The Existentialist Cowboy

Evidence that 911 was an Inside Job

2009-11-13T11:55:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

If 911 had not been an inside job, it would have been investigated! The cover up that followed has only one purpose: the protection of the guilty! It is not only the absurd, alleged conspiracy of 19 Arab hijackers, a cover story for which there is absolutely no convincing or admissible evidence, it is the fact that the events that day were deliberately covered up and access to evidence denied investigators.

It was odd to me that I was dispatched to go to New York even before the second plane hit the South Tower, while the media was still reporting only that a “small plane” had collided with the North Tower — far too small of a catastrophe at that point to involve FEMA . FEMA was mobilized within minutes, whereas it took ten days for it to deploy to New Orleans to respond to Hurricane Katrina, even with abundant advance warning! It was odd to me that all cameras were so fiercely prohibited within the secured perimeter of Ground Zero, that the entire area was declared a crime scene and yet the “evidence” within that crime scene was so rapidly removed and destroyed. And then it was very odd to me when I learned that FEMA and several other federal agencies had already moved into position at their command center at Pier 92 on September 10th, one day before the attacks!
...
We are asked to believe that all four of the “indestructible” black boxes of the two jets that struck the twin towers were never found because they were completely vaporized, yet I have footage of the rubber wheels of the landing gear nearly undamaged, as well as the seats, parts of the fuselage and a jet turbine that were absolutely not vaporized. This being said, I do find it rather odd that such objects could have survived fairly intact the type of destruction that turned most of the Twin Towers into thin dust. And I definitely harbor some doubts about the authenticity of the “jet” turbine, far too small to have come from one of the Boeings!
--Kurt Sonnenfeld, 9/11 FEMA videographer at Ground Zero goes public

Among the many lies about 911, the most egregious are the 'official ones' put forward by the Bush administration and Bush personally. And make no mistake about it: the story of 19 Arab hijackers co-ordinated from a cave in Afghanistan by a man who was most certainly already dead of kidney failure, is the most absurd lie among them. There is not a shred of convincing or admissible evidence in support of it.

It has been my experience that those who lie about a crime does so to cover it up, deflect a real investigation. Those who lie, cover up or obstruct justice are almost always guilty of the crimes. And those guilty of crimes are most motivated to cover them up. Bush order the destruction of evidence, in fact, the cover up of 911. He shut down every investigation. He his the truth. Then he lied about 911 repeatedly! We are justified in concluding that he lied and obstructed justice because he was he shares full responsibility for the 'inside job' we call 911.

This is a short article calling for justice. I am not inclined to re-write thousands of words already written. If you wish more, that's what 'labels' are for. Search this site for the label '911'. You will find plenty and all of it indicts the war criminal George W. Bush for whom 911 was the PNAC 'catalyzing event', the new Pearl Harbor that would justify his wars of naked aggression, conquest and oil theft in the Middle East.

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

The Inevitable Collapse of the Dollar

2009-11-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Americans live beyond their means, Asia finances it and China props up the buck so that the US can buy Chinese made stuff at Wal-Mart. Eventually the Asians/Europeans will stop financing the USA, China will pull the plug on the buck and the bubble will burst.

The CIA's World Fact Book lists the US at the very bottom of a list with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance. China, which pegs the Yuan to the dollar, is at the top with the world's largest positive Current Account Balance.

If the GOP had been correct, US exports should have risen! The 'balance of trade deficit' i.e, the NEGATIVE Current Account Balance would have been reduced! If the GOP had been correct, the US could have paid off huge amounts of national debt run up in incompetent and dishonest GOP regimes. The US might have survived decades of conservative budgets which forced the US to borrow from other countries. But --not surprisingly --things have not worked out as the GOP would have you believe.

Many economists, myself included, believe that China’s asset-buying spree helped inflate the housing bubble, setting the stage for the global financial crisis. But China’s insistence on keeping the yuan/dollar rate fixed, even when the dollar declines, may be doing even more harm now.

Although there has been a lot of doomsaying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere.
But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead.
--Palin vs Krugman On The Dollar -- Who Is Right?

It was hoped that by taking the dollar off the gold standard, US products would enjoy greater sales abroad. But like 'trickle down theory', it just has not worked out as planned. The CIA's World Fact Book proves it.

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.

--Paul Craig Roberts, The US as Failed State

If the US is a 'failed state', it is because it has been impoverished by at least two trends: 1) the transfer of US wealth upward to just one percent of the US population which now owns more than 95 percent of the rest of the nation combined; 2) the decline of the US dollar, a trend begun when Richard Nixon eschewed the Bretton-Woods agreement.

Reducing the chances that we will weather this crisis are US wars of aggression which benefit only the defense contractors. Wars, in fact, reduce the GDP, destroy jobs, reduce productivity, and increase the trade deficit! If wars are so 'bad' for the economy, then how are they sold so easily? Why are they 'sold' at all? The quick response: they are sold with focus group tested bullshit!

There's a 'living' in killing, we are told! It's a lie -- snake oil for idiots and rank and file GOP. That wars are good for the economy is just a bald-faced lie cooked up by the defense lobby for whom killing IS a living but only for the shrinking one percent who benefit: the Military/Industrial complex.

Fact is war is most often disastrous for the economy.

In fact, most models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment. In this way, military spending is comparable in most models to any other form of government spending, such as spending on public goods or improving the environment.
This paper shows the projections of the impact of an increase in annual military spending equal to 1 percent of GDP (approximately the actual increase in spending compared with the pre-war budget) of the Global Insight macroeconomic model (see Appendix). The Global Insight model was selected for this analysis because it is a commonly used and widely respected model.1 Other models will show somewhat different projections, but it is unlikely that the direction of the long-term impact on any of the key variables will be different. In fact, because of the structure of the Global Insights model, it likely understates the negative impact of military spending relative to other models.
--The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending>

At the link (a PDF file) look for Table 1 which shows the key differences in projections, at five year intervals, between the baseline model and the simulation assuming higher levels of defense spending.

The decline in GDP projected for the twentieth year in the high military spending scenario is $42.1 billion. This corresponds to a projected loss of 668,100 jobs. Inflation is projected to be 0.7 percentage points higher in the high military spending scenario, with the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note 1.1 percentage points higher than in the baseline scenario.
The higher interest rate is associated with a reduction in industrial production of 1.8 percent compared with the baseline scenario. Car and truck sales are projected to be 731,400 in the high military spending scenario compared to the baseline scenario. Residential investment is projected to be 3.5 percent lower, which corresponds to 38,500 fewer housing starts and a reduction of 286,500 in the number of existing homes sold.
--The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending>

The Inevitable Collapse of the Dollar

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Origins of 'Islamophobia' in US Imperialism and Neo-Colonialism

2009-11-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

'Islamophobia' in the U.S. is a top down phenomenon encouraged and exploited by the right wing. It is easier to whip up war fever if the populace is irrational, mindless, or unduly fearful of an entire class, religion or even race. A crooked, corrupt or illegitimate state is 'motivated' to encourage irrational fears among its populace. This was true of Rome, the Third Reich and it is true of the US. It is, perhaps, one of several harbingers of the fall of empire.

