Alito Confirmation: A Straussian Neocon Fait Accompli
Kurt Nimmo January 24th 2006

Now that the confirmation of Samuel Alito is a done deal—he won commitments from a majority of senators this afternoon and only a formal vote stands between him and the Supreme Court—we can say good-bye once and for all to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Academics and corporate media commentators like to call the encroaching dictatorial power of the Straussian neocon White House “unitary” presidential power, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves—it is nothing short of the sort of authoritarianism the founders did their best to avoid by establishing separated branches of government and a process of checks and balances, now virtually extinct.

In essence, what we now have is a government owned and ruled by a corporate plutocracy—and the father of modern fascism, Benito Mussolini, defined fascism as corporatism.
Alito is a long-time member of the reactionary Federalist Society and if you want to know how he will rule on the highest court in the land, look no further than this organization and its membership. “Initial funding for the Federalist Society came from the Institute for Educational Affairs, a group founded by Irving Kristol and William Simon,” notes Right Web. “The elder Kristol remained an important funding adviser, while his son William Kristol became closely involved with the Federalist Society, by writing for its publications and speaking frequently at its gatherings. Other early funding came from Pittsburgh mogul Richard Mellon Scaife, the Olin Foundation, Bradley Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation,” in other words, the Federalist Society is infested with the usual Straussian neocon and PNAC suspects. Bush administration insiders and former insiders who are members of the Federalist Society include Michael Chertoff, Spencer Abraham, Gale Norton, John Ashcroft, Theodore Olson, and John Bolton.

“The Bush administration, backed by the neoconservative Federalist Society, has brought the separation of powers, the foundation of our political system, to crisis,” Paul Craig Roberts wrote earlier this month. “The Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers, favors more ‘energy in the executive.’ Distrustful of Congress and the American people, the Federalist Society never fails to support rulings that concentrate power in the executive branch of government…. September 11, 2001, played into neoconservative hands exactly as the 1933 Reichstag fire played into Hitler’s hands. Fear, hysteria, and national emergency are proven tools of political power grabs. Now that the federal courts are beginning to show some resistance to Bush’s claims of power, will another terrorist attack allow the Bush administration to complete its coup?”

I wouldn’t put it past them—in fact, if I was a betting man, I’d say this is precisely what will happen: another nine eleven, possibly one of a larger magnitude, will put the finishing touches on the murder of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. As a side bet, I’d wager this will happen sooner before later, maybe even as soon as this March, as the dollar plummets and the sirens or war (or shock and awe) wail over Iran. Bush (or rather the Straussian neocons since Bush is basically an empty shell, a cardboard cut-out, a cigar store Indian) will need another terror attack on the homeland to consolidate the power of the Straussians, who live in the ponderous philosophical shadow of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt (the last two were hands-on Nazis). As Shadia B. Drury noted in her 1997 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, Strauss’ protégés include: Paul Wolfowitz, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork; William Kristol, William Bennett; Alan Keyes, Francis Fukuyama, John Ashcroft, and William Galston.

Jeffrey Steinberg writes:

The hallmark of Strauss’ approach to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run by “philosophers,” who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish “populist” mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude. For Strauss and all of his protégés (Strauss personally had 100 Ph.D. students, and the “Straussians” now dominate most university political science and philosophy departments), the greatest object of hatred was the United States itself, which they viewed as nothing better than a weak, pathetic replay of “liberal democratic” Weimar Germany.

Now, with the confirmation of Alito, these “philosophers” and “absolute rulers” will finish the task of trashing the “universal principles of natural law,” that is to say the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and especially Thomas Jefferson’s appeal to unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence. Instead of John Locke, we will get Thomas Hobbes and his theory of bellum omnium contra omnes, or “war of all against all,” the preferred state of political exchange in the Straussian world.

Of course, the American people are blissfully unaware to all of this and will—with the advent of another nine eleven, possibly of greater and more horrible magnitude—be deceived into “clueless servitude” and likely suffer the fate of the German people as the Weimar republic was systematically destroyed and Hitler ascended to his throne.

Hitler, unlike Bush and the Straussian neocons, however, didn’t have nuclear weapons at his disposal.

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The evil genius of Karl Rove
Editorial Seattle Times 25 Jan 06

WASHINGTON — Perhaps it's an aspect of compassionate conservatism. Or maybe it's just a taunt and a dare.

Well in advance of Election Day, Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, has a habit of laying out his party's main themes, talking points and strategies.

True Rove junkies (admirers and adversaries alike) always figure he's holding back on something and wonder what formula the mad scientist is cooking up in his political lab. But there is a beguiling openness about Rove's divisive and ideological approach to elections. You wonder why Democrats have never been able to take full advantage of their early look at the Rove game plan.
That's especially puzzling because, since Sept. 11, 2001, the plan has focused on one variation or another of the same theme: Republicans are tough on our enemies, Democrats are not. If you don't want to get blown up, vote Republican.

Thus Rove's speech to the Republican National Committee last Friday, which conveniently said nothing about that pesky leak investigation. Rove noted that we face "a ruthless enemy" and "need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in."

"President Bush and the Republican Party do," Rove informed us. "Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."

Rove went on: "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."

Oh, no, those Dems aren't unpatriotic, just security idiots.

Here's why the same approach keeps working.

First, note that phrase, "the same cannot be said for many Democrats." This is Rove's wedge through the Democratic Party. Rove has always counted on Bush's capacity to intimidate some Democrats into breaking with their party and saying something like: "Oh, no, I'm not like those weak Democrats over there. I'm a tough Democrat." The Republicans use such Democrats to bash the rest of the party.

Moreover, these early Rove speeches turn Democratic strategists into defeatists. The typical Democratic consultant says: "Hey, national security is a Republican issue. We shouldn't engage on that. We should change the subject." In the 2002 elections, the surefire Democratic winners were a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare (an issue Bush tried to steal), a patients' bill of rights, the economy and education. Those issues sure worked wonders, didn't they?

By not engaging the national-security debate, Democrats cede to Rove the power to frame it. Consider that clever line about Democrats having a pre-9/11 view of the world. The typical Democratic response would be defensive: "No, no, of course 9/11 changed the world." More specifically, there's a lot of private talk among Democrats that the party should let go of the issue of warrantless spying on Americans because the polls show that a majority values security and safety.

What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate. They must challenge the terms under which Rove and Bush would conduct it. Imagine, for example, directly taking on that 9/11 line. Does having a "post-9/11 worldview" mean allowing President Bush to do absolutely anything he wants, any time he wants to, without having to answer to the courts, to Congress or the public?

Most Americans — including a lot of libertarian-leaning Republicans — reject such an anti-constitutional view of presidential power. If Democrats aren't willing to take on this issue, what's the point of being an opposition party?

Democrats want to fight this election on the issue of Republican corruption. But corruption is about the abuse of power. If smart political consultants can't figure out how to link the petty misuses of power with its larger abuses, they are not earning their big paychecks.

And, yes, the core questions must be asked: Are we really safer now than we were five years ago? Has the Iraq War, as organized and prosecuted by the administration, made us stronger or weaker? Do we feel more secure knowing the heck of a job our government did during Hurricane Katrina? Do we have any confidence that the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies will clean up their act if Washington remains under the sway of one-party government?

Imagine one Super Bowl team tipping the other to a large part of its offensive strategy. Smart coaches would plot and plan and scheme. You wonder what Democrats will do with the 10-month lead time Rove has kindly offered them.

E.J. Dionne's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is postchat@aol.com

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Enough Senators to Back Alito Confirmation
By JESSE J. HOLLAND Associated Press Writer 25 Jan 06

WASHINGTON - As the Senate begins its final debate on
Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, the conservative jurist already has won enough commitments from senators to become the nation's 110th justice and likely tilt the high court to the right.
Senators were to consider Alito as the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on Wednesday with an eye toward getting him on the Supreme Court before
President Bush's State of the Union speech Jan. 31.

As of late Tuesday, the federal appeals court judge had enough vote commitments for confirmation — a simple majority in the 100-member Senate — with 50 Senate Republicans plus Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska publicly saying through their representatives, in interviews with The Associated Press or in news releases that they would vote for him.

One Republican, Sen. Craig Thomas (news, bio, voting record) of Wyoming, made his decision after meeting with Alito in his Senate office on Tuesday. "His judicial experience is second to none and I'm confident he will do an excellent job handling his constitutional responsibility," Thomas said.

Five Republicans, 23 Democrats and independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont were still publicly undecided or refused to say how they would vote on Alito's nomination. The nominee was meeting with two of the undecided Democrats, Sens. Patty Murray and Jay Rockefeller, on Wednesday in hopes of gaining their votes.

With Alito's ultimate confirmation assured, both Republicans and Democrats were preparing to use him as a campaign issue. Republicans said the Democratic filibuster of lower-court judges helped them defeat the re-election bid of former Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota two years ago.

Democrats, as they did during contentious Judiciary Committee hearings, could use the next few days on Alito's confirmation to continue the debate over the extent of presidential powers. Issues such as the Bush administration's treatment of terror suspects and its domestic spying program are likely to come before the Supreme Court.

As an appeals court judge, said Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., Alito "refuses to enforce core constitutional standards protecting individuals against low-level government officials in routine situations. There's no reason to believe he'll say no to a president who violates individual rights under the cloak of national security."

Democrats also worry that Alito, along with new Chief Justice John Roberts, would make the court more conservative and could even help overturn major decisions such as
Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that declared abortion a fundamental constitutional right.

"Roberts, who promised us humility, who promised us that he would be looking to chart a middle course, we see time and again that he's falling in league with Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas," said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, referring to Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the court's most conservative members. "My fear is that we are adding a fourth vote to that coalition with Sam Alito's nomination. And that's why I'm going to vote no."

Twenty Democrats already have publicly opposed Alito's nomination. All of the eight Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against him Tuesday, leading to a 10-8 party-line vote for the 55-year-old judge from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The only way Democrats could stop Alito is through a filibuster, a maneuver they show little interest in trying. Thus Democrats are working to get a large opposition vote to score points against President Bush.

"I think it sends a message to the American people that this guy is not King George, he's President George," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said.

Republicans say Alito is a perfect choice for the high court. They praise his parrying of Democratic attacks on his judicial record and personal credibility during his confirmation hearings this month.

"If anybody has demonstrated judicial temperament and poise and patience, it is Judge Alito, And he ought to be confirmed on that basis alone," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said.

Roberts won the votes of 22 Democrats last year, including three on the Judiciary Committee — ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont as well as Wisconsin Sens. Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl. Those three senators voted against Alito on Tuesday.
Comment: And so Democracy dies...

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Rove Threatens Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans
Bob Fertik January 24, 2006

Rev. Moon's Insight Magazine says the White House is gearing up for an impeachment battle. It's an unsigned article citing anonymous sources so what's the real agenda here? Let's see if we can find Karl Rove's fingerprints...

Impeachment hearings: The White House prepares for the worst

The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.

Impeachment hearings? Who's talking about impeachment hearings?

"A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment," an administration source said.

A coalition in Congress? Since we're in touch with the Members of Congress in the House who are most likely to impeach Bush, I think we'd know about such a coalition. But right now, there isn't a single Member willing to advocate impeachment. That's why we're launching The Henry Gonzalez Project - to find one Member who is as brave as former Rep. Henry Gonzalez.

Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February.

OK, they're not talking about the House - but about the Senate. Under the Constitution, impeachment begins in the House. So what's going on here?

They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Administration sources said the charges are expected to include false reports to Congress as well as Mr. Bush's authorization of the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant. This included the monitoring of overseas telephone calls and e-mail traffic to and from people living in the United States without requisite permission from a secret court.

Sources said the probe to determine whether the president violated the law will include Republicans, but that they may not be aware they could be helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush.

OK, now a motive for the article is emerging: Karl Rove is trying to scare Republican Senators away from asking hard questions about NSA wiretapping, because otherwise they will be unwitting dupes "helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush." Is that clear, Arlen?

"Our arithmetic shows that a majority of the committee could vote against the president," the source said. "If we work hard, there could be a tie."

OK, so the White House is concerned about losing a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee. A vote on what exactly?

The law limits the government surveillance to no more than 72 hours without a court warrant. The president, citing his constitutional war powers, has pledged to continue wiretaps without a warrant.

The hearings would be accompanied by several lawsuits against the administration connected to the surveillance program. At the same time, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that demands information about the NSA spying.

Sen. Arlen Specter, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, has acknowledged that the hearings could conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law. Mr. Specter, a critic of the administration’s surveillance program, stressed that, although he would not seek it, impeachment is a possible outcome.

"Impeachment is a remedy," Mr. Specter said on Jan. 15. "After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution. But the principal remedy under our society is to pay a political price."

This is all very confusing. It is unlikely that the Senate Judiciary Committee would "conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law." What would be the point of such a vote? The only possible reason would be to refer the issue to the Justice Department for a possible criminal indictment. But in what parallel universe would Attorney General Gonzales indict himself?

Mr. Specter and other senior members of the committee have been told by legal constitutional experts that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to authorize unlimited secret electronic surveillance. Another leading Republican who has rejected the administration's argument is Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.

Hmm - that's two Republican votes on a committee that is 10-8 Republican, so the White House could lose a 10-8 vote. That assumes all the other Republicans support warrantless wiretapping: Hatch, Grassley, Kyl, DeWine, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn. Do all of these guys really love Tyranny and hate Freedom? Hatch, Kyl and DeWine are all up for election this year and may have tough races. Do they really want to run as the Tyrannical Three?

On Jan. 16, former Vice President Al Gore set the tone for impeachment hearings against Mr. Bush by accusing the president of lying to the American people. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 election to Mr. Bush,

Very sorry, but Gore won Florida when all the votes were counted. Karl Rove definitely wrote this article!

accused the president of "indifference" to the Constitution and urged a serious congressional investigation. He said the administration decided to break the law after Congress refused to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government," Mr. Gore said.

"I call upon members of Congress in both parties to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution,” he said. “Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government that you are supposed to be under the constitution of our country."

Impeachment proponents in Congress have been bolstered by a memorandum by the Congressional Research Service on Jan. 6. CRS, which is the research arm of Congress, asserted in a report by national security specialist Alfred Cumming that the amended 1947 law requires the president to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of a domestic surveillance effort. It was the second CRS report in less than a month that questioned the administration's domestic surveillance program.

The latest CRS report said Mr. Bush should have briefed the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. The report said covert programs must be reported to House and Senate leaders as well as the chairs of the intelligence panels, termed the "Gang of Eight."

Administration sources said Mr. Bush would wage a vigorous defense of electronic surveillance and other controversial measures enacted after 9/11. They said the president would begin with pressure on Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Well, that proves the purpose of this article is to scare Senators. I wonder who on Karl Rove's staff wrote this propaganda - and how much Rove paid Rev. Moon out of our tax dollars to publish it?

Mr. Bush would then point to security measures taken by the former administration of President Bill Clinton.

They've been trying to pin this one on Clinton for a month - but that dog won't hunt. Even former Rep. (and current CIA head) Porter Goss said the Clinton's NSA did not eavesdrop on innocent Americans.

"The argument is that the American people will never forgive any public official who knowingly hurts national security," an administration source said.

Oh really? Then why is Karl Rove still in the White House - with a security clearance???

"We will tell the American people that while we have done everything we can to protect them,

Oh really? So why did Bush stay on vacation after he got the August 6 2001 memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"? And why did Bush let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora? And why did Bush invade Iraq, which posed no threat to the U.S., while letting North Korea and Iran escalate their nuclear programs?

our policies are being endangered by a hypocritical Congress."

Hypocritical? Congress isn't spying on millions of innocent Americans - George Bush is!!!!!!!!

Update 1: Moonwatcher extraordinaire Joseph Cannon asks "'Why is Moon pushing the [impeachment] idea now?' After all, the Korean Khrist has long been close to Dubya's daddy."

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The Poisoning of the Well
Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Of Paradoxes and Manna from Heaven

The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States is a profound paradox, a reality that in the natural evolution of human endeavor should not exist, an anathema to the inevitable progression of humanity and civilization, a manifestation that is at odds with what we would expect to exist in the wealthiest, most open and some would say the most learned nation the world has ever seen. Yet, not only does this variant of extremist religion exist in the land of plenty, it thrives, becoming a growing threat to the continued vitality of the nation.

Indeed, a movement already clandestinely growing and attracting more souls before 9/11 was given a gift from the heavens, quite literally, on that fateful day, creating images and emotions that transformed the way millions of Americans saw the world. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, terror fell from the sky like the vengeance-filled thunderbolts of Zeus, spawning a fear and insecurity never before seen inside a nation that had never been attacked on its continental soil. The world was transformed, along with the psyches of millions of people whose beliefs ratified in their minds that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a religious manifestation conjured up by God himself. Paranoid, afraid, uncertain and insecure, thinking themselves living in a troubled world on the verge of its last throes, millions traumatized by the events of 9/11 turned to fundamentalist religion for the salvation reserved for the end of days, answers to most troubling questions and the false comfort that religion offers in times of cataclysm and need.

The profound psychological shift in the minds of tens of millions in the aftermath of 9/11 cannot be underestimated, and must be seen as a monumental trigger that has unleashed the myriad of problems now afflicting America. The trauma, stress, fear and hatred engendered transformed America and its people in ways that have yet to be fully understood.
Images never before seen by a mass population, from every conceivable angle, played and replayed over and over again thanks to the power of television caused a massive paradigm shift the likes of which has never been seen or studied. The gravitational pull towards fundamentalist Christian religion by millions of people is one such reality of the aftereffects of 9/11, as humans tend to seek comfort and answers through religion when the world seems most dangerous and troubled. It is religion, through its myths and fantasies, its gods and parables, that can accommodate the fragile minds inherent in the human condition, offering short-term comfort and security through faith in the invisible and belief in the unknown.

At a time when millions needed to find solace and answers to the evil witnessed on 9/11 Christian extremism opened its doors. When the world was spinning out of control, bursting America’s bubble of security, fundamentalist Christianity took full advantage, absorbing those wanting to understand why God had allowed such wickedness upon our shores. Psychologically fragile, weak-minded and made vulnerable by the events of 9/11, millions quickly believed the lies of false prophets and corrupt high priests, the excuses made by fear engendering televangelists, the reasoning as stated by greed mongering evangelists. God allowed 9/11 to happen, millions were told, because America had become a debauched society, threatened by homosexuality, allowing the mass murder of pin-size zygotes and abandoning the ways of the Bible. America had been allowed to fall away from its Christian ways, and so the always psychotic God had, once again, wrought violence, death and destruction upon the lands of those breaking covenants with the Almighty.

The reality of why 9/11 happened was never told those seeking answers; the truth behind the attacks was destroyed in favor of lies of convenience and opportunity, where high priests saw benefit in tragedy, like good snake-oil salesmen ready to take advantage of opportunity, seeing a chance to expand religious belief and personal power in a society turning more secular and progressive every year. Millions were told what they wanted to hear, not what would help shake their foundations. Of course the fictions of false prophets and the reality of truth have always been mutually exclusive, with truth an enemy of those seeking the control of thought.

It is these charlatans that thrive off of the misfortunes, stresses and tragedies of others, waiting, like sharks in open water, for the right moment to strike, knowing exactly when the human mind is at its most vulnerable, weak enough to succumb to the whispered shrieks of false comfort and fictitious security, its trauma making willing servants of millions to institutionalized control. To the false prophets and high priests, 9/11 became the catalyst needed to push the agenda and interests of the extreme Christian right, presenting this group with the wallets, energy and political power of millions of fragile psyches and frightened converts. As a result, the influence of fundamentalist Christianity has only risen exponentially since 9/11, creating a deep rift throughout the nation.

What should have been eroded over time through civilization’s natural evolution and progression, with the healthy and continued accumulation of America’s wealth, progress, education and an increased standard of living has instead remained strong, in fact gaining numbers and momentum, threatening to help erase centuries of progress and struggle. The prosperity afforded America since its inception, together with its rising secularism, along with the separation of church and state enforced since the nation’s founding, should have been enough to sentence fundamentalist theology to the fringes of society. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. This is the reality of 21st century America, a land modern and progressive yet fighting itself over a return to Middle Ages thought and understanding, with millions of citizens preferring the unenlightenment of Dark Ages rather than the liberation of modern thinking.

Endowed with the greatest level of comfort humankind has ever witnessed, possessing a standard of living never seen in the human condition, addicted to the gluttony of materialism, its citizens living in one of the freest societies ever experienced by any people, able to bask in the riches of the world’s best technologies, education, infrastructure and society in general, America and its citizens, logic would tell us, should be headed in the direction of secularism and knowledge, reaching human enlightenment by escaping the shackles of religion and the indigence of ignorance.

Instead, America finds itself unable to exorcise itself from religious fundamentalism, with millions of its citizens refusing to enter the realm of modernity, and reality, preferring instead to remain captive believers in the myths and fables of primitive peoples living thousands of years ago. To tens of millions of Americans, Christian fundamentalism, with the Bible seen as the literal interpretation of humanity, of the planet’s creation, and of how civilization is to be managed, remains their idea of truth and of reality, even in the face of incontrovertible scientific truth proving otherwise and even with the accumulated knowledge of an ever-progressing society.

In Human Misery Religion Finds a Nest

American Christian fundamentalism, it seems, refuses to bend to the rules of human progress, becoming the exception, not the rule, of what happens to people’s religious beliefs the more education they receive and the better off they become. The more comfortable a life is made the less religious a person tends to become. The more secure a person feels the less religious he will be, and the less miserable her life is the less she will lean on religion for meaning to a life seen harsh and cruel.

The more education one receives, free of the education masking religious brainwashing from birth, has a direct correlation on the level of religious faith one has. Knowledge is power, after all, and education is liberation of free thought, a chance to see the world as it is, not as we are told it should be. There is reason why those seeking control and power consider true education and knowledge the enemy, for free thought, both analytical and logical, with reasoning and open mindedness, invariably leads to questioning of authority, to dissent, protest and debate of myths, beliefs and propaganda, and to thinking outside the box that has for millennia shackled the human mind, rendering us unable to see truth, reality and the possibilities of our own free thoughts and capabilities.

In capturing minds at the earliest possible age, when innocence is tender and naiveté bountiful, those seeking the control of souls, minds and energies know that they are more likely to have loyal slaves for an entire life, for the earlier the brainwashing commences the harder it is for the human mind to later escape its parasitic beliefs. The conditioning must begin early on, therefore, before the mind reaches the age of reason, before free thought can light dark tunnels and black holes, before the myths and fables and gods of religion can be seen for the fantasy they are.

In lives full of suffering, indigence, bitterness, disease, malnutrition and lost ability, where destinies are predetermined and inescapable, where education is nonexistent and anemic, where families are large and immobile, where faith in humanity has been replaced by the dying faith in metaphysical hope, such as those of 3 billion humans living on two dollars a day, or five billion people living on less than ten dollars a day, many living at the margins of human habitation, religion, whether fundamentalist or otherwise, finds its most suitable hosts, jumping, like a virus, from soul to soul, gorging on false faith and in the hope that a better life awaits, if not in the today then certainly in the tomorrow, if not on Earth then in the promised afterlife.

In the minds of those billions not lucky enough to escape perpetual castes of servility, forced to live lives squandered and wasted, becoming the numbers and statistics of the failed human pyramid of hierarchy, unable to ever escape a destiny not of their own making, religion becomes the only mechanism to cope, to find solace in a life rotting away in the shantytowns and shacks in which so much of mankind survives in. It is a modes of escape from the harshness of modern day living. Surviving day to day, meal to meal, rich in honor and integrity but not in material possessions, unable to offer a future to their children, powerless to escape the lives they have been chained to since birth, their innocence destroyed at an early age, their education halted even earlier, billions are forced to believe in and place blind faith in the invisible and unseen, for the visible and seen have failed to bear fruit, becoming utter disappointments to billions of people.

Exploited by and subjugated to the wickedness of their fellow man, abandoned to the fortune of misery, billions find in religion answers to questions about why their life has been so full of injustice and inequality, why they have been made to suffer endlessly, while a tiny minority thrives in the splendors of wealth and luxury, basking in opportunity and fortuitous birth. God has a plan for them, they are told; theirs is the kingdom of God, but only if they follow God’s legions of high priests, and only if they allow religious institutions to have dominion and control over their daily lives. They are not to seek happiness on Earth, for it certainly awaits them in heaven; they must simply place blind faith in an entity that has never been proved to exist.

They are taught that in suffering and poverty they will find the keys to salvation, unaware that only through education and opportunity will they find escape and futures. They are told to succumb to exploiters and subjugators, to market colonialism and the tentacles of neoliberalism. They are told to multiply as much as possible, with birth control being forbidden, not understanding that the more children they have the less resources they and their children will possess, thereby condemning the entire family to perpetual indigence and socio-economic immobility. More children means less education, which invariably means less of an ability to question authority or become threats to the system, and more of a probability to become the slaves of the high priests. Women are told to stay home and become factories of procreation, becoming subservient slaves to their husband masters, for women are told they were created out of a single male rib, not even worthy of a leg or arm. Yet only in female emancipation from paternalistic cultures will both women and their families find betterment, freedom and an opportunity to escape perpetual caste societies.

Billions are told that the Christian god has a plan for them after their life on Earth, that one must remain a faithful servant of religion and of institutionalized dogma, thus of human institutions, allowing themselves to be controlled by the high priests and elite who make of religion the opiate of the masses. Billions are told that education is not of importance, that it can be abandoned after a few measly years. When it is provided, it becomes another way to indoctrinate heathens to religion, brainwashing and conditioning the still developing human brain to the control mechanisms of theology. Real education is liberation, and those that control know this, which is why they abhor it; knowledge is their kryptonite, the antibiotic to their epidemic. Is it any wonder why the nations with the lowest per capita investments in education also have some of the highest percentages of their population who are deeply religious?

Around the world, religious fundamentalist belief thrives in anemic, poor, angry, exploited and undereducated peoples, those residing inside nations commonly described as “third world,” abandoned by incompetent governments and adopted by neo-liberal chicanery, billions lacking the liberation that comes with knowledge, the free thought that arises through education and the standards of living associated with prosperity. They are the ones born not in the apex of human civilization, such as those northern nations rich and developed, but in those resembling the armpit of humanity, those raped of resources, capital and slave labor by the peoples of the north.

Religious fundamentalism is most easily engendered in the soup of poverty, hopelessness, ignorance and bitterness, where humans, their faith in humanity eviscerated by the suffering that is their lives, living in the trenches of what modern day living affords billions of souls, are made to believe in the unseen greatness of invisible gods. It is blind faith in the unseen that gives them hope to press onward even as their high priests only work to subjugate them deeper into misery. Is it any wonder why religion is most strong in the nations of the south, whose peoples live in endemic poverty and perpetual misery, unable to receive substantial education nor opportunity, and almost extinct in wealthy and secular Europe, where only grey hair can be seen in decaying churches?

Created in Our Own Image

From birth hundreds of millions of humans are conditioned to believe in the despotic god of the Bible, a sadistic, vengeance-filled, incompetent leader with deep psychological and anger management issues, a violent, destructive and blood-thirsty entity playing with the psyches of the same creations molded out its image. This god, it seems, has a fascination with human war, with murder and criminality and masochistic lives, granted that humans killing humans, oftentimes for pleasure, are an inherent part of the human condition. This god relishes poverty and suffering of billions, given the present state of humankind, allowing squalor in most nations and bestowing riches upon few. It is allowing us to destroy ourselves, and the Eden it supposedly created, forever remaining a clandestine, missing and unfound entity for thousands of years.

Indeed, it seems that it prefers the rich few over the poor many, the powerful over the weak, the sinful over the honorable, those that exploit over those that are exploited, choosing injustice over justice, inequality over equality, death over survival and ignorance over knowledge. This so-called god allows the miserable death and suffering of millions every year to HIV/AIDS, particularly black humans from Sub-Sahara Africa, creating entire generations of orphaned children. It allowed for the slaughter and suffering of its chosen people during World War II, the Inquisition and other such persecutions over time. It grants sustenance to murder and mayhem in Rwanda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where millions of human beings have died, slaughtered to feed the ravenous need that is our embedded appetite for human violence and war. The god of man allows for wars of religion, wars in its name, where humans fight humans based on whose religious beliefs are right and superior. It is these wars, so full of hatred and bloodletting, carrying the icons of the god of man, committed in the name of the Almighty, that have killed more humans than any other human made or naturally spawned cataclysm in the history of human existence.

This so-called god allows for the extinction of his creations and the destruction of his paradise by the same organism molded in its own image. If such a god existed, it would be called an utter failure, for the state of human affairs, since our Diaspora out of Africa, has been war, violence, destruction, suffering, exploitation and decimation of the planet and its creatures. Such a god would be impeached by its own creations, replaced with more competent gods, for it has done nothing to alleviate the perpetually decaying state of human affairs since it came into existence a few thousands years ago. Human leaders are dethroned for less serious incompetence. One need only read the Old Testament to bear witness to failure and wrath, incompetence and psychotic behavior, animalistic emotions and human passion.

