"Prepubescent President": Bush grabs German Chancellor Angela Merkel from behind , video

BBC Transcript: Bush Language of Diplomacy: Speaking Ugly Words With A Mouthful , video

Note: This is an unbelievable video: Bush can be heard smacking his lips and pushing around a wad of bread in his cheek, while talking "shit" with Blair. (transcript below) Here, he's the epitome of the ugly American. For those of us who warned folks about the character of Bush years before he became president, we can only be saddened by the gullibility of the U.S. electorate. --Jerry Politex

Bush: And thanks for the sweaters - I know you picked em out yourself...

Blair: Oh yes absolutely - in fact I knitted it!!!

(laughter)

Bush: What about Kofi Annan - he seems all right. I don't like his ceasefire plan. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything sorts out.... But I think...

Blair: Yeah the only thing I think is really difficult is that we can't stop this without getting international presence agreed. I think what you guys have talked about which is the criticism of the [inaudible word]. I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.

Bush: Yeah I think Condi's [US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] gonna go soon.

Blair: Well that's all that matters but if you... You see at least it gets it going.

Bush: I agree it's a process...I told her your offer too.

Blair: Well it's only if she needs the ground prepared as it were. If she goes out she HAS to succeed whereas I can just go and...

Bush: You see the irony is what they need to is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's all over...

Blair: Dunno... Syria....

Bush: Why?

Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing...

Bush: (with mouth full of bread) Yeah

Blair: Look - what does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine. If you get a solution in Israel and Palestine. Iraq goes in the right way

Bush: Yeah - he's [indistinct]

Blair: Yeah.... He's had it. That's what all this is about - it's the same with Iran

Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.

Blair: Yeah

Bush: [indistinct] blaming Israel and [indistinct] blaming the Lebanese government....

Letters: Where is the Rage? , Shogg, Politex, Payne

Sometimes, when I read a sentence like Bob Herbert's-- "the American public doesn't seem to care that...," --well, just how is the "American public" supposed to show its distaste or dislike or whatever for Bush? I've voted against him, been more active in working against him and for others than I've ever done in my life--and I'm not alone. I'm one of many. Just what is it we're supposed to do? I sure as hell don't have the power to get MY thoughts or analysis published as Mr. Herbert does....

Most of us who strongly dislike and detest Bush and his cronies and his policies feel choked off and frustrated. The media barely covers most negative stuff about Bush and continues to cut Bush as much slack as you'd give a severely mentally impaired 8 year old boy w/behavioral problems who's trying to participate in Little League-- probably more. Despite MSN saying, oh pity poor Bush (an incredible op-ed article by Joan Vennochi not long ago) he has been successful in getting just about everything he (or Cheney, or the energy industry et al) wants, and it sounds as though the GOP is gearing up for another shot against Social Security, as opposed to doing anything constructive for the US public. I've written letters to the editor to the hilt....

I'd like to ask Mr. Herbert, just what is it we're supposed to be doing that we're not?... Is he planning on leading the march? But really, just what the hell is it the apparently monolithic public is supposed to be doing? --Shogg

Thanks, Shogg. I suppose Herbert would respond by saying if there were more folks like you, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. What follows are excerpts from Michael Payne's piece in Online Journal, 'Where is the rage? Where is the outrage?' Like Herbert, Payne does not answer your question, but what is implied is that we need a more organized effort to wake people up, and we need more people to do it, and we need to frame the issue in terms that would galvanize people to action. The recent pro-immigration marches and rallies have demonstrated that people will express their will when it comes to their personal interests. --Jerry Politex

We are all part of an American society that continues to silently watch as our government pursues a foreign policy that threatens the very future of our democracy. A large segment of this society is currently in a state of conditioned silence. It watches as America is undergoing radical changes that are transforming this nation into an instrument of world domination with the objective of controlling this planet's energy resources. The overriding question is: what will bring this society out of this state of conditioned silence -- does it have the will or any desire to say, "Enough is enough, we will accept no more?" Or have the American people completely lost their will to dissent?

It seems that we have become a society that no longer may know what is right versus what is just plain wrong....The senseless deaths of our military and Iraqi civilians continue each and every day; this is complete madness! Is Big Brother wiretapping you and me? Does anyone care? America remains in a state of conditioned silence. Where is the rage? Where is the outrage? National opinion polls have determined that there is dissatisfaction, uneasiness, and a tiredness in the American people. The public now feels the Iraq war was a mistake and not worth it. Is America disillusioned simply because we are not winning? God, I hope not. Is there anything at all that can reach the American mind so that so many of us who profess "family values" can just get real damned mad when we witness our foreign policy going berserk? Yes, there is only silence, only a weary acceptance of these travesties foisted upon the American people, only the passive condoning of this insidious wrongheaded direction that those in control of our government are taking. Americans seem to have lost the will to question and challenge. Thomas Jefferson, one of our greatest patriots said, "Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism" and truer words were never spoken. If we completely lose our ability to question, to challenge and to dissent when our democracy is in jeopardy, then we will have become nothing more than passive sheep.

We in America are so very content with our lifestyles, our gas-guzzling SUV's, Hummers, huge pickup trucks, bigger and bigger homes that many cannot really afford, interest-only loans; and now, believe it or not, 50-years mortgages. We see the price of gasoline rapidly escalating and we watch as our government, the auto companies and the energy corporations have no plan or any desire whatsoever to try to solve the energy problems that are endangering our very future. It seems that the American mind is so fixed upon personal gain, the accumulation of wealth and material possessions that this fixation has negated and wiped out the former great influence of moral values in our society. It appears we have become slaves of consumerism and that this addiction has virtually wiped out the will, incentive and courage to dissent....

Tyrant Bush: If Bush Gets His Way Our Democracy Will Be Toast (excerpts) , Bob Herbert

Congress is dithering and the American public doesn’t even seem particularly concerned as the administration of George W. Bush systematically trashes such fundamental American values as justice, due process, respect for human rights and submission to the rule of law. In the kangaroo courts that the administration concocted to try detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a defendant could be prevented from seeing the evidence against him, would not have the right to attend his own trial and would not have the right to appeal the sentence to a civilian court....

The Bush-Cheney regime believes it can do whatever outlandish things it wants, including torturing people and keeping them incarcerated for life without even the semblance of due process. And it’s not giving up. The administration now wants Congress to authorize what the Supreme Court has plainly said was wrong. White House lawyers, in a torturous (pun intended) interpretation of the court’s ruling, seem to be arguing that the kangaroo courts, otherwise known as military commissions, will be quite all right if only Congress will say so. They’re not all right. They’re an abomination (like the secret C.I.A. prisons and the practice of extraordinary rendition) that spits in the face of the idea that the United States is a great and civilized nation....

Mr. Bush has tried to scrap the very idea of checks and balances. The Republican-controlled Congress has, for the most part, rolled over like trained seals for the president. And Mr. Bush is trying mightily to pack the courts with right-wingers who will do the same. Under those circumstances, his will becomes law. Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion in the Hamdan case, referred to a seminal quote from James Madison. The entire quote is as follows: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”...

There is every reason to be alarmed about the wretched road that Bush, Cheney et al. are speeding along. It is as if they were following a route deliberately designed to undermine a great nation. A lot of Americans are like spoiled rich kids who take their wealth for granted. Too many of us have forgotten — or never learned — the real value of the great American ideals. Too many are standing silently by as Mr. Bush and his cronies engage in the kind of tyrannical and uncivilized behavior that has brought so much misery — and ultimately ruin — to previous societies.

Axis Of Idiots: Six Years And Counting Of Bush Phony Baloney (excerpts) , Frank Rich

...Only if we remember that the core values of this White House are marketing and political expediency, not principle and substance, can we fully grasp its past errors and, more important, decipher the endgame to come. The Bush era has not been defined by big government or small government but by virtual government....Like his father, George W. Bush always disdained the vision thing. He rode into office on the heels of a boom, preaching minimalist ambitions reminiscent of the 1920’s boom Republicanism of Harding and Coolidge. Mr. Bush’s most fervent missions were to cut taxes, pass a placebo patients’ bill of rights and institute the education program he sold as No Child Left Behind. His agenda was largely exhausted by the time of his fateful Crawford vacation in August 2001, so he talked vaguely of immigration reform and announced a stem-cell research “compromise.”