That 'Islamophobia' is a needless waste is proven by recent events.

Rev Michael Sinnott was freed in the early hours of Thursday morning. He said he was not harmed by his captors but was now "extremely exhausted".

"For long periods of time we had nothing at all to do, so we sat around in the hammocks and talked at length about religion," said Rev Sinnott, who was abducted on October 11 while taking a walk in his garden.
"We discussed ideology and they explained to me what they believed and I then explained what I believed. There were no problems and they treated me very well despite the difficult conditions.
-- Freed Irish priest 'treated well by Muslim kidnappers'

As appears to be the case with most of the US's most ill-considered 'adventures' and propaganda campaigns, Islamaphobia is all about 'oil' and how the US may justify its theft! Clearly, US adventures in the middle east are all about oil --a resource desperately needed by the US which had been, at one time, a leading producer.

The US finds it easier to 'sell' a war if it has been attacked by a class that is different. 911, clearly an inside job, a pretext for war, is the best example. 911 was --in fact --the 'catalyzing event' hoped for, perhaps planned for, by NEOCONS who drafted the infamous PNAC document: "REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES, Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century"

The passage reads as follows:

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

Some context: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break up of the old 'Soviet Union', the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev --all left the US without an easily exploited external enemy, one that might play the very role NEOCONS had hoped it might --that of providing a 'catalyzing event' around which right wing militarists, imperialists, oil fascists and would-be war criminals would rally a sheeple!

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

The Controlled Demolitions of 911

2009-11-11T06:24:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Only a controlled demolition looks like a controlled demolition. And WTC 7 looks like a controlled demolition because it was 'pulled' just as Silverstein himself said it was. And if it was 'pullled', it had to have been 'prepped', that is, explosives planted and wired perhaps two weeks or more in advance of the so-called 'terrorist attack'.

There is --in fact --not a shred of evidence to support the ludicrous THEORY that it fell as a result of dinky, piddly random fires that might have been pissed out!

For those who are not yet ready to make the commitment to obtain and read a book on 9/11, but who wish to learn more, a ten-minute solution is available. It only takes a few minutes to view video on the Internet of the collapse of Building 7, the 47 story skyscraper located immediately north of the WTC complex about 300 feet from the North Tower. Viewers will note the almost vertical collapse of the building. Only controlled demolitions have achieved vertical collapses of upright steel structures.
After viewing the video, many will agree with Dan Rather who said on CBS News that very evening that the collapse of Building 7 was “reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television before when a building was destroyed by well placed dynamite to knock it down.”
--Ronald Bleier, WTC Building 7 – The 911 Smoking Gun?

Now --about the other towers, we are shown videos that purport to be flights that BTS says were not even scheduled to fly that day and, if they had, the soft aluminum bodies could not have penetrated the HARD STEEL CLADDING at any speed. Nor would the airliners have penetrated the dense core clearly omitted from so-called 'official reports' and/or official conspiracy theories. The dense core seen pictured here is conveniently omitted from 'official theories' because its existence disproves the official lies.

The most notorious instance of omission is a a video which Perdue University --to its shame and chagrin --said 'animated' realistically the soft-bodied aluminum airliner literally slicing through the dense steel cladding. That is ludicrous in itself --a case of 'truth by animation'. Worse, however, is the fact that Perdue's 'whiz kids' omitted the existence of the dense, highly reinforced steel core seen in the photo.

I carry a swiss army knife. The blades are made of STEEL --not Aluminum. That's because Aluminum is not likely to penetrate anything that I might want to cut. Soft Aluminum airliner bodies, likewise, were never designed to penetrate hard, dense steel and 911 is most certainly NOT the test case that proves it does, will or ever has. Wenger and Victorinox are not likely to begin the manufacture of aluminum bladed Swiss Army knives any time soon.

Some have said that it was the kinetic energy of a moving aircraft that allowed it to penetrate the hard steel cladding. That's nonesense and easily disproven at home with simple materials. Try hurling a ball of modeling clay at a barn door. If you are Mickey Mantle reincarnated you might knock down the door if it is merely propped up. But you will NEVER ever penetrate the door itself. Try it! Soft aluminum fuselages, likewise, will never slice through the girders themselves as the official conspiracy suggests or states.

Condo LIES to Congress

Now ---if the official conspiracy theory of 911 were true, then CONDO would have had no MOTIVE for lying!

Criminals lie in order to cover up their crimes.

Criminals lie hoping to get away with it!

While CONDO was lying under oath, Bush, himself was ordering the destruction of all the forensic evidence relative to 911.

An innocent man is an idiot if he orders the destruction of evidence proving himself innocent.

ERGO --Bush was covering up his involvement in high treason and mass murder.
Sherlock Holmes said: 'When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth!'. And the truth is a story of method, motive and opportunity.

Marvin Bush: A Story of Motive, Method, Opportunity! Two weeks is probably enough time to 'wire' the buildings for a controlled demolition.

Tower 7 blasted into rubble from NEW angle!

No Plane PLUS Huge Explosion Equals Controlled Demmoltion; Constrolled Demolition equals INSIDE JOB!

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Restore Democracy: Abolish the Electoral College

2009-11-11T02:59:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

If the 'President' is elected to represent the people of the United states, then he/she should be elected directly by the people. The Electoral College, in which electors represent states --not people --must be abolished and the 'office' of President elected directly. The voice of the people needs no proxy. The voice of the people must be be heard directly, loudly and often.

Fears that the 'college' might elect a minority President are not merely speculative should the nation be so deeply divided that three or more candidates split the electoral votes among them --no one getting a necessary majority. Precisely that happened in 1824, attempted in 1948 and again in 1968.

There are but two resolutions should it happen again:

either one candidate could throw his electoral votes to the support of another before the meeting of the Electors, or
the U.S. House of Representatives would select the president in accordance with the 12th Amendment.

The people are without a voice. There is no office nor branch of government that bears the responsibility of representing the voice of the people. There is the increasing danger that the current system may be 'gamed' and its flaws exploited.

Krugman looks at how the teapartying far right acolytes of Beck and Limbaugh could literally gain enough power to do what Republicans in California have done, saying, "In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state's fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

--Rob Kall, Top-down blowback: The GOP Discovers that the Grassroots Bites Back,

Abolishing the electoral college and electing the 'President' directly is essential if these fatal flaws are to be addressed.

There are several advantages to the direct election of the office of President.

With the Electoral college, there is always the possibility that a minority president may be elected;
Though it has not happened (to my knowledge) there is, nevertheless, a risk that "faithless" or "rogue" electors will cast ballots for whomever they prefer;
The Electoral College is blamed for depressing voter turnout;
and, most importantly, its failure to accurately reflect the national popular will.

It is the job of Representatives and Senators in Congress to represent the states. A 'President', elected, in fact, by the states via the electoral college, likewise, represents the interests of the 'states' --not the people.

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Creationist B.S. Exposed

2009-11-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Richard Dawkins was recently issued a challenge --disprove creationism in one sentence. I can do that myself. Here it is: if we can see Andromeda --some 2.5 MILLION light years distant from earth --then creationism is false!

