4.29.2005
From the Heart
Hobsons Choice is sizzling hot. I recommend stopping by there for this piece,"Frist: I speak for God" before bookmarking his series "Private sector Imperialism", parts 1-11 and settling into it like a hot bath.
After watching Mr Bush engage in evasion and high fibbery on the tv last night, The Real ID act unmentioned, no really substantive questions nailed down and the the "talking heads" giving Mr Bush a post press conference tongue massage, framing everything about the press conference in pro Bush terms. I needed to read the Frist post linked to get back on keel.
The US debt is growing exponentially, the Constitution is being torn apart and Bush's minions, the religious right GOP flying monkeys are crapping on all that being truly American is about before drowning our much vaunted institutions (the ones that set America apart, "shining light on a hill" and all) in a bathtub of blood and hate, claiming the "righteous" mantle of (fictional)persecution as Christians (without benefit of The Sermon on the Mount or anything but Revelations from the New Testament), playing to their gullible co-religionists, a group of folks overwhelmed by a changing world of incredible complexity that sees them scurrying scared in the face of life without it's traditional moorings. Longing for a simpler time, one with John Wayne leading the way, women content to make supper and do the dishes happy in their mens shadow; where America was truly good- no Abu Ghraibs, no intellectual challenges between what the media shows us and the ugly realities we all sense below the surfaces offered, even if the majority is too ill informed to grasp the implications of truths appearing between the lines, the discrepancies and contradictions that even the most trusting intuit are wrong.
Staving off cognitive dissonance with the in group effect- would Mr Bush lie to us? He talks like one of us, good ol' boy, spouting Bible keyphrases- surely he is honest. He's our President for crying out loud. Saving us from "the elitists", folks who on closer examination want clean air and water, economic chances for all who will work and parity with the richest couple of percentage points of the population when it comes to taxation and representation in government. A chance for all who desire it to gain the benefits of higher education. To have access to medical care. Who choose love and decency over the toxic narcotics of ill gotten gains and power. To leave a better, more just world to their children.
"Elitists". Folks who put average Americans before the corporations fleecing our nation. The corporations that own our legislators through their cash contributions. That own the media- outright and through advertising budgets. Those who profit from the armaments of war as our nations infrastructure crumbles for lack of funds spoon feed us hate and fear, twin faces of the Rove-ian
divide and conquer strategy. A strategy to divide "We the People" and thwart a mass movement to oust the well dressed golden tongued plunders of our land.
But, I suppose I am ranting. What is happening to our nation is occuring in plain sight, we need to take the time to inquire, think and hopefully, act.
Talking Dog has a first person interview with Donna Newman, state appointed attorney for Jose Padilla. Good stuff...
Blogging offers insight and hope, at best leading us to learn and think outside the straits of corporate mummery. A democratic attempt to keep heart, to keep hope alive, to build a far flung community of folks who will share the truth. In realtime, away from the computer screen. In our daily lives among our community.
4/29/2005
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4.28.2005
Condi's latest sin of ommission
Evidence that the U.S. May Be Losing the Global War on Terror
"Independent Institute" - - The Bush administration is attempting to suppress key data showing that its Global War on Terrorism (or GWOT as government bureaucrats have dubbed it) likely has been counterproductive. According to Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who still has many sources within the intelligence community, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office is suppressing data showing that the number of major terrorist attacks worldwide exploded from 175 in 2003 to 625 in 2004, the highest number since the Cold War began to wane in 1985.
U.S. officials said that when analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center declined the office of the secretary’s invitation to use a methodology that would reduce the number of terrorist attacks, her office terminated publication of the State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.
Ms. Rice utilizing the sin of ommission for the good of the Bush regime? To the detriment of popular democracy?
Thats right:
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," said national security adviser Condoleeza Rice on May 16, 2002.
This report was news the next day, May 17, 2002:
Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building.
"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said
February 10 2005 we learn:
This morning's New York Times reported that in "the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations." [1] The article explained that the Federal Aviation Administration "received 52 intelligence reports" that mentioned Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda prior to September 11, 2001, and that the FAA warned airports that if "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable."
This information was included in a staff report by the 9/11 Commission dated August 26, 2004. The 9/11 Commission report found that there was "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11," but that this intelligence "did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures." Although the report did not find that the government had advance information about the specific September 11, 2001, attacks, it reported that the FAA took various measures to warn airport security officials about "the possibility of a suicide hijacking."
One shameless Secretary of State, that one...
