Saturday, September 20, 2008

John and the very delicate subject of his marbles

How he lost them? When did he lose them?

Should Americans not use what knowledge they have to elect a president? The man is 72 Y.O.A. He was a POW. He was tortured. He has flaming PTSD.

Now, do you want this guys finger on the button? Read on....

"Evil must be defeated!" -- John McCain 8/16/08

"Enough is enough! We're going to put an end to greed!" -- John McCain 9/17/08

It's inspiring to know that John McCain has a plan to end greed. I just hope it doesn't distract him from his mission to defeat evil. Either way, it has to kick the shit out of whatever Barack Obama's got on the docket, with his empty words and pie-in-the-sky promises.

America's choice is clear. Barack Obama, a messianic egomaniac who thinks he's, like, our savior or something, or John McCain, who will defeat evil and put an end to greed.

John McCain will not only take on special interests and Washington insiders, he'll fundamentally alter human nature. And without raising taxes, either. He'll lead us to a sort of martial nirvana where all other emotions are replaced with patriotism, and turn the United States into a shining, selfless, bipartisan cross between heaven and Sparta.

Or maybe he's just a desperate shell of a man, babbling glorp.

If Reverend Wright went around shouting stuff like "We're going to put an end to greed!" people would start thinking he was some kind of fruitcake.

You might think "I'll end greed" would be the most mortifying thing John McCain could say at one sitting. You'd be wrong. At Wednesday's town hall -- his first with Sarah Palin -- he topped himself with this explanation of her credentials:

"She has been commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard. Fact. On September 11 a contingent of the Guard deployed to Iraq and her son happened to be one of them so I think she understands national security challenges."

Which is fine except:

The governor of Alaska doesn't command the National Guard in combat overseas.

Sarah Palin didn't deploy anyone anywhere on September 11th. She was a guest speaker at an Army deployment ceremony.

Track Palin isn't in the National Guard; he's in the Army.

Sometimes it seems like it's more than John McCain can handle, just keeping all the lies about Sarah Palin straight in his head. Tomorrow he'll say she's in the Air Force herself, on a plane she bought on eBay, bombing the bridges at Toko-Ri.

It's all Shiites and Sunnis to John McCain. So what's your problem? We're told that Lord Raglan fought the entire Crimean War believing the Russians were the French. And that worked out okay because, uh, everyone under his command died.

"I know how to win wars! I know how to win wars!" -- John McCain 7/15/08

I know this is a sort of threadbare exercise -- the old switcheroo -- but imagine what would happen if Barack Obama got the Army and the National Guard mixed up.

More in Politics...

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Did Violence In Iraq Go Down Because of Ethnic Cleansing?

Satellite images show ethnic cleanout in Iraq - [ Is the surge responsible for drop in violence or population shift? ]

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080919/sc_nm/iraq_lights_dc
sent by Nomen

Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday. The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed. "By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement. "Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict. [ MORE AT STORY SITE ]

Drugs, sex and ....OIL

There just really isn't much hope, is there?

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

So, let me get this straight: House Republicans are slamming Dems using advice from drug-addled cheaters who are literally in bed with oil executives? Yes, sadly enough, that is one way to refer to the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service.

The House voted this week to pass an expansion of offshore drilling to allow companies to extract oil from coastal regions as little as 50 miles from the shoreline. Though they've been crying out for an expansion of offshore drilling for what seems like forever, Republicans still found a way to make Democrats weak at the gas pump. They said that "experts" say all the good oil reserves are between three miles and 50 miles from the shore. And who are these experts? Why, it's the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which was just revealed by the department's inspector general to have engaged in drug use and illicit sex with oil company executives.

The Associated Press reported the story, but they did it backwards. Always looking for conflict and a news peg, they started out talking about the new bill and Republicans attacking Democrats, sneaking the sex and drugs in at the very end, after readers had fallen asleep or turned to the crossword puzzle.

Palin probe has parallels to 2000 recount fight

September 19, 2008

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- This time, there are no hanging chads.

Yet the Republicans' drive to derail an abuse of power investigation against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP vice presidential candidate, reflects the same determination and many of the same methods employed in shutting down the 2000 presidential recount in Florida.

Now, as then, the playbook includes lawsuits, the exercise of power by sympathetic state officials, and appeals to the court of public opinion -- all in an operation directed by out-of-state Republicans.

''Hold me accountable,'' Palin said when the Republican-controlled legislature launched the investigation in mid-August.

Now John McCain's running mate, she declines to cooperate. She calls the investigation tainted, her husband won't honor a subpoena to testify, and Republican lawmakers are in court with a pair of lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the probe.

Republican lawyers, researchers and public relations specialists have been dispatched to Alaska. The Anchorage lawyer originally hired by the state to represent Palin is no longer paid by taxpayers and instead is part of the McCain-Palin campaign's legal team.

Former prosecutor Ed O'Callaghan, from New York, is the team's leading voice. ''The investigation is no longer a legitimate investigation because it has been subjected to complete partisanship and does not operate with the authority that it had at the time of its initial authorization,'' he told reporters earlier in the week.

Even though lawmakers announced plans for new subpoenas on Friday, there appears little chance that investigator Stephen Branchflower will receive testimony from all the witnesses he seeks before his Oct. 10 target date for completion.

That's nearly four weeks before Election Day, the date by which Troopergate, as it is known, can no longer affect McCain's chances of winning the White House.

And Democrats are not without their own maneuvers -- casting Palin in an unfavorable light with allegations that Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his party are playing politics with the issue.

''The Republican presidential campaign is doing everything it can to stall and smear,'' says Patti Higgins, chairwoman of the Alaska Democratic Party.

So far, the struggle has been largely one-sided. Advantage: Republicans and Palin, the governor whose firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan triggered the controversy this summer.

Critics say Monegan was fired because he refused to dismiss a state trooper who had gone through a difficult divorce with the governor's sister. Palin says she acted in response to a disagreement with Monegan over state spending.

Whatever her motivation, Republicans have acted as though they could not afford to allow Branchflower to complete his probe before the election.

One Republican veteran of the Florida recount, attorney Ben Ginsberg, said comparing that case to the one in Alaska was like mixing apples and oranges.

''If you won the election once, why would you ever have a recount?'' he said. And in the case of an investigation, ''there's always one side that tries to shut it down and another side that wants to keep it going.''

The similarities to the contested Florida recount of 2000 are striking, if imprecise -- the uncertain outcome of a complete manual recount then, the unpredictability of a full accounting of the Monegan firing now.

Then, Bush clung to a slender lead in Florida over Al Gore after a statewide machine recount. Democrats sought a follow-up manual re-tally by hand in four counties, and Republicans determined to block them.

Given a margin of a few hundred votes out of millions cast, it was impossible to tell who had truly won the state. There were numerous disputed paper ballots -- including those with partially-punched out holes that became instantly known by the phrase ''hanging chads.

Republicans also were fearful of forfeiting their advantage in the public relations battle. Their man was ahead, and any reduction in his lead could only undermine his claim on the White House.

Lawsuits tumbled on top of one another, eventually involving Florida's highest court and U.S. Supreme Court.

Katherine Harris, the Republican secretary of state, was stopped by court order from certifying the results once -- a ruling issued by seven judges appointed by Democrats, Republicans noted.

One county canvassing board, besieged by Republican protesters, shut down the recount Democrats sought. Harris refused to accept results from another county, submitted 90 minutes past the court-imposed deadline of 5 p.m. on Nov. 26.

That day, she certified Bush the winner of Florida by 537 votes -- and the tally stood despite days of additional lawyering and hand-counting.

The stakes are not nearly as large this time, and Democrats have appeared slow off the mark, unwilling or unable to dispatch their own crew to Alaska to counter the Republicans.

And while there is no direct equivalent of Harris, Alaska's Republican attorney general, Talis Colberg, has played a pivotal, if quiet, role in trying to bottle up the investigation of the woman who appointed him.

When Branchflower sought to subpoena 10 employees of Palin's administration, Colberg reponded with a letter that said they had been placed in a untenable position.

''As state employees, our clients have taken an oath to uphold the Alaska Constitution,'' he wrote.

Yet, he added, ''our clients are also loyal employees subject to the supervision of the Governor'' whom he said has stated that the subpoenas were of questionable validity.

''We respectfully ask that you withdraw the subpoenas directed to our clients and thereby relieve them from the circumstance of having to choose where their loyalties lie,'' he added.

--------

Eds: David Espo covers presidential politics for AP.

Recommendations From Bush War Crimes Prosecution Conference

Submitted by davidswanson on Thu, 2008-09-18 15:01.

Criminal Prosecution

By Sherwood Ross

ANDOVER , MASS. (Special) -- Twenty recommendations made at a conference on prosecuting President George Bush for war crimes are under consideration for action, according to conference convener Lawrence Velvel, a prominent law school dean.

"Attendees discussed the violations of international and domestic law that were committed and are now studying recommendations for action," said Velvel. “All of us feel that those who committed war crimes and other crimes against humanity must be held accountable," he said. “The continued viability of Nuremberg Principles barring aggressive war and torture depends on it.”

More than 120 public officials, lawyers, academics, and authorities on the U.S. Constitution and international law attended the two day conference, which was held in Andover , Massachusetts on September 13th and 14th.

The conference resulted in recommendations ranging from asking the next U.S. Attorney General to prosecute Bush, to having any of some 2,700 county district attorneys launch proceedings against him for murder, to having Bush prosecuted for war crimes in other countries.

A newly formed committee will decide which of the suggestions can practicably be pursued.

The complete list of possible actions is:

1. Working for the election of district attorneys who pledge to prosecute high level war criminals for murder under state law, and working for the reelection of district attorneys who pledge to prosecute such criminals for murder.

2. Working for the election of state attorneys general who pledge to prosecute high level war criminals for murder under state law.

3. Working for the election of local executive and legislative officials (e.g., city council members) in specified localities who will formally denounce war crimes and might even seek to take action against them, as apparently has occurred in Vermont.

4. Mandamus proceedings to force local prosecutors to act.

5. Requesting state bar authorities to disbar the lawyers who were part of the executive cabal to authorize torture and other abuses that are crimes under international law, domestic law, or both.

6. Teach-ins at universities on the question of war crimes.

7. Asking universities to conduct hearings on whether certain individuals (e.g., John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith) should be dismissed from faculties for aiding and abetting criminal acts.

8. A march of many thousands of American lawyers on the Department of Justice (a la Civil Rights or Viet Nam war marches or the million man march). The purpose of the march would be to highlight lawyers’ belief that crimes were committed and must be punished.

9. Seeking prosecutions of high level war criminals before foreign courts or before international tribunals such as the International Criminal Court.

10. Asking the next federal Attorney General to prosecute war criminals.

11. Seeking major congressional investigations of what occurred.

12. Obtaining inspector general reports of what was done in given federal departments like the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, etc.

13. A truth and reconciliation commission.

14. Impeachment, even after the culprits leave office. And, unless he resigns from the federal bench, Jay Bybee, who collaborated with John Yoo on the first torture papers, will still be in office after the election.

15. Legislative or judicial action to dramatically cut back on, and sometimes totally eliminate, the present vast overuse by the federal government of the state secrets doctrine, executive privilege and other such doctrines.

16. Repeal of immunity amendments (which, even if not repealed, may have tremendous holes in them with regard to federal prosecutions, are unlikely to have any immunizing effect at the state level (though they may nonetheless be claimed as a defense), and whose only effect on foreign and international prosecutions would be to encourage them because these amendments indicate that the American federal government (like the governments of Argentina and Chile for many years) refuses to take action against federal criminals.

17. Resisting pardons, particularly advance pardons by Bush or the next president before there are convictions.

18. Creating an office of Chief Prosecutor(s), with Vince Bugliosi as Chief Prosecutor for domestic actions and perhaps a Co-Chief Prosecutor, with international prosecutorial experience, as Chief Prosecutor for foreign and international actions. This office would handle prosecutions in which governmental officials are willing to use “our” designated chief prosecutor as the lead lawyer, and would advise governmental prosecutors who desire to handle the prosecutions themselves but are willing to use “our” chief prosecutor as an adviser.

19. Setting up an internet-accessible repository, or library, of information on the pertinent war crimes, so that persons will have ready access to all relevant information. The repository, or library, should be cross indexed by subject matter, and should include briefs, articles, books, memos, speeches, etc. -- anything that sheds light on what was done.

20. Considering what, if anything, can be done to overcome the current ineptitude, failure and sometimes even deliberate hiding of facts by the corporate mass media, and to consider how the web might be used to accomplish this.

Vincent Bugliosi, former Los Angeles county prosecutor, extensively explained the legal reasoning under which Bush can be prosecuted for murder once he is no longer president. Bugliosi added that “No Federal, state or local statute says there is any person who can't be prosecuted for murder."

Bugliosi said that, of the 2,700 district and county attorneys having the power to prosecute, "There should be one prosecutor bold enough to say 'No man is above the law'. I am looking for that courageous prosecutor and I am not going to be satisfied until I see George W. Bush in an American courtroom prosecuted for murder."

Bugliosi said the evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq was overwhelming. "There are over 100 books” providing facts to underpin“ bringing Bush to prosecution for the deaths of 4,000 American soldiers under false pretenses," Bugliosi said.

Philippe Sands, director of the Centre of International Courts and Tribunals at University College , London , discussed violations of law such as torture. He said that "Under the Convention Against Torture, any person who has tortured anywhere in the world can be arrested in the United Kingdom " if they enter that country.

Political scientist Christopher Pyle of Mt. Holyoke College , S. Hadley, Mass. , spoke for many Conference attendees when he said, “The evidence is overwhelming. The torture, kidnapping, and degradation of suspected terrorists was part of a deliberate policy, hatched and concealed at the highest levels of the Bush administration.” Pyle said the nation does not need any “truth commission” that will offer immunity to suspects who confess their crimes because “if there is no threat of punishment, and therefore no prospect of plea bargains, why would underlings admit anything?”

Any attempt by President Bush to pre-pardon himself or any of his aides involved in war crimes and torture would be “an obstruction of justice,” said Pyle.

He suggested one approach could be to appoint “a non-partisan prosecutor with considerable independence,” much as Attorney General Elliot Richardson did when he chose Archibald Cox to lead the Watergate team. “A special prosecutor could be chosen by the next attorney general from among any number of distinguished Republican attorneys.”

Professor Amy Bartholomew of Carleton University , Ottawa , told the conference that the Bush administration was attempting to replace the Nuremberg Principles adopted after World War Two with “a global and transnational state of exception” under which the U.S. can invade countries with impunity.

Peter Weiss of the Center For Constitutional Rights pointed out that there is no need for any new legislation to outlaw aggressive war, since “It is already outlawed by Article 2 of the United States Charter.”

Dean Velvel summarized the conference proceedings by saying, “In a nutshell, this conference was about giving continued life to the Nuremberg principles, which our country itself established, instead of allowing guilty members of the Bush Administration to destroy those principles wholesale by committing aggressive war and torture with impunity.”