Andromeda can be seen even with the naked eye; in any case, it takes light from Andromeda some 2.5 MILLION light years to get here and be seen. That we can see these objects with or without telescopes utterly disproves creationism and a 'young Earth' or young universe.

I chose Andromeda because it is accessible, close enough to be seen with a good pair of binoculars, perhaps, even, with the naked eye. I saw Andromeda as a kid with a pair of hand-me-down 7x35 binoculars duct-tape to a shaky tripod. Deep space images from the Hubble are, of course, state of the art and much more dramatic. Galaxies some 17 BILLION light years distant prove that the Universe is considerably older than Sarah Palin's idiotic concept that homo sapien co-existed with dinosaurs a mere 6000 years ago.

Astronomy mag has an excellent article about how distances are determined. And the speed of light is a universal constant. [See: The Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michael Fowler, Univ. Va. Physics 9/15/08. ]These are not 'assumptions'. This is established, empirical science.

That issue is settled --the speed of light is NOT an assumption but a proven empirical fact! And so too are the distances to nebulae and galaxies much farther distant than Andromeda.

There are likely to be galaxies that formed slightly earlier, which so far we haven't been able to detect because they are so faint and distant.

However if we look back too far in time, there's simply no stars and galaxies to look at — after the Big Bang, it would have taken a few hundred million years for matter to clump together with sufficient density for stars and galaxies to form.

So if more powerful telescopes can't enable us to see any further into the universe why are we still building them?

Lomb says larger telescopes will be more sensitive and enable us to look into the past of the universe more clearly.

"There's still the great mysteries of what happened between 13.7 and 13 billion years ago," he says.
--What is the most distant galaxy a telescope can detect?

Below is the Hubble Deep Space photo. Every galaxy in the photo disproves Sarah Palin's 6000 year old universe.

Pick a galaxy at random. Imagine that you are an intelligent being living on a planet -- just one of a multitude of 'solar systems' that most certainly exist in this vast cosmos! Imagine that you have struggled with the concept that should your civilization develop craft capable of near light speed, it may yet take a million or more lifetimes to reach our own galaxy --the Milky Way and, when reaching it, 100,000 additional years to traverse it!

Dawkins Challenges Creationists: Put up or shut up!

Now --contrary to claims by critics, this article is referenced. Check the University of VA site above. Check the link to the blockquote. Check the Dawkins video. At last --check any high school or university text book on science, astronomy or the sicentific method. At last, in accordance with the principles of logical positivism [See: A.J. Ayer, 'Language, Truth and Logic'] everything I posted is easily verified experimentallly as described.

Now --since posting the article, I have found a very interesting site featuring a Java applet that 'duplicates' the Michelson-Morley experiment which proved the speed of light and the fact that it was constant and independent of the speed of the light source or its 'target'. Light speeed, in other words, is a universal constant.

Michelson-Morley Experiment Java Applet

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

How the Iraq War Destroyed the US Economy

2009-11-06T04:34:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Wars reduce the GDP, destroy jobs, reduce productivity, and increase the trade deficit! If wars are 'bad' for the economy, then how are they sold so easily? The quick response: they are sold with focus group tested bullshit!

There's a 'living' in killing, we are told! There is a more opulent living in the commission of mass murder which requires the construction of tanks, smart bombs, and fighter jets --the MIC, in other words. But that's all just snake oil for idiots and Republicans!

That wars are good for the economy is just a bald-faced lie cooked up by the defense lobby for whom killing IS a living but only for the shrinking one percent who benefit: the Military/Industrial complex, truly MURDER INC. Fact is war is most often disastrous for the economy.

In fact, most models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment. In this way, military spending is comparable in most models to any other form of government spending, such as spending on public goods or improving the environment.
This paper shows the projections of the impact of an increase in annual military spending equal to 1 percent of GDP (approximately the actual increase in spending compared with the pre-war budget) of the Global Insight macroeconomic model (see Appendix). The Global Insight model was selected for this analysis because it is a commonly used and widely respected model.1 Other models will show somewhat different projections, but it is unlikely that the direction of the long-term impact on any of the key variables will be different. In fact, because of the structure of the Global Insights model, it likely understates the negative impact of military spending relative to other models.
--The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending>

The decline in GDP projected for the twentieth year in the high military spending scenario is $42.1 billion. This corresponds to a projected loss of 668,100 jobs. Inflation is projected to be 0.7 percentage points higher in the high military spending scenario, with the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note 1.1 percentage points higher than in the baseline scenario.
The higher interest rate is associated with a reduction in industrial production of 1.8 percent compared with the baseline scenario. Car and truck sales are projected to be 731,400 in the high military spending scenario compared to the baseline scenario. Residential investment is projected to be 3.5 percent lower, which corresponds to 38,500 fewer housing starts and a reduction of 286,500 in the number of existing homes sold.
--The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending>

Given those facts, should anyone be surprised that the US is at the very bottom of the CIA's World Fact Book with the world's largest NEGATIVE currnet account balance. China, which props up the declining dollar, is not surprisingly on top with the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance.

One should not be surprised when millions of jobs are lost as GDP declines. Yet, as a result of right wing/militaristic/jingoistic propaganda and FOX, many people still believe that war and military spending creates jobs. That may be true in the short-term. But, in the long run, increases in military spending cause job loss.

the policy would likely lead to a rise in interest rates and inflation, as higher levels of demand begin to push against the economy’s capacity. The rise in interest rates will lead to less investment, and less demand for cars and houses.
Higher interest rates will also push up the value of the dollar. This will increase demand for imports, since foreign-made goods will be cheaper for consumers in the United States, and decrease demand for exports, since U.S.-made goods will be more expensive for people living in other countries. The result will be that the United States will run a larger current account deficit. Over time, this will lead to a larger foreign debt.
--The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending>

As I have maintained for years --military spending is a waste. Millions spent building a tank, for example, is money sucked down a black hole. The rank returns nothing on the investment and will, inevitably, be blown up! We could just throw our dollars upon a heap, set fire to them, and cut out the middle man!

Military spending slows economic growth, increases the budget deficit, increases the trade deficit as can be seen, in fact, in US's NEGATIVE Current Account Balance, formerly called the 'balance of trade deficit'.

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Why Democrats Must Change or Perish

2009-11-04T01:41:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The GOP is a disciplined monolith. Even when the GOP screws up and runs an idiot like George W. Bush or John McCain, there is the danger that he will win because, on election day, the GOP will close ranks, hold their noses and vote the party line. Liberal Democrats for whom Clinton or Obama are too conservative will pout and stay home. Worse --conservative Democrats will join the evil minions and vote for a Bush Jr or a John McCain.

The Democratic party, meanwhile, doesn't have the luxury of settling for a 'base hit' in a game in which there are only home runs. For the Democrats, that is! The GOP has the luxury of just putting a man on base! Democrats don't have the luxury of nominating anything less than a JFK or an FDR.

The left wing world wide is a disorganized amalgam of differing opinions, sitting ducks for a disciplined, Nazi-like top down party like the GOP where issues are not derived from the people but from focus groups, consultants and think tanks who literally manufacture issues based upon how well they 'test'. What really hurts is that for their talk about 'the base', the GOP owes its allegiance to the richest one percent of the US population, a moneyed segment that plays and wins because it writes the rules.

Voting green ...is a luxury of the middle class, who will more or less fare equally well materially under either major party. Yes, there are social issues, but keep in mind that Bush was chosen as the GOP's dream candidate in part because is soft on abortion. Middle-class women are the key swing voters in this election, an there are a lot of pro-choice soccer moms who lean Republican.

The most active segment of the GOP base is pro-life, but the majority of people in this country are not and the Republican thinkers and money men know it. Bush is not a 'stealth' candidate; he comes from Eastern moneyed Republicans; his dad despised the Christian GOP activists (and the feeling was mutual). Gore knows this, which is why he feels the need to protest (too much) that Bush really is pro-life ---it's been the Democrat's hole-card for so long he can't bear to feel the tactical advantage slowly slipping away from him.
--Nate Blakeslee, Texas Observer, Nov 3, 2000

There are two options left to Democrats.

Find a long term wedge issue that will split the GOP right down the middle. Exploit it!
Support sweeping electoral/election reforms that will ensure that every vote counts in every race --borda counts, range voting, abolition of the primary system, direct elections et al

The current system sucks! The GOP has the money to endure and rebound. Democrats, always scrambling for money, are a party of speedy sprinters in a long distance race. Democrats may change but risk becoming GOP-lite. They have little choice, then, but to change the rules, but how?

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Is the GOP a Nazi Party?

2009-11-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

dby Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It was James Whitcomb Riley, a Hoosier, not a Texan, who is credited with having said: "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck." A thing or a party is what it does. This simple epistemological principles applies to everything from sub-atomic particles to mega-galaxies on the very edge of the universe and everything in between to include 'political parties'.

Merely putting a name on something does not explain it. Putting the label 'Nazi' on the US GOP does not explain either GOPPS or Nazis; it just helps us sort them out. I am sick of 'labels' and sick of the way labels have subverted American thought processes and debased the quality of debate and discourse. Labeling is passive. Meaningful sentences consist of subjects, ACTIVE verbs and, often, direct objects which are affected by some action that is taken. It is not enough for me to discount a politcian because they 'are' Republican. If I am to make my case, I must allege an 'action' --a GOP action --that has had, in fact, a harmful result. Indeed, it is the panoply of harmful actions that define this 'duck', this web-footed, forked tongued GOP!

The wake of WWII left many declaring that it must never happen again. If 'it' was to be prevented, however, it was clear that 'it' must be explained. The origins of WWII, however, could not be understood without first understanding a 'Nazi' mentality that provided it fertile soil and nurtured its growing roots. The Nazi weed grows and is cultivated in the US by bigots, authoritarians, and corporatists i.e, fascists.

At war's end, the victorious allies had in their custody the 'super-stars' of Hitler's Third Reich and imprisoned them at Nuremberg. Some believed that they should have been summarily executed. Others advocated trial for crimes against the peace and humanity. This is the legacy of Nuremberg: it left us what I hope is the lasting framework against which future crimes may be prosecuted. I have in mind the crimes perpetrated by the US against the sovereign nations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the peoples in those nations.

War criminals are where you find them. In the US, there were war hawks in both major parties, eager to avenge 911 and strike a blow against 'terrorism'. This is simplistic thinking. Terrorism is so vague as to be meaningless, certainly any act against US interests 'not liked' by the US or the specific interests affected. What if the 'interest' itself is illegal --the theft of Iraqi oil, for example. What about acts of terrorism perped by the US? Will the US govt root itself out and bring itself to justice? Don't hold your breath. The US govt has been, of late, fucked up!

'Revenge' is similarly problematic. 911 did not, does not and cannot justify the US invasion of either Afghanistan or Iraq for numerous reasons not the least of which is this: no one had been able to pin the 'rap' on Al Qaeda. Does al Qaeda exist? Could it possibly have pulled off 911? George W. Bush boasted of having killed alleged al Qaeda members though there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Afghanistan had anything whatsoever to do with crime of 911.

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.
--George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2003

I believe that this statement speaks to George W. Bush's guilt of war crimes that were defined and prosecuted by the US and its allies at Nuremberg. I believe that Bush should be cross examined with regard to this statement. It should be put to Bush: what --specifically --was that fate? Are we saying that the US rounded up Afghanis en masse and subjected them to summary executions? Who ordered these summary executions? Were the executions sanctioned by the President?

If so --then the President and those carrying out the murders should be charged and, when found guilty, they should be hanged!

How to Know a Nazi When You Find One

Nazis are where you find them. In pre-war Germany, they were found in the party which gave them their name. In the US, latter day Nazis will be found in abundance in the GOP and even among the Democratic right wing. Nazis are what Nazis do!

Ritzler and his colleagues saw a socially distant, intellectually pretentious person lacking depth of character...this psychological profiled belonged to a simple man. They speculated that he attained his success by being a good organization man, doing what he was told to do and not making waves. ...no one suggested a person from academia, the clergy or the arts.
...
the experience of learning the subject's identity has been unforgettable. the psychological protocol belonged to Adolf Eichmann!
The Quest for the Nazi Personality

As he was tried, Eichmann was portrayed in the media as a 'depraved killer responsible for the deaths of millions'. And so he was but only because he was a bureaucrat, a 'Republican', an 'organization man', a man whose truth was the party line and modus operandi. The very face of 'evil' as it was glimpsed by Dr. Gilbert and, later, Hanah Arendt, turned out to be the banal face of a bureaucrat.

Nazis may not have issued membership cards and a subscription to a newsletter! They were defined, however, by a psychological characteristic perhaps first described by Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the American psychologist who 'interviewed' Nazis imprisoned at Nuremberg. It was Gilbert who defined the Nazi mentality by its 'utter lack of empathy', a trait that has been identified in the contemporary US GOP. See John Dean's 'Conservatives Without Conscience'.

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

How the GOP is Killing America

2009-11-03T02:04:00.000-08:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The US is much, much worse off these days than Mexico which often takes the blame for the drug trade and 'income disparities'. Fact is --income and wealth inequalities are much, much worse in the US than in Mexico. At the end of the Bush Sr era, the upper quintile alone had benefited from the Reagan tax cuts. Even fewer benefited from Shrub's largesse! So --where do the GOP 'yankees' get off aiming their demagoguery at Mexico?

The piddly amounts of drugs sold across the border are a strawman --peanuts compared to the heist of US wealth pulled off by just one percent of the US population!

The GOP is either nuts or crooked or both! I often wonder what the US might have been if right wing psychopaths had not demagogued every war or every so-called 'crisis' and in ways that enriched only their 'base'! The end result is that just one percent of the entire population owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined! Anyone not of that ruling elite still supporting the elitist GOP and complicit DINOs is nuts! And I have no sympathy for you!

And if Mexican drugs are sold in the US --what of it? Isn't that just good ol' laissez-faire, right wing, GOP 'free enterprise'? How long would that evil drug trade last if 'yankees' were not lined up to buy? And what percentage of the GOP is 'hooked' on cocaine? How long would the border traffic last if 'white shirted', clean shaven GOP faithful were not lined up to buy?

If the GOP were truly concerned about the 'streets' of the US, it would get its stupid head out of its stupid ass and support 'leftist' or Keynesian policies that are known and proven to have created jobs and can be depended upon to get people off the streets and back to work! How many folk sell drugs because it represents a 'calling', a mission from God?

The trend in which the rich get rich at everyone else's expense abated --briefly --under Clinton. The trend resumed with a vengeance under Bush II. I have the official stats to prove all this and have posted them in numerous articles.

Time for the GOP to Put Up or Shut Up

The US is a Third World Nation kept afloat by China. That fact is confirmed by the the CIA's own World Fact Book. The US is listed at the bottom with the world's largest Negative Current Account Balance. China is on TOP with the world's largest positive Current Account Balance. Thus China is in a position to prop up the buck in order to continue selling its crap to us via Wal-Mart. Quick --name just one industry in which the US leads the world!

This was all by design. The elites have no particular allegiance to the US. Certainly, one of the causes for the collapse is the capital drain to offshore tax havens.

I often wonder how great the US might have been had it not committed genocide for the resources it 'won' only to squander them leaving behind vast wastelands where once Native Americans lived peaceably with Buffalo. You've never seen a buffalo? Chances are you never will! The object of US policy was to kill the Buffalo and thus the Native American.

Let's talk about the stupid people who have taken over the US and the shill media which kisses up to them. Let's review the implications of a recent article in the Texas Observer.

On March 25, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° rolled into El Paso to report on Mexican drug-cartel violence. Cooper was one more in a recent wave of national news heavy hitters to parachute in, scare the pants off millions of viewers, then jet off to the next headline destination.

Dressed in military green, Cooper furrowed his brow and squinted solemnly into the camera as the lights of the international border checkpoint glimmered behind him. Guest Fred Burton, identified as a terrorism and security expert with Stratfor Global Intelligence, was beamed in from a studio in Austin to paint a menacing picture of Mexican cartels invading U.S. city streets. “It’s just a matter of time before it really spills over into the United States unless we shore up the border as best we can,” Burton warned.
By God, they’re coming to your neighborhood! Looking at another live feed from El Paso, listening to the breathless reports of violence and “expert” analysis about “spillover,” viewers could only assume that the city in which Cooper stood was under imminent assault.

That’s the reality these days for El Pasoans. Or rather, it’s the twisted perception created by border-warrior politicians and national news media, and foisted on Juarez’s relatively peaceful sister city. For El Pasoans and residents of nearby border towns, it might all be a mere oddity—maybe even worth a chuckle—if it didn’t mean the construction of 18-foot border walls, blustery talk about National Guard troop surges, and new resources for the disastrous war on drugs. While “troop surge,” “border wall,” and “drug war” might sound irresistibly sexy to politicians and pundits, it’s border residents who have to live with the fences and tanks and consequences.

The truth differs wildly from the perception. Certainly, El Paso’s symbiotic relationship with Juarez has been disrupted by the explosion of drug violence south of the border, which began to tick up in January 2008. But it’s not the kind of disruption brought to you by CNN, Fox, and the rest of the media pack.

The real impact of the ongoing tragedy in Juarez is felt by El Pasoans in more indirect and personal ways. While the brutality across the river has not caused a wave of kidnappings and murders in El Paso, folks do feel its effects every day. Families are divided. El Pasoans can no longer visit their friends, relatives, doctors or dentists in Juarez. Businesses on both sides suffer. The stories are legion: The high-school student who can’t visit her beloved, 105-year-old grandmother because her parents don’t want to risk her safety. The young Juarez woman who worries that her El Paso friends and relatives won’t be able to attend her wedding. And the many families mourning loved ones lost on the other side of the Rio Grande.

All too often the nightly news portrays Juarez and El Paso as one and the same, with the U.S. city symbolizing the perils of that new buzzword: spillover. Night after night, TV spin-meisters, retired generals, terror analysts and politicians rage on about spillover violence. They call Mexico a “failed state” and argue for militarizing the border. No wonder Americans are scared. No wonder El Pasoans feel doubly besieged.

Lights, Cameras, Mayhem

Consider this gem from former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now a consultant for ABC News, commenting on Juarez: “There is in fact an insurgency on both sides of the American-Mexican border, and it’s stepped up a lot in the last several years because the Bush administration ignored it and put its focus on Iraq.”

After weeks of hearing the war drums beat louder and louder, Sito Negron, editor of El Paso’s online daily news journal, Newspaper Tree, recently decided he’d had enough. An insurgency on both sides? he thought, listening to Clarke’s prime-time pronouncement. Are you kidding me?

According to the FBI, more than 1,600 people were killed by cartel violence in Juarez in 2008. El Paso, a city of 755,000, recorded just 18 murders last year. Laredo had 11; Brownsville and McAllen had three and nine, respectively. By comparison, Washington, D.C., with a population smaller than El Paso’s, had 186 homicides in 2008.

Who Are the IDIOTS?

A native El Pasoan, Negron was fed up with national media feeding the frenzy to militarize his hometown. He published an opinion piece on Newspaper Tree titled, “Who are you idiots, and why are you on national television talking about the border? An open letter to U.S. media":

Get this straight. The violence is not “spilling over the border” into the U.S. No, every time you say that, whether you mean to or not, you’re conjuring up images of crazed Mexicans crossing the border to burn Columbus, and you have it backwards. It spilled over from the U.S. into Mexico and Latin America long ago. ... [F]or the past 20 years, we’ve been slowly turning the border into a militarized zone, so let’s not say there isn’t violence associated with both sides of the drug trade and the Drug War. We could say that we’re now sharing the violence to a higher degree, an important distinction from the simple-minded terminology of “spilling over.”

“I’m happy that the border is an important place,” Negron said a few days after writing the piece. “But I’m not happy about the context in which they place it. I’m generally a little more mainstream, but I got a bit loose with the editorial because I was ticked off.”

Other El Pasoans share his pique. Negron’s piece generated several dozen comments, mostly along this line: “Congratulations on hitting the nail on the head. I am so tired of hearing so-called pundits speak about the border without being here and experiencing it for themselves.”

Negron cops to his own role in whipping up the frenzy. In January he penned an article for Texas Monthly called “Baghdad, Mexico,” comparing the carnage in Juarez to the insurgent violence in Iraq. He wishes he hadn’t made the comparison, he says, because it helped fan the blaze of overheated news coverage.

“I regret using the word ‘Baghdad’ because people from elsewhere who don’t know much about the border or Mexico see that word and think, ‘We better send the military down there,’” Negron says. “The border becomes a backdrop for the nation’s fears and anxieties instead of a place where real people live.”

In late March, constituents criticized El Paso Mayor John Cook for missing a civic forum on the city’s east side. Cook couldn’t make it because he was being interviewed by BBC anchor Katty Kay. The BBC, Kay said, had information that drug violence had spilled into El Paso.

Cook was eager to set the record straight. He’s had plenty of practice lately, with national and international media frequently asking him about the situation in Juarez and in his own city. “I’ll speak with them and tell them there hasn’t been any spillover of violence into El Paso,” he says, “and then they will turn around and report that there is. Mostly I feel like I’ve wasted my time.”

He’s not the only border mayor who feels that frustration. In March, McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez got into an on-air tussle with CNN anchor Don Lemon. With archival footage of masked soldiers and body bags in Sinaloa, Mexico—960 miles from McAllen—rolling in the background, Lemon informed Cortez what was happening in his city.
...
When folks around El Paso and McAllen hear rhetoric [i.e, bullshit, EC] about sending troops to the border, they can’t help remembering what happened in Redford, four hours east of El Paso, in 1997. With drug trafficking having been declared a “threat to national security,” thousands of soldiers were dispatched to the border. Residents’ worst fears were realized when 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez was shot and killed by a Marine while tending his family’s herd of goats 100 yards from his home. Hernandez was the first American killed by U.S. military forces on native soil since the Kent State massacre in 1970. The Marine who shot him was not charged with murder, though the federal government eventually paid the Hernandez family $1.9 million to settle a wrongful death claim.

Shortly after Hernandez’s death, military operations along the border were suspended. Almost a decade later, from June 2006 to July 2008, 6,000 National Guardsmen were sent to the border as part of Operation Jump Start. This time they were assisting Border Patrol officers with technical, logistical, and administrative work to free up the patrol to focus on detaining more illegal immigrants. Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster says the National Guard troops in his area spent most of those two years parked outside the city in Humvees, dressed in camo fatigues. “I came back from a trip and thought, ‘My God, what happened while I was away?’” he recalls. This time, at least, there were no murders—just a couple of bored soldiers who got into trouble for shooting off rounds on the outskirts of town one night.

Tired of living under virtual house arrest, mayors, county judges and business leaders formed the Texas Border Coalition in 2006, the first year of Operation Jump Start. The coalition has tried ever since to educate state and federal policymakers about what U.S. border towns are really experiencing and what they really need. They’ve spent a lot of time pleading their case in Washington. It’s been uphill all the way.
--Texas Observer, Lights, Cameras, Mayhem!

The US presumes to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq even as it creates conditions of 'occupation' within its borders. As it declines, the US becomes an increasing danger to almost every nation on the globe. What is the threat posed by Afghanistan? None! What was the threat posed by Iraq? None! If you think it was, then show me the WMD! What was the threat posed by Viet Nam? After some thirty or forty years I am still awaiting a credible answer to that one!

Enough is enough!

A good start will consist of shutting up the right wing media. Turn off CNN, Fox and the bullshit peddlers all over the tube! Secondly, the people of the US must effect the complete and utter repudiation of right wing practices which have, in fact, enriched just one percent of the entire population as some 95 percent of the rest of us have gotten poorer, impoverished utterly.

Secondly, the GOP must be held to account for war policies that have, in fact, bankrupted the US.

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

How Foreign Lobbies and Elites 'Bought' the US

2009-10-31T06:03:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

FASCISM is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political policy defined by a corporatist economic ideology enforced by a dictatorial regime which, in turn, is supported by a symbiotic business/corporate community.

In pre-war Germany, Hitler held a meeting with his corporate backers. He cut them all a 'deal' and, in turn, was rewarded with their enduring support and they by his LUCRATIVE DEFENSE CONTRACTS. It was I.G. Farben which manufactured Zyklon 'B' used to murder Jews, gypsies and non-Nazis in concentration camps.

In the US just one percent of the nation's population has benefited from GOP (right wing) tax cuts. I have charged that the 'tax cuts' are, rather, an elaborate money laundering scheme in which the 'ruling elite' is paid a return on its investment, that is, the purchase of the US government by way of its pimps on K-Street.

Read the US govt stats re: income inequalities. Income inequalities in the US are instructive, the result of an ongoing auction of the US government to domestic and foreign lobbies. Glaring correlations not accidental: terrorism is worse under GOP regimes and --at the same time --income disparities increase. US tax policy, for example, favors the rich and, of late, just one percent of the US population which is enriched by those policies.

The area around K Street in Washington, D.C., abounds with lobbyists, many of whom represent foreign governments or entities. Although some major foreign governments continue to work mainly through their embassies in Washington, nearly one hundred countries rely on lobbyists to protect and promote their interests. The subculture of public relations and law firms that do this kind of work reflects a steady decline and privatization of diplomacy -- with an increasing impact on how the United States conducts its own foreign policy.
The strongest lobbies promoting foreign interests are driven by cohesive ethnic population groups in the United States, such as Armenia, China, Greece, India, Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and, historically, Ireland. Even countries that have strong bilateral relations with the United States, such as Australia, Japan, and Norway, need lobbyists as well as embassies. Lobbyists can operate within the system in ways that experienced diplomats cannot. A lobbying group can identify with a domestic ethnic bloc even though it is paid by a foreign government. Ethnic politics can trump corporate interests and, more important, influence what agencies within the U.S. government may see as the national interest.Illustration by Ib Ohlsson
The United States is a nation of immigrants -- a strength that has also created vulnerabilities. Although ethnic population groups have at times offset isolationist tendencies in the United States, they also can find themselves conflicted on issues that could divide the motherland from the adopted country, the United States. In other cases, these so-called hyphenated groups unhesitatingly side with the United States and, in effect, become more royalist than the king.
--Diplomacy Inc., The Influence of Lobbies on U.S. Foreign Policy

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Did Bush Era Mark the End of American Global Dominance?

2009-10-30T07:57:00.001-07:00

Recent evidence of the decline of US dominance began with US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, complicated by the decline of US economic hegemony begun under Ronald Reagan, the related decline of the US dollar begun under Richard Nixon who bought the US some time by withdrawing from the Bretton-Woods accords, commonly called the 'gold standard'.

The decline of American dominance during the Reagan years are defined by the start of several long term trends, not the least of which was the decline of the US middle class during which wealth began its flow upward to just one percent of the entire population. US efforts in Viet Nam, already failed, left a shadow on rather impotent efforts by Reagan to re-assert US hegemony.

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Lies About Lockerbie, 911 and Terrorism

2009-10-28T03:38:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Unlike 911, Lockerbie was investigated but, like 911, the case is obviously not solved. It it was Mossad, according to Time, which issued the first 'tip' that a bomb had been placed among the luggage. That may be sufficient grounds for reasonable suspicion. Mossad, after all, is probably second only to the US CIA among the world's largest 'official' terrorist organizations!

Memorial services were held to mark the 20th anniversary of the crash of Pan Am 103 near Lockerbie, Scotland. Like 911, 'Lockerbie', an alleged 'terrorist' attack named for the nearby township, raises more questions than are answered. But there is one important difference. In Lockerbie there is identifiable wreckage. In New York and at the Pentagon, the laws of physics --we are expected to believe --were suspended!

In Lockerbie, southern Scotland, eleven people were killed when large sections of aircraft fell on, in and around the township, bringing total fatalities to 270. Many have called it the 'Lockerbie bombing'. Unlike 911, Lockerbie was investigated but, like 911, the case is obviously not solved.

Precisely how a rogue bag containing the bomb eluded the Frankfurt airport security system is still not known.
If bomb-laden luggage replaced an innocent bag, what happened to the displaced suitcase?
It so happened that the flight from Berlin to Frankfurt was delayed. While all the passengers ultimately made the connection to London, 11 suitcases, including the pilot's two bags, remained behind in Frankfurt. They were entered into the airport computer system and rerouted via the Pan Am flight. But only one of the pilot's suitcases was recovered at Lockerbie. The other had been mysteriously left behind in Frankfurt, and arrived safely in Seattle a day later. That story, which TIME has corroborated, doesn't prove Pan Am's claim that terrorists used al-Kassar's drug pipeline to pull a suitcase switch in Frankfurt. But it does support the theory that a rogue bag was inserted into the automated baggage-control system, as the secret FBI report indicates was possible.

Time

George Bush's [Bush I] letter of condolence, written almost four months after the shattered remains of Pan Am Flight 103 fell on Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, expressed the usual "my heart goes out to you" sorrow. "No action by this government can restore the loss you have suffered," he concluded. But deep inside, Mrs. McKee suspects it was a government action gone horribly awry that indirectly led to her only son's death. "I've never been satisfied at ( all by what the people in Washington told me," she says.
Today, as the U.S. spearheads the U.N.-sanctioned embargo against Libya for not handing over two suspects in the bombing, Mrs. McKee wonders if Chuck's background contains the secret of why this plane was targeted. If her suspicions are correct, Washington may not be telling the entire story. Major Charles Dennis McKee, called "Tiny" by his Army intelligence friends, was a burly giant and a superstar in just about every kind of commando training offered to American military personnel. He completed the rugged Airborne and Ranger schools, graduated first in his class from the Special Forces qualification course, and served with the Green Berets. In Beirut he was identified merely as a military attache assigned to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). But his hulking physique didn't fit such a low- profile diplomatic post. Friends there remember him as a "walking arsenal" of guns and knives. His real assignment reportedly was to work with the CIA in reconnoitering the American hostages in Lebanon and then, if feasible, to lead a daring raid that would rescue them.
McKee's thick, 37-page Army dossier contains so many blacked-out words that it's hard to glean the danger he faced. Surviving the censor's ink was his title, "Team Chief." Under "Evaluation," it was written that he "performs constantly in the highest-stress environment with clear operational judgment and demeanor . . . Especially strong in accomplishing the mission with minimal guidance and supervision . . . Continues to perform one of the most hazardous and demanding jobs in the Army."
For Beulah McKee the mystery deepened six months after Chuck's death, when she received a letter from another U.S. agent in Beirut. It was signed "John Carpenter," a name the Pentagon says it can't further identify. Although the letter claimed that Chuck's presence on the Pan Am plane was unrelated to the bombing, Carpenter's message only stirred her suspicions. "I cannot comment on Chuck's work," he wrote, "because his work lives on. God willing, in time his labors will bear fruit and you will learn the true story of his heroism and courage."
A four-month investigation by Time has disclosed evidence that raises new questions about the case. Among the discoveries:
According to an FBI field report from Germany, the suitcase originating in Malta that supposedly contained the bomb may not have been transferred to Pan Am Flight 103 in Frankfurt, as charged in the indictment of the two Libyans. Instead, the bomb-laden bag may have been substituted in Frankfurt for an innocent piece of luggage.
The rogue bag may have been placed on board the plane by Jibril's group with the help of Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian drug dealer who was cooperating with the U.S.'s Drug Enforcement Administration in a drug sting operation. Al- Kassar thus may have been playing both sides of the fence.
Jibril and his group may have targeted that flight because on board was an intelligence team led by Charles McKee, whose job was to find and rescue the hostages.
--Pan Am 103: Why Did They Die

The wreckage found near Lockerbie is clearly traceable to a specific flight. The aircraft was largely re-assembled. By contrast, 'scraps' left behind on 911 were hurriedly disposed of by executive order of George W. Bush. No attempt was made to investigate the crime. It was, rather, covered up. At the Pentagon, the glaring lack of wreckage was 'explained away'. The fuselage of Flight 77, we are told, vaporized. Aluminum does not vaporize at temperatures less than 11000 degree F, according to NASA some 1000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. In any case, the dead were said to have been DNA id'd! But DNA literally 'melts' at temperatures well under 500 degrees F. So --which is it? Did the fuselage vaporize OR were the bodies identified via DNA. It cannot be both ways.

Willful destruction of evidence is a crime and those ordering it should be prosecuted! Moreover, it is my belief that only those guilty of a crime are sufficiently motivated to order the destruction of admissible evidence that might surely convict them of the crimes of mass murder and high treason. Bush Jr, should you happen to read this while surfing the net, you know who and what you are!

I defy anyone to produce a scrap, a shred of Pentagon wreckage traceable to Flight 77. Secondly, I defy anyone to produce a scrap of admissible evidence that any Arab hijacker was ever on board. Certainly, there are no Arab names whatsoever on the ONLY official document of Flight 77 passengers and that is the official autopsy report released to Dr. Olmsted in response to his FOIA request.

I have never had any reason --compelling or otherwise --to believe a word of Bush's 'official conspiracy theory' of 911. No aspect of this conspiracy theory can be believed. No part of it is credible. While it is time to fully investigate the events of 911, it might be advisable to begin a wider inquiry: why are there more terrorist attacks against US interests during GOP regimes than Democratic at least since the assumption of the office of President by Ronald Reagan? I'm waiting for a credible story from any Republican holding public office or supporting GOP officials holding any office in the nation!

Why I moderate comments
SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
'Flame' attacks, 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Exposing Lies About the FED, the CIA, the Murder of JFK

2009-10-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

New allegations about CIA involvment in the murder of JFK put a glaring spotlight on the current bankster crisis. Those who pull off crimes are, naturally, most motivated to lie about them! The CIA, therefore, looks very guilty of two murders that ripped America apart: the murders of JFK and RFK.

As news broke this week that CIA lies about the JFK murder had been exposed, I recalled that among the motives for JFK's murder was his threat to abolish the FED, the very source of the government's 'funny money' and most certainly, the root cause of the current banking collapse. JFK had threatened to strip the power of the FED, smash the CIA into 'a thousand pieces' and abolish the oil industry's sacred cow: the Oil Depletion Allowance. No President since has dared piss off so many powerful and ruthless people.

JFK tried to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest

The move would have bypassed the Fed by restoring to the government the power and authority to issue currency. Executive Order 11110 gave the US government the ability to create its own money --backed by silver! It just might have put the FED out of business.

Some background and basic economics: to pay it's bills, the US government borrows money from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Federal Reserve Notes are not backed up by anything. 'Silver certificates' issued under the authority of JFKs order would have been backed up by government owned silver. The government would no longer borrow from the FED to pay its obligations. It would have done so with 'silver certificates' issued by the government itself.

Like any commodity, Federal Reserve notes are subject to the laws of supply and demand. The demand for Federal Reserve notes might have collapsed altogether and the FED itself might have been forced out of business.

Executive Order 11110 could have prevented the national debt from reaching its current level. It would have would have made it possible for the government to repay its debt without having to borrow worthless 'notes' from the Fed and having to repay them later at interest.