But he failed to seriously lead on either issue, both of which remain subjects of toxic debate today. To appear busy once he returned to Washington after Labor Day, he cooked up a typically alliterative “program” called Communities of Character, a grab bag of “values” initiatives inspired by polling data. That was forgotten after the Qaeda attacks. But the day that changed everything didn’t change the fundamental character of the Bush presidency. The so-called doctrine of pre-emption, a repackaging of the long-held Cheney-Rumsfeld post-cold-war mantra of unilateralism, was just another gaudy float in the propaganda parade ginned up to take America to war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11. As the president’s chief of staff then, Andrew Card, famously said of the Iraq war just after Labor Day 2002, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” The Bush doctrine was rolled out officially two weeks later, just days after the administration’s brass had fanned out en masse on the Sunday-morning talk shows to warn that Saddam’s smoking gun would soon come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

The Bush doctrine was a doctrine in name only, a sales strategy contrived to dress up the single mission of regime change in Iraq with philosophical grandiosity worthy of F.D.R. There was never any serious intention of militarily pre-empting either Iran or North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions were as naked then as they are now, or of striking the countries that unlike Iraq were major enablers of Islamic terrorism. Axis of Evil was merely a clever brand name from the same sloganeering folks who gave us “compassionate conservatism” and “a uniter, not a divider” — so clever that the wife of a presidential speechwriter, David Frum, sent e-mails around Washington boasting that her husband was the “Axis of Evil” author....

Since then, the administration has fiddled in Iraq while Islamic radicalism has burned brighter and the rest of the Axis of Evil, not to mention Afghanistan and the Middle East, have grown into just the gathering threat that Saddam was not. And there’s still no policy. As Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution writes on his foreign-affairs blog, Mr. Bush isn’t pursuing diplomacy in his post-cowboy phase so much as “a foreign policy of empty gestures” consisting of “strong words here; a soothing telephone call and hasty meetings there.” The ambition is not to control events but “to kick the proverbial can down the road — far enough so the next president can deal with it.” There is no plan for victory in Iraq, only a wish and a prayer that the apocalypse won’t arrive before Mr. Bush retires to his ranch....

Sunday Funnies, Bell, Tomorrow, etc.

Jealousy: Bush Has New Dogfriend (By Steve Bell)
The Afghanistan War Needs a New Publicist (By Ward Sutton)
North Korea's Glorious Failure! (By Mark Fiore)
A Right-Wing Guide to Summer Blockbusters (By Tom Tomorrow)
Gore's Prediction: Corn Oil Fuel And... (By Mr. Fish)

Bush Passive-Aggression: Bush "Clarifies Things" Between Israel And Its Enemies ,
Michael Shtender-Auerbach

As feverish international efforts are underway to halt the spiraling violence between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon has upped the ante by abducting two and killing eight Israeli Defense Force soldiers. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described the raid as an “act of war” – raising the ominous specter of a 2006 Middle East War. This clash has the potential to reach as far as Tehran – the financial and logistical backers of Hezbollah – and most certainly Syria, who promptly announced that Israel “deserved the attack.” Calls for restraint from the United Nations and the European Union, urging Israel to recognize that military escalation will ultimately undermine its national interests, will predictably fall on deaf ears. And the intensification of the conflict will be all the more inexorable because of the conspicuous absence of an indispensable player in the region, the traditional guarantor of stability and essential intermediary for peace: the United States.

That fact that America has opted to watch this clash from the sidelines, rather than launching an effort to quell or avert it, represents a pronounced and deliberate change in policy, and an extraordinary transformation – and miniaturization – of America’s role in the Middle East. Through three decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, Washington has played a vital role in tempering the military response that Israel so often employs when besieged. The United States and Israel have always operated within the “good cop – bad cop” paradigm, with America’s role as “good cop” allowing it to maintain its status as an ‘honest broker’ for peace in the region. By tacitly approving Tel Aviv’s disproportionate response, Washington is unveiling a new paradigm -- “bad cop – worse cop”—and in doing so, compromising its role as fair interlocutor.

From the very first meeting of his National Security Council six years ago, President George W. Bush made it clear that he wanted the U.S. to reverse 35 years of consistent engagement, dating back to President Richard Nixon, by trying to manage the Israeli/Arab conflict. “I don't see much we can do over there at this point,” he announced. When Colin Powell expressed grave concerns over the implications of the disengagement Mr. Bush envisioned, the President replied: ''Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." Are things clear now?

While the U.S. steps back to let a new wave of violence “clarify things,” Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey have taken the lead as “honest brokers” in trying to negotiate a peaceful solution to the current confrontation. But America is at risk from Presidential indifference. Even before Sept. 11, 2001, and particularly after, the fates of the United States and the Middle East are irrevocably intertwined. In an uncanny twist, the very act of sitting out this round and letting the conflict happen has ended up fueling the view in the Arab and Jewish worlds that some blame for the violence should be laid at Washington’s door. According to the Forward, a Jewish weekly paper, the White House “appears to have dropped any objections to Israeli efforts to topple the Palestinian Authority’s democratically elected Hamas government.”...Before the United States...tolerate[s] a full scale war between Israel and its neighbors in hopes that force can "clarify things," Americans should consider whether this might strengthen the extremists and their links to Iran and even Al Qaeda.... --July 13, 2006, CommonDreams. org

Bush Economy: Bush Needs Your Money For His Rich Friends (excerpts) , Paul Krugman

...Bush supporter: “Why doesn’t President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias.” Informed economist: “But it’s not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well.”...Many observers, even if they acknowledge the growing concentration of income in the hands of the few, find it hard to believe that this concentration could be proceeding so rapidly as to deny most Americans any gains from economic growth. Yet newly available data show that that’s exactly what happened in 2004.

Why talk about 2004, rather than more recent experience? Unfortunately, data on the distribution of income arrive with a substantial lag; the full story of what happened in 2004 has only just become available, and we won’t be able to tell the full story of what’s happening right now until the last year of the Bush administration. But it’s reasonably clear that what’s happening now is the same as what happened then: growth in the economy as a whole is mainly benefiting a small elite, while bypassing most families. Here’s what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth. There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There’s a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better — like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004. In short, it’s a great economy if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport....

Sick Puppy Watch: Bush Wants Judgeship For His Torture Lawyer (excerpts) , Maureen Dowd

...As three female protesters in Abu Ghraib-style orange jumpsuits and black headscarves stood vigil in the back of the Senate Judiciary hearing room, like the supernatural chorus in “Macbeth,” William Haynes was grilled about his worthiness to ascend to the federal bench when his main claim to the promotion is complicity in letting Dick Cheney dance a jig on the Geneva Conventions.

“The State Department characterizes the use of dogs as an interrogation aid as torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,’’ Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said to the Pentagon general counsel. “We publicly condemned the countries of Libya and Burma for using dogs in interrogation. In November of 2002, you recommended that Secretary Rumsfeld approve the use of dogs to intimidate detainees at Guantánamo. The Department of Defense’s own investigation concluded that this technique migrated from Guantánamo to Iraq and Abu Ghraib. At least two members of the armed forces have now been convicted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for using dogs to frighten detainees. It is striking that as these soldiers were prosecuted, you were being promoted. What message are we sending our troops? And what message are we sending the world, in light of your role in promulgating abusive interrogation techniques, like the use of dogs, stress positions and forced nudity. What message are we sending if we promote you to the second highest court in the land?" The senator added that the message would be terribly unfair: “Well, we’re going to dispatch a few privates, a few corporals, a sergeant, maybe it will get to a lieutenant, but it’ll never get upstairs. ... Apparently, upstairs there’s a promotion party. Downstairs people are being sent to prison.’’

Mr. Haynes, 48, lamely resorted to the argument that Abu Ghraib was simply a few bad apples, “the work of the night shift, without any authority whatsoever.” Even as the Bush administration was forced to concede, after being slapped back by the Supreme Court, that terrorism suspects must be accorded the rights enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, W. was trying to reward those who helped shred them. He nominated Mr. Haynes to sit on the Fourth Circuit court, the conservative Virginia go-to court for contentious cases on civil liberties and detention of foreign prisoners.

