childhood. They were horrified at the suggestion he had killed himself through carelessness.

"The things in the paper about him accidentally shooting himself, we all knew in our family that he did not do that," said one of his cousins on radio on Thursday.

"I can see the way everybody is talking, the Government and everything, we're never going to be told the truth about what happened to him."

POLITICIANS, of course, love a bemedalled veteran even more than a bemedalled Olympian.

But with the Anzac Day flags put away for another year, here's another story of rank injustice. Civilian nurses who served in the Vietnam War have been left out in the cold by successive Australian governments, callously denied the repatriation benefits automatically available to their sisters in defence force uniform.

I met one of them on Tuesday. Jan Bell was nursing at Sydney's Concord Hospital in 1967 when volunteers were sought to go to Vietnam to help win the locals' hearts and minds. Young, and keen for a bit of adventure, she found herself working in a Vietnamese civilian hospital at the coastal town of Vung Tau, near the Australian base there.

She risked her life in the carnage of war, most especially during the famous Tet offensive of 1968, when the dead and the dying - women, children and infants - were piled in a bloody shambles in her emergency ward. Some 120 of her civilian colleagues gave similar noble service to our country.

Jan is now a handsome, grey-haired woman in her 60s. These many years on, she has been diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of her wartime experience.

Had she been a uniformed army nurse, she would have been offered all the medical and other benefits available to returned veterans. Instead, she and her colleagues are on the same sort of compo entitlements as a Canberra public servant who stabs himself with a paper clip.

These women have campaigned about this injustice for years, to Labor and Coalition governments, but they get nowhere. Is there no female member of the Federal Parliament who will fight for them?

smhcarlton@hotmail.com

======= ===
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060515/weiss
article | posted April 27, 2006 (May 15, 2006 issue)

Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'



Intellectuals can only dream of having the impact that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had this spring. Within hours of their publishing a critique of the Israel lobby in The London Review of Books for March 23, the article was zinging around the world, soon to show up on the front pages of newspapers and stir heated discussion on cable-TV shows. Virtually overnight, two balding professors in their 50s had become public intellectuals, ducking hundreds of e-mails, phone messages and challenges to debate.

Titled "The Israel Lobby," the piece argued that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, leading journalists and of course the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the issue. While supporting the moral cause for the existence of Israel, the authors said there was neither a strategic nor a moral interest in America's siding so strongly with post-occupation Israel. Many Americans thought the Iraq War was about oil, but "the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure."

The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."

The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."

While criticisms of the lobby have circulated widely for years and been published at the periphery, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper stands out because it was so frontal and pointed, and because it was published online by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is a professor and outgoing academic dean. "It was inevitably going to take someone from Harvard [to get this discussed]," says Phyllis Bennis, a writer on Middle East issues at the Institute for Policy Studies.

What's more, the article appeared when public pessimism over the Iraq War was reaching new highs. "The paper was important as a political intervention because the authors are squarely in the mainstream of academic life," says Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at DePaul University dedicated to bringing the issue of Palestinian suffering under the occupation to Americans' attention. "The reason they're getting a hearing now is because of the Iraq debacle." Bennis and Finkelstein, both left-wing critics of Israel, have criticisms of the paper's findings. Partly this reflects the paper's origins: Though it was printed in a left-leaning English journal, it was written by theorists of a school associated with the center/right: realism, which holds that the world is a dangerous neighborhood, that good intentions don't mean very much and that the key to order is a balance of power among armed states. For realists, issues like human rights and how states treat minorities are so much idealistic fluff.

Given the paper's parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?

[3pages more, can You HANDLE the Truth?! ]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060515/weiss

posted by USSSlavebation @ 4/30/2006 10:55:00 pm  0 comments

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.

posted by USSSlavebation @ 4/30/2006 10:37:00 pm  0 comments

Tide turns on Dubya's wreck || + Gilligan & The Cat In The Hat!

Tide turns on Dubya's wreck - Opinion - smh.com.au: "In recent weeks, scanning the political coverage in the mainstream US media and sampling the blogs has been to watch a flood tide ebbing to reveal a rotting, skeletal hulk. It is the George W. Bush ship of fools, stuck in the mud for the world to see in all its mendacity, its incompetence, its faith-based stupidity.

It is possible, at this late stage, that even Bush himself has begun to realise something is wrong. That oddly simian face is ashen, the eyes leaden. The voice is shrill and its tone defensive.

'I'm the decider and I decide what's best,' he squawked to reporters in the White House rose garden the other day, as the screws turned tighter on his disastrous Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Can you imagine Roosevelt, Eisenhower or Kennedy blurting something like that?"

