USA becoming the slave

USA is becoming a slave, to our rich elite, to oil and by debt to China. Remember, the rich rule over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave.

republican Giuliani, a liar? not a surprise

Mr. Romney accused Mr. Giuliani of having “a real problem with facts,” and aides circulated a statement calling Mr. Giuliani’s crime statistics “about as accurate as his prostate cancer survival numbers for England.”

“He has now done this time and again, making up facts that just happen to be wrong, and facts are stubborn things,” Mr. Romney said.

Translated, this means Giuliani is a liar.

transferring wealth to republicans

At the beginning of 2003, one euro bought one U.S. dollar. Eighteen months ago, it bought $1.20. Now it is pushing $1.50, and there is no reason to think that it will stop there. Three of the world's biggest oil exporters, Iran, Venezuela and Russia, are demanding payment in euros rather than U.S. dollars. Last week a Chinese central bank vice-director, Xu Jian, gave voice to the suspicion of many others, saying that the U.S. dollar was "losing its status as the world currency."

The main reason for the collapse of the U.S. dollar is President George W. Bush's attempt to fight expensive foreign wars while cutting taxes at home, largely for the rich. As the U.S. dollar fell in value, the price of oil (which is usually calculated in dollars) rose to compensate for it. So, you and I are paying for this wealth transfer to these rich republicans.

republicans attempt to spy on our reading habits

U.S. prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show, after a judge ruled against it.

The subpoena was troubling because it permited the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission.

It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else.

Army recruiting criminals and drugees

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon announced the "good news" that the army had met its recruiting goal for October, the first month in a five-year plan to add 65,000 new soldiers to the ranks by 2012.

But Pentagon statistics show the army met that goal by accepting a higher percentage of enlistees with criminal records, drug or alcohol problems, or health conditions that would have ordinarily disqualified them from service.

In each fiscal year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, statistics show, the army has accepted a growing percentage of recruits who do not meet its own minimum fitness standards.

The October statistics show that at least 1 of every 5 recruits required a waiver to join the service, leading military analysts to conclude that the army is lowering standards more than it has in decades.

republican oil profiteers

Bush just pulled the knee strings on his puppet in Iraq, and Nouri al-Maliki did the jig. The prime minister signed on to a deal laying the groundwork for the long-term presence of U.S. troops there.
Permanent military bases, anyone?

The deal would give “preferential treatment for American investments,” AP reports, adding nonchalantly that this “could provide a huge windfall if Iraq can achieve enough stability to exploit its vast oil resources.” There’s that dirty three-letter word again—oil, which this war was never supposed to be about but always, in part, was.

Oil and profits are two big reasons why republicans Bush and his fellow oil profiteers will keep probably more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Those are not legitimate reasons to ask our soldiers to die for, and almost 4,000 of them have done so already. But at least it’s out in the open now. The crassness, that is.

republicans getting richer on Iraq

KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company, according to a new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

In fact, the total dollar value of contracts that went to KBR—which used to be known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root and until April 2007 was a subsidiary of Halliburton--Cheney's Company—was nearly nine times greater than those awarded to DynCorp International, a private security firm that is No. 2 on the Center's list of the top 100 recipients of Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction funds.

behind the scenes

Read today: The New World Order’s “above the law” criminals — from the Krongards and the entire Blackwater apparatus, to Bush, Cheney, Blair, and the entire membership of the Bilderberg Group — have committed unprecedented atrocities out in the open, and have more than earned the kind of “interrogations” that they and their armed-to-the-teeth functionaries continue to inflict on political adversaries and innocent patsies in CIA prisons all over the world.

foreign Bush buddies lose

Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, one of President Bush’s staunchest allies in Asia, suffered a comprehensive defeat at the hands of the electorate on Saturday. Mr. Howard may suffer the indignity of losing his own seat, representing a district on Sydney’s north shore, which he has held for 33 years,

Mr. Howard’s defeat, after 11 years in power, follows that of José María Aznar of Spain, who also backed the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and political setbacks for Tony Blair, who stepped down as Britain’s prime minister in June.

corporate promise to our children

Corporate profits are up, labor costs continue their downward slide thanks to foreign workers flooding into the country. New opportunities are opening up in the cheap labor markets of China and India.

In an era of dwindling resources we are quietly conquering countries that possess the cheap fuel and raw materials our voracious economic engine demands. Globalization is inevitable, irrefutable, irrepressible: it is like a virulent disease for which there is no cure.

