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U.S. prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show,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

US corporations avoid taxes, we pay more

Microsoft sells its software in foreign countries from an affiliate in Ireland – after making small changes in the software so they can avoid US taxes. There, it pays only a 10 percent tax on its corporate profits, rather than the 38 percent corporate rate in the US.

Other US corporations set up affiliates in such tax havens as Barbados, the Bahamas, and Bermuda. US firms are "quite aggres­sive" in taking advantage of such tax havens,

standard of living going down w/ republicans

If you look at the current account of the US balance of payments, which measures primarily the balance of trade, and also flows of interest and dividends, foreign aid, and other international transfers, the US should be far deeper in hock – $2.9 trillion more over the years from 1990 through 2006 than the official $2.6 trillion.

Our country under the Republicans is now by far the world's biggest debtor nation. A quarter century ago, the US was the world's largest creditor nation. The result will be a much lower standard of living.

on to a police state

EARLIER this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House agreed to allow the executive branch to conduct dragnet interceptions of the electronic communications of people in the United States.

rumsfeld flees

read today:
War Criminals Beware, Justice Ahead : In Paris last week, Rumsfeld left a prestigious speaking event in haste, slipping out a side door to avoid the human rights lawyers and journalists waiting to confront him with criminal charges of torture.

He reportedly avoided the confrontation by sneaking out a door that attached the conference venue to, of all places, the United States Embassy. Have you seen this article in the mainstream media?

Update on Wars on Iraq and Iran

The US is secretly upgrading special stealth bomber hangars on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, according to military sources.

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday he had no evidence Iran was working actively to build nuclear weapons and expressed concern that escalating rhetoric from the U.S. could bring disaster. It sounds like Iraq all over again.

The Republicans are trying to get out of Iraq, saving face by blaming Iran and will enlarge the war to include a war on Iran.

is US supporting terroists?

"Escalation of terrorism in the region is one of the direct results of the presence of occupiers in Iraq, particularly America," Jalili, an ally of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said according to the country's state broadcaster. "And there are documents and information available proving America's support for terrorist groups in the region."

Cheney republicans against tax reform

The Democratic proposal, unveiled on Thursday, would cut taxes on married couples with annual incomes below $200,000 but raise taxes of most people earning more. It would eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which was created to prevent the rich from avoiding paying any taxes but could this year affect millions of families with incomes as low as $50,000.

It would replace the lost revenue with a 4 percent to 4.6 percent surcharge on the top 10 percent of taxpayers. Of course, the Cheney led Republicans are against making the tax code fair to the middle class.

another republican ATT General for torture

At his senate hearing, Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee
for attorney general, was plainly asked if the president is required
to obey federal statutes.

Not only did he refuse to answer that question with an unqualified
"Yes", the basis for his refusal was basically that a war president
can do whatever he likes, the catchall Constitution buster of the
current administration.

truth about the surge in Iraq

."This is a dangerous place," said Capt. Lee Showman (in Sadiyah,Iraq), a senior officer in the battalion. "People are killed here every day, and you don't hear about it. People are kidnapped here every day, and you don't hear about it."

The American people don't fully realize what's going on, said Staff Sgt. Richard McClary, 27, a section leader from Buffalo.

"They just know back there what the higher-ups here tell them. But the higher-ups don't go anywhere, and actually they only go to the safe places, places with a little bit of gunfire," he said. "They don't ever [expletive] see what we see on the ground." I guess that includes General "betray us."

Iraq the quagmire

The State Department will order as many as 50 U.S. diplomats to take posts in Iraq next year because of expected shortfalls in filling openings there, the first such large-scale forced assignment since the Vietnam War.

The union representing U.S. diplomats has officially objected to the Iraq call-up. "We believe, and we have told the secretary of state, that directing unarmed civilians who are untrained for combat into a war zone should be done on a voluntary basis," said Steve Kashkett, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association. "Directed assignments, we fear, can be detrimental to the individual, to the post, and to the Foreign Service as a whole."

Republicans muzzle global warning threats

White House officials eliminated several successive pages of
CDC's testimony, beginning with a section in which it planned to say that many organizations are working to address climate change but that, "despite this extensive activity, the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed," and that the "CDC considers climate change a serious public concern."

In another deleted part of the original testimony, the CDC director predicted that areas in the northern United States "will likely bear the brunt of increases in ground-level ozone and associated airborne pollutants.

Populations in mid-western and northeastern cities are expected to experience more heat-related illnesses as heat waves increase in frequency, severity and duration."

republicans, against other health care

Along with rejecting the SCHIP health insurance for US children with no health insurance, the Republicans are opposed US Senate legislation to fund health care for the nuclear-test-affected Marshallese. Sixty-seven US nuclear bombs were detonated in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958.

republicns wanted war on Iran for years

Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming otherwise.

In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice.

They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm -- not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years.

That was what people didn't realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn't wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say. "The hard-liners are upping the pressure on the State Department," says Leverett.

real reason for Iraq

The Hunt Oil deal with the Kurds(Ray Hunt of Hunt Oil, one of George W. Bush's Texas chums), one of several pending oil contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, may have put the last nail in the coffin of the US effort to force Iraq to rewrite its oil laws.

Like the Biden resolution and the Blackwater shooting, the Hunt deal unleashed pent-up anger among Iraqi Arab leaders, who called the deal illegal, since under current Iraqi law only the central government in Baghdad, not the Kurds, can approve oil deals.

The nationalization of Iraq's oil in 1972 by Saddam Hussein, after a decades-long struggle between Iraq and the Anglo-American oil cartel, was a landmark event, the first major oil nationalization in the region since the Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh took over the British oil interests there and, for his efforts, was toppled in 1953 by a CIA-engineered coup inspired by that cartel.

In Arab Iraq, if not in Kurdistan, the national oil industry is sacrosanct. If the United States intended to confirm Iraqis' belief that the invasion was about grabbing their country's oil, the US effort to open up the industry to foreign investors is perfectly designed to do so.

The real reason the US is in Iraq is about getting the republican oil barons to control and benefit from Iraq's oil, pure and simple.

Republicans want to stay in Iraq forever

Iraqi nationalism is the only political force capable of uniting Sunni and Shiite Arabs and ending the sectarian civil war, but for the past four years the United States has systematically worked to suppress it.

Do you wonder why? Wouldn't promoting nationalism bind them together? Well then the republicans would have to get out of Iraq, wouldn't they?

warning to Guard and Army Recruits

The U.S. Army will continue to rely on an unpopular program that forces some National Guad and Army soldiers to stay on beyond their retirement or re-enlistment dates, Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, deputy chief of staff for personnel, said Thursday that the number of soldiers kept on duty past their retirement or re-enlistment dates has actually increased in recent months as a result of President Bush's orders to increase troop levels in Iraq.

Republican Blackwater

Written by an army officer: "Every time one of those Blackwater convoys drives an Iraqi civilian off the road because the most important thing in the world is the protection of their'principal,' they make a new enemy for the United States. Every time they ram another car to clear the way (and, yes, I've seen them do that), so that they could maintain their own speed and thereby minimize their exposure to "improvised explosive devices," they make another enemy. Every time they kill innocent civilians, or wound them, they make whole families of new enemies."

"What employees of the private security firm care about, and I have heard this from the Blackwaters with whom I interacted in Iraq, is their paycheck. They care about their huge compensation packages, and about getting home alive to spend them."

"Blackwater USA has already taken in more than $1 billion from the public coffers. All in all, that's not a bad take for Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a Naval Academy dropout who served less time under the colors of the nation, in uniform, than my most recent pair of boots."

winning hearts and minds in Iraq

Associated Press photos showed the bodies of two toddlers, one with a gouged face, swaddled in blankets on a morgue floor. Their shirts were pulled up, exposing their abdomens, and a diaper showed above the waistband of one boy's shorts. Relatives said the children were killed when the US helicopter gunfire hit their house as they slept.

Immigrants and republicans

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has granted US citizenship to 32,500 foreign soldiers. In July 2002, US President George W. Bush issued an executive order to expand existing legislation to offer a fast track to citizenship to foreigners who agree to fight for the US Armed Forces.

The foreigners already represent 5 percent of all recruits. They even make up the majority of soldiers from some New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods.

The Pentagon spends $3.2 billion a year on recruitment, even sending its recruiters to high schools to persuade 17-year-olds still a year away from graduation to enlist.

Even so, four years and over 3,800 US deaths after the beginning of the Iraq campaign, fewer and fewer American citizens are willing to fight in a war opposed by a majority of the US population .

Most foreign recruits come from Latin America and the Caribbean. Latino rights groups in the United States, fearful that immigrants are being used as cannon fodder, object to the somewhat shady practice of offering citizenship in return for military service.

Also, aren't these the same people that Republicans bash at every chance to stoke fears for their political gain??????

a real right wing conspirator-Scaife

Richard Mellon Scaife. Remember him? The cantankerous, reclusive 75-year-old billionaire who's spent a sizable chunk of his inherited fortune bankrolling conservative causes and trying to kneecap Democrats? He's best known for funding efforts to smear then-President Bill Clinton, but more quietly he's given in excess of $300 million to right-leaning activists, watchdogs and think tanks. Atop his list of favorite donees: the family-values-focused Heritage Foundation, which has published papers with titles such as "Restoring a Culture of Marriage."

The culture of his own marriage is apparently past restoring. With the legal fight still in the weigh-in phase, the story of Scaife v. Scaife already includes a dog-snatching, an assault, a night in jail and that divorce court perennial, allegations of adultery.

Oh, and there's the money. Three words, people. No. Pre. Nup. Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week.

The numbers are just one of many we-kid-you-not dimensions to this tale. In late 2005, Ritchie Scaife peered through a window at one of her husband's many homes and saw him with one Tammy Sue Vasco, a woman whose colorful criminal history includes an arrest for prostitution. And this tryst was no one-afternoon stand. Ritchie Scaife describes Vasco in court filings as her husband's "mistress."

That would be Andrew Mellon, the uncle of Richard Scaife's mother, a financial wiz who built a Gilded Age fortune through banking and oil. Income from the trusts of that estate yields roughly $45 million a year for Scaife, according to a filing by his wife. That's a gross disposable income of nearly $4 million a month, apparently just for having been born. As the lawyer of his soon-to-be-ex-wife noted, "These massive streams of income are attributable to no employment, business enterprise or other effort -- intellectual, physical, creative or ministerial -- past or present."

Scaife owns a handful of newspapers and newsweeklies, including the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, a conservative answer to the Post-Gazette. When he isn't tending to this modest publishing empire, he's underwriting what Hillary Clinton once called "a vast right-wing conspiracy." His highest-profile expenditure is the $2.3 million he gave the American Spectator magazine in the mid-'90s, to try to unearth prurient and embarrassing details about Bill Clinton's years as governor of Arkansas. (The magazine came up virtually empty-handed.)

t some point in late 2005, Ritchie started having suspicions about her husband and hired a private investigator named Keith Scannell, a specialist in high-end surveillance for insurance companies. In December of that year, Scannell followed Richard Scaife to nearby North Huntingdon, home of Doug's Motel, a place where the TVs are bolted to the furniture and rooms can be rented in three-hour increments, for $28. (It's now under new management and renamed the Huntingdon Inn. Head east on Route 8, then east on Route 30.) There, according to Scannell, Scaife spent a few hours with Tammy Sue Vasco.

Why a billionaire would shack up at Doug's Motel, of all places, is a mystery. Ditto his choice of companions. Vasco is a tall, blond 43-year-old mother who in 1993 was busted in a sting operation after showing up at a Sheraton hotel and offering to have sex with an undercover cop for $225, the Post-Gazette reported.

Social Register material she is not, but Vasco and Scaife seemed to have a relationship that went beyond the purely professional. The two usually met each other twice a week, for months, at the motel, says an employee of the motel. Scaife would show up in a chauffeured car, dressed in a suit, wearing cuff links, always bearing flowers. Vasco would be waiting in same room every time, Room 5 on the ground floor, facing the parking lot, said the employee. Mr. Dick, as he was known at the motel, would stay for two hours or so, then get back in the car, which had been waiting, and leave.

"He actually seemed infatuated with Tammy," says the Doug's Motel employee, who did not want to be identified because of the powerful parties in the case. "She'd talk about trips that he took her on, to California, New York City. And it was great for her. It changed her life."

Private investigator Scannell, commenting on what became a much-discussed local news story, put it this way: "Mrs. Scaife acted as any loving wife would upon finding out just days earlier that her husband had a confirmed meeting, for several hours, at a $40 motel with a woman previously arrested for prostitution."

Police would later say that Ritchie Scaife began pounding on doors and windows and refused to leave, which is why she was promptly arrested for "defiant trespass." She was handcuffed and driven downtown to the Allegheny County Jail -- near the Liberty Bridge, at 950 Second Ave. -- where a woman accustomed to traveling with a personal hairdresser spent the night in what her lawyers later called a "grim" holding cell.

Now we know that Scaife is beneficiary of nine different trusts, including one called the "1935 Trust," with an approximate value of $210 million, and another called "The Revocable Trust," valued at $655 million. Altogether, these gushers are worth about $1.4 billion.

what US policy should be in middle-east

The United States has three strategic interests in the Middle East: maintaining the flow of Persian Gulf oil to world markets, discouraging the spread of WMD, and reducing anti-American terrorism from this region.

It is also committed to Israel's survival, but on moral rather than strategic grounds. Instead of garrisoning the region with its own troops or attempting to transform the entire region, the United States should act as an "offshore balancer."

The United States does not need to control the Middle East itself; it merely needs to prevent any hostile power(s) from controlling the region. To do that, Washington should strive to maintain a balance of power in the region and intervene with its own forces only when local actors cannot uphold the balance themselves, as it did when it liberated Kuwait in 1991.

As part of this strategy, the United States would begin to treat Israel like a normal state, rather than as the 51st state. Israel is nearly 60 years old, increasingly prosperous, and now officially recognized by the vast majority of the world's nations.

The United States should deal with it as it does with other democracies: backing Israel when its policies are consistent with U.S. interests, but opposing it when they are not.

how the Israeli lobby hurts the US

Backing Israel's harsh treatment of the Palestinians has reinforced anti-Americanism around the world and almost certainly helped terrorists recruit new followers. U.S. and Israeli policy also led directly to Hamas' growing popularity and its victory in the Palestinian elections, which made a difficult situation worse and a long-term peace settlement even more elusive.

The Iraq war is a strategic disaster that has damaged America's standing and strengthened Iran's regional position, and now provides other terrorists with an ideal training ground. The Lebanon war enhanced Hezbollah's position, weakened the pro-American Siniora government in Beirut, and further tarnished America's image throughout the region.

A hard-line approach to Iran helped bring President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power but failed to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions, and threatening Syria led Damascus to stop helping the United States against al Qaeda. None of these developments has been good for the United States.

Israeli lobby for mid-east wars

The lobby has encouraged the United States to take Israel's side in its long struggle with the Palestinians, and made it more difficult for the United States to help bring this conflict to a close.

The lobby -- and especially the neoconservatives within it -- also played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, although other factors (such as the September 11 attacks) were also critical in making the decision for war.

The lobby has successfully pressed the Bush administration to adopt a more confrontational stance toward Syria and Iran, and encouraged it to back Israel to the hilt during the 2006 war in Lebanon.

using anti-semitism to smear others

Although most of the lobby's tactics are legitimate forms of political participation, some groups and individuals in the lobby also try to silence or marginalize opponents and critics by smearing them as anti-Semites or self-hating Jews.

This sort of response was evident in the personal attacks directed at Jimmy Carter for writing a controversial book about Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories, and in the efforts of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League to prevent the historian Tony Judt from giving a lecture on the Israel lobby to a group in New York City.

True anti-Semitism is loathsome and should be firmly opposed, but using this sort of accusation to silence or marginalize critics is antithetical to the principles of free speech and open debate on which democracy depends.

the Israeli lobby, how it works

The Israel lobby uses the same basic strategies that other interest groups employ. It pushes its agenda in Congress by supporting friendly candidates and legislators with votes and campaign money and by helping to frame legislation; by getting sympathetic individuals appointed to key policy positions in the executive branch; by monitoring the media and pressuring news organizations to offer favorable coverage; and by writing articles, books, and op-eds designed to move public opinion in directions they favor.

These various strategies are as American as apple pie, and there is nothing illegitimate about them. Yet it ought to be equally legitimate to examine and discuss how the Israel lobby works to push its agenda in government, and to debate whether its influence is beneficial?

understanding the Jewish lobby

Prominent groups in the lobby include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and pro-Israel think tanks like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Leading individuals in the lobby include the heads of these various organizations, as well as neoconservatives who served in the Bush administration like Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Wurmser, some of whom are closely associated with hard-line pro-Israel think tanks and conservative politicians in Israel, or Christian Zionists like John Hagee of CUFI and ... Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

Religious and ethnic identity does not define who is part of the lobby, as it includes gentiles as well as Jewish-Americans. It is the political agenda of an individual or a group, not ethnicity or religion, that determines whether they are part of the lobby.

Thus, the Israel lobby is not synonymous with American Jewry, and "Jewish lobby" is not an appropriate term for describing the various groups and individuals that work to foster U.S. support for Israel. These groups and individuals sometimes disagree on particular issues but they are united in their belief that the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel should not be substantively questioned.

They form a powerful special interest group, which over time has acquired considerable influence over U.S. policy in the Middle East.

truth about US and Israel

Israel is not the strategic asset to the United States that many claim. Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War, but it has become a growing liability now that the Cold War is over. Unconditional support for Israel has reinforced anti-Americanism around the world, helped fuel America's terrorism problem, and strained relations with other key allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The United States derives some tangible strategic benefits from its close security partnership with Israel, but it pays a high price for them. On balance, it is more of a liability than an asset.

why Iran

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. economic and military assistance, having received more than $154 billion in U.S. aid since its creation in 1948, and it currently receives roughly $3 billion in direct U.S. assistance every year, even though it is now a prosperous country. The United States also consistently gives Israel diplomatic support, and consistently comes to its aid in wartime, as it did during the 2006 war in Lebanon.

Most important, U.S. support for Israel is largely unconditional: Israel receives generous American assistance even when it takes actions that the U.S. government believes are wrong, such as building settlements in the Occupied Territories. As former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once remarked, U.S. backing for Israel is "beyond compare in modern history."

killing more Iraqi women and children

American air strikes on Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City killed 49 people including women and children, Iraqi officials said on Sunday.

Iraqi officials said that bombardment of Sadr City turned residential area into rubble killing civilians indiscriminately including women and children.

Reporters gave gloomy picture from massacre of civilians and innocent people in Baghdad district.

A reporter said that in a house where one of the children lived, a man pointed to bloodstained mattresses and blood-splattered pillows, choking back tears as he held up a photo of one of the dead.

Eyewitnesses said that most of those killed and wounded were women, children and elderly men which shows the indiscriminate bombardment of the city.

"We were waking in the morning and all of a sudden rockets landed in the house and the children were screaming," said a woman outside the house.

more on why Iraq and now Iran

Freedom's Watch made its first current public splash just prior to the appearance of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker before Congress, testifying about the situation in Iraq. In late-August, FW launched a $15 million radio and television advertising campaign aimed at maintaining Congressional support for President Bush's surge and the occupation of Iraq.


"If you look at how Iraq was sold to the American public, a number of pro-war groups and committees of the same ilk and backing had meetings at the White House, embarked on policy discussion tours around the country with media, and appeared as experts on news shows," Stauber pointed out. It's happening again with Iran.

why Iraq and now Iran

The idea for Freedom's Watch (FW) first surfaced in March of this year at the winter meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) in Manalapan, Florida, where Vice President Dick Cheney accused House Democrats of not supporting the troops in Iraq. The RJC, which is credited with shepherding then-Texas Governor George W. Bush on his first tour of Israel in November 1998, is a big-money pro-Israel lobby group that networks Jewish-American neoconservatives, Christian Right leaders and conservatives in Israel.

The Freedom's Watch "inner circle of strategists and donors are close to Vice President Dick Cheney or held high posts at the White House," the Associated Press's Jim Kuhnhenn pointed out in late September.

According to its website, Freedom's Watch is a 501 (c) (4) nonprofit corporation; it can lobby on issues but cannot expressly advocate for specific candidates.

lAso in the mix are Kevin Moley, who served as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva from September 2001 to April 2006; Howard Leach, a big-time GOP donor who served as Ambassador to France until 2005; Dr. John Templeton, Jr., the son of mutual-funds pioneer Sir John Templeton and chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation who is serving as chairman on Romney's National Faith And Values Steering Committee; Edward Snider, chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, the huge Philadelphia sports and entertainment firm; Gary Erlbaum, Vice Chairman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and Chairman of the Federation's Israel Emergency Campaign and the Executive Vice President of the Jewish Publishing Group which publishes the Jewish Exponent and Inside magazine; and Richard Fox, chairman of the Jewish Policy Center and Pennsylvania State Chairman of the Reagan/Bush campaign in 1980.

Writing in the October 8, 2007 issue of the American Conservative, Philip Weiss reported that a story titled "Pro-Surge Group Is Almost All Jewish," from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a wire service for Jewish news, noted that four out of five members of Freedom's Watch board are Jewish, and half of its donors are Jewish.

"It should be remembered that Freedom's Watch is run by a White House PR flack [Ari Fleischer] who was key to selling that last war. It is the same script, same images, same messages, and same players. And it is likely to provoke the same response from the mainstream media."

republicans lied us into war on Iraq

The outlines of the story are familiar: In 2002, the CIA sent Valerie Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, on an unpaid, eight-day fact-finding trip to Niger. Within hours of his return, he told eager CIA debriefers (while Valerie Wilson was ordering takeout Chinese food for them) that there was no evidence that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from the African nation.

When President Bush nevertheless included the uranium allegation in a State of the Union address, Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times accusing the administration of misleading the American people. Both of the Wilsons firmly believe that she was outed, in retaliation, by White House officials who sought to discredit him by telling reporters that his trip was arranged by his wife, who worked for the CIA.

Giulianim fails 9/11 test

Rudy Giuliani is running for office on how he handled 9/11. But for seven years before 9/11 he did nothing to replace the firefighter radios that failed in the 1993 WTC bombing. Then he awarded a no-bid contract to Motorola that went from $1.4 million to $14 million (sound familiar?). Then those radios were never field tested, failed in actual use, and were removed from service - leaving firefighters with the same radios that failed in 1993!

And on 9/11, 343 firefighters died because of Giuliani's administration, most needlessly.

Blackwater,Iraq, no-bids, accountablility?

In 2004, the State Department chose to take over the Pentagon's personal security contract with Blackwater. It was a sole-source no-bid contract worth $140 million.

Blackwater's Republican political contacts and campaign contributions influenced its selection, of course, they deny that.

When the sole-source no-bid contract expired in the summer of 2005,Blackwater formed a consortium with U.S. firms DynCorp and Triple Canopy, and the group had a multiyear, $1.2 billion agreement.

Blackwater charges State $1,221.62 a day for a "protective security specialist," according to a 2005 invoice released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Senior Dept of State official said, little thought was given to how contractors would be held legally accountable for incidents such as the Sept. 16 shootings. In other words, THEY ARE NOT ACCOUNTABLE. What happened to "winning the hearts and minds?

the birth of Blackwater

A new executive order, signed in January 2004, gave State authority over all but military operations. Rumsfeld's revenge, at least in the view of many State officials, was to withdraw all but minimal assistance for diplomatic security.

"It was the view of Donald Rumsfeld and [then-Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz that this wasn't their problem," said a former senior State Department official.

Meetings to negotiate an official memorandum of understanding between State and Defense during the spring of 2004 broke up in shouting matches over issues such as their respective levels of patriotism and whether the military would provide mortuary services for slain diplomats.

more on Blackwater

The shootings by Blackwater have also reopened long-standing, bitter arguments between the State Department and the Pentagon, which over the years have feuded over policies including the decision to invade Iraq and the treatment of detainees.

Such broad disagreements have frequently played out over a narrow question: Who is responsible for the safety of U.S. civilians serving in Iraq?

With State Department and FBI investigations underway, the military leaked its own report on the Sept. 16 shootings, finding no evidence that the Blackwater guards fired in self-defense, as the company has maintained.

U.S. officers have publicly criticized the security contractors as out-of-control "cowboys" who alienate the same Iraqis the military is trying to cultivate.

A new, $112 million contract was signed just last month with a Blackwater that is owned by a Republican.

republicans starting new cold war

At the Cold War's end, the United States was given one of the great opportunities of history: to embrace Russia, largest nation on earth, as partner, friend, ally. Our mutual interests meshed almost perfectly. There was no ideological, territorial, historic or economic quarrel between us, once communist ideology was interred.

We blew it. We moved NATO onto Russia's front porch, ignored her valid interests and concerns, and, with our "indispensable-nation" arrogance, treated her as a defeated power, as France treated Weimar Germany after Versailles.

Who restarted the Cold War? Bush and the braying hegemonists he brought with him to power. Great empires and tiny minds go ill together.

democrats vs. republicans

Tthere are certain things it means to be a Democrat, like supporting healthcare for kids, social security, medicare. and a good minimum wage, none of which would have been possible from republicans.

Thompson/McCain pandering to right wing

Fred D. Thompson said he would close the door in the Oval office and pray for wisdom in his “first hour” of becoming president.

Senator John McCain choked up when talking about a North Vietnamese prison guard who loosened his bonds and later drew a cross on the ground in front of him on Christmas Day.

US mercenaries in Iraq

Private security mercenary contractors in Iraq quickly earned a reputation as cowboys, the kind that shoot first and never have to answer any questions afterward. They went largely unnoticed outside Iraq until Sept. 16, when a Blackwater security convoy shot and killed 17 civilians at a major traffic intersection in western Baghdad.

Blackwater has more than 1,000 men under arms in Iraq, but it is just one of dozens of security companies there. The mercenary contractors — and they are almost all men — tend to be former soldiers and come from the U.S., as well as Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Nepal, Fiji, Russia, Australia, Chile and Peru.

