January 6, 2004
911 Made Simple at Memes.org. (Memes are mental viruses.) From November 26: "The Kennedys, Physical Evidence, and 9/11" by Michael C. Ruppert. View the winners of MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest. Message from Bev Conover of Online Journal: "Your nightmare vision may be closer to reality than you think. Comforting thought, eh? Take a look at these if you haven't already read them: 'Jesus Plus Nothing' and 'Meet the Family' -- Undercover among America's secret theocrats."
January 7, 2004
Some interesting links today include the following:A North Jersey paper goes "Back to the transcripts" recently released by the Federal Aviation Agency, which show that the agency never lifted a finger to do anything about the hijacked airlines that were heading to New York City on 911. Its own flight control people in New York didn't know anything about the first plane until they saw the story on TV after it hit the Trade Center. What was the FAA doing? NorthJersey.com Molly Ivins on three recent blows to Bush and on why Mad Cow disease is a result of special-interest politics. Working For Change John Dean on why Ashcroft may have recused himself from the Plame investigation. Findlaw Highway2health.net and Tom Flocco.com are running the story about how Bush has been served with a racketeering lawsuit by a 911 widow. Bradley endorsed Dean. Associated Press
January 8, 2004
After what happened to Bill Clinton for getting caught under oath in a lie about an entirely personal matter, Condoleezza Rice doesn't want to testify before the 911 commission under oath or in public, says Time. "One Republican commissioner says a comment by Rice last year -— that no one 'could have predicted that they would try to use a…hijacked airplane as a missile' -— was 'an unfortunate comment . . . that was, of course, a wrong-footed statement on its face,' given that there was years of intelligence about Al Qaeda's interest in airplane attacks," says Time. No such thing as a neoconservative movement? New York Times columnist David Brooks says "neoconservative" just means Jewish conservative, and therefore anyone who opposes them is anti-semitic. ("In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish') travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another ... Still, there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything." Not so easy to put up a bulletproof shield around your boys, says Steven Greenhut at LewRockwell.com. "I went to the American Enterprise Institute Web site ... which is Ground Zero for the neocon movement... [and where] Irving Kristol – author of the book, Reflections of a Neoconservative – has a long article posted called 'The Neoconservative Persuasion,'" in which "Kristol outlines well-defined principles of neoconservatism." He continues: "neoconservatism is a movement when people who are sometimes known as neoconservatives want it to be a movement, and not a movement when they don’t want to deal with the criticisms." The movement's tenets have "nothing to do with Judaism. Many of the most prominent neoconservatives one can think of – Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice – wouldn’t know Gouda from goyim, although Donald Rumsfeld does have a last name that sounds Jewish." WEEKEND UPDATE
Saturday Night
January 10, 2004Unelectable My Ass! says Ariana Huffington. "Of course Dean is angry. Take a look at what's happening in Iraq, where another 236 American soldiers have been killed or wounded since Saddam was dragged out of his spider hole. And take a look closer to home, where we have 12 million children living in poverty, six out of seven working poor families unable to afford quality child care, record levels of personal debt, and more and more U.S. jobs being "outsourced" overseas. If you still have a pulse (are you listening, Joe Lieberman?) you should be royally pissed. Alternet Bush: Driving While Intoxicated with Power. Counterpunch Powell admits, no hard proof linking Iraq to Al Qaeda. "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did." Consider? Yes, but invade a country? Blair tears up rules dating back to 1648. The Herald Squeaky Clean Rush Limbaugh paid blackmail to his housekeeper, he says, but says he did nothing illegal that he could be blackmailed for. Buzzflash George Will's lack of ethics. A nice summary. Morford: Resolution #1: Oust Bush "This is the year of the end of Bush. This is the year of the end of the nasty hissing political Scylla that is CheneyRummyAshcroftRove. This is the year we say good-bye to the collective spiritual and intellectual gouge. This is the year we all wake the hell up." SFGate The Republican's "Moral Outrage" is Bad Theater. "Key in the Republicans' tactic was the technique of 'manufactured outrage.' Remember the righteous anger of Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston and Newt Gingrich during the failed impeachment? Well, you can't possibly describe it as anything other than manufactured outrage - because while they were railing about how Clinton's conduct was rending the very fabric of our society and threatening the existence of our nation, every one of them was practicing the exact same conduct. Newtie was, to put it coarsely, bending his secretary over the desk. Hyde had wrecked his share of marriages by that time (of course it was, in his description, a 'youthful indiscretion' - if you can count age 40 as anything vaguely resembling 'youth'). And Livingston was engaging in conduct so potentially embarrassing and so deviant, that he resigned as Speaker of the House rather than have his personal sexual proclivities revealed." Take Back the Media! And moving right along...
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace accuses Bush of "systematically misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings. See the Guardian. Nine more Americans died in the Oil War today. Yahoo News. Cancer on the Presidency. Hartford Advocate. MEDIA ROULETTE
Sunday Morning
January 11, 2004Former U.S. Special Forces counter-terrorist operative Stan Goff, writes eloquently in "War, Race and Elections" in Counterpunch, that Howard Dean does not advocate pulling out of Iraq and elections will not achieve that result. "Legitimacy crises are provoked by demands from the people that are real demands, not yassa-massa requests respectfully submitted to elected officials with our hats in our hands. A demand that is really a request--this is what the faux-radical 'reformer' presents--is an acceptance at the outset that the power relation will remain unchanged. A real demand does not seek to make itself respectable or 'realistic.' A real demand is an exercise of power that says we are not going to accept, we are not going to shut up, we are not going to compromise, we are not going to obey, and we are not going away. It is not based on what we might be granted, but on the conditions we demand be created before we stop struggling." More Stan Goff. David Cornwell, a.k.a. John Le Carre, author of 19 novels such as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", former spy for M.I.5., now 72, is "firmly opposed to the war in Iraq and never misses a peace march," according to January 7's New York Times. He uses the spy world "to make a political point," he says. His latest book Absolute Friends is "meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order," according to the Times, which notes this as "disappointing". Ron Suskind, who made a splash interviewing John Dilulio a year or so ago, has put out a book in which he quotes former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was kicked out of the Bush Administration and now portrays them as a very vindictive group toward anyone who shows anything less than unconditional loyalty. "These people are nasty and they have a long memory," he told Suskind. (See CBS News.) O’Neill said that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" said O’Neill. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap." Yahoo. At cabinet meetings, O'Neill said Bush was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," which forced his officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."