Look What I Found

Check out this classic Scheer column (reprinted in his new book, “Playing President," and below), which reminds us:

Lay was the primary backer of Bush’s rise to the presidency.

Lay privately met with Dick Cheney to create the administration’s energy policy.

In 1997 Bush called then-Pa. Gov. Tom Ridge on Lay’s behalf to open that state’s market to energy trading.

The Bravery of Being Out of Range

Roger Water's 3 minute video

The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range

What Are They...

... Fucking stupid? Look at the Apple Stores and perhaps that'll teach you something.

"These stores, however, aren't typical cash-and-carry retail outlets. Visitors who decide they want Dell products will still have to go online and buy them through the company's Web site. The two locations, opening this summer, are only showrooms, designed to show off Dell technology."

Dell's New Approach To Retail

Are They All Racist?

"Britain's largest college teachers' union voted Monday to consider boycotting Israeli academics over what members termed 'apartheid' policies and discrimination against Palestinians.

The 69,000-member National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, or NATFHE, passed the motion at its annual conference in the northern English city of Blackpool. "

British Teachers' Union Votes on Boycott

A Good Question

Aside from its inflammatory and counter-historical nature, fundamentally, this is a good question.

"'I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War II. . . . The question is: Why is it that only Jews are at the center of attention?' he said in the interview published Sunday."

Iran's Leader Renews Doubt Of Holocaust

What Ahmadinejad Told Bush

It's long. But it's worth reading. A lot of questions which will remain unanswered.

"Why is it that any technological and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East regions is translated into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime? Is not scientific R&D one of the basic rights of nations?

You are familiar with history. Aside from the Middle Ages, at what other point in history has scientific and technical progress been a crime? Can the possibility of scientific achievements being utilized for military purposes be reason enough to oppose science and technology altogether? If such a supposition is true, then all scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, engineering, etc. must be opposed.

Lies were told in the Iraqi matter. What was the result? I have no doubt that telling lies is reprehensible in any culture, and you do not like to be lied to."

Letter From Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, to George Bush

Bush and Enron!

"As Enron’s crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush’s presidency, Lay secured Bush’s help in three key ways:

--Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush’s resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s consumers.

--Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration’s energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron’s businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron’s complex derivative-financing schemes.

--Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron’s interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion."

Consortiumnews.com

It's Time to Engage With Iran

"Ahmadinejad's letter clearly had the backing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the American context, that's like having the support of Vice President Cheney for a peace feeler. My own Iranian sources say there is broad consensus in Tehran that it is time for talks with the United States. 'Iran wants to start discussions the same way the Chinese wanted discussions' with Nixon, an Iranian businessman named Ali Ettefagh told me in an e-mail this week. 'Great Satan doesn't sell anymore. More than half the population was not born 27 years ago, and the broken record does not play well.' The Iranian offer of dialogue, he says, 'ought to be taken as an opportunity, if only to air out grievances and amplify differences.'"

It's Time to Engage With Iran

Quotable

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

– George W. Bush ... yeah, the same idiot who is now running the country.

Incubators...

So the guy suddenly finds himself with the Bushies and his message echoes that of the President... Somehow this reminds me of the congressional testimony given by a lone girl crying about the Iraqis taking incubators and getting rid of the babies needing them right before the Kuwaiti invasion... Maybe in several we will find out that this guy was all lies and on the payroll... But then it's going to be too late.

"He surfaced at the end of last month in Dubai, where 24 hours later he was met by the leading American neoconservative, Richard Perle. Fakhravar was whisked to America last weekend and has already met congressmen and Bush officials. He said he was in Washington to spread one message only: "Regime change," he said, breaking from Farsi into English to deliver it."

Fugitive pleads with US to 'liberate' Iran

The Real Reason of it All...

Prior to its illegal invasion, Iraq had announced its intention to move to the Euro as the basis for trading its oil. Iran has made the same announcement... Venezuela as well...

Do you see a pattern here?

"Folks, this isn’t about nukes, it is about taking control of Iran and its oil, and stopping the Iranians from setting up their own oil market separate from the New York and London oil trading markets that would be denominated in Euros and not dollars."

The Economy And Iran

The People v. The Corporation

This is a very interesting article to read. It talks about the contrast between the treatment two person receive when they decide to nationalize their oil industry. Bolivia v. Chad. Read it... Very instructive.

"So, on the one hand, you have a man who has kept his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to use it to help the poor. On the other, you have a man who has broken his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to buy guns. The first man is vilified as irresponsible, childish and capricious. The second man is left to get on with it. Why? Well, Deby's actions don't hurt the oil companies. Morales's do. When Blair and Rice and the Times and all the other apologists for undemocratic power say 'the people', they mean the corporations. The reason they hate Morales is that when he says 'the people', he means the people."

George Monbiot | When Two Poor Countries Reclaim Oil Fields

I dunno...

I just don't know. For about 1/10th of a second you see a while blur that looks more like a missile than an airplane... and then compared to the firy effects at the WTC after the impact, the file seems to just go away and turn into black smoke...

I just don't know... something smells fishy.

Pentagon Releases Video of 9/11 Attack

Video

Quotable

“According to a new study, one-third of America's youth cannot find Louisiana on a map. Well, hell, the federal government can't find Lousiana on a map.”

— David Letterman

Quotable

“Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaeda?”

— Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
Reacting to a USA Today report that the government has secretly collected records of ordinary Americans' phone calls to build a database of every call made within the country."

Be Afraid

"The Bush administration did not, of course, invent the use of fear as a weapon to justify its wrongful conduct and enhance its own power Nor is Al Qaeda the first enemy the United States has had. …

On April 24, 1950, President Harry S. Truman gave a speech to the nation regarding the threat posed by domestic communism -- a threat at least as real as Islamic terrorism. Part of what he said:

'Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.'

And the founders repeatedly warned of the danger, and the likelihood, that governments would attempt to exploit fear of external threats in order to justify abridgments of core liberties. …

The apex of fear-wallowing came during the exceptionally well-staged Republican National Convention of 2004 … Here is Zell Miller, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, explaining how his fears drove him to support George Bush:

'And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower, and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family? There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that man's name is George W. Bush

We do not have a government where the president can break the law in secret and then tell us not to worry about it because it is being done to 'protect' us. We have never had a system of government operate on such paternalistic and blindly loyal sentiments. And we have never before been a nation living in such fear that, in exchange for promises of protection and safety, we are told that we must allow the president to seize those very powers which the Constitution prohibits."

Excerpt: How Would a Patriot Act?

Theft Will Go Unoticed

"The Senate last week approved $109 billion in additional spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including $1.5 billion in added Iraq reconstruction money,' the Wall Street Journal begins in a page four story Wednesday. 'The administration has spent $20.9 billion to reconstruct Iraq's infrastructure and modernize its oil industry, but the effort hasn't restored the country's electricity output, water supply or sewage capabilities to prewar levels.'

Writes the Journal: 'A behind-the-scenes battle among legislators has made a crucial distinction between the new reconstruction money and that already spent: The new funds won't be overseen by the government watchdog charged with curbing the mismanagement that has overshadowed the reconstruction.'

'Special inspector general, Stuart Bowen, who has 55 auditors on the ground in Iraq, will be barred from overseeing how the new money is spent,' the Journal adds. 'Instead, the funds will be overseen by the State Department's inspector general office, which has a much smaller staff in Iraq and warned in testimony to Congress in the fall that it lacked the resources to continue oversight activities in Iraq.'

The move comes just two weeks after an American contractor was convicted for admitting a bribe-for-jobs scheme in Iraq."

Found: Provision in Iraq bill to shield reconstruction spending from US auditors

Quotable

"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."
- AJ Liebling

Woohoo... Check it Out

Declaring Victory

Something like premature ejaculation...

'Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?'
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)


'Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it.'
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)


'Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention.'
(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)


'Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints.'
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/13/03)


'The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington.'
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)


'We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back.'
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)


'We're all neo-cons now.'
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)


'The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war.'
(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)


'Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking.'
(WashingtPost reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)"

"The Final Word Is Hooray!"

Why Moussavi?

"Meanwhile, at a secret CIA 'black site' prison, the United States is holding the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. And at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it has Mohamed al-Qahtani, who the government now claims is the real would-be 20th hijacker. But the administration can't try either of these men, because any such proceeding would turn into a trial of the United States' own tactics in the war on terrorism. The CIA has reportedly water-boarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- a practice in which the suspect is made to fear that he is drowning in order to encourage him to talk. And Army logs report that interrogators threatened Qahtani with dogs, made him strip naked and wear women's underwear, put him on a leash and made him bark like a dog, injected him with intravenous fluids and barred him from the bathroom so that he urinated on himself. With these shortsighted and inhumane tactics, the administration essentially immunized the real culprits, so it was left seeking the execution of a man who was not involved in Sept. 11."

How Not to Fight Terrorism

Some Quotables

"Everybody in the government this week is suddenly trying to think of ways to conserve energy. For example, the smoke that blows out of the president's ass when he's talking about this issue is now from clean-burning ethanol."
---Bill Maher

"Condoleezza Rice is the most popular member of the Bush administration. Experts say that claiming to be the most popular member of the Bush administration is like claiming you got the 'good' kind of Herpes."
---Conan O'Brien

"Today, of course, was the `Day Without Immigrants' ... Or as the Native Americans call it, the good old days.
---Jay Leno

"Mr. President, it is time to hire the folks who've never let you down. Limbaugh at Health and Human Services. Hannity at State. Then give Rummy the Medal of Freedom and install Bill O'Reilly as Secretary of Defense. Only problem: you might find yourself invading Vermont. And I'll replace Chertoff at Homeland Security. The man's done nothing to control the bear population."
---Stephen Colbert

"I mean, it seems like every time I turn on the TV these days, I see some ad for some drug I never heard of, to treat some disease I never heard of. That's not a stomach ache you have from eating the chili-cheese fries at Johnny Rockets, it's Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Or I.B.S. Or as I call it, "B.S." Which would also apply to the dreaded "Social Anxiety Disorder." Or as we used to call it, "shyness." And we treated it with an old home recipe: scotch and water."
---Maher

Fake TV...

And you wonder why the American Public is ignorant of facts and, in general, of reality.

"Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)—a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety."

Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed

History's Judgment Is...

"... That in a long text recently published, the highly reputed Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz wonders whether Bush could be the worst president in all of United States history. Unquestionably, according to Wilentz, he belongs in the category of the very worst, along with James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. No less than 80% of historians polled share that opinion. What more can I add to that?"

To the Rescue