A group of 20 retired military officers sent a letter to Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, expressing “profound concern” about Mr. Haynes and arguing that he promoted policies that “compromised military values, ignored federal and international law, and damaged America’s reputation and world leadership.’’ If all the Democrats are opposed and even one Republican is willing to vote no, the nomination could stall on a 9-to-9 vote. Harry Reid, the minority leader, hinted that Democrats might try to filibuster it if it is reported to the full Senate....[Don't hold your breath. --Politex]

Op-Eds: The Latest from Hersh, Brasch, Clothier, Floyd, Bosworth, Weiner, Ostroy, Mickey Z., Pringle, Miller, and Fisher

The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy. , Seymour Hersh
On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezz Rice announced what appeared to be a majo change in U.S. foreign policy. The Bus Administration, she said, would be willing t join Russia, China, and its European allies i direct talks with Iran about its nuclear program There was a condition, however: th negotiations would not begin until, as th President put it in a June 19th speech at th U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, “the Irania regime fully and verifiably suspends its uraniu enrichment and reprocessing activities.” Iran which has insisted on its right to enric uranium, was being asked to concede the mai point of the negotiations before they started The question was whether the Administratio expected the Iranians to agree, or was layin the diplomatic groundwork for future militar action. In his speech, Bush also talked about “freedom for the Iranian people,” and he added “Iran’s leaders have a clear choice.” There wa an unspoken threat: the U.S. Strategi Command, supported by the Air Force, ha been drawing up plans, at the President’ direction, for a major bombing campaign in Iran....

Making Sense Out of Dangerous Nonsense , Bernard Weiner
...For both Israel and America, their occupations continue and appear to grow even worse. The very presence of these foreign troops on the ground, in Palestine and Iraq, is a large share of the problem, a running sore that creates a deepening infection in the local body politic, engendering a nationalistic resistance to throw the occupiers out. But the two military giants, each possessing overwhelming firepower, are caught in a quagmire of their own devising in trying to deal with shadowy, lightly-armed guerrillas who simply won't give up.

The End of Democracy Promotion in Iraq? , William Fisher
"America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof." So spoke President George W. Bush in his second inaugural address last January, vowing to help build democratic institutions and strengthen civil society in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Yet today, the Bush administration is substantially reducing funding for the organizations that are traditionally mandated to transform the president's vision into reality....

Bush Brags About $296 Billion Deficit and Kool-aid Repugs Cheer. , Andy Ostroy
With the new budget deficit numbers out, a reasonable expectation would be that President Bush would not only be sequestered at the Crawford ranch clearing brush, he'd be hiding in it too. Yet unlike any other president in history, this one believes a $296 billion deficit is actually something to brag about. It only goes to show that the Busheviks are so desperate for anything even remotely positive to tout that they'd use the deficit as something to be proud of. The performance bar is set so low for Bush that his operatives can now astonishingly point to a colossal failure and paint it as a success. In essence today, the 'good' news from Bush was that the news was not as horrifying as it could have been; that the previously projected $423 billion deficit for this year would be $127 billion smaller. Whoopee. Give the man a cookie. Is it too much to ask of this administration that they be measured against the Clinton days of record surpluses? Apparently so....

Bush's Mental Illness Screening Squad On the Move , Evelyn Pringle
On April 29, 2002, Bush kicked off the whole mental health screening scheme when he announced the establishment of the New Freedom Commission (NFC) during a speech in in New Mexico where he told the audience that mental health centers and hospitals, homeless shelters, and the justice and school systems, have contact with individuals suffering from mental disorders but that too many Americans are falling through the cracks, and so he created the NFC to ensure "that the cracks are closed." In words relevant here, the late President Ronald Reagan aptly described government intervention this way: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." According to award-winning investigative reporter, Kelly O'Meara: "Nowhere is this quote more appropriate than when applied to George W. Bush's New Freedom Commission on Mental Heath."

American Dream: The Fleeting Lights of Freedom , Chris Floyd
{Re} the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down the ludicrous and lawless "military tribunals" concocted by President George W. Bush to serve as meat grinders for the captives in his Terror War. Led by the sprightly Led by the sprightly – if not spritely – 86-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, a narrow Court majority delivered a stinging rebuke to Bush's assumption of imperial powers over the past five years, clearly rejecting the fundamental principle underlying the Crawford Caligula's foul misrule: that the president's unbridled will is the law. The ruling has been hailed as a "victory for democracy," the "light at the end of the tunnel," a "turning point" in the long struggle to reclaim the Republic from the usurping junta of the Bush Regime. But we have seen these lights before, and watched them fade. All the previous "turning points" – scandals, atrocities, judicial rebuffs, investigations, criminal convictions – have only led to more depredations; every seeming defeat of unlawful power becomes instead a springboard for its further advancement. There is no reason to think it will be any different this time....

Dick Morris Does Mexico , Andrew Bosworth
Dick Morris went all the way to Mexico to violate Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution, which says: “Foreigners may not, in any manner, involve themselves in the political affairs of the country.” But that is what Dick Morris did by immersing himself in the campaign as an “unofficial” advisor of Felipe Calderon - the right-wing darling of the international and banking community. Morris showed Mexico’s conservatives how to dirty up a campaign, how to smear and slander an opponent into defeat. His target? Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), a center-left candidate for president. The Morris-Calderon campaign broadcast television commercials showing AMLO actually morphing into Hugo Chavez, and right-wing media printed countless magazines depicting AMLO as a pawn on a chessboard, with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro hovering over him diabolically....Felipe Calderon was in the doldrums before the injection of American-style smear campaigns....

Don't Support Our Troops , Mickey Z.
For some Americans, the phrase "support our troops" is little more than a euphemism for: "support the policies that put our troops in harm’s way." For Americans of the liberal persuasion-ever cautious not to offend those mythical fence sitters-the phrase "support our troops" is a safe way to avoid taking a principled stand against this war (and all war). Either usage of the phrase "support our troops" does nothing to challenge the latest mission in particular or the concept of military intervention in general....

Shall we be an 'English-only' nation? , Walter Brasch
During World War I, with Americans despising anything German, and the establishment newspapers fueling flames of patriotic intolerance, "sauerkraut" became "victory cabbage," hamburgers became "liberty sandwiches" and hamburger steak became forever etched into Americans' vocabularies as "Salisbury steak." In March 2003, when France didn't agree with the United States about why the world should invade Iraq, Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), chair of the Committee on House Administration, ordered all restaurants in the buildings of the House of Representatives to rename french toast "freedom toast" and french fries "freedom fries." The White House also thought that was a reasonable thing to do while planning a "shock-awe-and-quagmire" invasion. Hundreds of restaurant owners throughout the country followed the Congressional will. In response to reporters salivating to report upon an international food fight, Nathalie Loisau, a spokeswoman for the French embassy in Washington, D.C., said, "We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes," (Apparently, Americans didn't have any problems with french horns or french poodles.) As absurd as the linguistic larceny that renamed food are the babblings of most of the nation's radio talk-show hosts and their ranting gaggle of jingoistic followers who demand the United States be solely an English-speaking country....

The Rendition of Christ , Jason Miller
Self-righteous hypocrisy and the banner of Christianity have been staples of the ruling elite in the United States as they have led their followers on a 200 year spree of economic and geographic expansion at the expense of those unfortunate enough to stand in their way.... Given that the psyche of most Americans has been battered with the notion that our country was founded by Christians intending to form a Christian nation, and that many of those besieged psyches have acquiesced and accepted this assertion as dogmatic truth, perhaps an analysis of the founder of Christianity would be instructive....

Big Ideas (A Poem of Partisan Politics) , Peter Clothier
Here’s what's up this morning, Bush:
I’m good and pissed. I’m fed up.
As my father used to say, I’m fed up
to the back teeth. Or as we here
in the US say, I’m sick and tired....