We have removed the few remaining obstacles to unimaginable wealth; gone are the regulations on the products we sell, the restrictions on which lands and workers we may exploit

more Republicans that can't pass the smell test

The industrialist who made a $250,000 personal loan to Giuliani protegee, Kerik, was an Israeli billionaire and philanthropist, Eitan Wertheimer, whose family’s vast holdings include companies with United States Defense Department contracts. Brooklyn businessman Shimon Cohen who has been a friend of Mr. Kerik’s for several years is served as an intermediary in the transaction

The loan to Mr. Kerik came in June 2003 when he was on leave from his job at Giuliani Partners, the consulting firm of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and serving in Iraq as an adviser to the Interior Ministry for the Coalition Provisional Authority. In that post, which he held for three months, Mr. Kerik was assigned to train the Iraqi police.

The money actually came from the wealthy industrialist, from whom Mr. Cohen had borrowed the funds. Prosecutors have not offered any explanation as to what might have brought about the transaction, or why Mr. Wertheimer did not provide the funds directly.

Using an intermediary, the fact that there was no written agreement that outlined the terms of the loan, and the fact that it came from a family with defense contracts doesn't pass the smell test.

Buffet and Gates alone with tax policies benefiting the working people

Real Leaders like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates should be prized, both as executives whose civic values shame their peers, and as advocates for better tax-and-spend policies generally. If society is to get the resources so that healthcare and secure retirement (not to mention child care and job training) are not left to the whims and public relations of corporations, Congress had better follow the lead of Buffett and Gates on tax equity, and restore our ability to finance these benefits as citizens.

more proof of Republican lies

Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary says:

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

the new holocaust is Iraq

Another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.

liberty not from government

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it."

we don't believe our government?

Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.

In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading."

Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence."

A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis. But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials.

In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements. People are still in jail convicted on false Government testimony.

The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis. Documents show that the FBI's concerns about the science dated to 1991. Another reason to not believe our government of lies and deception.

war on terror is a lie? here are the facts

The Bush administration, when it took office, was indifferent to terrorism, brushing aside explicit warnings about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden; we know the president was planning instead, at least six months before 9/11, to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq.

We know of a National Security Council memorandum dated Feb. 3, 2001, concerning the "capture of new and existing oil and gas fields" in Iraq; we have acquired with a lawsuit the maps of Iraqi oil fields Vice President Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was studying a month later.

We have learned how the privatized structure of Iraq's postwar oil industry was designed by the Bush administration a year before the war began; we know the administration was negotiating pipeline rights-of-way with the Taliban, unsuccessfully, until five weeks before 9/11; we know the final threat to them was a "carpet of bombs."

We are aware of President Bush twice refusing offers from the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden, before and after the carpet of bombs was unleashed; we've read of the five "megabases" in Iraq to house 100,000 troops for as long as 50 years.

We've learned the U.S. Embassy compound under construction in Baghdad will be ten times larger than any other in the world; and we know Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, and British Petroleum/Amoco are poised to claim immense profits from 81 percent of Iraq's undeveloped oil fields.

republicans working to kill social security

Despite all the attention paid to demographic challenges, such as the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation, our country’s financial health will in fact be determined primarily by the growth rate of per capita health care costs.”

How has conventional wisdom gotten this so wrong? Well, in large part it’s the result of decades of scare-mongering about Social Security’s future from conservative ideologues, whose ultimate goal is to undermine the program.

Thus, in 2005, the republican Bush administration tried to push through a combination of privatization and benefit cuts that would, over time, have reduced Social Security to nothing but a giant 401(k). The administration claimed that this was necessary to save the program, which officials insisted was “heading toward an iceberg.”

But the administration’s real motives were, in fact, ideological. The anti-tax activist Stephen Moore gave the game away when he described Social Security as “the soft underbelly of the welfare state,” and hailed the Bush plan as a way to put a “spear” through that soft underbelly. They want to kill the guarantee feature of the program and thereby kill the program itself.

Fortunately, the scare tactics failed. Democrats in Congress stood their ground; progressive analysts debunked, one after another, the phony arguments of the privatizers; and the public made it clear that it wants to preserve a basic safety net for retired Americans.

Repblican response to Katrina/Rita

More than two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita battered the Mississippi Gulf Coast, private tests of FEMA travel trailers and mobile homes provided to storm victims indicate that high levels of formaldehyde gas in the units is much more widespread than the government has acknowledged.

The previously undisclosed test results from nearly 600 units, reviewed by msnbc.com, found that 95 percent of the temporary housing units provided by FEMA measured at least twice the CDC’s maximum recommended level for long-term exposure to the toxic gas. In some extreme cases, the levels were 70 times the long-term standard.

Giuliani, a sick joke with a nasty temper

This Kerik thing is a big deal. Rudy Giuliani knew for a very long time about the unsavory characters Mr. Kerik associates with and the fact that he turned a blind eye only proves one thing, that he wasn't thinking about running for President at the time.

Rudy's campaign is based solely on opportunism and it is sad that he is the frontrunner only because he walked around ground zero after 9/11. There are plenty of people who were affected by that day who do not hold the Mayor in high regard. Coupled with the fact that his approval ratings were Bush like on 9/10, it seems so obvious.