(For additional information contact Sherwood Ross, sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

So, What's Up With McCain and The POWs/MIAs of Vietnam

I've had a gut-hunch for a long time that there is much more to McCain's Vietnam stories than meets the eye, or less depending on how one looks at it. Old John has ridden the POW whine train to a successful political career, helped along by his decision to dump his crippled wife to marry a very wealthy heiress.

Now, he has found himself a new beauty queen he hopes will help get him into the White House. It will be sad, indeed, if the McCain myth takes a deadly blow because McCain was as big a liar back then as he is now.

McCain and the POW Cover-up

By Sydney H. Schanberg

This article appeared in the October 6, 2008 edition of The Nation.

September 17, 2008

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute; a longer version of this article is available at nationinstitute.org.

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

McCain and the POW Cover-up

John McCain

Sydney H. Schanberg: The war hero has long sought to bury information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as McCain has made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number--probably hundreds--of the US prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate "Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs." The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid. The North Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners--just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, secretaries of defense under Nixon, said in a public session and under oath that they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data--letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion...some were left behind."

Furthermore, over the years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) received more than 1,600 firsthand reports of sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand accounts. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports. Yet the DIA, after reviewing them all, concluded that they "do not constitute evidence" that men were still alive.

There is also evidence that in the first months of Reagan's presidency, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.

Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors, and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion of the testimony relating to the ransom offer and wrote about it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story, saying his memory had played tricks on him.

But the story didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981. The Senate POW committee voted not to subpoena him to testify.

On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground--a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang--could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors--as US pilots had been trained to do--"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, says the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE."

McCain, whose POW status made him the committee's most powerful member, attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect--she began to cry.

After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything about those 20 POWs.

The committee's final report, issued in January 1993, began with a forty-three-page executive summary--the only section that drew the mainstream press's attention. It said that only "a small number" of POWs could have been left behind in 1973. But the document's remaining 1,180 pages were quite different. Sprinkled throughout are findings that contradict and disprove the conclusions of the whitewashed summary. This insertion of critical evidence that committee leaders had downplayed and dismissed was the work of a committee staff that had opposed and finally rebelled against the cover-up.

Pages 207-209 of the report, for example, contain major revelations of what were either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions. These pages say that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the distress signals US forces were trained to use in Vietnam--nor had they ever been tasked to look for such signals from possible prisoners on the ground.

In a personal briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me privately that as it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners, those prisoners became not only useless as bargaining chips but also a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men--those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture--were eventually executed. My own research has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few--if any--are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of McCain's role not only in keeping the subject out of public view but in denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in this hide-the-scandal campaign. The Arizona senator has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and National Security Adviser, among many others (including Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush's defense secretary).

An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved 1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence said that the "head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency."

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge--only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against "any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person." A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the Pentagon.

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.

McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the work of the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," "charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos." Family members who have personally pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.

The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW information is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I've met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.

It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo--to try to break down other prisoners--and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of McCain's debriefing when he returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by McCain.

(That McCain will release anything he isn't forced to release is highly unlikely)

In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II, was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."

McCain still didn't know the answer when his father died in 1981. He got his answer eighteen years later. In his 1999 memoir, the senator writes, "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father."

Does this hint at explanations for McCain's efforts to bury information about prisoners or other disturbing pieces of the Vietnam War? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing rekindles his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of someone's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about.

About Sydney H. Schanberg

Sydney H. Schanberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has since 1959 been a reporter and columnist for the New York Times, Newsday and the Village Voice. He has reported extensively on the POW story. more...

Are Conservatives Turning On McCain/Palin?

or Palin/McCain, whichever is operative this week?

David Brooks writes in the New York Times that Sarah Palin is unqualified:

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that
the nation's founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest
offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of
professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like
Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived
through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was
anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive
practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first
term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance,
the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired
skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

...

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a
corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of
governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national
issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like
President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with
brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Ross Douthat agrees at the Atlantic:

Now that we've seen the entirety of the Palin-Gibson
tete-a-tete, I concur with Rich Lowry and Rod Dreher. The most that can
be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal
gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue
outside her comfort zone. Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones
that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but
they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be
able to answer. And there's no way to look at her performance as
anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of
her candidacy - that it's just too much, too soon - and a splash of
cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the
national stage.

And in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen goes off on McCain, seizing on the Palin pick as a sign of how far gone the candidate is:

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be
unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar
higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that
very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of
the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the
shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just
as honorably. No more, though.
...

His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his
political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country
-- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for.
Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to
become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all
right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

Democracy?

Are Americans really smart enough to take on the mantle of democracy.

One does have to wonder.....

Robert C. Koehler: Goo-Goo America; Republicans declare all-out war on democracy 9/20

Friday, September 19, 2008

By 2 to 1, Americans blame Goopers For Economic Crisis

By Paul Steinhauser
CNN Deputy Political Director

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- By a 2-to-1 ratio, Americans blame Republicans over Democrats for the financial crisis that has swept across the country the past few weeks, a new national poll suggests.

Sen. Barack Obama greets supporters during a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Monday.

That may be contributing to better poll numbers for Sen. Barack Obama against Sen. John McCain in the race for the White House.

In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey out Monday afternoon, 47 percent of registered voters questioned said Republicans are more responsible for the problems currently facing financial institutions and the stock market; only 24 percent said Democrats are more responsible.

Twenty percent blame both parties equally and 8 percent say neither party is to blame.

The poll also indicates more Americans think Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, would do a better job handling an economic crisis than McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. Watch Obama blast McCain on the economy »

Forty-nine percent of those questioned said Obama, D-Illinois, would display good judgment in an economic crisis, six points higher than McCain, R-Arizona.

And Obama has a 10-point lead over McCain when it comes to who respondents think would better handle the economy overall.

These numbers seem to be affecting the battle for the presidency. Fifty-one percent of registered voters now say they will back Obama, five points ahead of McCain, at 46 percent.

Don't Miss

McCain and Obama were tied at 48 percent apiece in the previous CNN/Opinion Research survey conducted September 5-7.

Obama's advantage, while growing, is still within the poll's sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Where did Obama make his gains?

"In two core McCain constituencies: men, who now narrowly favor Obama, and seniors, who have also flipped from McCain to Obama," said Bill Schneider, a CNN senior political analyst.

When including people most likely to vote, the results are pretty much the same. Among likely voters, Obama has a four-point lead, 51 percent to 47 percent. Watch McCain blast Obama for not having a plan »

A CNN Poll of Polls calculated Monday also shows Obama leading McCain -- 49 percent to 44 percent.

"The economy has always been considered John McCain's Achilles' heel, and the CNN Poll of Polls started to show an Obama edge in the middle of last week -- just as the financial crisis began to hit home for many Americans," said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director.

The poll also expands to include third-party candidates. When included in the results, independent Ralph Nader has the support of 4 percent of those polled, with Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney each at 1 percent. Also, Obama has the backing of 48 percent of likely voters, three points ahead of McCain's 45 percent.

A couple of other factors in the survey appear to contribute to Obama's slight rise and McCain's slight drop in the polls. Fifty-three percent of those questioned say McCain, if elected, will mostly carry out the policies of President Bush, who remains extremely unpopular with most Americans. Bush's disapproval rating is up three points from the previous CNN/Opinion Research poll. Watch Obama's ad tying McCain to Bush »

The survey also indicates Obama has recaptured the "change" factor. Just after the Republican convention, Obama's lead had shrunk to eight points when voters were asked which candidate would be more likely to bring change. His lead is up to 14 points in the new poll.

The margin of error on that question is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Another factor could be McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Thirty-five percent of those questioned have an unfavorable opinion of her, up 8 points from a previous survey. And two-thirds believe she and her husband should testify in the Alaska investigation into the firing of a state official.

"Change has always been Obama's strong suit, but McCain and Palin clearly made inroads into that issue during the GOP convention," Holland said. "Palin, in particular, was seen as an agent of change when she made her first appearance on the national stage. That may be changing now."

The poll also sheds more light on how Americans feel about the financial crisis. Twenty-two percent said they are "frightened" by the crisis, while two-thirds said they are "concerned." Eleven percent said they are "not worried."

Most Americans think the programs to deal with the financial crisis currently being worked on by Congress and the Bush administration will be unfair to U.S. taxpayers, but they think those programs will help the economy.

Six in 10 think the federal government should step in and address the financial crisis, and 37 percent say the government should stay out. But when it comes to last week's bailouts, support slips to 55 percent. Given concerns about how future programs will affect taxpayers, it's conceivable that public support for the new government plans could be even lower.

The survey comes out just four days before McCain and Obama face off in the first of three presidential debates. Will the debates make a difference? Probably, since the poll finds that 14 percent of Americans say they haven't made up their minds yet.

The first debate, scheduled for Friday in Oxford, Mississippi, will focus on foreign policy, a topic that may play into what some registered voters see as a strength for McCain. The poll finds 54 percent of them believe McCain would display better judgment in an international crisis; 42 percent believe Obama would.

The margin of error on that question is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Conducted Friday through Sunday, the CNN/Opinion Research poll questioned 1020 Americans including 909 registered voters and 697 likely voters

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Talking Back To Barack

Espanola, New Mexico - Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama promised fresh ideas Thursday to calm America's financial meltdown and help struggling families avoid mortgage foreclosure, saying "this is not a time for fear, it's not a time for panic."

Nope, not time to panic, mainly because panicking usually does more harm than good and who the hell has the energy to panic in the first place. These last 7 years have worn me to a damn frazzle. I couldn't muster up the energy to panic if my pants were on fire.

Obama also heaped criticism and sarcasm on Republican rival John McCain and mocked his promise to fire the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission if elected."I think that's all fine and good but here's what I think," Obama said. "In the next 47 days you can fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path.

Barack, I have a few years on you. I'm sort of at that age when knowledge and history (both studied about and lived) begin to all come together and one begins seeing everything from a new perspective; a perspective that only comes with having lived, at least, a half century. So, please allow me to advise you on a really quite simple fact of history. Of course, life is never quite so simple. That's why we can't usually see ourselves brazenly repeating the same dreadful mistakes over and over again.

If you step back a bit, you will see (as you probably already do) that the one constant, at least in my lifetime, has been the never-ending struggle between Capitalism and Communism. That's what it is always about, in the final analysis. Other countries deal with the eternal struggle with various forms of compromise.

Not us.

The Right-wing honestly believes that all social programs, unless they are run by some religious group, no matter how bizarre, untrained or out-right dangerous they are, are a result of "obvious" communist creep. Even policies that would be considered "socialist' by most people are viral, totalitarian, communism to the citizens of Wingnuttia. It's free market capitalism or nothing.

So, what the hell does "free-market capitalism" mean, anyhow? Does anyone know? Whatever it is, it doesn't appear to be working for most folks. I do know that when capitalist society disintergrates, as it will when left completely unregulated, it becomes authoritarian fascist, indeed, no matter the image it wishes to maintain.

"Don't just get rid of one guy. Get rid of this administration," he said. "Get rid of this philosophy. Get rid of the do-nothing approach to our economic problem and put somebody in there who's going to fight for you."

Does the American electorate know what they want or need for that matter? I hate to say this as a member of that electorate, but I don't believe that the American voter has a clue what she or he wants to be fought for; Mom and apple pie? Some other American myth?

I can only hope that Americans recognize this period in time for what it is; a second chance, as a nation.

Obama came up with yet another way to poke fun at McCain for his comment Monday that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. "This comment was so out of touch that even George Bush's White House couldn't agree with it when they were asked about it. They had to distance themselves from John McCain."

President Bush has used the same language many times but his press secretary would not repeat the line Wednesday in the face of historic financial turbulence.

With the economy rocketing to the front of the campaign agenda, Obama said he would unveil new proposals Friday in Florida. Senior members of his economic team were flying to Miami to meet with Obama before his announcement.

Obama also had telephone discussions Thursday about the financial markets with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Fed chief Paul Volcker and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

Summers and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were among those expected in Florida for Friday's meeting. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett and former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were to participate by telephone, along with O'Neill and others.

Obama's stop in northern New Mexico's Rio Arriba County was aimed at energizing the Hispanic vote, which is crucial for his hopes of carrying this state. New Mexico voted for George W. Bush in 2004 but Democrat John Kerry got 65 percent of the vote in Rio Arriba. The county is about 73 percent Hispanic and 12 percent Native American, according to the 2000 Census.

Gov. Bill Richardson, warming up the crowd in a community plaza, said the Hispanic vote in tossup states Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada "is going to decide this election." Obama visited each of those states, along with California, on his Western swing and then was heading to Florida for two days of campaigning. He ended the day at an Albuquerque fundraiser that hosts said raised more than $1.7 million.

I like Bill Richardson, but I wish people would stop making this kind of comment. No one group wins an election. It is usually the independents ( a very amorphous bunch to say the least) who decide elections, but no identifiable group decides an election alone. It seems to me to be pandering to ethnic egos, probably not the healthiest action one could take to help heal our nation's wounds.

Saying that McCain strongly advocated deregulation and then changed his mind, Obama said: "We can't afford to lurch back and forth between positions depending on the latest news of the day when dealing with an economic crisis.

McCain's not lurching back and forth on policy. We all know what his policy is going to be, if he is elected; more of the same. Finish breaking the federal government and get rid of everything that communist, FDR, did "to" this country. Until then, he will say whatever he has to say, no matter if it's true or not. What's worse, he will continue to repeat the same lies whether they are debunked or not. The McCain's are no better than the Bushies. Actually, I believe that they are even worse. Most people will stop lying once they are caught red-tongued, so to speak, but not this crowd. They are more Cheney-esque. They just keep on telling the same made-up B.S., no matter that 99% of the rest of the world believes they've lost all touch with reality

"We need some clear and steady leadership and that's why I was ahead of the curve in calling for regulation," he said. "And that's why I'm calling on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to use their emergency authorities to maintain the flow of credit, to support the availability of mortgages and to ensure that our financial system is well capitalized."

In response, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said: "When Barack Obama came to Washington, he chose to strengthen his ties to spiraling lenders like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their jet-set CEOs, not make change. The American people cannot afford leadership that puts a higher premium on campaign contributions than protecting hardworking Americans."

(Tucker Bonds is almost a bigga idiot as Tucker Carlson)

A Senator is not a leader. He isn't the president. He moves in the circles of the congress, consensus and such.

Briefly outlining his proposals, he said he would call for a Homeowner and Financial Support Act "that would establish a more stable and permanent solution than the daily improvisations that have characterized policy making over the past year."

I would feel better if someone would tell the truth about the "ownership society." What one owns, he/she is owned by.

Bush's ownership society is not the American dream, it is the American nightmare.

He said his measures would provide capital to the financial system, insure liquidity to allow the financial markets to function and "get serious about helping struggling families to restructure their mortgages on affordable terms so they can stay in their homes."

The new proposals were intended to demonstrate that Obama is the candidate who would bring change, not just promise it, and that he has the ideas to prove it.