Yet the god of man is a failure because it is a god concocted in man’s own image, not the other way around. It is molded in our self-image, which explains just how fallible our god really is. It espouses our animalistic behaviors and emotions because it is a creation of our most imaginative minds, fantasies of metaphysical prowess that cannot escape our own frail and fragile human psychology. The god of the Bible is a god captured by mammalian behaviors and emotions, unable to escape the human condition, no matter how hard its creators tried to concoct a being superior to us. Thus, the god of man is susceptible to the same emotions and passions as ourselves simply because it is of our own making, molded to hate as well as love, to be indifferent as well as caring, becoming enraged, seeking vengeance, destroying cities and murdering humans as it sees fit, becoming a creation unable to escape the human realm of understanding, a concoction existing and acting within the ignorance and unenlightenment of its primitive creators. It was molded as a way for us to find our place in the unknown world of yesteryear, helping to make us more secure that our fears of the unknown had purpose and that we were not alone in a world full of mystery and fright.

The god of the Bible is a mirror image of humanity itself, the best and worst of the human condition, a direct introspection of humankind. It is us and we are it.

Having gods, created by a tribe’s elder men – at a time when women had no voice—made to resemble the all-powerful male paternalistic figure, enabled followers to place reason behind that which was not understood. At a time when little was known or understood, gods were created to help man understand the complexities of nature and the vastness of the sky and earth. Through gods we became differentiated from the animal world, escaping a reality too humbling for the human ego to absorb. Through religion, gods, myth and fable a world too complex and large to fathom became easier to grasp, placing us, as usual, as the center of the known universe, the splendorous and wonderful creations of the gods, perfect entities placed in charge of Earth, masters of nature and all its creations. Man’s religion is as much our ego as our creativity.

The rise of religion, and of gods, allowed humans to believe and strive for an afterlife, for the insecure and fragile human mind cannot be made to contemplate in the reality of nothingness after death. The idea of death, and that life ends after one’s last breath, is a thoroughly taboo idea to us because of the amazing human fear of seizing to exist, of never again living, of not continuing life, of becoming the food for maggots and the fertilizer for plants, of finding darkness and not light. Through an afterlife humans could continue living, even after death, joining their god in his realm, a better place than Earth, a heaven where we can continue our life, even if only in spirit form. The idea of gods, and of a heaven, allows us to continue believing in the afterlife of human existence, making our frail and primitive minds secure that even after death we continue living. A god with a kingdom of heaven awaits us, after all.

Our egos not wanting to contemplate the reality of our evolution from the reptilian to the animal to the human worlds, nor our close relation with our primate cousins, along with the substantial behaviors, psychologies, social structures, needs, wants, passions and instincts we share with the animal world, we choose instead to believe in a primitive myth of created molded clay, borrowed rib and six day constructions of planets, a fantasy of escapism and denial, a story made up by the archaic creativity of primitive men gathering around a warm fire, knowledgeable only to the limits of their time and space, contemplating their place in the natural world, awe struck by the countless stars in the night sky and the sheer darkness enveloping them, trying to find meaning to life and purpose to existence, molding fantasies to the understandings and knowledge then known to them.

Theirs was a legend molded to the time, beliefs and place of its authors, never meant for a world of knowledge, certainties and proven analysis, where science extinguishes faith on a daily basis. Out of all creation stories, and there are hundreds known and undoubtedly thousands forever lost, all wonderful examples of the diversity of human creativity and thought, the western world adopted the one in Genesis, a metaphysical myth that helped primitive humans of thousands of years ago understand the world around them, meant for the ignorance of prehistory, not the wisdom of modernity. In its story lies not literal truth but myth and fable, tales of times long gone when the world was less known and more innocent, its complexities given meaning not by the accumulated knowledge of a thousand generations but by the experience of primitive tribes and clans whose stories were passed down orally under cover of darkness while warming to the radiance of warm fires.

Make no mistake about it, religion is a defense mechanism of the frail human ego, unable and unwilling to conceptualize the idea of who and what we truly are. It is our ego that refuses to accept the reality that we evolved, much the same way every mammal and organism on Earth has evolved, making us no different than the creatures we claim dominion over. It is our ego that wishes to ignore the possibility that there is no life after death, for human beings cannot accept death, finality and nothingness, a return to the circle of life from which all things derive. Death and finality are very difficult concepts for us to grasp, and accepting them would mean that our lives are made that much more insignificant than they already are.

Religion offers us meaning to our lives, a purpose that we are part of a much grandeur structure. It caresses our ego into the belief that we are cherished beings, special creatures molded by God himself, chosen to rule over Earth. The fear of being alone is conveniently made to disappear with the introduction of the metaphysical, for if a realm of gods and souls exists then we have purpose and are therefore not alone in the universe. Human religion allows us to comprehend, in human terms, and as far as we are capable of understanding with our primitive brains, the vast complexities of the natural world, of a universe that is larger than we can ever imagine, and it helps us better understand, by inventing fantasy and fable to explain human nature, why we are the way we are, yet failing, as always, thanks to our inflated egos, to confront the reality and truth of what the human condition truly is.

Unknown to tribal elders then but now understood by modernity is the truth of evolution, of natural selection and of the incredible mutations that have created the abundance of life on Earth as we see it today. Known now are the chemical reactions and the enzyme combinations and protein concoctions that led to the creation of homo sapiens, taking us onto a separate branch from our chimpanzee cousins, and the continued mutations, based on genetics and environment, that has led to the diversity of humanity that we see today, including those responsible for eye, skin and hair color as well as those affecting skull shape and body height.

Known to us now is our rise from East African jungles, our branching out to all corners of the planet, the 98 percent genetic similarities with our chimpanzee brethren and the evolution of our species from scavenger to cave dweller to dominator of agriculture to builder of enormous cities. The powerful truths of Darwin and Galileo and Copernicus can no longer be silenced or threatened with burning or excommunication. Books of knowledge and of enlightenment no longer face threats of bonfires. Humans seeking alternative religions or no religion at all no longer face being burned at the stake or eternal banishment. We live in the 21st century, not the Dark Ages, a product of centuries of progress and accumulated knowledge, a time when myth and fable no longer dominate and control, a time when fear of the unknown is evaporating like a thin fog, now replaced by knowledge, science and free thought.

The remnants of the Middle Ages, collections of times past and thankfully gone, are now left to gather dust in museums and libraries, hopefully never again to find refuge in human society. Gone are primitive torture devices, Church dominated literature and art, and medieval thought processes, where fear of the unknown was exploited in the accumulation of souls. Gone are indulgences, direct tickets to heaven sold by the Church for money, with their automatic forgiveness of sins granted those wealthy enough to have their bad deeds expunged. Gone are the fears engendered by the Roman Catholic Church that captured the minds, and souls, of millions; gone is its control over the masses and of society in its entirety that made conservative and regressive thought the hallmark of the Dark Ages.

Never-Ending Hypocrisy

American Christian fundamentalism has degenerated to an entity wishing a return to the Dark Ages, when religion actually controlled government, society and the minds of the masses. It is a movement dependent on the fears and ingrained hatreds of its followers, exploiting emotions and ignorance to further its ultra-conservative goals. Its leaders are false prophets and corrupt high priests preaching the teachings of Jesus but following the examples of Lucifer. They depend on the growing numbers of under educated citizens from which to replenish their ranks, becoming highly successful manipulators of fragile psychologies, using the insecurities and hatreds and hereditary prejudices of their followers to mold ordinary citizens into extremist followers of lies, distortions and manipulations.

Christian fundamentalism preaches about right to life and living in a culture of life but supports the wholesale death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Muslims and Arabs, preferring saving pin-size zygotes rather than actual human beings whose only crimes are living in Iraq and being Iraqi. Salivating at the thought of dead Muslims, these extremists support war crimes and crimes against humanity, turning a blind eye to torture and bombings and illegal kidnappings and rapes and murder, sanctifying the criminality of incompetent American leadership. They are ardent supporters of the debacle called the Iraq War, remaining mute to its atrocities even while having the audacity to preach the teachings of Jesus Christ, the most anti-war political activist to ever exist. It has often been said that these people are the biggest hypocrites on the face of the Earth.

Fundamentalists would have no problem eviscerating a women’s right to free choice and having complete control over her body, preferring the rights and freedoms of cell size structures over those of adult human beings. It seems making women once again subservient to paternalistic structures, where they can be readily controlled and subjugated, due to the threats presented on insecure males by the wiser half of humanity, is again on the agenda. Never satisfied with the emancipation of women, fundamentalists seek male control over their bodies and lives, wishing a return to days when women were dependent to and slaves of men, acting out their roles as baby factories and housewives, just as the Bible and their god command.

They have declared war upon homosexuals, thinking these people deranged deviants from Hell, acting in direct response to the literal interpretation of the thousands year old Bible (though conveniently forgetting the other many literal rules and interpretations that would undoubtedly condemn them as well), doing everything in their power to eliminate any rights gays might have. A tremendous fear of gay marriage do they possess, even though in most likelihood these activities will never affect their daily lives. Again, preaching the tolerance and acceptance of Jesus, they hypocritically hate and prejudge those different than themselves, becoming the most intolerant and bigoted people in the nation. Their ignorance is only superceded by their idiocy; their hypocrisy knows no bounds. Blind Christian fundamentalists remain to their hypocrisy and to the complete opposite actions they perform relative to the teachings of their Lord Jesus Christ.

Christian fundamentalists want to destroy the separation of church and state, allowing the reintroduction of the Dark Ages into modern times. They seek to destroy knowledge and education by introducing children to myth and fantasy wrapped around pseudo-science, renaming creationism “intelligent design,” a concept of religion at complete odds with reality and truth. They seek to condition children that the planet is only 6,500 years old, that man lived alongside dinosaurs, and that 6.5 billion humans are direct descendants from Adam and Eve, two creations popped out by God in their complete and evolved human form, failing to take into account the dynamics of evolution or the abundant evidence of our slow and gradual progression from mammal to ape to human.

Fundamentalists wish that four billion years of Earth’s history be erased from memory, replaced with a six-day creation story that has no basis in reality. They conveniently fail to report the entire findings of paleontologists and archeologists. They wish to teach children that woman was born from a single male rib, out of an entire body (what does that say about the superiority of man over woman, or the supposed inferiority of woman to men?), and that it was woman, in her deeply flawed and corrupted ways, that was the cause of eternal banishment from Eden (what does that say about the Church leaders’ trust in women’s psychology?)

Extremists wish to become the American Taliban, banning progress and all its freedom-engendering virtues. They are the book burners and music banners, the censors of enlightened programming and movies and the persecutors of knowledge. They wish to rob children of real enlightened education, wishing to teach the myths of primitive peoples upon modern minds. They wish to fight science, just like their predecessors have since time immemorial, because in science and knowledge they see a threat to their continued control of millions, for its findings continue to destroy their cherished myths and fables and tales of primitive thought. In science and knowledge they see the enemy that will birth their extinction. It is science that has exposed the illusions and fantasies of control, the impotent attempts at grasping at straws, at retaining power over human beings.

Their kind has tried to silence progress ever since science and knowledge began to question dogma. They fear it, loathe it and hate it, their fright apparent in the stench running out their pores, in the desperate attempts at suppressing human progress, in their attempts to stop enlightenment. With each myth or belief or act of faith eviscerated by our accumulated knowledge their power over us erodes further, their voices trembling and lies growing, their vague attempts at retaining their fantasies growing ever more desperate. In their literal interpretation of the Bible they fail to understand progress or the reality of the human condition, preferring to live in ignorance and unenlightened belief, choosing the faith of the never seen over the reality of the always present.

Wherever they live their hypocrisy is readily apparent, as always preaching Jesus while living Satan, hiding behind the cross while seeking Hell for others, becoming bigots and engines of hatred while hiding inside monolithic Houses of God, cheering tax cuts for the wealthy while wanting to destroy social services, wanting to erect walls to keep the poor, weak and hungry from seeking a better life. They support war while preaching peace, purposefully making themselves ignorant to death and mass murder committed in their name, all the while carrying the cross and Bible in their hands. They praise the Almighty yet raise their hands higher to the Almighty Dollar. They say they want a culture of life yet support the death penalty, but cannot allow the right of individual’s afflicting with terminal pain and suffering to die with dignity. Intolerant of other religions and other belief structures, of diverse peoples and those different than themselves, extremists can accept only their way of life, becoming the opposite of what their founder told us to do.

The threat posed by Fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or in America, is as strong as ever, yet progressive thought will not be defeated. The natural progression of human civilization is away from ignorance and fear of the unknown and towards knowledge of the world around us. History abounds with this reality. Modern times attest to this truth, for if it were not so we would still be trapped in the Middle Ages. Religion was created because we failed to understand this world of ours, and in this inability to understand where we lived and who we were a fear of the unknown arose. We needed answers and comfort, we needed to make secure our frail egos, and so religion served a valuable purpose to those people primitive and ancient. The modern world has allowed us to better understand our world as well as ourselves, and in time new ways of thinking will emerge, new spiritualities will be born, based not on the writings of tribal people living thousands of years ago but based on the time, space and knowledge of modern times.

It is only a matter of time, yet the backwards movements of humanity, exemplified best by the American Christian fundamentalists, cannot be allowed to become an insurmountable barrier to the inevitable evolution of human thought. The days of Dark Ages and of control through fear of the unknown are coming to an end, yet steadfast progress must remain, unafraid to confront the truths exposed almost daily, unafraid to battle the regressive and repressive groups among us, and unafraid to push forward the limits of human knowledge. It is better to live in truth than in fantasy, in free thought over that which is controlled, in reality over fiction. Faith in the seen and understood will always go further than faith in the never seen and unknown.

It is time to evolve religion before religion regresses us backwards yet again, as it has attempted to do for millennia, returning us to the days when tribal men sat around, afraid of darkness and the vast expanse of the universe, forcing themselves to conjure up stories to explain away their fears of the unknown, their women subservient to them, their children brainwashed from birth, their high priests and false prophets in complete control over the lives of the masses.

For 2,000 years the poisoning of the human well has taken place, becoming the strong friction and inertia slowing human progress and understanding and knowledge and spirituality down, betraying our true selves, forcing us to live in lies and fantasy, becoming the weight attached to our legs, the shackles maintaining us prisoners in the dungeons of backwardness, capturing and hypnotizing our minds, forcing us to see charades and mirages, hiding truth and reality, slowing us down just enough to hinder our immense ability and talents, robbing us of the enlightenment we are due and the renaissance that must inevitably come.

The time to cleanse the polluted waters of the well is upon us, helping build a fertile oasis from which humanity can prosper and be reborn.
Comment: Much of Valenzeula's critique is spot on. Yes, religion is a control system for keeping the flock in step, cowed with fear over God's potential wrath, or spaced out on wishful thinking in hopes that the Savior will return and save the true believers before things get too bad for the heathen and the heretic. Jesus as the original space brother. We think, however, that Valenzeula has his own ideological blind spots, for he preaches the very same materialism that he is denouncing, he has accepted the materialist notion of progress, he does not mention the in-fighting among scientific circles over the anthropological and genetic squabbles over man's evolution, dismisses the Middle Ages as a backwater of Church-dominated thought when in fact there were very progressive societies that were crushed by this same Church, among other shortcomings. Indeed, the situation of fundamentalist religion in the US is dire for those who wish to bring reason and fact to the debate on our future as opposed to belief and fairy tales masquerading as science. But there is no understanding in this piece of the nature of psychopathy and pathocracy, so he falls back onto the common sense notion of human nature, as if we were all nothing more than animals with a grain of rational thought struggling to keep our beastial depths in check. Furthermore, his analysis of just how bad the situation really is stops short. He appears to still accept the idea that it was a small gang of Islamic fundamentalists, guided by Osama Underthebed, who pulled off 9/11. Is this a case of his own rational side being stifled by his beliefs and preconceptions? Freeing oneself from the programming of society is no easy task. Reason alone will not do it for we are more than reason. The entire personality must be brought into play. But that, too, is not enough because we are blind to ourselves in countless ways. It takes the viewpoint of an objective observer to help us see ourselves. That objective observer can be a network of like-minded people. By that, we mean people who have made the commitment to do the work, not that they think and believe the same things. It is our BEing that must be transformed. True progress is the progress of the soul, not in the terms dictated by the milk doctrine of religion designed to keep us beholden to our psychopathic leaders, but in our work to become that which we have today only in potential, masters of ourselves.

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Self Flagellating Congress Promotes a New Geometric View
by Linda Milazzo

Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our government is unbalanced, tilted, and in the hands of those who, if not stopped, will destroy it.

For over two centuries, Social Studies teachers have drawn an equilateral triangle as the visual metaphor for the three branches of government, as ascribed by the Constitution of the United States. Three equal sides with three equal angles, symbolizing balance, symmetry and equality. At one corner, the Executive Branch, another the Legislative, and the third, the Judicial, each sharing equal power for lawful checks and balances.
In today's schools, Social Studies teachers (if there still are Social Studies teachers), instructing on the same three branches of government, would be more accurate by drawing a scalene triangle instead. Three disproportionate sides with three disproportionate angles, symbolizing disparate symmetry, imbalance and inequality. Such is the Constitutionally challenged government of George W. Bush, characterized by a megalomaniacal Executive, a codependent Legislature, and a crony-based Judiciary.

Upon closer analysis, codependency doesn't come anywhere close to describing the self-destructive behavior of the Legislative Branch.

It's far simpler to describe the behavior of the Executive Branch. A depraved hunger for power. The current Administration makes no bones about its quest for absolute rule.

The cronyism of the Judiciary is also simple to explain. One should presume Presidents will only choose cronies. A polar opposite is certainly not a choice. Of course, in a legitimate government not dominated by one party rule, a crony may ultimately be denied. But that's not probable today.

But who can explain a self-flagellating Legislature? Who can comprehend a body that bitch-slaps itself? Who understands why the Legislative Branch grants greater control to the Executive Branch, when by law, it shares equal authority? What is the logic of an organization that relinquishes its own command, laying it at the feet of the Executive like some sacrosanct offering, knowing full well that its submission tilts the balance of power the Constitution has enshrined?

Even more confounding is why the Congress puts its faith in a man, in this case George W. Bush, who presumes absolute power, knowing
absolutism destroys the very underpinning of our Democracy. The Republican majority of the Senate and the House have done exactly that, to the detriment of the nation, and the world. And sadly, they've been followed begrudgingly, sometimes compliantly, by some shameful Democratic wimps; most notably, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.

There is a hypothesis that helps define the odd behavior of Congress. It helps to explain why the Republican Legislature surrenders so readily to George W. Bush. It is the theory of the 'stern father' as described by Berkeley Linguistics Professor, George Lakoff, who contends that neocons and Conservatives embrace the concept of a strict patriarchal role.

As Lakoff writes in his book, "Don't Think of an Elephant": "as far as I have been able to discern, neocons believe in the unbridled use of power (including state power) to extend the reign of strict father values and ideas into every domain, domestic and international...... On the whole the right wing is attempting to impose a strict father ideology on America and, ultimately, the rest of the world."

Lakoff goes on to say, "Strict father morality defines what a good society is. The good society is threatened by liberal and progressive ideas and programs. That threat must be fought at all costs. The very fabric of society is at stake."

Perhaps this need for a strict father helps explain why the United States Senate is complicit in loading the Supreme Court with Executive Branch devotees who will usurp the power of their own Legislative Branch. Perhaps the whole 'whose your daddy?' concept goes right to the heart of how the adult men and women in the Senate and House cravenly relinquish authority to Mr. Bush whenever he gives them a squint and a swagger. Maybe visions of belt buckles and tool sheds dance in their wee little heads.

Lakoff's hypothesis does make sense when one considers the principal accepted characteristic of a stern father: absolute authority, uncontested and rightfully ordained.

For the past eight years George Bush has wagged his autocratic finger at Congress members, publicly proclaiming his expectations of them. He frequently begins with, "I expect the Congress to........" and concludes with his decree. Rarely have his commandments been refuted or ignored. Such blatant capitulation would embarrass Progressives, being the free thinkers they are, but it plants smiles on the faces of Conservatives. They're good sons and daughters. Well behaved. Able to follow directions, absent inquiry, curiosity, or the flaw of independent thought. The
unfortunate result of their paternal pandering is the increasing imbalance between the Executive and Legislative branches, which grows stronger and more pernicious every day.

And now, in a tour de force act of compliance, the Senate will enable the further subversion of the Judicial Branch as well. Its already welcomed Chief Justice crony John Roberts. Now it's intent on welcoming crony Associate Justice Samuel Alito, whose pronounced endorsement of a Unitary Executive reveals he believes in 'a strict father', too.

As stated often in his Senate confirmation hearing, Italian American Samuel Alito, Jr. worshipped his own father. He learned his moral authority from his father and says he retains that moral authority today. I share a personal knowledge of Italian fathers. If Samuel Alito, Sr. was a typical Italian father, he embodied the strict paternal role. A role that Samuel Alito, Jr. clearly embraces. If chosen to serve on the Supreme Court, Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, Jr. will likely never challenge Presidential authority.

In the government of George W. Bush, his Presidency is intended to symbolize the 'stern father'. The more Mr. Bush embodies that role, the more deferential the other branches will be. What's most interesting about George W. Bush is that his own stern father was really his mother. Hats off to the architect who taught Mr. Bush how to play the 'stern father' role. He may be a horrible President, but the guy can act up a storm.

Placing Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court will further tilt the balance of power, fortify the Executive branch, and seal the scalene triangle as the government symbol for many decades to come. One wonders how the stern father dynamic will play when a woman President is finally elected. It can't come a moment too soon.

Linda Milazzo is a Los Angeles based writer, educator and activist. She can be reached at pimbalina@mac.com.

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To Stand Alone If Necessary, That's What COURAGE Is - Who Will Lead The Filibuster Of Alito?
by thepen 25 Jan 06

BE YOUR OWN HERO, DEMAND A FILIBUSTER OF ALITO NOW

Even if you have already sent emails or made calls, the most powerful way for you to follow up is by calling and faxing the LOCAL district offices of your senators. You can get all their numbers in an instant with one click at

http://www.nocrony.com

The national toll free numbers are 888-355-3588, 888-818-6641 and 800-426-8073, just ask for any senator by name.
From time to time people will arise with the vision and the passion to inspire other people, and the bravery to take a stand for justice even if they have to do it alone. Sometimes tyranny maintains its power only by a kind of mental intimidation, a threat that would collapse entirely if it were just challenged. And whether those people are celebrated or not, all who take a stand against tyranny, in any way they can, deserve to be recognized as heros.

So it was with Rosa Parks. She was a simple seamstress who did not set out to be a hero. While she worked as a volunteer secretary for the NAACP, she did not see herself as a national leader. But on that day in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, she decided she would no longer suffer the humiliation and surrender her bus seat because of her race. In her own words, "The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed I suppose."

That one simple act of resistance precipitated the Montgomery Bus Boycott, perhaps the key pioneering event in the creation of the whole civil rights movement.

Today we have a Congress controlled by a numerical majority who operate as bullies. They hold votes open for hours at a time while they browbeat and threaten even their own party members. They disrespect and disregard long established rules of procedure and decorum. They exclude the participation of those representing at least half of the American people from any kind of meaningful decision making. And if ever opposed, they threaten they will not hesitate to further abuse their power by moving to abolish the right to filibuster.

Do they not fear the American people? Thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of our citizens are calling and emailing and faxing their senators right now to demand that Samuel Alito not be allowed to run our Supreme Court into some right wing ditch. And if you are asking, "Who will lead the filibuster that will stop this?". If you are asking yourself, "Who will stand up against the intimidation and the fear and expose those bullies for the fringe minority that they truly are?". The answer is . . . YOU are doing it right now.

With every personal message you send, you are telling our senators that it is time for we the people to take a stand. With every phone call you make, you are telling them it's time to take our country back. With every fax, YOU are a hero for democracy. The majority of the American people no longer believe in done deals. The other side has already lost, and the proof of it is that they are reduced to making empty verbal threats. They'll clean our clock one Republican senator was quoted yesterday as saying.

But privately the other side is telling its own few supporters that something dreadful has happened, that we actually think we can win, and that we will succeed unless they redouble their own lobbying efforts. And it's not working for them. On the Ed Shultz show yesterday, and Ed does not screen his calls, EVERY person who called in was demanding that there be a filibuster if necessary to save our Supreme Court from Samuel Alito.

There is only one way to deal with a bully. You must stand up to them. And we must keep standing up to them. We must keep calling our senators to tell them that the American people support them for taking a courageous stand. They must stand alone on the floor of the Senate, but we must continue rallying to their side. If the other side declares war on the filibuster we must call and call again to express our outrage. Each of us in our own way must find the courage to stand individually and declare, "The time has just come when I've been pushed as far as I can stand to be pushed."

As more and more of us raise our voices together we are seeing the dawning of a new political day. And on this day, no longer will we have to live under the tyranny of intimidation and fear. Indeed, we have nothing to fear but defeatism itself. It's up to us alone.

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Democrats May Argue Liberties to Their Peril
By Ronald Brownstein LA Times Staff Writer 25 Jan 06

WASHINGTON — Leading Democrats are challenging President Bush's record on civil liberties across a wide front, inspiring a Republican counterattack that even some Democratic strategists worry could threaten the party in this year's elections.

From Bush's authorization of warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency to renewal of the Patriot Act, the president and his critics are battling more intently than at any time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks over the proper balance between national security and personal liberty.
In each of these disputes, prominent Democrats — joined by a few Republicans — accuse Bush of improperly expanding presidential power and dangerously constricting the rights of Americans. Bush and his allies have fired back by escalating charges that Democrats would weaken America's security by imposing unreasonable restraints on the president.

These exchanges establish contrasts familiar from debates over law enforcement and national security throughout the 1970s and '80s, with most Republicans arguing for tough measures and many Democrats focusing on the defense of constitutional protections.

That emerging alignment worries some Democratic strategists, who believe it may allow Bush to portray Republicans as stronger than Democrats in fighting terrorism, as he did in the 2002 and 2004 campaigns.

"If Democrats want to be the party of people who think [the government] is too tough and the Republicans are the party of people who are tough, I don't see how that helps us," said one senior Democratic strategist who asked not to be identified while discussing party strategy.

Other Democrats say that because it is often unpopular to defend civil liberties during wartime, doing so would allow the party to demonstrate strength and conviction.

"There's a Washington consensus that this is politically bad news," said Eli Pariser, executive director of the political action committee associated with MoveOn.org, the online liberal advocacy group. "My read is that more than any given position, people want to see that their leaders are principled and that they stand up for what they believe in, and it seems to me [these fights] signal precisely that."

The differences between the two parties will be on display today, when the Senate begins debate over the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. In unanimously opposing Alito on Tuesday, several Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee echoed comments by Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who said the federal appellate judge's "record and testimony strongly suggest that he would … defer to the executive branch in case after case at the expense of individual rights."

Similarly, Senate Democrats charged Bush last month with eroding civil liberties as they helped block reauthorization of the Patriot Act. And Bush's two Democratic opponents in his presidential races — Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts in 2004 — recently have called for a special counsel to investigate whether Bush broke the law in authorizing the NSA to monitor domestic phone calls and e-mails from those suspected of having links to Al Qaeda.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, said the Democratic emphasis on civil liberties marked a shift not only from party attitudes after the Sept. 11 attacks, but also from efforts by President Clinton to expand government's law enforcement power after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Rosen said that in the last several weeks, Bush has invited greater Democratic opposition by defending the surveillance program so unapologetically, even after independent analysts such as the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service had questioned its legality.

"The boldness of the administration's response has escalated the fight and made it more difficult for fair-minded Democrats to step back from the brink," said Rosen, author of "The Naked Crowd," a book on security and civil liberties.

The White House has signaled that it was comfortable with, and even eager for, this debate.

In an aggressive series of speeches this week, Bush and other administration officials have portrayed the controversial surveillance program as not only legal but essential to national security.

Also, Democratic Senate aides say the White House has taken a hard line against negotiating changes in the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. A short-term extension of the law expires next week, and if no agreement is reached, that deadline could provoke another confrontation between Bush and congressional Democrats.

In a speech to the Republican National Committee last week, Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor, made it clear that he would encourage Republican candidates to use these disputes — along with Democratic criticism of the Iraq war — in the election to portray Democrats as weak on national security.

"At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security," Rove said. "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview."

Political analysts interpreted the speech as evidence that the White House wanted to replicate its 2002 strategy, when Bush used a dispute over union rules for the Department of Homeland Security to picture Democrats as soft on security concerns.

But some Democrats see key differences from 2002. Bush's current approval rating is about 20 percentage points lower than it was then. That means he enters the argument with fewer voters leaning in his direction.

