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Home To The World's Best Progressive Thought And Humor
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In This Edition
Noam Chomsky follows, "Obama On Israel-Palestine."
Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis."
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 We Are The Predators! By Ernest Stewart I am a predator That's one thing for sure I am a predator You better lock your doors We are the predators I Am A Predator ~~~ Ted Nugent "Night after night, on radio talk shows, disgruntled, self-identified progressives call in to inform the host and her audience that we (the American people) can - in fact - "walk and chew gum at the same time" (a response to the argument on the part of some Obama defenders that now - in the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades - is simply not the right time to focus our energies on a task of this magnitude - that such an effort would be an irresponsible distraction). Those folks, many of whom, frankly, invoke images of villagers wielding torches and pitchforks, are sadly missing the point." ~~~ Cynthia Boaz "Good day, EH! And welcome to the Great White North! Take off ya hoser!" ~~~ Bob and Doug McKenzie This also gives the aforementioned CIA sponsored terrorists a huge planning and staging area for their attacks on our surge in Afghanistan, which is just what our corpo-rat goons in the military/industrial complex desire, i.e., a never ending war! Barry insured this by announcing he's sending in an extra 17,000 soldiers and Marines this spring, just as a start on his surge! Sure, our otherwise bored boy and girls sitting inside windowless buildings out in the Nevada desert now have a vast array of new targets to acquire. A strange thing happened the other day. I hear when they were routinely bombing school buildings they actually hit one full of soldiers instead of children. As once was said about disco "music," "If you throw enough sh-t against the wall some of it's bound to stick." So high-fives all around! We started using the Predator aircraft, which are unmanned drones, to save our billion dollar junior birdmen for flying the big corpo-rat owned airliners when their enlistments run out. It used to be that pilots would actually risk their lives against enemy pilots to bomb schools, orphanages and the like from 50,000 feet but since there has been no opposition during all of our latest wars, why risk those future airline pilots to "speed balls" and equipment failure when we can kill the same non-combatants with drones from 12,000 miles away? At least when we were firebombing Europe, Japan, Korea or Vietnam there was a little sport involved from enemy pilots, ack-ack guns or missiles. Now death from the skies is just a sophisticated video game, which is why our sons and daughters are the new pilots! From Pac Man to Predators--one easy step away! I wonder if they get to sign their initials after blowing up a wedding party? Do you get an extra 5,000 points if you kill both the bride and the groom? In Other News Pundits like Joe Conason and several politicians like Sin-ator Patrick Leahy want to set up truth commissions to bring the Bush Junta's crimes to light. Others, like Obama, want us to forget about these outrages; forget about them and roll over and go back to sleep until the vans come to take us off to a "Happy Camp!"(tm) One of these is college prof Cynthia Boaz who wrote a little piece of trash called, "Obama's Justice: Reconciliation, Not Retribution." In it Cynthia say Barry can't prosecute the Junta for their hundreds of acts of treason, war crimes and the like because it would be deemed by the rat-wing controlled press as political. Well duh, but so what? I wrote Cynthia a letter: "Hey Cynthia, Just finished reading your little rant about not bringing the Crime Family Bush to trial for their various acts of treason and sedition as to do so might seem political. After all, since it was our corpo-rat masters and our elite who committed those war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the Bill of Rights, mass murder, genocide, concentration camps, mass kidnapping, official torture, theft of trillions etc. we should look the other way and concentrate on putting those pot smokers and thieves stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving families in the death camps instead, huh? I'm guessing you were paid the traditional 30 pieces of silver for your rant? How do you look into the mirror in the morning without cutting your throat? Or don't you wear makeup? Obama and the Democrats aren't going after Bush because he and they are as guilty of the same war crimes as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice and the rest are. Our anti-war president voted for every war bill that came his way, knowing full well what he was supporting, voting to suppress the Bill of Rights by backing the F.I.S.A. bill, a definite act of treason, etc. etc. etc. If Barry doesn't bring these monsters to justice by giving them all 6 years down in Gitmo to be water boarded and have broom handles shoved up their asses, (I wonder if that would be considered torture when applied to them?) followed by a quick people's tribunal and some very slow, painful executions on PBS then this country is doomed. If not, then the last 8 years will be repeated again and again and again. If there is no prosecution for those crimes then Obama must open every cell door in every jail and prison in America and let everyone go because if you added up all the crimes committed by America's two million prisoners they would be a small fraction of what was done by the Bush Junta. Either we are a nation of laws or we are not. One set of rules for everyone or anarchy! We voted for change and got the same ole, same ole! There are dozens of laws and treaties that demand that Obama bring charges for these crimes and for him not to do so is a serious crime as well! The only thing that will bring this country together is not a truth commission, like the cover up of 911, but capital, criminal trials. The hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions of wounded and the millions of displaced cry out for justice. Can't you hear their cries Cynthia, or are you deaf as well as blind? Sincerely yours, Ernest Stewart Managing editor Issues & Alibis magazine" If the good professor replies, I'll share it with you! And Finally It's that time of the year again when those holier-than-thou sophisticated knuckleheads to the north take a break from torturing their native population (The suicide rate amongst Canada's native population is higher than that of any other group of aboriginals in the world) and begin joyfully clubbing to death three week old baby mammals for fun and profits. The Canadians, who spend most of their time looking down their noses at America and Americans, drop the pretense, grab a case of "Labatt's Blue" and stumble across ice flows in search of helpless, defenseless puppies and then beat out their brains with clubs and hakapiks. A "hakapic" is a particularly nasty instrument looking like something out of an old Vincent Price horror movie. They scurry from seal pup to seal pup killing as many as they can, sometimes killing as many as three or four a minute, wiping out every single one upon the ice flow before moving off to the next flow. They're also allowed to "hunt" on various islands and are protected from animal lovers and the press by the Canadian Navy. The reason given for this annual mayhem and slaughter is that the government cannot create jobs for these hunters so it's either this or they'll starve to death. Bullsh-t, of course, but even if it were true, what would the loss be? They could draft all of these he-man killers, send them off to Afghanistan and have them attack the Mujahideen with a hakapic. Now wouldn't you like to see that, eh? The Europeans have had about enough of this and have made noises about ending the importation of these skins and starting boycotts of other Canadian products like tooks, beer and bacon! That, of course, is the only way to put an end to this. Stop buying products made from these babies and boycott all things Canadian from Celine Dion to William Shatner, (again hardly a loss) until they put an end to this terrible slaughter! Meanwhile the folks over at PETA have plans of their own to stop the slaughter. I was hoping that would be a bunch of naked PETA ladies throwing themselves between the seals and the hunters but no such luck. Here's their plans.  PETA TO TARGET VANCOUVER OLYMPICS IN CAMPAIGN TO END CANADA SEAL SLAUGHTER Group Calls Vancouver News Conference to Unveil Year-Long Campaign That Will Run Through the 2010 Winter Games Vancouver, B.C. - As the world's attention turns to Canada in anticipation of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, PETA is hoping to switch some of the focus from Canada's Games to Canada's shame-the annual massacre of hundreds of thousands of baby seals. At a news conference in Vancouver on Wednesday, PETA will announce a relentless year-long campaign leading up to and through the 2010 Games. The group will unveil its new parody of the Olympic logo targeting the seal slaughter, screen video footage, and display photos of the annual slaughter. The following are just a few aspects of the new campaign: … PETA will join forces with its international affiliates in the U.K., Germany, France, India, Australia, and Asia. On behalf of every animal protection organization in the world, it will focus attention on the massacre by staging protests and sending action alerts to millions of supporters. … The group will use the campaign's logo-a parody of the Olympic logo showing a hunter clubbing a baby seal next to a blood-dripping rendition of the five interlocking Olympic rings-on trading pins and billboards and at pre-Olympic events around the world. … Activists will write letters to the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee to ask for its help in persuading Canadian officials to end the hunt, which places Canada in the worst possible light. The world looked on in horror as the Canadian government permitted the killing of more than 205,000 baby harp seals last year, primarily on the ice floes off Newfoundland and Labrador. These gentle animals have their heads bashed in or are shot, and they are often skinned alive while their wailing mothers look on helplessly. "If Canada wants to clean up its world image for the Olympics, the first thing it should do is call off the universally condemned seal slaughter," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "We want to make sure that everyone who's interested in Canada's Games learns about Canada's shame." For more information, please visit PETA.org. I still like the naked ladies on the ice flows idea better! ***** We don't sell our readers new cars, fancy homes or designer clothes. We don't advocate consumerism nor do we offer facile solutions to serious problems. We do, however, bring together every week writers and activists who are not afraid to speak the truth about our country and our world. The articles we print are not for the faint of heart. As access to accurate information becomes more difficult and free speech and the exchange of ideas becomes more restricted and controlled, small publications and alternative presses disappear. Issues and Alibis may soon join that list. We aren't asking for much-not thousands of dollars a month, not tens of thousands a year. What we need is simply enough money to cover expenses for the magazine. A few thousand dollars a year. A few hundred dollars a month. We cannot continue to go into debt to publish Issues and Alibis but at the same time we cannot, in good conscience, go quietly about our daily lives, remaining silent in face of the injustices perpetrated by our leaders and our government. So we need your help. We need your spare change. A dollar, five dollars, whatever you can contribute. Every penny makes a difference. Ernest & Victoria Stewart *****  05-26-1939 ~ 02-13-2009 Thanks for all the toons! ***** The "W" theatre trailers are up along with the new movie poster and screen shots from the film. They are all available at the all-new "W" movie site: http://wthemovie.com. Both trailers are on site and may be downloaded; the new trailer can be seen with Flash on site. You can download in either PC or Mac formats. I'm in the new trailer as myself but don't blink or you'll miss me! The trailers are also available on YouTube along with a short scene from the film. ******************************************** We get by with a little help from our friends! So please help us if you can...? Donations ******************************************** So how do you like the 2nd coup d'etat so far? And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it? Until the next time, Peace! (c) 2009 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and for the last 8 years managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. In his spare time he is an actor, writer and an associate producer for the new motion picture "W The Movie." |