"Everywhere you look," he said, "the economic news is troubling. But here's the thing for so many of you here in northern New Mexico and for so many Americans -- this isn't really news at all. Because you've been going through hardships for a lot longer than Wall Street has."

This be the truth and no one can doubt it, except the super-wealthy

"Here's what I also know," Obama said. "This is not a time for fear, it's not a time for panic. This is a time for resolve and it is a time for leadership."

McCain's campaign released a new television ad Thursday that says among those advising Obama on housing policy is Franklin Raines, the former Fannie Mae chief executive. The government recently took control of the mortgage giant to help stabilize the housing market.

Obama's campaign released a statement from Raines, who says he is not an Obama adviser. The campaign also released a response ad that turns the spotlight on McCain's "fundamentally wrong" economic advisers.

Are there really people out there who are so freakin' stupid that they can't 'guess who is on the side of ordinary American?

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

A Bad Week For Market Capitalism

Does AIG Spell the end for strict Capitalisism; or as it was know in biblical times: Worship of the Golden Calf.

by Edmund Ross

With a single act the concept of "conservatism" as espoused by centuries of free market capitalists is washed away. The heart and soul of the ideology; small government, low taxes, and free markets; has been exposed as nothing but a fair weather ideology, something that works when things go well and fails when circumstances do not. The U.S. government bailout of Insurance Giant AIG demonstrates the failure of the conservative ideology and exposes its proponents as frauds.

"We're in trouble, save us" was the call that came out from insurance giant AIG after its high risk gamble produced a downside it could not cope with. That AIG asked for the government nationalization of itself is only a little surprising since the alternative was bankruptcy. That the rest of the "free market" proponents are sighing with relief is the truly amazing story.

First; the only institution with the ability to save the insurance giant is big government, the same big government the proponents hate.

Second; AIG's failure is not related to tax policy, government regulation, trade tariffs, or any of the other principles the proponents hold up as the reasons business struggle to prosper. AIG's failure is because it played in markets it thought it understood, but didn't. AIG's failure is failure of businessmen doing business poorly.

Third; the calls for nationalization of the insurance giant demonstrates the hypocrisy of those same people who want government to get out of the way of business and economics. All of a sudden they need this government to save them. They need all that tax revenue they hate collecting to bail out a major player whose collapse could endanger the entire financial system. If there wasn't a big government ready to play an active role there might not be much of a financial system left.

When a conservative think tank such as the Heritage Foundation or CATO Institute calls for free trade and less government, AIG is the three letter response that destroys the myth they are perpetuating. When the small government ideologues such as Steve Forbes make their case for the evils of government, AIG is the three letter response. When an individual asks for government assistance because he is either unfortunate, reckless, lazy, or simply unlucky, AIG is the response. When "push came to shove" the free market conservatives blinked and with that blink an entire ideology came crumbling down. The age of the welfare state is back and the welfare the state is protecting belongs to the very people that hate the concept.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Suspicions Continue In Anthrax Case

By LARA JAKES JORDAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the of Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday he does not believe that Dr. Bruce Ivins acted alone in the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks. Sen. Patrick Leahy was one of the targets of the lethal anthrax-laced letters that killed five and sickened 17 in fall 2001.

At a hearing in front of his committee, the Vermont Democrat told FBI Director Robert Mueller that he thinks other people must have been involved.

Leahy did not say why he believed Ivins had help and he also cast doubt that the Army scientist was the attacker in the first place.

"If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all," Leahy said.

He added: "I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact. I believe that there are others out there, I believe there are others who could be charged with murder. I just want you to know how I feel about it, as one of the people who was aimed at in the attack."

Mueller did not directly contradict Leahy, saying "I understand that concern."

Still, Mueller maintained the Justice Department's view that Ivins was the mastermind and sole attacker.

"In the investigation to date, we have looked at every lead and followed every lead to determine whether anybody else was involved, and we will continue to do so," Mueller told Leahy. "And even if the case does become closed, if we receive additional evidence, indicating the participation of any additional person, we certainly would pursue that."

The Justice Department and FBI have yet to close the case on the "Amerithrax" investigation after declaring Ivins its only suspect last month. Ivins killed himself in July after learning that prosecutors were preparing to indict him.

Republicans shared Leahy's doubts surrounding the case.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top GOP member of the panel, said he had problems with some of the evidence against Ivins that has been made public. In a testy exchange with Mueller, he also demanded to have a say in selecting scientists who will be performing an independent review of the DNA fingerprinting analysis of the anthrax that lies at the heart of the government's case.

The review by the National Academy of Sciences will be made up of private scientists who did not assist the FBI in the investigation, and could take up to 18 months to complete. Mueller said he would consider allowing the Judiciary Committee to suggest scientists, but noted that the NAS and Justice Department likely would have to agree to it.

"What's there to consider, Director Mueller?" Specter said. "We'd like to have the authority to name some people there to be sure of its objectivity. We're not interlopers here. This is an oversight matter. What's there to consider?"

Mueller said "to the extent that the rules of the science allow that to happen, I have no objection to that request."

"Well, that's not far enough," Specter snapped.

NAS spokesman William Kearney said the organization would "welcome input on potential committee members" from Congress, federal agencies, scientific community and the general public. Still, all suggestions must be approved by the NAS president, Kearney said.

Sitting in the front row of the audience at the Senate hearing was Dr. Steven Hatfill, another Army scientist who for years was wrongly accused of orchestrating the attacks. The Justice Department in June settled a $5.8 million lawsuit with Hatfill, who claimed his privacy rights were violated by officials speaking with reporters about the case.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a longtime skeptic of the anthrax investigation, grilled Mueller on how the FBI could have focused on Hatfill for years when investigators as early as 2002 had lab records showing Ivins was conducting late-night research in the days immediately before the deadly letters were mailed.

"Shouldn't the FBI apologize to Dr. Hatfill?" Grassley asked. "Please explain how chasing an innocent man for four years was not a mistake, as you said it was not a mistake."

Mueller said the FBI investigators acted appropriately throughout the case — based on the information they had at any given time.

Hatfill, smiling, left the hearing after Grassley's questions.

The yield on 3-month U.S. Treasuries....Way Down

Wed Sep 17, 2008 1:00pm EDT

NEW YORK, Sept 17 (Reuters) - The yield on 3-month U.S. Treasury bills sell to 0.02 percent early afternoon New York trade on Wednesday amid investors' panicked scramble into the safe haven of ultra short-dated government securities, traders said.

The 3-month U.S. Treasury bill yield "last traded at 0.02 percent as an actual trade and may have traded negative earlier today," said Sean Murphy, Treasuries trader at RBC Capital Markets in New York, shortly after 12:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT).

The last time the 3-month U.S. T-bill yield was at or below zero was in January 1940, said Bryan Taylor, chief economist with Global Financial Data in Los Angeles.

Murphy cited "a flight to quality into the Treasury bill market." "People are just panicking and they just want their principal," he said.

Andrew Brenner, analyst at MF Global Inc, said the 3-month bill traded at 0.02 percent.

"Probably there's disappointment in the Fed's decision (to hold interest rates unchanged) yesterday and what's transpiring is that banks are just pulling back and not lending and not being able to get the funding they need," Murphy said.

(Reporting by John Parry; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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The Keating 5 , Rage and John McCain

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The Keating Five and John McCain: Poor Judgment, Uncontrolled Rage, Indecision, and Wimpy Behavior

The Savings and Loan Scandal of the late 1980’s resulted in the failure of 747 savings and loan associations, costing over $160 billion. The federal government ended up bailing out the saving and loan associations to the tune of $120 billion (Over $1.3 billion went to Neil Bush’s S&L, George W.’s brother). Most economists believe that the crisis led to the recession of 1990-91.
Five US Senators were involved in an influence-peddling scandal, improperly trying to steer regulators away from Charles Keating’s troubled Lincoln Savings and Loan. John McCain was one of the Keating Five.

McCain’s involvement is vitally important as our nation struggles with the current financial crisis because it testifies to his lack of judgment and his inability to make decisions in a time of crisis. The US Senate investigation that followed the scandal cited McCain’s “poor judgment.” McCain agreed with that assessment.

What was his poor judgment?

· Meeting with regulators with the clear intention of steering them away from investigating Keating.

· Accepting $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and associates.

· Getting into business with Keating. Cindy and her father invested $359,100 in a shopping center scheme with Keating.

· Taking nine trips, including 3 to the Bahamas, on Keating’s dime. McCain brought his family and babysitter on these trips.

The Arizona Republic ran a series on its home state senior senator in March of 2007. The following are excerpts from the portion of the series on McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal.

The whole story can be read here:
http://www.azcentral.com/news/specials/mccain/articles/0301mccainbio-chapter7.html

· "McCain's a wimp," Keating replied, according to the book Trust Me, by Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden. "We'll go talk to him." Keating had other business on Capitol Hill and did not reach McCain's office until 1:30. A DeConcini staffer already had told McCain about the "wimp" insult. When he arrived, Keating presented McCain with a laundry list of demands for the regulators.

· In an interview with The Republic, Black said the meeting was a show of force by Keating, who wanted the senators to pressure the regulators into dropping their case against Lincoln. The thrift was in trouble for violating "direct investment" rules, which prohibited S&Ls from taking large ownership positions in various ventures. "The Senate is a really small club, like the cliche goes," Black said. "And you really did have one-twentieth of the Senate in one room, called by one guy, who was the biggest crook in the S&L debacle." Black said the senators could have accomplished their goal "if they had simply had us show up and see this incredible room and said, 'Hi. Charles Keating asked us to meet with you. 'Bye.'"McCain previously had refused DeConcini's request to meet with the Lincoln auditors themselves. In Worth the Fighting For, McCain wrote that he remained "a little troubled" at the prospect, "but since the chairman of the bank board didn't seem to have a problem with the idea, maybe a discussion with the regulators wouldn't be as problematic as I had earlier thought."McCain concedes that he failed to sense that Gray and the thrift examiners felt threatened by the senators' meddling.

· According to nearly verbatim notes taken by Black, McCain started the second meeting with a careful comment. "One of our jobs as elected officials is to help constituents in a proper fashion," McCain said. "ACC (American Continental Corp.) is a big employer and important to the local economy. I wouldn't want any special favors for them. . . . "I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper." Black said the comment had the opposite effect for the regulators. It made them nervous about what might really be going on. "McCain was the weirdest," Black said. "They were all different in their own way. McCain was always Hamlet . . . wringing his hands about what to do."

· As the investigation dragged through 1988, McCain dodged the hardest blows. Most landed on DeConcini, who had arranged the meetings and had other close ties to Keating, including $50 million in loans from Keating to DeConcini's aides. But McCain made a critical error. He had adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent. Keating was no ordinary constituent to McCain. On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433. When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself. "You're a liar," McCain said when a Republic reporter asked him about the business relationship between his wife and Keating. "That's the spouse's involvement, you idiot," McCain said later in the same conversation. "You do understand English, don't you?" He also belittled reporters when they asked about his wife's ties to Keating. "It's up to you to find that out, kids." The paper ran the story. In his 2002 book, McCain confesses to "ridiculously immature behavior" during that particular interview and adds that The Republic reporters' "persistence in questioning me about the matter provoked me to rage."

· In the book, DeConcini reiterates his allegation that McCain leaked to the media "sensitive information" about certain closed proceedings in order to hurt DeConcini, Riegle and Cranston. It's a fairly serious charge. The Boston Globe revisited the Keating Five leaks in 2000. The story paraphrased a congressional investigator, Clark B. Hall, as personally concluding that "McCain was one of the principal leakers." The newspaper also reported that McCain, under oath, had denied involvement with the leaks. McCain owns up to his mistake this way: "I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Palin and Troopergate

A former top Justice Department prosecutor now working for John McCain's presidential campaign has been helping to direct an aggressive legal strategy aimed at shutting down a pre-election ethics investigation into Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

The growing role of Edward O'Callaghan, who until six weeks ago served as co-chief of the terrorism and national security unit of the U.S. attorney's office in New York, illustrates just how seriously the McCain campaign is taking the so-called "troopergate" inquiry into Palin's firing last summer of Walt Monegan, Alaska's Public Safety Commissioner.

O'Callaghan emerged publicly for the first time this week when he told reporters at a McCain campaign press conference, in Anchorage, that Palin is "unlikely to cooperate" with an Alaskan legislative inquiry into Monegan's firing because it had been "tainted" by politics. That new stand appeared to directly contradict a previous vow, expressed by her official gubernatorial spokesman on July 28, that Palin "will fully cooperate" with an investigation into the matter.

But O'Callaghan (who resigned from the U.S. attorney's office at the end of July to join the McCain campaign) is doing more than just public relations when it comes to "troopergate." He told NEWSWEEK that he and another McCain campaign lawyer (whom he declined to identify) are serving as legal "consultants" to Thomas Van Flein, the Anchorage lawyer who at state expense is representing Palin and her office in the inquiry. "We are advising Thomas Van Flein on this matter to the extent that it impacts on the national campaign," he said. "I'm helping out on legal strategy." A McCain spokesman said Wednesday that, while Van Flein was originally hired last month by the Alaska Department of Law to represent Palin and her office, that arrangement has been changed over the past week and he is now being paid only by Palin and her husband — not state funds. He has not billed the state for his work, the spokesman said.

The investigation revolves around allegations that Palin fired Monegan, the state's top cop, because he rebuffed intense pressure from the governor and her aides to dismiss Mike Wooten, a state trooper involved in a messy custody battle with Palin's sister. Critics, including Monegan himself, have accused Palin of being obsessed over the Wooten matter—sending him repeated e-mails about it—in an attempt to use her public office to settle a private score.

But Palin, while acknowledging her chagrin that Wooten was still on the state police force (she told ABC's Charlie Gibson last week that the trooper was engaged in "dangerous and illegal activities" and had "threatened to kill my dad") has said she never directly told Monegan to fire the trooper. Palin and her lawyers have also said that she had other reasons for firing Monegan, including a dispute over the state public-safety budget and actions her lawyers have depicted as "insubordination." (Wooten has denied Palin's charges that he threatened her family and contended he has already been appropriately disciplined for his wrongdoings—including Tasering his 10-year old stepson—as a state trooper.)

National Polls: Can they really be trusted?

In a word, NO!

Ernest Partridge: Should We Believe the Polls?

www.crisispapers.org/essays8p/polls.html

Should we believe the most recent public opinion polls? Today’s “dead heat” seems inconsistent with other statistics. Among them: New registrations are overwhelmingly Democratic: The AP reported September 7 that during the primary season, “more than two million Democrats [were added] to voter rolls in the 28 states that register voters according to party affiliation.

The Republicans have lost nearly 344 thousand voters in the same state." The same AP article reported that nationwide, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, 42 million to 31 million.

As recently as September, Gallup reported that the Democrats had a ten percent lead in party affiliation among voters: 47% to 37%. And 80% of the American public is “dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States.”