4/28/2005
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4.27.2005
Sexual Control = Social Control
Pope Benedict XVI can stand to learn something important from Israeli rabbinical leaders. That sex is good, important, natural- a part of high holidays.
According to Jewish law, you can only take drugs during the Passover festival that treat life-threatening illnesses. But could not making good love to your wife be considered life-threatening? As one man joked during a conversation at a Seder about Kosher Viagra, "If I don’t please my wife tonight, she just might kill me."
Viagara had earlier been considered traiff (non-kosher) because of the coating on the pill itself. A work-around was to put the drug in a kosher gelatin capsule.
OK, so I made a joke of the life threatening angle. But I'll remind you of something you already know; sex is a potent way of communing with the Ground of our Being, momentarily "shuffling off this mortal coil" to experience One-ness with another. The most clearly human moments we can share. Religious experience of the highest order.
I really appreciate what Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has to say:
Life lost its magic when it lost its eroticism. Eroticism, that elixir of passion, that thirsty desire to uncover the mystery of all life has to teach us, is noticeably absent from our being.
That is the reason, in my opinion, that the Jews have always read the Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) on the holiday of Passover, a holiday that celebrates the birth of our nationhood. Being freed of Egyptian slavery made our bodies free, but it did not necessarily make our spirit come alive. God wished to free us not only from the chains of slavery, but from the bane of an unanimated existence. God did not wish for us simply to exist, but to live; to subsist not merely with necessities, but with magic. For this reason He gave us the Song of Songs to teach us the power of discovering an erotic existence.
Sorry to point out the obvious, Holy Father , but the primitive sexual strictures you promote look, at best, as unadulterated CONTROL. I extend my perspective to Fundamentalists leaders as well. How can condoms, which when properly used prevent pregnancy as well as disease, be bad? Yet in our overcrowded world awash in STD's conservatives in power promote ineffective abstinence only sex education programs that mislead about the simple truth of condom effectiveness. Not to mention that eighty-eight percent of kids taking abstinence pledges engage in pre-marital sex- without the benefit of basic sex education- except maybe catching episodes of "Desperate Housewives" and the like on tv.
But these studies also highlight that abstinence-only and other sex ed programs have a critical flaw in common: The focus is on "sex" defined either explicitly or implicitly as vaginal intercourse. The abstinence kids pledge not to have sex (vaginal intercourse) but do have oral sex, manual sex, and anal sex.
The religious right is seeing to it that young people are sexually ignorant (informative link). Here is some BS an abstinence only instructor touts:
# no one has ever had sex with more than one partner without paying a price
# birth control pills make you ten times more susceptible to death
# abortion causes long-term psychological damage
# condoms are unsafe
# boys don’t get hurt by premarital sex while girls suffer for life
# large numbers of 18 to 20-year- old women are having radical hysterectomies because of cervical cancer caused by early sexual activity
Control. Wilhelm Reich spoke to the fact of sexual repression and social control:
It has a crippling effect on man's rebellious forces because every vital life-impulse is now burdened with severe fear; and since sex is a forbidden subject, thought in general and man's critical faculty also become inhibited. In short, morality's aim is to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order. I've linked to materials highlighting this nexus here previously, "Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" by James Prescott is very informative.
Remember, Jocelyn Elders lost her position as Surgeon General under President Clinton for mentioning that masturbation is part of human life. She also mentioned that drug legalization should be studied to reduce crime.
Social control rears it's head in many ways...
4/27/2005
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One Party Democracy?
Senate Republicans claim to have the votes to stop Democratic fillibusters of Bush activist judges. The Republicans are comfortable using their majority to subvert the democracy enabling filibuster rules. Robert Kuttner touched on the GOP's attempts to institute a right wing autocracy in his important article "America as a One-Party State". More recently Kevin Drumm has spoken of the Republican shift from using these time honored techniques to keep the majority in line now that they are the majority. The two articles offer historic context that is necessary but sadly lacking in media accounts. Frist was happy to use the filibuster during the Clinton presidency.
The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
The above quote is from FDR's vice-president Henry Wallace Times article "The Danger of American Fascism" Take a moment to read it, written 61 years ago it is frighteningly timely.
Share what you learn. Without context showing where we've been as a people it is much more difficult to realistically see where we are heading as a nation.
4/27/2005
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4.26.2005
An "F' for 90% of the Senate's Republicans, 99% of the House's !
Middle Class 2004: How Congress Voted issues each member of Congress, as well as the House and Senate as a whole, a letter grade based on their 2004 votes on selected pieces of legislation affecting the middle class. We chose bills that, if passed, would have an impact on the squeezed middle class, as well as the aspirations of low-income Americans who want to work their way into the middle class.
Middle Class 2004 concludes that Congress did not rise to the occasion when presented with the opportunity to support policies strengthening and expanding the middle class.
MAIN FINDINGS:
• Neither chamber of Congress did an adequate job of supporting the middle class. In both the House and the Senate, about half the members passed, half failed and less than a quarter received As.
• Despite a more lenient grading system than last year’s report, Congress did significantly worse overall in 2004.
• While the vast majority—90 percent—of Senate Republicans received
an F, nearly half of Senate Democrats received an A for their support
of the middle class.
• The same partisan pattern is observable in the House, where 99 percent of Republicans failed to support the middle class and slightly fewer than half of Democrats received an A.
• Democratic support for the middle class dropped off most drastically when it came to the American Jobs Creation Act (HR 4520) and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act (S 1920). In both bills corporate special interests lobbied heavily against the interests of the middle class.
• The Republicans showed the most support for the middle class on the
Pension Funding Equity Act (HR 3108), which was also championed
by large companies with pension plans.
• Out of the 14 votes considered, the middle-class position won out six times. However, even this feeble 43 percent success rate masks an even worse outcome, since bills like the Overtime Compensation Amendment —supported by the middle class— won votes in the House and Senate but never became law.
4/26/2005
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Homegrown American Stupidity: Priceless
Priceless to the elite, but it is costing every American in every way. It is costing the world. Our media fostered stupidity, morphing into complicity.
Last week, the House voted to repeal all inheritance taxes after 2010. Currently, estates worth $1.5 million for individuals and $3 million are taxed, affecting only a few thousand families. The repeal is going to cost the government up to $740 billion in the decade after 2010—a debt that the rest of the 295 million Americans minus a few thousand will have to carry.
Did I mention the article's title? Read the next quote and then guess.
And yet, as the Republicans rightly point out, polls show that most Americans—up to 80 percent—support the total repeal of the inheritance tax. It gets funnier: According to a poll last year by McLaughlin & Associates, 85 percent of those who earn under $40,000 found such a tax on "large estates" to be "unfair," whereas only 78 percent of wealthy people earning over $100 found the tax "unfair."
Imbeciles at Home is the title. Hearkens back to The 'S' Factor piece a year ago January.
And some folks are proud of our C student President:
"This is one of the most intellectually gifted presidents we've had." - Karl Rove, "Hardball," MSNBC, Jan. 19, 2005
the above is a useful link
He is proud of his mediocrity (video link).
Be countercultural. Think. For yourself.
4/26/2005
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4.25.2005
Unpardonable
I have covered the fact that the Bush administration caters to terrorists if they are Anti-Castro Cubans, citing the case of convicted murderer Orlando Bosch as well as highlighting longstanding Republican links from Iran/Contra that include terrorist Posada Carriles.
Over at Consortium News this Republican Terrorist nexus is brought up to date. Politics as usual with a conservative GOP flavor. "Taint" is probably a better word...
The reason is that this terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, was a CIA-trained Cuban whose long personal war against Fidel Castro’s government is viewed sympathetically by the two Bush brothers and their father. When it comes to the Bush family, Posada is the epitome of the old saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
The Bush administration – which has imprisoned Jose Padilla and other alleged Muslim “enemy combatants” without trial – has taken a far more lenient approach toward the 77-year-old Posada, who is still wanted in Venezuela for the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane in 1976 that killed 73 people. Posada also has admitted involvement in a deadly hotel bombing campaign in Cuba in 1997.
further on
Two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters. While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil.
Read the full article by Robert Parry and Jerry Meldon to get the scoop on acceptable terrorists, embarrassing Bush family connections, "intelligence" bereft of justice -Business as usual for the Bush clan.
4/25/2005
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4.24.2005
Morality Manifest
I read the "news" and try to read deeply, in the sense of drawing connections. The connection I sense between the character of the ambassadors wife and the IDF soldiers makes me uncomfortable; granted there is no comparable instance of behavior here- berating and denigrating ones employees from a sense of entitlement is a far cry from shooting an unarmed journalist that you had talked about music with hours before. But a sickness of the spirit seems readily revealed in both these cases; in the micro interpersonal level in one case, growing from that malignantly to the macro institutional level in the other.
As above, so below...