Public attitudes about the balance between civil liberties and security also have shifted since 2002, according to nationwide polls. More Americans now express concern that the government will restrict civil liberties too much in the fight against terrorism, and fewer say the average American needs to relinquish civil liberties to protect the country.

Although results vary depending on the wording of poll questions, most Americans generally say they place a higher priority on pursuing terrorists than protecting civil liberties.

On the NSA surveillance program, opinion seems closely divided and fluid. Three national surveys in early to mid-January found that slightly more Americans supported than opposed the program; a CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey conducted Friday through Sunday found that a slight majority opposed it.

The White House faces another difficulty in forging its arguments into a partisan weapon for 2006: Some Republican lawmakers, and many prominent conservative activists, have joined Democrats in opposing Bush in the recent disputes.

For instance, four Republican senators backed the filibuster that blocked renewal of the Patriot Act. Other leading Republicans, including Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and John McCain of Arizona, have questioned Bush's claim of legal authority to launch the NSA program.

Some key Democrats also insist that public anxiety about the continuing violence in Iraq will make it tougher for Republicans to use security arguments this year.

"When we talk about national security, we are going to go right to what happened to the men and women in uniform," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Yet even with these new factors, most Republicans remain confident that disputes over national security and civil liberty issues will strengthen their hand this fall, just as they did in 2002 and 2004.

"I think the Democrats are picking a fight that really plays to Republican strengths, and I think that's why the president is fighting back so strongly," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

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Why the Democrats Should Filibuster Alito
By Abby Bar-Lev The Minnesota Daily 24 January 2006

The recent discovery that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless domestic wiretapping and is claiming that it is within his "constitutional authority" and indeed telling the American people we should just "trust" him is not only jarring, but brings to mind a flesh-crawling phrase: "police state." Now more than ever, the American people need an independent judiciary that will not wilt in submission to executive pressure. Judge Alito seems all too willing to protect the president from the necessary constitutional checks on power in a time of war. It was Benjamin Franklin who said those who are willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither liberty nor security.
Three reasons the Democrats should filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Samuel Alito should not be on the Supreme Court. The Democrats have every right and reason to filibuster his appointment. To prove the point, here are three reasons why.

1. There is too much at stake. When I say "too much at stake," that covers a variety of legal and constitutional issues. Everything surrounding privacy rights from personal medical decisions and reproductive freedom, to wiretapping, to data mining, to the definition of an illegal search and seizure is on the line. A topic prominently discussed at the hearings and one that should be on the minds of all Americans is the extent of presidential power.

The recent discovery that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless domestic wiretapping and is claiming that it is within his "constitutional authority" and indeed telling the American people we should just "trust" him is not only jarring, but brings to mind a flesh-crawling phrase: "police state." Now more than ever, the American people need an independent judiciary that will not wilt in submission to executive pressure. Judge Alito seems all too willing to protect the president from the necessary constitutional checks on power in a time of war. It was Benjamin Franklin who said those who are willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither liberty nor security.

2. Democrats have political capital. In light of the president's illegal wiretapping authorization, ethics scandals that are plaguing nearly the entire Republican leadership, low approval ratings of the president, and little light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq, the Democrats have a prodigious window of opportunity to prove themselves. With the 2006 elections around the corner and the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot with every step they take, it is far past time for the Democrats to take a stand. After years of acquiescence and moving their politics to the center of the spectrum, people hardly know who the Democrats are anymore. Now they finally have collected the political capital to prove themselves as the party that stands up for the American people, and if they do not spend it now doing anything they can to prevent a dangerous nominee from reaching the highest court, they may end up broke at election time.

3. The Sandra factor. Let's discuss the elephant in the room, shall we? Samuel Alito is not a woman. Not only is he not a woman, he is the most typical Supreme Court nominee Bush could find: a white, Catholic, Ivy League-educated man. Ironically, my column about why Bush needs to appoint another woman to the Supreme Court after the Harriett Miers debacle came out on the same day Bush named Alito as his next nominee. I am going to repeat myself: "There is a plethora of brilliant and talented, qualified women all over this country; women who may appease conservatives in their constitutional philosophy but who have witnessed and understand the necessity of the continuing expansion of constitutional rights to women."

Samuel Alito is so far right, so caught up in the narrow, nonreal world perspective of serving as an appellate court judge for 15 years that he seems to be unaware of many of the harsh realities social minorities in this country face. His record on women's rights and minority rights is dismal at best. This is, after all, a man that has said, "the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion." This is a man who upheld the unreasonable strip search of a 10-year-old girl. This is a man who, as the Boston Globe discussed, "advised against including a ban on capital punishment for minors in an agreement by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child." Furthermore, the Los Angeles Times reminded readers that his records as a judge show "a troubling tendency to tolerate serious errors in capital proceedings," and that "whatever one may think of the death penalty, Alito's record should give pause to all Americans committed to basic fairness and due process of law." Sandra Day O'Connor was certainly not a liberal, but with Alito replacing her swing vote on the Court and unique perspective on issues as a woman, there is much to be considered. His appointment would, after all, cut the number of women on the Supreme Court in half, and that is a very disconcerting thought.

It is true that a filibuster may not stop the Senate from approving Alito's nomination. A filibuster, though, serves many purposes. This is the Democrats' chance to take a stand, to be furious, to educate the public and to prove the president does not have a blank check to wrap the Supreme Court around his finger.

Abby Bar-Lev welcomes comments at abarlev@mndaily.com

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At NSA today, Bush to back spy effort
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis Sun reporter January 25, 2006

WASHINGTON - When President Bush addresses employees at the National Security Agency today, he will also be aiming his message at millions of independent voters who have not made up their minds about the agency's warrantless eavesdropping program, pollsters and strategists say.

Opinion surveys have found that the public is split along partisan lines over whether Bush should have secretly authorized the NSA surveillance operation on people inside the United States. Republicans overwhelmingly approve, and Democrats are strongly opposed.
Independents are divided about whether it was proper, surveys indicate.

"They're not as rigid or convinced either direction like partisans," said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. "They're certainly more in play."

The past two elections have given Bush and his political advisers reason to believe that portraying Republicans as the party best prepared to protect Americans against terrorism can be a winning strategy in this year's midterm vote. Whether the message will work again could depend on how centrist and independent voters view the spying program.

A recent Gallup survey found that independents lean strongly against the NSA program, with one-third approving and two-thirds opposing, Newport said. But they are split nearly evenly over whether the Bush administration has gone too far in restricting civil liberties in order to fight terrorism.

The president has embarked on a public relations blitz, which continues with this afternoon's visit to the NSA's top-secret Fort Meade campus. His comments there will be beamed to NSA staffers around the globe, and Bush plans to speak with reporters at the agency after the speech.

Bush and top administration officials are campaigning hard to remind the public about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Polls consistently have shown that protecting the country against terrorism is the public's top priority and the area in which Bush's performance gets its highest grades from voters.

The "open wounds that so many of us carry" from Sept. 11, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said in a speech yesterday, are the "backdrop" to the eavesdropping debate. The administration says the NSA operation tracks communications between suspected al-Qaida members or related terrorists overseas and people in the United States.

"The general attitude, I think, is if the choice is between fighting terrorism and protecting people's rights, fighting terrorism wins every time," said John E. Mueller, an Ohio State University political scientist who has tracked the attitudes on national security. Bush and his political advisers have "basically seen ... that terrorism works very well for them as a theme, and anytime they can say, 'We have to do this to protect you' and wave that red flag, people fall in line."

A slight majority of independents say the government has not gone far enough to protect the country against terrorism, according to research by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said Carroll J. Doherty, an analyst there.

"Right now the public is seeing this through a partisan prism, but that could change depending on what revelations are to come and what people hear," Doherty said. "If they feel that average Americans are being spied on routinely, we may see a shift."

Opinions could change, depending on how Bush presents the surveillance operation and what the public learns about it. In the meantime, Bush's full-throated defense of the program is stoking enthusiasm among his conservative base, which has largely returned to the president's side after turning away from him during his failed attempt to promote Harriet L. Miers to the Supreme Court.

Some Republican strategists say the NSA surveillance debate is giving the party's congressional candidates an avenue to solidify their support among key voter groups -- such as suburban women and white Southern men -- who might be put off by other parts of Bush's agenda.

"The hope is you turn it to some kind of advantage among your security moms and those that are doubtful," said Greg Crist, who consults with House Republicans.

"That's going to help offset problems on Medicare and seniors," he added, referring to widespread discontent over the launch of a new prescription drug plan.

"The administration is doing a good job neutralizing the debate on this, but then also arming [Republicans] with two or three retorts to the entire argument that can turn it into something positive," Crist said.

Bush's position on the program has shifted considerably since last month, when he said that disclosure of the surveillance program's existence had harmed national security. Now, the White House is eagerly speaking out about the program, through speeches by Bush and appearances by administration officials on numerous TV programs.

"We're going to continue to talk to the American people and educate them about what we're doing to save lives," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters.

The public relations push has played up a theme that unites most Americans -- concern about terrorism -- while seeking to play down divisive aspects such as whether Bush skirted laws to carry it out.

In recent days, Bush has dubbed the program a "terrorist surveillance program," while other administration officials have compared it with passenger searches in airports, a widely accepted practice.

By describing the NSA operation in such terms, analysts say, Bush is practically daring Democrats to call for an end to it. The tactic mirrors past efforts by Bush to portray Democrats as weak on security, a theme his political guru Karl Rove signaled would be front and center in this year's elections.

Gonzales noted yesterday that "through all of the noise on this topic, very few have asked that the terrorist surveillance program actually be stopped."

"The last thing in the world that Democrats are going to do, despite their problems with the program, is to stop it," said Marshall Wittmann of the center-left Progressive Policy Institute. "It would be politically disastrous [for Democrats] to stand in the way between the administration and an effort to aggressively hunt down terrorists."

The most immediate way the NSA surveillance debate is helping Bush, Wittmann said, is by "blurring the Democrats' corruption issue," taking the spotlight away from Jack Abramoff and his Republican connections, a weak spot for Bush's party.

Pollsters say it can be difficult to get a clear sense of the public's views on the NSA program, given people's limited knowledge of how it works and narrow understanding of the laws involved.

"What the public does want is for there to be a real capacity to investigate a threat when there are real suspects," said Clay Ramsay, the research director for the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes. "What the public does not want is for the presidency to get greater authority to abridge constitutional rights."

As long as voters view the program primarily as Bush is presenting it -- as a tool for protecting them -- they are much more likely to support it, Ramsay said.
Comment: Bottom line is, there is NO excuse for Bush's knowing violation of the LAW.

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Bush on the defensive Over indefensible NSA snooping
NY Newsday 25 Jan 06

President George W. Bush is taking the fight over warrantless eavesdropping to his critics this week, sending top aides out to sell the dubious view that the spying is necessary and legal. In politics, a strong offense may well be the best defense. But in this fight Bush is peddling two false dichotomies.

First, that the debate is simply Republicans for, Democrats against. It isn't. Second, that the public must either accept this off-the-reservation electronic snooping or, as Gen. Michael Hayden, the administration's No. 2 intelligence official intimated, remain vulnerable to terrorist attack. That ignores the fact that there are well-established legal avenues for monitoring suspected terrorists that Bush simply chose to avoid.

Given Bush's claimed authority to spy on Americans without court oversight, the nation needs a sober debate on the limits of presidential power. What it doesn't need is a cynical appeal to partisanship and fear.
Starting in 2002, Bush turned the National Security Agency loose to monitor the international phone calls and e-mail of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the United States without warrants. Since the press revealed the snooping, Bush has insisted that both the U.S. Constitution and a congressional authorization for the use of force give him authority to bypass the courts in his role as commander-in-chief.

Opposition to that specious assertion and to the eavesdropping is not just the usual partisan carping. True, many Democrats are skeptical about the legality of the NSA operation. But so are some powerful Republicans.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he doesn't think Bush had the authority for the operation and should seek congressional approval to alter the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a secret court in 1978 to grant warrants for just such intelligence gathering. The committee will hold hearings on the eavesdropping operation in February.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a possible presidential contender, is also skeptical about the operation's legality. And he took strong exception to top Bush political adviser Karl Rove's claim that Republicans have a post-9/11 world view while many Democrats cling to a pre-9/11 world view. At this critical moment in our history, the nation needs to have a serious conversation about freedom and security, not one driven by fear and partisan gamesmanship.

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Attention all Election Fraud Bounty Hunters!
electionfraudbounty.org

Nothing motivates like money, so we're asking for pledges toward a bounty that will be paid to the person or persons who provide the evidence that successfully demonstrates that election fraud took place at the State or Federal level with convictions in open court.

The most likely persons to have the evidence required are also likely to be feloniously involved themselves, so they must consider two possibilities: either they come forward as quickly as possible and make a deal which includes their own immunity, or this bounty may encourage one of their colleagues to do so . . . and they will have nothing to bargain with.
We strongly suspect that election fraud was rampant during the 2004 Presidential election. There were more reported votes than registered voters in many precincts; poll workers who personally submitted official poll tapes who recognize that the ones used for official counts are fraudulent; mathematical analysis that show the odds of certain election events being honest are vanishingly small; and more than 37,000 other suspicious incidents reported at the time of this writing. All this after years of outcry about paperless and unverifiable voting machines . . . which were forced upon us all. Please go to the “Evidence & Links” page for a discussion of these issues and direction to further resources.

If we are right, there are people who know what happened, how it was done, and who did it. People who through testimony or documentation, by themselves or in concert with others, can make the case that election fraud on a grand scale was committed . . . and prove it.

We want to encourage those people to do something positive for their country.

Nothing motivates like money, so we're asking for pledges toward a bounty that will be paid to the person or persons who provide the evidence that successfully demonstrates that election fraud took place at the State or Federal level with convictions in open court.

The most likely persons to have the evidence required are also likely to be feloniously involved themselves, so they must consider two possibilities: either they come forward as quickly as possible and make a deal which includes their own immunity, or this bounty may encourage one of their colleagues to do so . . . and they will have nothing to bargain with.

If only ten million concerned citizens pledge an average of $100 apiece, the reward for those who come forward with proof will exceed $1 billion! Supporters of George W Bush should be among the first who wish to pledge. What better way to dispel the spiraling doubts about our 2004 election and prove to the world that it was honest?

Except for those who wish to donate modest amounts to help sustain this effort, we are asking for no money. We only ask for your pledge to provide your share of a bounty that will be paid out when the evidence is clear and after convictions have been obtained.

Whether your desire is to expose the fraud you think may have corrupted our democracy, or whether you wish to help positively demonstrate that this election was fundamentally honest and did not distort the outcome, please join us in raising the cash that will cast a bright ray of cleansing sunshine on our democracy and the 2004 election in America. Please go to the "Pledge" link above and do your part to support this effort.
Comment: SOTT is going to pledge $500.00

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“Hacking” and the Paper Ballot-Optical Scan Voting System
Wanda Warren Berry January 22, 2006

An observer1 of the famous “Harri Hursti hack” in Florida has pointed out that that test revealed “only one vulnerability in an almost unlimited number of potential flaws” that computer scientists recognize to be characteristic of electronic voting systems (both optical scanners and DREs). Revelation of this flaw was important because it exposed a vulnerability that must have been purposefully programmed into the system.
Some alarm has been expressed at learning that the recent test in Florida that disproved the Diebold claim that its machines could not be “hacked” was carried out on an optical scanner (Diebold’s Accu-Vote OS 1.94w). New Yorkers for Verified Voting again has been asked to justify its support for the paper ballot-optical scan system (PBOS). NYVV has never denied that optical scanners are computers and that they are subject to accidental or deliberate miscoding and “hacking.” NYVV has argued that the hand-marked paper-ballots that are the foundation of the PBOS system provide security to elections because the scanners can be checked by hand-counting the paper.

Let’s be very clear that the PBOS system is far superior to direct recording electronic voting machines (DREs) in spite of our knowledge that scanners can be hacked. Keep in mind that scanners only count votes; therefore they provide many fewer opportunities for miscoding and/or hacking than do DREs, which must be programmed for recording, verifying, and counting votes as well as for accessibility. Note that the programming of the scanners for the one task of counting can be transparently tested by running a test deck of ballots that have been publicly hand-counted as many times as are necessary to convince the observers that the scanner is correctly programmed. After an election, the original hand-marked paper ballots are the official record and are available for manual recounts whenever law or circumstance requires it.

An observer1 of the famous “Harri Hursti hack” in Florida has pointed out that that test revealed “only one vulnerability in an almost unlimited number of potential flaws” that computer scientists recognize to be characteristic of electronic voting systems (both optical scanners and DREs). Revelation of this flaw was important because it exposed a vulnerability that must have been purposefully programmed into the system. Most significantly, the observer’s report goes on to correctly argue that “the Hursti hack shows, above all, the importance of having paper ballots.” The Hursti hack demonstrates that “there must be an independent paper trail that can be manually audited to confirm (or discredit) machine results.”

The PBOS system provides such a direct paper record of the voter’s intent. Voter-assistive devices allow the disabled also to mark paper ballots. While some would prefer a system of hand-counted paper ballots over optical-scan counting, we need to remember that politics is the art of the possible and to seek to discover “what can and cannot be accomplished politically at a given place and moment in time” (Bo Lipari). Most of the election commissioners who have been given the power to choose our voting system in New York have deep reservations about managing elections based on paper ballots. Advocacy of the PBOS system is politically wise inasmuch as it answers the public’s interest in rapid preliminary counts at the same time as it promises the commissioners that they will need to count paper only for the 3% required audits and whenever problems arise.

NYVV joins the Government Accountability Office in urging improved standards and testing of all electronic voting equipment, including optical scanners.2 Adequate testing should be able to close some of the doors to hacking. Careful procedures and audits of hand-marked paper ballots will take us the rest of the way to voter confidence in the paper ballot-optical scan system.

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Evidence? We Don't Want Your Stinkin' Evidence!
By Ernest Partridge The Crisis Papers January 24, 2005

Like biologists with evolution and atmospheric scientists with global climate change, those who warn us that our elections have been stolen and will be stolen again must now be wondering, "just how much evidence must it take to make our case and to convince enough of the public to force reform and secure our ballots?"

The answer, apparently, is no amount - no amount, that is, until more minds are opened. And that is more than a question of evidence, it is a question of collective sanity.

In his new book Fooled Again, Mark Crispin Miller not only presents abundant evidence that the 2004 election was stolen, but in addition he examines the political, social, and media environment which made this theft possible.
When I first read the book immediately after its publication, I confess that I was a bit disappointed. What I had hoped to find was a compendium of evidence, from front to back. To be sure, Miller gives us plenty of evidence, meticulously documented. But evidence tells us that the election was stolen. Miller goes beyond that to explain how and why it was stolen, and how the culprits have managed, so far, to get away with it.

So on second reading, I find that it was my expectation and not Miller's book that was flawed. We have evidence aplenty, to be found in John Conyers' report, and the new book by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, in addition to the Black Box Voting website among numerous others. Soon to be added is Prof. Steven Freeman's book on the statistical evidence of election fraud. What we don't gain from these sources is an understanding and appreciation of the context in which this crime was committed. This we learn from reading Miller's book.

If, in fact, the last two presidential elections have been stolen, and if in addition there is a preponderance of evidence to support this claim, then this is the most significant political news in the 230 year history of our republic.

So what is the response of the allegedly "opposing" party to the issue of election fraud? Virtual silence. And of the news media? More silence. Case in point: the media response to Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again. As he reports: "There have been no national reviews of Fooled Again. No network or cable TV show would have the author on to talk about the book. NPR has refused to have him on... Only one daily newspaper – the Florida Sun-Sentinel – has published a review."

Force the question of election fraud and demand an answer, and the most likely response will be a string of ad hominem insults – "sore losers," "paranoid," "conspiracy theorists" - attacks on the messenger and a dismissal of the message. We've heard them, many times over.

Persist, and you might get as a reply, not evidence that the elections were honest and valid (there is very little of that), but rather some rhetorical questions as to the attitudes and motives of the alleged perpetrators and to the practical difficulties of their successfully accomplishing a stolen national election. Questions such as these:

* How could the GOP campaign managers believe that they could get away with a stolen election?

* Why would they dare risk failure, and the subsequent criminal indictments and dissolution of their party?

* What could possibly motivate them to subvert the foundations of our democracy?

The answer to the first two questions is essentially the same: they believed and they dared because they controlled the media and thus the message. Miller's sub-text throughout his book is that the great electoral hijack has been accomplished with the cooperation, one might even say the connivance, of the mainstream media, without which the crime could never have succeeded.

Immediately following the election, the critics were shouted down with such headlines as these: "Election paranoia surfaces; Conspiracy theorists call results rigged" (Baltimore Sun), "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud is dismissed" (Boston Globe), "Latest Conspiracy Theory – Kerry Won – Hits the Ether" (Washington Post), and in the "flagship" newspaper, the New York Times: "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried." (Miller, 38.)

Even more damaging than the slanted "reports" in the media, was the silence. The Conyers investigations? Ignored. The scholarly statistical analyses of exit poll discrepancies? Ignored. Evidence that Bush cheated in the debates with a listening device? Dismissed. The recent GAO report on e-voting vulnerabilities, and the Florida demonstration hacking of computer vote compilation? Ignored. And most appalling of all: the media blackout last week of Al Gore's eloquent speech, warning of the threat to our Constitution and our liberties posed by the Bush regime.

And all this merely scratches the surface of media malpractice. For more, read the book.

The motivation to steal the election, says Miller, combined religious (or quasi-religious) dogma and self-righteousness and a perception of the opposing Democratic party, not as the loyal opposition, but as the enemy - deserving not defeat, but annihilation. ("You are either with us or against us," says Bush). Together, this adds up to what Miller calls "The Requisite Fanaticism." He writes:

It is not "conservatism" that impelled the theft of the election, nor was it merely greed or the desire for power per se... The movement now in power is not entirely explicable in such familiar terms... The project here is ultimately pathological and essentially anti-political, albeit Machiavellian on a scale, and to a degree, that would have staggered Machiavelli. The aim is not to master politics, but to annihilate it. Bush, Rove, DeLay, Ralph Reed, et al. believe in "politics" in the same way that they and their corporate beneficiaries believe in "competition." In both cases, the intention is not to play the game but to end it – because the game requires some tolerance of the Other, and tolerance is precisely what these bitter-enders most despise... (Miller 81-2.)

Reiterating a theme that is prominent in his writing, Miller points out that the psychological pathology most conspicuously at work in the right's demolition of politics is projection: the attribution in "the enemy" of one's own moral depravity:

The Bushevik, so full of hate, hates politics, and would get rid of it; and yet he is himself expert at dirty politics: an expertise that he regards as purely imitative and defensive. Because his enemies, he thinks, are all "political" – dishonest, ruthless, cynical, unprincipled – he is thereby "forced" to be "political" as well, in order to "fight fire with fire." As we have seen, this paranoid conviction of the Other's perfidy suffuses and impels the propaganda campaigns of the right, and it was especially important in Bush/Cheney's drive to steal the last election. Indeed it was their firm conviction that they had to steal the race, in order to frustrate the Democrats' attempt to do it first. (Miller, 82.)

This is just a brief sampling of Miller's astute political and psychological analysis of the "why" and the "how" of the stolen elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004. That analysis, which takes up about a third of the book (Chapters 3 and 4), adds an invaluable dimension to our understanding of the political disaster that has befallen our Republic, and that analysis suggests guidelines in the struggle to avoid the theft of the upcoming elections of 2006 and 2008.

I have written at length about what might be done if we are to restore the ballot box to the voters. These crucial steps come immediately to mind, as I read Miller's Fooled Again.

Briefly, we need a media, we need an opposition party, we need an aroused public, and we need a miracle. But take heart: history tells us that political crises have a way of producing miracles.

The mainstream media (MSM) must be discredited and an alternative media established in its place. The internet offers a voice to an opposition that is excluded from the mainstream, and a few independent publications and broadcasts remain, however feeble in comparison to the MSM. If a sizeable portion of the public deserts the mainstream, and directly informs the publishers and broadcasters why they are doing so, the media, and particularly their sponsors and advertisers, will take notice. Recently, some of the media have become more critical of the Bush regime and the GOP Congress, but it is, by and large, too little and too late.

So either the commercial media must resume the role of watchdog of government power, as intended by Jefferson and Madison, or it must be made irrelevant. The Russian dissidents late in the Soviet era have given us an example: if you have no media, create one, even if it is suppressed by the government. It was called "Samizdat" – a painstaking process of typing several carbon copies of forbidden manuscripts on condition that the recipients would do likewise. Similarly, the Iranian dissidents during the reign of the Shah copied and distributed audio tapes of revolutionary speeches. In the computer age, there are huge advantages: Internet publication and, f the Internet is taken from us, CDs and minidiscs. For now, the Internet is our Samizdat.

The Democratic party is the only potentially effective opposition party in sight. But at the moment, it is a toothless tiger. We must tell that party that it must either lead the struggle to restore electoral integrity or step aside. When the Clintons, Cantwells, Liebermans and Feinsteins run for re-election, they must be opposed in the primaries by authentic progressives. Even if those progressives lose, but with a creditable showing, the "establishment" Democrats will nonetheless get the message. Next time you get a solicitation notice from the DNC or the Senate or Congressional Campaign Committees, tell them "no dice" unless they deal with the election fraud issue. Then tell them that instead of a contribution, you are purchasing Miller's book and donating it to the local library.

As for the public, remember that more than half the public is awake, aware, and opposed to the Bush regime. Of these, a small but significant minority is convinced that election fraud is a serious problem. But that dissenting public lacks a voice, cohesion and leadership. This is a recipe for potentially sudden change: like fuel and oxygen, lacking the third necessity – heat of ignition. A message, from a Tom Paine or a Jefferson, or leadership from a Washington, a Gandhi, a Mandela or a Sakharov, can ignite the fire that will consume this evil regime. Or not. That depends on whether concerned citizens sit by and wait for others to act, or instead take some initiative and join the struggle – writing to Congress, talking to any and all associates that will listen and perhaps a few that won't, contributing to alternative media, copying and distributing dissenting essays, and generally raising hell.

And finally, miracles: they are, by nature, unpredictable. Some possibilities: A few corporate and financial elites will finally come to realize that where Bush is leading, they don't want to follow, and they will join the opposition. (There are a few intimations of this already). Similarly, perhaps a few journalists, and even some Republicans, will finally if belatedly decide that they would prefer not to live in a dictatorship. Bushenomics is bound to lead to an economic collapse that is certain to wake up the public. And even now, some state Attorney General or some District Attorney may be preparing an indictment for election fraud against an e-vote company executive that could break this conspiracy wide open.

But don't wait for miracles to happen – make them happen.

If we are to take back our country, we must first take back our vote. Mark Crispin Miller's book will tell you what has happened, how and why it has happened, and what must be done about it.

Will we, the people, take up the challenge? On that question rests the fate of our republic, of our liberties, and of "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, The Online Gadfly and co-edits the progressive website, The Crisis Papers. He is at work on a book, Conscience of a Progressive, which can be seen in-progress here. Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com.
Comment: It bears repeating, "If, in fact, the last two presidential elections have been stolen, and if in addition there is a preponderance of evidence to support this claim, then this is the most significant political news in the 230 year history of our republic."

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Republicans are destroying America
R. Dale Webb The Daily Utah Chronicle 25 Jan 06

Bush's approval ratings are once again seeking their natural level-30 percent of Americans think he's sent by God and would support him even if he sacrificed a baby to Moloch on Fox News.
Regarding Jessie Fawson's column ("Both parties are prone to corruption, and the GOP has done great things," Jan. 23), I'm glad to see she was able to swallow the Republican talking points so well that she can spit them right back out; I'm surprised she left out, "It's all Clinton's fault!"

The Abramoff scandal is a Republican scandal-lock, stock and proverbial barrel. Some of his clients might have given money to Democrats, but old Jack himself was a tried and true Republican, former president of the Young Republicans, BFF with Karl Rove. He never gave one thin dime to any Democrat. To say otherwise is, quite simply, a lie.

What else? Bush's approval ratings are once again seeking their natural level-30 percent of Americans think he's sent by God and would support him even if he sacrificed a baby to Moloch on Fox News.

The biggest laugh came from Fawson's statement: "...our actions in Iraq prove beneficial to the Iraqi people."

Whom do our actions benefit? Families killed by stray bombs? People who live with four hours of electricity a day? Women who had more freedom under Saddam than any other Muslim country and will now be forced to live under Sharia law by the new theocratic government that we fostered?

Wait! Here's who benefited: al-Qaida, which now gets to train terrorists in an urban environment, thanks to Dubya.

Next, "the recession is ending." If you're Paris Hilton or Bill Gates, why, the economy is just peachy!

But if you're one of the tens of thousands of unemployed because your job was outsourced, or a senior trying to decide between food and medicine or a student who now can't get a loan, things don't look quite so rosy. ?
Yes, there are bad apples in the Democratic Party. But the Republicans under Bush and his minions have created a staggeringly corrupt-not to mention breathtakingly incompetent!-"government" that could bring down the whole structure of the American way of life. Heckuva job, Bushie!

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GOP cries foul - Dems bring upDouglas quotes as 19-year-old
By Darren M. Allen Vermont Press Bureau

MONTPELIER — Vermont Republicans say they are outraged that a Democratic-leaning Web site has posted a Middlebury College newspaper article from 1970 in which a young James Douglas apparently questions the existence of segregation.

The author of the 35-year-old article in The Campus said Tuesday it was "nonsense" to assert that Douglas was a racist then or now. But Democrats continued to call on the governor to explain the article's statements, in which the then-president of the Vermont Young Republicans also expressed support for the Vietnam war and the bombing of Cambodia.
Republicans, from the governor to his spokesman to the chairman of the state GOP, said posting the article — and alerting the media to its existence — was an exercise in race-baiting and character assassination.

"Here's the bottom line: The Democratic leadership of Vermont are adopting a new policy of character assassination against their political opponents," said James Barnett, chairman of the Vermont Republican Party.

"We're talking about a truncated quote that is the polar opposite of anything the governor believes now or I suspect he believed then," Barnett said. "This was from a time when he was 19 years old, and it is being disseminated by a legislative leader of the Democratic Party."

The article, written by Ted Hobson and called "Nixon's Man on Campus," said in part: "In relation to Vermonters, Douglas' conservative outlook might pass unnoticed, but on a college campus Douglas is somewhat of a political loner, defending Nixon's Supreme Court nominees … his segregation policies ('I'm not sure there is segregation'), Vietnamization ('a very admirable plan') and even the Cambodian invasion ('I personally would have liked a little more')."

Douglas, through his press secretary, said he did not recall Hobson interviewing him for the article, but unequivocally said he never held the belief that segregation didn't exist.

"The governor doesn't recall this article, but he's been very clear that he did not believe that then and he doesn't believe that now. He doesn't remember sitting down for the article," said Jason Gibbs, Douglas' press secretary. "This is a disappointing display of the politics of personal destruction, and there's no place for this kind of trash in Vermont."

Hobson, now a litigation attorney in Burlington who wrote a letter of support when Douglas made his first run for governor, laughed as he recalled the article.

He said Middlebury College was in the throes of changing from a conservative to a more liberal place, and that while he genuinely liked Douglas then, the two of them probably were on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

That said, Hobson said he fondly recalls Douglas' dry wit, and it was entirely possible that Douglas was playing around with him during the interview for comic effect.

"I assume those quotes are accurate, and I certainly never bore Jim any animus at all, but you have to wonder if he was saying those things a little tongue-in-cheek," Hobson said. "He's always had that sense of humor. … At times, he had me rolling on the floor."

Gibbs said the governor doesn't dispute that he may have been hamming it up with Hobson.

"Mr. Hobson may certainly be correct, and his tongue may very well have been planted firmly in his cheek," Gibbs said.

The article was first posted on the VermontersFirst.org Web site, which is run by Democratic consultant Adam Quinn and has close ties to Rep. Floyd Nease, D-Johnson, the majority whip of the House.

Quinn alerted major media outlets to the posting last week in an e-mail message.

"Well, it says some fairly outlandish things about our very own Gov. Douglas," said the posting, which was unsigned. "We are pretty sure the paper is legitimate and no reason to question the accuracy of the quotes. It is interesting to see that Douglas hasn't changed much."

Barnett and other Republicans called on Nease, a frequent contributor to VermontFirst.org and a site organizer, and the state Democratic Party to disavow the posting.

"At the very least the leadership of the Democratic Party would ask this guy to step down from his legislative leadership post, and frankly if he wants to spend all of his time doing dirty tricks and character assassination instead of the work of a legislator, he should step down," Barnett said.

Quinn, in a brief interview, said it was he — not Nease — who posted the article and was responsible for its dissemination. He said he did not talk to Hobson before posting it, but said it was important information for Vermont voters.

"This article brings up more questions than answers," Quinn said. "But I think claiming the article was being used as race-baiting just doesn't fly."

Nease said he was not responsible for the posting.

"Everything I post on the blog I put my name under," he said. "I didn't post it. I didn't approve it. And I don't have power of approval, nor do they have approval over what I post. As for the assertion that I should resign, it's ridiculous. I know that Jim (Barnett) is doing what Karl Rove taught him to do, to attack people in this way."

The episode is reminiscent of the flap caused during the 2004 gubernatorial election in which Barnett and Republicans released old newspaper clippings showing Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle marching in a parade celebrating the 10th anniversary of the communist overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Clavelle was Douglas' Democratic opponent two years ago.

Democrats called that episode "red-baiting," and officials from Clavelle to then-party chairman Scudder Parker said Barnett should have been fired. Douglas even distanced himself from Barnett's actions at the time.

Democrats are saying this episode isn't the same. Ian Carleton, the state Democratic Party's current chairman, said Quinn acted without any direction from the state party.

Parker, who is now running against Douglas, took pains to draw distinctions.

"If the story is about how this is some kind of equal exchange, well, the field isn't equal," Parker said. "That was the leaders of the party and the Douglas administration itself."

He said his campaign wasn't behind the letter, and "this is not the way I want to conduct my campaign."

Gibbs wasn't buying the distinction.

"The governor spoke out loudly and clearly in that case," he said. "Those same individuals should be held to their same standards."

Contact Darren Allen at darren.allen@rutlandherald.com.

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Honest conversation will get America through the next three years
By Molly Ivins Quad City Times 25 Jan 06

We live in interesting times, we do, we do. We can read in our daily newspapers that our government is about to launch a three-day propaganda blitz to convince us all that its secret program to spy on us is something we really want and need. “A campaign of high-profile national security events,” reports The New York Times, follows “Karl Rove’s blistering speech to national Republicans” about what a swell political issue this is for their party.
The question for journalists is how to report this. President Bush says it’s a great idea and he’s proud of the secret spy program?

Attorney General Gonzales explains breaking the law is no problem? Dick Cheney says accept spying, or Osama bin Laden will get you?

Or might we actually have gotten far enough to point out that the series of high-profile security events is in fact part of a propaganda campaign by our own government? Should we report it as though it were in fact a campaign tactic, a straight political ploy: The Republicans say spying is good for you, but the Democrats say it is not — equal time to both sides?

Then there’s the problem of reporting within the context of this administration’s other propaganda efforts. “We do not torture,” and, “We are not running a gulag of secret detention centers,” are two of the more recent examples, superceding the golden oldies — like the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Furthermore, the Rove offensive is not to admit that we are indeed running a gulag of secret detention camps, but to attack those who point it out and put them under investigation for revealing government secrets and helping the enemy. Even without the intimidation, how do you report something claimed by George W. Bush as though you hadn’t recently heard him say he would support John McCain’s amendment barring torture — and then turn around and claim that he has the right to violate that law?

I genuinely appreciate the response by real conservatives on this issue — the libertarians, the true heirs of Barry Goldwater, the all-government-is-bad grumps. It’s called principle. But I am confounded by the authoritarian streak in the Republican Party backing Bush on this. To me it seems so simple: Would you think this was a good idea if Hillary Clinton were president? Would you be defending the clear and unnecessary violation of the law? Do you have complete confidence that she would never misuse this “inherent power” for any partisan reason?

The warrantless wiretaps reportedly covered thousands of calls, and the information obtained was widely circulated among federal agencies. I know one guy who is now on the federal no-fly list. His sin? Co-authoring an unflattering book about Karl Rove. What a menace to national security he is.

One of the odder features of our time is that much of our political debate is cast in “moral” terms, with such helpful authorities as Pat Robertson holding forth on whom we should assassinate next. A more useful contribution from this direction comes from Jimmy Carter in his new book, “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.”

I am a great admirer of Carter’s and glad to hear his soft Southern Christian voice once more. But it occurs to me that in his quiet way, many of his arguments are as pragmatic as they are moral.

As one with considerable faith in the common sense of Americans, it occurs to me we may yet rescue ourselves from this bootless skunk match over morality by using plain sense, instead. Many of Carter’s points center on the fact that our war on terrorism is not working. Iraq is not working (hard to even count the ways). Major terrorist attacks themselves more than tripled from 2003, to 655 attacks in 2004. Our support in the Middle East sinks lower and lower. The region is not becoming more democratic.

What would happen if we had not a political, but a pragmatic debate about all of this: We have made a horrible mess of this entire war on terrorism, now how do we fix it? What do we do? I realize it’s a bit simplistic of me after all this time, but I really think one of the best things we could do for ourselves is deal honestly with the facts. Because we have made a mess of this does not mean we are a pitiful, helpless giant — the United States still has more sheer military power than anyone else on earth. But using it is not necessarily the best way to get the results we want.

Because we are stuck with this administration for another three years, I think it important to begin to get past the defensiveness. And part of that calls on American journalism to get over reporting the Bush administration as though it were a credible source. We need to face facts.

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Fascism Doesn’t Always Roar... Sometimes, It Creeps on Cat’s Feet
by Mark S. Tucker 25 Jan 06

Lexicographers to the side, a word can, in certain instances, be best defined by its most ardent supporters. Catholics are not the wise choice in consulting a description of zen, History teachers are ill-equipped to define the vocabulary of quantum physicists, and one would not repair to the hut of a palm reader for technical terms in the building of 747s, so to whom might we go for a reliable working understanding of ‘fascism’? Why, to a fascist, of course!

And who better than Il Duce Benito Mussolini, a figure who once extolled it as the marriage of corporations and the State. One of the most faithful of its practitioners, we can trust this gentleman’s insight, I think, seeing as how he yet stands as a reliable yardstick, heels kicking in the air though they may have for his pains.
The definition itself, though, reveals the insanity of the condition a little more lucidly when one understands the idea of ‘corporation’, a word drawn from the latin ‘corpore’, meaning ‘body’. ‘Corpore’, in latin, referred to an actual, physically verifiable, biological unit, and perhaps a non-biological one, but certainly to a tangible form in nature. Simple, yes? Well, no. Somewhere along the way, in the land that mothered us - and got bit for her pains - some lawyerly weasel decided that a ‘corpore’ could also be entirely fictional...yet...still be a “body”! This was done in service to business and intended to provide a way to shed liability, which it did quite nicely, once the insane concept was forced down the throats of the British.

Here in America, Jefferson and any number of lawyers and others decried the practice, so the idea of creating invisible “bodies” was verboten. How, then, did it come to be the business standard in America? Through law, right? Right? Ahhh, so glad you asked.

Actually, a corporation has always been competely illegal in America, as Prof. Morton J. Horowitz clearly and irrefutably showed in his landmark The Transformation of American Law, 1870 - 1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, in the chapter “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory”. That section inspects the Santa Clara V. Southern Pacific Railroad (118 U.S. 394 [1886]) case, in which, completely irrelevant to the question before the court, the sentiment was rendered that “[t]he court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

As the good professor points out, there was no precedent in law to support any part of that statement, nor was counsel for either side allowed to comment on it. It was, speaking of that which the conservative (read: business) element in the society decries: an outrageously egregious example of legislation from the bench. Mostly, nowadays, this stand-out bizarre occurrence is assiduously avoided, but one will occasionally catch a gaggle of esquired monkeys battling over how many angels can fit on the head of the period closing it. How appropriate. A point of law that would never have withstood populist inspection, probably not even broad legal community scrutiny, became standing law through the witting sabotage of a set of justices colluding to birth it. After all, the opinion reads “we are all”, not “some of us” or even “a 5-to-4 decision”.

So, should you wish to take the opposite stance, you mean to tell me that a group of uberlawyers, what has been called “nine scorpions in a bottle”, well past law school, into a long career of diverse cases, did not know to quote law when stating that the law says “such and such”? All those averring in the affirmative, please address me through the e-address below; I have a bridge I think you’re going to like.

In case you didn't catch it, that sentiment, for it was not an opinion, in Santa Clara was an act of fascism. The business community, represented by the railroads here, persuaded justices to fiat something strange that never became law. It also managed to keep them shut afterwards somehow. Prof. Horowitz goes so far as to say this was not even unusual but represented a disturbing growing trend in American jurisprudence: (I’ll say it, so he won’t have to have words shoved in his mouth that he might not want to elucidate so plainly) law and its minions as servants of business. Nice. Yet, there it was, and I’m willing to bet that some have tried to bring a question on it to the Court and the Court has chosen not to entertain it, as is it’s ill-gotten right. Maybe not, but what are the odds? Hence, some weasel, or some outfit of weasels, slipped a little bomb into the public register, and the interested parties thereafter went nuts. Sound like something we’re looking at right now?

Governo-corporate toad-eater Samuel Alito has invented a theory of, now get this, “unitary executive”, a more meaningless phrase as could never be concocted, and is trying to pull another Santa Clara on the public. The irony is that if he is admitted to the Supreme Court, he’ll be his own facilitator and abettor!. Neat trick, Sammy. This will not to be, as you may infer, a one-time farrago, as Santa Clara was, but now stands as a signal of subservience to the ruling class, a bid to join the nobles as a useful courtier.

Look at Alito. Another Il Duce? Hardly. He’s a poster boy for the Christian Far Right, an Ivory Soap Miltowner with a Pepsodent smile, a faceless body in the multitude, the better to escape suspicion as much as is humanly possible. Ever wonder why so many commercials feature kindly mothers, soft-spoken well-intentioned grandfathers, and burblingly cute little kids trying to sell you on some damn commodity you’re going to regret buying? It’s for the same reason we’re now seeing geeks dominate the political scene. They’re playing on your psychological paradigms. You’re already a bit too wary of roughnecks like Uncle Joe Stalin and and Benny Mussolini, so you’re getting, instead, gents you’d never suspect otherwise.

“Unitary executive” is indeed another “corporation” Santa Clara ploy, but with a far deadlier effect. It’s well camouflaged, carefully kept from inspection, and intended to be a flashpoint “fact” that will herald the sort of legislatve nightmare Prof. Horowitz would never have imagined. It will be, as the idiotic phrase itself clearly intimates, the ingress by which dictatorship finally gains a firm and irremovable foot in the threshold of the country.

So, don’t look to wild-eyed Gadaffis, bearded Husseins, or flaming-faced bin Ladens for fascism in America; those are CIA creations and that’s not how it will come. Look for the well-scrubbed, kissy-faced, prayerful hands class president for our own proud mutation of the hoary tradition. We do nothing quite like anyone else and this will be no exception. The new facilitator will beam and quote scripture as he reveals his horns and tail. The Repuglicans will rejoiceth in his presence, yea, even while the Dimocrats bow and scrape, begging for a crust of the royal bread...and thus fascism will have decended upon America, not roaring and fierce, not raking the air with bloody claws, not squalling and preening, but softly, quietly, unnoticed, on cat’s feet.

Mark S. Tucker, a critic, has written for numerous magazines and presently writes for Perfect Sound Forever on-line, as well as this forum. He can be reached at progdawg@hotmail.com. This article is originally published at opednews.com. Copyright Mark S. Tucker, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.

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Living Under Fascism
Davidson Loehr 7 November 2004 First UU Church of Austin

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word “fascism” in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don’t mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That’s what I am about here. And even if I don’t persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.
The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.

Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word "fascism" they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in “The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul”), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. Yet reviewing our past may help shed light on our present, and point the way to a better future. So I want to begin by looking back to the last time fascism posed a serious threat to America.

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy — those concerned with individual rights and freedoms — as anti-American. That was 69 years ago.

One of the most outspoken American fascists from the 1930s was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism — a coming which he anticipated and cheered — Dennis declared that defenders of “18th-century Americanism” were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."

So it is important for us to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s, and nearly worshiped by some powerful American industrialists. And fascism has always, and explicitly, been opposed to liberalism of all kinds.

Mussolini, who helped create modern fascism, viewed liberal ideas as the enemy. "The Fascist conception of life," he wrote, "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual." (In 1932 Mussolini wrote, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, an entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism. You can read the whole entry HERE)

Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights: The essence of fascism, he believed, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people.

Still, fascism is a word that is completely foreign to most of us. We need to know what it is, and how we can know it when we see it.

In an essay coyly titled “Fascism Anyone?,” Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, identifies social and political agendas common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 “identifying characteristics of fascism.” (The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2.) See how familiar they sound.

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism

Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights

Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause

The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military

Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism

The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media

Sometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security

Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined

Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected

The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed

Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts

Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment

Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections

Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

This list will be familiar to students of political science. But it should be familiar to students of religion as well, for much of it mirrors the social and political agenda of religious fundamentalisms worldwide.

It is both accurate and helpful for us to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. They both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again.

But, again, this is not America’s first encounter with fascism.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. See how much you think his statements apply to our society today.

“The really dangerous American fascist,” Wallace wrote, “… is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism he saw rising in America, Wallace added, “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

By these standards, a few of today’s weapons for keeping the common people in eternal subjection include NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, union-busting, cutting worker benefits while increasing CEO pay, elimination of worker benefits, security and pensions, rapacious credit card interest, and outsourcing of jobs — not to mention the largest prison system in the world.

The Perfect Storm

Our current descent into fascism came about through a kind of “Perfect Storm,” a confluence of three unrelated but mutually supportive schools of thought.

1. The first stream of thought was the imperialistic dream of the Project for the New American Century. I don’t believe anyone can understand the past four years without reading the Project for the New American Century, published in September 2000 and authored by many who have been prominent players in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan to name only a few.

This report saw the fall of Communism as a call for America to become the military rulers of the world, to establish a new worldwide empire. They spelled out the military enhancements we would need, then noted, sadly, that these wonderful plans would take a long time, unless there could be a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor that would let the leaders turn America into a military and militarist country. There was no clear interest in religion in this report, and no clear concern with local economic policies.

2. A second powerful stream must be credited to Pat Robertson and his Christian Reconstructionists, or Dominionists. Long dismissed by most of us as a screwball, the Dominionist style of Christianity which he has been preaching since the early 1980s is now the most powerful religious voice in the Bush administration.

Katherine Yurica, who transcribed over 1300 pages of interviews from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” shows in the 1980s, has shown how Robertson and his chosen guests consistently, openly and passionately argued that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian Dominionists. Robertson is on record saying democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians. He also rails constantly against taxing the rich, against public education, social programs and welfare — and prefers Deuteronomy 28 over the teachings of Jesus. He is clear that women must remain homebound as obedient servants of men, and that abortions, like homosexuals, should not be allowed. Robertson has also been clear that other kinds of Christians, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are enemies of Christ. (The Yurica Report. Search under this name, or for “Despoiling America” by Katherine Yurica on the internet.)

3. The third major component of this Perfect Storm has been the desire of very wealthy Americans and corporate CEOs for a plutocracy that will favor profits by the very rich and disempowerment of the vast majority of American workers, the destruction of workers’ unions, and the alliance of government to help achieve these greedy goals. It is a condition some have called socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and which others recognize as a reincarnation of Social Darwinism. This strain of thought has been present throughout American history. Seventy years ago, they tried to finance a military coup to replace Franlkin Delano Roosevelt and establish General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in 1934. Fortunately, they picked a general who really was a patriot; he refused, reported the scheme, and spoke and wrote about it. As Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie “The Corporation,” they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.

Our plutocrats have had no particular interest in religion. Their global interests are with an imperialist empire, and their domestic goals are in undoing all the New Deal reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that enabled the rise of America’s middle class after WWII.

Another ill wind in this Perfect Storm is more important than its crudity might suggest: it was President Clinton’s sleazy sex with a young but eager intern in the White House. This incident, and Clinton’s equally sleazy lying about it, focused the certainties of conservatives on the fact that “liberals” had neither moral compass nor moral concern, and therefore represented a dangerous threat to the moral fiber of America. While the effects of this may be hard to quantify, I think they were profound.

These “storm” components have no necessary connection, and come from different groups of thinkers, many of whom wouldn’t even like one another. But together, they form a nearly complete web of command and control, which has finally gained control of America and, they hope, of the world.

What’s coming

When all fascisms exhibit the same social and political agendas (the 14 points listed by Britt), then it is not hard to predict where a new fascist uprising will lead. The actions of fascists and the social and political effects of fascism and fundamentalism are clear and sobering. Here is some of what’s coming, what will be happening in our country in the next few years:

# The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.

# Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.

# Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children’s education to Christian schools.

# More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work.

# Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state’s official stories.

# The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veterans’ Day sermon for this year.)

# More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.

# More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.

# Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.

# Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.

# Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control – the New York Times, for instance.

# Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America’s workers to a more desperate and powerless status.

# Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.

# Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.

# In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive — the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.

Can these schemes work? I don’t think so. I think they are murderous, rapacious and insane. But I don’t know. Maybe they can. Similar schemes have worked in countries like Chile, where a democracy in which over 90% voted has been reduced to one in which only about 20% vote because they say, as Americans are learning to say, that it no longer matters who you vote for.

Hope

In the meantime, is there any hope, or do we just band together like lemmings and dive off a cliff? Yes, there is always hope, though at times it is more hidden, as it is now.

As some critics are now saying, and as I have been preaching and writing for almost twenty years, America’s liberals need to grow beyond political liberalism, with its often self-absorbed focus on individual rights to the exclusion of individual responsibilities to the larger society. Liberals will have to construct a more complete vision with moral and religious grounding. That does not mean confessional Christianity. It means the legitimate heir to Christianity. Such a legitimate heir need not be a religion, though it must have clear moral power, and be able to attract the minds and hearts of a voting majority of Americans.

And the new liberal vision must be larger than that of the conservative religious vision that will be appointing judges, writing laws and bending the cultural norms toward hatred and exclusion for the foreseeable future. The conservatives deserve a lot of admiration. They have spent the last thirty years studying American politics, forming their vision and learning how to gain control in the political system. And it worked; they have won. Even if liberals can develop a bigger vision, they still have all that time-consuming work to do. It won’t be fast. It isn’t even clear that liberals will be willing to do it; they may instead prefer to go down with the ship they’re used to.

One man who has been tireless in his investigations and critiques of America’s slide into fascism is Michael C. Ruppert, whose postings usually read as though he is wound way too tight. But he offers four pieces of advice about what we can do now, and they seem reality-based enough to pass on to you. This is America; they’re all about money:

# First, he says you should get out of debt.

# Second is to spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information.

# Third is to stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you angry and exhausted.

# And fourth is to learn how money works and use it like a (political) weapon — as he predicts the rest of the world will be doing against us.

That’s advice written this week. Another bit of advice comes from sixty years ago, from Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace. Wallace said, “Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.”

Still another way to understand fascism is as a kind of colonization. A simple definition of “colonization” is that it takes people’s stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense. When you are taxed to support a government that uses you as a means to serve the ends of others, you are — ironically — in a state of taxation without representation. That’s where this country started, and it’s where we are now.

I don’t know the next step. I’m not a political activist; I’m only a preacher. But whatever you do, whatever we do, I hope that we can remember some very basic things that I think of as eternally true. One is that the vast majority of people are good decent people who mean and do as well as they know how. Very few people are evil, though some are. But we all live in families where some of our blood relatives support things we hate. I believe they mean well, and the way to rebuild broken bridges is through greater understanding, compassion, and a reality-based story that is more inclusive and empowering for the vast majority of us.

Those who want to live in a reality-based story rather than as serfs in an ideology designed to transfer power, possibility and hope to a small ruling elite have much long and hard work to do, individually and collectively. It will not be either easy or quick.

But we will do it. We will go forward in hope and in courage. Let us seek that better path, and find the courage to take it — step, by step, by step.

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Wineke: Now even illusion of Washington integrity ends
Bill Wineke Wisconsin State Journal 25 Jan 06

We all knew that Jeb Bartlet couldn't remain president forever and that, sooner or later, "The West Wing" would close its doors.

But did it have to happen now, now at a time when we need the essential decency and high-mindedness of the Bartlett administration more than ever?

Well, yes, I suppose it did. "The West Wing" is a television show and television shows rise and fall by ratings. The producers didn't even wait for the Democrats to be voted out of office.

But, at a time when the real Washington, D.C., is beset by scandals here, scandals there and Karl Rove promising another campaign in which the alternatives are an imperial president or horrifying, terrible mass destruction at the hands of the enemy, it has been nice to see the fictional Washington operate with some sense of integrity.
If you're a "West Wing" fan, you know that it's not just the Democrats who come off looking good on the show. Bartlett and his staff are Democrats, of course. They seem reminiscent of what the Clinton White House might have been had it lived up to its highest values.

But Republicans generally came off pretty well, too. Remember when John Goodman became acting president for a few episodes? He had a Barry Goldwater toughness and reversed most of Bartlett's feel-good policies - but he did so fairly and out of conviction. The viewer could at least consider the merits of the policies he espoused.

Likewise, Alan Alda, the current GOP presidential candidate on the show, is presented as a man of conviction with serious proposals that, at least, merit consideration from the viewer.

We'd like to think that's the way the real Washington operates and that all the things we read about in the headlines are mere aberrations. I used to think that was true.

However, I'm increasingly convinced that Lord Acton was right, that power corrupts and the more power you amass, the more corrupt you become. The real difference between the Republican scandals of today and the Democratic scandals of yesterday is that Republicans have all the power today. Sooner or later, we'll kick them out and then Democrats will have the power and will use it badly.

I know that sounds cynical. It is cynical. But it's part of the genius of our political system.

"The West Wing" was an antidote to that cynicism. It posited a fairy-tale world in which the corruption of power was, in the end, thwarted by decent politicians who put country ahead of self, at least most of the time. The show never pretended the politicians were always right - but it did contend they were usually decent.

I'm going to miss that insight, even though I doubt that it reflected reality.

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A Nation of Kitty Genovese's Neighbors
William B. Cushman, Ph.D. 2004

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King wrote the famous quote above in regard to the civil rights movement, but it is equally true of our current crisis. We, the good people of the United States, are embarrassingly silent when we should be raising our voices in utter and complete outrage. We are throwing our honor and our standing before the world to the winds of ignominy without the slightest sign of any struggle, and without the slightest semblance of any claim to moral standing. Ironically, it was not too many years ago we were collectively outraged by similar behavior from Kitty Genovese's neighbors. We were collectively appalled at the behavior of those few callous individuals, and now most of us join their ranks. We need to remember the events of Ms. Genovese's murder now, and exactly how we felt about her neighbors, because that is exactly how the rest of the world now views every American citizen.
In the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, a 28-year-old woman by the name of Kitty Genovese was returning home after working late at her job. She was less than 35 yards from her own apartment in an upscale area of Queens, New York, when she was attacked and stabbed by an assailant.. She screamed, lights came on, and a man shouted at the assailant from his window, causing him to withdraw. The assailant ran and hid, then returned within minutes and stabbed Ms. Genovese again. There were more screams, and lights again went on in the apartments all around, and Kitty's assailant again fled. Ms. Genovese managed to get to her feet after this second attack, and stagger to her doorway. A bus passed by but didn't stop--even though she must have been bleeding profusely--and the assailant returned for the third time. After all, no one was seriously assisting the helpless young woman. His third attack was fatal.

Murder is far from unusual in our country. In this case, however, thirty eight individuals were witness to the murder from the safety of their apartments. No doubt many more saw something from the bus that passed, yet only one of Kitty's neighbors called out. Later, too much later, only one neighbor called the police. That call was placed after first calling and conferring with a friend for many long minutes about whether he should "get involved." The police arrived very promptly, too late, within two minutes of this belated call.

All but two of Kitty Genovese's neighbors remained completely silent and took no action whatsoever. Had any one of them been more forceful in rendering assistance of any sort, Kitty Genovese would probably have lived. But, thirty six of Kitty's neighbors weighed the costs of "getting involved" against her life . . . and decided to let her die.

Ms. Genovese's neighbors defined themselves with their inaction and their silence, and clearly demonstrated the real result of their presumed moral training for all to witness. Now, we define ourselves as a nation in exactly the same way.

Now is our time to demonstrate as an entire Nation the result of our presumed moral training --- and we are failing utterly. Americans by the millions stand silently by as our government commits mass murder in our name. Unjustified war, mass murder, and the taking of assets by force is clearly on a moral level lower than robbing a convenience store and shooting a few customers in the process. It is the highest of high crimes both domestically and internationally. It is unquestionably a war crime as defined first at Nuremberg and later at the United Nations. Yet, the silence of Americans is deafening.

Even though those who supported and continue to support Mr. Bush can be worked into a mouth-frothing rage over the personal peccadillos of a previous president, they remain completely silent about our current one's many murders. The representative of the American people, our representative, George W. Bush has murdered far more innocent children than Osama bin Laden has murdered adults. But the citizens supporting these atrocities do not seem to care about this little detail, and add insult to the deep injury they have done the rest of us by laying claim to moral high ground at the same time they sponsor and support these murders. And yet, very few Americans try to correct them. Thus the people of the United States define themselves with their silence as completely lacking any practical morality, just as Kitty Genovese's thirty six neighbors defined their selves.

We have earned the outrage and genuine disgust of the entire world with our inaction, our silence, and our clearly demonstrated absence of morality. Justifiably so, because if we would simply get involved and raise our voices these murders could not happen. Even now we could redeem ourselves partially before the world by shipping those directly responsible for the atrocities and murder off to The Hague for trial. Doing so would demonstrate our intention to participate in the world as law-abiding citizens, and we would thus reclaim some semblance of belated honor for ourselves. But we won't do any such thing. To do so would force us to admit that those Americans who have remained silent for so many years are also guilty. We thus remain an entire nation of Kitty Genovese's neighbors: despicable, dishonored, immoral, and silent.

How did we get ourselves into such a horrible situation?

It did not happen overnight, but had its seeds in the very founding of our country. Monied interests have, throughout our history, used their money to influence politicians in their favor, and their favor has always been about money and power. Under the law, a corporation may not be a charitable organization without violating its duty to provide a profit for its stockholders. Under the law, any corporate campaign contribution must be made with the expectation of a return on that investment. A politician thus accepts money from a corporation or special interest with the clear understanding that he must either pay this money back with favorable legislation or pay it back directly from the public treasury --- with enormous interest . This system has now evolved to the point where no politician can survive without the active support of the corporate interests that support his campaigns, and this fact argues strongly that the great majority of our current politicians are corrupt.

Corporate interests are selfish and insular, and proceed with their plutocratic programs without any regard for consequences to the public as a whole. Should they be otherwise leaves those in charge liable to the stockholders for violation of their fiduciary responsibilities. The United States government is now completely controlled by corporate interests via their campaign contributions and these corporations compete among themselves for the spoils we provide. They resemble parasites with no regard for the well-being of their host. So our economy is being trashed to facilitate the profits of a few, and we are now murdering innocent individuals in Iraq so that Haliburton and others gain riches well beyond what they could accrue during peaceful times. And the rest of us will continue to pay the bill with our treasure, the future of our children, and with our blood.

There is no apparent limit to the horrors perpetrated by corporate greed. The mass murder of millions upon millions of innocent babies has been going on for decades to insure corporate profits, and we forced the world to accept these murders and do nothing about them --- but not in the name of the corporations who profit, but in our name.

Hyperbole, you think? I am very much afraid not.

In the late sixties and early seventies I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. At that time companies that produced baby formula advertised widely in third-world countries with messages designed to convince expectant mothers that their formula was the "modern way" to raise an infant, implying that mothers breastmilk was "old fashioned" and inadequate. To promote their products, companies such as Nestle' would give a new mother enough formula to feed her baby for six weeks as a free trade sample. This was long enough to dry up the mother's own milk and make her completely dependent on baby formula for her child. The baby formula from Nestle' and others was expensive. To try and save money ignorant mothers with no knowledge of bacterial infections would try to extend their baby's formula with water --- which was often contaminated. Bottle-fed babies have no immune system to speak of, they normally get the antibodies for that with their mother's milk. The result was predictable: the babies so treated would sicken and die.

This marketing practice and its result was noted by the United Nations World Health Organization. After an estimated one million babies had died, the issue of whether the practice should be condemned was brought to a vote at the United Nations. All the nations on this earth that were present at the United Nations that day voted to condemn the practice --- except one. On this important day the citizens of one greedy and immoral nation sent the unequivocal message to the rest of the world that killing babies for profit was less reprehensible to them than interfering with the right of the killers to make a profit. American citizens, via their representative at the United Nations, voted against the measure, and thus effectively killed it. (1)

All of the major papers outside of the United States carried the news of our despicable vote, but it was universally absent from the corporate media here. Most Americans I have told this story to have never heard it before, and many simply refuse to believe it. But that is how Americans have been represented by our government to the world . . . as killers of babies for profit. If your baby had died because of this practice how would you feel about the people who simply stood by and allowed it to happen? Does it anger you to know that you are personally responsible for this practice? Because by our silence, our studied ignorance, we most definitely are responsible.

We have forced the rest of the world to allow this practice since 1981, very much against their will. This translates to roughly twenty nine million dead babies that we are responsible for, and many, many more that died before the U.N. vote that the manufacturers of these products are responsible for.

Can you seriously believe that our lone vote in the United Nations was anything but bought and paid for by corporate interests that feared a loss of profits, and abhorred the precedence of international control on those profits? It certainly had nothing to do with any moral stance, and it surely did not promote the interests of the people of the United States, who are generally decent albeit entirely too passive and quiet. If our corporations are willing to kill defenseless babies by the millions for profit, what else are they capable of? Who have they angered in the process? Who's corporate profits are we now paying for with our blood and treasure as those effected fight back or seek revenge?

You can hardly call yourself a human if you are not outraged at being put into the position of supporting and being personally responsible for the mass murder of babies for profit, and the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people in Iraq and too many other places around the world. Which is exactly the position our government has put us all into. And the horror our corporate media know you would feel if you knew the extent of the atrocities done in our name is exactly why most remain completely ignorant. Our corporate media don't want you to think about such things. Their main job is to keep you passive, compliant, and consuming. And they are obviously very good at that job.

The union of corporate and government interests that has been accomplished with corporate control of political funding and public sources of information has led to the looting of our treasury and the sacking of our honor. As citizens, we pay for this system with our moral standing, our treasure, and our blood every day that it exists. We have become the battered spouses of our own government, cringing quietly in a corner as the blows rain down, wondering why we deserve such ill treatment. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is time to stop our passive acceptance of this abuse and act like honorable and moral human beings. We must search for and find our backbones so that we can cast off this despicable silence and start to scream our outrage, for it is our only hope. This is our government, we are not their serfs. For our honor, for our future, for the future of our children, we MUST FIGHT BACK!

The key to this fight is the link between campaign contributions and resulting legislation. These contributions are Bribes by any definition of the word, and this fact is their weakness. All States exempt campaign contributions from their Bribery statutes in one way or another, but the very fact that they must be exempted points a revealing finger at their nature. We must stand up and call these Bribes by their rightful name, insist that they not be exempted, and rid ourselves of the practice. This web site is merely a tool to be used in this fight. Ultimately it will be citizens like you that make it work, or not. Please study it carefully.
Comment: "There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government."

-- Thomas Jefferson -

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Wolfowitz under fire
Financial Times January 24 2006 02:00

The term of a World Bank presidency is an all-too-brief five years and the early months are frequently marred by sniping from the career staff who are more permanent fixtures. Because the post is filled by the nominee of the US president, a new chief often knows little about the organisation and takes time to make a mark. Almost eight months after taking up the role, Paul Wolfowitz has yet to set a course for his presidency and staff disquiet is reaching deafening levels.
The immediate cause of the turmoil at the World Bank is the appointment of an adviser to Mr Wolfowitz with close ties to the Republican party as the new director of the internal watchdog that investigates suspected fraud and staff misconduct. His choice has raised questions about the selection of someone so close to the president and whether this was the best person for such a sensitive post. But the ensuing strife has revealed widespread unhappiness among senior bank staff and executive directors over Mr Wolfowitz's management style and performance.

Following his arrival, Mr Wolfowitz made clear his intention to streamline the bank's management structure. His predecessor had appointed five managing directors, four of whom had already left. There were more than 30 vice-presidents below managing director level, whose ranks he planned to thin out.

The fifth managing director left late last year, as did the highly regarded general counsel. Only now is Mr Wolfowitz close to appointing new managing directors, who are unlikely to be in place until the summer - a year after his arrival. Meanwhile power has gravitated to his immediate circle - mainly Republican stalwarts, prompting agitation among the career staff.

Nor has Mr Wolfowitz set a new intellectual agenda for his presidency. Instead, he has appeared more concerned about being seen to respond to criticisms on Capitol Hill over allegations of corruption - allegations that bank staff often see as witch-hunts against them for the sins of those in the countries where the bank operates.

Mr Wolfowitz can reasonably say that he wanted time to assess priorities for the organisation and that 2005 was a year of heavy commitments, such as the Group of Eight summit at Gleneagles. But as time has passed, authority has drained upwards from those beneath him in the hierarchy to his clique of advisers. Decision-making has slowed - made worse by his tendency to take a long time making up his mind.

When Mr Wolfowitz was appointed, the Financial Times urged him to give the bank greater focus and to overhaul its management. He cannot achieve this in an organisation with 10,000 staff operating in more than 100 countries by relying on a handful of trusted aides from his own country. Unless he moves quickly to appoint a team representative of the shareholders that is credible to the staff, his presidency risks ending in paralysis and disappointment.

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Iris Scanning For New Jersey Grade School
By Laurie Sullivan TechWeb.com Mon Jan 23, 6:34 PM ET

When a parent arrives to pick up their child at one of three grade schools in the Freehold Borough School District, they'll need to look into a camera that will take a digital image of their iris. That photo will establish positive identification to gain entrance into the school.
Funding for the project, more than $369,000, was made possibly by a school safety grant through the National Institute of Justice, a research branch of the U.S.
Department of Justice. "The idea is to improve school safety for the children," said Phil Meara, superintendent, Freehold Borough School District, on Monday. "We had a swipe-card system that operated the doors, but the technology was obsolete."

Installation of the iris technology began in October. The system is now operational after two months of testing. The Teacher-Parent Authorization Security System (T-PASS), a software application developed by Eyemetric Identity Systems, was installed on the front office computers at each of the three schools.

It took software engineers about nine months to develop the platform. Two technicians were hired by the school board to provide IT support for maintenance and updates to the platform. School participation in the 18-month study is voluntary.

Parents who have children that attend any of the three schools in the district, teachers who instruct students attending classes at the locations, and staff employees are assigned access rights. Each child can have up to four adults approved in the system.

The platform provides entry-access controls, visitor management and the capability to scan a driver's license from 50 states and automatically import the information into the database. "The file size created when the camera takes a picture of the iris to match it against records in the database is about 512 kilobytes," said Raymond Bolling, co-founder of Eyemetric Identity Systems, a spin-off of New Jersey Business Systems Inc., which specialized in biometrics identification.

The system takes a digital photograph of the iris, the color portion of the eye, each time a parent, teach or administrative and school employee gains access to the school. "The algorithm can map out up to 242 unique points in the iris," Bolling said. "A good fingerprint patch is anywhere from seven to 22 points."

The algorithms for iris scanning are licensed through a LG Electronics from Iridian Technologies Inc. The software keeps a log and digital record or any visitor entering the school, which replaces a four-column paper spreadsheet.

Global biometric revenues are projected to grow from $2.1 billion in 2006 to $5.7 billion in 2010, which includes iris scanning, according International Biometric Group. Iris scanning is emerging, albeit slowly. The research firm said iris recognition revenues are estimated to exceed $250 million by 2008.

Eyemetric developed and deployed the iris recognition system using IrisAccess iris recognition cameras and software from LG Electronics, and Tailgate Detection Alarm Recording (T-DAR) anti-tailgating system from Newton Security. The hardware supporting the application is Hewlett-Packard & Co.'s ProLiant DL140 servers, along with HP dx5150 desktop PCs with Advanced Micro Device (AMD) processor, and Access Point for wireless networking from ProCurve Networking.

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Homeland Security To Confiscate Bank Safe Deposit Box Contents
by notepad 22 Jan 06

While all the other points I mentioned in a previous post are fairly well documented and discussed elsewhere on the Internet, the bank information I reported is not. This information is from my own experience and research. I discovered the disturbing news quite by accident - and by virtue of its importance, I decided to post my findings here and on a few other forums.

What did I hear?

A family member from Irvine, CA (who’s a branch manager at Bank of America) told us two weeks ago that her bank held a "workshop" where the last two days were dedicated to discussing their bank’s new security measures. During these last two days, the workshop included members from the Homeland Security Office who instructed them on how to field calls from customers and what they are to tell them in the event of a national disaster. She said they were told how only agents from Homeland Security (during such an event) would be in charge of opening safe deposit boxes and determining what items would be given to bank customers.

At this point they were told that no weapons, cash, gold, or silver will be allowed to leave the bank - only various paperwork will be given to its owners. After discussing the matter with them at length, she and the other employees were then told not to discuss the subject with anyone.
The family member has since given her notice to quit the bank.

I found the news alarming and decided to find out more myself. On a trip to my bank here in Houston, I remarked to a young bank employee (who’s new there), "well I guess you’ve been told all that stuff by the manager and the Homeland Security about what to tell your customers" - and to my amazement, the young woman came right out and said yes she’d been through all that, then whispered to me across the counter, "but we’re not supposed to talk about - I could lose my job."

Why haven’t you heard more about this?

First of all, since maybe only banks’ upper management is privy to the new "rules", the information doesn’t trickle down so easily.

Also keep in mind that employees have been told NOT to say anything about this, that it’s a matter of National Security (with an allusion toward arrest if they do). They face possibly losing their job too. Another reason is that bank employees may not think it’s important, or they believe they’re a unique part of the effort towards curtailing "terrorism" and helping America’s internal defenses.

It is also important to realize that not everyone’s a writer, or Internet savvy - even if the employees moved beyond their banks’ warnings & constraints, most people don’t know how to get their experience published on the Web in the public domain - it’s a mystery they are not familiar with so you never hear their story.

How to get the information yourself:

Visit your bank, ask a few well-worded questions, being careful not to arouse suspicion - if that doesn’t work, talk to friends and other family members - maybe they’ve heard something - or as a last resort, just point blank call the bank manager in private and demand to know what’s all this business with the Homeland Security deciding what I can have from my safe deposit box - tell me now or I’ll close my account today.

I’ll bet if you put forth the effort you’ll get the answers you want.

What should you do with this information?

I’m not trying to "scare" anyone - just providing some news I think is relevant to Americans. Each must find his way through this dark forest - you will do with this information what best suits you and your loved ones - me personally, I see this as another indicator of how the criminals in charge over our lives intend to fleece U.S. citizens completely then dispose of them as only refuse.

Be prepared.

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Mention of CIA adds mystery to court-martial - Agency, interrogation might be linked
AP 22 Jan 06

FORT CARSON, Colo. - The initials were spoken aloud only once all week, and then apparently by mistake.

After this past week's testimony, any role the CIA had -- or didn't have -- in the interrogation of an Iraqi general who died in U.S. custody remains a tantalizing and mysterious backdrop to the court-martial of Army Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.

The CIA is "the ghost at the banquet," said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert in military law who has been following the court-martial but doesn't know whether the CIA was involved in the case.
"We're playing 'Hamlet' without Hamlet here," said Fidell, an attorney in private practice who teaches military law at American University in Washington. He also represented news organizations in their attempts to open pretrial hearings in Welshofer's prosecution.

Welshofer is charged with murder in the 2003 death of Republican Guard Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush at a detention camp in western Iraq.

Prosecutors say Mowhoush was stuffed headfirst in a sleeping bag and bound with electrical cord, then suffocated with Welshofer sitting atop his chest.

The defense contends a heart condition caused Mowhoush's death, and that Welshofer's commanders had approved the interrogation technique.

In 2004, the CIA said one of its officers may have been involved in Mowhoush's death, but the agency refused to elaborate. Last August, the Washington Post reported that documents it examined said Mowhoush was severely beaten by a CIA-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary group two days before he died.

Testimony at Welshofer's court-martial this past week confirmed that Mowhoush was indeed beaten by Iraqis two days before he died. But the witness, Chief Warrant Officer Todd Sonnek, did not identify the Iraqis.

Then defense lawyer Frank Spinner at one point questioned a witness whose identity is so secret that he was shielded from reporters and others by a green tarp suspended from the ceiling. The witness had said he was alarmed when Welshofer told him he thought the Army's interrogation guidelines were being broken every day.

"And you didn't report it to the CIA?" Spinner asked. The attorney then stopped himself and quickly apologized to the judge.

Welshofer testified that when he left the room where he was questioning Mowhoush, he "noticed other people in the hallway" and that they took control of the session.

Welshofer said the Iraqis slapped and pushed Mowhoush, and the session escalated into a beating with rubber hoses after Mowhoush and one of the Iraqis recognized each other.

During his testimony, Welshofer said commanders offered little guidance on how to question detainees.

He said he received an e-mail from his unit's commanders saying there were no rules for interrogations because officials still had not determined how to classify detainees. The e-mail, sent as the insurgency was growing more lethal, claimed officers were "tired of taking casualties and that the gloves were coming off," he said.

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More questions surround Texas' D.C. lobbyist
By TARA COPP Cox News Service January 25, 2006

WASHINGTON — When the state first approved hiring a new lobbying firm with close ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 2004, it rejected competing bids that met more of the state's selection criteria and cost less, according to documents obtained by the Austin American-Statesman.

What the winning firm, Cassidy & Associates, did have was access — all the way to presidential aide Karl Rove, according to memos and e-mails that were obtained through a Texas Open Records Request.
And despite the lower marks the firm received when state officials first reviewed the bids, staff members from Texas' state agencies tapped to choose a new lobbyist eventually awarded the firm a $15,000-a-month contract to lobby Congress.

"Cassidy is the best fit for Texas," Office of State-Federal Relations associate director David Pagan said in a May 25, 2004 e-mail to staff. "Firm is (the) leader in DC on approps. (acquiring federal funding)."

The firm now is under fire from Texas House Democrats because of the close ties between Cassidy senior vice president Todd Boulanger and Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy, tax evasion and mail fraud.

Seven Texas House Democrats also sent a letter to Gov. Rick Perry last Friday demanding that Cassidy's contract be cancelled, because the firm has not bothered to reach out to them.

Perry spokeswoman Kathy Walt said Tuesday that, even though Cassidy was not the top scorer in the bidding process initially, it rose to the top of the list after in-person interviews with the state's selection committee, and after the firm's references were checked.

Walt also said that Cassidy & Associates was not hired to lobby Texas' Democrats, but to reach out-of-state Democrats.

Neither Cassidy & Associates nor any of the other competing firms responded to calls for comment Tuesday. State-Federal Relations executive director Ed Perez did not take questions from a reporter directly, but was in contact with Walt to answer questions.

Ironically, getting more Democrats involved in the state's lobbying efforts was one of the main stated reasons the state hired Cassidy, according to the documents.

In 2004, the Texas Office of State-Federal Relations had terminated its contract with lobbying firm Piper Rudnick, LLP, according to the documents. Piper Rudnick had brought some prominent Democrats to the state's lobbying team.

The state also has a standing, $15,000-a-month lobbying contract with The Federalist Group, which employed embattled former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, Drew Maloney.

More political balance was needed, the state's office in Washington reasoned in a Dec. 10, 2004 memo. "An additional firm can help ensure (Texas) maintains a bipartisan strategy on certain issues."

The memo was an after-the-fact explanation of how the state had selected Cassidy & Associates, which had beat out competitors that were initially given higher scores, based on seven criteria, including experience, access and quality of prior jobs performed.

"The Federalist Group is seen primarily as a Republican firm," the memo continued. "Cassidy & Associates is headed by a Democrat founding name partner, and is considered to be a bipartisan firm."

The Cassidy team assembled to tackle Texas' needs, had at least two Democrats on staff but became more Republican over time.

The assembled team had Boulanger in the lead. Boulanger had worked closely with Abramoff in a previous job at Greenberg-Traurig, a firm where Abramoff had been a partner.

In its proposal, Cassidy & Associates said Boulanger "has exceptional ties to Republican leaders and can provide access to a broad range of offices."

In a supporting e-mail sent in July, 2004, Boulanger told Pagan, "I don't want to inundate you with names, so here are (a) few from some of the people that would likely be working on the TX team should we get the contract." He then listed a deep bench of access, including Rove and Joshua Bolton, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Boulanger's initial support team included two staffers with Democratic backgrounds and four from Republican offices. By 2005, the team included seven Republicans and two Democrats.

When Cassidy initially competed for the contract, it was one of 17 firms. Those proposals were then rated by a panel of two State-Federal Relation staff members and a staffer from the Texas Department of Transportation.

The panel ranked each proposal based 75 percent on how well the company met the state's criteria and 25 percent on cost. The panel submitted its final recommendation to Perez, who then made his recommendation to Office of State-Federal Relations' Advisory Policy Board, which included Perry, Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick, and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Both Dewhurst and Craddick have said they had no role in selecting Cassidy & Associates.

Although Perry reviews the contracts, his approval is not required, Walt said. "He certainly is aware of who we hired," Walt said. "But decisions are made more at the staff level."

The assessment in 2004, though, did not initially favor Cassidy, which was ranked fourth. Two of the firms ranked ahead of it would have charged Texas between $300 and $833 less per month than Cassidy's initial offer of $15,833 a month. (Once the contract was signed, Cassidy's fee was down to $15,000 plus expenses.)

After the interview rounds in May, the panel started checking references to the remaining firms. Boulanger sent his email about access to Rove that July. By December, after calls had been made to all the firms' contacts, Cassidy stood out, and was recommended.

Tara Copp writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: tcopp AT statesman.com

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Tanker fire shuts down I-95
Staff Report Daytona Beach News Journal 24 Jan 06

A tanker truck filled with 8,000 gallons of fuel exploded into a giant fireball visible for miles after it crashed on Interstate 95 in Palm Coast Monday night, shutting down southbound traffic for six hours between U.S. 1 north of Flagler County and Palm Coast Parkway.
The accident occurred about 8 p.m. on I-95 a couple of miles north of the Palm Coast Parkway exit.

The driver of the tanker was identified as Wayne McNeill, 39, of Palatka. He was airlifted to Halifax Medical Center and was listed in fair condition Tuesday morning.

The accident caused some damage to the road surface, said Florida Department of Transportation spokesman Steve Homan.

"It damaged what is called the structure course," Homan said. "It's a base course, not the top layer." The incident occurred on a portion of the road that is being widened and state transportation workers used paving equipment that was stationed nearby to make the road smooth enough to drive on, Homan said.

State road crews were expected to make further repairs Tuesday night, he said.

According to a report from the Florida Highway Patrol, the driver of the tanker truck was in the outside lane when an unidentified car in the inside lane tried to make a lane change. The tanker driver went onto the shoulder and then tried to get back onto the highway when the truck overturned on its right side and exploded into flames.

The only information available about the other vehicle is that it was a brown car, according to the FHP report. The incident remains under investigation.

The fire was extinguished about 9:30 p.m., and authorities opened one lane of traffic in the northbound direction.

Southbound lanes on I-95 were closed for nearly six hours. Southbound traffic north of the Flagler County line was diverted to U.S. 1 in St. Johns County and then back to I-95 just north of Ormond Beach.

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Feds Agree To Pay ACLU To Settle Suit Over 'No Fly' List
FreeInternetPress January 24 2006

Two federal agencies agreed Tuesday to pay the American Civil Liberties Union $200,000 to settle a lawsuit brought to uncover information about the government's no-fly list, which bars suspected terrorists from airliners.

The government will compensate the ACLU for attorneys' fees, settling a lawsuit initiated by two San Francisco peace activists who were detained while checking in for a flight three years ago.
In October 2004, documents that the FBI and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) provided in the lawsuit revealed the government has "two primary principles" but no "hard and fast" rules for deciding who gets put on the secret list.

The 301 pages of redacted (i.e. edited or with portions blacked out) documents, lodged in federal court in San Francisco in 2004, also said the secret list grew from 16 names the day of the Sept. 11 terror attacks to 594 by mid-December 2001. The list now is believed to carry thousands of names.

The documents were released as part of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Rebecca Gordon and Janet Adams, who co-publish a newsletter critical of the Bush administration. They were stopped while checking in for a San Francisco flight to Boston three years ago and detained until cleared for travel.

They and the ACLU invoked the Freedom of Information Act to demand that the government explain how people get on and off watchlists.

The FBI did not immediately comment on the settlement, and the TSA did not immediately return messages.

The agencies at first balked at supplying any information to the ACLU, but U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, after privately reviewing secret government data, said the government was making "frivolous claims" about why it could not.

The ACLU decided to seek compensation, allowed under the FOIA, after it obtained all the information it believed it could get from the government.

One heavily redacted document says getting on a list is guided by two "primary" principles: Whether various intelligence agencies view an individual as a "potential threat to U.S. civil aviation," and whether the agency requesting a listing has provided enough information to identify the person to be flagged at check-in.

The documents disclosed that people are regularly removed from lists if the FBI is convinced they are not a threat.

Intellpuke: "I feel obliged to note that a Mr. Moore, who co-authored the book "Bush and His Brain", about Bush and Karl Rove, is still on the no-fly list and has never received an adequate explanation for why he was put on the list.

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4 Teens Arrested for Beating Man in Philadelphia
AP Jan 24 10:12 AM US/Eastern

Four teens were arrested on attempted murder charges after they beat up a man who was chosen at random, videotaping the planning and the attack "almost like a documentary," police said.

A Drexel University engineering graduate student told police he was attacked Friday afternoon by four young men who beat him and tried to throw him in front of a moving car, authorities said. The 30-year-old victim was treated for a dislocated jaw.
The suspects, walking around after a scheduled half-day of school, videotaped themselves before the attack as they discussed how they were going to assault a random victim, then took turns holding the camera during the beating, said police Lt. John Walker.

"They were talking about (how) it was an early day (from school), the weather was nice, and what they were going to do," Walker said. "In the beginning, it's almost like a documentary."

"Just pick somebody out, anybody out," one student said to another on the video, according to Walker. He said there were about two minutes of taping before the assault.

Police identified one of the suspects arrested Monday as Tyrez Osbourne, 18. The other, ages 17 and 16, were not identified because of their ages. After their arrests, all four were expelled from University City High School, district officials said.

Osbourne's mother said he was an innocent bystander who happened to be nearby and caught on tape.

"He ain't that kind of guy," she told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Father charged after boy shoots girl at day care center
CNN Wednesday, January 25, 2006

GERMANTOWN, Maryland (AP) -- A 7-year-old girl was shot in the arm at a day care center Tuesday after an 8-year-old classmate brought in one of his father's guns and it accidentally went off, authorities said.
The father was arrested for gun offenses, and court documents outlined an extensive criminal record. The boy also was charged, but authorities said that was done only so he could be helped by juvenile authorities.

The boy had the weapon in a backpack and was playing with it when it went off, said Montgomery County police spokesman Derek Baliles.

The girl was taken to a Washington hospital with a wound that was not considered life-threatening.

There were six children at the For Kids We Care Inc. day care center at the time of the shooting, authorities said. Police said the boy had found the gun, a .38-caliber Taurus revolver, in a container in his father's closet.

Police charged the 56-year-old father with leaving a firearm in a location accessible by an unsupervised minor, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and possession of a firearm by a felon.

Montgomery County State's Attorney Douglas Gansler declined to give any details of the charges against the boy because of his age. The boy was to have his case reviewed by the Department of Juvenile Services, according to a police news release.

Neither youngster's name was released.

The father has an extensive criminal record dating to the 1960s, according to court documents. It includes several convictions of assault with intent to maim and gun charges. He could be sentenced to five years in prison if convicted of being a felon in possession of a handgun and three years on the delinquency of a minor charge, authorities said.

The documents said there were "numerous" other weapons in the father's apartment that his son had access to. The man was in custody and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Gansler said the boy knowingly brought the gun to the day care center and that the charges filed against him were in the "best interest of the 8-year-old to make sure he gets the help he needs" from the state.

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Body-parts scandal spawns lawsuits
CNN 24 Jan 06

NEW YORK (AP) -- Patricia Battisti had thought her back surgery in early 2005 was routine. A letter from her hospital nearly a year later made it clear she was wrong.

Battisti was informed that the cadaver bone that was implanted in her back may have been infected with various viruses -- the result of what investigators say was a large-scale scheme in which corpses were cut up and body parts illegally sold.

The Long Island woman now claims she contracted syphilis from the bone and plans to sue. The hospital adamantly denies the allegation. But the case may be an early warning that the gruesome body-parts scandal is going to lead to a lot of lawsuits.
"I just want answers," said Battisti, 41, a single mother of four. "I had the operation to feel better, not get sick."

Battisti joins a burgeoning list of potential victims.

Authorities believe two men paid off funeral homes so they could take bone and skin from the dead without their families' knowledge. Worse, some body parts came from elderly people and perhaps victims of infectious diseases, and the paperwork was doctored to say they had been younger and healthier, investigators say.

The Brooklyn district attorney's office has opened a criminal case focusing on scores of funeral homes in the New York City area and hundreds of looted bodies, including that of "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke. No arrests have been made.

At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration is trying to trace the tissue, which was sold to medical facilities across the country and in Canada.

Both the FDA and hospital officials, while suggesting certain patients should get tested for viruses as a precaution, insisted the risk of becoming ill from tainted tissue is minuscule.

But some of those patients are not comforted, said Battisti's attorney, Jeffrey S. Lisabeth.

"It really freaks them out," he said.

Also disturbed are families who recently learned of evidence that their dead relatives were secretly carved up before being buried or cremated.

A lawsuit filed in Brooklyn accuses a now-defunct New Jersey tissue bank, Biomedical Tissue Services, of stealing parts from a 43-year-old woman who died of ovarian cancer in 2003. The business allegedly forged a signature on a consent form, and listed the cause of death as head trauma.

Authorities also found paperwork indicating Cooke's bones had been removed by the tissue bank before he was cremated. Cooke died of cancer last year at 95, but authorities say documents listed the cause of death as heart attack and lowered his age to 85.

The operators of the tissue bank have denied any wrongdoing.

Battisti's ordeal began in December, when North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System warned her and 41 other patients that they were at risk for HIV, hepatitis B and C and syphilis. The letters explained that tissue products used for surgical repairs came from body parts that were removed without permission or medical safeguards.

Doctors implanted bone in Battisti's back to relieve pain from a car accident injury. Her lawyer said a recent blood test indicated she had been exposed to syphilis; she is awaiting the results of further tests.

The hospital's attorney, Anthony Sola, argued the tissue banks were responsible for screening and sterilizing their products, which arrive at hospitals ready for use in sealed containers. He also claimed anyone getting syphilis from a bone graft would be "a medical first."

Unfounded allegations, he warned, could "create undue fear in patients who need treatment."

Both Lisabeth and the attorney who filed the lawsuit in Brooklyn said they have been contacted by other lawyers and possible victims nationwide.

"The number of potential plaintiffs is virtually limitless," Lisabeth said.

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Palestinians vote in key election
Wednesday, 25 January 2006, 11:57 GMT

Palestinians are voting in their first parliamentary election for a decade, with the governing Fatah party facing a strong challenge.

The militant Islamic group Hamas is fielding candidates for the first time, and polls suggest they could do well.

Hamas does not recognise Israel and has launched hundreds of attacks against its citizens.

Palestinian police are out in force to guard the ballot boxes, while militants have pledged not to disrupt voting.

Nearly 1.5m Palestinians are eligible to vote at about 1,000 centres in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In East Jerusalem, where 100,000 Palestinians are eligible to vote, just 6,300 residents are allowed to cast their ballot inside the city, while the remainder have to travel outside Jerusalem's boundaries.

Polls opened at 0700 (0500 GMT) and are set to close at 1900 (1700 GMT).

The BBC's Alan Johnston, at a polling station in a school in Gaza City, said voting got off to a brisk start.

About 60 people were waiting to get into the school to vote when the doors opened, while hundreds of people have been queuing at polling stations elsewhere.

In other parts of the city, members of Hamas were out in force, greeting voters as they arrived.

Hamas is accusing Fatah of corruption and incompetence, and opinion polls have put the group only a few points behind Fatah.

In Rimal neighbourhood, Hamas activists wearing green hats and bandanas held computerised lists of voters and assigned volunteers to drive supporters to the polling station.

Samer Lulu, 29, said he voted for Hamas because he was tired of corruption.

"With religious people at least we will have our public money in clean hands," AP news agency quoted him as saying.

'Historic' day

In East Jerusalem, voting is taking place at the central post office.

There, an unnamed 34-year-old woman said she voted for Fatah "because I remain faithful to Yasser Arafat," a badge of the late Palestinian leader pinned to her lapel, AFP news agency reported.

At one point, a group of right-wing Israeli MPs and their supporters tried to force their way into the post office, but were blocked by Israeli police.

Israeli security forces are reported to be keeping a low profile.

On the eve of the vote, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said he was determined to ensure the vote was a success and "conducted in a free and honest way".

"This great day will be of historic significance, a decisive step on the road to freedom and independence," he said in a televised address.

Israel's acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert welcomed the election as an historic opportunity for the Palestinians, but urged voters not to plump for "extremists" - a reference to Hamas.

The militant group's involvement has caused serious concern in Israel, the US and Europe, where Hamas is banned as a terrorist organisation.

Hamas 'pragmatic'

The BBC's James Reynolds, in Jerusalem, says there is real excitement among Palestinians who have waited a long time to pick their parliament.

Many Palestinians say they want to punish Fatah, which is widely seen as ineffective and corrupt, our correspondent says.

Hamas has taken note of what it sees as an opportunity, he says, and has cast aside its hatred of the Palestinian parliament in the hope of converting popular support into a formal political voice.

This may show Hamas has added a measure of pragmatism to its arsenal, our correspondent says, but it has not given up its weapons.

The election, which has been repeatedly delayed, is the first since 1996.

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Netanyahu willing to make concession
Jan. 22, 2006 21:00 | Updated Jan. 23, 2006 9:37

Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu promised the Palestinians on Sunday night that if he will be elected prime minister, he will be willing to make compromises and offer them concessions without sacrificing Israel's security.

Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, Netanyahu said that he would begin by removing settlement outposts and then gradually remove IDF checkpoints to allow unhindered Palestinian travel. He said that a Likud-led government would not be in favor of reoccupying or annexing Palestinian populated areas of Judea and Samaria.
"In the frameworks of a peace agreement, a government under my leadership would agree to make real territorial concessions but will not compromise our security borders," Netanyahu said. "We want there to be less friction. We want to remove outposts to help the Palestinian population. We will not reoccupy the Palestinian population."

Netanyahu outlined five points that will be the guidelines in the Likud's platform on diplomatic and security issues: "Yes to compromises within a peace agreement, yes to security borders, no to a unilateral withdrawal, yes to moving the security fence and yes to decreasing the friction with the Palestinians."

The Likud's "security borders" include the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights, Judean desert, an undivided Jerusalem, settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria, and the hilltops overlooking Ben-Gurion Airport, the Gush Dan region and Road 443.

Netanyahu said that he would be willing to negotiate a permanent-status accord with a responsible Palestinian leadership while sticking to those borders on the basis of reciprocity. Any agreement reached with the Palestinians would then be brought to a vote among the Israeli people in a national referendum.

As reported exclusively in Sunday's Jerusalem Post, Netanyahu said that he would favor shifting the security fence to ensure that Ben-Gurion Airport, Road 443 and Road Six would not be in the range of missiles. Netanyahu said that a buffer zone would also be needed near the Dead Sea to respond to the security threat from the east.

Netanyahu's associates said that shifting the fence would require legal action. They said that the fence has been moved from the route recommended by security officials because the Supreme Court relied on international law in lieu of Israeli laws. Netanyahu wants the law changed to give the Supreme Court the means to accept the original route.

Lashing out at the two parties that a Likud spokesman on Sunday called "Siamese twins," Netanyahu said that both Labor and Kadima see the 1967 borders as their endgame with only minor adjustments. He said that by contrast, the Likud believes that withdrawing to the 1967 borders would perpetuate the conflict.

"The government's policies have strengthened Hamas and weakened the Palestinian Authority," Netanyahu said. "Reciprocity rewards those who behave positively and punishes those who violate agreements."
Comment: So, sounds great, right? Peace in our time! From the man who, with his rhetoric, has been making Sharon look like a peacemaker.

So what is he offering? To give back a few outposts while grabbing the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights, Judean desert, an undivided Jerusalem, settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria, and the hilltops overlooking Ben-Gurion Airport, the Gush Dan region and Road 443. Some deal, isn't it?

Moreover, he'll reroute the apartheid wall according to Israeli law, which was well inside the green line, rather than accepting the International Court's decision that it had to stick to the green line. He wants to change israeli law to give him the power to do what he wants with the wall. Sound familiar?

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Kyrgyzstan gives US new conditions for keeping airbase
AFP 25 Jan 06

Kyrgyzstan said it has given the United States new conditions, including a sharp hike in fees, for maintaining an airbase supporting US troops in Afghanistan, officials said. ...

Last year US forces were evicted from a base in another ex-Soviet republic in Central Asia, Uzbekistan, which was set up to support operations in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The eviction has forced the Americans to rely more heavily on the base in Kyrgyzstan.
The foreign minstry said it had handed the US ambassador in the Central Asian state a note specifying the new conditions.

They call for "a significant increase in the lease fees, payment for ecological damage, as well as a few other points reflecting Kyrgyzstan's national internests," the ministry said in a statement.

The statement gave no further details. But parliament speaker Omurbek Tekebayev said earlier this month that Kyrgyzstan is seeking to sharply increase, to 50 million dollars (41.4 million euros) a year, the amount the United States pays for the Manas airbase,

Under the current complicated system, the land on which the airbase is located is controled by several entities, which charge anything between three cents and four dollars per square meter.

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said last month that Washington should pay "tens of times more" for use of the airbase.

Bakiyev earlier raised environmental concerns as a reason to "review" the rent paid by Washington for use of the base.

Last year US forces were evicted from a base in another ex-Soviet republic in Central Asia, Uzbekistan, which was set up to support operations in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The eviction has forced the Americans to rely more heavily on the base in Kyrgyzstan.

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Kuwaiti parliament votes to replace emir with Prime Minister
By Jerome Taylor 25 January 2006

The move, a rare assertion of parliamentary power in an area of the world where hereditary monarchies are near absolute, ends speculation over whether the new emir was fit enough to rule. "Today, Kuwait has rid itself of tribal and social constraints," an analyst, Mohammed al-Jassem, told Reuters. "The constitution alone now governs the politics of Kuwait."
Kuwait's parliament has taken the unprecedented step of unanimously voting to oust the ailing emir and replace him with the Prime Minister, ending the country's succession crisis.

Legislators and cabinet ministers agreed to depose their leader just minutes before a letter of abdication from the increasingly frail emir arrived in parliament.

Sheik Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah, who had been ruler for little more than a week, will be replaced by the Prime Minister, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah. The day-to-day running of the country will be handed over to the cabinet.

"After listening to the medical report, the assembly with its 65 members agreed to remove him from the post of emir," the parliamentary speaker, Jassem al-Kharafi, said. "The emir remains in the hearts of all Kuwaiti people. We all love, appreciate and respect him, but this is God's will. We can only wish him a quick recovery."

The parliament will now elect a new leader, widely expected to be Sheikh Sabah, by a simple majority, bypassing centuries of tradition that alternated the Kuwaiti succession between two branches of the Sabah dynasty.

The move, a rare assertion of parliamentary power in an area of the world where hereditary monarchies are near absolute, ends speculation over whether the new emir was fit enough to rule. "Today, Kuwait has rid itself of tribal and social constraints," an analyst, Mohammed al-Jassem, told Reuters. "The constitution alone now governs the politics of Kuwait."

Sheikh Saad was proclaimed king on 15 January, just hours after the death of Sheikh Jaber, who had ruled Kuwait since 1977. But rumours over Sheikh Saad's health led to a divide within the royal family as to whether he was physically capable of ruling one of the world's richest countries.

Little information on the health of the Kuwaiti royal family is ever released. It has been common knowledge for years, however, that Sheikh Saad, 75, suffers from increasingly bad health. In 1997 he was treated for a bleeding colon and last year he spent a week in hospital for high blood pressure. Some have suggested the newly-ousted ruler suffers from Alzheimer's and would have been unable even to utter the short 30-word oath in parliament that would have made his rule official. Since his succession, Sheikh Saad had appeared only in a wheelchair and had not spoken in public.

Health problems have dogged the Sabah dynasty for several years, and finding a suitable successor to Sheikh Jaber was always going to prove problematic. Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah had, in effect, been running the country since Sheikh Jaber suffered a brain haemorrhage in 2001. But even the Prime Minister, who is also in his mid-seventies, is known to have health complications.

Parliament's decision comes after a particularly difficult week for Kuwaitis who look upon their royal family with great affection. The succession crisis has also affected business in the Gulf state, which contains roughly 10 per cent of the world's crude oil reserves. Parliament has been unable to debate an $8.5bn (£4.7bn) plan to boost oil output with the help of foreign firms since the crisis began.

Last Friday, Al-Qabas, a leading Kuwaiti daily newspaper, took the remarkable step of calling for Sheikh Saad's abdication, urging him to hand the throne to "he who is able among the sons of the honourable ruling family". The decision by Al-Qabas to publicise its views on the royal family was widely seen as evidence of not only how important the succession crisis was to Kuwaitis but also their heightened concerns over business in the oil-rich state.

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Galloway wins libel award battle
Wednesday, 25 January 2006, 11:53 GMT

The Daily Telegraph has lost its appeal to overturn a £150,000 libel award to the Respect MP George Galloway.

He successfully sued the paper for suggesting he had received money from Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.

The Court of Appeal has now dismissed the Telegraph's claim that the story was covered by qualified privilege.

Mr Galloway was unable to comment because he is currently in Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother House. He is favourite to be evicted on Wednesday.
'Public interest'

At the Court of Appeal, judges agreed that the £150,000 damages awarded to Mr Galloway by High Court judge Mr Justice Eady in December 2004 should not be reduced.

"Given the seriousness of the key allegation - Mr Galloway had taken money from Iraq for personal profit - we can see no basis upon which this court should interfere with the amount of damages."

James Price QC, for the newspaper, told the Court of Appeal that the story was in the public interest, whether or not the documents - found at the Iraqi foreign ministry following the fall of Baghdad - were true.

He said the story, published in April 2003, had been covered by the legal defence of privilege because it was "of truly global significance".

The newspaper had apparently found evidence that a British MP, the leader of a worldwide campaign against sanctions in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and high-profile member of the anti-war lobby, had been accepting substantial amounts of money from the "oil for food" programme, Mr Price added.

He said the newspaper had never sought to prove Mr Galloway had taken money from the programme, designed to help sick and hungry Iraqis while the West imposed trade sanctions.

'Witch-hunt'

Mr Price said Mr Justice Eady had rejected the defence of privilege at the trial because the newspaper had also published its own conclusions.

He went on: "If it was entitled to publish documents under the protection of privilege, it was entitled to comment on them."

Privilege should not be lost because the newspaper took a different view of the correct interpretation of the documents to that of the trial judge, he said.

Outside the court, John Rees from the Respect party, said he was delighted with the verdict, claiming there had been "a sustained witch-hunt" against Mr Galloway.

Video footage

Meanwhile, Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, is taking legal advice about whether to reopen his investigation into complaints about Mr Galloway's conduct.

Tory MP Andrew Robathan and a member of the public complained in April 2003 that Mr Galloway had allegedly earned £375,000 from the Iraqi regime but failed to declare the money in the Register of Members' Interests.

The commissioner's report and recommendations will go to the Standards and Privileges Committee before it is published.

Meanwhile, footage has emerged of Mr Galloway with Saddam Hussein's son, Uday. Uday and his brother Qusay were killed when US forces raided a house in Mosul on 22 July 2003.

Mr Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party for comments about the Iraq war, and went on to win the parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green at the 2005 general election as leader of the anti-war Respect party, ousting Labour's Oona King.

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Journalist who exposed London Police Shooting of Brazilian arrested
AFP 25 Jan 06

A journalist who helped expose a series of police errors in the shooting of a Brazilian man mistaken for a suicide bomber has been arrested on suspicion of theft, a newspaper said. ...

Leicestershire Police arrested him in October and raided his home, the daily said, quoting an ITV News insider.

The anonymous insider said police seemed to be looking for evidence that money was paid for the information. This did not appear to be the case.

A 43-year-old IPCC employee has also been arrested and since resigned from the commission, according to the newspaper. Police have also arrested a 30-year-old woman over the affair. All three people remain on police bail.
A journalist who helped expose a series of police errors in the shooting of a Brazilian man mistaken for a suicide bomber has been arrested on suspicion of theft, a newspaper said.

The scoop in August by television broadcaster ITV News was based on leaked statements from the official inquiry into the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes at a London subway station on June 22.

The documents from the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) revealed among other factors that the 27-year-old electrician had been held down when he was shot by armed officers.

The journalist, who works as a news producer for ITV News, is thought to have obtained copies of the text, The Guardian newspaper reported.

Leicestershire Police arrested him in October and raided his home, the daily said, quoting an ITV News insider.

The anonymous insider said police seemed to be looking for evidence that money was paid for the information. This did not appear to be the case.

A 43-year-old IPCC employee has also been arrested and since resigned from the commission, according to the newspaper. Police have also arrested a 30-year-old woman over the affair. All three people remain on police bail.

The de Menezes expose by ITV News is regarded as one of the biggest scoops in the history of British television news.

David Mannion, the broadcaster's editor in chief, told The Guardian: "We absolutely stand by the story, the way we covered it and the way we got the story; it was to our usual high editorial standards."

De Menezes was shot seven times on a subway train at Stockwell Underground station in south London the day after an alleged attempt to replicate the July 7 attacks on the capital's transport system.

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Google Agrees to Censor Results in China
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE AP Business Writer 24 Jan 06

SAN FRANCISCO - Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet's fastest growing market.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company planned to roll out a new version of its search engine bearing China's Web suffix ".cn," on Wednesday. A Chinese-language version of Google's search engine has previously been available through the company's dot-com address in the United States.
By creating a unique address for China, Google hopes to make its search engine more widely available and easier to use in the world's most populous country.

Because of government barriers set up to suppress information, Google's China users previously have been blocked from using the search engine or encountered lengthy delays in response time.

The service troubles have frustrated many Chinese users, hobbling Google's efforts to expand its market share in a country that expected to emerge as an Internet gold mine over the next decade.

China already has more than 100 million Web surfers and the audience is expected to swell substantially _ an alluring prospect for Google as it tries to boost its already rapidly rising profits.

Baidu.com Inc., a Beijing-based company in which Google owns a 2.6 percent stake, currently runs China's most popular search engine. But a recent Keynote Systems survey of China's Internet preferences concluded that Baidu remains vulnerable to challenges from Google and Yahoo Inc.

To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country's government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisons on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.

Although China has loosened some of its controls in recent years, some topics, such as Taiwan's independence and 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, remain forbidden subjects.

Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

"We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel.

Google's decision rankled Reporters Without Borders, a media watchdog group that has sharply criticized Internet companies including Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com for submitting to China's censorship regime.

"This is a real shame," said Julien Pain, head of Reporters Without Borders' Internet desk. "When a search engine collaborates with the government like this, it makes it much easier for the Chinese government to control what is being said on the Internet."

When Google censors results in China, it intends to post notifications alerting users that some content has been removed _ to comply with local laws. The company provides similar alerts in Germany and France when, to comply with national laws, it censors results to remove references to Nazi paraphernalia.

Google is cooperating with China's government at the same time it is battling the U.S. government over a subpoena seeking a breakdown of one week's worth of search requests _ a list that would cover millions of terms.

Reflecting its uneasy alliance with the Chinese government, Google isn't releasing all its services.

Neither Google's e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn't want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone's personal information. The e-mail service, called Gmail, creates a huge database of users' messages and makes them instantly searchable. The blogging services contain a wide range of personal background.

Yahoo came under fire last year after it provided the government with the e-mail account information of a Chinese journalist who was later convicted for violating state secrecy laws.

Initially, Google's Chinese service will be limited to searching Web pages and images. The company also will provide local search results and a special edition of its news service that will be confined to government-sanctioned media.
Comment: Of course we understand that if google has the capability to censor search results for China, they must have been testing such programming already... like in the U.S.

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Bush to visit India, Pakistan in March
AFP 25 Jan 06

US President George W. Bush said he will travel to India and Pakistan in March, as visiting Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz urged "closer communication and coordination" against terrorism.

That was as close as Aziz came in public remarks at the White House to rebuking Washington over a suspected US air strike in remote Pakistan targetting Al-Qaeda members that killed as many as 18 civilians, angering many Pakistanis.
Asked after his meeting with Bush whether they discussed the attack, for which Washington refuses to take responsibility, Aziz told reporters: "We discussed every issue which related to relations between the two countries."

"We discussed the war on terror and the need for closer communication and coordination to take this effort forward," the prime minister said after a nearly two-hour long meeting with Bush.

During a brief joint public appearance in the Oval Office, the president praised Pakistan as a strong ally in the global war on terrorism and announced that he would visit Pakistan and India in March.

"I'm really looking forward to going to your country," said Bush, who had been expected to visit the region early this year. "I want to thank you for your invitation and your hospitality in advance."

Bush and Aziz papered over tensions resulting from the airstrike, and emphasized cooperation on issues like the global war on terrorism, fighting the spread of nuclear weapons technology, and trade.

They also highlighted US efforts to help Pakistan recover from the devastating October 2005 earthquake, the worst in the country's history, which killed nearly 74,000 people and left more than three million homeless.

"I was very pleased that the United States, our taxpayers, our military, could contribute to helping the people of Pakistan recover. They are our friends," said Bush.

"A sense of caring and sharing always builds a better relationship between countries. And that's what we are seeing between Pakistan and the United States," said the prime minister.

"We also strive for peace in our area. It's an area which has a lot of challenges, and we are pursuing peace with all our neighbors. We want a solution of all disputes, including the Kashmir dispute," said Aziz.

Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan each hold the Himalayan region of Kashmir in part but claim it in full. The dispute has kept ties between the neighbors tense for almost six decades and triggered two of their three wars since 1947.

The prime minister also said Pakistan wanted "a strong, stable Afghanistan" and that Islamabad was "against proliferation of nuclear weapons by anybody. And we want to fight terrorism in all its forms and manifestations."

"I think the relationship with Pakistan is a vital relationship for the United States," said Bush. "We're working closely to defeat the terrorists who would like to harm America and harm Pakistan."

The meeting came after Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden threatened fresh attacks on the United States in a new audiotape, and following the suspected US Central Intelligence Agency airstrike on January 13.

The strike on the remote village of Damadola, in a tribal area bordering Afghanistan, was reportedly aimed at killing Al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, during a gathering of senior Al-Qaeda operatives there.

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan suggested that the United States reserved the right to future military strikes, telling reporters: "This president has made it clear we're going to pursue terrorists wherever they are."

But Bush and Aziz "talked about how we're working together in the war on terrorism and how it's important to continue working together. They talked about continuing to work to improve cooperation and coordination," he said.

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India and China dominate Davos agenda
Wednesday, 25 January 2006, 07:21 GMT

The rise of China and India, stalled trade talks and worries over high energy prices are high on the agenda as the World Economic Forum (WEF) gets under way.

But it's not the heavy topics that make Davos special.

The Belvedere hotel in Davos is buzzing.

Hundreds of people with excited faces crowd into a huge room, incessantly chatting, forming small clusters here and there, and constantly moving around.

Most are complete strangers, but have one thing in common: a white badge the size of a credit card.
It's what made them come from all over the world to this bitterly cold and snow-bound valley high in the Swiss Alps.

The badge is their passport to the World Economic Forum, and they are determined to make good use of it.

Networking is the name of the game, or schmoozing, as some would call it - except that the best schmoozer of them all, Bill Clinton, is not in Davos this year (for once).

You're here, you must be interesting

Business cards change hand at a rapid clip; old friends embrace; people move around with their eyes set chest-high where those white badges dangle, displaying name and affiliation of each participant.

It's a diverse bunch of people, but they have one thing in common, says one of the participants: "The great thing about Davos is this assumption that you must be interesting, just because you are here."

And in most cases the assumption is right.

Take Markus Brehler, the founder of Enocean.

His cutting-edge tech firm has developed ultra-low power sensors and switches that get their energy from unlikely sources like vibration and temperature. It's environmentally friendly and does away with miles of cabling.

It's his first time in Davos and he is keen to meet potential business contacts.

"But the best thing is the opportunity to take your mind away from running a company for a few days and learn new stuff," he says.

Take Matthieu Ricard, a molecular geneticist by training, now co-director of the Buddhist Shechen monastery in Nepal.

Dressed in purple and orange robes, he is here to discuss what makes people happy.

"We work so hard to improve ourselves, but our outer conditions contribute to just 15% of our well-being," he says. "I want to talk about what makes out the rest of our happiness."

And of course he wants to network as well, in the hope of finding help for the 16 clinics his monastery runs in Nepal and Tibet , and for his schools in the desperately poor districts high up in the Himalayas.

Njabulo Ndebele is the vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, and looking forward to a meeting with university presidents from around the world.

Wang Jianmao is a professor at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai and eager "to promote China, to make sure that it is treated as an equal member of the international community".

A man with a mission

The Davos agenda is packed. Too packed for many.

Amory Lovins runs the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental research lab.

He pulls out two large pieces of paper, tightly printed in small font to list the talks he has to give, sessions he hopes to attend, and the numerous events he would really love to go to but is unlikely to be able to squeeze in.

He dives into his backpack, pulls out a bowl and bangs it hard with a metal stick without making a dent.

"I'll give a speech to a meeting of the chief executives of all the world's top car makers this week," he says. "I'll show them this new light-weight carbon fibre thermo plastic composite material", which is lighter than steel or aluminium, just as tough and will do wonders for fuel efficiency.

Davos is full of people like that, and the best place to make connections and your case.

"You would never be able to meet that many interesting people in one place in normal life," says Mack Gill.

The 36-year old runs the rapidly growing offshore operation of financial software giant Sungard in India.

It's his first time in Davos, and he confesses to being "really excited" about the five days that lie ahead.

Talking trade

But it's not all talk.

Once again the forum has attracted many of the world's most influential trade ministers.

Nearly 30 of them are in town, and as in previous years they are meeting on the sidelines of the event to hammer out a framework that could restart the global trade round.

The fact that they do so surrounded by top executives of the world's largest multinational companies will fan the suspicion of critics of the world's trade regime.

Anti-poverty group Actionaid has just released a report to coincide with the WEF start, accusing corporate lobbyists of having "an undue influence on the current global trade talks".

And in a way Davos is indeed the perfect place to lobby, whether for a good cause or your country.

India is making Davos the focus of its new "India everywhere" campaign, with a huge delegation of top government officials and business leaders.

Others are betting on the powers of jazz.

The state of Louisiana has invited to a "Bring back New Orleans" party, hoping to persuade investors to return to the hurricane-battered region.

Many of the people that Louisiana needs to persuade will be among the white badge holders in Davos.
Comment: "[W]ill fans the suspicion of critics..." So delicately phrased, don't you think?

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Russian Authorities say Pipeline strike a terrorist attack
By Andrew E. Kramer The New York Times JANUARY 24, 2006

MOSCOW Saboteurs who bombed two natural gas pipelines high in the Caucasus Mountains this week - by one estimate sending a fireball nearly 200 meters into the sky - paralyzed Georgia and sent a message straight to Western Europe, which depends on Russian natural gas.

The Russian authorities are calling the strike a terrorist attack on a gas main, suggesting that groups in or near the rebellious republic of Chechnya may be targeting the country's energy infrastructure.

That would be bad news for Western Europe, which depends on Russia for one quarter of its natural gas.
European leaders were already jittery after supplies were disrupted twice this month, once during a Russian dispute with Ukraine ostensibly over prices and later when extremely low temperatures caused surging demand in Russia.

Georgian officials, upset over what they contended were unexplained delays in repairing the sabotaged pipeline, cautioned that Europe should take a look at Georgia's unheated capital this week before become more reliant on Russia.

"The lesson that all of Europe should draw is the importance of alternative corridors of energy and of not being dependent on one source of energy, especially from a country such as Russia," George Arveladze, presidential chief of staff in Georgia, said in an interview Tuesday.

All this is proving an embarrassment for Moscow, since the problems coincided with the Kremlin's assuming the rotating presidency of the Group of 8 industrial countries and pushing a theme of energy security.

Officials of Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, have repeatedly insisted that supplies are reliable at current levels and can easily be increased from vast Arctic reserves to meet growing demand in Europe, where the company expects to increase its market share to 38 percent by 2020.

Chechen separatists and terrorists have articulated a policy of targeting objects important to Russia's economy, and the country's energy infrastructure has been sabotaged before, although without causing major disruptions.

Last summer, the Federal Security Service said it had arrested 11 suspects in what it called a terrorist attack on a gas pipelines in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, a Muslim enclave east of Moscow.

A spokesman linked that attack to separatist movements in the north Caucasus, the southern region near Chechnya where the bombing took place Sunday.

Earlier, saboteurs struck gas pipelines in Dagestan, another Russian republic in the Caucasus Mountains. Two years ago, a bombing and explosion shut for several days the same mountain gas route to Georgia that was hit Sunday.

The strike before dawn on a main and reserve pipeline, running on opposite banks of the headwaters of the Terek River, at an elevation of about 1,000 meters, or 3,300 feet, set fire to residual gas in a reserve pipeline and punctured but did not ignite the compressed fuel in the active pipeline, said Vladimir Ivanov, a spokesman for a regional branch of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. He spoke in a telephone interview.

He said that whoever placed the bombs probably waded under cover of darkness across the shallow river from a nearby military highway.

Alerted by falling pressures, pipeline workers shut valves situated about three kilometers, or nearly two miles, from the blast site, Ivanov explained.

Repairs were delayed Tuesday by what Gazprom said was residual gas in a pipeline that prevented welding for fear of another explosion.

The work was also slowed by strong winds and subzero temperatures, Gazprom said, referring to the Celsius scale.

Meanwhile, an alternative supply route to Georgia was disrupted by the failure of a compressor station, officials reported.

Georgian officials, who have hinted that Russia was behind the bombing to undermine the economy of a pro-Western former Soviet state, dismissed Gazprom's explanation of the delay.

"Officials continue to request explanations from Gazprom and other offi- cials within the Russian government following the sudden and simultaneous interruptions, but have so far been met with silence," the government said Tuesday.

Gazprom, the world's largest natural gas producer, maintains about 100,000 kilometers of pipelines.

Many are above ground and easily accessible. The system is a web of interconnected pipes to ensure reliability, meaning that any single pipeline failure would probably not carry grave consequences, according to officials.

Still, security services have said they are on the alert.

"We have our methods of securing the gas pipeline, including the export routes," Sergei Ignatchenko, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB, said in a telephone interview.

"Of course, I can't tell you the specific methods we use," he added.

Italian energy officials said that natural gas deliveries were off 8 percent because of Russian supply problems unrelated to the bombing. The cabinet of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi met to consider emergency measures.

Officials recommended that Italians shower rather than take baths and cover their pots and pans as they cook to conserve energy, the Bloomberg news agency reported.

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France pushes nuclear power for oil-dependent Europe
AFP Jan 24, 2006

BRUSSELS - France proposed Tuesday a radical shake-up of Europe's energy policies, stressing the need of nuclear power amid growing concern at dependence on oil and gas highlighted by recent Russian supply cuts.

Finance Minister Thierry Breton also said the European Union must boost investment in greener alternative sources such as wind power, while stressing the need for more energy-saving initiatives.
"European energy policy must ... take account of two essential elements at an international level: the increasingly tense situation worldwide between oil and natural gas supply and demand (and) climate change," he said.

"The three goals of any responsible energy policy ... are security of supply, consideration for environmental impacts, both local and global, and competitiveness," Breton told his EU counterparts in Brussels.

In an 18-page document setting out the French plans, Breton cited International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that global energy consumption is due to surge by 60 percent by 2030.

Fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — will still provide 85 percent of the world's energy, according to IEA figures.

Europe's dependence on gas has come under the spotlight in recent weeks, initially following a standoff between Russia and Ukraine which saw supplies temporarily reduced to some EU countries.

That case was followed a few days later by a cut in gas to Moldova — like Ukraine an ex-Soviet satellite on the expanded EU's border — and then to Georgia after mystery explosions on two key pipelines at the weekend.

While not referring explicitly to the latest incidents, the French minister said the EU must ensure it is not overly dependent on any one source.

"Guaranteeing the EU's security of supply with a view to sustainable development ... implies diversifying the energy sources and taking advantage of a broader supply spectrum," Breton said.

France is a leading producer of nuclear energy, which currently provides some 34 percent of Europe's elecricity, Breton noted. Nearly all electricity in France is produced by nuclear power and France exports electricity. Other key EU states such as Germany have long opposed atomic power.

While agreeing that each country must decide its own energy policy, he noted that the current level of nuclear power, if produced by fossil fuels, would produce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the entire European car fleet.

"Maintaining the current contribution of nuclear power to the European energy mix and preserving Europe's technological and industrial edge in this field are issues of strategic importance for the Union," he said.

Breton also noted that the IEA had concluded that, in its heavy reliance on fossil fuels, "we are on the wrong track."

"Climate change ... could have serious impacts in the near future, through changes to the water cycle and to basic economic activities such as agriculture and energy production," he said.

And he added: "France believes that the challenges to be met are so great that with respect to world energy supply and demand, no technology and no instrument of public policy should be necessarily ruled out."

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US unhappy over bid to end Manila security treaty
By Manny Mogato Reuters Wed Jan 25, 2006 7:05 AM ET

MANILA - Washington is not pleased with a plan by some Philippine lawmakers to scrap a treaty that they believe gives undue protection to visiting U.S. troops who break the law, a Philippine official said on Wednesday.
The two countries are close security partners, but are currently engaged in a tug-of-war over the custody of four U.S. Marines charged by a Philippine court for raping a local woman.

Last week a Philippine legislative panel reviewing the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) agreed to scrap the treaty and seek a new one in a bid to grant Manila more authority to punish U.S. troops who may commit crimes in the country.

"An (U.S.) embassy official told me the Philippines does not only stand to lose a lot, but all if we abrogate the treaty," a senior Filipino diplomat, who declined to be named, told reporters.

"They are not happy with what's happening."

The terms of the VFA surfaced after the four U.S. Marines faced trial by a Philippine court for the rape in November last year of a 22-year-old Filipino woman inside a van at the former U.S. navy base in Subic Bay, northwest of Manila.

Washington has rejected a request by Manila to hand over the marines, saying the treaty allowed for U.S. custody until the case was concluded.

Despite weeks of small protest rallies, the rape case has not inflamed any serious anti-American sentiment among the public.

On Wednesday, Alberto Romulo, the foreign affairs secretary, told a senate budget hearing that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has agreed to abolish a government agency tasked to monitor the implementation of the security pact.

But some Filipino diplomats said Arroyo could replace it with a new body that would be clothed with wider powers to protect the country's interests.

The United States, Manila's former colonial master, has been a major source of military assistance for the poorly funded Philippine armed forces in the form of training and hardware such as helicopters, gunboats and rifles.

Since 2000 when U.S. troops returned to the Philippines to exercise and train with local military units, Washington has poured more than $300 million in security assistance to Manila, excluding funds to build roads and schools in poor communities.

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UK to boost Afghan troop numbers
BBC News 25/01/2006

The UK is expected to send 3,500 extra troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total number in the country to about 4,000, the BBC has learned.

Defence Secretary John Reid is to address the Commons on Thursday. [...]

Steve Bell

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Study: Army Stretched to Breaking Point
By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer 24 Jan 06

WASHINGTON - Stretched by frequent troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has become a "thin green line" that could snap unless relief comes soon, according to a study for the Pentagon.

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.
As evidence, Krepinevich points to the Army's 2005 recruiting slump _ missing its recruiting goal for the first time since 1999 _ and its decision to offer much bigger enlistment bonuses and other incentives.

"You really begin to wonder just how much stress and strain there is on the Army, how much longer it can continue," he said in an interview. He added that the Army is still a highly effective fighting force and is implementing a plan that will expand the number of combat brigades available for rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 136-page report represents a more sobering picture of the Army's condition than military officials offer in public. While not released publicly, a copy of the report was provided in response to an Associated Press inquiry.

Illustrating his level of concern about strain on the Army, Krepinevich titled one of his report's chapters, "The Thin Green Line."

He wrote that the Army is "in a race against time" to adjust to the demands of war "or risk `breaking' the force in the form of a catastrophic decline" in recruitment and re-enlistment.

Col. Lewis Boone, spokesman for Army Forces Command, which is responsible for providing troops to war commanders, said it would be "a very extreme characterization" to call the Army broken. He said his organization has been able to fulfill every request for troops that it has received from field commanders.

The Krepinevich assessment is the latest in the debate over whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have worn out the Army, how the strains can be eased and whether the U.S. military is too burdened to defeat other threats.

Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam veteran, created a political storm last fall when he called for an early exit from Iraq, arguing that the Army was "broken, worn out" and fueling the insurgency by its mere presence. Administration officials have hotly contested that view.

George Joulwan, a retired four-star Army general and former NATO commander, agrees the Army is stretched thin.

"Whether they're broken or not, I think I would say if we don't change the way we're doing business, they're in danger of being fractured and broken, and I would agree with that," Joulwan told CNN last month.

Krepinevich did not conclude that U.S. forces should quit Iraq now, but said it may be possible to reduce troop levels below 100,000 by the end of the year. There now are about 136,000, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

For an Army of about 500,000 soldiers _ not counting the thousands of National Guard and Reserve soldiers now on active duty _ the commitment of 100,000 or so to Iraq might not seem an excessive burden. But because the war has lasted longer than expected, the Army has had to regularly rotate fresh units in while maintaining its normal training efforts and reorganizing the force from top to bottom.

Krepinevich's analysis, while consistent with the conclusions of some outside the Bush administration, is in stark contrast with the public statements of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior Army officials.

Army Secretary Francis Harvey, for example, opened a Pentagon news conference last week by denying the Army was in trouble. "Today's Army is the most capable, best-trained, best-equipped and most experienced force our nation has fielded in well over a decade," he said, adding that recruiting has picked up.

Rumsfeld has argued that the experience of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has made the Army stronger, not weaker.

"The Army is probably as strong and capable as it ever has been in the history of this country," he said in an appearance at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington on Dec. 5. "They are more experienced, more capable, better equipped than ever before."

Krepinevich said in the interview that he understands why Pentagon officials do not state publicly that they are being forced to reduce troop levels in Iraq because of stress on the Army. "That gives too much encouragement to the enemy," he said, even if a number of signs, such as a recruiting slump, point in that direction.

Krepinevich is executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit policy research institute.

He said he concluded that even Army leaders are not sure how much longer they can keep up the unusually high pace of combat tours in Iraq before they trigger an institutional crisis. Some major Army divisions are serving their second yearlong tours in Iraq, and some smaller units have served three times.

Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the private Brookings Institution, said in a recent interview that "it's a judgment call" whether the risk of breaking the Army is great enough to warrant expanding its size.

"I say yes. But it's a judgment call, because so far the Army isn't broken," O'Hanlon said.
Comment: So there is talk of expanding the Army's size... There's only one problem: if recruitment levels have dropped, how are they going to get people to enlist?? And they are talking about a war on Iran? But not to worry! Dubya has his "no child left behind" act to fall back on.

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In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond
Edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler and Brendan Smith Metropolitan Books, 2005, 332 pp. Reviewed by Jan Barry

One of the most sobering books I own is Crimes of War (Vintage, 1971), edited by Richard A. Falk, Gabriel Kolko and Robert Jay Lifton. This indictment of the US war in Indochina by three respected historians was published just as many Vietnam veterans were making the same case speaking out about their own experiences.

Thirty-four years later, a very similar book tackles the US war in Iraq, just as -- again -- veterans are returning home sharply critical of military actions they were embroiled in.
To stop the atrocities, based on the Vietnam experience, now comes the hardest part of American civics -- convincing a clear majority of Americans, and then of Congress, that our national leaders have crossed a forbidden line. That line consists of repeatedly violating national and international laws on the conduct of military operations. And when that line is crossed, as the editors of In the Name of Democracy put it, Americans have a “duty to make our country stop committing war crimes.”

The focus of this book is public education followed by concerted public action. The materials marshaled include government documents, statements by government officials and war critics, news accounts and a Washington Post editorial that concluded in December 2004 that “violations of human rights … appear to be ongoing in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.”

The editors and contributors to In the Name of Democracy offer a variety of things to do to help create a remedy. These range from legal actions to civil disobedience.

“Difficult as it may be, our institutions of government can be pressured to do the right thing, and public and media insistence on through investigations and appropriate punishments for those responsible, no matter how high up the chain of command, could bring about those results,” Elizabeth Holtzman writes in an essay titled “Watergate and Abu Ghraib: Holding War Criminals Accountable in the U.S. Courts and Congress.”

Holtzman was a member of Congress who helped draft articles of impeachment against President Nixon, forcing his resignation from office over his imperious widening of the war in Indochina and misuse of government agencies to attack war critics.

“Gandhi pointed out that ‘even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.’ Such a resistance movement advances not so much by amassing power to itself as by withdrawing the elements of cooperation and acquiescence that give usurpers their power,” the editors conclude.

“When soldiers refuse to fight; youth refuse to enlist; activists interfere with induction centers; officials refuse to hide the truth; lawyers, judges, and elected officials refuse to accept abuse of government authority; and more and more ordinary citizens support such efforts -- the days of those who usurp legitimate authority are numbered.”

Click HERE to buy the book.

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Warriors and wusses
Joel Stein LA Times January 24, 2006

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.

I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.

But I'm not for the war.
And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

Blindly lending support to our soldiers, I fear, will keep them overseas longer by giving soft acquiescence to the hawks who sent them there — and who might one day want to send them somewhere else. Trust me, a guy who thought 50.7% was a mandate isn't going to pick up on the subtleties of a parade for just service in an unjust war. He's going to be looking for funnel cake.

Besides, those little yellow ribbons aren't really for the troops. They need body armor, shorter stays and a USO show by the cast of "Laguna Beach."

The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel for voting to send them to war and then making absolutely no sacrifices other than enduring two Wolf Blitzer shows a day. Though there should be a ribbon for that.

I understand the guilt. We know we're sending recruits to do our dirty work, and we want to seem grateful.

After we've decided that we made a mistake, we don't want to blame the soldiers who were ordered to fight. Or even our representatives, who were deceived by false intelligence. And certainly not ourselves, who failed to object to a war we barely understood.

But blaming the president is a little too easy. The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying. An army of people ignoring their morality, by the way, is also Jack Abramoff's pet name for the House of Representatives.

I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq. I get mad when I'm tricked into clicking on a pop-up ad, so I can only imagine how they feel.

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

And sometimes, for reasons I don't understand, you get to just hang out in Germany.

I know this is all easy to say for a guy who grew up with money, did well in school and hasn't so much as served on jury duty for his country. But it's really not that easy to say because anyone remotely affiliated with the military could easily beat me up, and I'm listed in the phone book.

I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we don't think was a good idea. All I'm asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades.

Seriously, the traffic is insufferable.
Comment: Blaming Bush is "a little too easy", so the solution is to blame the soldiers?! The simple fact of the matter is that the US is supposed to be a democracy. If representatives were deceived by faulty intelligence, then it is up to the people to demand at least half-way intelligent representatives to replace them. It is also up to the people - who vastly outnumber all the politicians in the country - to demand a president who isn't a greedy warmonger.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be quite so simple. Ever since 9/11, Bush and his pals have used every trick in the book to scare the masses into submission. Even now, when Bush's ratings are rock bottom and scandals abound, not many Americans are standing up and demanding change. Alito is even poised to help the Bush gang seize complete control of the judicial system. Add in the threat of war with Iran and an economic collapse, and there is plenty of fear to go around.

Nevertheless, as dark as things may seem, there is always the possibility that people will start to spread the word, decide that enough is enough, and stand together. The alternative - doing nothing - will have consequences that are far less appealing. What will you do?

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The life and suicide of an Iraq veteran who could take no more
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Oliver Duff 25 January 2006

By his own admission Douglas Barber, a former army reservist, was struggling. For two years since returning from the chaos and violence of Iraq, the 35-year-old had battled with his memories and his demons, the things he had seen and the fear he had experienced. Recently, it seemed he had turned a corner, securing medical help and counselling.

But last week, at his home in south-eastern Alabama, the National Guardsman e-mailed some friends and then changed the message on his answering machine. His new message told callers: "If you're looking for Doug, I'm checking out of this world. I'll see you on the other side." Mr Barber dialled the police, stepped on to the porch with his shotgun and - after a brief stand-off with officers - shot himself in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The death of Mr Barber is one of numerous instances of Iraqi veterans who have taken their own lives since the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in spring 2003. Concern is such that the Pentagon has recently instigated new procedures for monitoring the mental health of returning troops. But his story would not have been told but for a group of determined activists and a British journalism student who was among the handful of people the reservist e-mailed just minutes before he killed himself.

Craig Evans, 19, a student at Bournemouth University, was working on a project about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and had been in regular contact with Mr Barber. But the e-mail message he received on Monday 16 January told him something was terribly wrong. It read: "I have nothing to live for any more - I am going to be checking out of this world." Mr Evans said he tried to contact the US embassy and some of Mr Barber's friends in the US to alert them to what he suspected might happen. "I e-mailed him back and wrote, 'I am going to ring you, don't do anything stupid'.It was an effort in vain: within an hour Mr Barber had used his shotgun to end to his torment.

Mr Evans said: "Doug said he wasn't the same person when he got back [from Iraq] - he was paranoid, had lost his social skills, his marriage was over, he couldn't walk down the street without worrying something was going to blow up. I made a promise to him that I would do everything I could to get his story out there."

Mr Barber was a member of the 1485th Transportation Company of the Ohio National Guard and was called up for active duty in February 2003. He arrived in Iraq in summer 2003, when the initial invasion had been completed and just as the insurgency was gathering strength.

He spent seven months in Iraq, driving trucks and trying to avoid the deadly perils that confronted him. He was haunted by the deaths of his colleagues and by the fear and desperation he saw in the faces of Iraqis. Like many reservists pushed into the front line, Mr Barber said he was not properly trained.

"It was really bad - death was all around you, all the time. You couldn't escape it," he said in an interview after he returned to Alabama with the campaign group Coalition for Free Thought in Media. "Everybody in Iraq was going through suicide counselling because the stress was so high. It was at such a magnitude, such a high level, that it was unthinkable for anyone to imagine. You cannot even imagine it." He was opposed to the war but felt obliged to go because he believed that without the experience his opinion would be invalid.

Friends said that when Mr Barber returned things started to fall apart and he split from his wife of 11 years. He had been prescribed clonazepam, an anti-anxiety drug that can cause depression. One friend of more than 13 years, Rick Hays, a minister from Indiana, said: "He was a really good guy, pretty level-headed ... He liked to have fun. But when he came back from Iraq the difference in him was so sad."

Charlie Anderson, of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said the federal Veterans Administration relied too heavily on the use of drugs for dealing with returning soldiers suffering from stress.

Mr Barber's sister, Connie Bingham, said a funeral was due to take place on Saturday.

'We live with permanent scars from horrific events'

Doug Barber wrote this internet article on 12 January, just before he died

My thought today is to help you the reader understand what happens to a soldier when they come home and the sacrifice we continue to make. This war on terror has become a personal war for so many, yet the Bush administration do not want to reveal to America that this is a personal war. They want to run it like a business, and thus they refuse to show the personal sacrifices the soldiers and their families have made for this country.

All is not OK or right for those of us who return home alive and supposedly well. What looks like normalcy and readjustment is only an illusion to be revealed by time and torment. Some soldiers come home missing limbs and other parts of their bodies. Still others will live with permanent scars from horrific events that no one other than those who served will ever understand. We come home from war trying to put our lives back together but some cannot stand the memories and decide that death is better. We kill ourselves because we are so haunted by seeing children killed and whole families wiped out.

Others come home to nothing, families have abandoned them: husbands and wives have left these soldiers, and so have parents. Post-traumatic stress disorder has become the norm amongst these soldiers because they don't know how to cope with returning to a society that will never understand what they have endured.

PTSD comes in many forms not understood by many: but yet if a soldier has it, America thinks the soldiers are crazy. PTSD comes in the form of depression, anger, regret, being confrontational, anxiety, chronic pain, compulsion, delusions, grief, guilt, dependence, loneliness, sleep disorders, suspiciousness/paranoia, low self-esteem and so many other things.

We are easily startled with a loud bang or noise and can be found ducking for cover when we get panicked. This is a result of artillery rounds going off in a combat zone, or an improvised explosive device blowing up.

I myself have trouble coping with an everyday routine that often causes me to have a short fuse. A lot of soldiers lose jobs just because they are trained to be killers and they have lived in an environment that is conducive to that. We are always on guard for our safety and that of our comrades. When you go to bed at night you wonder will you be sent home in a flag-draped coffin because a mortar round went off on your sleeping area.

Soldiers live in deplorable conditions where burning your own faeces is the order of the day, where going days on end with no shower and the uniform you wear gets so crusty it sticks to your body becomes a common occurrence. We also deal with rationing water or even food. So when a soldier comes home they are unsure of what to do.

This is what PTSD comes in the shape of - soldiers can not often handle coming back to the same world they left behind. It is something that drives soldiers over the edge and causes them to withdraw from society. As Americans we turn our nose down at them wondering why they act the way they do. Who cares about them, why should we help them?
Comment: While we can certainly understand why this young man felt that he had no option but to take his own life, we do not support suicide. We know that there are exceptional cases of terminal illness and individuals who suffer chronic and intractable pain. In those cases, we bow our heads and acknowledge that the individual has the right to make their own decision without judgment from others.

What we see in this case, of course, is a case of chronic and intractable emotional pain. This is a common malady of our world, due primarily to the patologizing of our society. Again we must point out the work of Andrew Lobaczewski who has so thorougly described this process and its effects on normal human beings. The most tragic thing about all of it is that a very small segment of the population is responsible for the sufferings of the majority.

One of the reasons for the existence of this website is so that those who do begin to see, or who have struggled all their lives trying to make sense of a society that has been shaped by The Cult of the Plausible Lie. The primary problem that I see humanity struggling with today is precisely delineated by Lobaczewski: it is an almost total lack of adequate psychological knowledge on the part of the masses of humanity - the population of ordinary, normal people.

Plausible lies are monstrous things propagated by evil people for the express purpose of deceiving good people into doing the will of those who do not have their best interests at heart. It's that simple. The most powerful of these lies are so plausible that nobody even dreams about questioning their validity.

Learning about evil in our society, how it operates on the macro-social scale, is considered by many to be "unpleasant." They don't want to go there. It is too disturbing and even frightening. More than that, talking about these things as we do here at SOTT is not familiar. To talk about evil as though it were a REAL concept is something we have been programmed to NOT do!

We clearly need to study this problem of macro-social evil in our world in a systematic and scientific way. And we need to get over the idea that thinking only good thoughts, thinking about happy and "nice" things is the way to good psychological health.

It's clear that trying to think "happy thoughts" did no good for Douglas Barber; his observations and experience were in conflict with this plausible lie. But it is so plausible that millions upon millions of people are taken in by it.

Who knows? If Douglas Barber had known about SOTT, if he had known about our work with the Quantum Future Group, if he had known about our studies in psychopathy and Ponerology, perhaps he would have been able to come to a resolution about the fact that Evil does exist, that it rules this world and has done for millennia, and then he would have been able to convert his suffering into positive work for the promotion of that which is good, decent, and normal.

But of course, there is no possibility of a world that is ruled by normal people to come into being until they begin to wake up from the spell of the Evil Magician, the Ponerological union of pathological elements in our society. And it is for this purpose, waking people up, that SOTT exists.

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Iran 'positive' on Russian uranium enrichment plan
AFP 25 Jan 06

Iran expressed qualified support for a plan to enrich its uranium on Russian territory but vowed to start industrial-scale enrichment at home if it is hauled before the UN Security Council.

"We positively evaluate this offer," top Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani was quoted as saying Wednesday by RIA Novosti agency after talks with Russian security and energy officials in Moscow.

He added that "this plan can be perfected" during further Russian-Iranian talks planned next month.

Under the proposed deal, uranium for Iran's nascent nuclear power programme would be enriched in Russia in order to keep tabs on the material and allay Western and Israeli fears that Iran secretly plans to build a nuclear weapon under cover of the civilian power project.
The European Union and the United States have given backing to the plan.

However, the Iranian negotiator warned any deal would be scuppered if his country's nuclear programme was referred for discussion at the UN Security Council -- a move that would allow Western powers to press for sanctions against Iran.

"If the matter is referred to the UN Security Council or is used for political pressure, Iran will begin industrial enrichment of uranium," he was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS news agency.

At the request of Britain, Germany and France, the UN nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will hold an emergency meeting in Vienna February 2-3 to discuss the Iranian programme. The IAEA could decide to send Iran to the UN Security Council.

The European powers declared negotiations over the Iranian programme were at a dead end after Tehran on January 10 broke IAEA seals and resumed uranium enrichment work to produce material that could serve either as fuel for atomic reactors or the raw material for nuclear weapons.

The European Union and the United States are trying to convince key Iranian trading partners Russia and China to back a hard line against Iran, including the referral to the UN Security Council.

But diplomats said the two sides still disagree on the wording of a resolution that could be adopted at the Vienna meeting.

An important flurry of diplomatic activity is likely Monday when the foreign ministers of all five UN Security Council permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- meet in London. Germany's foreign minister will also attend.

Although in London for a meeting on Afghanistan, the officials are to hold separate talks about Iran and the upcoming IAEA meeting, the British Foreign Office said.

Larijani warned that referral to the UN Security Council "will not serve peace and security in the region."

Larijani also stipulated that many details still had to be worked out before the proposed Iran-Russia uranium enrichment partnership became reality.

"Russia's idea is good, but... favourable conditions concerning the time and place" of the uranium enrichment scheme have still to be worked out, he said.

Larijani also insisted that Iran had full rights to "carry out scientific-research work in the area of enriching uranium," saying that this differed from actual enrichment.

He reiterated Iran's willingness to negotiate with Europe, adding that "Russian efforts can help this."

Russia is Iran's main partner in the nuclear power programme, which Iran says it needs to boost energy supplies. Russian engineers are building a plant at Bushehr and Russia supplies the uranium.

However, Western governments and Israel say Tehran could be secretly aiming to build a nuclear weapon. This would upset the longstanding security balance in the Middle East, where Israel is the sole, if undeclared, atomic power.

Iran -- whose populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinjead has said Israel should be "wiped off the map" -- has warned that sanctions against Iran could drive up already sky-high world energy prices.

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US relents on Islamic law to reach Iraq deal
Rory Carroll in Baghdad and Julian Borger in Washington Monday August 22, 2005 The Guardian

The United States has eased its opposition to an Islamic Iraqi state to help clinch a deal on a draft constitution before tonight's deadline....

If approved, critics say that the proposals would erode women's rights and other freedoms enshrined under existing laws. "We understand the Americans have sided with the Shias. It's shocking. It doesn't fit with American values," an unnamed Kurdish negotiator told Reuters. "They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state."
The United States has eased its opposition to an Islamic Iraqi state to help clinch a deal on a draft constitution before tonight's deadline.

American diplomats backed religious conservatives who threatened to torpedo talks over the shape of the new Iraq unless Islam was a primary source of law. Secular and liberal groups were dismayed at the move, branding it a betrayal of Washington's promise to advocate equal rights in a free and tolerant society.

Stalemate over the role of Islam, among other issues, meant last week's deadline was extended for a week. Outstanding disputes could produce another cliffhanger tonight, triggering a further extension.

The Bush administration, keen to show the political process is on track, has waded into negotiations and pressured all sides to compromise.

Administration officials have suggested that the number of US troops could be reduced next year if Iraq makes political progress and enough Iraqi troops are trained to take on insurgents. But yesterday, a US general said the army was making "worst case" contingency plans to maintain troops at the current level for another four years.

In an interview with the Associated Press, General Peter Schoomaker said the army had planned troop rotations up to 2009 to ensure enough soldiers would be available. But actual deployments will be decided by commanders in Iraq, if conditions allow, he added.

There are currently 138,000 US troops in Iraq, including 25,000 marines. President Bush has repeatedly denied that the US intends to "cut and run", leaving Iraq to the insurgents. "Our troops know that they're fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy," the president said yesterday in his weekly radio address.

Conservative Shias, dominant in the Iraqi government, had clashed with Kurds and other minorities who wanted Islam to be "a" rather than "the" main source of law.

According to Kurdish and Sunni negotiators, the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, proposed that Islam be named "a primary source" and supported a wording which would give clerics authority in civil matters such as divorce, marriage and inheritance.

If approved, critics say that the proposals would erode women's rights and other freedoms enshrined under existing laws. "We understand the Americans have sided with the Shias. It's shocking. It doesn't fit with American values," an unnamed Kurdish negotiator told Reuters. "They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state."

Dozens of women gathered in central Baghdad yesterday to protest against what the organiser, Yanar Mohammad, feared would be a "fascist, nationalist and Islamist" constitution. "We are fighting to avoid becoming second class citizens," she said.

The US embassy declined to discuss the negotiations but a state department official in Washington told the New York Times that the draft document should be judged in its entirety.

There are conflicting signals about the prospect of a deal before the deadline, with some factions claiming divisions have narrowed, others saying they have widened.

If a text is not handed to parliament by midnight, deputies could be asked to repeat last week's vote and amend the existing law, which decreed the deadline, to extend it further.

The alternative would be to dissolve parliament and call an election, something the ruling Shia and Kurdish coalition wants to avoid.

If a text is agreed, there will be a referendum in October which - if passed - will pave the way for a December election.

Sunni Arabs, a dominant minority under Saddam Hussein and now the backbone of the insurgency, fear a constitution which cedes autonomy to Kurds in the north and Shias in the south, leaving central government too weak to funnel oil revenues to Sunnis in the middle.

The drafting committee's 15-member Sunni bloc said it had been sidelined in recent days and appealed to the US and UN to ensure their voice was heard. US and British diplomats have suggested that federalism will be fudged enough to bring mainstream Sunnis on board and drain support from the resistance.

Al Qaida in Iraq and other insurgent groups have threatened to kill Sunnis who register to vote, saying the political process is a US-orchestrated sham. Three Sunnis who erected posters in Mosul urging people to vote were murdered last week.
Comment: The U.S. agreed to this imposition of Islamic law PRIOR TO the Iraqi elections, because if the U.S. didn't agree, the Shiites said they would NOT support the formation of an Iraqi government. This FACT will come back to haunt George W. Bush.