And yet Gallup chooses to survey an even number of Democrats and Republicans.

Why?

In addition, the pollsters contact users of land-line phones and exclude cell phone users. Presumably, younger and more liberal voters are more inclined to use cell phones. Both factors would surely inflate the GOP numbers. [and there's the rigged elections factor...]

Another Terrorist Attack On Our Embassy (Yemin)

....and we agree, this won't stop until the perpetrators of the crimes committed in Iraq and other places are held accountable to the fullest extent of international law.

US Embassy attacked in Yemen.

By: John Amato on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 12:30 PM - PDT

This is awful…Since we invaded Iraq, these attacks will only continue…

Tristero:

Speaking of Iraq, in Baghdad, ten also died. And that’s not all. Read and weep about the “success” of the “surge.”

McCain Economic Plan: A Disaster For The Country

Alan Greenspan Calls the McCain Economic Plan a Disaster for the Country: By E. Nelson

www.opednews.com/articles/Alan-Greenspan-calls-the-M-by-E-Ne...

Much of the current Republican attitude, that has led to this mess, started with Ronald Reagan famously saying, "Greed is good". But if any one single event could be most directly linked to the current financial mess it would be the reversal of the Glass-Steagall act back in 1999. Led by the Republican controlled congress Phil Gramm, McCain's current top economic advisor, successfully repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933 which was put into place after the "Great Depression" and which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and provided regulations designed to control dangerous speculation within the banking industry.

Phil Gramm was the chief architect for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed much of the Glass-Steagall act and was eventually signed into law by Bill Clinton on November 12th, 1999. Do we really want a president who yesterday said to an audience in Jacksonville, Florida that the economy is strong on the same day the stock market plunged 504 points and whose top economic advisor thinks the American people should stop whining about their economic woes?

Scientist concedes 'honest mistake' about weaponized anthrax

Peter B. Jahrling, who aided the federal probe of the 2001 mailings, says he erred when he told White House officials that material he examined probably had been altered to make it more deadly.

By David Willman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 17, 2008

WASHINGTON -- An acclaimed government scientist who assisted the federal investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailings said Tuesday that he erred seven years ago when he told top Bush administration officials that material he examined probably had been altered to make it more deadly.

The scientist, Peter B. Jahrling, had observed anthrax spores with the aid of an electron microscope at the government's biological warfare research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md.

Anthrax blend led FBI to Ivins

On Oct. 24, 2001, Jahrling was summoned to the White House after reporting to his superiors what he believed to be signs that silicon had been added to anthrax recovered from a letter addressed to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

The presence of silicon was viewed with alarm because the material, if artificially added to the anthrax, would make it more buoyant in air and more capable of penetrating deeply into the lungs.

"I believe I made an honest mistake," Jahrling said in response to questions e-mailed to him for this article, adding that he had been "overly impressed" by what he thought he saw under the microscope.

"I should never have ventured into this area," said Jahrling, who is a virologist, referring to his analysis of the anthrax, which is a bacterium. Jahrling's initial analysis -- and his briefing of officials at the White House -- was first detailed in a 2002 book by bestselling author Richard Preston.

Although Jahrling was careful in 2001 not to implicate Iraq or any other regime in the mailings, others used his analysis to allege that the silicon perhaps linked the letters to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Inhaled anthrax can kill at a rate of 80% to 90% unless patients are treated quickly with an antibiotic.

Jahrling's comments Tuesday came soon after a congressional hearing at which FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III announced that he was arranging for an outside review of scientific findings that helped the bureau conclude that another scientist at Ft. Detrick, Bruce E. Ivins, perpetrated the deadly mailings. The review is to be overseen by the National Academy of Sciences, Mueller said.

FBI scientists and outside experts hired by the bureau to analyze the anthrax recovered from the mailings announced Aug. 18 that although they had found silicon, it occurred within the spores naturally and was not added.

In challenging those experts, one journalist reminded them that Jahrling, among other scientists, had concluded otherwise.

Some critics of the FBI investigation have asserted that Ivins lacked the skills to have "weaponized" the anthrax with any additive that enhanced its virulence.

At Tuesday's hearing, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), pressed Mueller anew about how the silicon got into the spores.

After being informed of the events at the hearing, Jahrling renounced his earlier analysis.

"In retrospect," Jahrling said, "I believe I was mistaken and defer to the experts."

Ivins, 62, a civilian bacteriologist for the Army, died July 29 after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol 3.

Attorneys Ivins had hired to defend him against criminal charges being prepared by the Justice Department have said that they would have won his acquittal if the case had gone to trial.

In 2001, Jahrling briefed a roomful of officials at the White House, including Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Mueller and Tom Ridge, President Bush's secretary of Homeland Security.

The next day, the Washington Post published a front-page article headlined "Additive Made Spores Deadlier" that reported:

"The presence of the high-grade additive was confirmed for the first time yesterday by a government source familiar with the ongoing studies, which are being conducted by scientists" at Ft. Detrick.

The article said that the United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq were "the only three nations known to have developed the kind of additives that enable anthrax spores to remain suspended in the air, making them more easily inhaled" and more deadly.

At the time, Jahrling was employed as the senior civilian scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, within Ft. Detrick.

Jahrling is a past winner of the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for Mueller, said after the congressional hearing that the FBI was seeking the outside review while maintaining "full confidence in our scientific approach."

"Consideration of an outside review began before any public disclosure of the scientific aspects of the investigation," Kortan said.

david.willman@latimes.com

Times researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Pakistan Invades America --

"Without Permission"

By M. Junaid Levesque-Alam

17/09/08 "MRZine" -- -- The U.S. State Department lodged a sharp protest over ongoing Pakistani missile strikes and ground raids today, saying the Islamic Republic was violating American sovereignty.

"We will try to convince Pakistan . . . to respect [the] sovereignty of the United States -- and God willing, we will convince," State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.¹

The controversy stems from the Pakistan Army's recent decision, leaked in a prominent Pakistani newspaper, to mount intensifying air attacks and new ground assaults against extremists hiding in American safe havens across the ocean.

American papers reported that under the new policy, the Pakistani military will no longer seek America's permission in killing Americans, but will inform American diplomats about these killings as a friendly gesture between close allies.²

Pakistan Army General Ashfaq Kayani told reporters outside Islamabad late last night that the new strategy was justified. "We are working to prevent more attacks on the Pakistani people," he said.³

The general's stance signified strong Pakistani dissatisfaction with America's reluctance to crack down on religious fundamentalists and neoconservatives, who, experts note, have deep ties to American intelligence services and military leaders. The largely unchecked extremists, experts observe, have used America to bolster the agenda of their ideological counterparts across the ocean in Israel, and to strike directly against Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world.

"We have to strike them over there so that they cannot order strikes against us here at home," General Kayani said, referring to American firepower that has terrorized hundreds of thousands of civilians on either side of the Pak-Afghan border and in the Middle East.

As Kayani spoke, new precision attacks and commando raids were being conducted against ranches in Texas, small towns in Alaska, the offices of AIPAC and energy-related lobbying firms in Washington, D.C. Commandos were also dispatched to America's unruly federally-administered Bible Belt, where resentment of government authority runs high.

Several high-value targets were killed in the attacks. Local media outlets claimed 50 civilians were also killed, but these assertions could not be independently verified. Pakistani officials said they would send in their own team to investigate the claims, time permitting.

Seeking to assuage domestic concerns, American officials downplayed the actions of their staunch ally. "The nation should not be upset by the statement of Pakistani General Kayani," White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in an official statement.⁴ "Pakistan respect U.S. sovereignty and looks at us as partners," she added.⁵

U.S. officials also insisted no secret deal had been reached beforehand allowing Pakistanis to strike inside American territory. "Media reports about authorization for Pakistani raids into the U.S. are incorrect," the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, told Fox News last night. She added that the South Asian country had "no aggressive designs or postures" toward America.⁶

Regimes allied to Pakistan, including those in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Palestine, expressed support for the new Pakistani strategy, citing the need to "remove and destroy" strongholds where key militants have masterminded attacks against their countries.⁷

Informed of this, Ambassador Patterson appeared unfazed, saying, "Pakistan respects American sovereignty." She insisted that Pakistani officials provided her with assurances that "no such order had been given" for new rules of engagement.⁸ Finally, the ambassador explained, America had already carried out its own recent military offensive that left hundreds of rural Americans dead, relieving the need for further Pakistani intervention.

But in Islamabad, Pakistani corps commanders said their new strategy would see continued implementation in the coming weeks. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one commander said that as far as Pakistan was concerned, "most things have been settled in terms of how we're going to proceed."⁹

Notes

Except for note 2, all the above-quoted statements are real quotes; only the roles have been switched.

1 Quote actually taken from Pakistani PM Yousaf Gilani. Reuters, Sept. 12, 2008. (http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=343756)

2 It was actually the Pakistan daily, Dawn, which reported on the U.S. policy shift as follows: "Under this new policy, the US military will notify Pakistan's government when it conducts raids, but will not seek its permission." Sept. 12, 2008.

3 Quote actually taken from US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen. Dawn (Pakistan Daily), Sept. 12, 2008.

4 Quote actually taken from PM Gilani. (Source: note 3)

5 Quote actually taken from Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani. (Source: note 3)

6 Quotes actually taken from Ambassador Haqqani. (Source: note 3)

7 Quote actually taken from U.S. ally and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2008. ()

8 Quotes actually taken from Ambassador Haqqani. (Source: note 7)

9 Quote actually taken from anonymous U.S. official. (Source: note 7)

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam is a Pakistani-American who blogs about America and Islam at Crossing the Crescent (www.crossingthecrescent.com). He writes about American Muslim identity for WireTap magazine and has been published in CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, The Nation (online), and The American Muslim. He works as a communications coordinator for an anti-domestic violence agency in the NYC area and obtained his undergraduate degree in journalism from Northeastern University. He can be reached at: junaidalam1 AT gmail.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Washington Is Risking War with Pakistan

By Robert Baer

17/09/08 "Time" - -- - As Wall Street collapsed with a bang, almost no one noticed that we're on the brink of war with Pakistan. And, unfortunately, that's not too much of an exaggeration. On Tuesday, the Pakistan's military ordered its forces along the Afghan border to repulse all future American military incursions into Pakistan. The story has been subsequently downplayed, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, flew to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, to try to ease tensions. But the fact remains that American forces have and are violating Pakistani sovereignty

You have to wonder whether the Bush administration understands what it is getting into. In case anyone has forgotten, Pakistan has a hundred plus nuclear weapons. It's a country on the edge of civil war. Its political leadership is bitterly divided. In other words, it's the perfect recipe for a catastrophe.

All of which begs the question, is it worth the ghost hunt we've been on since September 11? There has not been a credible sighting of Osama bin Laden since he escaped from Tora Bora in October 2001. As for al-Qaeda, there are few signs it's even still alive, other than a dispersed leadership taking refuge with the Taliban. Al-Qaeda couldn't even manage to post a statement on the Internet marking September 11, let alone set off a bomb.

U.S. forces have been entering Pakistan for the last six years. But it was always very quietly, usually no more than a hundred yards in, and usually to meet a friendly tribal chieftain. Pakistan knew about these crossings, but it turned a blind eye because it was never splashed across the front page of the country's newspapers. This has all changed in the last month, as the Administration stepped up Predator missile attacks. And then, after the New York Times ran an article that U.S. forces were officially given the go-ahead to enter Pakistan without prior Pakistani permission, Pakistan had no choice but to react.

On another level the Bush Administration's decision to step up attacks in Pakistan is fatally reckless, because the cross-border operations' chances of capturing or killing al Qaeda's leadership are slim. American intelligence isn't good enough for precision raids like this. Pakistan's tribal regions are a black hole that even Pakistani operatives can't enter and come back alive. Overhead surveillance and intercepts do little good in tracking down people in a backward, rural part of the world like this.

On top of it, is al-Qaeda worth the candle? Yes, some deadender in New York or London could blow himself up in the subway and leave behind a video claiming the attack in the name of al-Qaeda. But our going into Pakistan, risking a full-fledged war with a nuclear power, isn't going to stop him.

Finally, there is Pakistan itself, a country that truly is on the edge of civil war. Should we be adding to the force of chaos? By indiscriminately bombing the tribal areas along the Afghan border, we in effect are going to war with Pakistan's ethnic Pashtuns. They make up 15% of Pakistan's 167 million people. They are well armed and among the most fierce and xenophobic people in the world. It is not beyond their military capabilities to cross the Indus and take Islamabad.

Before it is too late, someone needs to sit the President down and give him the bad news that Pakistan is a bridge too far in the "war on terror."

Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down.

Socialism for the Super-Rich

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20080916_socialism_for_the_super_rich/

Posted on Sep 16, 2008

Here we go again: The Federal Reserve is bailing out another tanking financial institution—the insurance behemoth American International Group—by sinking $85 billion into AIG in return for a stake in the company. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a Wall Street investigation following this latest startling agreement between big government and big business.

The New York Times:

Still, the move will likely start an intense political debate during the presidential election campaign over who is to blame for the financial crisis that prompted the rescue.

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said Mr. [Henry] Paulson and Mr. [Ben] Bernanke had not requested any new legislative authority for the bailout at Tuesday night’s meeting. “The secretary and the chairman of the Fed, two Bush appointees, came down here and said, ‘We’re from the government, we’re here to help them,’ ” Mr. Frank said. “I mean this is one more affirmation that the lack of regulation has caused serious problems. That the private market screwed itself up and they need the government to come help them unscrew it.”

The decision was a remarkable turnabout by the Bush administration and Mr. Paulson, who had flatly refused over the weekend to risk taxpayer money to prevent the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the distressed sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America. Earlier this year, the government bailed out another investment bank, Bear Stearns, by engineering a sale to JPMorgan Chase that left taxpayers on the hook for up to $29 billion of bad investments by Bear Stearns. The government hoped at the time that this unusual step would both calm markets and lead to a recovery by the financial system. But critics warned at the time that it would only encourage others to seek bailouts, and the eventual costs to the government would be staggering.

Read more

Obama's Secret Weapon

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080916_boyarsky_obama_secret_weapon/

Posted on Sep 16, 2008

By Bill Boyarsky

While it’s fashionable for the media and some of his own supporters to be mourning the demise of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, they may well be overlooking an important point—that the vaunted McCain-Palin ticket has peaked.

What else but such blind optimism could be motivating the unflagging energy of thousands of Obama grass-roots workers? These optimists are making phone calls, walking door to door and recording voter information in a huge database. Some are even moving in with hospitable strangers and sleeping on couches so they can work in states far from home.

“The media doesn’t really know what’s going on with the grass-roots campaign,” Obama campaign worker Keith Martin told a dozen supporters in a pleasant and large Los Angeles yard last weekend as he prepared them to make telephone calls to Nevada. They nodded enthusiastically. By the end of the afternoon, their number had grown to 20. Similar events were being held across the country.