Republican honesty?

The disappearance of millions of e-mails sent and received by aides to President Bush from March 2003 to October 2005 have disappeared in violation of the law.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, has said it was told by internal sources that the White House determined that at least 5 million and perhaps many more e-mails from that period were not saved as required by law.

The missing e-mail, along with the disclosure that some White House aides regularly used private Republican National Committee e-mail accounts, suggests that they are hiding wrongdoing.

real costs of war

"The full economic costs of the war to the American taxpayers and the overall U.S. economy go well beyond even the immense federal budget costs already reported," said the 21-page draft report, obtained yesterday by The Washington Post.

The report argues that war funding is diverting billions of dollars away from "productive investment" by American businesses in the United States. It also says that the conflicts are pulling reservists and National Guardsmen away from their jobs, resulting in economic disruptions for U.S. employers that the report estimates at $1 billion to $2 billion.

Added to these amounts are future costs to care for wounded veterans.

like Iraq, no evidence of nukes in Iran

There is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran . The US and its allies pressure Iran to prove that it is not hiding a nuclear weapons program.

This demand is logically impossible to satisfy and serves to make diplomacy fail in order to force regime change. Numerous intrusive and snap visits by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, totalling more than 2,700 person-hours of inspection, have failed to produce a shred of evidence for a weapons program in Iran .

Traces of highly enriched uranium found at Natanz in 2004, were determined by the IAEA to have come with imported centrifuges.

republicans want another war

Five years into the US-UK illegal invasion of Iraq and its consequent catastrophe for Iraqi people, peace loving people throughout the world are appalled by the current Iran-US standoff and its resemblance to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq .

The republican hawks, headed by Dick Cheney in Washington , are now shamelessly calling for a military attack on Iran . The same Israeli lobby which pushed for the invasion of Iraq is now pushing for a military attack on Iran .

The same distortions which were attempted to dupe the western public opinion for the invasion of Iraq , are now used to pave the way for another illegal pre-emptive war of aggression against Iran .

As in the case of Iraq , the UN Security Council Resolutions against Iran , extricated through massive US pressure, are meant to provide a veneer of legitimacy for such an attack.

republican war, what a mess

American military lost track of some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraq’s security forces in 2004 and 2005, as auditors discovered in the past year. Billions of dollars in arms disappeared without significant oversight.

American officers short-circuited the chain of custody by rushing to Baghdad’s airport to claim crates of newly arrived weapons without filing the necessary paperwork. And Iraqis regularly sold or stole the American-supplied weapons, American officers and contractors said.

Iraqi security guards are suspected of stealing hundreds of weapons last year in about 10 major thefts at arms depots at Taji and Abu Ghraib. Already there is evidence that some American-supplied weapons fell into the hands of guerrillas responsible for attacks against Turkey, an important United States ally.

Many of those weapons were issued when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, was responsible for training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. He said that warehouse crews had been infiltrated by Iraqis sympathetic to insurgents, and that sometimes weapons would disappear.

30 percent of the equipment delivered went to Iraqi soldiers who showed up for duty one day, and disappeared the next. the Pentagon turned to contractors to operate warehouses to store equipment and weapons.

The Baghdad Police Academy, which along with a nearby warehouse, was operated by an American-owned Contractor company based in Kuwait.

run up to war on Iran just like that of Iraq

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

There is a split in the intelligence community on how much of a threat the Iranian nuclear programme poses, according to the intelligence official's account. Some analysts who are less independent are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the alarmist view coming from Cheney's office, but others have rejected that view.

The draft NIE first completed a year ago, which had included the dissenting views, was not acceptable to the White House, according to the former intelligence officer. "They refused to come out with a version that had dissenting views in it," he says.

waterboarding is torture

Waterboarding is a long-standing form of torture used by history's most brutal governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. Those who have experienced it say it is torture and makes you say anything to make it stop.

Yet republicans favor keeping it and our new republican attorney general won't say it's torture. Register to vote and vote.

US/Israel run-up to nuclear war

ISRAEL also has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

Scientists have calculated that although contamination from the bunker-busters could be limited, tons of radioactive uranium compounds would be released.

more killed US military killed in Iraq

Recent casualties has made 2007 the bloodiest year for U.S. troops in Iraq. Seven deaths on Monday took the number of U.S. soldiers killed to 853 this year; the worst previous year was 2004, when 849 deaths were recorded.

U.S. Military personnel sacrificed (officially acknowledged) In America's War On Iraq now totals 3,857.

more on republicans using AT&T to spy on us

By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that AT&T office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.

That was my 'aha!' moment," Klein said. "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room." The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.

"This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style," he said. "The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T's customers but everybody's."

One of Klein's documents listed links to 16 entities, including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern Virginia now owned by Verizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local, long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas; and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange,