A Sad and Scary Day for the World

There are some days that I'm afraid that a clash of civilizations can't be avoided. Today is one of those days. I'm profoundly sad and angry that anyone would dare stoke the fires of religious intolerance, especially from a country that has in it's Bill of Rights freedom of religion.
Yet, an entire political party panders to religious hatred. Worse yet, Democratic candidates kowtow to the Israeli lobby, the source of tremendous acrimony towards the west. The world is truly insane.
CNN.com

Hundreds of angry protesters, some waving ceremonial swords from trucks equipped with loud speakers, gathered Friday outside the presidential palace to denounce a teacher whose class named a teddy bear "Mohammed" -- some calling for her execution.


The protesters, which witnesses said numbered close to 1,000, swore to fight in the name of their prophet.


Gillian Gibbons, 54, was given 15 days in jail late Thursday after she was convicted of insulting religion. She was cleared of charges of inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs, her lawyer, Ali Ajeb, said.


Ajeb said they planned to appeal the sentence, which begins from the date she was detained, Nov. 25. Including Friday, she has 10 more days in jail.


British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he was "extremely disappointed" that the charges were not dismissed.


The demonstration began around 2.30 p.m. (6a ET) as worshippers spilled out of mosques in the capital after Friday prayers. They marched to the palace, which is on the same street as Unity High School, where Gibbons taught grade school students. Those who named the bear were 7 years old.


A heavy police presence was maintained outside the school, but no demonstrators were there. Armed with swords and sticks, the protesters shouted: "By soul, by blood, I will fight for the Prophet Mohammad. Western journalists who attempted to talk to the protesters were ushered away by men in plain clothes. Gibbons is being held in a women's prison in the Omdurman district of Khartoum, and she will be deported at the end of her prison term, British consular officials told CNN.

Kucinich suggests a Republican Paul as a Running mate

I fail to see what progressives see in Kucinich. Sure he is an honest, straight shooting guy who will buck the political pressures to go his own way. But Edwards is the viable candidate. Kucinich is too much of an odd ball. Here is a good example.
cleveland.com

Call it the liberal-libertarian ticket, where left meets right and Democrat Dennis Kucinich picks Republican Ron Paul to be his vice president.


Kucinich, the Cleveland congressman running in a longshot bid to become president, suggested it himself Sunday.


"I'm thinking about Ron Paul" as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters at a house party here, one of numerous stops throughout New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving weekend. A Kucinich-Paul administration could bring people together "to balance the energies in this country," Kucinich said.

Victoria's Secret: It's Slave Labor

AlterNet

"The Victoria's Secret workers toil 14 to 15 hours a day, from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., seven days a week, receiving on average one day off every three or four months. All overtime is mandatory, and workers are routinely at the factory 98 to 105 hours a week while toiling 89 to 96 hours. Treatment is very rough, as managers and supervisors scream at the foreign guest workers to move faster to complete their high production goals.


" Workers who fall behind on their production goals, or who make even a minor error, can be slapped and beaten. Despite being forced to work five or more overtime hours a day, the workers are routinely shortchanged on their legal overtime pay, being cheated of up to $18.48 each week in wages due them. While this might not seem like a great deal of money, to these poor workers it is the equivalent of losing three regular days' wages each week.
" Workers are allowed just 3.3 minutes to sew each $14 Victoria's Secret women's bikini, for which they are paid four cents. The workers' wages amount to less than 3/10ths of one percent of the $14 retail price of the Victoria's Secret bikini."
[..]Write to Leslie Wexner, the CEO of Limited Brands, which puts out Victoria's Secret clothing, and protest the treatment of the workers in Jordan:
Leslie Wexner, CEO
Limited Brands Inc.
3 Limited Pkwy.
Columbus, Ohio 43230
United States
Phone: (614) 415-7000
Fax: (614) 415-7080
E-mail: tkatzenmeyer@limitedbrands.com

Open Email to Leslie Wexner:
Dr. Ms Wexner:
I was shocked to read the The National Labor Committee's report on your sweat shop in Jordan. How dare you exploit poor and isolated immigrants in Jordan to make money. I can only join in advocating a boycott of Victoria Secret.

Huckabee Is a Racist

There is something very scary about the Christian Right wing. They have managed to incorporate Christian Theocracy, Social Darwinism, racisim, anti-abortionists, and pro-rich financial policies into a package largely bought by blue collar voters. If there is an anti-Christ. It will emerge from this unholy coalition. Huckabee pitches to lead these extremists into the White House again.
CNN.com

Speaking before a gathering of Christian conservative voters, GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said legalized abortion in the United States was a holocaust.


"Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Riots rock Paris suburb for third night

CNN.com

Club-wielding police fought stone-throwing rioters in the northern suburbs of Paris for a second night Monday, with at least five officers suffering injuries during the clashes, authorities said.


The riots began Sunday night, after two teenagers on a motorcycle were killed in a collision with a police car in the town of Villiers-le-Bel, the Val d'Oise police prefecture reported late Monday.


The melees come two years after riots in other Paris suburbs populated largely by immigrants and their French-born children. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking in Beijing while on a visit to China, called for calm while an investigation in the crash is under way.


Rioters set ablaze at least 60 cars, as well as a police station, library and car dealership in Villiers-le-Bel, police said. The clashes had spread across six towns by Monday night, they said. None of the injuries to police were life-threatening, police reported. The number of rioters hurt and the extent of their injuries was unknown.


The 15- and 16-year-old boys killed in the Sunday evening wreck were both sons of African immigrants, police said. They died when their motorbike hit a patrol car in the town of Villiers-le-Bel, police said.
Some residents of the town, which is heavily populated by immigrants, accused the police officers of fleeing the scene without helping the boys. Police said the teens drove through a red light without wearing helmets and on an unregistered bike.


In a statement issued by the Elysee Palace, Sarkozy urged residents to "cool down and let the justice system determine who is responsible for what." But by Monday, the clashes had spread to the nearby towns of Sarcelles, Garges-lhs-Gonesse, Cergy, Ermont and Goussainville. Villiers-le-Bel was not among the districts hit by the weeks of rioting of November 2005, when disaffected youths set thousands of cars ablaze to protest unemployment and discrimination. Those riots were touched off by the deaths of two men of North African descent who were electrocuted while hiding from police in an electrical substation.


Sarkozy served as interior minister during that wave of unrest and provoked controversy by referring to the rioters as "scum" -- language that served only to inflame the vandalism.

Wall Street End of Year Bonus Are Huge!

Everyone agrees Wall Street is having a bad year. Why are bonuses still in over the top? Someone must be profiting from the disaster of our economy, someone beyond the invest bank brokers. Someone is making billions selling stocks and equities short. And they are making sure the brokers who help them are rewarded for a job well done. Joe Kennedy did it in the Depression. There have to be hundreds profiting now from our misfortune.
Too Much

They don’t just make deals on Wall Street. They make myths. And last week Wall Street's myth-making machine was roaring at full throttle — after the news broke that America’s five biggest investment banks will this year shell out a record $38 billion in bonus pay.


To justify the financial industry’s annual bonus blitz, friends of Wall Street fortunes usually recycle some variation on that most elemental of investment banker fables, the wealth creation myth. Wall Street’s movers and shakers, we are assured, create fabulous wealth. They richly deserve an appreciable share of the wealth they create.


This year, that wealth creation myth rings a bit hollow. Over the last 12 months, the movers and shakers of Wall Street have presided over a colossal loss of wealth. Shareholders at Wall Street’s five biggest banks have lost $74 billion off the value of their stock holdings.


[..] Wall Street giants like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, these mythologists acknowledged, have certainly registered big-time losses this year. But these powerhouses, the new myth goes, can’t afford not to shell out big bonuses.


“If Bear and Merrill plead poverty,” as Manhattan College's Charles Geisst opined, “they're going to lose all of their good people.”


But “good” people don’t lose billions betting on risky securities, do they?


True enough, the myth-makers also acknowledge. But not all power suits on Wall Street, they quickly add, have been wheeling and dealing in subprimes. The power suits who spend their time cutting corporate merger deals, underwriting initial public stock offerings, and trading currencies did just fine in 2007.


The bulk of this year’s bonuses, Wall Street’s cheerleaders are arguing, are going to these “successful” traders and bankers, not those wretches responsible for all that subprime unpleasantness.

Supreme Court Allows Warrantless Searches of Welfare Applicants' Homes

AlterNet

If you apply for public assistance in San Diego County, Ca., you are granting agents of the government the right to come into your house, unannounced and without a warrant, and examine every nook and cranny to make sure that you're not committing welfare fraud. The usual "proof of need" is no longer applicable. If you are poor in San Diego County, you are presumed guilty until proven innocent.


[..]Around the time of the American revolution in the late 1700's, English jurist William Blackstone opined that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."


With their refusal to hear the San Diego County case yesterday, the Supreme Court once again turned Blackstone on his head - in the view of the Roberts court, it is better that ten innocents suffer than one guilty person escape.

US Navy is stockpiling fuel in Persian Gulf

Daily Kos: smintheus's diary

Many Middle East experts have wondered aloud what point there is to the Annapolis peace conference. It appears destined to achieve nothing significant. One of its main goals, I think, must be to demonstrate that Iranian-backed Hamas can in fact be marginalized. That PR victory would be worth enough to the Saudi regime that they'd send their Foreign Minister to a doomed conference.


Simultaneously, the US military is gearing up for some kind of very large show of force against Iran to occur during the next 90 days. Reuters reported over the weekend that large amounts of fuel are being stockpiled at US naval and air bases in the U.A.E., Qatar, and Diego Garcia (where long-range bombers are based).


In the past, these kinds of arrangements have foretold aggressive military operations or major changes in tactics in the region.


For example, we're told in passing that...

In February, oil industry sources told Reuters [Saudi Arabia] had raised the amount of jet fuel earmarked for the military from 1.5 million barrels last year to close to eight million in 2007.

[..]The current stockpiling of jet fuel and marine diesel can only be directed against Iran, however (h/t Cernig):

The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) has tendered for four tankers in November to move at least one million barrels of jet and ship fuel between Gulf ports, from Asia to the Gulf and to the Diego Garcia base, tenders seen by Reuters show...


"They have been very active," said a ship industry source, familiar with the MSC tender process, who asked not to be named.


"Out of the multiple charter requirements they issue, they usually do maybe one or two (tankers) a month in the Gulf. They were quiet over the summer months," he said.

The fuel includes JA1 and JP5, the latter used by carrier-based F-18 fighters. The MSC, asked by Reuters for comment, stated that there was "nothing abnormal about current requirements in the Gulf ". But a doubling of fuel tenders is a pretty good working description of "abnormal". Why deny it?


Reuters adds that even more fuel (including JP5) has been requested from Bahrain by the Defense Energy Support Center. And in addition, there's a very unusual arrangement whereby the MSC has chartered a large oil tanker for 90 days (beginning in early December) to carry fuel, including jet fuel, in any number of trips between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

"What's most interesting is the time-charter in the Gulf. It's a big ship and here we have a commitment for a lot of movement of fuels, backwards and forwards down to the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman," the Gulf source said.


"This confirms there is going to be a lot of activity, possibly a serious demonstration to Iran that the military means to protect the Hormuz Strait," he said.

Dubya Part of the Plame Cover-up?

AlterNet

The latest piece of evidence was the statement from former White House press secretary Scott McClellan that Bush was one of five senior officials who had him clear Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby in the leak when, in fact, they were two of the leakers.


"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore the credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," McClellan said in a snippet released by the publisher of his upcoming memoir.


"So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby," McClellan said. "There was one problem. It was not true."


After McClellan's statement touched off a brief furor on the Internet and cable TV shows, his publisher Peter Osnos tried to soften the blow. Osnos told Bloomberg News that McClellan didn't mean that Bush deliberately ordered his press secretary to lie.


"He told him something that wasn't true, but the President didn't know it wasn't true," Osnos said.


What Bush Knew


But neither McClennan nor Osnos knows what Bush really knew.


The revelatory point in McClellan's statement was that Bush was a direct participant in the campaign to protect Rove and Libby as they lied about their roles in the leak. Previously that was an inference one could draw from the facts, but it had not been confirmed by a White House official.


Indeed, looking at the available evidence, it would defy credulity that Bush wasn't implicated in the Plame-gate leak and the subsequent cover-up, which led to Libby's conviction earlier this year on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.


For Bush not to have been involved would have required him to be oblivious to the inner workings of the White House and the actions of his closest advisers on an issue of great importance to him.


From the evidence at Libby's trial, it was already clear that Bush had a direct hand in the effort to discredit Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he had gone public in July 2003 with his role in a CIA investigation of what turned out to be bogus claims that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.


Bush, who had cited those bogus claims in his 2003 State of the Union Address in making his case for invading Iraq, was worried about his credibility when U.S. forces failed to find WMD evidence and when Wilson became the first Washington insider to start questioning Bush's case for war.


So, Bush collaborated with Vice President Dick Cheney in mounting a counter-attack against Wilson. Bush decided to selectively declassify portions of a National Intelligence Estimate in order to undercut Wilson's credibility and agreed to have that information leaked to friendly reporters.

Iraq Troops Casualty Cover-up?

Why would there be 20,000 severely injured troops excluded from the Pentagon's casualty reports?
USATODAY.com

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.


The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon's official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.


[..]More than 150,000 troops may have suffered head injuries in combat, says Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., founder of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force. "I am wary that the number of brain-injured troops far exceeds the total number reported injured," he says.


About 1.5 million troops have served in Iraq, where traumatic brain injury can occur despite heavy body armor worn by troops.

I would tend to agree with Juan Cole at Informed Comment.

Although some of the under-reporting of this condition could be inadvertent, the scale of it strongly suggests an underlying policy.

The Balkans Are Heating Up with Russian Support

Convinced Russia again is a super power, now that the US is bogged down in Iraq, he is rattling sabers in the former USSR client states from Central Asia to Eastern Europe. The Balkans have been a tinderbox for war for centuries. It continues today to suggest a possible WWIII should the US or Russia call the other's cards into play. Dubya was serious when he warned of WWIII.
International Crisis Group

On October 30, one hand in action, the UK, France, Italy and Germany -along with the US - issued a joint demarche to Serbia criticising its suggestion a few days before that the fates of Kosovo and Bosnia were tied: that if Kosovo became independent, the Dayton Accords might also be questioned, undoing 12 years of difficult and costly international engagement to patch a devastated Bosnia back together.


The other hand then took over last week, as EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn initialled a stabilisation and association agreement with Belgrade, the next step toward membership talks for Serbia, overlooking not only the demarche but also Serbia's continued harbouring of Europe's most wanted men, Bosnian war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.


One week chastising Belgrade and the next week rewarding it, Europe's relations with Serbia have seemed guided by two policies rather than one. A single, coherent approach means choosing between them, and considering what is actually going on in the region right now, the right choice is clear.


The sad truth is, Serbia is back in full Balkan bully mode, once more setting fires everywhere, or at least preparing enormous loads of kindling wood, hoping this will somehow prevent Kosovo's independence.


Most worrying is its interference in Bosnia. In the 1990s, Bosnia fell victim to Belgrade's efforts to create a Greater Serbia, with well known results: genocide, ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, concentration camps, a brutal three-and a-half-year war and the Srebrenica massacre.


Unfortunately, Belgrade has never really counted its losses - including Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and, soon, Kosovo -and learned the hard lesson about where ultra-nationalism leads. Today, it is back to its old tricks, threatening to play the Greater Serbia card again.


Within the last two weeks, Serbia's nationalist premier Vojislav Kostunica - with Russian support - has not only directly linked the fate of Kosovo to that of Bosnia, suggesting that any change in Kosovo would undermine Dayton, but has intervened openly on the side of Bosnia's Serbs in their opposition to the international community's efforts to unblock the reform process. Zeljko Komsic, the Croat president of Bosnia's three-man rotating multi-ethnic presidency warned Kostunica to "keep his fingers out of Bosnia".


Belgrade also meddles openly in Montenegrin politics, actively supporting that country's political opposition in its efforts to block passage of the liberal, western-style constitution that made Montenegro a civic state, rather than an ethnic Serb state. More than a year after Montenegro became independent, Kostunica has yet to acknowledge its independence and permits his top adviser to publicly refer to Montenegro as a "quasi-state"...
[..]Initialling the stabilisation and association agreement at this time, however, was an EU foreign policy mistake. Since the beginning of SAA talks, Brussels has rightly insisted upon Serbia's full cooperation with The Hague tribunal as a condition for an agreement. True, initialling is a lower level of commitment than signing, but it still represents the EU rewarding Belgrade while Mladic remains at liberty on Serbian soil.


And as if that were not bad enough, this diplomatic gift comes just after Belgrade's threat to the integrity of Bosnia.

Daniel Ellsberg: "A Coup Has Occurred."

GlobalResearch.ca

Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming attack on Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at a recent American University symposium. What follow are his comments from that speech. They have been edited only for space.


Let me simplify . . . and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9-11. That’s the next coup that completes the first.


The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution . . . what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world—in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.


There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.


All these violations were impeachable had they been found out at the time but in nearly every case the violations were not found out until [the president was] out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.


That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable. They weren’t found out in time. But I think it was not their intention, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.


It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 1970s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but [they] have believed in executive government, single-branch government under an executive president—elected or not—with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.


When I say this, I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country—but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country [and the Framers of the Constitution] thought.


They believe we need a different kind of government now, an executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with ‘signing statements.’


Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says: ‘I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.’


It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the executive branch, essentially of the president—a concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.”


Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right. It’s not just ‘our way of doing things’— it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody, including Americans.

Veterans Shafted Again

kdka.com

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments. To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases. Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

Now that the word is out, the military is "forgiving" at least one soldiers bonus refund order without explanation or details on what happened.

On Trading Corporate Republicans for Corporate Democracts

I just don't understand why the progressive end of the Democratic Party hasn't just glommed on to this guy. Or does Kucinich, who could never win, engender such loyalty? Do you want change in Washington? Listen to this guy, he's singing our song.
The Nation

"All the Democratic candidates talk about ending the war. That's great. Do they have a specific way to do it?" He posed a few questions that were clearly directed at Hillary Clinton. "I have heard Senator Clinton say she would keep combat troops in Iraq and continue combat missions." Edwards, by contrast, would withdraw 40-50,000 troops immediately and get all combat troops out within a year.


He then assailed Hillary's vote for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution on Iran. If Bush invades the country, Edwards asked, would politicians like Senator Clinton say "if only I knew then what I know now?"


After that, Edwards broadened the discussion to domestic concerns, arguing that Democrats needed to take on corporate America and give 'em hell. "Does anyone really believe that if we trade a crowd of corporate Republicans for a crowd of corporate Democrats there's gonna be any change in Washington?" he asked rhetorically. "No!" the audience replied. "We need to shake Washington up!" he responded to loud applause.


These days Edwards' tone is one of outrage. He frequently refers to the "crowd in Washington" and how lobbyists and large corporations have hijacked the country to benefit an elite few. On the stump, Edwards is blunt, to the point, animated and hard-hitting. Love him or hate him, but unlike many politicians, he's got something to say.

This Fight is About Your Government Pensions

If the French cut pensions to government workers, you can bet your's will be next on the block.
New York Times

President Nicolas Sarkozy urged transit workers to end their weeklong strike over pension benefits on Tuesday as civil service employees, including primary school teachers, firefighters, newspaper printers and weather service employees walked out in a separate dispute over job cuts.


After a week of avoiding commenting on the train strike, Mr. Sarkozy said in a speech to a group of French mayors that an overhaul was long overdue for early retirement privileges for public sector employees, including the transit workers.


“We will not surrender, and we will not retreat,” he said. “France needs reforms to meet the challenges imposed on it by the world.”

The Art of Mental Warfare

The Art of Mental Warfare is going to do to you: What Dylan did to folk music, What Hendrix did to electricity, What Pollock did to the canvas, What Ali did to the ring, What a juiced up Bonds did to the Home Run, What Paine did to revolution, What Jefferson did to democracy, What Bush did to stolen elections, What Einstein did to the atom, What Darwin did to evolution, It's Happening Here Mr & Ms Jones. Jump Start Your Mind. Our time has come. We're going to do what your mama did to you. It's time to be born. Awake! Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you.


Ye are Many - They are Few.

A Horse Race in Iowa

Clinton is no longer a shoe-in for the nomination. I think we have a three way race in Iowa. My man Edwards is looking better every day.
The Black World Today

It’s still more than six weeks until the Iowa primaries, but it seems a lot closer to the Democratic presidential contenders as the rhetoric among them intensifies. A few days after a column from Robert Novak revealed that Sen. Hillary Clinton’s camp was in possession of scandalous information about Sen. Barack Obama, a poll revealed that Obama had eased passed Clinton to claim the lead in Iowa.


A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that Obama has edged into a lead over Clinton in Iowa, though the race remains close. Obama has 30% of likely voters, while Clinton has 26% and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards has 22%, the poll revealed. The poll shows that Obama has marginally increased his standing since a similar Iowa poll in August, which found Obama at 27%, with Clinton and Edwards at 26%.

CNN Dem Debate Fixed for Clinton

Gateway Pundit

It's hard to have a bad debate performance when:

** The audience is planted in your favor
** The questions are planted in your favor
** The questioners are your supporters
** The after debate spin room includes 2 former staff members and 1 current campaign analyst

The post debate was as Clinton-friendly as the actual debate. The CNN debate may have been pre-planned and censored every step of the way, but CNN did not have to worry about a Clinton-friendly environment in the post debate.

CNN took care of that when hired the debate analysts. Two of the three debate analysts worked for the Clintons.

On the Verge of Catastrophe

The challenge of global warming will likely define the next era of history. Will the dominant west break its deadly addiction to fossil fuels? Most of the rest of the world will suffer famine and other environmental catastrophes if they do not.
CNN.com

Climate change is "severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" can head it off, a United Nations scientific panel said in a report on tackling global warming issued Saturday.


The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was delivering its fourth and final report on the science of climate change and the impact of human-produced greenhouse gases at a conference in Valencia, Spain.


The report produced by the Nobel prize-winning panel warns of the devastating impact for developing countries and the threat of species extinction posed by the climate crisis.


U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, presenting the report, warned that some of the effects of rising levels of greenhouse gases may already be irreversible. The U.N. head said the situation was already "so severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" could head off the crisis.


[..]Scientists say up to an 85 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions is needed to head off potential catastrophic changes that could lead to more floods and famine.