Whether these folks are hardheaded pols or softheaded and delusional will be determined by Election Day, Nov. 4. But a strong argument can be made that they—and the strategists who designed the grass-roots operation—are well prepared for a dash to victory over John McCain and Sarah Palin at the end of the campaign.

The timing is right for them. As they made their calls, powerful economic forces beyond their control—and that of McCain and Obama—were influencing the campaign. Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers headed into bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch was being purchased by Bank of America. The collapse of these famous and venerable firms was followed Monday morning by a report from the Federal Reserve that the nation’s industrial output dropped 1.1 percent in August, most of it in manufacturing and much in motor vehicle production. Economic troubles reached from Wall Street deep into neighborhoods around the country, already hit hard by foreclosures, dropping home prices and new difficulties in obtaining credit.

This will change the presidential campaign. Economic turmoil is bound to overshadow the so-called cultural wars that McCain and Palin have tried to ignite. The debate should shift to Obama’s ground.

An Obama campaign training video shows volunteers how to phone bank from home.

The Obama campaign is prepared for the shift. Its grass-roots effort is targeted at tossup states, including several suffering from the bad economy.

The drive, along with a successful voter registration drive in key states, has produced a potentially large turnout of Obama voters—one so big that it throws off the turnout estimates pollsters use for their surveys of likely voters. This would mean the polls have understated the Obama vote.

The Web site Pollster.Com, which compiles a number of surveys, said the race is about even. Obama is now leading in states with a total of 238 electoral votes and McCain in those with a total of 224. States with 76 electoral votes are rated tossups. A total of 270 electoral votes is needed to win.

To best follow the election, watch the numbers in the tossup states rather than those for the nation as a whole.

These are the Web site’s tossup states, with the number of their electoral votes and each candidate’s polling score by percentage: Nevada 5, McCain 47, Obama 44.7; Colorado 9, Obama 46.9, McCain 46.5; New Mexico 5, Obama 47.3, McCain 43.4; Montana 3, McCain 49, Obama 46; Michigan 17, Obama 47, McCain 44.3; Ohio 20, McCain 46, Obama 45.9; Virginia 13, McCain 48, Obama 45.9; New Hampshire 4, McCain 47, Obama 45.3.

My Saturday afternoon visit to the Los Angeles home, in an affluent neighborhood several miles south of the UCLA campus, showed the well-organized nature of the Obama grass-roots operation.

Organizer Martin explained that the volunteers were all calling Nevada, where President George W. Bush beat Sen. John Kerry in 2004. Kerry beat Bush in the strongly Democratic Las Vegas area, but Obama will have to increase the margin, plus improve on Kerry’s showing in the slightly Republican Reno area, to win Nevada’s four electoral votes, which could tip a tight national election.

The economy will undoubtedly shape the result. Foreclosures have hit Las Vegas-area subdivisions hard, and casino business is down.

The callers talk about the economy as they phone from lists from the campaign database, which contains information on each voter ranging from sex, age and party affiliation to whether a person sleeps days—important for Las Vegas casino night workers.

Using a script from the campaign, the volunteers asked those answering the phone if they supported Obama or leaned his way or if they were for McCain or someone else. Answers were entered in the VoteBuilder database. Follow-up calls are made to undecideds or leaners, along with personal visits from precinct walkers, increasing in frequency as Election Day approaches.

This is happening in each of the target states. It is the culmination of an effort that began at the start of the Obama campaign. It’s labor-intensive, requiring many thousands of well-organized volunteers. It’s expensive.

But the economy is in trouble, and if Obama can deliver a message strong and clear enough to match the efforts of his grass-roots workers, it could well work.

AP photo / LM Otero

Barack Obama with supporters in Texas. The Obama campaign’s unprecedented voter registration efforts have limited the accuracy of polling in contentious states.

Former GOP House leader says Cheney misled him on Iraq

Cheney is as paranoid as anyone I have ever seen in mental health practice, both research and clinical. If he is going to be in Washington, D.C. he should be at St. Elizabeth's, with the guy who attempted to kill Reagan.

The vice president told Dick Armey, who in 2002 spoke against going to war, that Saddam Hussein had direct ties to Al Qaeda and would soon have a suitcase nuclear weapon, a new book says.

From the Washington Post

September 16, 2008

WASHINGTON -- A GOP congressional leader who was wavering on giving President Bush the authority to wage war in late 2002 said Vice President Dick Cheney misled him by saying that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had direct personal ties to Al Qaeda terrorists and was making rapid progress toward a suitcase nuclear weapon, according to a new book by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman.

Cheney's accusations, described by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, came in a classified one-on-one briefing in the vice president's office in the Capitol.

Iraq's Nouri Maliki breaking free of U.S.

The threat Cheney described went far beyond public statements that have been criticized for relying on "cherry-picked" intelligence of unknown reliability. There was no intelligence to support the vice president's private assertions, Gellman reports.

Armey had spoken out against the coming war, and his opposition gave cover to Democrats who feared the political costs of appearing weak. Armey reversed his position after Cheney told him, he said, that the threat from Iraq was "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large."

Cheney said, according to Armey, that Iraq's "ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been "substantially refined since the first Gulf War."

Cheney linked that threat to Hussein's alleged ties to Al Qaeda, Armey said, explaining "we now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as Al Qaeda."

"Did Dick Cheney . . . purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?" Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case. . . . Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end."

Palin Just Keeps On Telling the Same Lies

Palin Keeps Lying, and Lying, and …

By Eugene Robinson —

What kind of person tells a self-aggrandizing lie, gets called on it, admits publicly that the truth is not at all what she originally claimed—and then goes out and starts telling the original lie again without changing a word?

Bush Could Still Attack Iran (No Kidding)

Bush plans to attack Iran, with or without Israel's help, especially if Obama wins. Of course, the McCain train-wreck of a campaign may cause BushCo to attempt complete annihilation and leave the blow-back for Obama to deal with.

Bush told some visiting friends from Texas that he was working on a plan to make sure that whomever is the next president, they will have few options other than to continue the Bush policy. The newspaper in Houston reported that Junior's friends were quite concerned about his mental health. Who the hell isn't concerned about his and Cheney's mental health?

Why don't we just make Israel the 51st state and be done with it. We need the taxes, right?

Yeah, right. Lets just keep adding states until statehood means nothing. Won't have far to go. Alaska and Hawaii already have movements afoot to secede from the union. Sarah Palin knows all about this, as she and her husband were members in good-standing of a secessionist political party in Alaska.

I, myself, cannot say much about this issue since I have wanted to leave here for years. Nevertheless, I have stayed, thinking that the only way to change the system is from within. There always comes a time, however, when one must put one's own principles above government; especially an illegitimate government who have been intent on shredding all that was left of the Constitution from day one of their administration.

I have always loved my country. At least I have always loved the country in which I was taught to believe, whether it ever existed or not. The founding principles of this nation are a goal, devotedly to be wished for and worked for. We have an overwhelming amount of work to be done. We have lost our country and it will not be easy to win it back. We have only ourselves to blame.

Most of us knew, from the get-go, what was happening after 9/11/01. Yes, we made our thoughts known, along with millions of other world citizens, by taking to the streets. Bush called us a "focus group."

What he has yet to say is that we were right then and we are right now. He never will. He can't seem to face the fact that his administration has taken this nation down a self-destructive, suicidal path. I find i hard to believe that this was a huge mistake for Bush and Cheney.

I believe it was intentional. The Goopers have tried to undo everything FDR did, because social-security and medicare are "socialist schemes." Yep, Pinkos, KGB Dupes!

Well, we can say to you, Mr.Bush:

We told you so, Mr. Bush! There were no WMD, no connection between Osama and Saddam and, therefore, no connections between 9/11 and Saddam. What the hell is wrong with you and the Dick?

By The Guardian

17/09/08 "The Guardian" -- - Despite the main finding in the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that it "has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran", the western media has focused on the issue of Tehran's lack of transparency over the IAEA investigation into recent intelligence allegations (Report, September 12). These involve missile re-entry vehicle projects and have been rejected by the Iranians, who have not even been permitted to see the documents upon which the allegations are founded.

This week the US Congress is debating two non-binding resolutions which, if passed, will greatly increase the likelihood of military intervention against Iran. They call on the US president to "increase economic, political and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities", and demand "stringent inspection requirements" of all goods entering or leaving Iran and an embargo of refined petroleum products to Iran. Although both resolutions exclude authorization for military action, the embargo will require a naval blockade. Such a blockade could result in skirmishes with the Iranian navy which could rapidly escalate.

The US is massing the largest armada of warships in the Gulf since 2003. Two aircraft carrier task forces are already there and a third was dispatched on August 22. French and British warships and carrier groups are also reportedly on their way. This has increased speculation that George Bush might authorize military attacks against Iran before the end of his term in office in January, or before the November elections to boost to the likelihood of a McCain presidency.

Stefan Simanowitz -Westminster Committee on Iran

Cool Gadgets For The New Depression

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Wed, 09/17/2008 - 2:20pm. Tony Peyser

Stuffing cash in mattresses is old school
Here's a new idea that's swell; so
What about specially made mattresses
Equipped with zippers or Velcro?

VERSE CASE SCENARIO

Tony Peyser provides daily poems and weekly cartoons for BuzzFlash and also writes the BuzzFlash column, "Blue State Jukebox." He was a daily cartoonist for the L.A. Times from 1994 to 1997. You can e-mail Tony at tonypeyser@yahoo.com.

Group: Palin's energy claims ‘not even close’ to the truth

Published Wednesday, September 17, 2008

FAIRBANKS — A nonpartisan fact-checking organization says Gov. Sarah Palin is “not even close” to the truth in her claims that Alaska supplies 20 percent of the country’s energy.

FactCheck.org said Sen. John McCain also is wrong when he touts Palin as being in charge of 20 percent of America’s energy supply.

Both candidates issued the claims in interviews with ABC’s Charles Gibson. Palin also made the claim at a campaign event Monday in Golden, Colo.

Palin was interviewed several times during two days last week in Alaska by Gibson. According to the transcript on ABC’s Web site, www.abc.com, Palin said, “Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to this table, Charlie, and that’s with the energy independence that I’ve been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.”

Hold it right there, FactCheck.org says. Twenty percent?

“If you’re going to be an energy expert — if that’s going to be your credential for being vice president of the United States — you should at least be able to get the numbers straight,” said Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org.

For 2007, Alaska is credited with 14 percent of U.S. domestic oil production, or 263.6 million barrels, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. However, Alaska accounts for only 5 percent of U.S. oil supplies, which come from foreign and domestic sources. But, Palin failed to qualify the stats as oil-only production. Alaska was responsible for 3.5 percent of domestic energy production and only 2.4 percent of total energy consumed in the U.S.

“Either way, whether she meant total energy production or total energy consumption, she was off by a full order of magnitude,” Jackson said. “I’m sure it was true once, that Alaska produced 20 percent of the oil produced in the U.S., but certainly not 20 percent of the oil consumed in the U.S.”

In a Sept. 3 interview with Gibson, McCain, talking about his running mate, said: “This is a very dynamic person. (Palin has) been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America’s energy supply.”

According to the fact-checking group, McCain used the figure again in an interview Thursday with a Maine news station.

When questioned, a campaign spokesman said Palin was referring to “oil and gas production,” Jackson said. “Lumping oil and gas in together really gets you farther away from the 20 percent figure. ... Her statistics were way off.”

The factcheck.org account says that McCain’s campaign pointed to the Resource Development Council for Alaska for the citation.

The nonprofit council is funded by its members, businesses and individuals from many resource sectors to promote responsible development of Alaska’s resources, including support for mining, oil and gas, fishing, timber and tourism industries.

The McCain campaign did not return a call by press time asking for comment.

Jackson said political reporters seem to be paying more attention to the factual accuracy of what candidates are claiming this year — and that they’re getting frustrated when candidates called out on factual errors keep handing out the same message.

In particular, he said, Palin and McCain were put to task last week on claims that Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks,” on the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, as she has repeated often on the campaign trail. Yet, Palin kept using the phrase in speeches.

“For a lot of reporters, this was kind of a slap in the face,” Jackson said.

“I think you saw quite a reaction to that.”

Palin hadn’t even taken office when Congress removed a controversial earmark on money for two Alaska bridges, the Knik Arm bridge near Anchorage and a separate bridge that would have linked Ketchikan with its airport on Gravina Island.

The state got the money anyway, based on a federal transportation funding formula.

Her claims about the bridge are wrong in another sense, which has earned her a “flip-flopper” tag from another fact-checking group, PolitiFact.com.

After winning the gubernatorial primary but before the 2006 general election, a Palin spokesperson, Curtis Smith, told the Associated Press that Palin supported the Ketchikan bridge project.

By early February, the new governor, Palin, had cut funding for Ketchikan’s bridge from a state budget proposed by former Gov. Frank Murkowski.

In September 2007, Palin directed the state Department of Transportation to find a fiscally responsible alternative for access to Ketchikan’s airport. She said that without federal funding, the state would not be able to afford a bridge and should instead upgrade the existing ferry system, according to an Associated Press news article.

FactCheck.org is a consumer advocate for voters, “a place where perplexed, confused voters can go when they hear dubious claims from candidates … or when they hear conflicting claims,” Jackson said.

The organization is not so bold as to think its work will change politicians’ behavior. But, Jackson said, voters should know candidates are at best giving only one side of the story, and, at worst, embellishing or falsifying.

Fact-checking groups can iron out the talk and offer up straight information.

“You can’t count on just listening to the candidates to get the full picture,” he said.

Faulty claims can be even more damaging when they’re tied to a basic premise.

McCain is zeroing in on Palin’s experience with oil and gas issues as a way to ground his claims that she is ready for the vice presidency.

After her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Palin served about a year on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a $118,000-per-year appointment. The quasi-judicial state agency manages oil and gas drilling, development and production and other matters on land that falls under the state’s jurisdiction.

The commission’s general concern is protection of health, safety and the environment.

Palin also is credited with securing a deal that could spur construction of a 1,715 mile long natural gas pipeline from Alaska’s far north, with an estimated 224 trillion cubic feet of natural gas resources, to a major natural gas hub in Alberta, Canada.

The deal, forged under the state’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, gives TransCanada $500 million in state funds as reimbursement for costs incurred in obtaining pipeline regulatory approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The license does not guarantee that the project — billed as the largest construction project in North America — will actually get off the ground.

Alaska political leaders have sought a natural gas line for years. When Palin took office, she scrapped plans made by her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, with producers. Instead, in early 2007, Palin proposed AGIA as a transparent, competitive process.

After more than a month of hearings, the Legislature granted an AGIA license to TransCanada in August, as the project that would “maximize benefits to Alaskans,” according to findings by the state Department of Natural Resources.

TransCanada was the sole applicant to meet all the state’s criteria.

Palin actively promoted TransCanada’s proposal before a legislature that was, at times, divided on whether to issue the license.

At a Fairbanks rally Sept. 10 welcoming her return to Alaska, Palin said national energy dependence will start in Alaska with the gas line.