Mercenary contractors can make up to $12,000 to $33,000 a month. Some security convoys keep a low profile, using cars and dress that blend into the bustling streets of the city. Others — especially Blackwater — "roll heavy" in large convoys of big, armored SUVs.
In crowded Baghdad streets it's not always possible to swerve out of the way. All too often, accidents turn fatal. (There are no reliable statistics on the number of Iraqis killed or hurt in such incidents.)

Some mercenary security men carry the aggression too far, treating all the Iraqis they encounter as potential enemies, using hostile body language and verbal abuse — and sometimes worse.

Many uniformed American soldiers regard the mercenary contractors with disdain, describing them as reckless and trigger-happy. Since Iraqis don't always distinguish between private and military convoys, soldiers say, bad behavior by contractors only deepens Iraqi antagonism toward the military.

They behave like Iraq is the Wild West and Iraqis are like Injuns,' to be treated any way they like," one soldir said, asking to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity.

"They're better-armed and -armored than the military, but they don't have to follow military rules, and that makes them dangerous." The men he was describing worked for Blackwater. So much for winning hearts of minds of the relatives of innocent women and children killed by these mercenaries.

how to end the war on Iraq

The occupation in Iraq will end on the day that there are enough Democrats in Congress to override the Republicans support for the demands of the Republican Administration for more money to fund their imperial endeavor along with the massive war-profiteering by administration-linked republican firms such as Halliburton and Blackwater.

Iraq like Korea

In the summer of 1950, U.S. military forces opened fire on a group of South Korean refugees at a railroad trestle near the village of No Gun Ri. Survivors said hundreds died, mostly women and children. Retreating U.S. commanders had issued orders to shoot approaching civilians to guard against North Korean infiltrators among refugee columns.

The killing of innocent women and children is happening again by our troops and our Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq.

could it happen?

read today: If you believes that 9-11 was a “false flag” op, then you say that BushCo will engineer ANOTHER false flag op, blame Iran, declare martial law, (George can do that unilaterally now because of Presidential Directive 51) and attack Iran, possibly using “strategic” nuclear strikes on “military” targets.

Then of course, when our Homeland is in such a terrible state of emergency, it would be an awful idea to “change horses in the middle of the stream,” you know, so we must suspend elections: thereby, staging yet BushCo’s third coup in a row: the first two being the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004.

republicans spying on your finances

The American Civil Liberties Union said Sunday that newly uncovered documents show that the Pentagon secretly sent hundreds of letters seeking the financial records of private citizens without court approval.

republican Blackwater

Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater mercenaries, has been a huge financial supporter of George W. Bush and the Republican Party. That might explain why Mister Bush's State Department worked with Prince's people to try and cover up the latest Blackwater slaughter of civilians in Iraq, and could be a big part of the reason why so many Republicans came to the chief mercenary's defense during Congressional hearings. His fondness for and belief in all things Republican probably answers too, Erik Prince's problem with honesty.

freedom under attack by republicans

Government repression in some countries has shifted from journalists to bloggers, with the vitality of the Internet triggering a more focused crackdown as blogs increasingly take the place of mainstream news media, according to Lucie Morillon, Washington director of the advocacy group Reporters without Borders.

Countries that were not sentencing journalists to prison terms anymore have been doing it these last months for bloggers. This is the case of our allies in the middle east, Egypt and Jordan.

The reason the United States did not make the top 30 in press freedom is because videographer and blogger Josh Wolf spent almost eight months in jail for not turning over video footage of a demonstration in San Francisco and because the confidentiality of press sources is under continued attack by our republican administration. We are also under attack if we differ or criticize our republican government.

republians spying on you

In May 2006, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecom firms. Only Qwest, it reported, declined to participate because of fears that the program lacked legal standing.

Verizon said it had received FBI administrative subpoenas, called national security letters, requesting data that would "identify a calling circle" for subscribers' telephone numbers, including people contacted by the people contacted by the subscriber.The privacy concerns are exponential each generation you go away from the suspect's number.

The administration is seeking blanket immunity, which would extend to anyone sued for assisting the government -- not just telecom carriers -- in its post-Sept. 11 surveillance programs. What else are these republicans doing that violate our Constitution???

republican Iraq for Blackwater

Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent.

That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability.

The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

Rebulicans show true nature

Republican leaders are afraid their caucus of cruelty is caving out from under them. They are afraid that the House of Representatives will join the 2/3 majority in the Senate to override the heartless White House veto of a health safety net for those just above the poverty line.

And the evidence of their mean spirited desperation is their carpet bomb smearing of a 12-year-old child with a serious brain injury, personally coordinated by an aide in the office of Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Yes, that's right, a member of the U.S. Senate actually has his dirty hand prints all over the despicable distortions about an American family whose only sin was having two of their children serious injured and hospitalized for months, and the courage to tell their story to the American people of the true value of the SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) program.

Since that time they have been bombarded with hate mail, made even more terrifying by having their home address published for any lunatic to act on.

Who did they think would speak out for this program, someone who did NOT need it? That's exactly what the sick minds behind this swift boat campaign want everyone else to believe.

rebpublican middle east mess

Iraq never has been viable as a national entity, not when the British Colonial Office cobbled it together out of former Ottoman provinces in 1921, nor when Saddam Hussein ruled it by terror, and surely not under the present American occupation. As the US Senate has had the belated wisdom to recognize, it will break up. The Ottoman Empire never was viable - at its peak half of its population was Christian - and its Anatolian rump, namely modern Turkey, may break up as well. Iran, the mini-empire of the Persians who comprise only half the population, may not hold together, nor may Syria, a witches’ cauldron of ethnicities ruled by the brutal hand of the Alawite minority.

