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Attention

"The Money Has Gotten Scarce ... but the Truth Is Getting Fierce"

Simon Davies & Donald Hunt
SOTT.net
Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:22 UTC
Image
© Jules Joseph Lefebvre
Truth standing naked and bold holding the mirror.
The 1975 lyrics of Murray Head from Say it ain't so Joe seem appropriate for this stage in the Obama presidency:-
they told us that our hero has played his trump card
he doesn't know how to go on
we're clinging to his charms and determined smile
but the good old days have gone
the image and the empire may be falling apart
the money has gotten scarce
one man's word held the country together
but the truth is getting fierce
The question in our minds is just how fierce does the truth have to get before people wake up and really start questioning how the world works.

Surveying the world economy, the past two weeks saw most non-reserve currencies fall in value, as emerging economies and export-oriented countries are suffering capital flight. In past downturns some regions would experience this and not others, some countries and not others, but now capital flight and, it seems, both real and induced social unrest are widespread.

The beneficiary has been the U.S. dollar, which is surprising given the fact that the Federal Reserve has been "printing" money like crazy and the US government has been borrowing like crazy. "There is nowhere else to go" is the justifying mantra of the times. But what seems to be happening is that those making the bets remain convinced of US global military and economic hegemony. As we have been pointing out, the signs are that military force will be used and the era of "free trade" may be coming to an end. Some are pointing to "currency protectionism."
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Bad Guys

The Pathological Mind: Without a Doubt

Ron Suskind
The New York Times
Sun, 17 Oct 2004 07:33 UTC
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Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. "Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them...

"This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." Bartlett paused, then said, "But you can't run the world on faith."
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Attention

Hamas condemns Gaza rocket strikes on Israel


Haaretz
Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:10 UTC
Gaza's Hamas rulers issued rare criticism Thursday of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel from the strip, saying now is the wrong time for such attacks.

The Islamic militant group has fired thousands of rockets at southern Israel in recent years. But Hamas said Thursday that it was not behind recent attacks and that it was investigating who was responsible.

It apparently fears that new rocket fire could disrupt the reconciliation talks currently underway in Cairo.

Comment: The following reports will shed some light on the question, who is really behind these attacks, that threaten the reconciliation talks?

Hamas blames 'Israeli collaborators' for launching rockets
Gaza residents: IDF troops posing as Hamas men
U.S. partner, not Hamas, firing rockets into Israel

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Vader

The Scam and the Reality of Israel/Palestine

W. Christopher Epler (Bill)
OpEdNews
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:58 UTC
The scam of extremist Israeli's (who do not represent the whole of Israel) is that they don't want to be "pushed into the sea". One wonders why they would fear this since they have incredibly more atomic weaponry than the entire Arab world combined!

The Reality is that the extremists want the entire country of Palestine, as the quotes below make tragically clear . . .

"We must expel Arabs and take their places." -- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

In 1948, David Ben-Gurion stated: "We have taken their country....We must do everything to insure they never return....We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
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Binoculars

US ship in China spat was hunting subs

Anne Gearan
Huffington Post
Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:20 UTC
Image
© Associated Press/ US Navy
The military Sealift Command ocean surveillance ship USNS Impeccable is seen underway on Monday, March 9, 2009.
The U.S. Navy ship that got into a scrape with five Chinese vessels last weekend in the South China Sea was looking for threats such as submarines, presumably Chinese, in waters that China claims as its own, defense officials acknowledged Tuesday.

The United States maintains that the unarmed USNS Impeccable was operating legally in international waters when it was surrounded and harassed by the Chinese. Beijing responded hotly to a U.S. protest over Sunday's incident, and neither nation is backing down, even as they prepare for a much-anticipated first meeting between President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao next month.

Although they would not be specific about the Impeccable's mission when it was intercepted by the Chinese ships, two defense officials said the ship is designed and equipped for sub-hunting work and was part of a calculated U.S. surveillance operation in the disputed South China Sea.

Comment: Wow, a somewhat different perspective from the bluster displayed in this article about the same event. Seems the US were not squeaky clean after all, spying on Chinese submarines in Chinese waters.

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Bad Guys

Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States

Christopher Ketcham
AlterNet
Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:41 UTC
Mossad logo
Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S., yet public discussion about it is almost nil.

Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.

This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S.. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory -- the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel's top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.


Comment: Interesting that after writing "Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S." Mr. Ketcham then writes that the Mossad engineering the 9/11 attacks is hallucinations of conspiracy theory.

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Document

The Obama-Holder-Panetta Legal Disconnect

William Fisher
OpEdNews
Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:25 UTC
Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Leon Panetta are all lawyers, And Holder and Panetta both work for Obama. Wouldn't that suggest that they would agree on really important issues - at least in public?

Well, apparently they don't. And Obama's recent interview with the New York Times editorial board provides lots of examples.

During that session, President Obama stated categorically:

"We ultimately provide anybody that we're detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer to charges."
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Arrow Down

Dalai Lama: China has created 'hell' in Tibet

Dean Nelson
The Telegraph
Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:17 UTC
The Dalai Lama has accused China of creating "hell on Earth" in Tibet on the 50th anniversary of the uprising that led to his exile.

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Propaganda

France hits Iran on 'suspicious' no-response


Press TV
Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:45 UTC
France accuses Iran of not fully cooperating with the UN nuclear watchdog, once again calling on Tehran to suspend its disputed nuclear work.

"Iran must respond to requests from the IAEA to prove that their nuclear program is not military. They have not done that yet," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in an interview with Le Figaro on Monday.

Kouchner said it was 'suspicious' that Iran did not respond to the International Atomic Energy Agency requests, insisting that it was 'essential' for Iran to abandon its nuclear work.
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Nuke

Israel believes Iran can build nukes

Mark Lavie
NineMSN
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 04:46 UTC
iran
© unknown
Israel fears that a nuclear power plant in Bushehr will give Iran independent nuclear capability.
Iran is now able to produce atomic weapons, Israel's top military intelligence officer told his country's cabinet on Sunday, sounding the highest-level warning that Israel's arch-enemy has achieved independent nuclear capability.

Participants in the cabinet meeting said the chief of military intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin, did not say Iran already has the bomb. However, he said, Iran has "crossed the threshold" and has the expertise and materials needed to make one.

The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the cabinet meeting was closed. They said Yadlin told them Iran continues to accumulate uranium for enrichment and hopes to exploit the Obama administration's intention to open a dialogue as a cover for developing nuclear weapons.

Comment: The war drums are building to a crescendo over Iran. First the US Admiral Mike Mullin claims Iran has enough material to build a bomb and now Israel is repeating it. This might be an attempt to put pressure on Obama or it might be an indication that Israel is going to take unilateral action. Either way it does not bode well for peace in the Middle East.

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