The Russian Bear Growls

Bush's clumsy move into Central Asia and the Middle East has provided the Russians all the political capital among friendly neighbors and a power vacuum as big as the one in Bush's skull created by the used up US military. Bush has managed to restart the Cold War. Make no mistake, Russia knows it can trust the US only as far as it can force it to move.
The US has been quite provocative, unnecessarily so. A new arms race seems to be in the offing.
AlterNet

A particular irritant to Putin, parallel to the arguments about CFE, is the U.S. proposal (a pet project of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld) to deploy 10 ground-based interceptor missiles in Poland and a 360 degree X-band radar in the Czech Republic. These are linked to an Alaska-based ballistic missile defense system, for which Gordon Brown agreed in late July 2007 (without the public debate Tony Blair promised the previous February) to provide facilities at Fylingdales and Menwith in Yorkshire. This U.S. system was initially justified to counter a threat from North Korea, then rationalized against an Iranian threat.


Putin, however, sees U.S. missiles deployed in central Europe as primarily directed against Russia, specifically the Topol, Topol-M and RS-18 ICBMs stationed in the Russian regions of T'ver, Ivanovo, Kaluga and Saratov. Putin's fears are well-founded as a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld in January 2002 and a national security directive signed by Bush the following December (NSPD-23) both specify that these BMD systems would be upgraded as U.S. technology advanced.


Putin's initial response in February 2006 to the prospect of missiles in Poland was to threaten new missiles in Kaliningrad. In a slightly more conciliatory mood at the G-8 meeting in early June 2007 in Heiligendamm, Germany, Putin offered, as an alternative to a U.S. radar in the Czech Republic, the use of Russia radars in Gabala, Azerbaijan, and at Armavir in southern Russia, an offer he repeated in early July to Bush in Kennebunkport. The American response was cool, proposing only some form of "joint architecture."


[..]In an effort to resolve differences on a number of security issues (including CFE, BMD and the thorny issue of independence for Kosovo) the U.S. and Russia recently launched a series of 2+2 meetings comprising foreign and defense ministers to be held every six months. At the first of these on October 12, 2007, in Moscow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made no headway on CFE. This was reflected in the vote of October 16, in the Security Committee of the Russian Duma, endorsing Putin's proposed legislation to abrogate the treaty on December 12. On BMD, however, Gates suggested to the Russians that radars and interceptor missiles would not necessarily be deployed in the Czech Republic and Poland if the Iranian threat did not materialize, a suggestion he repeated ten days later in Prague to the Czech defense minister.


Meanwhile, at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., Bush reiterated the immediacy of the Iranian threat and the need to act now on BMD in Europe. Opponents of BMD took heart at this apparent rift in administration thinking, which reflects the deep apprehension throughout the U.S. about the Bush-Cheney project to demonize Iran in preparation for yet another war. In any event, Putin seemed unimpressed by the concession offered by Gates in Moscow and Prague. At an EU-Russia meeting in Portugal in late October, Putin invoked the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, noting that Soviet deployments of offensive missiles in Cuba were a direct response to U.S. missile deployments in Turkey, implicitly threatening a similar Russian response to American BMD deployments in central Europe.

Putin has responded as the Russians always have.
PINR

During the past few months, the Russian Federation has implemented a new doctrine of increased military activity, as well as the development of new thermobaric bombs. There are a number of political implications for Russia's close neighbors and for the international community.


The renewed bomber runs, which have been a regular occurrence since June 2007, have skirted U.S., British, and Norwegian airspace. Besides their provocative nature, Russia has not violated any international laws since the bombers have never entered the airspace of another country. Instead, the bombers have remained in international airspace, and only come close to U.S., British, and Norwegian airspace.


Nevertheless, the bombers have caused sufficient concern, as has been seen by the scrambling of Norwegian, British, and U.S. interceptors to "escort" the Russian bombers back toward Russian airspace. The perception of these flights has been summed up by Gene Renuart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (N.O.R.A.D.), who told the media last month that "any time you have an unidentified aircraft approaching sovereign airspace of the country there's some concern about the intentions of the airplane."


The statement from Renuart encompasses the concerns of the political and military elite in the West. The return of the bomber runs has many of the older members of the Western political and military elite reminiscing about the days of the Cold War. This unnerve in the West is exactly what the Russians want, as Moscow is using the bomber runs in order to extend their influence over their neighbors, and to achieve leverage from their political adversaries in the West.


Another change in the military spectrum of the Russian Federation is the recent development of the so called "Father of All Bombs," or F.O.A.B. Aside from the obvious play on words used on the U.S. military's "Mother of All Bombs" (M.O.A.B.; the acronym was originally derived from the technical name, Massive Ordinance Air Blast), the F.O.A.B. represents an explosive leap forward in non-nuclear weaponry, especially in the field of thermobaric weaponry. [See: "Keep a Watchful Eye on Russia's Military Technology"]


The F.O.A.B. is allegedly four times as powerful, and produces an explosion that is twice as hot, as the next most powerful thermobaric weapon, the aforementioned M.O.A.B. It is also interesting to note the rhetoric involved with the name of the new bomb; while the United States may have the Mother of All Bombs, the Russians want everyone to know that they have the Father of All Bombs.

Jane M. O. Sharp, MIT Center for International Studies offers us an alternative. Cooler heads will have to wait for the next president.

The main problem facing Europe in dealing with a belligerent President Putin and a lame duck President Bush bogged down in Iraq is that neither is inclined to accommodate the other. Putin is an increasingly difficult leader for western powers to deal with on Iran, Kosovo, and many other issues. Nevertheless his goal of establishing a measure of parity with NATO should not be dismissed out of hand.


The parity principle also serves the goal of international stability and should be supported as long as western security interests are not put at risk. This requires an alliance leader strong enough for the give and take of multilateral diplomacy, one who can resist Russia's effort to block Kosovo's independence, but also open up a number of arms control possibilities. For example: freeze the needlessly provocative BMD plans for Europe; extend the START-I agreement; begin new Strategic Offensive Reduction Talks (SORT), which Bush promised Putin in Kennebunkport in July; and open up the bilateral INF treaty to new partners -- including Iran. Putin might then re-think his threat to abrogate CFE, a win-win situation for everyone.

Dubya Hates America's Freedoms

More Doublethink Dubya from AlterNet

George W likes to claim that global terrorists are out to attack America because "They hate our freedoms." But we're learning that it's really the Bushites themselves who hate America's freedoms.


Retired Army Col. Ann Wright and one of America's leading peace activists, Medea Benjamin, have recently felt the bullying hate of the Bush regime. Both women have been very vigorous practitioners of our freedom to speak out and assemble in opposition to government policies, using these freedoms to protest the war in Iraq. They've put themselves on the line and been willing to undergo several arrests for their nonviolent civil disobedience.


This is as American as the 4th of July. Yet Wright, Benjamin, and civil libertarians everywhere were stunned to learn last August that Bush's FBI has suddenly turned this misdemeanor into a weapon of political intimidation, using it to bar the two women from traveling to Canada... and perhaps to other nations.


When they tried to visit Canada, Wright and Benjamin were detained by Canadian customs officials and told that their names were on an FBI no-entry list. Even though this list is meant to stop fugitives, potential terrorists, and violent felons - not peaceful protesters - they were told that they would have to apply for "criminal rehabilitation" and pay a fine if they ever wanted to enter Canada.


Unintimidated, the women have since tried to re-enter, this time at the invitation of five members of parliament to come speak to that assembly. Yet, Canada's officials have bowed to the Bushites, honoring the FBI's no-entry list, rather than respecting their own parliament. The FBI refuses to say why non-violent protesters are on a terrorist list.


Chillingly, the U.S. media have ignored this story, but you can learn more about this blatant assault on our freedoms by going to www.codepinkalert.org.

There is No Scientific Basis To Race

Archeology has largely accepted that man evolved in Africa and eventually traveled to the East, and then finally the west. Complexion became white along the way for reasons not understood.
The one fact that everyone seems to ignore is that we are all Africans.
UNDERNEWS

BURIED IN A NY TIMES ARTICLE on the effect of DNA research on people's view of race was a sentence of a sort we can't recall having read in a major paper before:


"Race, many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades, is a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution."


The mythological - indeed racist - origins of the concept of race has almost completely passed the mainstream media by and this omission has been a major factor in country's continuing ethnic problems.


SAM SMITH, GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL REPAIR MANUAL, 1997 - There is simply no undisputed scientific definition of race. What are considered genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation. As far back as 1785, a German philosopher noted that "complexions run into each other." Julian Huxley suggested in 1941 that "it would be highly desirable if we could banish the question-begging term 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and substitute the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand." Anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1942 called race our "most dangerous myth."


Yet our conversations and arguments, in our media, and even in our laws, the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result, that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed, that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable.


Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others make up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views.


Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse of power.


DNA research has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around.


As Thomas S. Martin has written:


"The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines, though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color. . . There is no clearly distinguishable 'white race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid, about two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more Mongoloid, while Italians and Spaniards are more African, but the deviation is vanishingly slight.


[..]And so we come to the Catch-22 of ethnicity. It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory, unprejudiced society in which race and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal, our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting message that they are extremely important.


For example, our laws against discriminatory practices inevitably heighten general consciousness of race and sex. The media, drawn inexorably to conflict, plays up the issue. And the very groups that have suffered under racial or sexual stereotypes consciously foster countering stereotypes -- "you wouldn't understand, it's a black thing" -- as a form of protection. Thus, we find ourselves in the odd position of attempting to create a society that shuns invidious distinctions while at the same time -- often with fundamentalist or regulatory fervor -- accentuating those distinctions.


In the process we reduce our ethnic problems to a matter of regulation and power, and reduce our ambitions to the achievement of a tolerable stalemate rather than the creation of a truly better society. The positive aspects of diversity remain largely ignored and non-discrimination becomes merely another symbol of virtuous citizenship -- like not double-parking or paying your taxes.


Martin Luther King said once: "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right."


Sorry, Martin. Our approach to prejudice and discrimination is not unlike our approach to drugs: We plan to simply rule them out of existence. In so doing, we have implicitly defined the limits of virtue as merely the absence of malice.

Islam Forbids Nuclear Weapons: Tehran Friday Prayer Leader

Informed Comment: Global Affairs

The USG Open Source Center translates a Friday sermon by Ayatollah Emami-Kashani asserting that nuclear weapons are forbidden in Islamic law and that Iran is not trying to get them.


"In Iran, the person who is a mufti, who has the right (to issue) fatwas, who is recognized as a jurist and is the leader of the community -- he who is the highest authority in the nation and is our eminent Leader [Ali Khamenei] -- has made it abundantly clear, as have others, that the destruction of nations, any nation, women and children, large or small -- the massacre of innocents is wrong. The same is true of the atomic bomb and atomic weapons. The very idea of an atom bomb is forbidden, the very deed is a sin. The foremost authority in this country, one who is in a position to issue fatwas, in political affairs, and in decision-making processes has stated it explicitly. Nevertheless, the enemy says you want to make atom bombs. It is like the other things they say -- they say things like you train terrorists and you make this and that place unsafe."

Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans

The truth about the depth of the problem is out. Someone had the courage to investigate. Thank you CBS.
CBS News

A CBS News Investigation Uncovers A Suicide Rate For Veterans Twice That Of Other Americans.


They are the casualties of wars you don’t often hear about - soldiers who die of self-inflicted wounds. Little is known about the true scope of suicides among those who have served in the military. But a five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic, Chief Investigative Reporter Armen Keteyian reports exclusively.


[..]r. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005. It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets. (Veterans committed suicide at the rate of between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)


One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)


"Wow! Those are devastating," said Paul Sullivan, a former VA analyst who is now an advocate for veterans rights from the group Veterans For Common Sense.

MORE HERE

To Impeach or Not

Since Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced Impeachment Articles against Cheney on April 24, 2007, there has been no open debate on the topic on a lot of people's minds. Here are some possible reasons why.
American Research Group

A total of 64% of American voters say that President George W. Bush has abused his powers as president. Of the 64%, 14% (9% of all voters) say the abuses are not serious enough to warrant impeachment, 33% (21% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses, but he should not be impeached, and 53% (34% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses and Mr. Bush should be impeached and removed from office.


A total of 70% of American voters say that Vice President Dick Cheney has abused his powers as vice president. Of the 70%, 26% (18% of all voters) say the abuses are not serious enough to warrant impeachment, 13% (9% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses, but he should not be impeached, and 61% (43% of all voters) say the abuses rise to the level of impeachable offenses and Mr. Cheney should be impeached and removed from office.

Could it really be that Bush wouldn't let it happen?
GlobalResearch.ca

Congressman John Olver expressed the prevailing view in government circles when he told twenty of his constituents at a private meeting in Massachusetts on July 5, 2007, that he could not support a movement to impeach Bush. According to an attendee, the reason the Congressman gave was that, “The President would declare a national emergency, institute martial law, and suspend the 2008 elections.”

A Youth Driven Social Revolution in Pakistan?

Daily Times

The sudden rise of the social movement rejects the conventional analysis that the youth is depoliticised and mainly interested in advancing their careers. What we are witnessing in Pakistan these days is a new social movement that is remarkably different from the ones launched against dictators in the past. It is not being driven as much by the old-fashioned, deal-making power elites as it is by strong popular sentiment among the Pakistani youth inside and outside the country. What is this popular sentiment, and why are the Pakistani youth at the centre of it? What explains the rise of this new social movement? What are its aims, and its chances of success?


It is heartening that while the power-elites were still debating how the imposition of martial law in the country would hurt them or create fresh opportunities of cooptation, college and university students along with young media and legal professionals instantly realised the enormity of the act of trashing the constitution and throwing the vast majority of judges of the superior judiciary out of the system.


It is perhaps for the first time in the political history of the country that legal and constitutional issues, hitherto a domain of the expert, have entered into the popular imagination with a powerful reminder that what happens in the superior judiciary is a matter of public concern. The unfolding of political events since March and the manner in which the media presented and debated the question of independence of the judiciary on the one hand, and the efforts of the executive to subvert it, brought into sharp relief the value of rule of law, dissent and the larger question of representation in the structures of power.


The judicial crisis and the lawyers’ movement captured the attention of all sections of society. But more than any other, the youth became interested in the identity of their state — who controls and runs it and for what purposes — and learnt their first lesson in politics. The lesson was that one or few individuals associated with powerful formal institutions and informal social structures have absolute control over the state and do not care about public interests.


In the past, ruling elites got away with acts of corruption, martial laws and emergencies because they could easily manage and control society through a co-opted intermediating class comprising landowners, caste and tribal chiefs and other socially influential figures with an inherent stake in the elitist power structure, often directed and manipulated by the men in uniform. Their recent moves against the constitution and the judiciary are based on the old assumptions about society. Their reading of the changes that have occurred on a global, regional and domestic level does not seem realistic.


[..]This is not likely to end even if the presently dysfunctional regime of General Musharraf takes immediate remedial actions, like holding elections or lifting the state of emergency. The focus of the struggle is the constitution and an independent judiciary, including reinstatement of judges axed by the martial law, and redefinition of the role of the military in Pakistani politics. This is bound to happen, but the when and how is yet to be seen.


Signs of the demise of perhaps the last martial law are everywhere. Defiance is growing, and is taking new and innovative forms. And, there is close networking among civil society groups and resistance is being aided by technology.


The primitive, elite-led state faces a serious challenge from a very modern civil society. It would not be difficult to foretell the winner.

Israeli official warns of nuclear 'apocalypse'

The Daily Star

Egyptian and Saudi nuclear ambitions, on top of Iran's atomic drive, will lead to an "apocalyptic scenario," a senior Israeli Cabinet minister said in comments published on Friday. "If Egypt and Saudi Arabia begin nuclear programs, this can bring an apocalyptic scenario upon us," Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the English-language Jerusalem Post newspaper.


"Their intentions should be taken seriously and the declarations being made now are to prepare the world for when they decide to actually do it," said the minister, responsible for coordinating Israeli efforts against a nuclear Iran.


On October 29, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced a program to build several nuclear power stations.


Jordan, one of only two Arab countries with Egypt to have signed peace deals with Israel, as well as Algeria, Libya, Yemen and all six pro-Western Gulf states including Saudi Arabia have also announced peaceful nuclear ambitions.


Lieberman, who heads the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, also told the Jerusalem Post that Pakistan could pose a major threat to Israel.


"If the Taliban or [Al-Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden get control [of Pakistan], they will have nuclear weapons for terror use and they don't hide their opinions about Israel," he said.

Analysts Say Decision to Block Bhutto Could Backfire

VOA News

South Asia analysts say the Pakistani government's decision to block former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto from leading a rally against President Pervez Musharraf and his decision to declare emergency rule could backfire. The analysts say the move is likely to galvanize public opinion, and could lead to more unrest and violence. VOA correspondent Meredith Buel reports from Washington.


It took thousands of police, cement barricades and barbed wire to keep Ms. Bhutto at her home in Islamabad and stop her from leading a protest rally in nearby Rawalpindi.


"To stop one million people they have to paralyze the whole government of Pakistan in the northern part of the country. How can they do this day after day? They can not," Ms. Bhutto said.

Rollup to War Continues: Cheney Strong Arms "Intellegence" on Iran

Think Progress

Vice President Cheney has been thwarting the release of a long-overdue National Intelligence Estimate on Iran because it doesn’t deliver the casus belli for war:


A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.


The current dispute over the Iran NIE bears striking resemblance to the controversies that played out over pre-war Iraq intelligence in at least two important ways.

FOX Attacks Decency

Sign the Petition
Tell the FCC you should not be forced to pay for FOX's smut.

Musharraf Does His Double Talk Dance

Musharraf and Dubya are good buddies because of their shared penchant for double-talk. In the Pakistani version of Doublethink Dubya, Musharraf sacks the Supreme Court and places his cronies in charge so they can ratify his election as President, despite his being military chief, forbidden by the Pakistani constitution.
WSJ.com

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's said Pakistan's parliamentary elections will be held by mid-February, a month later than originally planned.


"Elections in Pakistan must be held before Feb. 15, 2008, latest," Gen. Musharraf told a handful of government reporters after a meeting of his National Security Council.


The White House applauded the decision to proceed with elections. "We think it is a good thing that President Musharraf has clarified the election date for the Pakistani people," press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday.


However, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto denounced the pledge as insufficient and said he should step down as army chief within a week.


Gen. Musharraf's announcement was seen as an indication that the state of emergency imposed on Saturday would be short lived because authorities would likely have to ease up on security restrictions to allow campaigning. Attorney General Malik Mohammed Qayyum forecast that the state of emergency would be lifted in "one or two" months, depending on how the situation develops.


Gen. Musharraf, dressed in a business suit rather than his army fatigues, also reaffirmed that he would be sworn in for a new presidential term and quit his post as army chief once the supreme court confirms his disputed victory in last month's presidential election.


The court had been poised to rule on opposition complaints that Gen. Musharraf was ineligible because of a constitutional bar on public servants seeking elected office. Purged of independent-minded judges under the emergency, the court has yet to announce when hearings will resume, though officials have said they want a quick ruling.


Protests against the state of emergency have continued despite being quickly and sometimes brutally put down by the police. In Islamabad, police chased about 20 high-school students into the city's bar association headquarters after they showed up in solidarity with dozens of protesting lawyers, who were observing the fourth day of a nationwide strike. In Lahore, in eastern Pakistan, more than 100 professors boycotted classes and marched on the campus of the state-run University of the Punjab.


Thousands of lawyers and opposition activists have been detained since Gen. Musharraf declared the state of emergency Saturday. Four of those arrested -- three politicians and a labor union activist -- were charged with treason for making anti-government speeches in the southern city of Karachi, a court official said Thursday.

Guiliani, the Rapture Candidate

Not surprisingly, Pat Robertson the Republican candidate most likely to bring him the rapture he dreams and speaks about. World War III including Iran is Robertson's most fervent wish. This wacko thinks he'll go straight to heaven.
New York Times Blog

The televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudolph W. Giuliani today at the National Press Club in Washington, providing the former New York City Mayor with a big symbolic boost as he tries to allay the concerns of Christian conservatives about his candidacy.


The endorsement by Mr. Robertson could have some impact because of Mr. Robertson’s clout through the Christian Broadcasting Network, where Mr. Giuliani can deliver a central argument of his candidacy: that the threat of terrorism is too important and should outweigh voters’ concerns about his stand on abortion.


[..]To me, the overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists.

Protests Escalate in Pakistan

Can Musharraf stand up to mass protests in the street? Only if the army is willing to massacre it's own people. Bhutto is right, his marshal law declaration is to retain power, not fight jihadis.
WSJ.com

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto escalated her confrontation with the government by calling on Pakistanis to rise against the imposition of emergency rule by Pervez Musharraf, the nation's president and army chief.


"I appeal to the people of Pakistan to come forward. We are under attack," Ms. Bhutto told a news conference Wednesday after holding talks with other opposition leaders in Islamabad.


The former prime minister vowed to lead a protest march by her Pakistan People's Party on Friday to the garrison town of Rawalpindi, which also is home to Gen. Musharraf. The government has banned the protest, raising the prospects for large-scale clashes between supporters of Ms. Bhutto and security forces.

Musharraf Crushs Peaceful Protest

Doublethink Dubya's buddy in Pakistan has seized power with marshal law. After spending $10 Billion to prop up Musharraf, who do you suppose the Pakistani people blame? But do you suppose Bush actually sees this as another foreign policy failure?
I'm sure Dubya gets a lot of respect calling for free elections and democratic ideals. Meanwhile, he works every day to undermine those principles in his own country. Yet most of America can't believe a president would do that.
Perhaps Bush is quietly cheering on a fascist dictator who had the chutzpa to do what he only wishes he could.
ABC News

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf faced his first organized resistance today since declaring a state of emergency, and he responded with force.


Across Pakistan, thousands of lawyers, many in coats and ties, clashed with police in dramatic demonstrations. The lawyers, protesting Musharraf's suspension of the constitution, threw stones and insults, while police responded with batons, tear gas and then arrest.


An estimated 1,500 lawyers, human rights activists and local journalists are now detained by Pakistani police. All independent Pakistani television stations have been shut down as well.


This morning, in Pakistan's capital, the bar association met to plan a strategy. Just as ABC News approached, lawyers told us the head of the bar was being arrested, but when the police saw the cameras, they backed off. But the lawyers we spoke to fear the reprieve will not last.


"Every lawyer is expected to be arrested," lawyer Hanuna Rashid, president of the bar association, said to ABC News' Martha Raddatz. "What can you do? We will fight in the streets. We will fight in the roads."


Although Musharraf imposed a state of emergency as he said, "fight extremists," he has been going after his political opponents, instead.


[..]Today Bush warned Musharraf that his actions were undermining democracy.


[..]U.S. aid to Pakistan — nearly $10 billion since 9/11 — is now seen by many in the country as propping up a deeply unpopular president, who's violating Pakistan's constitution to stay in power.


The nightmare scenario for U.S. officials is that a government collapse could put Pakistan's nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.

Bigotry Against Muslims Has Made the Republican Campaign Stump

Juan Cole, in his article in The Nation describes the problem and gives a realistic glimpse at the threat.

Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani in his recent Foreign Affairs article complains that the United States has been on the "defensive" in the war on "radical Islamic fascism" and says with maddening vagueness that it must find ways of going "on the offensive." He promises that "this war will be long." Giuliani is being advised on such matters by Representative Peter King, who has complained that "unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country"; by Daniel Pipes, who has questioned the wisdom of allowing American Muslims to vote; and by Norman Podhoretz, author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Combining the word "Islam" with a European term like "fascism" is profoundly offensive; a subtext of anti-Muslim bigotry pervades Giuliani's campaign, a sop to the Christian and Zionist right.


John McCain depicts withdrawal from Iraq as "defeat," saying in Michigan on September 21 that it would "would strengthen Al Qaeda, empower Iran and other hostile powers in the Middle East, unleash a full-scale civil war in Iraq that could quite possibly provoke genocide there and destabilize the entire region.'' But continued occupation of Iraq, a major Muslim country, is just as likely to lead to the consequences McCain fears. Some front-runners, like Mitt Romney, argue for a big expansion in US military forces, without explaining how that would help with counterterrorism.


[..]Advocates of the "war on terror" fantasize about the Muslim world as a Soviet Union-type challenge to the United States. In fact, the dozens of countries with majority Muslim populations are mostly strong allies of the United States. One, Turkey, is a NATO ally, and six (Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan) are non-NATO allies. Only fourteen countries have this status, so Muslim states make up nearly half. The United States counts many other friends in the region, having significant frictions only with Sudan, Syria and Iran, and those are mixed pictures (Syria and Sudan helped against Al Qaeda, and Iran sought a strategic alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein in early 2003).


The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with America's future with their bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric. Muslims may constitute as much as a third of humankind by 2050, forming a vast market and a crucial labor pool. They will be sitting on the lion's share of the world's energy resources. The United States will increasingly have to compete with emerging rivals such as China and India for access to those Muslim resources and markets, and if its elites go on denigrating Muslims, America will be at a profound disadvantage during the next century.


Some Muslim extremist groups are indeed a threat, but they have not been dealt with appropriately. Bush has argued that terrorist groups have state backing, a principle that authorizes conventional war against their sponsor. In fact, asymmetrical terrorist groups can thrive in the interstices of states, and September 11 was solely an Al Qaeda operation. In his speech about the conquest of Iraq on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush announced, "We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." It was a bald-faced lie.


Imperial occupations under the pretext of fighting terrorism suck up scarce resources and multiply terrorism, and so are self-defeating. They benefit only the military-industrial complex and political elites pursuing American hegemony. The backlash is growing. Sympathy bombings deriving from Muslim distress at brutal US military actions against Iraqis have been undertaken in Madrid, London and Glasgow, and a handful of formerly secular Iraqi Sunnis have suddenly expressed interest in Al Qaeda.


[..]The Administration clearly is not very interested in doing the hard work of dealing effectively with small fringe terrorist networks. That is why Osama bin Laden is at large and the CIA unit tracking him disbanded. Successful counterterrorism involves good diplomacy and good police work. A case in point is the plot last summer by young Muslim men in London to bomb several airliners simultaneously using liquid explosives in innocent-looking bottles and detonators hidden in disposable cameras. Contrary to the allegations of skeptics, the techniques they envisaged were perfectly workable. The plotters were determined enough to make chilling martyrdom videos.


[..]Since resources are scarce, it is important that the magnitude of the threat not be exaggerated. Al Qaeda has at most a few thousand members. It holds no territory and its constituent organizations have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Algeria and other Muslim nations. Its command and control networks have been effectively disrupted. Most threats now come from amateur copycats. Al Qaeda has no prospect whatsoever of taking over any state in the Muslim world. It probably would be dead altogether if Bush had not poured gasoline on the flames with his large-scale invasions and occupations. For John McCain to proclaim that Al Qaeda is a bigger threat to US security than was the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at this country, is to enter Alice's Wonderland.


Very few Muslims are either violent or fundamentalist; most are traditionalist, mystic, modernist or secularist. Murder rates in the Muslim world are remarkably low. About 10 to 15 percent of Muslims throughout the world, or 130 million to 215 million, generally support a fundamentalist point of view, including the implementation of Islamic law as the law of the state. But they are not typically violent, and the United States has managed to ally with some of them, as with the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The fundamentalists are atypical. In a 2006 Pew poll, majorities in Egypt, Jordan and Indonesia were optimistic that democracy would work in their countries.


Because of its support for or acquiescence to Israel's creeping erasure of the Palestinian nation and for Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006, and because of Washington's own brutal war in Iraq, the United States is poorly positioned to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency, some 75 percent of the population of Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country) had a favorable view of the United States. By the time Bush had invaded two Muslim countries, in 2003, America's favorability rating there had fallen to 15 percent. It recovered a bit after US magnanimity during the tsunami but then fell back to less than half the pre-Bush level. In Turkey, the favorability rating has fallen from 52 to 12 percent in the same period (all polling figures from the Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Charitable Trust).


Extremist Muslim networks have a specific history, almost entirely rooted in reaction to many decades of European colonial domination or in the Reagan jihad against the Soviet Union, during which the United States gave extremists $5 billion, pressured Saudi Arabia to do the same and trained the extremists at CIA facilities in Afghanistan. Much of their subsequent violence can properly be seen as a form of blowback--black operations that go bad and boomerang on the initiating country.


Marc Sageman, a CIA case officer in Afghanistan in the late 1980s who is now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, has estimated the number of extremists who could and would do violence to the United States at less than a thousand. There is a larger group that supports the creation of Taliban-style rigid theocracies in their countries and who are willing to deploy violence to achieve that goal. While their ideology may be unpleasant, they do not necessarily pose a security threat to the United States.


American politicians should cease implying that Muslim nations and individuals are different from, or somehow more dangerous than, any other group of human beings, a racist idea promoted by the Christian and Zionist right. They should acknowledge that most Muslim nations are US friends and allies. A wise American policy toward the small networks of Muslim extremists would reduce their recruitment pool by the quick establishment of a Palestinian state and by a large-scale military drawdown from Iraq, thus removing widespread and major grievances. An increase in visible humanitarian and development aid to Muslim countries has a demonstrable effect on improving the US image.


The reconstitution of the United States Information Service as an independent body would allow better public diplomacy. Promoting American studies in the Muslim world, in its major languages rather than just in English, would help remove widespread misconceptions about the United States among educated Muslim observers. Increasing federal funding for Middle East studies at home would better equip this country to deal with this key region. More adept diplomacy with the Muslim states, most of which are as afraid of terrorism as we are, could lead to further cooperation in the security field. Better police work and cooperation with the police of Middle Eastern states would be much more effective than launching invasions. It would also help if we stopped insulting Muslims by calling their religion "fascist."