Tuesday, July 11

Aryan Nations Graffiti in Baghdad: Bush's neo-Nazi, Skinhead Military (excerpts) , Bob Herbert

...The U.S. military — its capabilities and its reputation so painstakingly rebuilt in the decades since Vietnam — is again falling victim to lowered standards, breakdowns in discipline and a series of atrocities that are nothing less than a betrayal of the many honorable men and women in uniform and the country they serve. The Army has had to lower its standards because most young Americans want no part of George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Recruiters, desperate to meet their quotas, are sifting for warm bodies among those who are less talented, less disciplined and, in some cases, repellent.

John Kifner reported in The Times last week about a study by a watchdog group that showed that recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military. The study, by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist groups, was titled "A Few Bad Men." It said that recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure to fill the thinning ranks, "often look the other way" as militant white supremacists and anti-Semites make their way into the armed forces. The center quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying: "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a problem."

This comes 10 years after a Pentagon crackdown on extremist activity in the armed forces. The crackdown followed the Oklahoma City bombing, which was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a gulf war veteran, and the murder of a black couple by skinheads in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division....It was already known that the Army had become more reluctant to release soldiers who were seriously out of shape, or pregnant, or abusing alcohol or drugs. The pressure to put somebody — anybody — in uniform also led to the lowering of standards for admission to the junior officer ranks. For example, minor criminal offenses that previously would have been prohibitive could suddenly be overlooked.... This is the sort of thing that happens when the military is run by power-hungry amateurs who lack the maturity and the sense of history to temper their arrogance.

As the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded, I wondered how such completely and obviously unfit characters as Charles Graner Jr. and Lynndie England had not previously been weeded out of the military, which had bragged for so long about how high its standards had become. Now we're faced with the case of American soldiers suspected of raping an Iraqi teenager and murdering her and her family. This is one of at least five cases currently being investigated in which American troops have been accused of killing unarmed civilians. Marines are suspected of slaughtering 24 Iraqis, including women and children, in the western town of Haditha last November — a case that in its horror, if not its scale, recalls the My Lai massacre of Vietnam....

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Monday, July 10

No Parachute For You: Show Cheney The Money , Mike Whitney

Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney's financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly....This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the "Bush Economic Plan" is anything more than a scam aimed at looting the public till. The whole deal is intended to shift the nation's wealth from one class to another. It's also clear that Bush-Cheney couldn't have carried this off without the tacit approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low-interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets.

Reasonable people can dispute that Bush is "intentionally" skewering the dollar with his lavish tax cuts, but how does that explain Cheney's portfolio? It doesn't. And, one thing we can say with metaphysical certainty is that the miserly Cheney would never plunk his money into an investment that wasn't a sure thing. If Cheney is counting on the dollar tanking and interest rates going up, then, by Gawd, that's what'll happen. The Bush-Cheney team has racked up another $3 trillion in debt in just 6 years. The US national debt now stands at $8.4 trillion dollars while the trade deficit has ballooned to $800 billion nearly 7% of GDP.

This is lunacy. No country, however powerful, can maintain these staggering numbers. The country is in hock up to its neck and has to borrow $2.5 billion per day just to stay above water. Presently, the Fed is expanding the money supply and buying back its own treasuries to hide the hemorrhaging from the public. Its utter madness. Last month the trade deficit climbed to $70 billion. More importantly, foreign central banks only purchased a meager $47 billion in treasuries to shore up our ravenous appetite for cheap junk from China. Do the math! They're not investing in America anymore. They are decreasing their stockpiles of dollars. We're sinking fast and Cheney and his pals are manning the lifeboats while the public is diverted with gay marriage amendments and "American Celebrity".

The American manufacturing sector has been hollowed out by cutthroat corporations who've abandoned their country to make a fast-buck in China or Mexico. The $3 trillion housing (equity) bubble is quickly loosing air while the anemic dollar continues to sag. All the signs indicate that the economy is slowing at the same time that energy prices continue to rise. This is the onset of stagflation; the dreaded combo of a slowing economy and inflation....The American economy is barrel-rolling towards earth and there are only enough parachutes for Cheney and the gang. The country has lost 3 million jobs from outsourcing since Bush took office; more than 200,000 of those are the high-paying, high-tech jobs that are the life's-blood of every economy.

Consider this from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) June edition of Foreign Affairs, the Bible of globalists and plutocrats:

"Between 2000 and 2003 alone, foreign firms built 60,000manufacturing plants in China. European chemical companies, Japanese carmakers, and US industrial conglomerates are all building factories in China to supply export markets around the world. Similarly, banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies are building R&D and service centers in India to support employees, customers, and production worldwide." ("The Globally integrated Enterprise" Samuel Palmisano, Foreign Affairs page 130)

"60,000 manufacturing plants" in 3 years?!? "Banks, insurance companies, professional-service firms, and IT companies"? No job is safe. American elites and corporate tycoons are loading the boats and heading for foreign shores. The only thing they're leaving behind is the insurmountable debt that will be shackled to our children into perpetuity and the carefully arranged levers of a modern police-surveillance state....

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Sunday, July 9

Why Bush Has Attacked The New York Times (excerpt), Frank Rich

...The third and most important explanation [for Bush's attack on the NYT] has nothing to do with the facts of the case or the law and everything to do with politics. For all the lynch mob's efforts to single out The Times — "It's the old trick, go after New York, go after big, ethnic New York," as Chris Matthews put it — three papers broke [bank spying] stories on their front pages. Even in this bash-the-press environment, the last spectacle needed by a president with an approval rating in the 30's is the national firestorm that would greet a doomed Justice Department prosecution of The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.

The administration has a more insidious game plan instead: it has manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year. There are momentous stories far more worrisome to the White House than the less-than-shocking Swift program, whether in the chaos of Anbar Province or the ruins of New Orleans. If the press muzzles itself, its under-the-radar self-censorship will be far more valuable than a Nixonesque frontal assault....Will this plan work? It did after 9/11....

The Clash of Cultural "Isms", Dr. Gerry Lower

Samuel P. Huntington wrote "The Clash of Civilizations," when he was the Director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. His now-famous essay was originally published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 and then expanded into a book. More recently, Huntington's analysis has been reconsidered by Prof. David R. Loy in the context of Dick Cheney's Bush administration and its promotion of neoconservative capitalism with an imperial bent toward self-righteousness and belligerence on the world stage. What Huntington attempted to develop over a decade ago was a new global paradigm that ostensibly brought "the new global mess into focus." Democratic societies do not go to war against each other and the Cold War era of struggle between nation-states and rival ideologies was over. Huntington foresaw that post-Cold War conflicts would be waged between "civilizations" which have "different languages, histories, institutions, and - most importantly - different religions"....

Sunday Funnies, Mr. Fish, Tomorrow, etc.

Look! America! It's Britney Spears!! (By Ward Sutton)
One of the most locked up countries around! (By Mark Fiore)
How a Lifelong Democrat Became a Republican! (By Tom Tomorrow)
Mi$$ion Accomplished (By Ward Sutton)
Founding Fathers Wait For Bush To Correct Constitution (By Mr. Fish)

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Saturday, July 8

India Gets Bush-Brand Democracy (excerpts), Pankaj Mishra

Encouraged by a powerful lobby of rich Indian-Americans who seek to expand their political influence within both their home and adopted countries, President Bush recently agreed to assist India's nuclear program, even at the risk of undermining his efforts to check the nuclear ambitions of Iran. As if on cue, special reports and covers hailing the rise of India in Time, Foreign Affairs and The Economist have appeared in the last month. It was not so long ago that India appeared in the American press as a poor, backward and often violent nation, saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy and, though officially nonaligned, friendly to the Soviet Union. Suddenly the country seems to be not only a "roaring capitalist success story" but also, according to Foreign Affairs, an "emerging strategic partner of the United States." To what extent is this wishful thinking rather than an accurate estimate of India's strengths?

Looking for new friends and partners in a rapidly changing world, the Bush administration clearly hopes that India, a fellow democracy, will be a reliable counterweight against China as well as Iran. But trade and cooperation between India and China is growing; and, though grateful for American generosity on the nuclear issue, India is too dependent on Iran for oil (it is also exploring developing a gas pipeline to Iran) to wholeheartedly support the United States in its efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The world, more interdependent now than during the cold war, may no longer be divided up into strategic blocs and alliances....The increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country's $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.