“When the last section of that pipeline is laid and the valves are open, our state — our state — Alaska will be a leader in energy policy and our state will have brought Americans one step closer to energy independence and one step closer to an America free of foreign suppliers that do not have our interests at heart,” Palin said.

Which is exactly what should have been done in the days, weeks, months and years after 9/11/01. All the progress that has been made in the last few years, having to do with cuts in energy spending has been made by the American public, with no real leadership from Washington, D.C. It became clear, long ago that the oil men in the White House would not lead us in a way that is best for the naton and/or the planet on which we live.

Who can possibly forget our president's call to arms, after the nation was, supposedly, under attack by a terrorist organization under the protection of the Afghan government, ruled by the Taliban?

"Shop," he said,"fly, drive, consume like there's no tomorrow; by all means, spend money you don't have. Max out your credit cards and/or use the value of your home. It's the patriotic thing to do. Bin Laden hates us for our lifestyle, our freedoms."

Did anyone really buy that?

Our president told us to do the worst possible things for our own lives, not to mention that of the nation. Can't say that I ever bought it. It just didn't make any sense. Who could have possibly guessed, on that early September morn' in lower Manhattan, where we were headed; WWIII and how it will manifest from now on is anyone's guess. One thing, however, is very clear. McCain and Palin are worse than what we have endured for 7 years.

I know that believing anything could possibly be worse than the Bush administration, stretches one's mind a great deal. It leads us to a conclusion no one really wants to face....think about. It's far too overwhelming.

If we do not; if we refuse to acknowledge the horribly unpleasant truth, beginning with stolen power in 2000, if not in 2002, 2004 and even 2006, we are going to all die of denial.....a refusal to doubt anything the current administration has done, supposedly in the name of national security is our greatest flaw, as a nation. For The U.S.A., the practice of deceit, of being inauthentic, is the worst "sin."

Someone, maybe someone like Will Rogers....a national, folk, social commentator, once said something like this: "The wonderful thing about Americans is that an administration must lie to them in order to win public support for ......say.....the war in Iraq....or the one in Vietnam or Korea, for that matter. Not so wonderful, is how easily Americans can be lied to successfully. It is almost as if we are expecting it. Would we recognize truth if we saw it or heard it? Given what I see and hear on the Internet, I can't envision how this nation is ever going to come together as one.

Is it not a good thing that Americans are so easily deceived by government, corporate grand poobahs and high hoohas. How many of us really want to be under American fascist rule? How many of us even know what the word," fascist" means and how it will manifest itself in the U.S.A.

Well, just take a hard look around you, friends. It not only can happen here, it's already well under way.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Bush Justice Department Taking Over Palin Case

Well, sorta.....

Same tactics, same strategy, same slime and sleaziness.

It's the Busheviks All Over Again Obstructing Justice in the Form of Palin:

"Five Republican state lawmakers filed suit Tuesday to end the bipartisan investigation into Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's firing of the public safety commissioner even though the vice presidential candidate once said she welcomed the probe into allegations of abuse of power." Ah, hypocrisy and abuse of power and lying are vital prerequisites for running for office as a Republican! 9/17

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Bush administration Will "Gulf of Tonkinize" Iran

We predicted this two years ago!

September 15, 2008

NJ Congressman: Bush Admin. Will 'Gulf of Tonkinize' Iran

By Cheryl Biren-Wright

Before an audience of constituents, activists and veterans, U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ) issued a strong warning at a South Jersey Iraq War Forum in June:

There is a real and consistent concern that the government of Iran is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. Now there has been saber rattling about this. There’s going to be an attempt, I believe, to Gulf of Tonkinize this issue before the November election and I think you can anticipate all kinds of Naval adventures in the Persian Gulf that will try to be used as a pretext for an attack on Iran. I think that that will be the strategy in the November election. [video at 6 min]

ongressman Andrews made a similar charge two weeks prior while engaged in a bitter primary campaign against incumbent and fellow Democrat, Senator Frank Lautenberg.

In May, Max Pizarro of the Politickr quoted Rep. Andrews, "Every couple of weeks the administration tries to blow out of proportion a naval incident. If you look at their history - the way they beat up Max Cleland in 2002, and their use of the Bin Laden tape against Kerry in 2004 - I expect them to do something like that again, and I wouldn’t doubt their attempts to Gulf of Tonkinize Iran in an election year."

Pizarro either unconcerned or unfamiliar with what it would mean to "Gulf of Tonkinize" Iran zeroed in on Andrews claim that the 84-year-old Lautenberg could not "fight back against this Republican attack machine." Other media outlets ignored the statement altogether.

What makes the June 13 remarks any different? Ten days earlier, Rep. Andrews lost decidedly to the senior statesman from North Jersey. The race for the U.S. Senate was no longer a factor. In addition, Rep. Andrews who held the House seat since 1990 announced in April that he would not seek reelection in November if he lost to Sen. Lautenberg.

Empty Rhetoric or Fair Warning?

The idea that the Bush administration would deliberately provoke a military conflict with Iran was not a new concept particularly among the mostly antiwar audience. Strong words, however, from a congressman tapped by President Bush to coauthor the House version of the Iraq Resolution in 2002.

Additionally, Rep. Andrews who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, co-founded the Iran Working Group and is on the board of advisors of the Israel Project is known to take a hard line when it comes to Iran. Regarding a nuclear Iran, he is clear: "A nuclear Iran would present the world with a danger never before realized." In a 2006 address on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Rep. Andrews foreshadowed a "nuclear 9/11 in Lower Manhattan" if Iran were allowed to continue enriching uranium.

By February 2007, as Andrews’ faith in the administration’s handling of the Iraq War was waning, he began to express concern over President Bush’s approach to Iran. Andrews took to the House floor and argued that the House needed to affirm its constitutional prerogative and sole authority to declare war.

I am troubled by recent signs that I have seen from our administration with respect to the issue of Iran. Placement of naval assets in that area of the world is justified as a defensive measure, but I worry that it may be a provocative measure. The words of our President are words which can be taken, and I hope they are meant in the spirit of warning and cooperation, but they could also be taken in the spirit of provocation, and I hope and pray that they are not meant in that regard.

On May 16, 2007, Rep. Andrews’ amendment to the Defense Authorization Act for 2008 that would prevent authorized funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from being used to plan a contingency operation in Iran was narrowly defeated. Among supporters was Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR).

Minutes later, the House voted on Rep. DeFazio’s amendment. It would clarify that no previously enacted law authorized military action against Iran. It prohibited funding authorized by the bill from being used to take military action against Iran without authorization from Congress unless there was a national emergency created by an attack by Iran. Andrews inexplicably voted against it.

The following month Rep. Andrews joined Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) in introducing the Iran Sanctions Enhancement Act of 2007. This bipartisan legislation would extend sanctions to entities that provide refined petroleum to Iran.

Now Congressman Andrews, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and Iran Working Group, predicts that in order to win an election for the Republicans, the administration will create a false flag, a casus belli, in order to attack Iran. Regardless of the reason, would the Bush administration take such sinister action? Journalist, Seymour Hersh, laid out such a case in his July article in the New Yorker, Preparing the Battlefield.

Were Rep. Andrews’ remarks partisan rhetoric or sincere warning? If it is the former, we may have stumbled upon a new low in partisan politics. If the latter, the question should be what is he going to do about it.

Caution and Reminders

Upon his return from Israel this summer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen warned of opening up a "third front" in Iran. He added, "Just about every move in that part of the world is a high risk move."

Furthermore, Dr. Thomas Fingar, Deputy Director of the NIA and Chair of the NIC reaffirmed in a keynote address two weeks ago what was stated in the November NIE on Iran that "work on the weaponization portion of the program was suspended."

Congressional Inaction and Reaction

If Rep. Andrews stands by his ‘Gulf of Tonkinize’ claim then he should be taking the proper steps to prevent what could be a catastrophic event. Unfortunately, the staffers in Andrews’ DC office are adept at reciting "we can’t speak for the congressman." Numerous attempts at clarification have been ignored.

Meanwhile, a controversial resolution on Iran, H. Con. Res. 362, continues to gain support. Despite sponsorship withdrawal by five House members (Reps. Danny Davis, Steve Cohen, Thomas Allen, Wm. Lacy Clay and John Lewis), there are presently 271 cosponsors. Three other cosponsors (Reps. Robert Wexler, Barney Frank, and Jackie Speier), have called for a change in specific language.

This non binding resolution, demands that the President prohibit the export of refined petroleum products to Iran and impose stringent inspections on persons and transport entering and departing Iran. In addition, it prohibits all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating a suspension of Iran’s nuclear program from international movement.

A related bill introduced by Senator Evan Bayh (R-IN) now with 50 cosponsors has been referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Contained in both resolutions are whereas clauses that are of questionable validity.

Should President Bush choose to rise to the occasion and act on the recommendations, a perfect storm for Mr. Andrews’ gloomy prediction may soon roll into the Persian Gulf.

Dissing the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran

Among the Key Judgments of the Nov. 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is the statement "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Before the NIE release President Bush, ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran, invoked references such as "World War III." Never one to let 16 U.S. intelligence agencies get in his way, the president used the findings to boost his claim that Iran is a "threat to peace" adding "My opinion hasn’t changed."

Soon, the media and many members of Congress fell in line creating an opening for those hell-bent on opening up that third front.

Two weeks ago, John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN spoke to Pepe Escobar of the Real News. Regarding the November NIE, Bolton said, "Look, the NIE has been effectively repudiated by the intelligence community. It's as dramatic a reversal as I've ever seen. I don't think there's any doubt in most people's minds that Iran continues to pursue a nuclear-weapons capability, and I fear that they have achieved all of the scientific and technical knowledge that they need to have a deliverable nuclear weapon. So we're at a very critical point in dealing with Iran, and our options are quite limited."

Tell that to Dr. Fingar, Mr. Bolton.

Perverse Legislation

Perversion of the NIE has also made its way into congressional legislation. One "whereas" clause within H. Con. Res. 362 states, "Whereas the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reported that Iran was secretly working on the design and manufacture of a nuclear warhead until at least 2003, but that Iran could have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon as soon as late 2009."

The first part of the clause is a far cry from the original that states "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Part two states "Iran could have enough HEU for a nuclear weapon as soon as late 2009." While the NIE judged with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of this is late 2009, it continued "but that this is very unlikely."

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern who, during his 27-year tenure with the CIA, chaired National Intelligence Estimates commented "The resolution conveniently drops off the clause, but that this is very unlikely." He added, "That is so transparent and disingenuous that it is not worthy of legislators."

Recent news suggests the administration may not need to risk a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. Israel Today reported over the weekend, "In an apparent about-face, the Bush Administration announced on Friday that it has decided to approve the sale of 1,000 advanced bunker-buster bombs to Israel."

If Israel uses these weapons against Iran it will come as no surprise if in the aftermath, the U.S. rushes to the aid of Israel. After all, Bush declared in an address to the Knesset in May that "America is proud to be Israel's closest ally and best friend in the world."

What should be done now?

Ray McGovern offered that "Mullen should formally and publicly request a Memorandum to Holders of the November 2007 NIE on Iran inquiring into what the evidence collected since mid-07 might tell us of any changes. He could do that and he should."

The function of an MTH explained McGovern "would be to update the most serious issues covered in the original NIE dated Nov. 07. A Memo to Holders could be done and coordinated among the 16 intelligence agencies in a month or two."

At least one member of Congress agrees with the need for an MTH. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) offered an amendment to the 2009 National Intelligence Act that calls for a Memorandum to Holders of the NIE on Iran. The Bush administration has already threatened a veto.

McGovern responded, "It was a laudable effort on his part to try to make it law that there be an MTH so McConnell would be forced (theoretically, at least) to do one. But, it speaks volumes that a member of Reyes' committee thinks it necessary to do, via eminently veto-able legislation, what Reyes could do by just picking up the phone. HPSCI does, after all, control the CIA budget and other agencies' money as well."

Yes. Congress has the power to request an update - a Memorandum to Holders - of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

With a surge in rhetoric, a U.S. sale of bunker-busting bombs to Israel, a media that hasn’t learned its lesson, charges that the administration will "Gulf of Tonkinize" Iran, and more members of Congress including Presidential candidates conveniently forgetting or dismissing the findings of the NIE on Iran, ordering a Memorandum to Holders is the responsible thing to do. Anything less would be gross misfeasance.

For five months, Mr. Andrews emphatically stated he would not seek reelection to the House if he lost the Senate primary. Last week, he threw his hat back in the ring replacing wife, Camille, on the ballot.

Mr. Andrews, now that you’re back in the game, action is what is needed. Call for a Memorandum to Holders of the 2007 NIE on Iran and invite your colleagues on both sides to join you. Set the record straight before President Bush taps you on the shoulder once again.

Congressman Rob Andrews: Phone 202-225-6501 Fax 202-225-6583

Authors Bio: Writer/Photographer. Advocate for clean government, media reform and civil liberties. Chair of the PDA-SJ Impeachment Team and co-leader of the NJ Impeach Groups. Writer and managing editor for OpEdNews.com. cherylbirenwright.wordpress.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Stop, In the Name of God!

Or whomever! Just stop it!!!!

By Mamoon Alabbasi

16/09/08 "ICH" -- - A top Saudi cleric is reported to have issued a religious decree claiming that it is "lawful to kill" owners of Arab television networks broadcasting "depravation and debauchery".

Saleh al-Luhaidan, responding to a question by a caller in a radio phone-in programme regarding 'immoral' content in Arabic television, is reported to have said that if lesser punishments fail, then those responsible "can be put to death."

The issue here is very serious and goes beyond arguments pertaining to censorship, social taboos, or morality.

The decree is an example that provides further demonstration how religion can be misused to justify the killing of others in a casual way.

And this time, it is not carried out by some underground extremist desperate for support or legitimacy, but by a religious authority who is supposed to set an example for tolerance and wisdom.

Killing is not an issue that should be taken lightly.

Only few days ago, during the seventh anniversary of 9/11, we were reminded of how a group of criminals had set out to highjack Islam by murdering thousands of innocent civilians in the name of God.

Today, this dangerous trend, though by no means new, is growing internationally at an alarming rate, and it is certainly not exclusive to a few deluded Muslims.

Earlier this month, the Iraq war, arguably the biggest mass murder expedition of the twenty-first centaury, was branded by Republican vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin as a "task that is from God."

The fervent Christian evangelist has implied that the slaughtering of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, as well as the displacement of more than four million others is actually "God's plan."

Similarly, a growing number of Jewish extremists in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank are becoming more and more vocal in expressing their desire to subject the Palestinians – the original inhabitants of the land – to a second campaign of ethnic cleansing because God is alleged to have promised "His chosen people" the said land for them alone.

How can the message of peace and justice at the heart of the monotheist religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – be distorted in such a way that renders it the exact opposite of what was intended?

Any justification of murder, invasion, or ethnic cleaning using religion or any other ideology is something that we should be extremely worried about.

At a time when events seem to suggest that we are heading for a possible third Word War, we could learn a lot from quotes from the man who started the previous Word War.

