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09/29/2007
The pot calls the kettle black, or, Phony outrage from phony patriots
Speech is free, civility is optional,
I chose not to post this after I first watched it, it's disgusting and perverse. BUT, in light of the Pretraeus/Betray Us controversy between the Reich wing and Moveon.org, I feel it's appropriate to show what THEY won't denounce or condemn. The video is of low quality but, then again, so is Ted Nugent.
P.S. From blatherWatch: Thursday Oddems: bad week for aural sex, cabañas in Aruba, succor for suckees, and don't drive like my brother...:
:"... when it was time to register for the draft during the Vietnam era....By his own admission, Nugent stopped all forms of personal hygiene for a month and showed up for his draft board physical in pants caked with his own urine and feces, winning a deferment." Sean Hannity refused to denounce Nugent's behavior, saying, "I like Ted Nugent . . . he's a friend of mine." Hannity , if you remember, called for the beheading of the Dixie Chicks after their apostasy.
And, from the comments to the above listed blog link:
Nugent--crazy.
Nugent--a Draft Dodger--divorced his wife, used his rock star money to gain sole custody of the kids, lived with a teen groupie who raised the kids (he was too busy touring), cheated on his second wife, Shemane, and had a kid outside of wedlock with Karen Gutowski of New Hampshire, with whom he fought against paying child support for years.
P.P.S. I didn't research any of those charges but I've seen the top one in several publications. The second one rings true for an overgrown, underdeveloped egomaniac with an infantile fascination with weapons and who also sits on the board of the NRA.
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09/28/2007
This is devastating
Don't ever say that it can't get worse,
Juan Cole has been unflinchingly reporting on the Iraq war since it began. His anti-war, anti-bush blog: Informed Comment didn't start out that way. He originally supported an intervention to remove Saddam but was suspicious of the administration's rationales for war. He is a well respected, although, controversial academic and speaks Arabic (Modern Standard as well as Lebanese and Egyptian dialects), Persian, and Urdu, and is familiar with Turkish.
He has translated the transcript, published by El Pais of Bush's conversations of Bush's conversation with Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar on 22 February, 2003, at Crawford, Texas. His may be the first transcript available online.
While Ari Flesischer was staging a charade press conference about Bush's meeting with Anzar, allegedly to discuss the Columbian terrorist organization, FARC, the press conference quickly turned to the question of the upcoming U.N. resolution on the use of force against Iraq. Here, Fleischer and the press play a little game of footsie, indicating the seriousness with which the whole question of war was considered, http://usinfo.state.gov/articles/washfile-english/2003/02/20030222213319DDenny @ pd.state.gov0.704632.body.html:
Q: Can you give us some color from the Aznar meeting? Did he get a tour of the ranch? What did they have for lunch?
MR. FLEISCHER: They did have a tour this morning, the President driving his pickup truck. And similarly, on the way to the news conference, the President drove his pickup truck. It's one of the few times he gets to drive; he relishes it. He wishes the drive could be as long as the news conference. And he drove back. Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Aznar were seated in the back seat of the pickup truck. And in the bed of the pickup truck was Blake Gottesman and Eric Draper.
Cole asserts, according to his translation of the afore mentioned document, that Bush had already assured Aznar that an invasion of Iraq was going forward with or without a final U.N. Resolution. At that point, Colin Powell had already made his flawed case to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003 and after failing to gain U.N. support, the U.S., together with the UK and small contingents from Australia, Poland, Denmark, launched the invasion on March 20, 2003.
Juan Cole makes these assertions:
The first is that the transcript shows that Bush intended to disregard a negative outcome in his quest for a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a war against Iraq. Bush wanted such a resolution. He expressed a willingness to use threats and economic coercion to secure it. But he makes it perfectly clear that he will not wait for the UNSC to act beyond mid-March. He also explicitly says that if any of the permanent members of the UNSC uses its veto, "we will go." That is, failure to secure the resolution would trigger the war.
Uh, that is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. If you can't get a UNSC resolution, and you haven't been attacked by the state against whom you want to go to war, then you are supposed to stand down.