Nor is India rising very fast on the report's Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day. Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country's market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country's growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country (the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names). In the countryside, where 70 percent of India's population lives, the government has reported that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003.

Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by the urban-oriented economic growth, communist insurgencies (unrelated to India's parliamentary communist parties) have erupted in some of the most populous and poorest parts of north and central India. The Indian government no longer effectively controls many of the districts where communists battle landlords and police, imposing a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless rural population. The potential for conflict — among castes as well as classes — also grows in urban areas, where India's cruel social and economic disparities are as evident as its new prosperity. The main reason for this is that India's economic growth has been largely jobless. Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already. For decades now, India's underprivileged have used elections to register their protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the 2004 general elections, they voted out a central government that claimed that India was "shining," bewildering not only most foreign journalists but also those in India who had predicted an easy victory for the ruling coalition.

Among the politicians whom voters rejected was Chandrababu Naidu, the technocratic chief minister of one of India's poorest states, whose forward-sounding policies, like providing Internet access to villages, prompted Time magazine to declare him "South Asian of The Year" and a "beacon of hope." But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism.

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Friday, July 7

Bush Plays the Fascist Card (excerpts), Paul Krugman

...Anyone who was genuinely shocked by The [Wall Street] Journal's willingness to play the treason card [against the New York Times] must not have been paying attention these past five years. Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch. Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented executive authority — the right to imprison people indefinitely without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by Congress, that the laws don't really mean what they say.

But an almost equally important aspect of the project has been the attempt to create a political environment in which nobody dares to criticize the administration or reveal inconvenient facts about its actions. And that attempt has relied, from the beginning, on ascribing treasonous motives to those who refuse to toe the line. As far back as 2002, Rush Limbaugh, in words very close to those used by The Wall Street Journal last week, accused Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, of a partisan "attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism." Those of us who tried to call attention to this authoritarian project years ago have long marveled over the reluctance of many of our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on. For example, for a long time many people in the mainstream media applied a peculiar double standard to political speech, denouncing perfectly normal if forceful political rhetoric from the left as poisonous "Bush hatred," while chuckling indulgently over venom from the right. (That Ann Coulter, she's such a kidder.)

But now the chuckling has stopped: somehow, nobody seems to find calls to send Bill Keller to the gas chamber funny. And while the White House clearly believes that attacking The Times is a winning political move, it doesn't have to turn out that way — not if enough people realize what's at stake. For I think that most Americans still believe in the principle that the president isn't a king, that he isn't entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front — from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony — he has consistently played politics with national security. And he has done so with the approval and encouragement of the same people now attacking The New York Times for its alleged lack of patriotism....

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Thursday, July 6

Minimum Wage: No Justificaion For Screwing The American Worker (excerpts), Bob Herbert

...The federal minimum wage, currently $5.15 an hour, was last raised in 1997. Since then, its purchasing power has deteriorated by 20 percent. Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities jointly crunched the numbers and determined that, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is at its lowest level since 1955....If you're making the minimum wage, you're hurting. If Congress and the president don't raise the minimum wage by Dec. 2, it will have remained unchanged for the longest stretch since it was established in 1938. (The longest period previously was from January 1981 to April 1990 — a span that saw the entire Reagan administration come and go.)

Senate Republicans recently blocked a Democratic bill, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy, that would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, noted that while Republicans in Congress are standing like a stone wall against this modest increase in the poverty-level wage, "they are working as hard as they can to repeal the estate tax." "That," he said, "is just vicious class warfare." The most important pay increases for most members of Congress are their own, and they are diligent in that regard. Senator Clinton, in a floor speech supporting the minimum-wage hike, said, "During the past nine years, we've raised our own pay by $31,600."

Mrs. Clinton has introduced a bill that, in addition to raising the minimum wage to $7.25, would link Congressional pay raises to hikes in the minimum wage. Under the bill, the minimum wage would be increased automatically by the same percentage as any increase in Congressional pay. Polls have shown that Americans overwhelmingly favor an increase in the minimum wage. But the low-income workers who would benefit from such an increase are not part of the natural G.O.P. constituency. Thus, the stonewall. A separate study by the Economic Policy Institute found that in 2005, with the pay of top corporate executives up sharply, and with the minimum wage falling further and further behind inflation, "an average chief executive officer was paid 821 times as much as a minimum wage earner." That C.E.O., according to the study, "earns more before lunchtime on the very first day of work in the year than a minimum wage worker earns all year."

"The reality," said Senator Clinton, "is that a full time job that pays the minimum wage just doesn't provide enough money to support a family today. We have to acknowledge that fact and do something about it. As a country, we cannot accept that a single mother with two children who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year earns $10,700 a year — let me say this again: $10,700 a year. That is almost $6,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three." During the 1950's and 60's, the minimum wage was roughly 50 percent of the average wage of nonsupervisory workers. It has now fallen to 31 percent — less than a third — of that average.

As the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget pointed out in their study: "Each year that Congress fails to raise the wage floor, its purchasing power erodes. The fact that the minimum wage has remained the same for nearly nine years means that its real value has declined considerably over that period. As inflation has accelerated recently due to higher energy costs, the real value of the minimum wage has fallen faster." There is no justification — none — for condemning the nation's lowest-paid workers to this continuing slide into ever deeper economic distress. "No one who works for a living should have to live in poverty," said Senator Kennedy....

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Wednesday, July 5

Op-Eds: The Latest from Uhler, Samples, Floyd, Weiner, Ostroy, Mickey Z., Ireland, Miller, Partridge and Fisher

Immovable Object, Irresistible Force, Ernest Partridge
Surely, one of the most remarkable and enviable traditions of American politics has been that of the peaceful transfer of power. Never in our history has a President and his administration been removed from office by force of arms. Instead, it has been our tradition that when, following an orderly election, a new President is inaugurated, he is usually greeted by his predecessor at the White House, whereupon they ride together to the inauguration ceremony. Then the former President begins an honorable retirement, writes his memoirs, and accepts six-figure speaking engagements.

No longer. For perhaps the first time in our history, a significant number of administration officials and supporters, including perhaps the President himself, must keep themselves and their party in power to avoid criminal indictment, conviction, and imprisonment. For it can scarcely be doubted that these individuals have committed numerous crimes, as they have, in fact, proclaimed themselves above the law. Among these crimes: disclosure of a covert intelligence agent, waging an illegal war, lying to Congress, violation of the Geneva accords on treatment of prisoners, unlawful incarceration of both citizens and aliens, illegal surveillance of private citizens, bribery, and much more. These crimes are well known. Surely there are many additional crimes that have been successfully hidden by this secretive regime, but would likely be discovered and prosecuted should an opposition party take control of the government.

In addition, there are ill-gotten fortunes, and political and economic advantages at stake. Billions of dollars of public money have been “transferred” into the private hands of Bush and GOP supporters – much of that cash unaccounted for. Deregulation and tax policies have lavishly benefited the most wealthy among us, while the incomes and personal wealth of the poor and middle class have stagnated or even declined. Were the GOP to be driven from office and economic justice restored, all these gains and advantages might come to an end.

Thus the Busheviks simply can not afford to relinquish power. Not the White House in 2008, and not either house of Congress in November, for that would allow the opposition party to conduct Congressional investigations of the behavior of the Bush regime. This the GOP will not allow, and they are in a position to prevent it, whatever the cost and whatever the methods required, including election fraud, regardless of the wishes and the actual votes of the American people. There is abundant and compelling evidence that they have committed election fraud in the previous three national elections, notwithstanding the dogged refusal of the mainstream media to report this evidence or of the Democratic party to recognize the fraud and to initiate criminal and civil action against these crimes....

Getting Worried About Al Gore, Andy Ostroy
He's everywhere you turn these days. Saturday Night Live, Letterman, Larry King, The View to name a few. What's next, Desperate Housewives? His movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," as well as the book of the same name, have been out for weeks and The Goracle's been in heavy-duty promo mode. The problem is, with the exception of the hilarious SNL bit, Al seems more like his old stiff self than the passionate Democrat firebrand we've seen on the lecture circuit these past couple of years. Perhaps it's true that Al indeed suffers from TV camera-itis. Seems like whenever he's in front of that magic lens his body stiffens, his speech slows, and there's sighing. Oh God, lots and lots of sighing. His performances at times have made me wince....