Rummy is looking knackered too, with six retired generals going public to agree that he is "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically", to quote one of them.

These men would have been junior officers in Vietnam, veterans of the all-American nightmare they now see replicated in Iraq. They don't want the mad old warmonger doing it over again in Iran. As former Marine Corps Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold wrote in Time magazine: "… we must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it".

But the Middle East quicksands are not all that is killing Bush's presidency. Domestically, the rot is wide and deep. It is a budget deficit blowing out towards $US700 billion this financial year as Dubya juggles to fund his war while stealing from the American and immigrant poor to bestow tax cuts on the rich.

It is criminal sleaze in Washington, with the Republicans' favourite influence peddler, Jack Abramoff, headed for jail, and one of Bush's closest Texan buddies, the disgraced House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, not far behind him.

It is arrogant, Nixonian trampling of the law to order the wiretapping of American citizens and the leaking of national security secrets. It is the rape of the environment to enrich big business, especially big oil. And resonating with ordinary Americans most of all, it is the loss of the city of New Orleans - not by Hurricane Katrina but by the bottomless incompetence of the feds' post-apocalypse response.

This is a trash presidency, founded on lies and knavery, fraud and ignorant ideological [the still forbidden truth of Zionism] crackpottery.

KARL ROVE is another faux-Texan wheeler-dealer sometimes described as Bush's brain [a high school graduate, FYI] , a courtier most often seen superglued to the presidential right ear. Pink and pudgy, he looks like one of Disney's three little pigs, although infinitely more smug.

Rove was shunted sideways this week in a shuffle of the White House deck chairs which also saw Dubya's press secretary lose his job [to one of the terds already professionally lying for the chief, at faux neus]. His new assignment will be to divert the Republican Party from the coming train wreck of the Congressional mid-term elections this November.

That will be crucial to the survival of this gang. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there would be a good chance of them moving to impeach Bush for high crimes and misdemeanours. [rigged receiptless 'voting' machines will prevent that, or military coup if needed]

The famous Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein raised just that possibility in a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine. "We have never had a presidency in which the single unifying thread that flows through its major decision-making was incompetence stitched together with hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale," he wrote.

Exactly. Compared to this lot, Bill Clinton was John the Baptist. [erm, His head under the desk, not upon a platter]

THE next question is this: what will the Howard Government do when Bush and co decide to bomb Iran?

On past performance, Australia will be the kiddie on the sideline, panting to join the team: "Pick me, pick me." That, of course, is how we wangled our way into Iraq.

To quote the admirable US Marine Lieutenant-General Newbold again: "My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the results."

As we have seen, John Howard and Lord Downer are terrific at casual swagger, although neither has ever heard a bullet go pffwt-pzzz through the rubber trees. Luckily, they have not had results to bury. But next time we might not be so easily conned. After the never-ever GST, children overboard, Iraq, WorkChoices, AWB and now Papua, Howard has lost public trust. The moment we hear him blather that no decision has been made for war, that everyone is working for a peaceful solution to the Iran crisis - that's when we know the SAS is already there.

When the shoulders go back, the chin goes up and the lower lip juts out, you know the Prime Minister is lying.

smhcarlton@hotmail.com

== == == == ==

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_stephen__060429_comments_on_noam_cho.htm
Solutions Chomsky Proposes

Chomsky ends his book by suggesting some possible solutions to the dismal and dangerous state of our nation, but I doubt he sees any of them being adopted. He lists: (1) accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and World Court; (2) signing and adopting the Kyoto protocols; (3) allowing the UN to lead in international crises; (4) confronting terror by diplomacy and economic measures, not military ones; (5) adhering to the UN Charter; (6) ending the Security Council veto power and practicing real democracy; and (7) cutting military spending sharply and using it for greater social spending. He calls these very conservative suggestions and what the majority of the public wants. Up to now, that majority has been ignored, denied and deprived in a society that only serves the privileged.

Will any of these changes happen? Not likely unless enough people act strongly enough to demand them. Chomsky ends by noting past social gains were never willingly given. They were only gotten by "dedicated day-by-day engagement" to win them. But he believes we have many ways to do so and, in the process, promote the democratic process. His final thought is a call to us to do it collectively. If we don't, it "is likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world, and for future generations."

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog address at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
==============

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_full_060429_the_us_doesn_t_give_.htm

The Bush regime has long asserted their immunity from prosecution by international courts. Stephen Hadley, NSA director, wrote in a byliner that "the international tribunal is a threat to the United States. The U.S. has a number of serious objections to the International Criminal Court," he wrote. Yet, the Bush regime is determined to make the case that Iran somehow threatens the international community without a weapon, without any means to produce such a weapon, and without any action that could be interpreted as a threat to anyone except in defense of their own borders.