America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle East. The Middle East has known nothing but chaos for most of its history. The colonial policy of the European powers after World War I left inherently unstable structures in place that must, one day, meet their reckoning.

But America’s obsession with the surgical implant of democracy in the region forces it into a murderous game of whack-a-mole with a welter of armed ethnicities.

our humanity threatened by republicans

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name

troops vs mercenaries in Iraq

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our post-surge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Blackwater's war on Iraq

Two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent.

That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005.

There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal.

Giuliani's record

There is certainly not much in Giuliani's background to attract religious conservatives. A McGovern Democrat in 1972, he opposed term limits, school choice and an end to rent controls during his successful 1993 campaign for mayor. As the Republican mayor, he backed Democrat Mario Cuomo's losing fourth-term bid for governor of New York. He consistently has been pro-choice, pro-gay rights (including civil unions) and pro-gun control.

cultivated world view

The American world view has been carefully crafted: a good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same.

We have cultivated a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very different countries, and a great religion, with many different and even opposing tendencies (like Christianity, like Judaism), which has given the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures,and is thrown into one and the same pot. THIS WORLD VIEW is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing civilizations is, for our war lords, the best of all possible worlds.

The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it.

No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a world-wide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean - we are among the good guys of this world.

Western "culture"

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

more on Blackwater

"Isn't it interesting that the same government individual, who has been reported by one investigative committee to have made the initial decision for Blackwater to get its first contract, is the brother of the current State Department Inspector General, who was found, by the same committee, to have intervened in preventing an investigation into Blackwater's illegal activity?"

mercenaries are in nine countries?

The incident in question regarding Blackwater needs to be put in a proper context. It's just one company out of 181 other private military companies operating in that space in Iraq and around the world. The incidents involving abuses of private military contractors go back to the starting of the war.

This includes the incidents at Abu Ghraib (Torture Scandal) and the private contractor Aegis Trophy's infamous video of 2005 (Aegis employees posted a video online showing them shooting at Iraqi civilians.) You also had the Triple Canopy shootings lawsuit in '06. Blackwater is just one of the companies in the game.

The United States government aspect of it is - that the unfortunate truth that the overall effect of use has of mercenary contractors actually has been the undermining rather than assisting U.S. operations and goals. It extends all the way to tactical levels on the field to the grand strategic world.

The Blackwater "Nisoor Square" shooting incident resonated negatively not only inside Iraq but throughout the Muslim world. A variety of major media out there in the Middle East like Al Jazeera reported on the Blackwater contractors as "an army that seeks fame, fortune and thrills away from all considerations and ethics of military honor. The employees are known for their roughness, they are known for shooting indiscriminately at vehicles or pedestrians."

Your research has borne many egregious example of private contractors' reckless conduct in Iraq--including the Blackwater shootings, CACI and Titan firms responsible for the notorious Abu Ghraib interrogations, and Aegis Company's "trophy video" in which they posted a video of them shooting at civilians to an Elvis song on the net. What I and others want to know is what legal repercussions do they face, if any, under international law and U.S. law?

The questions that should be asked:

"We understand that you fired the person that got into a drunken argument on Christmas Eve and killed the Iraqi Vice President's security guard. Our question is who flew him out of the country? Which entity made the decision to get that individual out of the country 36 hours after they potentially committed a murder, which in effect assured prosecution would be difficult and impede the investigation? Was Blackwater operating under its own discretion? Or, were they ordered to do so by its clients and the State Department? Who was it?"

Another one is "Why do your helicopters in Iraq not carry any identifying insignia, such as the numbers painted on U.S. Army vehicles? Is there something that sets the company aside from standard U.S. tactics?

more Blackwater in Iraq

At least two cars, a black four-door taxi and a blue Volkswagen sedan, had their back windshields shot out, but their front windshields were intact, indicating they were shot while driving away from the square, according to the photos and soldiers.

U.S. soldiers did not find any bullets that came from AK-47 assault rifles or BKC machine guns used by Iraqi policemen and soldiers. They found evidence of ammunition used in American-made weapons, including M4 rifle 5.56mm brass casings, M240B machine gun 7.62mm casings, M203 40mm grenade launcher casings, and stun-grenade dunnage, or packing.

An Iraqi colonel walked up to Tarsa and described the Blackwater shooters as men in "tan uniforms, black helmets, and that flag," pointing at the U.S. flag on Tarsa's sleeve. The colonel added that he knew the U.S. military wasn't involved.

Blackwater mercenaries for hire

Blackwater USA guards shot at Iraqi civilians as they tried to drive away from a Baghdad square on Sept. 16, according to a report compiled by the first U.S. soldiers to arrive at the scene, where they found no evidence that Iraqis had fired weapons.

They found no evidence to indicate that the Blackwater guards were provoked or entered into a confrontation. "I did not see anything that indicated they were fired upon," said Tarsa, 42, the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery Regiment of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division. He also said it appeared that several drivers had made U-turns and were moving away from Nisoor Square when their vehicles were hit by gunfire from Blackwater guards. SHOT IN THE BACK.