Unfit to Lead the World,Walter C. Uhler
Appropriately, much has been made of the recent survey conducted by Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress, which found that 84 percent (of the more than 100) of America's top foreign policy experts believed that the United States is not winning the war on terror. Not only do they dispute President Bush's insular and politically self-serving assertion that America is winning that war, they also "see a national security apparatus in disrepair and a government that is failing to protect the public from the next attack." [See "The Terrorism Index," July/August 2006] "Disrepair" is an understatement. Not only has former domestic policy advisor, John Dilulio, decried the "complete lack of a policy apparatus" within the Bush administration, where "policy analysis is just backfill, to back up a political maneuver," Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, also has complained about policy formulation and implementation by a "cabal."....

Shadows On The Wall, S. Samples
Once again we are eager to accept appearance for reality. The Supreme Court ruling last week rejecting George Bush's military commissions to try Guantanamo detainees casts a huge shadow on the wall. Many are saying it not only curbed Bush and Cheney's unlimited presidential power grab, but absolved us of the responsibility of having to do anything about it.Such giddiness -- wishful thinking -- can almost be excused when you consider this is the first time in more than five years Bush has been confronted with a single check or balance. Almost excused....

Home free: American power in Mahmudiyah, Chris Floyd
Did you see her and want her so bad, that young, forbidden fruit? Did she once smile nervously at the checkpoint, and you thought it was just for you? Did you come on strong the next time around, flash a little money maybe, or lay a syrupy line on her that you got from a phrasebook? What did she do--recoil? Look away? Look disgusted? Look blank? What did she do to bring on the big hurt from a big, tough man like you? So you planned it all out....

Why I Support the "War on Terror", Mickey Z.
Yes, I support the "War on Terror." No, I'm not declaring public allegiance to the current jihad against a tactic (which is in actuality a war against terrorist attacks not perpetrated by the United States or its allies/client states)...I'm thinking of another meaning entirely for our new favorite word: "terror." As defined at Dictionary.com, "an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety" and/or an "intense, overpowering fear" characterize the brand of terror I speak of. Don Lutz, author of "The First Ism," has written that such "terror" is "what one feels when being kidnapped or raped." Lutz goes on to list other terrifying examples:

"Terror is what poor people worldwide feel when approached by uniformed, armed men; what animals feel in research laboratories; what people feel when their families are faced with starvation; what a child feels when an adult starts to hit; what millions of families feel when they hear planes overhead; what fish feel when hooked in the mouth; what people fell under threat of having loved ones tortured or killed; what forest dwellers feel when the loggers come in to clear-cut; what people feel when they are threatened with invasion; and what animals feel at slaughterhouses."

You want to wage war against terror, why not find a worthy adversary? No need for shady FBI stings, unconstitutional wire tapping, or panic-inducing color-coded warnings that conveniently pop up at the most politically expedient intervals; the variety of terror described by Lutz above is genuine and it's endemic. Perhaps a big step toward ending the use of terror as a tactic would be to alleviate the feeling of terror triggered across the globe by the home of the brave....

Israel: Ravening Wolves in Sheep's Clothing, Jason Miller
In Gaza, the elephant has finally removed its foot from the mouse’s tail. Much to the dismay of the mouse, the behemoth is not done with him. Not this elephant. He has decided to bring his immense weight to bear on the mouse’s miniscule body, sadistically reveling at the sight of the blood oozing from the mouse’s bodily orifices as it is gradually reduces it to a mass of flattened pulp. I abandoned my neutrality long ago. My thoughts, prayers, support, and activist efforts as an essayist, small Internet publisher, and dissident against the American Empire are with the Palestinians. I am deeply sickened by fact that the United States government finances Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians with my tax dollars. It enrages me that AIPAC and bellicose supporters of Israel dictate so much of our foreign policy.....

Politics-US: Signing Away the Constitution?, William Fisher
Last March, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring Justice Department officials to give them reports by certain dates on how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers. But when President George W. Bush signed the measure into law, he added a "signing statement". The statement said the president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations....These are but two examples of more than 100 signing statements containing over 500 constitutional challenges President Bush has added to new laws passed by the Congress -- many times more than any of his predecessors. While he has never vetoed a law, many constitutional scholars say the president is, in effect, exercising a "line item veto" by giving himself authority to waive parts of laws he doesn't like....

Green Party Leader Leaves German Politics to Teach in U.S., Doug Ireland
Joschka Fischer, the German Green Party leader who, as his country's foreign minister, opposed the invasion of Iraq, is leaving politics and coming to the U.S. to take up posts at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and at the Council on Foreign Relations, Deutsche Welle reports today. The German public radio and television news service notes that Fischer was "the most popular German politician for a long time," and led the Greens into a coalition government with the Social Democrats and their highest electoral score ever....Fischer was famous for being unafraid to confront powerful U.S. leaders. For example, when asked his name by President Bush, he replied, “My name is Mr. Fischer. What’s your name?” (October 22nd, 2005). And to Donald Rumsfeld (at the 39th Security Conference in Munich), after a Rumsfeld peroration in favor of the Iraq war, Fischer looked him in the eye and told him, "Excuse me, I am not convinced."...

Five Intercepted NSA Communiques Revealed (Fiction), Bernard Weiner
The following memos, emails and phone calls, which allegedly were intercepted by the NSA, have come into our possession. I can't vouch for the absolute authenticity of these communiqués, but they seem to pass the smell test. See what you think. PHONE CALL FROM ROVE (In this one, Karl Rove appears to be talking with David S. Addington, a key legal architect of the Bush Administration's war/torture policies, now Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Here are excerpts from the phone conversation, as transcribed by the NSA.)...

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Tuesday, July 4

Parody: You're A Grand Old Flag ,
George M. Cohan, with Jerry Politex

You're a grand old flag,
You're a high flying flag
But you're never made of asbestos.
You're the emblem of
The votes they love
Politicians have made you a mess.
All their hearts beat true
For a spare vote or two,
So they'll always lie and brag.
Never hypocrisy be forgot,
Keep their hands off the grand old flag.

Quote: The Real Meaning Of July 4th, Derek Maul, CSM
"This is our government; this country belongs to all of us." Indeed, how can freedom crumble when both the idea of liberty and the responsibility for its stewardship reside in the people? How can such a dream be eroded when authority is vested not in a favored few but with the average Joe? The extraordinary influence of American citizens is guaranteed in the very Constitution that breathed life into this nascent republic when it was struggling to find its feet.

However, every time government acts to increase the distance between real power and the people our government is commissioned to serve, we move a little further away from the meaning of July 4.That's why it concerned me so much last [year] when the Supreme Court aligned itself with government and corporate interests at the expense of the rights of individual property owners. It is not the first such move however; I smell the makings of a trend. When the government makes arrests on the basis of secret evidence; when taxing agencies overreach boundaries and abuse their power; when evidence increasingly suggests that, while we trusted them, leaders knowingly deceived us; when members of Congress award themselves privileges and benefits not available to those they purportedly serve; when the lifestyles of our representatives in Washington more closely resemble those of rock stars or European royalty than public servants.

People tend to withdraw when they feel powerless and "out of the loop;" people tend to stay away from the ballot box when they no longer feel any relationship to those who govern; people tend to live outside the political process when they stop believing it pertains to them.Don't get me wrong; I'm not worried that we're going to have another revolution in America. Instead, I'm worried that people aren't going to care any longer; I'm concerned that they won't believe any more.

Opinion: Letter From Oklahoma: July 4th, 2005 And I Can't Celebrate, K.J. Lovell
The current wave of change should send a wave of shock through any normal thinking person in America. The changes are daily and growing in gravity. We the people have voluntarily given up our civil and constitutional rights, whether through apathy or simply being too busy to pay attention to current events. We continue to do it daily with no regard to the big picture. Here are ten examples of where we could be heading:

Verse: I Am A Patriot, Steve Van Zandt
I am a patriot, and I love my country, Because my country is all I know.
Wanna be with my family, People who understand me. I got no place else to go.
And I ain ' t no communist, And I ain ' t no socialist,
And I ain ' t no capitalist, And I ain ' t no imperialist,
And I ain ' t no Democrat, Sure ain ' t no Republican either,
I only know one party, And that is freedom.