Both because he set a deadline beyond which his "patience" would not stretch (the poor thing had already waited four months; I mean, is he a toddler that he lacks elementary patience?), and because he specified a UNSC veto as a signal for his launching of the war, Bush made it very clear that he was willing to trash the charter of the United Nations and to take the world back to the 1930s,to an era of mass politics when powerful states launched wars of choice at will on the basis of fevered rhetoric and fits of pique.
The second claim that I made was that Bush was aware of, and rejected, an offer by Saddam Hussein to flee Iraq, probably for Saudi Arabia, presuming he could take out with him a billion dollars and some documents on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. Both provisions were intended by Saddam to protect him from later retaliation. The money would buy him protection from extradition, and the documents presumably showed that the Reagan and Bush senior administrations had secretly authorized his chemical and biological weapons programs. With these documents in his possession, it was unlikely that Bush would come after him, since he could ruin the reputation of the Bush family if he did. The destruction of these documents was presumably Bush's goal when he had Rumsfeld order US military personnel not to interfere with the looting and burning of government offices after the fall of Saddam. The looting, which set off the guerrilla war, also functioned as a vast shredding party, destroying incriminating evidence about the complicity of the Bushes and Rumsfeld in Iraq's war crimes.
Bush rejected an offer by Saddam to flee Iraq! We could have totally avoided war but then according to the terms of the deal, Saddam would have retained documents incriminating the Bush family. And, behind the looting that took place after toppling Saddam was an intentional desire to destroy those same documents. WOW!
I'm dumbstruck. We've destroyed at least one country, endangered the entire middle east and possibly the world, broken the back of our own constitution, cluster bombed innocents, tortured, raped, machine gunned and dislocated millions so Bush could come out the other side with his reputation? God have mercy on our souls. Gene
P.S. Juan Cole's above quoted comments and the entire translation of the Bush/Aznar meeting, which, by the way, was attended by Condoleezza Rice, is available at his web site: Informed Comment.
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09/27/2007
Twisted Sister
Hahahahahha...I'd like to...hahaha... write this blog...hahahaah....honest...but I can't stop laughing...hahahahahaa,
That's my take on the latest weirdness from the front running democratic nomination candidate, Hillary Clinton. She's finding tons of humor everywhere these days, inappropriately and annoyingly. The last time I witnessed behavior like this, I was very high and so was everyone in the room. Last night, at the debate, it was not only her expression of ironic disgust with certain questions, it became an uncomfortably obvious defense/issue avoidance mechanism.
Mike Gravel, who doesn't stand a snowball's chance at getting the nomination, but, none the less, has been bringing up vital issues all along, convicted her last night. From TheHill.com - In the spotlight, Clinton withstands heat:
Gravel, who was standing to Clinton’s immediate left had an almost Rick Lazio moment when he turned to Clinton and pointed at her, raising his voice and telling her he was “ashamed” of her for her vote in favor of Thursday’s Senate resolution asking President Bush to designate Iran’s Islamic Republican Guard a terrorist organization. Sens. Chris Dodd (Conn.) and Joseph Biden (Del.) voted against the measure, and Obama was absent, which Gravel also noted.
Her reaction? She howled, she laughed and laughed. She f-u-c-k-i-n-g laughed. It's too creepy for me. She's too creepy for me. The political scene, the world and maybe the universe is her inside joke. Rather than defending her vote, the same kind of vote that paved the way for our Iraq blunder, she is laughing, at you and me, at anyone that doesn't see the brilliance behind everything she says and does.
The media is portraying her as dominating the debate and in a sense she did, but only because Tim Russert spend an inordinate amount of time querying her. Christopher Dodd's campaign will break down the time allotments per candidate, and it won't be much of a surprise who captured the lion's share.