The wife of Danny Ayalon, Israeli Ambassador to the US seems to see what it is to be American in a repellant light, as well as offering the world a neat portrait of "The Ugly American". Here is the headline and lead-in to an article on the "leadership style" Anne Ayalon utilizes to keep her house "in order":
Her Royal Highness
Wife of Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. says she lives according to "American standards," allowing her to insult embassy employees and make unreasonable demands
The "American standards" are manifest by Ms Alayon's comfort with yelling at her subordinates, calling them names and requiring that they bow to her. Honest. You'd think I'm making this up, but look:
"She yelled 'Who put that picture there! I had taken it down," former butler Aharon Cohen recalled. "So Virginia told her 'I put (the picture) there, but I am very sorry.'"
In response Ayalon said to her, "No, no, you will bow before me and say you're sorry."
According to Cohen, "she repeated it maybe three times – 'bow again,' she said to her. Podilla then packed up her belongings, threw away her key and said 'I am not coming here anymore
Ms Alayon hails from a small town outside Cleveland, Ohio.
When asked whether she had ever referred to her employees as 'stupid', Ayalon answered, "You have just heard me call the butler a retard; and everyone will tell you he is retarded. So yes, I do use the word 'stupid.'"
Rude and unrepentant, this dual Israeli/United States citizen is a living breathing answer to the question "Why do they hate us?"
"Israelis are the most moral people on earth," said Ayalon, who holds an MBA from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. "We are constantly checking our morality...and caring for human lives." The IDF imbeds photographers within its units so that there is physical evidence of what actually has taken place, rather than relying on others' accounts.
Just as I hope others will not judge me as a US citizen by the actions of folks like Mr Delay, I am not offering Ms Alayon as an exemplar of typical Israeli/U.S citizens. Obviously she checks her morality all right, from the article it looks as though she checks it at the door. Although her comments about the IDF in the above quote is not germane to the highlighted article it is a great lead-in to an important piece I'd like to touch on. The death of journalist James Miller.
Here's what happened as Mr Miller was filming house demolitions for a film to be shown on HBO:
"At approximately 23:30, we decided to leave the house and the area, but we realized that we were blocked inside the house and Israeli tanks were very close. We decided to get out of the house and introduce ourselves to Israeli soldiers, tell them about our work and let them know that we would like to leave the area, to avoid being fired at by Israeli soldiers if we did not tell them.
Three of us got out; I was carrying a white flag, James was holding a lamp directed at the flag and Sierra was raising her hands. We were all wearing helmets and bullet proof suits, on which "TV" was written. We walked about 20m towards the tanks. We called on Israeli soldiers, saying that we were British journalists who wanted to leave the area, but they did not reply.
Suddenly, they fired at us, wounding James. James cried and we shouted at the Israeli soldiers to stop shooting and told them that one of us was wounded. We asked them for help as James was bleeding profusely. I went back to the house and told the others that James was wounded and asked them to call an ambulance. Then, I ran towards the tanks to ask Israeli soldiers for help, but they did not reply..."
Israeli army 'lied' about Miller death
I stole the headline from the Guardian newspaper account of the handling of James Miller's death by IDF officials. The International Federation of Journalists fleshes out what the Guardian article just touches on. Ballistics tests show that the killing round was from an Israeli weapon at close range. Mr Miller was shot from the front, not from the back as the IDF claimed. The guns of the possible IDF shooters were not collected for a month after the killing; the Lieutenant whom the IDF found to have fired in breach of regulations will not be charged in the death because:
... the report alleges the barrel of the rifle understood to have been used in the shooting two years ago was changed. Rifles submitted as part of the investigation could not have been those used in the shooting because it was 'impossible' that bullets found at the scene in Rafah belonged to the weapons surrendered, adds the report.
'It is important to point out that during the investigation a concern was raised, based on intelligence information, that some of the soldiers later changed the barrel they used during the event with a different barrel,' it continues.
Coincidently in this case where the suspect changed his story six times, where the soldiers under him lied, Ms Alayon would be shocked, I'm sure, to learn that the photographic evidence she spoke of, in this case videotaped evidence somehow came up lost. Go figure...
"There were nine soldiers in two vehicles," says Sophy. "They knew James's crew were filming and had offered them tea and spoken about music with them earlier that day – you can hear this in some of the footage James took. The soldiers have even referred to the house as 'the house of the journalists'. James knew the procedure when leaving the house – that's why he was holding a white flag. The veranda was fully lit, and these soldiers were equipped with US-made light-amplification devices, the latest in night-vision technology. There was no threat whatsoever to these soldiers."
Sophy is the widow of James Miller, she is caring for their two young children. The link offered above gives a detailed look into her and her families quest for the truth- and justice.
It seems like abuse of power is the sickness of our times.
4/24/2005
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