The Bush regime ignored the UN in their rush to invade and occupy Iraq. This same Bush regime now wants the UN's blessing on their new imperialism toward Iran. But, it's not clear they'll get the cover this time either from the world body


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


http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_gene_c___060429_the_decider_nominate.htm


The Decider Nominates Chief Polluter for the EPA

President Bush Nominated an Opponent of the Clean Air Act to the EPA

President Bush, the nation’s self-appointed “Decider,” has nominated William Wehrum to serve as Assistant Administrator for the office of air quality at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He’s been serving as legal counsel and interim head of this office since 2001. During his tenure at the EPA, Mr. Wehrum has consistently worked to weaken the nation’s air pollution laws and regulations. And his actions have resulted in a revolt within the EPA and serious criticism by the federal courts.
===============
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bob_burn_060428_george_bush_and_the_.htm
April 28, 2006

George Bush and The Cat in The Hat

by Bob Burnett





Once upon a time
The Cat in the Hat
George Bush and I
Had a big spat.

One summer day,
Just after three
My mother said,
“I’m going for tea.”

She went out the door
And in two seconds flat
Out of the closet
Came the Cat in the Hat.

“It’s time to have fun,”
Said the Cat in the Hat
“Let’s watch TV,
Nothing’s better than that.”

He went to our den
And without saying please
Turned on the FOX news
Which quivered my knees.

“I always watch this,”
Said the Cat with a grin.
“They take all the news
And then give it a spin.”

Bill O’Reilly was on
And he made me cry
“Stop sniveling,” said Cat,
“Want a poke in the eye?”

I cowered in fear
And covered my tush
When onto FOX news
Came our President Bush.

“I love him,” said Cat
“He’s simply the best
He’s stalwart and brave
He passes each test.”

I shouldn’t have argued
I’m only a kid
But I had to point out
The bad things Bush did.

“What about Iraq?
He lied and deceived
Distorted the facts
Fudged what we believed.”

“Tut tut,” said the Cat
“Surely you jest
We must sacrifice
Be put to the test.”

Then Bush gave a speech
The crowd began cheering
He said that the war’s
End was now nearing.

“The going is tough
And we’ll surely win
I just can’t say how
Nor do I know when.”

“Hmm,” said the Cat,
“Iraq seems a mess.
But Dubya’s my hero
He’ll be a success.”

Before I could think
The words tumbled out,
“You imbecile Cat
You’re never in doubt.

“Don’t you remember Al Qaida?
Osama and crew?
We haven’t caught many
In fact very few.

“Our security’s a joke
Our friends have departed
‘Cause of President Bush
And this war that he started.”

“If you are so smart,”
Said the Cat in the Hat,
“Then talk to George Bush
What’s the matter with that?”

So the Cat in the Hat
Reached in our TV
Grabbed Georgie Bush
Set him down facing me.

“We’re winning the war,”
Said Commander-in-Chief
“Yes, Iraq is hard work
But well worth all this grief.”

I couldn’t believe it
He wore a big grin
As if Bush enjoyed
This mess we are in.

“Hard work if you don’t
Know what you’re doin’
George, you and your gang
Will lead us to ruin.”

Then Dubya got angry
And made a bad sound
He shouted and bellowed
And stomped on the ground.

“I don’t have to listen
To peons like you
I’m Decider-in-Chief
I like what I do.”

Then Bush took a leap
Back in our TV
He hugged Bill O’Reilly
They giggled with glee.

“We’re looting America
And having such fun
Too bad ‘bout your future
But we’ve just begun.”

I jumped from the couch
Turned off the TV
“George is real bad,
“Just as bad as can be.”

Cat nodded his head
“He’s no fun all,”
And he turned and ran,
Cross the room, down the hall.

Then Mother came in
With a swish of her skirt
“I see you were good
Not covered with dirt.”

I said not a word
About the Cat in the Hat
Or my visit with Bush
She doesn’t know that.

Yet sometimes I ponder
George Bush and his flock
What does Dubya think
About solving Iraq?

Maybe he just sits
There, as simple as that
He waits for an answer
From the Cat in the Hat.

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer and Quaker actvist. He is particularly interested in progressive morality and writes frequently on the ethical aspects of political and social issues.

posted by USSSlavebation @ 4/30/2006 09:45:00 pm  0 comments

Bertrand Russell

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1950/

Bertrand Russell: "Bertrand Arthur William Russell (b.1872 - d.1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic, best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), and his theories of definite descriptions and logical atomism. Along with G.E. Moore, Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Along with Kurt Gödel, he is also regularly credited with being one of the two most important logicians of the twentieth century.