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Monday, July 3

Parody: Ex-Adviser Says Bush Administration Member Wanted To
Bomb New York Times After 9/11 , Bill Brasin

Washington, D.C., July 3, 2006 (NYT). Since his appearance on 50 Minutes last Sunday, Ricardo Clark, former White House counterterrorism adviser, has faced a barrage of attacks from Bush Administration officials over his claims that the White House ignored the threat posed by al-Qaeda before Sept. 11 because of its obsession with the New York Times. Dick Cheney told Rash Limbaugh that Clark “wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff”; Condoleezza Rice said Monday that "Ricardo Clark just does not know what he's talking about"; and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, in that same 50 Minutes broadcast said that the White House has found "no evidence" that conversations Clark claims to have had with President Bush even occurred. Clark has responded to his critics with a dollop of wistful regret, followed by an adamant refusal to back down. "It pains me to have Condoleezza Rice and the others mad at me," he told Mornin' 'Merica. "But I think the American people needed to know the facts, and they weren't out. And now they are."

Perhaps Clark's most explosive charge is that on Sept. 12, President Bush instructed him to look into the possibility that the New York Times had a hand in the hijackings. Here's how Clark recounted the meeting on 50 Minutes: "The President dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, 'I want you to find whether the New York Times did this'.....the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, 'The New York Times did this.'" After Clark protested that "there's no connection," Bush came back to him and said "The New York Times, bin Laden — find out if there's a connection." Clark says Bush made the point "in a very intimidating way." The next day, interviewed on BPS' The NewsWhore, Clark sexed up the story even more. "What happened was the President, with his finger in my face, saying, 'The New York Times, a memo on the New York Times and al-Qaeda, a memo on the New York Times and the attacks.' Very vigorous, very intimidating." Several interviewers pushed Clark on this point, asking whether it was all that surprising that the President would want him to investigate all possible perpetrators of the attacks. Clark responded, "It would have been irresponsible for the president not to come to me and say, Ricky, I don't want you to assume it was al-Qaeda. I'd like you to look at every possibility to see if maybe it was al-Qaeda with somebody else, in a very calm way, with all possibilities open. That's not what happened."

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After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clark, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clark writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to the New York Times.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb the New York times," Clark said to 50 Minutes. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets at the New York Times. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but the New York Times had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clark says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clark then tells 50 Minutes of being pressured by Mr. Bush:

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether the New York Times did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said the New York Times did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "The New York Times! bin Laden! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clark continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

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A Google search of "New York Times treason" will elicit around 7 million hits, according to one reporter. Among those, one would probably find the invective delivered by New York GOP Congressman Peter King on Fox News: “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous.” He said he would urge Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to “begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times—the reporters, the editors and the publisher.” King added, “Nobody elected the New York Times to do anything. And the New York Times is putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people,” reports WSWS.

In a joint statement,Dean Baquet, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and Bill Keller, executive editor, The New York Times, concluded a lengthy defense of their right to exist and do what they do: "We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government."

--Bill Brasin was our campaign editor during the Gore-Bush presidential election, and reports in on various topics from time to time. Previous stories are archived here and here. Watch the cobwebs.

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Sunday, July 2

Globalization: The Religion of Moneyism vs. The Fundamentalism of Islam (excerpts) ,
David R. Loy

...Religions unite civilizations by providing people with a common identity, which they are often willing to die and kill for. Religions are also the source and repository for our most cherished values; except perhaps in the modern West, where traditional religion has been losing a war of attrition with this-worldly values such as Enlightenment rationalism, secular nationalism, "moneytheism" and consumerism. For Huntington the social scientist and foreign policy mandarin, what is most important about religions is that the identity they provide is irreconcilable with other religious identities. A Jew is a Jew, a Muslim is a Muslim, and ne'er the twain shall meet. That is why religious differences are at the heart of the civilizational clash.

Again, things look rather different from a perspective more sensitive to religious values than to "realist" foreign policy (i.e., nationalist) values. The struggle over globalization is, at its heart, not just a clash of identities but a clash of values: the values which people of different cultures want to live by. In order to understand the contemporary conflicts that religions are involved in, we must also realize that the secular culture of the modern West does not really offer an alternative to religious values; rather, it offers this-worldly versions of them. Religion is notoriously difficult to define, but if we understand it functionally; as teaching us what is really important about the world, and therefore how to live in it; modern identities such as secular nationalism and modern values such as consumerism are not so much alternatives to religion as secular religions. They offer this-worldly solutions to the problem of ultimate meaning in life: for example, patriotic identification with one's nation (a poor impersonal substitute for genuine community) or the promise of a more sensuous salvation in consumerism (the next thing you buy will make you happy!).

The Cold War victory of the West means that capitalism now reigns unchallenged and so has been able to remove its velvet gloves. Because capitalism evolved within a Christian culture, they have been able to make peace with each other, more or less, in the contemporary West. Christ's kingdom is not of this world, we should render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and as long as we go to church on Sunday we can devote the rest of the week to this-worldly pursuits. From some other more traditional religious perspectives, however, the values of globalizing capitalism are more problematical....

...Tensions do not arise simply because of a clash of fissured, irreconcilable value systems, in which we need to focus on promoting our own. In the contemporary world all religions are under tremendous pressure to adapt to new circumstances, including new world-views and new values, for globalization means that re-negotiation with modern developments is constant. Fundamentalism -- clinging to old verities and customs -- is a common response, but the fact that some fundamentalists are willing to die and kill for their cause does not quite disguise the reality that the fundamentalist reaction to modernity is defensive, cramped and in the long run untenable in a fast-shrinking world where all civilizations are increasingly interconnected.

This does not mean that religious beliefs and values are incompatible with globalization. It means that the struggle between globalization and anti-globalization is in part an on-going negotiation between traditional religious concerns; most importantly, love and responsibility to something greater than our own egos; and the corrosive effects of a secular modernity that, when unchecked, tends to become nihilistic. For either side to "win" this struggle would be disastrous. Traditional religions need the challenge of modernity to wake them from their dogmas and institutional sclerosis. On the other side, the unrestrained dominance of corporate capitalism and its commodifying values would be catastrophic not only for human communities but for the entire biosphere.

The real test-case for their negotiation is Islam. Huntington discusses many clashes between civilizations, and most of them involve Islam. "Islam has bloody borders" (5). Without Islam, it would be difficult for him to make his case; thanks to Islam, it is easy, since the Islamic world seems to have trouble getting along with any other world.

Or so it seems from a Western perspective. That perspective, however, is hardly a neutral one. For most of their histories, the Christian West and the Islamic world have been each other's chief rivals. At first Islam had the edge, culturally as well as militarily. Medieval Christian theology and philosophy were revived by the rediscovery of classical Greek texts preserved by Islamic scholars; European science developed on an Arabic foundation. That is part of Islam's burden today: in contrast to early Christianity, which had to endure centuries of Roman persecution, Islam was immediately triumphant, establishing a mythic legacy that makes eclipse (including colonial and now economic subordination) by the modern West all the more difficult to bear.

There are other ways in which Islam stands out from other missionary religions such as Christianity and Buddhism. Unlike Jesus and Shakyamuni Buddha, Mohammed was not only a spiritual teacher but a political and military leader, in ways which were often quite progressive for his time, but some of which have become problematical as the world has changed. Because neither Jesus nor Shakyamuni provided a detailed political or economic program, it has been easier to adapt their teachings to radically different cultural conditions, including secular modernity. Today a Christian can pray in church on Sunday and more or less serve Mammon the rest of the week. A Muslim prays five times a day and follows more than a few customs from seventh-century Arabia, including studying and memorizing the Koran in Arabic.