He combined mass murder, invasions, and ethnic cleansing in the most despicable way known in modern history.

It was Adolf Hitler who was quoted as saying:

"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator."

"What we have to fight for is …. the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator."

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter."

"The national Government sees in both Christian denominations [Catholic and Protestant] the most important factor for the maintenance of our society."

"The [Nazi] party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession."

If Hitler has allied himself to the religion of the symbol of peace and love – Jesus – then we should not be surprised to see others turn messages of peace into excuses for murder or domination.

However, Hitler was not a madman living in isolation; he had the blessings of many churches at the time. And today, his ideas are still shared – in one way or another - by many followers of different faiths and ideologies.

If the comments attributed to the Saudi cleric are true, then Muslims must protest such un-Islamic remarks.

Imposing one's own style of morality and threatening those who do not abide by it with death will not work. Ask the German who tried it before:

"We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess."

Morality – or the lack of it – should not be imposed with the edge of a sword or at the barrel of a gun, and certainly not with a gas chamber.

Isn't the sanctity of human life a moral cause in its own?

Mamoon Alabbasi is an editor for Middle East Online and can be reached mamoon@meo.tv

Sarah Is Praying For Armaghedon? Oh, Christ!

Some days ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following her Vice Presidential acceptance speech, viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters according to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey. The self-described ‘hockey mom’’s poll ratings, if they are to be believed, are that of a rock superstar who is rated now higher than either McCain or Democrat Obama. The same Bush-Cheney propaganda apparatus that made the nation believe that Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler and that Georgia was a helpless victim of ruthless Russian aggression after 8.8.08 in Georgia is clearly behind one of the most impressive media propaganda efforts in recent history—the effort to package Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska for less than 19 months, to be the American dream candidate. Her religious roots are something she has been deliberately vague about. It’s worth a closer look.

As I discuss in some detail in my soon-to-be-released book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, one of the most significant transformations of American domestic politics over the past three decades since the early 1970’s, when George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA, has been the deliberate manipulation of significant segments of the population, most of them undoubtedly sincere believing people, around the ideology of ‘born-again’ evangelical Christian Fundamentalism to create something known as the Christian Right. Within the broad spectrum of fundamentalist denominations there are some currents which are particularly alarming. Sarah Palin comes out of such a milieu.

The phenomenon of the rapid spread within the United States since the 1980’s of evangelical Pentecostalism is a political phenomenon which has become so influential that the two elections of George W. Bush as well as countless races for Senate or Congress often depend on the backing or lack of it from the organized Religious Right.

The spawning of some Christian Right sects also creates an ideology to drive the shock troops willing to literally ‘die for Christ’ in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran or elsewhere that the Pentagon needs their services. That ideology has been used to build a fanatical activist base within the Republican Party which backs a right-wing domestic agenda and a military foreign policy that sees Islam or other suitable opponents of the US power elite as Satanism incarnate. How does Sarah Palin fit into this?

The CNP: manipulating religion to political ends

Many of the religious evangelical groups in America are coordinated top-down by a secretive organization called the Committee on National Policy. Former close Bush adviser, Rev. Ted Haggard, was a member of the Committee on National Policy until a sex and drugs scandal forced him out in late 2006.

Haggard was Pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs described as the ‘evangelical Vatican,’ and was head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Ted Haggard was also a member of a highly significant and little-understood sect known as Joel’s Army or the Manifest Sons of God, the same circles which spawned Sarah Palin.

Another noteworthy member of the CNP as was Grover Nyquist, the man once described as the ‘Field Marshall of the Bush Plan.’

The CNP, created in the early 1980’s during the Reagan era, is the nexus for several odd and quite powerful organizations. It was described by ABC's Marc J. Ambinder as ‘the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations.’ CNP Members include names such as General John Singlaub, shipping magnate J. Peter Grace, Texas billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, Edwin J. Feulner Jr of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Rev. Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye and most of the prominent names in the Christian Right around Bush. It has included prominent politicians including Senator Trent Lott, Senator Don Nickles, former Attorney General Ed Meese, Col. Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, and Right-wing philanthropist Else Prince, mother of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater the controversial private security firm.1

CNP members have also included not only the Rev. Sun Myung Moon Unification Church, definitely a bizarre formation whose founder openly states that he is superior to Christ. The CNP as well reportedly includes the Church of Scientology.2

CNP member and GOP strategist, Gary Bauer, links both. Bauer’s Family Research Council was a signatory of the Scientology Pledge to remove psychology from California schools and replace it with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Bauer was also a speaker at Sun Myung Moon's Family Federation for World Peace and Unification Conference in 1996.

Religious researchers Paul and Phillip Collins describe the CNP as follows: ‘The CNP appears to be a creation of factions of the power elite designed to mobilize well-meaning Christians to unwittingly support elite initiatives. The CNP could also be considered a project in religious engineering that empties Christianity of its metaphysical substance and re-conceptualizes many of its principles and concepts according to the socially and politically expedient designs of the elite. These contentions are supported by the fact that many CNP members are also members of other organizations and/or criminal enterprises that are tied directly to the power elite.’3

In order to shape public debate over the course of national military and foreign as well as domestic policy, the US establishment had to create mass-based organizations to manipulate public opinion in ways contrary to the self-interest of the majority of the American people. The Committee on National Policy was formed to be a central part of this mass manipulation.

The Committee on National Policy is a vital link between multi-billion dollar defense contractors, Washington lobbyists like the convicted felon and Republican fundraiser, Jack Abramoff, and the Christian Right. It’s at the heart of a new axis between right-wing military politics, support for the Pentagon war agenda globally and the neo-conservative political control of much of US foreign and defense policy.

The CNP has been at the center of Karl Rove’s carefully-constructed Bush political machine. Tom Delay and dozens of top Bush Administration Republicans are or had been members of the CNP. Few details about the organization are leaked to the public. As secretive as the Bilderberg Group if not more so, the CNP releases no press statements, meets in secret and never reveals names of its members willingly.

The elite circles behind the Bush Presidency have crafted an extremely powerful political machine using the forces and energies of the Christian Right and millions of American Christians unaware of the darker manipulations. Is Sarah Palin a part of such darker manipulations?

Sarah Palin and Dominionism

Sarah Palin it appears now, was chosen very carefully as she comes out of the very fundamentalist evangelical circles that the CNP uses to mobilize and shape America’s political agenda.

Palin reportedly drew early attention from state GOP leadership when, during her first mayoral campaign, she ran on an anti-abortion platform. Normally, political parties do not get involved in Alaskan municipal elections because they are nonpartisan. But once word of her evangelical views made its way to Juneau, the state capitol, state Republicans put money behind her campaign. According to researcher, Charley James, "Once in office, Palin set out to build a machine that chewed up anyone who got in her way. The good, Godly Christian turns out to be anything but."

The religious background of Sarah Palin is not unrelated to her bid to take the nation’s second highest office. She herself has been extremely vague about that background. Given the details, it becomes clearer perhaps why.

Sarah Palin has spent more than two and a half decades of her life as a member of an Alaska church which is part of a fanatical Christian-named cult project that is sweeping across America. Palin comes out of the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as ‘Joel’s Army,’ an offshoot of what is called Dominionism and sometimes also called the Latter Rain cult or Manifest Sons of God. The movement deliberately attempts to remain below the radar screen.

A Dominionist soldier in McCain’s Army

Sarah Palin is a product of an extreme fringe of the American Evangelical movement known variously as the Third Wave Movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or as Joel's Army, a part of what is called Dominionism. Until 2002 according to their own website, Palin was a member of Wasilla Assembly of God with Senior Pastor Ed Kalnins. Online video clips of Palin speaking from the pulpit of this church are revealing. Curiously, between the time this article was begun on September 9^th and the 11^th, the video was removed without explanation:

(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20712.htm.).

As one researcher familiar with the history of the Third Wave Movement or Dominionism describes, ‘The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form ‘Joel’s Army’ to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.’4

The excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.

Sarah H. Leslie, a former Christian Right leader, describes the ideology of Dominionism:

‘The Gospel of Salvation is achieved by setting up the ‘Kingdom of God’ as a literal and physical kingdom to be ‘advanced’ on Earth in the present age. Some dominionists liken the New Testament Kingdom to the Old Testament Israel in ways that justify taking up the sword, or other methods of punitive judgment, to war against enemies of their kingdom.

‘Dominionists teach that men can be coerced or compelled to enter the kingdom. They assign to the Church duties and rights that belong Scripturally only to Jesus Christ. This includes the esoteric belief that believers can ‘incarnate’ Christ and function as His body on Earth to establish His kingdom rule. An inordinate emphasis is placed on man’s efforts; the doctrine of the sovereignty of God is diminished.’5

Leslie quotes from Al Dager’s Vengeance Is Ours: The Church In Dominion: ‘Dominion theology is predicated upon three basic beliefs: 1) Satan usurped man’s dominion over the earth through the temptation of Adam and Eve; 2) The Church is God’s instrument to take dominion back from Satan; 3) Jesus cannot or will not return until the Church has taken dominion by gaining control of the earth’s governmental and social institutions.’6

Sarah Leslie pinpoints to the central deception behind the current spread of Dominionism among various Protestant denominations across America today:

‘Dominion theology is a heresy. As such it is rarely presented as openly as the definitions above may indicate. Outside of the Reconstructionist camp, evangelical dominionism has wrapped itself in slick packages – one piece at a time – for mass-media consumption. This has been a slow process, taking several decades. Few evangelicals would recognize the word ‘dominionism’ or know what it means. This is because other terminologies have been developed which soft-sell dominionism, concealing the full scope of the agenda. Many evangelicals (and even their more conservative counterparts, the fundamentalists) may adhere to tidbits of dominionism without recognizing the error…

‘To most effectively propagate their agenda, dominionist leaders first developed new ecclesiologies, eschatologies and soteriologies for targeted audiences along the major denominational fault lines of evangelical Christianity. Then the 1990s Promise Keepers men’s movement was used as a vehicle to ‘break down the walls’, i.e., cross denominational barriers for the purpose of exporting dominionism to the wider evangelical subculture. This strategy was so effective that it reached into the mainline Protestant denominations. Dominionists have carefully selected leaders to be trained as ‘change agents’ for ‘transformation’ (dominion) in an erudite manner that belies the media stereotype of southern-talking, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist half-wits.’7

Wasilla Assembly of God

Sarah Palin comes out of the circles of such Dominionist networks. Sarah Palin was reportedly re-baptized at age twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God church. Palin attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002, over twenty-eight years. Palin's association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as running mate.

Palin is now under investigation for possible improper use of state travel funds for a trip she made on June 8 to Wasilla. Her trip in turns out was to attend a Wasilla Assembly of God ‘Masters Commission’ graduation ceremony, and a multi-church Wasilla event known as ‘One Lord Sunday.’ At the latter, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the "laying on of hands" by Wasilla Assembly of God's Head Pastor Ed Kalnins, her former pastor.

The pastor, Ed Kalnins, and Masters Commission students have traveled to South Carolina to participate in a ‘prophetic conference’ at Morningstar Ministries, one of the major ministries of the Third Wave movement. The head of prophecy at Morningstar, Steve Thompson, is currently scheduled to do a prophecy seminar at the Wasilla Assembly of God. Other major leaders in the movement have also traveled to Wasilla to visit and speak at the church.

In his sermons, Kalnins promotes such exotic theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family ‘curses.’ Palin has also been ‘anointed,’ by an African cleric, Bishop Thomas Muthee, prominent in the Joel’s Army movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a ‘spirit of witchcraft.’8

As Governor in Juneau, six hundred miles from Wasilla, Palin attends the Juneau Christian Church of Pastor Mike Rose, an Assembly of God Third Wave church.

Sarah Leslie describes the movement which has supported Sarah Palin for most of her life:

‘New Apostolic Reformation. This dominionist sect is a direct offshoot of the Latter Rain cult (also known as Joel’s Army or Manifest Sons of God). Chief architect of this movement for the past two decades is C. Peter Wagner, President of Global Harvest Ministries and Chancellor of the Wagner Leadership Institute. His spiritual warfare teachings have been widely disseminated through mission networks such as AD 2000, which was closely associated with the Lausanne Movement. A prominent individual connected to this sect is Ted Haggard, current head of the National Association of Evangelicals.’9

C. Peter Wagner is quoted by Leslie defining his view of what he calls ‘The New Apostolic Reformation,’:

‘Since 2001, the body of Christ has been in the Second Apostolic Age. The apostolic/prophetic government of the church is now in place. . . . We began to build our base by locating and identifying with the intercessory prayer movements. This time, however, we feel that God wants us to start governmentally,(Sic), connecting with the apostles of the region. God has already raised up for us a key apostle in one of the strategic nations of the Middle East and other apostles are already coming on board. Once we have the apostles in place, we will then bring the intercessors and the prophets into the inner circle, and we will end up with the spiritual core we need to move ahead for retaking the dominion that is rightfully ours.’-- C. Peter Wagner

Wagner, who took over Haggard’s Colorado Springs center when the latter was forced to resign in disgrace, claims that there are as many New Apostolic Reformation churches in the US as Southern Baptist churches. The movement worldwide is estimated as high as 100 million people. And yet its impact is completely under the radar of most researchers outside of those in the movement itself.

An ‘end-time soldier in God’s army’?

All evidence suggests Palin was carefully selected by the leadership of the Bush-Cheney-McCain Republican party to galvanize the Party’s activist Evangelical base, something McCain had been unable to do.

Some theological and political background to the Joel’s Army or Third Wave movement as it is also known, is instructive. It teaches a radical fundamentalist creed that its adherents must actively engage in politics, to become what they term, ‘soldiers in God’s Army.’

The Joel’s Army movement focuses on recruiting young people to sessions of writhing on the floor in uncontrollable ecstasy, calling it a sign of the ‘Holy Spirit.’ Children as young as five speak of having ‘gotten saved.’ The movement is extremely authoritarian according to those conservative Christian churches who have studied and openly oppose the sect as heretical. It teaches a dogma that echoes the infamous Manichean line of George Bush following the shock of September 11, 2001: ‘There are two kinds of people in the World: Those who love Jesus, and those who don’t.’

Until recently a ‘general’ in Joel’s Army was a 32-year old Canadian, Todd Bentley. In one case, on YouTube, clips of his most dramatic healings have been condensed into a three-minute highlight reel. Bentley describes God ordering him to kick an elderly lady in the face. A report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group, describes the Joel’s Army mass recruiting techniques of Bentley:

‘Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don't bat an eye when he tells them he's seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven...Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read "Joel's Army." They're evidence of Bentley's generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that's gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other "hyper-charismatic" preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers.’ 10

Their name comes from their special focus on the Old Testament Book of Joel, Chapter Two. On his website, Bentley declares,

‘An end-time army has one common purpose -- to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion…The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. ... Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth.’