Over the course of his long career, Russell made significant contributions, not just to logic and philosophy, but to a broad range of other subjects including education, history, political theory and religious studies. In addition, many of his writings on a wide variety of topics in both the sciences and the humanities have influenced generations of general readers. After a life marked by controversy (including dismissals from both Trinity College, Cambridge, and City College, New York), Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Also noted for his many spirited anti-war and anti-nuclear protests, Russell remained a prominent public figure until his death at the age of 97."

Interested readers may also wish to listen to two sound clips of Russell speaking.
-------------
Underlying these various projects was not only Russell's use of logical analysis, but also his long-standing aim of discovering whether, and to what extent, knowledge is possible. "There is one great question," he writes in 1911. "Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions."[1]
... he underlying themes of this "revolution," including his belief in pluralism, his emphasis upon anti-psychologism, and the importance of science, remained central to Russell's philosophy for the remainder of his life.[3]
... Russell's emphasis upon logical analysis also had consequences for his metaphysics. In response to the traditional problem of the external world which, it is claimed, arises since the external world can be known only by inference, Russell developed his famous 1910 distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description."
... Among Russell's many popularizations are his two best selling works, The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Both of these books, as well as his numerous but less famous books popularizing science, have done much to educate and inform generations of general readers. Naturally enough, Russell saw a link between education, in this broad sense, and social progress. At the same time, Russell is also famous for suggesting that a widespread reliance upon evidence, rather than upon superstition, would have enormous social consequences: "I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration," says Russell, "a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."[5]

Still, Russell is best known in many circles as a result of his campaigns against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and against western involvement in the Vietnam War during the 1950s and 1960s. However, Russell's social activism stretches back at least as far as 1910, when he published his Anti-Suffragist Anxieties, and to 1916, when he was convicted and fined in connection with anti-war protests during World War I. Following his conviction, he was also dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge. Two years later, he was convicted a second time. The result was six months in prison. Russell also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament (in 1907, 1922, and 1923) and, together with his second wife, founded and operated an experimental school during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Although he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his brother in 1931, Russell's radicalism continued to make him a controversial figure well through middle-age. While teaching in the United States in the late 1930s, he was offered a teaching appointment at City College, New York. The appointment was revoked following a large number of public protests and a 1940 judicial decision which found him morally unfit to teach at the College. [fyi: because he did not believe in G-d]

In 1954 he delivered his famous "Man's Peril" broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini H-bomb tests. A year later, together with Albert Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. In 1957 he was a prime organizer of the first Pugwash Conference, which brought together a large number of scientists concerned about the nuclear issue. He became the founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 and was once again imprisoned, this time in connection with anti-nuclear protests in 1961. The media coverage surrounding his conviction only served to enhance Russell's reputation and to further inspire the many idealistic youths who were sympathetic to his anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.

During these controversial years Russell also wrote many of the books that brought him to the attention of popular audiences. These include his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), A Free Man's Worship (1923), On Education (1926), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), Marriage and Morals (1929), The Conquest of Happiness (1930), The Scientific Outlook (1931), and Power: A New Social Analysis (1938).

Upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Russell used his acceptance speech to emphasize, once again, themes related to his social activism.

==============
http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/brtexts.html
////////////
In 2002, The Hours, a film loosely based on Woolf's life and her novel Mrs. Dalloway, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. It did not win, but Nicole Kidman was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie. The film was adapted from Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The Hours was Woolf's working title for Mrs. Dalloway. Many Virginia Woolf scholars are highly critical of the portrayal of Woolf and her works in the film.

stub: In England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an aesthete was a person who was usually well educated, had exaggerated tastes and cultivated a style of dress and manner calculated to annoy the mainstream of intellectual society. Oscar Wilde might be designated the archetypal aesthete, and aesthetes of note were usually found in London or Oxford University and were often well-connected, if not already in the heart of fashionable social circles. There is a whiff of decadence associated with aesthetes. Aesthetes were often queer or adopted a queer posture, and the Oxford aesthete is also associated with a form of camp. Compton Mackenzie's novel Sinister Street makes use of the type as a phase through which the protagonist passes under the influence of older, decandent individuals. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was a young participant in aesthete society at Oxford, portray the aesthete mostly from a satirical point of view, but also from that of an insider. Some names associated with this loose assemblage are Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford, and Anthony Powell.

VSA, Home of the Bunk
http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_essay_2005_04_13_does_this_girl_need_a_tax_break.asp

posted by USSSlavebation @ 4/30/2006 12:21:00 am  0 comments