This is what you get when you have a mercenary army. What happened to the goal of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people?

contributors to the Republican Party

Federal government officials generally have declined to discuss contractual arrangements with the company. As a private corporation, Blackwater does not have to divulge such details.

Public procurement data show that over the past six years, about half of Blackwater's federal contracts were awarded with little or no competition from other companies, according to a congressional report.

In a decade, Blackwater's revenue from federal government contracts has grown exponentially, from less than $100,000 to almost $600 million last year.

The organization most people think of as Blackwater is actually a collection of companies with Prince and his McLean-based holding company, the Prince Group, at the top. Prince, a former Navy Seal and heir to an industrial fortune, owns everything. He and his family are also big contributors to the Republican Party. Are you surprised?

spying before 9/11 on us?

A former Qwest Communications International executive has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records that the company thought might be illegal.

His account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: "It's inappropriate for the government to be awarding a contract conditioned upon an agreement to an illegal program. That truly is what's going on here."

a typical republican

Ann Coulter only says what true conservative republicans really think like,
"Jews need "to be perfected.
"The nation would be better off if it were all-Christian."
"It would be a lot easier for Jews if they were to become Christians." "President Bill Clinton showed some level of latent homosexuality." "Former Vice President Al Gore was a "total fag."
About 9/11 widows "I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”
Now there is a typical Republican.

reich get richer under republicans

The gap between America's richest and poorest is at its widest in at least 25 years, with the wealthiest taking home a record share of the nation's income that exceeds even the previous high in 2000.

According to recent data from the Internal Revenue Service, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all U.S. income earned in 2005. That is a significant increase from 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of the nation's income.

republicans like to work in the dark

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

In his role as the agency’s inspector general since 2002, Mr. Helgerson has investigated some of the most controversial programs the C.I.A. has begun since the Sept. 11 attacks, including its secret program to detain and interrogate high value terrorist suspects

Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say. Of course, these republicans don't want anyone seeing what they are doing.

Frederick P. Hitz, who served as C.I.A. inspector general from 1990 to 1998 and now teaches at the University of Virginia says “I think it’s a terrible idea, Under the statute, the inspector general has the right to investigate the director. How can you do that and have the director turn around and investigate the I.G.?”

Remember Cheney and his republicans, the most dangerous people in our country, like to "work in the dark."

republicans want another war

"ATTENTION: Joint Chiefs of Staff and all U.S. Military Personnel: Do not attack Iran."

The initiative responds to the growing calls for an attack on Iran from the likes of Norman Podhoretz and John Bolton, and the reports of growing war momentum in Washington by reporters like Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and Joe Klein of Time.

International lawyer Scott Horton says European diplomats at the recent United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York "believe that the United States will launch an air war on Iran, and that it will occur within the next six to eight months." He puts the likelihood of conflict at 70 percent.

The initiative also responds to the recent failure of Congress to pass legislation requiring its approval before an attack on Iran and the hawk-driven resolution encouraging the President to act against the Iranian military.

our bought and paid for government

A coalition of neoconservatives, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish organizations, and, most strikingly, a richly coffered and extremely influential lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), court both Democrats and Republicans in order to promote Israel.

Among AIPAC's many lobbying activities - it has a 200-person staff and an annual budget of $47 million - are the well-known tours it organizes to Israel three or four times a year, not just for journalists but for politicians, too. Recent tours have included staff from "The Daily Show" and reporters from Spanish and African-American media. "There's hardly a journalist left in D.C. who hasn't taken this trip," one AIPAC representative told us.

return to founders vision for USA

We have endured the fascist takeover of our nation by these neo-con right-wing republican ideologues. Now, we now have the opportunity to take our country back from these immoral fanatics. It will require enormous determination and effort to get the country back on track in 2009--as the founders envisioned. But, I believe we can do it.

throw these republicans out

American citizens should be allowed to spend their hard-earned money wherever they wish across the globe, not told that certain countries are under embargo and thus off limits. An American trade policy should encourage private American businesses to seek partners overseas and engage them in trade. The hostility toward American citizens overseas in the wake of our current foreign policy has actually made it difficult if not dangerous for Americans to travel abroad.

The real isolationists are those who impose sanctions and embargoes on countries and peoples across the globe because they disagree with the internal and foreign policies of their leaders. The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy, rather than seek change through diplomacy, engagement, and by setting a positive example.

The test for new and old is that of wisdom and experience, or as the editors wrote "historical reality," which argues passionately now against the course of anti-Constitutional interventionism.

Our Administration should see Americans engaged overseas like never before, in business and cultural activities. But, we should never attempt to export democracy or other values at the barrel of a gun, as we have seen these republican in power do over and over again.

That is a counterproductive approach that actually leads the United States to be resented and more isolated in the world. We need to throw these republicans out of power.

more republican lies

The acrimony among politicians has strained the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki close to the breaking point. Nearly half of the cabinet ministers have left their posts. The Shiite alliance in parliament, which once controlled 130 of the 275 seats, is disintegrating with the defection of two important parties.

Legislation to manage the oil sector, the country's most valuable natural resource, and to bring former Baath Party members back into the government have not made it through the divided parliament. The U.S. Military's latest hope for grass-roots reconciliation, the recruitment of Sunni tribesmen into the Iraqi police force, was denounced last week in stark terms by Iraq's leading coalition of Shiite lawmakers. So much for republican lies about progress of reconciliation.