 Obama On Israel-Palestine By Noam Chomsky Barack Obama is recognized to be a person of acute intelligence, a legal scholar, careful with his choice of words. He deserves to be taken seriously -- both what he says, and what he omits. Particularly significant is his first substantive statement on foreign affairs, on January 22, at the State Department, when introducing George Mitchell to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mitchell is to focus his attention on the Israel-Palestine problem, in the wake of the recent US-Israeli invasion of Gaza. During the murderous assault, Obama remained silent apart from a few platitudes, because, he said, there is only one president -- a fact that did not silence him on many other issues. His campaign did, however, repeat his statement that "if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that." He was referring to Israeli children, not the hundreds of Palestinian children being butchered by US arms, about whom he could not speak, because there was only one president. On January 22, however, the one president was Barack Obama, so he could speak freely about these matters -- avoiding, however, the attack on Gaza, which had, conveniently, been called off just before the inauguration. Obama's talk emphasized his commitment to a peaceful settlement. He left its contours vague, apart from one specific proposal: "the Arab peace initiative," Obama said, "contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative's promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all." Obama is not directly falsifying the Arab League proposal, but the carefully framed deceit is instructive. The Arab League peace proposal does indeed call for normalization of relations with Israel -- in the context -- repeat, in the context of a two-state settlement in terms of the longstanding international consensus, which the US and Israel have blocked for over 30 years, in international isolation, and still do. The core of the Arab League proposal, as Obama and his Mideast advisers know very well, is its call for a peaceful political settlement in these terms, which are well-known, and recognized to be the only basis for the peaceful settlement to which Obama professes to be committed. The omission of that crucial fact can hardly be accidental, and signals clearly that Obama envisions no departure from US rejectionism. His call for the Arab states to act on a corollary to their proposal, while the US ignores even the existence of its central content, which is the precondition for the corollary, surpasses cynicism. The most significant acts to undermine a peaceful settlement are the daily US-backed actions in the occupied territories, all recognized to be criminal: taking over valuable land and resources and constructing what the leading architect of the plan, Ariel Sharon, called "Bantustans" for Palestinians -- an unfair comparison because the Bantustans were far more viable than the fragments left to Palestinians under Sharon's conception, now being realized. But the US and Israel even continue to oppose a political settlement in words, most recently in December 2008, when the US and Israel (and a few Pacific islands) voted against a UN resolution supporting "the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination" (passed 173 to 5, US-Israel opposed, with evasive pretexts). Obama had not one word to say about the settlement and infrastructure developments in the West Bank, and the complex measures to control Palestinian existence, designed to undermine the prospects for a peaceful two-state settlement. His silence is a grim refutation of his oratorical flourishes about how "I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security." Also unmentioned is Israel's use of US arms in Gaza, in violation not only of international but also US law. Or Washington's shipment of new arms to Israel right at the peak of the US-Israeli attack, surely not unknown to Obama's Middle East advisers. Obama was firm, however, that smuggling of arms to Gaza must be stopped. He endorses the agreement of Condoleeza Rice and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni that the Egyptian-Gaza border must be closed -- a remarkable exercise of imperial arrogance, as the Financial Times observed: "As they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else's border -- Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as `fictional'." Egypt's objections were ignored. Returning to Obama's reference to the "constructive" Arab League proposal, as the wording indicates, Obama persists in restricting support to the defeated party in the January 2006 election, the only free election in the Arab world, to which the US and Israel reacted, instantly and overtly, by severely punishing Palestinians for opposing the will of the masters. A minor technicality is that Abbas's term ran out on January 9, and that Fayyad was appointed without confirmation by the Palestinian parliament (many of them kidnapped and in Israeli prisons). Ha'aretz describes Fayyad as "a strange bird in Palestinian politics. On the one hand, he is the Palestinian politician most esteemed by Israel and the West. However, on the other hand, he has no electoral power whatsoever in Gaza or the West Bank." The report also notes Fayyad's "close relationship with the Israeli establishment," notably his friendship with Sharon's extremist adviser Dov Weiglass. Though lacking popular support, he is regarded as competent and honest, not the norm in the US-backed political sectors. Obama's insistence that only Abbas and Fayyad exist conforms to the consistent Western contempt for democracy unless it is under control. Obama provided the usual reasons for ignoring the elected government led by Hamas. "To be a genuine party to peace," Obama declared, "the quartet [US, EU, Russia, UN] has made it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements." Unmentioned, also as usual, is the inconvenient fact that the US and Israel firmly reject all three conditions. In international isolation, they bar a two-state settlement including a Palestinian state; they of course do not renounce violence; and they reject the quartet's central proposal, the "road map." Israel formally accepted it, but with 14 reservations that effectively eliminate its contents (tacitly backed by the US). It is the great merit of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, to have brought these facts to public attention for the first time -- and in the mainstream, the only time. It follows, by elementary reasoning, that neither the US nor Israel is a "genuine party to peace." But that cannot be. It is not even a phrase in the English language. It is perhaps unfair to criticize Obama for this further exercise of cynicism, because it is close to universal, unlike his scrupulous evisceration of the core component of the Arab League proposal, which is his own novel contribution. Also near universal are the standard references to Hamas: a terrorist organization, dedicated to the destruction of Israel (or maybe all Jews). Omitted are the inconvenient facts that the US-Israel are not only dedicated to the destruction of any viable Palestinian state, but are steadily implementing those policies. Or that unlike the two rejectionist states, Hamas has called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus: publicly, repeatedly, explicitly. Obama began his remarks by saying: "Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel's security. And we will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats." There was nothing about the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against far more extreme threats, such as those occurring daily, with US support, in the occupied territories. But that again is the norm. Also normal is the enunciation of the principle that Israel has the right to defend itself. That is correct, but vacuous: so does everyone. But in the context the cliche is worse than vacuous: it is more cynical deceit. The issue is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself, like everyone else, but whether it has the right to do so by force. No one, including Obama, believes that states enjoy a general right to defend themselves by force: it is first necessary to demonstrate that there are no peaceful alternatives that can be tried. In this case, there surely are. A narrow alternative would be for Israel to abide by a cease-fire, for example, the cease-fire proposed by Hamas political leader Khaled Mishal a few days before Israel launched its attack on December 27. Mishal called for restoring the 2005 agreement. That agreement called for an end to violence and uninterrupted opening of the borders, along with an Israeli guarantee that goods and people could move freely between the two parts of occupied Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The agreement was rejected by the US and Israel a few months later, after the free election of January 2006 turned out "the wrong way." There are many other highly relevant cases. The broader and more significant alternative would be for the US and Israel to abandon their extreme rejectionism, and join the rest of the world -- including the Arab states and Hamas -- in supporting a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. It should be noted that in the past 30 years there has been one departure from US-Israeli rejectionism: the negotiations at Taba in January 2001, which appeared to be close to a peaceful resolution when Israel prematurely called them off. It would not, then, be outlandish for Obama to agree to join the world, even within the framework of US policy, if he were interested in doing so. In short, Obama's forceful reiteration of Israel's right to defend itself is another exercise of cynical deceit -- though, it must be admitted, not unique to him, but virtually universal. The deceit is particularly striking in this case because the occasion was the appointment of Mitchell as special envoy. Mitchell's primary achievement was his leading role in the peaceful settlement in northern Ireland. It called for an end to IRA terror and British violence. Implicit is the recognition that while Britain had the right to defend itself from terror, it had no right to do so by force, because there was a peaceful alternative: recognition of the legitimate grievances of the Irish Catholic community that were the roots of IRA terror. When Britain adopted that sensible course, the terror ended. The implications for Mitchell's mission with regard to Israel-Palestine are so obvious that they need not be spelled out. And omission of them is, again, a striking indication of the commitment of the Obama administration to traditional US rejectionism and opposition to peace, except on its extremist terms. Obama also praised Jordan for its "constructive role in training Palestinian security forces and nurturing its relations with Israel" -- which contrasts strikingly with US-Israeli refusal to deal with the freely elected government of Palestine, while savagely punishing Palestinians for electing it with pretexts which, as noted, do not withstand a moment's scrutiny. It is true that Jordan joined the US in arming and training Palestinian security forces, so that they could violently suppress any manifestation of support for the miserable victims of US-Israeli assault in Gaza, also arresting supporters of Hamas and the prominent journalist Khaled Amayreh, while organizing their own demonstrations in support of Abbas and Fatah, in which most participants "were civil servants and school children who were instructed by the PA to attend the rally," according to the Jerusalem Post. Our kind of democracy. Obama made one further substantive comment: "As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza's border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime" He did not, of course, mention that the US-Israel had rejected much the same agreement after the January 2006 election, and that Israel had never observed similar subsequent agreements on borders. Also missing is any reaction to Israel's announcement that it rejected the cease-fire agreement, so that the prospects for it to be "lasting" are not auspicious. As reported at once in the press, "Israeli Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who takes part in security deliberations, told Army Radio on Thursday that Israel wouldn't let border crossings with Gaza reopen without a deal to free [Gilad] Schalit" (AP, Jan 22); ŒIsrael to keep Gaza crossings closed...An official said the government planned to use the issue to bargain for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group since 2006 (Financial Times, Jan. 23); "Earlier this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that progress on Corporal Shalit's release would be a precondition to opening up the border crossings that have been mostly closed since Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in 2007" (Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23); "an Israeli official said there would be tough conditions for any lifting of the blockade, which he linked with the release of Gilad Shalit" (FT, Jan. 23); among many others. Shalit's capture is a prominent issue in the West, another indication of Hamas's criminality. Whatever one thinks about it, it is uncontroversial that capture of a soldier of an attacking army is far less of a crime than kidnapping of civilians, exactly what Israeli forces did the day before the capture of Shalit, invading Gaza city and kidnapping two brothers, then spiriting them across the border where they disappeared into Israel's prison complex. Unlike the much lesser case of Shalit, that crime was virtually unreported and has been forgotten, along with Israel's regular practice for decades of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and dispatching them to Israeli prisons, often held for many years as hostages. But the capture of Shalit bars a cease-fire. Obama's State Department talk about the Middle East continued with "the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and PakistanŠ the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism."A few hours later, US planes attacked a remote village in Afghanistan, intending to kill a Taliban commander. "Village elders, though, told provincial officials there were no Taliban in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, the head of the provincial council" (LA Times, Jan. 24).
Afghan president Karzai's first message to Obama after he was elected in November was a plea to end the bombing of Afghan civilians, reiterated a few hours before Obama was sworn in. This was considered as significant as Karzai's call for a timetable for departure of US and other foreign forces. The rich and powerful have their "responsibilities." Among them, the New York Times reported, is to "provide security" in southern Afghanistan, where "the insurgency is homegrown and self-sustaining." All familiar. From Pravda in the 1980s, for example.
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 Ms Tantalus TANTALUS IS punished by the Gods for reasons that are not entirely clear. He is hungry and thirsty, but the water in which he stands recedes when he bends down to drink from it and the fruit above his head continually evades his hand. Tzipi Livni is now undergoing a similar torture. After winning an impressive personal victory at the polls, the political fruit keeps slipping from her grasp when she stretches out her hand. Why should she deserve that? What has she done, after all? Supported the war, called for a boycott of Hamas, played around with empty negotiations with the Palestinian Authority? OK, she has indeed.. But such a terrible punishment? HOWEVER, THE results of the elections are not as clear as they might seem. The victory of the Right is not so unambiguous. Central to the election campaign was the personal competition between the two contenders for the Prime Minister's office: Livni and Netanyahu (or, as they call themselves, as if they were still at kindergarten, Tzipi and Bibi.) Contrary to all expectations and all polls, Livni beat Netanyahu. Several factors were involved in this. Among others: the masses of the Left were terrified by the possibility of Netanyahu winning, and flocked to Livni's camp in order to "Stop Bibi!" Also, Livni - who was never identified with feminism - remembered at the last moment to call Israel's women to her banner, and they hearkened to her call. But it is impossible to ignore the main significance of this choice: Netanyahu symbolizes total opposition to peace, opposition to giving back the occupied territories, to the freezing of the settlements and to a Palestinian state. Livni, on the other hand, has declared more than once her total support for the "Two-Nation-States" solution. Her voters opted for the more moderate line. True, the big winner in the elections was Avigdor Liberman. But his triumph is far from the fateful breakthrough everyone foresaw. He did not win the 20 seats he had promised. His ascent from 11 to 15 seats is not so dramatic. His party is indeed now the third largest in the Knesset, but that is less due to its own rise than to the collapse of Labor, which fell from 19 to 13. By the way, not one of the parties won even 25% of the vote. Israeli democracy is now very fragile indeed. The Liberman phenomenon is ominous, but not (yet?) disastrous. HOWEVER, THERE is no way to deny the most significant message of these elections: the Israeli public has moved to the right. From Likud to the right there are now 65 seats, from Kadima to the left only 55. One cannot argue with numbers. What has caused this shift? There are several explanations, all of them valid. One can consider it as a passing phase after the war. A war arouses strong emotions - nationalist intoxication, hatred of the enemy, fear of the Other, longing for unity and for revenge,. All these naturally serve the Right - a lesson sometimes forgotten by the left when it starts a war. Others see in it a continuation of a historical process: the Zionist-Palestinian confrontation is becoming wider and more complex, and such a situation feeds the Right. And then there is, of course, the demographic factor. The rightist bloc attracts the votes of three sectors: the Oriental Jews (a majority of whom vote for Likud), the religious (who mostly vote for the fundamentalists) and the Russians (most of whom vote for Liberman). This is a group vote, almost automatic. Two sectors in Israel have an especially high birth-rate: the religious Jews and the Arabs. The religious vote almost unanimously for the Right. True, the Orthodox and the National-Religious parties have not increased their strength in the elections, probably because many of their natural voters chose Likud, Liberman or the even more extreme National Union. The Arab citizens almost completely abstained from voting for Jewish parties, as many of them used to in the past, and the three Arab parties together gained one more seat. The demographic development is ominous. Kadima, Labor and Meretz are identified with the old-established Ashkenazi sector, whose demographic strength is in steady decline. Also, many young Ashkenazis gave their votes - at least four seats worth - to Liberman, who preaches a secular fascism. They hate the Arabs, but they also hate the religious Jews. The conclusion is quite clear: if the "center-left" does not succeed in breaking out of its elitist ghetto and striking roots within the Oriental and Russian sectors, its decline will continue from election to election. NOW MS TANTALUS must choose between two bitter options: to retire to the desert where there is neither water nor fruit, or to serve as a fig-leaf for an obnoxious coalition. Option No. 1: to refuse to join Netanyahu's coalition and to go into opposition. That is not so simple. The Kadima party came into being when Ariel Sharon promised its members - refugees from right and left - power. It will be very hard for Livni to hold the lot together in opposition, far from the seat of power, far from the posh ministers' offices and from luxurious official cars. That would give us a rightist government which includes open fascists, pupils of Meir Kahane (whose party was banned because of his racist teachings), the advocates of ethnic cleansing, of the expulsion of Israel's Arab citizens and the liquidation of any chance for peace. Such a government would inevitably find itself in confrontation with the United States and in worldwide isolation. Some people say: that's good. Such a government will necessarily fall soon and break apart. Thus the public will be persuaded that there is no viable rightist option. Kadima, Labor and Meretz will stew in opposition, and perhaps a real center-left alternative will come into being. Others say: too risky. There is no limit to the disasters that a Netanyahu-Liberman-Kahanist government can bring upon the state, from the enlargement of the settlements that will torpedo any future peace, to outright war. We can't stake everything on one card, when the chip is the State of Israel. Livni's option No. 2: to swallow the bitter pill, give in and join the Netanyahu government as a second, third or fourth wheel. In that case, she must decide at once, before Netanyahu establishes a fait accompli with an extreme-right coalition which Livni would then be invited to join as a junior partner. I shall not be surprised if President Shimon Peres takes the initiative unofficially and promotes this option - before starting, in a week's time, the official process of consulting with the Knesset factions and entrusting one of the candidates with the task of forming a government. Could such a government move towards peace? Conduct real negotiations? Agree to the dismantling of settlements? Accept a Palestinian state? Recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas? Hard to imagine. In the best case, it will go on with the charade of meaningless negotiations, quietly enlarge the settlements, lead Barack Obama by the nose and mobilize the pro-Israel lobby in order to obstruct any real American moves towards peace. What was will be. CAN ISRAEL change course? Can a real peace-oriented alternative arise? The two "Zionist Left" parties have been decisively beaten. Both Labor and Meretz have collapsed. Their two leaders who called for the Gaza War and supported it - Ehud Barak of Labor and Haim Oron of Meretz - have received the punishment they richly deserve. In a normal democracy, both would have resigned the day after the elections. But our democracy is not normal, and both leaders insist on staying on and leading their party to the next disaster. Labor is a walking corpse - the only "social-democratic" party in the world whose leader's sole aim is to stay on as war minister. When Barak spread the mantra "there is no one to talk with" he overlooked the logical conclusion "therefore we don't need anyone to talk with them." The Labor Party has no party, no members, no political program, no alternative leadership. It will fail in opposition as it failed in government. Barring a miracle, it will end up in the junkyard of history. It will find Meretz already there. A socialist party that lost its way a long time ago: a party without any roots in the classes at the foot of the socioeconomic ladder, a party that has supported all our wars. Some believe in easy solutions: a union of Labor and Meretz, for example. That is a union of the lame and the blind. No reason to expect that they would win the race. THE REAL task is far more difficult. A completely new building must be erected in place of the one which has collapsed. The need is for a new Left that will include new leaders from the sectors that have been discriminated against: the Orientals, the Russians and the Arabs. A new Left that will express the ideals of a new generation, people of peace, advocates of social change, feminists and greens, who will all understand that one cannot realize one ideal without realizing all of them. There can be no social justice in a military state; no one is interested in the environment while the cannons are roaring, feminism is incompatible with a society of machos riding on tanks, there can be no respect for Oriental Jews in a society that despises the culture of the Orient. The Arab citizens will have to leave the ghetto in which they are confined and start to talk with the Jewish public, and the Jewish public must talk with the Arabs on equal terms. The Liberman slogan "No Citizenship Without Loyalty" must be turned around: "No Loyalty Without Real Citizenship." As Obama has done in the US, a new language, a new lexicon must be created, to replace the old and tired phrases. Much, much must be changed if we want to save the state. AS FOR Ms. Tantalus: she can contribute to this process of change, or her torture will continue.
Echoing Pyrrhus, king of Epirus and Macedon, she can well say: Another such victory and we are undone.
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 Jailing Kids For Cash By Amy Goodman As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States. Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration: "I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word." Jamie was placed in one of the two controversial facilities, PA Child Care, then bounced around to several other locations. The 11-month imprisonment had a devastating impact on her. She told me: "People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. My family started splitting up ... because I was away and got locked up. I'm still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places [are] just horrible." She began cutting herself, blaming medication that she was forced to take: "I was never depressed, I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn't even know what they were. They said if I didn't take them, I wasn't following my program." She was hospitalized three times. Jamie Quinn is just one of thousands that these two corrupt judges locked up. The Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center got involved when Hillary Transue was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parodying the assistant principal at her school. Hillary clearly marked the Web page as a joke. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Judge Ciavarella. As Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center told me: "Hillary had, unknown to her, signed a paper, her mother had signed a paper, giving up her right to a lawyer. That made the 90-second hearing that she had in front of Judge Ciavarella pretty much of a kangaroo court." The JLC found that in half of the juvenile cases in Luzerne County, defendants had waived their right to an attorney. Judge Ciavarella repeatedly ignored recommendations for leniency from both prosecutors and probation officers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard the JLC's case, then the FBI began an investigation, which resulted in the two judges entering guilty-plea agreements last week for tax evasion and wire fraud. They are expected to serve seven years in federal prison. Two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children. This scandal involves just one county in the U.S., and one relatively small private prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, "the United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.1 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails-a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years." The Wall Street Journal reports that "[p]rison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails." For-profit prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) are positioned for increased profits. It is still not clear what impact the just-signed stimulus bill will have on the private prison industry (for example, the bill contains $800 million for prison construction, yet billions for school construction were cut out). Congress is considering legislation to improve juvenile justice policy, legislation the American Civil Liberties Union says is "built on the clear evidence that community-based programs can be far more successful at preventing youth crime than the discredited policies of excessive incarceration."
Our children need education and opportunity, not incarceration. Let the kids of Luzerne County imprisoned for profit by corrupt judges teach us a lesson. As young Jamie Quinn said of her 11-month imprisonment, "It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we're supposed to look up to and trust."
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Wait - George W did do this, and I did blast him!
The "this" is a recent move by President Barack Obama's justice department to usurp the judicial branch's Constitutional authority to hear a legal case. Obama's lawyers have told the Court of Appeals that it may not proceed with a case brought by five victims of Bush's immoral and illegal program of "extraordinary rendition" - a program that sent war prisoners abroad to be tortured.
In a bid to halt the court proceeding, the Obama presidency has invoked an autocratic doctrine known as "state secrets," arguing that the very subject matter of this case is a government secret of such importance that it cannot bear discussion in a courtroom. This is the same hokey legalistic effort that the Bushites had used to dodge public accountability for their illegal torture program.
Obama's use of the state secrets gimmick to continue covering up Bush's illegalities is ridiculous, because the "secrets" being hidden are hardly secret. From books to TV exposÈs, the world knows about them. As the ACLU lawyer for the victims noted, "The only place in the world where these claims can't be discussed is in this courtroom."
Obama's stand is also a direct betrayal of voters who cheered last year when he frequently and vehemently denounced Bush's use of torture, extraordinary rendition, and - yes - state secrets. Yet, after only one month in office, and in a single case, he has reneged on all three of those principled stands.
What we've learned here is not that Obama is suddenly without principle, but that we have to be vigorous in demanding that he hold true to his principles. One group we can trust to help us do this is the ACLU. Contact it at : www.aclu.org.
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We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelg”nger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington's new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s.
It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. You wouldn't know this from the Obama administration, which seems hellbent on draining the blood out of the body politic and transfusing it into the corpse of our financial system. But by the time Barack Obama is done all we will be left with is a corpse-a corpse and no blood. And then what? We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.
The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund's prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent-the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.
And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state's strategies to crush potential civil unrest and you get a glimpse of the future. It doesn't look good.
"The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications," Blair told the Senate."The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism."
The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College in November in a monograph [click on Policypointers' pdf link to see the report] titled "Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' in Defense Strategy Development." The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States," which could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse," "purposeful domestic resistance," "pervasive public health emergencies" or "loss of functioning political and legal order." The "widespread civil violence," the document said, "would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security."
"An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home," it went on.
"Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance," the document read.
In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of Defense. They are considering it. So should you.
Adm. Blair warned the Senate that "roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown." He noted that the "bulk of anti-state demonstrations" internationally have been seen in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they could not spread to the United States. He told the senators that the collapse of the global financial system is "likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year." He added that "much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international aid or credit, or other coping mechanism."
"When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we're looking for that," he said. He referred to "statistical modeling" showing that "economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period."
Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us. Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal underclass.
The committee's Republican vice chairman, Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, not quite knowing what to make of Blair's testimony, said he was concerned that Blair was making the "conditions in the country" and the global economic crisis "the primary focus of the intelligence community."
The economic collapse has exposed the stupidity of our collective faith in a free market and the absurdity of an economy based on the goals of endless growth, consumption, borrowing and expansion. The ideology of unlimited growth failed to take into account the massive depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming and climate change. The huge international flows of unregulated capital have wrecked the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which will soon deflate), wild tech, stock and housing financial bubbles, unchecked greed, the decimation of our manufacturing sector, the empowerment of an oligarchic class, the corruption of our political elite, the impoverishment of workers, a bloated military and defense budget and unrestrained credit binges have conspired to bring us down. The financial crisis will soon become a currency crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.
The corporate thieves, those who insisted they be paid tens of millions of dollars because they were the best and the brightest, have been exposed as con artists. Our elected officials, along with the press, have been exposed as corrupt and spineless corporate lackeys. Our business schools and intellectual elite have been exposed as frauds. The age of the West has ended. Look to China. Laissez-faire capitalism has destroyed itself. It is time to dust off your copies of Marx.
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Captain May's Analysis
An alarming report reached me on Thursday, Feb. 12. It stated that Homeland Security and FEMA are now preparing for a disaster and martial law in Chicago:
"Inside source reveals FEMA & DHS preparing for mass graves and martial law near Chicago."
After I listened to the brief audio part of the report, I found no reason to reject the identification of the speaker as an inside source. As for the particulars of disaster preparations, they are consistent with specific inside information I have been receiving since April/May 2006.
I will further analyze the Chicago scenario in an upcoming column. For the time being, I hope that concerned patriots will review this article and its links. Please forward it, especially to the Chicago area and its first responders. With further networking we shall assimilate and circulate information that the mainstream media withholds or distorts.
The new Chicago information dovetails with the December 2008 article by Major William B. Fox. It was widely published and discussed, and it detailed successful effort by Internet activists to forestall a false flag attempt against the 110-story Sears Tower on May 3, 2006 (its 33rd anniversary).
"Chicago Cops Dodge Blagojevich/Sears Tower Investigation"
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Major Fox's Hypothesis
On Feb. 12th Dr. James Fetzer, founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, interviewed me on his program, The Real Deal (archive: http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com/). We discussed a hypothetical but plausible false flag scenario involving three simultaneous explosions in Israel and the US.
The first explosion, carried out in Israel by the Mossad and blamed on Muslims, would take place at the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, and would outrage Christians worldwide.
"Menacing Warning from Top Israeli: Christ's Crucifixion and Burial Site Will Be Bombed"
The second explosion would take out the Dome of the Rock, clearing the way for the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon (a major Zionist objective).
"Dome of the Rock: Target of Muslim Extremists?"
The third explosion would involve a nuclear device in a US city. The body count would be substantially increased from the 3,000 killed on 9/11 to insure that we would want to nuke Muslims and not ask too many questions before doing it.
Any attack like the three above would further mobilize us into domestic tyranny and foreign wars, while distracting us from economic depression and the groups that brought it about.
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Writers' endnote -- for further reading we recommend:
"9/11 Was Good for Us!" -- The Case against Israel
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By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff's duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else's imagination.
Unfortunately, that's a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.
Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.
At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?
Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naÔve, it's worth remembering just how many influential voices - notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review - promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.
Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion - but the surge in debt had been all too real.
So now we're in trouble - deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I'm not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now.
For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks, which are indeed in even worse shape than the rest of the system. But the banks aren't the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.
And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.
Are policy makers ready to do what it takes to break this vicious circle? In principle, yes. Government officials understand the issue: we need to "contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral," says Lawrence Summers, a top Obama economic adviser.
In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don't look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won't do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. And the much-awaited announcement of the bank rescue plan left everyone confused rather than reassured.
There's hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance, with even Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham conceding that it may be necessary. But even if we eventually do what's needed on the bank front, that will solve only part of the problem.
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn't just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government's debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.
Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion - our decade at Bernie's - will be a long, painful slump.
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 Getting The Goat A Bipartisan Proposal on Torture By Chris Floyd Jason Leopold has the low-down on some more smoking guns proving the highest level involvement in some of the basest tortures in the American gulag. In this case, we have more documentary evidence, gathered by the Pentagon's own investigators, linking former Pentagon honcho Donald Rumsfeld - the preppy pipsqueak who nosed his way through blood and filth for decades at the center of the American power structure - to the criminal abuse and murder of several prisoners by government goons who were following Rummy's "Special Interrogation Plan." As Leopold reports: Those documents which span thousands of pages include: * Investigation of two deaths at Bagram. Both detainees were determined to have been killed by pulmonary embolism caused as a result of standing chained in place, sleep depravation and dozens of beatings by guards and possibly interrogators. (Also reveals the use of torture at Gitmo and American-Afghani prisons in Kabul). * Investigation into the homicide or involuntary manslaughter of detainee Dilar Dababa by U.S. forces in 2003 in Iraq. * Investigation launched after allegations that an Iraqi prisoner was subjected to torture and abuse at "The Disco" (located in the Special Operations Force Compound in Mosul Airfield, Mosul, Iraq). The abuse consisted of filling his jumpsuit with ice, then hosing him down and making him stand for long periods of time, sometimes in front of an air conditioner; forcing him to lay down and drink water until he gagged, vomited or choked, having his head banged against a hot steel plate while hooded and interrogated; being forced to do leg lifts with bags of ice placed on his ankles, and being kicked when he could not do more. * Investigation of allegations of torture and abuse that took place in 2003 at Abu Ghraib. * Investigation that established probable cause to believe that U.S. forces committed homicide in 2003 when they participated in the binding of detainee Abed Mowhoush in a sleeping bag during an interrogation, causing him to die of asphyxiation. A separate report issued by Army Maj. Gen. George R. Fay several years ago said Other prisoner abuses resulted from Rumsfeld's verbal and written authorization in December 2002 allowing interrogators to use "stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, removal of clothing and the use of detainees' phobias (such as the use of dogs)." ...Rumsfeld's approval of certain interrogation methods outlined in a December 2002 action memorandum was criticized by Alberto Mora, the former general counsel of the Navy. "The interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary [of Defense] should not have been authorized because some (but not all) of them, whether applied singly or in combination, could produce effects reaching the level of torture, a degree of mistreatment not otherwise proscribed by the memo because it did not articulate any bright-line standard for prohibited detainee treatment, a necessary element in any such document," Mora wrote in a 14-page letter to the Navy's inspector general. But Rumsfeld did not confine himself to general principles of torture. He sometimes took a keenly personal interest as well: Additionally, a Dec. 20, 2005, Army Inspector General Report relating to the capture and interrogation of suspected terrorist Mohammad al-Qahtani included a sworn statement by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt. It said Secretary Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in the interrogation of al-Qahtani and spoke "weekly" with Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantanamo, about the status of the interrogations between late 2002 and early 2003. Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents al-Qahtani, said in a sworn declaration that his client, imprisoned at Guantanamo, was subjected to months of torture based on verbal and written authorizations from Rumsfeld. "At Guant·namo, Mr. al-Qahtani was subjected to a regime of aggressive interrogation techniques, known as the 'First Special Interrogation Plan,' that were authorized by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," Gutierrez said. "Those techniques were implemented under the supervision and guidance of Secretary Rumsfeld and the commander of Guant·namo, Major General Geoffrey Miller. These methods included, but were not limited to, 48 days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory over-stimulation, and threats with military dogs." We know that President Obama and leading Democrats believe that no one should be prosecuted for these putrid atrocities. As the progressive president himself reminded us just the other day, his "general orientation" is to "move forward," not look back at such unseemly matters. We know that President Obama and leading Democrats believe that no one should be prosecuted for these putrid atrocities. As the progressive president himself reminded us just the other day, his "general orientation" is to "move forward," not look back at such unseemly matters as a widespread system of torture and murder created by the top officials of the government which he now heads. And the most that any Democrat with even a modicum of influence - Sen. Patrick Leahy - is willing to do is to suggest setting up a "truth commission" that will punish no one for their base crimes. A shameful situation all around. But in keeping with the spirit of comity and cooperation that exemplifies our new era - an era whose motto, also stated by the president, is "do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good" - we would like to suggest a compromise. It is obvious that there is no political will amongst our great and good to launch a wide-ranging criminal prosecution of the atrocities that have been so well documented. It's just not going to happen. Yet it is also clear that a majority of the American people do want to see some sort of investigation and redress of these high crimes, as USA Today reports. So why don't we split the difference, in the good-old fashioned time-honored tradition of the Beltway's beloved centrists? Let's take one high-level fall guy and put him through the legal meat-grinder: investigate him, try him, and put him in prison for the rest of his life, as a symbol that "no one is above the law." Sure, it will be a sham; all kinds of powerful people will continue to get away, literally, with murder, because they are, literally, above the law. But the folks at home can go back to believing they are living in the last best greatest whizbang God-blessed happy valley homeland on earth, and stop pestering their betters with all this sissy handwringing about torture. The Republicans can claim they got rid of their "bad apple," and the Democrats can claim they have "restored American honor." Most importantly, at least one of these bloodstained putzes will get what's coming to him. As the Scarlet Pimpernel would say: Odd's fish, that's something, isn't it? It's certainly better than no justice at all - which is precisely what we will get if our "forward-looking" president and our toothless "truth commissioners" have their way. So I hereby nominate Donald Henry Rumsfeld to be the designated sacrifice of the American elite to expiate the blood guilt of the United States government (at least for a few news cycles). It is an honor that he richly deserves; why, one might say that he made love to this employment.
We wait with bated breath for the White House to act upon this bold, bipartisan compromise.
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 Iraq Reconstruction The Greatest Fraud in US History? By Patrick Cockburn In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme. "I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad," said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003. In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in "pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills" to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering. Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad's infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later. Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defense Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armored cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defense Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud. American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of senior US officers involved in the program to rebuild Iraq, according to The New York Times, which cites interviews with senior government officials and court documents. Court records reveal that, in January, investigators subpoenaed the bank records of Colonel Anthony B Bell, now retired from the US Army, but who was previously responsible for contracting for the reconstruction effort in 2003 and 2004. Two federal officials are cited by the paper as saying that investigators are also looking at the activities of Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald W Hirtle of the US Air Force, who was senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004. It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, who have both said they have nothing to hide. The end of the Bush administration which launched the war may give fresh impetus to investigations into frauds in which tens of billions of dollars were spent on reconstruction with little being built that could be used. In the early days of the occupation, well-connected Republicans were awarded jobs in Iraq, regardless of experience. A 24-year-old from a Republican family was put in charge of the Baghdad stock exchange which had to close down because he allegedly forgot to renew the lease on its building. In the expanded inquiry by federal agencies, the evidence of a small-time US businessman called Dale C. Stoffel who was murdered after leaving the US base at Taiji north of Baghdad in 2004 is being re-examined. Before he was killed, Mr Stoffel, an arms dealer and contractor, was granted limited immunity from prosecution after he had provided information that a network of bribery - linking companies and US officials awarding contracts - existed within the US-run Green Zone in Baghdad. He said bribes of tens of thousands of dollars were regularly delivered in pizza boxes sent to US contracting officers. So far, US officers who have been successfully prosecuted or unmasked have mostly been involved in small-scale corruption. Often sums paid out in cash were never recorded. In one case, an American soldier put in charge of reviving Iraqi boxing gambled away all the money but he could not be prosecuted because, although the money was certainly gone, nobody had recorded if it was $20,000 or $60,000. Iraqi ministers admit the wholesale corruption of their government. Ali Allawi, the former finance minister, said Iraq was "becoming like Nigeria in the past when all the oil revenues were stolen." But there has also been a strong suspicion among senior Iraqis that US officials must have been complicit or using Iraqi appointees as front-men in corrupt deals. Several Iraqi officials given important jobs at the urging of the US administration in Baghdad were inexperienced. For instance, the arms procurement chief at the centre of the Defence Ministry scandal, was a Polish-Iraqi, 27 years out of Iraq, who had run a pizza restaurant on the outskirts of Bonn in the 1990s. In many cases, contractors never started or finished facilities they were supposedly building. As security deteriorated in Iraq from the summer of 2003 it was difficult to check if a contract had been completed. But the failure to provide electricity, water and sewage disposal during the US occupation was crucial in alienating Iraqis from the post-Saddam regime. Female suicide bomber kills 39 Shia on pilgrimage A woman suicide bomber blew herself up in the middle of a crowd of Shia pilgrims who were celebrating a religious festival south of Baghdad yesterday, killing 39 and wounding 69 others. The explosion was the latest in a series of attacks in different parts of Iraq which undermine hopes that the country would become less violent as the government re-establishes its authority. The bombing took place at Iskandariya, 25 miles south of Baghdad, as hundreds of thousands of Shia marched to the holy city of Kerbala to celebrate the festival of Arbain. Female bombers are increasingly used by al-Qa'ida in Iraq because their long black robes make it easier for them to conceal explosives and because male soldiers and police, 40,000 of whom are protecting the pilgrims, are inhibited from searching women. "We came here for the pilgrimage," said Sadia Ali, who was walking to Kerbala from the Sadr City slum. "We aren't afraid. We've been through worse events in the past." A day earlier another bomber killed eight pilgrims and injured 15 in Kerbala, showing al-Qa'ida still has a network capable of launching sectarian attacks. The success of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - running on a non-religious platform - in coming first in the polls in Baghdad and Basra in the provincial elections on January 31 kindled hopes that secularism and nationalism were beginning to overcome sectarian differences. Recent bombings and shootings show that the Sunni-Shia conflict remains very much alive though casualties are much lower than in the 2005-07 civil war. In northern Iraq, tension between Arabs and Kurds is increasing in the wake of the election that saw Kurdish control of Nineveh province and its capital Mosul eroded. The Kurds previously had a majority on the local council thanks to a boycott by the Sunni majority in the previous election in 2005. But in the latest poll the Kurds won 31 per cent, about their proportion of the three million population of Nineveh, and al-Hadba, a Sunni Arab coalition dedicated to rolling back Kurdish influence, won 48 per cent. In the days since the election, there has been a surge of violence. On Monday, four American soldiers and an interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb. Two important local politicians have been assassinated. The latest was Ahmed Fathi al-Jabouri who was walking out of a mosque after evening prayers when a car drew up and a gunman shot him in the head. Elsewhere in the city there have been repeated bomb attacks on police and government installations with heavy loss of life. Some of this violence is a battle for power within the Sunni community but overall friction between Arabs and Kurds has been growing across northern Iraq in the past six months. The government of Mr Maliki has been sending units of the Iraqi army which are Arab to replace those that are Kurdish in both Kirkuk and Nineveh provinces. This is highly sensitive since the Kurds claim all of Kirkuk and Kurdish parts of Nineveh outside Mosul. Kurdish leaders do not conceal their anger at Mr Maliki's actions in disputed areas. "There is an effort to move away Kurdish officers above a certain rank," says Safeen Dizayee, a senior official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party led by the Kurdish President Masoud Barzani. He says that last year the Iraqi army's Twelfth Division was moved close to Kirkuk without prior consultation with the Kurds. He adds that Mr Maliki's government is "becoming a one-man show," taking important decisions, such as appointing commanders of the 16 Iraqi army divisions, without consultation with his Kurdish coalition partners.
Mr Maliki's confrontational attitude to the Kurds did him nothing but good with Arab Iraqis in the election. But the Kurds are highly sensitive to any move by non-Kurdish troops into disputed areas which they hope will join their autonomous area, the Kurdish Regional Government, through a referendum as they have long demanded.
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 Government Is Betting The Farm; Your Farm! By Mike Folkerth Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News is on the air, armed with another dose of the painful truth aimed at keeping the pain out of your lives. I'm going to leave this article up over the week-end, it's that important. If in fact, you can get your mind around the content of this article, the rest is easy. I'm going to be on the road next week and will do my best to produce some content. Please be patient, I need some time to think and consider the outcome of our governments current ill advised approach. Yesterday I posted the following comment: "I'm sick and tired of hearing this thing called a 'Credit Crisis.' I hear that term 100 times per day! What we have is a 'Borrowing Crisis.' We borrowed against the future and the future has come calling for payback." I asked for anyone who really believes that we have a credit crisis to please explain it to me. There were no takers. So why then do the main-streamers continue to use the term? Do they believe it or are they simply greedy pigs? I'll leave that for you decide. In a nation that bases their entire economy on borrow and spend; lack of credit is somewhat of a crisis. In the U.S. we have mortgaged our children's, children's, children to the hilt and flat ran out of collateral. Somewhere between 80% and 85% of Americans are now quite broke if their phantom home equity is not considered. Many Americans have lost their jobs to the planned recession and . . ."Whoa, hold it there Jonesy, what do you mean 'planned' recession?" I thought you'd never ask. When a plan is put into action and that plan is mathematically fatally flawed, the consequences while perhaps unintended, were none the less; planned. Our government's ability to print endless quantities of money without physical backing (think no gold standard), and to loan that ever increasing money supply against phantom assets (think credit default swaps), will eventually eclipse all present and future possibilities of repayment; which it has. In the real world, the above situation is called bankruptcy. In the mystical world of Microbamaonomics, it's called round-up-time. All of the sheep are rounded up in the middle of winter and sheared of their last protective coat. In the discipline of MicrObamanomics, which is eerily similar to MicroBushonomics, we must first get the money flowing by borrowing gigantic sums of cash against phantom assets that will incur compounding interest based on long term colossal debt after which Americans can get back to saving. And you thought the Wizard of Oz was a little loopy. What's most amazing about this entire spectacle is that American's in general actually consider that the current plan might work! Leroy says, "I tell ya what I've got in mind Earl. I'm gonna take my Harley out and jump the quarter mile across the Black Canyon. The good news is, I have a side car and you being my good buddy..." Going along with our current plan is far crazier than jumping in Leroy's side car; Leroy might actually have a .0001% chance of making it. Slip out of the herd folks before we reach the shearing pens. Take preventive action. I have written many revealing articles. One such article talked about what really happened that started the ball for this last dance. In other words, it wasn't the government version. As a reminder, not only does government not know much, many of them don't even suspect anything. During the lending and housing craze that was purposely created to get out of our last encounter with reality and which led up to our current debacle, government and Wall Street were counting on creating inflation; which they did. More importantly however, they were counting on creating wage inflation to repay the inflationary debt; which they didn't. Everything in America was going up like a rocket, including CEO pay, but not the wages of the Middle Class. Wage inflation was considered such a certainty that the likes of Allen Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, the talking heads on Wall Street, and the main-stream news, all called for a soft landing. There would be no recession, the U.S. would experience real growth in GDP, tax receipts would increase; after all, that scenario had always followed purposely induced inflation. What went wrong, what changed, why didn't wages rise? If you follow this blog, you know what went wrong. But our government doesn't read the King of Simple News, they are still pondering the above questions behind closed doors. Let's face it, you haven't read this slant in the main stream rags. It is such a puzzle to government and the crazed economist's who steer them, that we are currently repeating the experiment to see if lightening really can strike twice in the same place. Every possible measure is now being applied for the purpose of creating a new round of inflation. Inflation that our leadership is confident, will be followed by wage inflation. And, they are betting your quality of life on it.
Of course, it won't work. Because there is no such thing as a "service economy" outside the minds of economists, the U.S. Congress, the robber barons of the notorious Wall Street Gang and the terminally insane, but then I repeat myself.
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 Despite These Riots, I Stand By What I Wrote The answer to the problems of free speech is always more free speech By Johann Hari Last week, I wrote an article defending free speech for everyone - and in response there have been riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who published the article. Here's how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on "abuses of free expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets." Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it. I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists - of all stripes - have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths. They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead, they must be "respected" - by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of "adulterous" women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these are "religious" issues, and it is "offensive" to talk about them. This trend is not confined to the UN. It has spread deep into democratic countries. Whenever I have reported on immoral acts by religious fanatics - Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim - I am accused of "prejudice," and I am not alone. But my only "prejudice" is in favour of individuals being able to choose to live their lives, their way, without intimidation. That means choosing religion, or rejecting it, as they wish, after hearing an honest, open argument. A religious idea is just an idea somebody had a long time ago, and claimed to have received from God. It does not have a different status to other ideas; it is not surrounded by an electric fence none of us can pass. That's why I wrote: "All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him. I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. When you demand "respect", you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade." An Indian newspaper called The Statesman - one of the oldest and most venerable dailies in the country - thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor, and the publisher to be arrested - or worse. They brought Central Calcutta to a standstill. A typical supporter of the riots, Abdus Subhan, said he was "prepared to lay down his life, if necessary, to protect the honour of the Prophet" and I should be sent "to hell if he chooses not to respect any religion or religious symbol? He has no liberty to vilify or blaspheme any religion or its icons on grounds of freedom of speech." Then, two days ago, the editor and publisher were indeed arrested. They have been charged - in the world's largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly guaranteeing a right to free speech - with "deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings." I am told I too will be arrested if I go to Calcutta. What should an honest defender of free speech say in this position? Every word I wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth - especially in a democracy of a billion people riven with streaks of fanaticism from a minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize. I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that could lead to a rerun of India's hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want - as long as I too have the right to respond. It's worth going through the arguments put forward by the rioting fundamentalists, because they will keep recurring in the twenty-first century as secularism is assaulted again and again. They said I had upset "the harmony" of India, and it could only be restored by my arrest. But this is a lop-sided vision of "harmony." It would mean that religious fundamentalists are free to say whatever they want - and the rest of us have to shut up and agree. The protestors said I deliberately set out to "offend" them, and I am supposed to say that, no, no offence was intended. But the honest truth is more complicated. Offending fundamentalists isn't my goal - but if it is an inevitable side-effect of defending human rights, so be it. If fanatics who believe Muslim women should be imprisoned in their homes and gay people should be killed are insulted by my arguments, I don't resile from it. Nothing worth saying is inoffensive to everyone. You do not have a right to be ring-fenced from offence. Every day, I am offended - not least by ancient religious texts filled with hate-speech. But I am glad, because I know that the price of taking offence is that I can give it too, if that is where the facts lead me. But again, the protestors propose a lop-sided world. They do not propose to stop voicing their own heinously offensive views about women's rights or homosexuality, but we have to shut up and take it - or we are the ones being "insulting." It's also worth going through the arguments of the Western defenders of these protestors, because they too aren't going away. Already I have had e-mails and bloggers saying I was "asking for it" by writing a "needlessly provocative" article. When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take a happy position somewhere in the middle. But is this true? I wrote an article defending human rights, and stating simple facts. Fanatics want to arrest or kill me for it. Is there equivalence here? The argument that I was "asking for it" seems a little like saying a woman wearing a short skirt is "asking" to be raped. Or, as Salman Rushdie wrote when he received far, far worse threats simply for writing a novel (and a masterpiece at that): "When Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem against Stalin, did he 'know what he was doing' and so deserve his death? When the students filled Tiananmen Square to ask for freedom, were they not also, and knowingly, asking for the murderous repression that resulted? When Terry Waite was taken hostage, hadn't he been 'asking for it'?" When fanatics threaten violence against people who simply use words, you should not blame the victim. These events are also a reminder of why it is so important to try to let the oxygen of rationality into religious debates - and introduce doubt. Voltaire - one of the great anti-clericalists - said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." If you can be made to believe the absurd notion that an invisible deity dictated The Eternal Unchanging Truth to a specific person at a specific time in history and anyone who questions this is Evil, then you can easily be made to demand the death of journalists and free women and homosexuals who question that Truth. But if they have a moment of doubt - if there is a single nagging question at the back of their minds - then they are more likely to hesitate. That's why these ideas must be challenged at their core, using words and reason. But the fundamentalists are determined not to allow those rational ideas to be heard - because at some level they know they will persuade for many people, especially children and teenagers in the slow process of being indoctrinated. If, after all the discussion and all the facts about how contradictory and periodically vile their 'holy' texts are, religious people still choose fanatical faith, I passionately defend their right to articulate it. Free speech is for the stupid and the wicked and the wrong - whether it is fanatics or the racist Geert Wilders - just as much as for the rational and the right. All I say is that they do not have the right to force it on other people or silence the other side. In this respect, Wilders resembles the Islamists he professes to despise: he wants to ban the Koran. Fine. Let him make his argument. He discredits himself by speaking such ugly nonsense. The solution to the problems of free speech - that sometimes people will say terrible things - is always and irreducibly more free speech. If you don't like what a person says, argue back. Make a better case. Persuade people. The best way to discredit a bad argument is to let people hear it. I recently interviewed the pseudo-historian David Irving, and simply quoting his crazy arguments did far more harm to him than any Austrian jail sentence for Holocaust Denial. Please do not imagine that if you defend these rioters, you are defending ordinary Muslims. If we allow fanatics to silence all questioning voices, the primary victims today will be Muslim women, Muslim gay people, and the many good and honourable Muslim men who support them. Imagine what Britain would look like now if everybody who offered dissenting thoughts about Christianity in the seventeenth century and since was intimidated into silence by the mobs and tyrants who wanted to preserve the most literalist and fanatical readings of the Bible. Imagine how women and gay people would live. You can see this if you compare my experience to that of journalists living under religious-Islamist regimes. Because generations of British people sought to create a secular space, when I went to the police, they offered total protection. When they go to the police, they are handed over to the fanatics - or charged for their "crimes." They are people like Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the young Afghan journalism student who was sentenced to death for downloading a report on women's rights. They are people like the staff of Zanan, one of Iran's leading reform-minded women's magazines, who have been told they will be jailed if they carry on publishing. They are people like the 27-year old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman who has been seized, jailed and tortured in Egypt for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah law. It would be a betrayal of them - and the tens of thousands of journalists like them - to apologize for what I wrote. Yes, if we speak out now, there will be turbulence and threats, and some people may get hurt. But if we fall silent - if we leave the basic human values of free speech, feminism and gay rights undefended in the face of violent religious mobs - then many, many more people will be hurt in the long term. Today, we have to use our right to criticise religion - or lose it. Postscript: If you are appalled by the erosion of secularism across the world and want to do something about it, there are a number of organizations you can join, volunteer for or donate to. Some good places to start are the National Secular Society, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, or - if you want the money to go specifically to work in India - the International Humanist and Ethical Union. (Mark your donation as for their India branch.) Even donating a few hours or a few pounds can really make a difference to defending people subject to religious oppression - by providing them with legal help, education materials, and lobbying for changes in the law.
An essential source of news for secularists is the terrific website Butterflies and Wheels. |
 Drink Tea And Reduce Risk Of Breast Cancer By Thirty-Seven Percent By Barbara Minton Enjoying a cup of tea while reading this article? If so, keep right on drinking. A newly released study has found that drinking tea results in a 37% reduction in breast cancer risk for women under the age of 50, an age in which breast cancer can be particularly virulent. Another recent study has shown that tea drinking reduces risk of endometrial cancer. These results add to the pile of data showing tea is one of the healthiest beverages a person can drink. Study finds tea lowers risk for all common breast cancers The study, reported in the January edition of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention, examined the association of regular tea consumption with the risk of breast cancer in a large population-based, case-controlled study completed in the U.S. Researchers examined data from 5,082 women with breast cancer between the ages of 20 and 74 years from population-based cancer registries, along with 4,501 age-matched controls. Information on usual tea consumption five years prior to the interview and other breast cancer risk factors were analyzed. Results showed that among women less than 50 years old, those consuming three or more cups of tea per day had a 37% reduction in breast cancer risk when compared with women reporting no tea consumption. This relationship was consistent for invasive breast cancers and in situ, and for ductal and lobular breast cancers. Whether it is Black, Green, White or Oolong, tea is the world's second most commonly consumed beverage After water, people around the world rely on this beverage staple from ancient China. Throughout history, people have believed that tea aids the liver, destroys the typhoid germ, purifies the body, and preserves mental equilibrium. In recent times, scientists have documented that many of the health benefits of tea reported through the ages are more than folklore. Black, green, white, and oolong teas all derive their leaves from the Camellia sinensis plant. Research on tea has yielded profound results no matter which variety is used. All the teas from this magical plant provide a wealth of health benefits. Tea provides potent flavonoids and antioxidants Flavonoids in tea are naturally occurring compounds that have antioxidant properties. Antioxidants work to neutralize free radicals, believed to damage elements in the body over time, contribute to chronic disease, and accelerate the aging process. Tea is a research superstar against cancer A study from the January edition of International Journal of Cancer examined the association between endometrial cancer risk and usual consumption of black tea and coffee among 541 women with endometrial cancer and 541 women without such diagnosis at Rosewell Park Cancer Institute in New York. They found a non-significant association with endometrial cancer risk among women who reported drinking more than 2 cups of regular coffee. In women who drank more than 2 cups of tea, a significant decrease in endometrial cancer risk was shown. A significant decrease in risk was also reported for women who drank more than 4 cups of combined coffee and tea. Tea drinking has been shown to play an important role in human cancer reduction by inhibiting uncontrolled cell growth, known as cell proliferation, and by promoting appropriate programmed cell death, known as apoptosis. A recent study found that smokers who drank four cups of decaffeinated green tea per day showed a 31 percent decrease in oxidative DNA damage in white blood cells as compared to those who drank four cups of water. Oxidative DNA damage is implicated in the promotion of many forms of cancer. Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), an abundant polyphenol in green tea, may protect normal cells from carcinogens as well as eliminate cancer cells through promotion of apoptosis. In a test of EGCG with hamsters, researchers found that EGCG suppressed DNA changes and damage, and inhibited growth and multiplication of cancer cells. Consumption of 2.5 cups or more of any tea from the Camellis sinensis plant resulted in a 60 percent drop in rectal cancer risk among Russian tea drinking women compared to those who drank less than 1.2 cups of tea per day. The women who drank between 1.2 and 2.5 cups per day had a 52 percent decrease in risk of rectal cancer. The Iowa Women's Study, which followed post-menopausal women between the ages of 55 and 69 for eight years, found that those who drank two or more cups of tea per day had a 32 percent reduced risk of developing digestive cancers, and a whopping 60 percent decreased risk of developing urinary tract cancers. In a large population-based control study, male participants drinking 4.5 cups of tea per day showed an 18 percent decrease in colon cancer risk, a 28 percent reduction in rectal cancer, and a 47 percent reduced risk of pancreatic cancer. Women who drank 3 cups of tea a day showed a drop in colon cancer risk of 33 percent, a decrease in rectal cancer risk of 43 percent, and a reduction of pancreatic cancer risk by 37 percent. Pancreatic cancer is an especially deadly form of cancer. The major polyphenols of black tea and green tea have been shown to inhibit proteins which are closely associated with tumor growth and metastasis. Black tea polyphenols have also been shown to prevent oxidative DNA damage to colon mucosa. A study at the University of Arizona found that drinking iced black tea with citrus peel provided a 42 percent reduction in risk of skin cancer, while hot black tea consumption was associated with significantly lower risk of squamous cell carcinoma. Consumption of green or black tea decreased the number of tumors in mice following exposure to UV radiation. Topical treatment of green tea polyphenols on human skin prior to UV exposure inhibited DNA damage, thus inhibiting UV induced skin cancer. Green and black tea, or topical preparations of specific tea flavonoids, inhibited the growth of established non-malignant and malignant skin tumors in tumor-bearing mice. In addition, drinking black tea enhanced cell death in the animals. A case-control study from China found that tea consumption decreased risk of ovarian cancer. The more tea that was consumed and the greater the frequency of consumption, the lower was the risk. Compounds in tea work together to provide broad support for cardiovascular health Human population studies have found that people who regularly consume three or more cups of black tea per day have a reduced risk of heart disease and stroke. Studies have shown this risk reduction may be due to improvement in cholesterol levels, blood vessel function, and reduction in oxidative damage. Researchers are examining the mechanisms by which tea flavonoids function in maintaining cardiovascular health. Some studies suggest that several mechanisms work together to collectively improve markers. Blood vessel and endothelial function, ability of blood vessels to dilate to allow for proper blood flow, serum cholesterol levels, and LDL cholesterol are areas currently under study. All of these factors impact the risks for heart attacks, strokes, cardiovascular disease, and other cardiac events. Tea and obesity Preliminary research findings have suggested that drinking tea has an effect on weight, fat accumulation and insulin activity in the body. Researchers have found that:
1.Green tea extract significantly increased 24 hour energy expenditure and fat oxidation in healthy men. Tea and osteoporosis Although it has been suggested that caffeine intake is a risk factor for reduced bone mineral density (BMD), research shows that tea drinking does not negatively impact BMD, and preliminary research suggests that tea may even be protective of bone health. A study published in the April, 2000 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that older women who drank tea had higher BMD measurements than those who did not drink tea. The researchers suggested that flavonoids in tea might influence bone mass. Green and white teas are the least processed Although black, green, white and oolong teas all come from the same plant, each is processed differently. The more processing tea leaves undergo, the darker they will turn, indicating black tea to be the most processed variety. White tea is derived from young silvery leaves in early spring. It contains no chlorophyll. Black and oolong teas are partially dried, crushed and fermented, while green and white teas are simply steamed. Regardless of the processing method, each of these teas contains polyphenols. In fact, tea ranks as high as or higher than many fruits and vegetables in ORAC score, a measure of free radical scavenging ability. Herbal and rooibos teas lack the particular health promoting properties of other teas
Herbal tea is not really tea at all. It is an infusion made with herbs, flowers, roots, spices or other part of plants. The term for the herbal beverage is "tisane". Rooibos falls within the herbal tea or tisane category. It is not really tea either. Neither herbal or rooibos come from the Camellia plant, and therefore do not have the health promoting benefits found in that plant. Although tisane does not contain as many polyphenols, it does promote other various health qualities and has relaxing and calming effects. |
Dear Unterfuhrer Rush, Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, George W. Bush, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Clarence (slappy) Thomas. Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your constant, year after year calling for the destruction of the right to own firearms via your Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Demoncratic Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account! Along with this award you will be given the Iron Cross, first class, with diamond clusters presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 05-23-2009. We salute you Herr Rush, Sieg Heil!
Signed by, Heil Obama |
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On Friday in Salon, Joe Conason argued that there should be no criminal investigations of any kind for Bush officials "who authorized torture or other outrages in the 'war on terror'." Instead, Conason suggests that there be a presidential commission created that is "purely investigative," and Obama should "promise a complete pardon to anyone who testifies fully, honestly and publicly." So, under this proposal, not only would we adopt an absolute bar against prosecuting war criminals and other Bush administration felons, we would go in the other direction and pardon them from any criminal liability of any kind.
I've already written volumes about why immunizing political officials from the consequences for their lawbreaking is both destructive and unjust -- principally: the obvious incentives which such immunity creates (and, for decades, has been creating) for high-level executive branch officials to break the law and, even worse, the grotesque two-tiered system of justice we've implemented in this country (i.e., the creation of an incomparably harsh prison state for ordinary Americans who commit even low-level offenses as contrasted with what Conason calls, approvingly, "the institutional reluctance in Washington to punish political offenders"). Rather than repeat those arguments, I want to focus on an issue that pro-immunity advocates such as Conason simply never address.
The U.S. really has bound itself to a treaty called the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994. When there are credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture, that Convention really does compel all signatories -- in language as clear as can be devised -- to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution" (Art. 7(1)). And the treaty explicitly bars the standard excuses that America's political class is currently offering for refusing to investigate and prosecute: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture" (Art. 2 (2-3)). By definition, then, the far less compelling excuses cited by Conason (a criminal probe would undermine bipartisanship and distract us from more important matters) are plainly barred as grounds for evading the Convention's obligations.
There is reasonable dispute about the scope of prosecutorial discretion permitted by the Convention, and there is also some lack of clarity about how many of these provisions were incorporated into domestic law when the Senate ratified the Convention with reservations. But what is absolutely clear beyond any doubt is that -- just as is true for any advance promises by the Obama DOJ not to investigate or prosecute -- issuing preemptive pardons to government torturers would be an unambiguous and blatant violation of our obligations under the Convention. There can't be any doubt about that. It just goes without saying that if the U.S. issued pardons or other forms of immunity to accused torturers (as the Military Commissions Act purported to do), that would be a clear violation of our obligation to "submit the [torture] case to [our] competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution." Those two acts -- the granting of immunity and submission for prosecution -- are opposites.
And yet those who advocate that we refrain from criminal investigations rarely even mention our obligations under the Convention. There isn't even a pretense of an effort to reconcile what they're advocating with the treaty obligations to which Ronald Reagan bound the U.S. in 1988. Do we now just explicitly consider ourselves immune from the treaties we signed? Does our political class now officially (rather than through its actions) consider treaties to be mere suggestions that we can violate at will without even pretending to have any justifications for doing so? Most of the time, our binding treaty obligations under the Convention -- as valid and binding as every other treaty -- don't even make it into the discussion about criminal investigations of Bush officials, let alone impose any limits on what we believe we can do.
What was all the sturm und drang about in 2003 over Bush's invasion of Iraq without U.N. approval, in violation of the U.N. charter? Wasn't it supposed to be a bad thing for the U.S. to violate its own treaties? What happened to that? Conason himself was actually one of the clearest and most emphatic voices presciently highlighting the deceit on which the pro-war case was based, stridently warning of "ruined alliances and damaged institutions." Why, then, is it acceptable now to ignore and violate our treaty obligations with regard to torture and other war crimes committed by high-level Bush officials? What's the argument for simply pretending that these obligations under the Convention don't exist?
* * * * *
On a related note, Conason, in the very first paragraph of Friday's article, plainly misstated the results of a new Gallup poll on the question of whether Bush officials should be prosecuted and/or investigated. I have no doubt it was unintentional, but his error highlights a very important point about how this debate has proceeded. Here's what Conason wrote in his first paragraph (emphasis added):
More than 60 percent of Americans believe that alleged abuses and atrocities ordered by the Bush administration should be investigated either by an independent commission or by federal prosecutors, according to a poll released yesterday by the Gallup Organization. A significant minority favors criminal sanctions against officials who authorized torture or other outrages in the "war on terror" -- yet a considerably larger minority of nearly 40 percent prefers that the Obama administration leave its wayward predecessors be.
That last assertion (the one I bolded) is simply untrue. As Jim White notes here, the Gallup poll asked about three different acts of Bush lawbreaking: (1) politicization of DOJ prosecutions, (2) warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (3) torture. For each crime, it asked which of three options respondents favored: (1) a criminal investigation by the DOJ; (2) a non-criminal, fact-finding investigation by an independent panel; or (3) neither. The full results are here.
For all three separate acts of alleged crimes, the option that receives the most support from Americans is criminal investigations (i.e., the exact opposite of what Conason wrote). And the percentage that favor that nothing be done is in every case less than the percentage that want criminal investigations, and the "do-nothing" percentage never reaches 40% or close to it (the highest it gets is 34% -- roughly the same minority of pro-Bush dead-enders that continue to support most of what was done).
As White notes, the breakdowns are even more revealing. For all three areas of lawbreaking, majorities of Democrats (which, by the way, is now the majority party) favor criminal investigations. For each of the three areas, more independents favor criminal prosecutions than favor doing nothing, and large majorities of independents -- ranging from 59% to 71% -- want either a criminal investigation or an independent fact-finding investigation. A Washington Post poll from a couple weeks ago found very similar results: majorities of Americans (and large majorities of Democrats) favor investigations into whether Bush officials broke the law and, by a wide margin, oppose the issuance of pardons to Bush officials.
Imagine what those numbers would be in a world where virtually every establishment political pundit -- literally: whether Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative -- weren't uniting together to oppose prosecutions for torture and war crimes. Even with that unified anti-prosecution stance from a trans-partisan rainbow of Beltway opinion-makers, criminal investigations remain the leading position among Americans generally and among majorities of Democrats specifically. Those are just facts.
As is always the case, the mere fact that majorities of Americans believe X does not mean that X is right or true. But pundits, journalists and politicians should stop claiming that they're speaking for most Americans when they argue that we should just "move on" -- or that the belief in investigations is the province of the leftist fringe -- because that claim is demonstrably false.
Recall when opposition to the Iraq War and a demand for a withdrawal timetable was routinely depicted by the Beltway class as a "liberal" or even Far Left position -- even though large majorities of Americans held exactly those views. Apparently, the Far Left encompassed more than 60% of the country. Or recall when Time's Managing Editor, Rick Stengel, went on national TV and claimed that Americans don't want Bush officials and Karl Rove investigated for the U.S. Attorney scandal even when polls showed that large majorities of Americans favored exactly those investigations (a false claim which, to this day, Stengel refuses to retract).
That is the same flagrant distortion of public opinion that one finds here in the debate over investigations. The Washington Post's David Ignatius claims that a desire for investigations of Bush crimes is confined to "liberal score-settlers." Lindsey Graham asserts that only the "hard Left" wants criminal investigations. Newsweek's Jon Barry is certain that the desire for investigations is only about "vengeance, pure and simple."
Apparently, huge numbers of Americans -- majorities, actually -- are now liberal, vengeance-seeking, score-settlers from the Hard Left. What we actually have is what one finds again and again: establishment journalists who will resort to outright distortions about American public opinion in order to render it irrelevant, by claiming that "most Americans" believe as they believe even where, as here, that claim is categorically false. It's hardly surprising (except to an insular Beltway maven) that Americans, who know that they will be subjected to one of the world's harshest and most merciless criminal justice systems if they break the law, don't want political elites exempted from the rule of law. Imagine that.
* * * * *
Finally, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff -- echoing a report from John Yoo's Berkeley colleague, Brad DeLong -- reports that an internal DOJ probe (initiated during the Bush administration) has preliminarily concluded that Bush DOJ lawyers who authorized torture (John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury) violated their professional duties as lawyers by issuing legal conclusions that had no good faith basis, and that this behavior will be referred to their state bar associations for possible disciplinary action. Those conclusions so infuriated the allegedly honorable Michael Mukasey that he refused to accept the report until changes were made. Now it is up to Eric Holder to accept and then release that report.
The implications of this event can't be overstated. One of the primary excuses offered by Bush apologists and those who oppose investigations is that Bush DOJ lawyers authorized the torture and opined that it was legal. But a finding that those lawyers breached their ethical obligations would mean, by definition, that the opinions they issued were not legitimate legal opinions -- i.e., that they were not merely wrong in their conclusions, but so blatantly and self-evidently wrong that they were issued in bad faith (with the intent to justify what they knew the President wanted to do, rather than to offer their good faith views of what the law permitted).
The Convention Against Torture explicitly prohibits the domestic legalization of torture, and specifically states that it shall not be a defense that government officials authorized it. So whether or not these legal opinions were issued in good faith is irrelevant to our obligations under that treaty to investigate and prosecute. But a finding that these legal opinions were issued in bad faith -- with the deliberate intent to knowingly legalize what was plainly criminal behavior -- will gut the primary political excuse for treating Bush officials differently than common criminals.
UPDATE: Citing numerous leading international law authorities, Valtin has an excellent discussion of the obligations the U.S. has to criminally investigate Bush crimes, not only under the Convention Against Torture but also under the Geneva Conventions. If we don't consider ourselves bound by the treaties we sign, we should just say so and abrogate them. Those demanding criminal immunity for Bush officials are advocating that we can and should violate our treaty obligations; they really ought to be honest about it.
UPDATE II: On June 28, 2004, George Bush commemorated the U.N. Day to Support Torture Victims and vowed that the U.S. "will investigate and prosecute all acts of torture and undertake to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment in all territory under our jurisdiction." In doing so, he specifically cited the U.S.'s binding obligation under the Convention to do so (h/t leftydem):
To help fulfill this commitment, the United States has joined 135 other nations in ratifying the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. America stands against and will not tolerate torture. We will investigate and prosecute all acts of torture and undertake to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment in all territory under our jurisdiction. American personnel are required to comply with all U.S. laws, including the United States Constitution, Federal statutes, including statutes prohibiting torture, and our treaty obligations with respect to the treatment of all detainees. . . .
The United States also remains steadfastly committed to upholding the Geneva Conventions, which have been the bedrock of protection in armed conflict for more than 50 years. . . . [W]e will not compromise the rule of law or the values and principles that make us strong. Torture is wrong no matter where it occurs, and the United States will continue to lead the fight to eliminate it everywhere.
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Just three weeks after Barack Obama was sworn in, we are barraged with complaints because he has not yet wiped out all the vestiges of the Bush administration from the environs of Washington, D.C. We are daily confronted by newspaper items, editorials, and blogs telling us of his shortcomings and failure to correct all the bad Department of Justice decisions, all the illicit Executive Orders, the no-bid contractors, to withdraw all the troops from Iraq, and to restore our country to a state of peace. And yet, the polls show an unprecedented approval by the people!
This is, above all, a man who is measured and prudent in his thinking and has established his priorities for action. He has chosen first to put right our economic state, no insignificant or simple task. Believing in our tri-partate system of government, he allowed the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives to write the necessary legislation, to offer it for a vote, and send it to the Senate where it was amended, passed, and sent to Conference. It moved through the process in record time and is within his recommendations as to the amount of money involved.
This is the way it should be done, people! Are we all so accustomed to the Bush system of change that we expect the President to issue an order and both parties match in lockstep to issue a blank check as they did in his request for authority to "handle" the aftermath of September 11, 2001? Now, that really worked, didn't it?
In the meantime, behind the scenes, there is a small army of people working feverishly; going through records and subpoenaing those that are lacking, compiling data, uncovering facts, and putting information into presentation form that will be given his attention in the order of his pre-determined order of priorities. Buried in those piles of papers are things of which we, the people, have known nothing and we can expect to find several surprises there which President Obama will deal with as they arrive.
Meanwhile, the newly-appointed Secretary of State and the various Ambassadors are traveling all over the world, renewing acquaintances with foreign leaders and establishing bases for official talks to try to correct some of the ills of the rest of the world. Shifts have been made in the accents on the tasks of our troops around the world and in the personnel involved in directing them. There is much yet to be done there and it will be done in due time.
So, what are all the complaints about? Some of the Cabinet choices had to be withdrawn before being confirmed. Has that never happened before? The Vice-President has a bit of a mouth problem, not much of a surprise and at least, he is not running a sub rosa spy program from his basement! Health care and Social Security problems have not yet been solved. Again, not a surprise inasmuch as several administrations have failed in that effort and the President determined that the economy, (the number one concern of the voters), was the most important thing to do first.
The largest and loudest complaint is that President Obama has been unresponsive to the demands for investigation of the previous administration for their many instances of illegal actions and violations of the Constitution. His answers have not been sufficiently decisive for those who feel that this should be done as soon as possible. Suspicions are voiced that the President is "in cahoots" with the "Bush criminals!" Yet, we have no knowledge of the tasks that have been assigned to the Department of Justice other than the fact that we have been told that, if and when the necessary information reaches his desk, he will be ready to respond.
And yet, when the Congress began to lag in the passage of the economic stimulus bill, he turned to the people. Not just to any people and not just to Democratic strongholds where he would be assured of support but the states where he lost to his Republican opponent. The audience was not vetted and there was no "protest zone." It was come-one-come-all and the cheers were as supportive as those on his campaign trail. It may not have caused the bill to pass but it certainly did not hurt the effort when Congress was exposed on the evening news to the faces of their own suffering constituents as they voiced their pleas for relief.
This is a different kind of President. He is probably the most intelligent and, so far, appears to be the most thoughtful and mentally-organized person to hold the office in a very long time. He can carry the weight of all the troubles of the world on his shoulders and yet be able to "put it away" and enjoy a fast game of basketball, take the kids to the beach, and treat his wife to a romantic dinner for Valentine's Day, and then come back to work refreshed and ready for action. He may not be Super Man but he comes close.
The point that the complainers still just don't get is that Barack Obama was not elected to the presidency simply because we wanted to get rid of the Bushes by changing the person in the White House. The "revolution" was not only against George Bush; it was against the "business as usual" of the Washington culture. We sat through eight years of watching the Democrats in Congress roll over and act in a "spirit of bipartisanship" while Bush and Company raped our nation and destroyed much of the world. Retribution can wait. First, the welfare of the people must be restored and the working class put back on their feet so that our neglected infrastructure can be restored and we can, once again, be a proud nation and a leader of the free world.
Let us give the man time, stop carping and nit-picking, and give him a decent amount of time to show progress. It is a Herculean job that cannot be done overnight. It's the least we can do, considering what he is trying to do for us.
~~~ Ed Stein ~~~  |
Waiting out all the sticks they threw at us
Looking past, will we ever learn the way
Lying press that will never spill it all
Blood wherever you go
Those who write the book always keeping score
Even so now here we all are
Blood wherever you go
It carries it carries over
First witnessed shortly after President Obama's historic victory, the open and cheerful smiling has only continued in recent months, leaving members of the black community completely unnerved.
"On behalf of black people across this nation, I would like to say to our white brethren, 'Please stop looking at us like that,'" said Brown University psychology professor Dr. Stanley Carsons. "We're excited Barack is president, too, and we're glad you're happy for us. But giving us the thumbs up for no reason, or saying hello whenever we walk by, is really starting to freak us out."
Added Carsons, "We just want to be able to stand in line at Home Depot without getting patted on the back."
According to the poll, more than 92 percent of African-Americans have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of beaming Caucasians in their vicinity, as well as a marked rise in the instances of white people making direct eye contact with them on the bus, engaging them in pleasant conversation, and warmly gazing in their general direction with a mix of wonder, pride, and profound contentment. All respondents reported being "petrified" by the change.
"Yesterday, I'm pretty sure the cashier at the Giant Eagle winked at me," said Eddie Wilkes, a Pittsburgh resident who described himself as "not a politics person." "Then she said something about what a happy day it was and tried to bump fists. The whole thing gave me the willies."
"I can't even be at a bar anymore if they have the news on," said Chicago native and small business consultant Jarell Brown. "Obama gives a speech on the economy and people act like my team just won the Super Bowl. I didn't even vote for the guy. I'm a Libertarian."
Although poll respondents said that the regularity of jovial white strangers greeting them in elevators has risen approximately 450 percent since mid-January, the incidents are reportedly nowhere near as frequent as they were on Nov. 4, 2008. On that day, the country was temporarily seized by an epidemic of unsolicited white-on-black hugging.
In an attempt to return the nation's interracial interactions to their preinauguration level of stilted awkwardness, the NAACP and the ACLU released a joint statement Monday addressing the issue. In the four-page address, the activist groups call for normalcy and urge the nation's whites to immediately desist creeping everybody out with all the nodding and warmth and raised eyebrows.
"If you could all stop acting like you're generally pleased to see black people walking around, out in the open, that would be better for all of us," NAACP president Benjamin Jealous said to a smiling and misty-eyed press corps that was "just thrilled" to have him there. "It's very kind of you to be so enthusiastic about our achievements, but if it's still on the table, we'd like to return to the times when your reactions varied between unfounded apprehension and complete indifference. To be honest, you people are kind of terrifying when you're happy."
Added Jealous, "Oh, and please stop e-mailing us that picture of Jesse Jackson crying. We've seen it."
While experts couldn't predict how long this unsettling new trend would continue, at least one citizen, who wished to remain anonymous, said he had given up hope of ever feeling comfortable around white people again.
"Everywhere I go, there they are: offering me pancakes, laughing at all my jokes, even bursting into tears when they see me," said the Washington, D.C. resident and father of two. "I know you mean well and all, but seriously, knock it off. You're giving my children nightmares."
As of press time, the nation's Arab-Americans have reported no discernible change in all the angry, reflexive scowling.
W The Movie_Teaser #1
Blood Wherever
By LeAnne Broas
In a sense of new resolve of an old ideal
The peaceful seem to always need to shout
Can our eyes stay open to acknowledge violence
Here and always was
Keep the masses idle while their children die for
Someone, someone else's greed
Follows, flows
Promises that need to be met
Tell us when it carries over
Based on fathers' sins
Fail to write enough
Keep us hateful and unsure
Someone has to say it
Silence is complacent
They fail to ever write enough
Follows, flows
Promises that need to be met
Tell us when it carries over
It carries, it caries over
(c) 2004/2009 LeAnne Broas
Welcome To Canada!
Parting Shots...
Black citizens have reported a disturbing 350 percent increase in interracial high-fiving since January 20
(c) 2009 The Onion
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