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Iran accuses Britain over bombing
CNN 25 Jan 06

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran on Wednesday accused Britain of cooperating with bombers who killed eight people in the southern Iranian city of Ahvaz on Tuesday.

"Their (British) cooperation, either in London or Basra, is clear and we will seriously express this to British officials," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been due to visit the southern city where bombs exploded at a bank and government building, his officials said.

Ahmadinejad had been due to visit Ahvaz on Tuesday, but his office said he cancelled the trip on Monday night.

Differing reasons for the cancellation were reported: Reuters said it was due to sandstorms that would have wrecked his hallmark walks through the streets while the official Islamic Republic News Agency, quoted by The Associated Press, said heavy rain was to blame.

Ahmadinejad and his entire Cabinet had been expected to meet in Ahvaz -- a city with a history of violence involving members of Iran's Arab minority -- as one of a series of visits to regional capitals to address key local issues.

Lebanon's al-Manar television, run by the Hezbollah militant group, said earlier that Tuesday's bombs had been intended to kill Ahmadinejad. Its Tehran correspondent said the president had canceled his trip after a security tip-off.

Tuesday's explosions followed bitter exchanges between Tehran and London. Iran has accused Britain of provoking unrest in Khuzestan, which lies across the border from southern Iraq, where 8,500 British soldiers are stationed.

Britain has also opposed Iran's nuclear activities, supporting moves to refer it to the U.N. Security Council, and has accused Tehran of backing Iraqi insurgents in attacks on British soldiers.

Both countries have denied the claims and counterclaims.

Ahvaz city governor Mohammad Jafar Samari said Tuesday there was no word on who planted the bombs.

"The place where the bombs exploded was a long way from where the president had planned to make a speech," he told Reuters.

Iranian news agencies said the Saman bank was gutted by fire and broken glass littered streets near the blast sites.

Iranian authorities are sensitive about protests in Ahvaz and the surrounding province of Khuzestan, which sits on most of the country's oil reserves, the second biggest in the world.

Bombings took place in Ahvaz last June and October that the government blamed on Iranian Arab extremists whom it claimed were trained abroad and had ties to foreign governments, including Britain.

The October bombings killed six people and those in June killed at least eight. Britain denied any link to the unrest.

Nezam Molla Hoveizeh, a Khuzestan lawmaker, said Tuesday the bombers were "dissidents based outside our borders," IRNA reported, without elaborating.

A preliminary United Nations report said Arabs, who comprise about three percent of Iran's 69 million people, were discriminated against with regard to basic amenities, resources and legal rights.

Copyright 2006 CNN.

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Iran blames Britain and US for bombings
25/01/2006

Iran’s president today blamed Britain and the US for two bombings that killed at least nine people in the southwestern city of Ahvaz.

“Traces of the occupiers of Iraq is evident in the Ahvaz events. They should take responsibility in this regard,” state television quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying.

The station reported that Ahmadinejad had issued a decree ordering his foreign minister and intelligence minister to investigate the possibility that “foreign hands” might have been responsible for the explosions.
At least nine people were killed in yesterday’s two blasts in Ahvaz, the capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province which borders Iraq, police spokesman Mohammed Ali Pour said today.

Forty-six people were wounded in the explosions inside a bank and outside a state environmental agency building, the official Islamic Republic News Agency has reported.

Ahvaz has a history of violence involving members of Iran’s Arab minority. Last year, bombings in June and October killed a total of 14 people in the city. In April, residents rioted for two days over claims – denied by the government - that the state was planning to reduce the number of Arabs in the area.

Iran has repeatedly accused Britain of provoking unrest in the region, which borders Iraq near where 8,500 British soldiers are based.

Britain has denied any connection to the Khuzestan unrest.
Comment: Sounds logical enough to us, after all, counter-insurgency tactics are SOP for Western intelligence agencies. Obviously the basic goal of counter-intelligence operations is to destroy the enemy. To achieve this, many different tactics can be used, but all aim to discredit and demoralize the enemy as a means to destroying it.

Today, an enemy can be universally discredited (at least in the public eye) if he can be portrayed as a "terrorist". To portray him as a terrorist, it is often necessary to carry out terrorist acts that your enemy would not normally engage in.

British army intelligence agents were caught engaging in exactly this type of operation late last year when the car they were travelling in was stopped and found to contain explosives. Both men were wearing full Arab dress. It seems that the plan was to create yet another Western media headline along the lines of "Iraqi insurgent car bomb kills dozens of Iraqis."

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'I believe I must end my life while I am still able'
Sarah Boseley and Clare Dyer Wednesday January 25, 2006 The Guardian

A British doctor suffering from an incurable illness killed herself yesterday in Zurich with the help of Dignitas, the Swiss voluntary organisation.

Anne Turner was the 42nd Briton to seek medical help from Dignitas to end her life. Her case will cause controversy because she was diagnosed only last summer and as yet had relatively few symptoms of the brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP).

Yesterday the UK organisation Dignity in Dying, which used to be known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, said Dr Turner's story showed British law was shortening lives and called for assisted suicide to be legalised.
"This case is truly heartbreaking," said its chief executive, Deborah Annetts. "The government must make time in parliament for the assisted dying for the terminally ill bill. Only this bill could have prevented Anne Turner from taking her life early. If this bill had been law, Anne would not have been forced to go to Zurich while she was still able to travel, for help to die. She would be alive today."

Dr Turner, who would have been 67 today, said in an interview shortly before her death that she did not want to reach the point where she could not travel to a country where assisted suicide is legal. "I think it's dreadful that somebody like myself has to go to Switzerland to do this, which is an awful hassle," she said.

"I want to go there while I still can, because I have to be able to swallow a solution of barbiturates. I know that people say that I look well, but I'm not. My condition has deteriorated an awful lot, particularly my speech. I hate talking on the phone now and, really, I don't like talking much at all."

Further evidence of Dr Turner's preparation and determination was apparent in the sheaf of envelopes she is seen clutching in the interview. She had prepared more than 100 typed letters for her family, friends and neighbours telling them of her plans. Each carried a personal, handwritten message on the back.

They were left in her kitchen and delivered to each recipient by her cleaner yesterday lunchtime.

The typed message in the letters read: "I have no shortage of people to convince me that life with the illness is worth living ... Because the law in the UK is not currently supportive, I have had extra complications which have required a certain degree of secrecy.

"I am firm in my belief that I must end my life now while I'm still able. I hope to have spared you some of the protracted grief."

Her son, Edward, 39, speaking to the Guardian from Zurich hours after her death, said the experience had been hard for Dr Turner's three children. "For us as a family it has been a really horrific experience and we did it for my mother," he said. "We wanted to help her in whatever way we had to." Dr Turner, who retired early from her job running a family planning clinic to nurse her husband, who had multiple system atrophy, would have had an average life expectancy of seven years with PSP, but would have faced the lingering death suffered by Dudley Moore, who died in 2002 of the same condition.

The rare disease causes degeneration of the nerve endings. Balance, vision, movement, speech and the ability to swallow all deteriorate. Death is usually triggered by something else, such as pneumonia or choking.

A former GP and campaigner for voluntary euthanasia yesterday told the Guardian that he watched a terminally ill woman from Glasgow take a lethal dose of barbiturates at the Dignitas clinic. Michael Irwin said: "I've never seen anyone actually commit suicide before. I wasn't sad or tearful. I was glad for her. This was a life she didn't want to lead any more." The 75-year-old widow from Glasgow, whose identity her family wants to keep secret, had multiple system atrophy and was in a wheelchair.

The dignity trade

Dignitas was founded by a Swiss lawyer, Ludwig Minelli, in 1998. The Zurich-based charity's aim is to help people with chronic illnesses to die a quick and painless death. Its motto is "Live with dignity, die with dignity." Patients die by drinking a lethal dose of barbiturate that kills them in about five minutes. The suicide is recorded on video to prove it is voluntary and the tape is examined by police and a coroner. Over the last eight years the organisation has assisted in the deaths of more than 450 people from around Europe, 42 of whom were from the UK. Although the law here prohibits assisted suicide, no one has yet been prosecuted for travelling to Switzerland to help a relative die.

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Flashback: Dr. Kevorkian is denied release from prison
22 Dec 2005 Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian lost his bid to win release from prison on the grounds he was dying, when Michigan's governor said on Thursday she would accept a state parole board's denial of his request.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm said she would follow the recommendation of the state's parole board, which voted 7-2 to deny the 77-year-old Kevorkian's wish to be pardoned or to have his 10- to 25-year sentence for second-degree murder commuted.

Kevorkian, a retired pathologist nicknamed "Dr. Death," is serving his sentence at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer, Michigan. He suffers from Hepatitis C and other illnesses and does not have long to live, his lawyer has said.
But the parole board ruled his health did not meet the criteria of having a terminal illness and having less than a year to live, the governor's spokeswoman, Heidi Hensen, said.

Kevorkian is eligible for parole on June 1, 2007, when he would be 79.

Kevorkian's fascination with dying brought him notoriety when he crusaded for the right of terminally ill people to get help committing suicide. He used a drug-delivery device he designed and built to help them do it, sometimes in the back of his rusty white 1968 Volkswagen.

Kevorkian thumbed his nose at prosecutors and opponents, and juries found him not guilty four times before he was convicted in 1999 of giving lethal injections to 52-year-old Thomas Youk, who had Lou Gehrig's disease. Kevorkian videotaped the procedure in which he delivered the shots to Youk himself, and the tape was shown on CBS's "60 Minutes."
Comment: Why this guy is in prison while Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, DeLay, and the rest of the gang, still stalk our country, causing tens of thousands of deaths of people who do not WANT to die, passes our understanding.

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Flashback: Court rules govt. can't stop Oregon suicide law
By James Vicini Reuters 17 Jan 2006

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration cannot stop doctors from helping terminally ill patients end their lives under the nation's only physician-assisted suicide law, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

In a stinging defeat for the administration, the high court ruled on a 6-3 vote that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001 impermissibly interpreted federal law to bar distribution of controlled drugs to assist suicides, regardless of the Oregon law authorizing it.
The justices upheld a U.S. appeals court ruling that Ashcroft's directive was unlawful and unenforceable, and that he had overstepped his authority.

The Oregon law, called the Death with Dignity Act, was twice approved by the state's voters. The only state law in the nation allowing physician-assisted suicide, it has been used by more than 200 people since it took effect in 1997.

Under Oregon law, terminally ill patients must get a certification from two doctors stating they are of sound mind and have less than six months to live. A prescription for lethal drugs is then written by the doctor, and the patients administer the drugs themselves.

Ashcroft's directive declared that assisting suicide was not a legitimate medical purpose under the Controlled Substances Act and that prescribing federally controlled drugs for that purpose was against the federal law.

The directive threatened to revoke prescription-writing licenses for physicians and pharmacists who filled orders for life-ending drugs.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice
Anthony Kennedy said the federal drug law does not allow the attorney general to prohibit doctors from prescribing regulated drugs for use in physician-assisted suicide under state law permitting the procedure.

COURT'S CONSERVATIVES DISSENTED

The court's most conservative members -- Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and new Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by President George W. Bush -- dissented.

Ashcroft reversed the policy adopted by his predecessor, Attorney General Janet Reno, during the Clinton administration. Conservative lawmakers and groups had opposed Reno's decision.

The closely watched case pitted the federal government's power to interpret and enforce the nation's drug laws versus the traditional authority of a state to regulate doctors and the practice of medicine.

Bush administration attorneys argued that federal drug law trumped the Oregon law on the issue of whether doctors may prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients.

But Kennedy, joined by another moderate conservative, retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and the court's four most liberal members, rejected the government's arguments.

He said the administration maintained that the law delegated to a single officer in the executive branch "the power to effect a radical shift of authority from the states to the federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality."

Kennedy concluded in the 28-page opinion that the text of the federal law shows that "Congress did not have this far-reaching intent to alter the federal-state balance."

Oregon had argued that Congress did not authorize Ashcroft to overrule a state's decision about specific medical uses of controlled substances.

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Baffled Scientists Say Less Sunlight Reaching Earth
By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor 24 January 2006

After dropping for about 15 years, the amount of sunlight Earth reflects back into space, called albedo, has increased since 2000, a new study concludes.

That means less energy is reaching the surface. Yet global temperatures have not cooled during the period.

Increasing cloud cover seems to be the reason, but there must also be some other change in the clouds that's not yet understood.
"The data also reveal that from 2000 to now the clouds have changed so that the Earth may continue warming, even with declining sunlight," said study leader Philip R. Goode of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "These large and peculiar variabilities of the clouds, coupled with a resulting increasing albedo, presents a fundamental, unmet challenge for all scientists who wish to understand and predict the Earth's climate."

Cloud changes

Earth's albedo is measured by noting how much reflected sunlight in turn bounces off the Moon, something scientists call earthshine. The observations were made at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California.

The findings will be published Jan. 24 in Eos, a weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

On any given day, about half of Earth is covered by clouds, which reflect more sunlight than land and water. Clouds keep Earth cool by reflecting sunlight, but they can also serve as blankets to trap warmth.

High thin clouds are better blankets, while low thick clouds make better coolers.

Separately, satellite data recently showed that while the difference between high and low clouds had long been steady at 7-8 percent, in the past five years, for some unknown reason, the difference has jumped to 13 percent. High, warming clouds have increased while low clouds have decreased.

What about global warming?

Earth's albedo appears to have experienced a similar reversal during a period running from the 1960s to the mid-1980s.

Goode's team says there may be a large, unexplained variation in sunlight reaching the Earth that changes over the course of two decades or so, as well as a large effect of clouds re-arranging by altitude.

How do the findings play into arguments about global warming and the apparent contribution by industrial emissions? That's entirely unclear.

"No doubt greenhouse gases are increasing," Goode said in a telephone interview. "No doubt that will cause a warming. The question is, 'Are there other things going on?'"

What is clear is that scientists don't understand clouds very well, as a trio of studies last year also showed.

"Clouds are even more uncertain than we thought," Goode said.

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Archeologists Unearth 1,300 Skeletons
AP 24 Jan 06

LONDON - A medieval cemetery containing around 1,300 skeletons has been discovered in the central English city of Leicester, archaeologists said Tuesday.
The bones were found during a dig before the site is developed as part of a $630 million shopping mall.

University of Leicester archaeologists say the find promises to shed new light on the way people lived and died in the Middle Ages.

"We think, probably outside London, this must be one of the largest parish graveyards ever excavated," said Richard Buckley, director of University of Leicester Archaeology Services.

"Archaeology will tell us a lot from the rubbish people throw away. We can really learn about the lives they were leading.

"But it's very rare that we get a look at a (whole) population itself. It's quite a tightly dated group."

Buckley said the graveyard was probably used from the 12th century until the demolition of a church at the site in 1573.

Communal graves and the many skeletons of children provide evidence of high infant mortality and contagious diseases, Buckley said.

What is believed to be Britain's largest medieval cemetery was found at Bishopsgate London in 1999. It contained more than 10,000 bodies.

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DNA helps solve mysterious murder case
IOL-AFP 25 Jan 06

Brest, France - French police who spent two years trying to identify a woman who was murdered by a blow to the head were relieved to discover the reason their efforts were failing was that the woman died half a millennium ago.

The skeleton of a woman in her thirties was found during an exceptionally low tide in December 2003 near the seaside Brittany town of Plouezoc'h. A long gash in the skull convinced investigators she was killed with a hatchet or other sharp implement.

Police ploughed through missing persons' files to no avail. A theory that the woman was the wife of a Normandy doctor who disappeared with his family in a famous 1999 case was dismissed after DNA tests.

Eventually radiocarbon dating established that the death had occurred between 1401 and 1453.

"We are satisfied because at least we know the date now. We reckon it was pirates," said Francois Gerthosser of the Plourin-les-Morlaix police. - Sapa-AFP

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Omega-3 Flounders as Cancer Protection
By Neil Osterweil, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. January 24, 2006

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Jan. 24 - Eating fish and other foods high in omega-3 fatty acids doesn't have the wondrous effect on preventing malignancies that it seems to have in warding off heart disease.

As a cancer preventive strategy, omega-3 was left high and dry, reported Catherine H. MacLean, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at Rand Health in the Jan. 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The authors noted that their results seem to conflict with laboratory and animal studies suggesting that omega-3 fatty acids may have a protective effect against cancer, but they chalked up this discrepancy to the inadequacies of cancer models, and to differences between omega-3 forms found in foods and in dietary supplements.

The finding that omega-3 is a bust as a cancer preventive came just as the American Heart Association took the air out the sails of soy protein for heart disease, saying that it's not effective for lowering LDL cholesterol, does not improve HDL or triglycerides, and has no effect on blood pressure.

In a review of 38 articles describing the effects of omega-3 consumption (either from foods or from dietary supplements) on cancer, Dr. MacLean and colleagues found that "omega-3 fatty acids appear not to affect a mechanism of cancer development that is common across the different types of cancers evaluated in this report. Likewise, there is little to suggest that omega-3 fatty acids reduce the risk of any single type of cancer."

The researchers scoured the medical literature for studies that looked at the effects of omega-3 fatty acids on tumor incidence, and they narrowed their search to studies with a prospective cohort design that considered different levels of omega-3 consumption.

Two reviewers independently extracted from the studies detailed data about the incidence of cancer, the type of cancer, the number and characteristics of patients, details on the exposure to omega-3 fatty acids, and the elapsed time between the intervention and outcome measurements.

The reviewers identified 20 cohorts from seven countries for 11 different types of cancer, and up to six different ways to categorize omega-3 fatty acid consumption. The cohorts ranged in size from 6,000 to 121,000, and had follow-up periods ranging from 9,000 to 1.5 million person-years.

More than half of the studies focused on breast, colorectal or prostate cancer. The rest looked at the effects of omega-3 on either aerodigestive cancers (i.e., squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity or pharynx, esophagus, or larynx); or other malignancies, such as bladder, lung, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, ovarian, pancreatic, basal cell carcinoma, and stomach.

The authors found that among 65 estimates of the association between omega-3 fatty acid consumption and cancer, only eight were statistically significant, and there was conflicting evidence for an association with cancer risk across many of the studies.

For example, they found one study indicating that for breast cancer there was an increased risk for cancer associated with omega-3 (incidence risk ratio 1.47; 95% confidence interval, 1.10-1.98), but three other suggesting a decreased risk (RR, 0.68-0.72). Still seven other estimates showed no significant association between breast cancer risk and omega-3 consumption.

Similarly, only one study showed a significant association between omega-3 and reduced risk of colorectal cancer (RR, 0.49; 95% CI, 0.27-0.89), whereas 17 other studies showed no association.

As for a possible association between lung cancer and omega-3, one study showed an increased risk (IRR, 3.0; 95% CI, 1.2-7.3), another showed a decreased risk (RR, 0.32; 95% CI, 0.13-0.76), and four others showed no significant associations.

In the case of advanced prostate cancer, again, one study showed an increased risk (RR, 1.98; 95% CI, 1.34-2.93), one estimated a decreased risk (RR, 0.43; 95% CI, 0.22-0.83) and 15 others found no association.

One study looking at basal cell carcinoma found a slightly increased risk (RR, 1.13; 95% CI, 1.01-1.27), but for all the other types of cancer there were no significant associations reported.

"A large body of literature spanning numerous cohorts from many countries and with different demographic characteristics does not provide evidence to suggest a significant association between omega-3 fatty acids and cancer incidence," Dr. MacLean and colleagues wrote.

"Dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids is unlikely to prevent cancer," they concluded.

Primary source: Journal of the American Medical Association
Source reference:
MacLean CH et al. Effects of Omega-3 Fatty Acids

on Cancer Risk. A Systematic Review. JAMA. 2006;295:403-415

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Chinese woman dies from bird flu: WHO
Reuters Wed Jan 25, 2006 7:03 AM ET

BEIJING - A Chinese woman infected with bird flu, the country's 10th human bird flu victim, has died, the World Health Organization confirmed on Wednesday.

The 29-year-old woman surnamed Cao, who ran a shop in a farm goods market in Jinhua town in the southwestern province of Sichuan, died on Monday, Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in Beijing, said.
Cao fell ill with a fever on January 12 and had been receiving treatment in a hospital in the provincial capital, Chengdu. She was Sichuan's second human case of bird flu this month, after the Chinese health ministry announced last week that a 35-year-old woman from the province died of the disease on January 11.

To date, seven of the 10 Chinese people officially confirmed to have contracted bird flu have died.

China's Ministry of Health was not immediately available for comment.

In Cao's case, and most of China's other reported human bird flu infections, there was no officially confirmed outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu among poultry in the area beforehand.

China, along with Vietnam, has suffered numerous outbreaks in poultry since October and Beijing has launched sweeping measures to stop the virus from spreading and infecting more people.

Experts believe the H5N1 virus is contracted through close contact with sick birds, and fear that as the virus spreads it will mutate to enable it to spread easily from human to human, sparking a pandemic that could claim many millions of lives.

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Mysterious painting in Berlin could be last portrait of Mozart
Fabien Novial AFP January 17, 2006

BERLIN -- Is it Mozart? A mysterious portrait discovered in a Berlin vault could be the last image of the musical genius painted while he was alive, but experts are at odds over its authenticity.
Despite the doubts, the painting, entitled Gentleman in Green Coat, is to go on show in Salzburg soon as part of Austria's year-long celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth.

If it is in fact Mozart, the portrait would show the premature aging of a bon vivant who died when he was only 35.

The face is lined, the hair is graying and the tired features speak to a lifetime of experience. The man is smiling but without great conviction.

Something about the impressive mane, the intelligence in the gaze and the nonchalance of the pose prompt the viewer to think that the model was not just anyone.

Yet the subject appears banally human, with slouching shoulders, rings under his eyes and the start of a double chin.

Perhaps it is Mozart, but if so it is an image that dramatically corrects the angelic figure familiar from the half dozen portraits judged to be authentic.

It meshes, however, with the biographical details known from the end of his short life, in which his body was ravaged by excesses with alcohol and women. The swollen face in the painting, for example, could easily reflect treatment for syphilis, from which Mozart is widely believed to have suffered.

The picture, signed by a renowned portraitist of the era, Johann Georg Edlinger, was completed in 1790 in Munich, where the composer spent a brief period a year before his death.

While he stayed in the Bavarian capital, he frequented The Black Eagle inn, whose patron was a friend of the artist.

The Gentleman in Green Coat remained in Munich for a century and a half before Berlin's Gemaeldegalerie museum bought it from an art dealer in 1934.

But the painting remained in a depot in eastern Berlin during World War II and Germany's four-decade-long division until it went on display again last year.

"There is no reason to doubt it is Mozart," museum director Wolf Lindemann said, although "definitive proof" will never be possible.

A descendant of the painter, Wolfgang Seiller, was the one who drew the link to Mozart by comparing the physical traits of the model with those of another portrait of the composer in a similar pose on display in Bologna, Italy.

The historical archives in Munich, however, offer several pieces of evidence that cast doubts on Berlin's claims.

If Mozart were the model, the painting would have somehow made reference to music as a form of "recognition of his art by the German royal courts", the city wrote in a report on the painting.

Secondly, historical records indicate that Mozart only spent a week in Munich in the autumn of 1790, where he gave a concert for the Neapolitan king.

Skeptics say that it would have been difficult for him to find the time to pose for a painter known for interminable sittings.

The city of Munich also argues that a known portrait of Mozart would surely have been put on display in the months following his death on December 5, 1791.

And finally, the painting is part of a set with a female portrait, yet Mozart's wife Constanze was not in Munich at the time.

Mozart might have had himself secretly painted with a favorite mistress but in those days, "even the greatest libertine would not have gone that far", said the director of the Munich archives, Richard Bauer.

Bauer, who said that the Gentleman in Green Coat is far more likely to be a wealthy merchant, noted that "subjective physical similarities that are not backed up with other indices have never been enough to identify people. Not under the law, and not in the history of art."

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One third of all trees damaged in Germany's ailing forests
AFP Jan 24 12:01 PM US/Eastern

Germany's forests are in a worrying state and nearly one third of all trees are showing signs of damage.

The situation among oak trees is of particular concern, with half in poor condition, the study carried out by the agriculture ministry in 2005 found.
The main causes of the damage were air pollution from motor vehicles and contamination of the soil from agriculture.

"The state of health of forests remains a source of concern," Peter Paziorek -- a state secretary in the agriculture ministry -- said Tuesday.

He called for stricter air pollution measures to be introduced and an increase in the use of environmentally friendly fuel.

The report by the agriculture ministry said 29 percent of trees showed signs of damage or disease in 2005, a slight improvement on the 31 percent in 2004.

However, the state of oak trees had worsened dramatically, while 20 percent of fir trees were in a poor condition compared with 17 percent in 2004.

The German farmers' federation (DBV) blamed the Europe-wide heatwave in 2003 and the high ozone levels it triggered for much of the damage.

Environmental group NABU said the report was alarming.

"Such a picture of damage being painted repeatedly and so often proves the clear threat to the very existence of forests," the group said.

It called for an end to mass livestock rearing which it said contributed to soil pollution from chemicals.

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2005 was warmest year on record: NASA
Reuters January 24, 2006

WASHINGTON - Last year was the warmest recorded on Earth's surface, and it was unusually hot in the Arctic, U.S. space agency NASA said on Tuesday.

All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, NASA said in a statement.
"It's fair to say that it probably is the warmest since we have modern meteorological records," said Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City.

"Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it's even fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years."

Some researchers had expected 1998 would be the hottest year on record, notably because a strong El Nino -- a warm-water pattern in the eastern Pacific -- boosted global temperatures.

But Shindell said last year was slightly warmer than 1998, even without any extraordinary weather pattern. Temperatures in the Arctic were unusually warm in 2005, NASA said.

"That very anomalously warm year (1998) has become the norm," Shindell said in a telephone interview.

"The rate of warming has been so rapid that this temperature that we only got when we had a real strong El Nino now has become something that we've gotten without any unusual worldwide weather disturbance."

Over the past 30 years, Earth has warmed by 1.08 degrees F (0.6 degrees C), NASA said. Over the past 100 years, it has warmed by 1.44 degrees F (0.8 degrees C).

Shindell, in line with the view held by most scientists, attributed the rise to emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, with the burning of fossil fuels being the primary source.

The 21st century could see global temperature increases of 6 to 10 degrees F (3 to 5 degrees C), Shindell said.

"That will really bring us up to the warmest temperatures the world has experienced probably in the last million years," he said.

To understand whether the Earth is cooling or warming, scientists use data from weather stations on land, satellite measurements of sea surface temperature since 1982, and data from ships for earlier years.

More information and images are available online at: NASA.gov.
Comment:

"Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it's even fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years."

So anyway, don't worry about that whole "Global Warming" thing. And by all means, ignore the fact that global warming precedes ice ages, and Europe is currently experiencing a deep freeze...

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Cold claims more lives in Europe, snow covers south
By Karolos Grohmann Reuters Wed Jan 25, 2006 7:16 AM ET

ATHENS - Freezing weather has killed scores more people in eastern Europe and snowstorms forced the closure of the Acropolis in Athens and blanketed parts of Sicily on Wednesday as the bitterly cold air pushed south.

Ukraine said 66 people had died across the country since the freeze set in last week. Russia urged neighbor Ukraine to restrict gas usage as demand rockets during the coldest winter in a generation in the region.
Ten people have frozen to death or died of burns while trying to keep warm in the Czech Republic in recent days after temperatures fell below -30 Celsius (minus 22 F), media said.

Police said another another 14 people have died of exposure in Poland over the past 24 hours.

The bitter cold has now spread to the far south of Europe, regions which normally enjoy milder winters.

In Greece, more than 400 villages and towns were cut off after 36 hours of continuous snowfall and hundreds of snow-clearing vehicles struggled to keep main routes open.

Ports across the country stayed shut as icy gale-force winds swept across the Aegean sea, dropping a carpet of snow over the islands.

A Cambodia-flagged cargo ship sank in the northern Aegean sea amid a snowstorm on Tuesday, the merchant marine ministry said. All but two of the 16 mainly Turkish crew were rescued by the coast guard and rescuers were search for the missing.

Athenians also enjoyed the rare sight of the Acropolis hill under a covering of snow. One of the world's most visited monuments, its classical marble temples were closed to the public for a second day due to the weather.

Italy is also suffering from the cold snap, with the thermometer falling to -35 C in mountains in the north-east. At the other end of the country, heavy snow swept parts of the Mediterranean island of Sicily on Wednesday morning.

Newspapers reported that two people died of exposure near Imola in the north of the country, while cities around Italy opened metro stations and railway waiting rooms overnight to provide shelter for the homeless.

The harsh winter has led to a surge in demand for gas as Italians try to keep their homes warm, forcing the government to introduce emergency measures to preserve dwindling gas stocks.

The initiative includes lowering the maximum temperature of central heating systems by one degree Celsius and cutting the heating time by one hour per day. People who ignore the decree face a fine of up to 800 euros ($980).

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