Partly as a result of these differences, Islam has remained more traditionalist than either Christianity or Buddhism. No religion is monolithic, and all major religions have deep fissures of their own, including an unavoidable one between literal interpretations of scriptures and more adaptable metaphorical readings. There have been rationalist movements in Islam such as the Mutazilists in the ninth century, and more recently many other attempts at modernist reform, but they have generally been less successful than similar movements in Christianity and Buddhism. As a result, the contemporary image of Islam among most non-Muslims is of an extremely conservative, ritualistic and literalistic faith. Among the major religions, Islam is having the most difficulty adjusting to the modern distinction between an enervated sacred sphere and a more dynamic secular sphere. There are also political problems due to the legacy of Western colonialism (including the imposition of a nation-state structure that evolved in Europe and has not often grafted well onto non-Western cultures) and economic problems due to the neo-colonialism of Western-led globalization.

Yet there is another way to look at Muslim difficulties today. Of the world's missionary religions, Islam is the one most deeply concerned with social justice; and social justice is an increasingly important issue in the struggles over what kind of globalization we shall have. That is the other side of Muhammad's legacy as a political leader as well as a spiritual one. This theme is missing in Huntington, but we cannot understand Islamic values and present concerns without it. That is why it is not sufficient to emphasize the fissure between Islam and the West, a clash between their values and ours. A demand for social justice has become essential in a world where, according to the United Nations Development Report for 1999, almost a billion people in 70 countries consume less today than they did 25 years ago; where the richest twenty percent of the world's population now account for 86% of private consumption, the poorest twenty percent only 1.3% (a gap that globalization so far is aggravating); where, as a result, a quarter million children die of malnutrition or infection every week, while hundreds of millions more survive in hunger and deteriorating health.

Allah is a merciful God but He is also a God of justice and will judge us harshly if we do not accept personal and collective responsibility for the less fortunate. The third pillar of Islam is zakat, alms. Zakat is not so much charity as an essential expression of the compassion that all Muslims are called upon to show to those who need it. Muslims believe that everything really belongs to God, and material things should be used as God wishes them to be used. This means not hoarding but sharing with others who need them. That is why the capitalist idea of using capital to gain ever more capital; you can never have too much! ; is foreign, even reprehensible, to many devout Muslims.

By adapting so well to the modern world of secular nationalism, capitalism and consumerism, most Christians in the West have learned to finesse such concerns. The Bible tells us that the poor will always be among us, and in any case we must accept what the "social science" of economics tells us are laws of supply and demand, the importance of free trade, etc. Admittedly, the main effect of transnational capitalism so far has been to make the rich richer, but we must have faith that a rising tide of worldwide wealth will eventually lift all boats.

Islam is less willing to accept such equivocations, because it recognizes no God above Allah. The need to "have faith" that corporate globalization will eventually work to benefit almost everyone points to what is increasingly apparent: as Western culture has lost faith in any afterlife salvation, the West's economic system has also become its religion, because it now has to fulfil a religious function for us. Economics today is less a social science than the theology of that moneytheistic religion, and its god, the Market, has been able to become a vicious circle of ever-increasing production and consumption by pretending to provide us with a this-worldly salvation. Western-led globalization means that the Market is becoming the first truly world religion, rapidly converting all corners of the globe to a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as secular.

Few people yet understand pro- versus anti-globalization struggles in such spiritual terms, but many instinctively feel what is at stake....the West is imposing new "religious" values on other civilizations in the economic guise of "free trade....

David R. Loy, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University, Japan

Sunday Funnies, Mr. Fish, Tomorrow, etc.

Washington's new favorite dance move (By Mark Fiore)
You Gotta Love That Conservative Humor! (By Tom Tomorrow)
What If They Stole an Election and No One Cared? (By Ward Sutton)
Dems' 2008 Campaign Strategy (By Mr. Fish)

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Friday, June 30

A New Vision: The West Against The Rest? (excerpts) , David R. Loy

When he wrote "The Clash of Civilizations," Samuel P. Huntington was the Eaton Professor of Government and Director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. His now-famous essay was originally written for an Olin Institute project on "The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests," published in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then expanded into a book.* As this genesis suggests, what it offers us is not some impartial overview of global civilization but the post-war world as perceived by the U.S. foreign-policy elite &endash; the "best and brightest" that previously gave us the Vietnam War and the "domino theory" that also rationalized U.S. support for Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Marcos, Suharto, etc. Huntington himself was a consultant for the State Department in 1967, when he wrote a long position paper that supported U.S. goals in Vietnam but criticized the military strategy for attaining them.

I mention this not to make an ad hominem attack on Huntington's ideas but to clarify the purpose for his essay: determining the new security needs of the United States in the post-Cold War world. This becomes apparent in its second half, which is more obviously concerned about defending "the values and interests of the West" against those of other civilizations. This subtext is not always explicit but it determines what Huntington sees, and what he is unable to see.

What he sees is a new global paradigm that brings the new global mess into focus. The era of struggle between nation-states and rival ideologies is over. Democratic societies, in particular, do not go to war against each other. The new conflicts are between civilizations, which have different languages, histories, institutions, and &endash; most importantly &endash; different religions. Huntington lists seven or eight civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin-American, "and possibly African" (3). The differences between them are more fundamental than the old differences between political regimes or ideologies. Huntington claims that increasing interaction among people of different civilizations is enhancing the historical "civilization-consciousness" of peoples in ways that "invigorate differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history".

This challenges the usual and more irenic perception that increasing contact tends to decrease tensions. Today, more than ever, people from different parts of the world not only buy each other's commodities and consume each other's products but enjoy each other's music, films and TV shows, fashions and food; when they have the opportunity, many are eager to travel to far-away countries, to meet other people, and sometimes even to intermarry. Is this increasing contact and awareness also increasing inter-civilizational intolerance and strife, or decreasing it? Or does that question miss the point because the effects of all this interaction are too complicated to generalize about in either simpleminded way?

Civilizations, Huntington tells us, are the broadest level of cultural identity that people have, "short of that which distinguishes humans from other species". Why such cultural differences should be emphasized more than our similarities as fellow humans is not immediately obvious, except perhaps for the unfortunate but common tendency to identify ourselves by distinguishing our own interests from those of some other "out group." This is no minor point, if the subtext of Huntington's argument &endash; U.S. national security &endash; itself exemplifies such an "in group" defending its own interests at the cost of other groups. U.S. relations with Latin America is an obvious example: history suggests that the Monroe Doctrine (1823) was promulgated not so much to protect Central and South American countries from European interference as to monopolize U.S. interference....

We have supported constitutionalism, human rights, liberty, the rule of law and democracy in other countries when those values have produced leaders amenable to our own national interests. Those same values evidently resonate less loudly for us when they produce leaders who have different ideas. In 1954, for example, the U.S. sponsored a coup against the democratically elected government of Guatemala, which over the following years led to the deaths of over 100,000 peasants. In 1965 the U.S. overthrew the government of the Dominican Republic and helped to kill some 3000 people in the process. In 1973, the U.S. sponsored a coup against the democratic government of Chile that murdered or "disappeared" several thousand people. In the 1980s the U.S. sponsored a terrorist contra war against the government of Nicaragua, which led to the deaths of over 30,000 innocent people and to a World Court declaration that the U.S. government was a war criminal for mining Nicaragua's harbors. Another U.S.-supported war in the 1980s against El Salvador resulted in the deaths of 80,000 more innocent people. Lots of "collateral damage."

All those recent examples are from Latin America alone. Also in 1965, the U.S. sponsored or assisted a military coup in Indonesia that led to the deaths of well over half a million people. When President Bush declares that Iran is part of a new "axis of evil," we should remember why many Iranians return the compliment, viewing the U.S. government as "the Great Satan." Why? When Western oil interests were threatened, the CIA helped to sponsor a brutal coup that installed the widely detested Shah of Iran, whose notorious Savak secret service then proceeded to torture and kill over 70,000 Iranians between 1952 and 1979.

There are many more examples, unfortunately, but the point is made. Clearly, the problem here is something more than not living up to our own ideals. Nor do we just keep making mistakes, such as innocently backing the wrong sort of people. Once can be a mistake, twice may be stupidity, but this pattern of repeated violations of our own self-declared values amounts to something more sinister. "By their fruits shall you know them," as someone once put it. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that our so-called values are not really our values, at least not when it comes to international relations. The basic problem is not a clash between our values and theirs, but between our (declared) values and our (short-term) interests....[tbc]

David R. Loy, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University, Japan

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