Love her or hate her, she's here for the long haul and is, more or less, the democratic status quo candidate. She's ingrained and, she thinks, ordained. Gene
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09/26/2007
Obligatory picture blog
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09/25/2007
The spirit is willing but the body is stupid
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Our fearless leaders
Ahmadinejad takes a bite of the big apple while the serpent revels in wicked delight,
If you read yesterday's blog, you may have deduced that we were in New York City over the weekend. Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was there too but we didn't run into each other. I think he had more pressing business.
He was invited to speak at New York's Columbia University by Columbia President Lee Bollinger who introduced Mr Ahmadinejad as a "a petty and cruel dictator." Petty? Cruel? Aren't these the traits that we ourselves have refined through issue avoidance, obfuscation and the misdirection of the public's attention? Isn't misrepresentation and out-and-out lying on par with being petty and cruel?
Columbia's stance is only a tattered reminder that we have lost our tenuous grasp on any claims to moral authority that we may have previously held in our once imagined world of lessor nations.
While Bush declares that Moveon.org has attacked the military through it's "betray us" ad, Ahmadinejad questions the Holocaust. *While the US illegibly transports nuclear arms in the air space over our heads, Iran has, to a degree, **allowed the IAEA to inspect their nuclear facilities.
Ahmadinejad plays to his base and Bush to his, he hates Jews in the same sense that Bush hates terrorists, i.e., without them, both of their politically expedient super villains disappear. Bush thumps his chest and Ahmadinejad thumps back, It's good theater and an even better way to pad your military budget. The stakes are high and the gamblers well heeled, you and I may lose but that's a small price to pay for our participation in this winner-take-all game of no compromise, no quarter, isn't it? Gene
*B-52 bomber mistakenly loaded with six nuclear warheads flew from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30, resulting in an Air Force-wide investigation, according to three officers who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.
The B-52 was loaded with Advanced Cruise Missiles, part of a Defense Department effort to decommission 400 of the ACMs. But the nuclear warheads should have been removed at Minot before being transported to Barksdale, the officers said. The missiles were mounted onto the pylons of the bomber’s wings.
**The IAEA has access to Iranian nuclear facilities under a safeguards agreement, and in February 2007 it verified that Iran had not diverted to illegal use any material it had declared. However, Iran has not implemented a more intrusive Additional Protocol it signed in 2003, so the IAEA says it cannot verify the absence of undeclared nuclear material.
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Staring back in amusement and disgust
Where once these totems were sacred, revered and worshiped, today they fill the display cases of even bigger display cases waiting to stare back at us. They neither understand nor comprehend our lives. We are measley and weak, they leave our kind to their women and children to butcher.
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09/21/2007
Giant pink bunny
On September 19, 2005, Gelitin, a group of artists from Vienna, erected a pink bunny measuring 200 feet in length (about 60 metres) on the side of a northern Italian mountain.
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Disaster Capitalism
Shock and awe doctrine,
While tooling around the Internet this evening, I remembered that Naomi Klein had a new book out. I had heard her earlier this afternoon discussing it and other issues on The Thom Hartmann Radio Show. Once, on her book's page at Amazon, I found this companion, promotional video. I traced it back to YouTube:
I have tremendous respect for Naomi Klein, she spent a month in Baghdad in April-May, 2004. In response to her experiences there she wrote, Baghdad Year Zero, for Harper's Magazine, exposing the neocon's plan for a free market paradise that was meant to be created in Iraq. Baghdad Year Zero:
Seeing the sign (SUNBULAH: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia) I couldn't help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies.” The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Her newest book, The Shock Doctrine, takes "disaster capitalism" to task, from Amazon's book description:
The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.
At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
Sounds like a good read. Gene
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09/19/2007
Old Blackwater keep on rolling
I heard the greatest comment this morning from Clarence on the Lynn Cullen radio talk show. A previous caller had expressed his trepidation over the (possibly) returning Blackwater mercenaries, making the point that they would probably be absorbed into local police forces around the country and, since they are trained killers who haven't been answerable to anyone, that maybe it wouldn't be the best thing for our vanishing civil liberties.
Clarence called and said that we should keep them fighting over there so we don't have to fight them over here. Funny, huh?
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