This past March, at a ‘Passion for Jesus’ conference in Kansas City sponsored by the International House of Prayer, or IHOP, a ministry for teenagers from the heavy metal, punk and goth scenes, one Joel’s Army pastor, Lou Engle, called on his audience for vengeance:

‘I believe we're headed to an Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth, not just in America but all over the globe, and the main warriors will be the prophets of Baal versus the prophets of God, and there will be no middle ground," said Engle. He was referring to the Baal of the Old Testament, a pagan idol whose followers were slaughtered under orders from the prophet Elijah.

‘There's an Elijah generation that's going to be the forerunners for the coming of Jesus, a generation marked not by their niceness but by the intensity of their passion," Engle continued. ‘The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Such force demands an equal response, and Jesus is going to make war on everything that hinders love, with his eyes blazing fire.’

Joel's Army believers are hard-core Christian ‘dominionists,’ meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism. To paraphrase George W. Bush, ‘You’re either with us or you are against us.’

Joel's Army followers are most often labile teenagers and young adults. They are taught to believe they're members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world. Sarah Palin was twelve when she first came into these circles.

Palin recently told interviewer Charles Gibson of ABC News that Georgia should be granted membership of NATO. When pressed on whether this would mean that the US would be obliged to defend Georgia if Russian troops went into the country again, she replied, ‘Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help…We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia.’ Is this Sarah Palin a stateswoman with foreign policy experience, or is it Sarah Palin the Dominionist who sees a potential war with Russia as part of an ‘Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth’?

This is the background of the woman who might well become Vice President to a 72-year old President John McCain, a man reported to have severe skin cancer and other major health problems. According to the US Constitutional succession, should McCain be incapacitated or die in office, she would become President.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca ). His newest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order , is due out later this fall. He may be reached through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net .

Notes

1 Selected CNP Member Biographies in
http://www.seekgod.ca/topiccnp.htm.

2 Paul Collins & Phillip Collins, The Deep Politics of God: The CNP, Dominionism, and the Ted Haggard Scandal , Feb. 19th, 2007.

3 Ibid.

4 Bruce Wilson, Sarah Palin’s Churches and the New Wave Apostolic Reformation, in
http://endtimespropheticwords.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/sarah-palins-churches-and-the-third-wave/.

5 Sarah H. Leslie, Dominionism and the Rise of Christian Imperialism, accessed in
http://www.discernment-ministries.org/ChristianImperialism.htm.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Bruce Wilson, Ibid.

9 Sarah H. Leslie, Op. Cit.

10 Casey Sanchez, Theocratic Sect Prays for Real Armageddon, Southern Poverty Law Center.August 30, 2008, accessed in
http://www.alternet.org/story/96945/theocratic_sect_prays_for_real_armageddon/?page=entire.

Women Of Alaska Protest Palin

‘Alaska Women Reject Palin’ Rally is HUGE!

14 09 2008

I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.

After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.

The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.

So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.

Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.

So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.

: Right wing radio talk show host Eddie Burke, getting shouted down as he tries to talk to the media.

: Eddie Burke and the sign he created to show off the depth of his intellect.

UPDATE - Eddie Burke suspended without pay for one week. Better than nothing!

Has the U.S. Invasion of Pakistan Begun?

Tomgram: Tariq Ali,

As Andrew Bacevich tells us in the latest issue of the Atlantic, there's now a vigorous debate going on in the military about the nature of the "next" American wars and how to prepare for them. However, while military officers argue, that "next war" may already be creeping up on us.

Having, with much hoopla, launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, each disastrous in its own way, the Bush administration in its waning months seems intent on a slo-mo launching of a third war in the border regions of Pakistan. Almost every day now news trickles out of intensified American strikes -- by Hellfire-missile armed Predator drones, or even commando raids from helicopters -- in the Pakistani tribal areas along the Afghan border; and there is a drumbeat of threats of more to come. All of this, in turn, is reportedly only "phase one" of a three-phase Bush administration plan in which the American military "gloves" would "come off." Think of this as the green-lighting of a new version of that old Vietnam-era tactic of "hot pursuit" across national borders, or think of it simply as the latest war.

Already Pakistan's sovereignty has functionally been declared of no significance by our President, and so, without a word from Congress, the American war that already stretches from Iraq to Afghanistan is threatening to widen in ways that are potentially incendiary in the extreme. While Pakistani sources report that no significant Taliban or al-Qaeda figures have been killed in the recent series of attacks, anger in Pakistan over the abrogation of national sovereignty and, as in Afghanistan, over civilian casualties is growing.

In Iraq, 146,000 American soldiers seem not to be going anywhere anytime soon, while in Afghanistan another 33,000 embattled American troops (and tens of thousands of NATO troops), suffering their highest casualties since the Taliban fell in 2001, are fighting a spreading insurgency backed by growing anger over foreign occupation. The disintegration seems to be proceeding apace in that country as the Taliban begins to throttle the supply routes leading into the Afghan capital of Kabul, while the governor of a province just died in an IED blast. "President" Hamid Karzai was long ago nicknamed "the mayor of Kabul." Today, that tag seems ever more appropriate as the influence of his corrupt government steadily weakens.

In the meantime, in Pakistan, a new war, no less unpredictable and unpalatable than the last two, develops, as American strikes fan the flames of Pakistani nationalism. Already the Pakistani military may have fired its first warning shots at American troops. Part of the horror here is that much of the present nightmare in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be traced to the sorry U.S. relationship with Pakistan's military and its intelligence services back in the early 1980s. At that time, in its anti-Soviet jihad, the Reagan administration was, in conjunction with the Pakistanis, actively nurturing the forces that the Bush administration is now so intent on fighting. No one knows this story, this record, better than the Pakistani-born journalist and writer Tariq Ali.

As we head into our "next war," most Americans know almost nothing about Pakistan, the sixth most populous country on the planet with 200 million people, and the only Islamic state with nuclear weapons. As the Bush administration commits to playing with fire in that desperately poor land, it's time to learn. Ali, who posts below on the next U.S. war, has just written a new book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power -- published today -- that traces the U.S.-Pakistani relationship from the 1950s to late last night. I can tell you that it's both riveting and needed. Check it out. And while you're at it, check Ali out in a two-part video, released by TomDispatch, in which he discusses the history of the tangled U.S.-Pakistani relationship and Barack Obama's Afghan and Pakistani plans. Tom

The American War Moves to Pakistan
Bush's War Widens Dangerously
By Tariq Ali

The decision to make public a presidential order of last July authorizing American strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the approval of the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on the periphery of, the Bush administration. Senator Barack Obama, aware of this ongoing debate during his own long battle with Hillary Clinton, tried to outflank her by supporting a policy of U.S. strikes into Pakistan. Senator John McCain and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin have now echoed this view and so it has become, by consensus, official U.S. policy.

Its effects on Pakistan could be catastrophic, creating a severe crisis within the army and in the country at large. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.

Why, then, has the U.S. decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military's nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply that Washington was indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state, since the country would very simply not survive a disaster on that scale.

In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush administration's disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is hardly a secret that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is becoming more isolated with each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul.

When in doubt, escalate the war is an old imperial motto. The strikes against Pakistan represent -- like the decisions of President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to bomb and then invade Cambodia (acts that, in the end, empowered Pol Pot and his monsters) -- a desperate bid to salvage a war that was never good, but has now gone badly wrong.

It is true that those resisting the NATO occupation cross the Pakistan-Afghan border with ease. However, the U.S. has often engaged in quiet negotiations with them. Several feelers have been put out to the Taliban in Pakistan, while U.S. intelligence experts regularly check into the Serena Hotel in Swat to discuss possibilities with Mullah Fazlullah, a local pro-Taliban leader. The same is true inside Afghanistan.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a whole layer of the Taliban's middle-level leadership crossed the border into Pakistan to regroup and plan for what lay ahead. By 2003, their guerrilla factions were starting to harass the occupying forces in Afghanistan and, during 2004, they began to be joined by a new generation of local recruits, by no means all jihadists, who were being radicalized by the occupation itself.

Though, in the world of the Western media, the Taliban has been entirely conflated with al-Qaeda, most of their supporters are, in fact, driven by quite local concerns. If NATO and the U.S. were to leave Afghanistan, their political evolution would most likely parallel that of Pakistan's domesticated Islamists.

The neo-Taliban now control at least twenty Afghan districts in Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan provinces. It is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. Though often characterized as a rural jacquerie they have won significant support in southern towns and they even led a Tet-style offensive in Kandahar in 2006. Elsewhere, mullahs who had initially supported President Karzai's allies are now railing against the foreigners and the government in Kabul. For the first time, calls for jihad against the occupation are even being heard in the non-Pashtun northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.

The neo-Taliban have said that they will not join any government until "the foreigners" have left their country, which raises the question of the strategic aims of the United States. Is it the case, as NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer suggested to an audience at the Brookings Institution earlier this year, that the war in Afghanistan has little to do with spreading good governance in Afghanistan or even destroying the remnants of al-Qaeda? Is it part of a master plan, as outlined by a strategist in NATO Review in the Winter of 2005, to expand the focus of NATO from the Euro-Atlantic zone, because "in the 21st century NATO must become an alliance… designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders"?

As that strategist went on to write:

"The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward. As it does, the nature of power itself is changing. The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead the way… [S]ecurity effectiveness in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability."

Such a strategy implies a permanent military presence on the borders of both China and Iran. Given that this is unacceptable to most Pakistanis and Afghans, it will only create a state of permanent mayhem in the region, resulting in ever more violence and terror, as well as heightened support for jihadi extremism, which, in turn, will but further stretch an already over-extended empire.

Globalizers often speak as though U.S. hegemony and the spread of capitalism were the same thing. This was certainly the case during the Cold War, but the twin aims of yesteryear now stand in something closer to an inverse relationship. For, in certain ways, it is the very spread of capitalism that is gradually eroding U.S. hegemony in the world. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's triumph in Georgia was a dramatic signal of this fact. The American push into the Greater Middle East in recent years, designed to demonstrate Washington's primacy over the Eurasian powers, has descended into remarkable chaos, necessitating support from the very powers it was meant to put on notice.

Pakistan's new, indirectly elected President, Asif Zardari, the husband of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto and a Pakistani "godfather" of the first order, indicated his support for U.S. strategy by inviting Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai to attend his inauguration, the only foreign leader to do so. Twinning himself with a discredited satrap in Kabul may have impressed some in Washington, but it only further decreased support for the widower Bhutto in his own country.

The key in Pakistan, as always, is the army. If the already heightened U.S. raids inside the country continue to escalate, the much-vaunted unity of the military High Command might come under real strain. At a meeting of corps commanders in Rawalpindi on September 12th, Pakistani Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani received unanimous support for his relatively mild public denunciation of the recent U.S. strikes inside Pakistan in which he said the country's borders and sovereignty would be defended "at all cost."

Saying, however, that the Army will safeguard the country's sovereignty is different from doing so in practice. This is the heart of the contradiction. Perhaps the attacks will cease on November 4th. Perhaps pigs (with or without lipstick) will fly. What is really required in the region is an American/NATO exit strategy from Afghanistan, which should entail a regional solution involving Pakistan, Iran, India, and Russia. These four states could guarantee a national government and massive social reconstruction in that country. No matter what, NATO and the Americans have failed abysmally.

Tariq Ali, writer, journalist, filmmaker, contributes regularly to a range of publications including the Guardian, the Nation, and the London Review of Books. His most recent book, just published, is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Scribner, 2008). In a two-part video, released by TomDispatch.com, he offers critical commentary on Barack Obama's plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as on the tangled U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling From Direct Hits

A raid on private pensions?

By Paul Craig Roberts

16/09/08 "ICH" -- - We were promised a “New Economy” of high-tech tradable services to take the place of the offshore manufacturing economy. Wondering what had become of the “New Economy,” Duke University’s Offshoring Research Network searched for it and located it offshore. Yes, the activities of the “New Economy” are also outsourced offshore.

Call centers, IT operations, back-office operations, and manufacturing have long been moved offshore. Now high-value-added proprietary activities such as research and development, engineering, product development, and analytical services are being sent offshore. All that’s left is finance, and it is crumbling before our eyes.

Independent broker-dealers are disappearing: Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers. These venerable institutions were too thinly capitalized for the risks that they took. Merrill Lynch is now part of the Bank of America, and Lehman Brothers is history.

Ill-advised financial deregulation led to financial concentration and not to more efficient markets. Independent local banks, which focused on financing local businesses, and Saving and Loan Associations, which knew the local housing market, have been replaced with large institutions that package un-analyzed risks and sell them worldwide.

Regulation over-reached. The pendulum swung. Deregulation became an ideology and a facilitator of greed.

Deregulating electric power gave us Enron.

Deregulating the airlines destroyed famous American brand names such as Pan Am, shrank the number of companies, and caused a decline in service. When airlines were regulated, they could afford standby equipment, and cancelled flights were rare. Today, the bottom line prohibits standby equipment, and mechanical problems result in canceled flights. When economists calculated the benefits of deregulation, they left out many of its costs.

There are no longer any blue chip companies, which means that investing for retirement has become a crap-shoot. People realize this; thus, the privatization of Social Security has no support.

If we look realistically at the US economy, we see that what is not moved offshore is being bailed out. Last year, the US Department of Energy was authorized to make $25 billion in loans to auto manufacturing firms and suppliers of automotive parts. Last week the Secretary of the Treasury took $5 trillion dollars in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac home mortgages under its wing.
The Congressional Budget Office says this action by the Treasury means “that the operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be directly incorporated into the federal budget.” http://cboblog.cbo.gov/ Their revenues would be treated as federal revenues, and their expenditures as federal expenditures. If the former were greater than the latter, there would be no reason for the takeover.

The open question is: what do these new liabilities do to the Treasury’s own credit standing?

For now, this question is submerged. The traditional practice of fleeing to the US dollar and US Treasury bonds during periods of financial stress and uncertainty has boosted the dollar and kept interest rates low. But sooner or later the large US budget deficit, worsened by recession and bailouts, and the large trade deficit, which requires constant recycling of dollars held by foreigners into US financial and real assets, will result in renewed effort on the part of foreigners to lighten their dollar holdings.

When this time arrives, US interest rates will have to rise in order for the government to be able to continue to rely on foreigners to recycle the dollars acquired in trade to finance the US government’s annual budget deficit.

The current financial problems have pushed into the background the larger problems of the US budget and trade deficits. Goods and services for American markets that US corporations outsource offshore return as imports, which widen the US trade deficit. Moving production offshore reduces US GDP and employment and increases foreign GDP and employment. Moving production offshore reduces the export capacity of the US economy while raising the import bill.

Therefore, how is the trade deficit to be closed? One way is through the dollar’s loss in exchange value, which would reduce American consumers’ real incomes and leave them too poor to purchase the offshore goods and services.

How is the budget deficit to be closed when jobs are disappearing and GDP (tax base) is being relocated offshore?

Not by higher taxes. Higher taxes are problematic for a recessionary economy in which unemployment, properly measured, is already in double digits. (www.shadowstats.com ).

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