Manipulating Polls To Justify Another War

The roll up to war with Iran continues. The privileged system is now attempting to manipulate public opinion with a deliberately distorted poll. My opinion of Zogby has hit the dumps.
Informed Comment: Global Affairs

on July 6 of this year, a survey showed that "60 percent of Americans opposed a war with Iran." Now, however, he claims, "a majority of Americans now favor military action against Iran." The July poll from Angus Reid asked, "If the U.S. government decides to take military action in Iran, would you favour or oppose it?" 63% said they would oppose it.


The recent Zogby poll asked if voters "would support a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon." 52% said yes.


As anyone with the most microscopic acquaintance with polling knows, these are not the same questions. Iran says it is not building a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency (whose record on such matters is far more reliable than that of the Weekly Standard) says it has no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, noting that the rhetoric on Iran of people like Goldfarb "has lost all connection to reality," reminds us that "Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA."


Given these "facts," (sorry to bring that up), a military strike by the U.S. against Iran now and a military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon are not the same thing. The latter is invoked to justify the former.

Caging the African American Voter

ProjectVote.orgRepresentational Bias in the 2006 Electorate
The proportion of the U.S. population that registers to vote and that does vote is highly skewed towards Whites, the educated and the wealthy. Furthermore, young eligible Americans, particularly young minority males, and those who have recently moved, are disproportionately represented among those who do not participate in the U.S. electorate.
This report provides an introductory review of frequency tables for responses to some of the questions in the November 2006 CPS as well as cross tabulations showing how the responses interact with race, gender and income. Data on voter registration and voter turnout for each state and the District of Columbia for 2002, 2004 and 2006 are also provided.
ProjectVote.org: Caging Democracy Report
Republicans have engaged in voter caging on the national and
state level since the late 1950’s. According to many election observers, voter caging is a controversial
political tactic that typically targets minority voters to directly disenfranchise them or suppress their
vote by intimidation. Republican officials, on the other hand, maintain that voter caging is part of
what they describe as “ballot security” measures necessary to combat voter fraud.
The following report reviews Republican voter caging operations during the last 50 years,
culminating with the unprecedented number of large voter caging operations conducted across
the nation in the 2004 presidential election. The report briefly covers the origins and history of
voter caging and follows with a survey of individual caging operations during this 50-year period.
The key findings are as follows:
• V oter caging is a practice of sending non-forwardable direct mail to registered voters and
using the returned mail to compile lists of voters, called “caging lists,” for the purpose of
challenging their eligibility to vote. In recent years, other techniques, such as database
matching, have been used to compile challenger lists.
[..]ocuments submitted during civil litigation have established that voter caging operations were
directed consciously and specifically at jurisdictions with large numbers of minority voters. At
least one public statement by a state Republican office-holder and private communication
between party officials evidence an unambiguous intent to suppress Black votes. Precincts
that had historically high percentage of voters supporting Democratic candidates, which were
often minority precincts, were also targeted for voter caging operations.
• M edia campaigns immediately before elections were a key part of voter caging operations.
Part of the strategy was to call a press conference to announce the filing of mass challenges
on the eve of the filing deadline. The challenges were billed as evidence of massive voter
fraud although the voter caging lists were, in fact, only evidence of returned mailings.
Frequently, the pre-election media campaigns alleging voter fraud were as vigorously, or
more vigorously, carried out than the challenges themselves.
[..]n 2004, political operatives targeted more than half a million voters in voter caging
campaigns in nine states. At least 77,000 voters had their eligibility challenged between
2004 and 2006.
• A t least five states with competitive political environments enacted changes to their voter
challenge statutes just before and after the 2004 election. Three states with Republicancontrolled
legislatures, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, made it easier for private individuals
to challenge a voter’s eligibility while Washington and Minnesota passed laws making it
harder for private persons to challenge voters. Minnesota specifically outlawed the use of
caging lists compiled from returned mail sent by a political party.
[..]Although the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA ) prohibits election officials from canceling
the registration of voters merely because a single piece of mail has been returned, Republican
operatives have used the lists for many years in caging operations to challenge the voting rights of
thousands of minority and urban voters nationwide on the basis of returned mail alone. [..]The RN C is bound by a U.S. District Court consent decree
ordering it to obtain court approval before it engages in any type of ballot security program. Yet,
Republican-led caging operations continue unabated.
[..]The Ohio precincts in which approximately 91 percent of the state’s African American population
resided - including urban areas like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, and Akron - were
targeted for challenges.48 The state Republican Party recruited about 3,600 challengers statewide
to carry out the plan.

Guiliani Brings Nothing New in Foreign Policy

Guiliani's foreign policy advisor would provide more of the same neo-con attack dog ideology to a Republican Presidential administration. If you don't like Bush, you will hate Guiliani. It's much worse than more of the same.
Talking Points Memo

Tonight on The Newshour, Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy advisor and godfather of neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz debated Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria on the question of whether or not to go to war with Iran. It's perhaps an apt commentary on the rightward, lunatic turn of this country's foreign policy that Fareed is taking what I guess must be called the left (?) in this debate. In any case, I really urge you to give this a look. And note a few things: one is the denigrating tone Podhoretz takes toward Zakaria. It's curdled and bitter. It jumped out at me and I wonder if it does for you as well. Second are the constant references to Hitler and the Munich agreement. Hitler has become such a throwaway reference or comparison for whatever penny-ante dictator we're up in arms about at the moment that the reference has been drained of much of its meaning and horror. But with the Munich agreement and how 'time is not on our side' and so forth, this is beyond nonsense.


It's almost an insult to what the world faced in the late 1930s. Germany, industrial powerhouse, with arguably the most powerful army in the world, at the forefront of technology, overawing and invading neighboring countries. Iran, minor economic power, second or third-rate military power, which may get a couple of small nuclear-weapons compared to the couple hundred high-end nuclear warheads in Israel's arsenal (plus, a robust second strike capacity, as Fareed notes) and the many thousands we have -- and our blue water navy, satellites, air force. Please. Time's running out for us?

Comcast Interferes with Customer's Broadband Use

FreePress.net

Tell the FCC: Stop Comcast and Other Gatekeepers


You're the only person who should decide where you go, what you do, and whom you connect with on the Web. Net Neutrality protects your right to choose. Phone and cable lobbyists have called Net Neutrality "a solution in search of a problem." Well, here's the problem. In the past three months, incidents of censorship and blocking by Verizon, AT&T and now Comcast have made headlines around the world. That's just the tip of the iceberg. We stopped these gatekeepers in 2006. We can stop them for good by taking action right now. It's time to restore Net Neutrality once and for all.

We Can Stop Them

Rumsfeld the Bigot and Liar

This pretty much confirms my on-going perception. Rumsfeld and others in the Administration are bigots against Muslims. They also make it policy to deceive the American people.
washingtonpost.com

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

Iran: American's Manipulated by Media?

Zogby

More than half of likely voters in the United States would support a U.S. military strike against Iran to prevent it from building a nuclear weapon, according to a poll released Monday. The poll found 53 percent of Americans believe it is likely the United States will be involved in a military strike against Iran before the November 2008 presidential election. The nationwide telephone survey, conducted by polling firm Zogby International, found 52 percent of U.S. adults interviewed would support such a strike.

Robert Dreyfuss quotes Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution:

"I can envision a scenario in which, sometime next year, the intelligence community is against a war, telling the White House it doesn't know enough; the military is against it, saying that they're bogged down in Iraq; the State Department is against it, saying that there won't be any allies for a war with Iran; and the political people tell the White House that Congress won't support it--and still, the president and the vice president decide to go to war anyway."