Executive Order 11110 was never repealed. One wonders why no other President ever bothered to utilize it. Could it have had anything to do with the fact that JFKs order made him very, very unpopular throughout the banking establishment? JFK was brutally murdered in Dallas just five months after issuing the order. No more silver certificates were issued. The FED's gravy train was still intact.

FED owners do not have ready access to $trillions$ needed to float the US debt and deficit. They don't need it! The FED 'creates' money with a bookkeeping entry, writing out a check to the US government in exchange for US bonds. Cashing the check is easy; the US Government banks at the Federal Reserve.

It's a scam in which no 'real' money, no hard currency is exchanged. Government agents are never seen walking out of the FED offices --under armed guard --carrying bullion, coins, or, indeed, anything of real value. The Fed makes an 'entry' in the books! The government makes an entry in its books!

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
--Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, I believe, had foreseen what has happened in fact. That is the context in which the latest news should be considered.

The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed, perhaps for the first time in any major US newspaper, that the CIA has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK assassination.
On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The CIA hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in CIA support during 1963.
In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.
That the October 17 story was published at all is astonishing. According to Lexis Nexis, there have only been two earlier references to the CIA Joannides documents controversy in any major US newspaper: a brief squib in the New York Daily News in 2003 announcing the launching of the case, and a letter to the New York Times in 2007 (of which the lead author was Jeff Morley) complaining about the Times’ rave review of a book claiming that Oswald was a lone assassin.
--The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions

Just last year, the BBC reported that it was the CIA that was behind the murder of RFK, JFK's younger brother.

The new video and photographic evidence -- the result of a three year long investigation --"puts three senior CIA operatives" at the scene of the murder.
Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA's Miami base for its Secret War on Castro.
David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard."
Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations.
Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated. [See also: CIA Involvement in the assassination Of Robert Kennedy]
--CIA role in Kennedy killing
--Evidence That the CIA Murdered RFK

As with the 1963 murder of JFK in Dallas, lingering questions dog the official theories. Powder burns indicated that three shots had been fired from very close range from 0 to 1-1/2 inches though no witness could place Sirhan closer than three feet. Sirhan's gun held only eight bullets but a total of ten were recovered. Three were found in Kennedy. Two were lodged in a pantry door frame. One was found in an airspace. Presumably four more were found elsewhere. Significantly, four bullets 'touched' Kennedy to include the three that were recovered --lodged --in his back. At no time was Sirhan ever behind RFK.

Inexcusably, the door frames were burned, the Los Angeles Police Dept. claimed no bullets were found lodged in the "bullet holes", and two expended bullets (inexplicably dug out of wood) were soon found in the front seat of Sirhan's car. The LAPD then destroyed their records of the tests that had been done on the "bullet holes" in the doorframe.
--Facts about the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination

Like the fatal flaws in the official conspiracy theory of 911, the holes in the government's JFK story are fatal.

No competent or sane sniper/hit man would choose to shoot anyone from the TSBD. The 'view to a kill' was obscured by branches and leaves as photos taken that day prove! It was and remains the worst of several possible locations!
Zapruder frame 313 proves conclusively that the fatal shot came from the front, the so-called Grassy Knoll
No sniper in his right mind would choose a kill spot providing no possibility of egress or escape! Oswald would have had to have ditched his rifle and run down some six flights! No 'hit man' would have tried it! It's stupid! The place would have been 'sealed'!
I have visited Dealy Plaza! The picket fence afforded cover, egress and a clear unobstructed shot of the 'target' from a distance about one third that of a site in TSBD.
From TSBD, the motorcade is moving laterally and then away; from the picket fence, the target's lateral motion relative to the 'shooter' is minimal. A non-expert could have made the shot but, in fact, it was an expert who did!

I interviewed a witness to the JFK murder many years after the fact. Rosemary Willis was but a child on that fateful day and her story has been ignored by the mainstream media. When we met, she produced several boxes of color slides that had been taken by her father that fateful day in Dealy Plaza.

Referred to in the literature of the assassination as the "little girl in the red dress", she is seen in the Zapruder film running along the south side of Elm Street. Her father, Phillip Willis, taking 35mm color slides, can also be seen in the Zapruder film, looking forward at his daughter, perhaps calling to her. She stops suddenly just as the Presidential limousine is partially blocked by a sign between the motorcade and Abraham Zapruder's camera.

The FBI seized the Phillips photos but returned them years later. I looked at them on a light table with a loupe. I immediately recognized Dealy Plaza, the limousine, the motorcade, the Texas School Book Depository, the Pergola, the Grassy Knoll, the Triple Underpass, place names now burned into the consciousness of a scarred nation.

One Phillip Willis took a series of 12 photos of Dealy Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, in the minutes before and after the assassination. Mr. Willis' photos and testimony before the Commission appear in the report.
He was not questioned about the eighth photo, a shot of the Book Depository entrance shortly after the shooting. As Willis later pointed out, one of the men in the photo "looks so much like (Jack Ruby), it's pitiful". FBI agents questioning Willis agreed with him that the man bore a powerful resemblance to Ruby. When Willis mentioned this to the Commission, no interest was shown. When the photo was published in the Warren Report, a considerable part of the face of the Ruby look-alike had been cropped away.
- JFK Conspiracy Theories

At last, Rosemary (if I may be so familiar) pointed out some especially interesting slides. One of them was a shot of the Pergola, above the grassy knoll, taken from her father's position on the south side of Elm Street. Through the columns, all was clear. Then Rosemary produced an old copy of Look Magazine and turned to a double page spread. Reproduced over facing pages was her father's photograph of the limousine with the Pergola behind it.

"Do you notice anything unusual?" she asked.

I had noticed something, something which I now believe was the result of FBI complicity in the cover-up of a murder! In the magazine spread, a train locomotive could plainly be seen between the columns. Indeed, there are railroad tracks in that area to this day as Google earth reveals. Those tracks were there in 1963 as well --as photos of the time reveal. It was in that rail yard that three "tramps" had been arrested prior to the Kennedy assassination. [See: JFK Conspirator Wanted Every Kennedy Dead ]

But why was there a locomotive in the published picture but no locomotive in the "slide"? Rosemary explained that after Look Magazine published her father's pictures, FBI agents took all her father's slides. As I recall, the slides were kept for several years. When they were returned at last, every slide that had depicted the train had been doctored. The train was gone. Only the FBI could have 'removed' the depicted train --but why? It was clear to me that the answer to that question might very well have solved the JFK murder case! The removal of the train was intended to protect the guilty and it was equally clear that by removing the evidence, the FBI was overtly obstructing justice, protecting the identity/identities of murderers and traitors! The murder of JFK was not just a murder. It was an act of high treason!

Why would the FBI find it necessary to remove a train? What did the FBI find threatening about a train? I've speculated that the train was the egress, the perfect getaway for the assassins who fired the fatal shot from the grassy knoll just as Mark Lane had theorized years ago. That raises the question: why would the FBI protect an assassin's get-away? Unless the FBI was a part of the plot, lately called a coup d'etat, it would not.

However speculative my thoughts, it is fair to say that when you have uncovered the FBI's motive for removing the seemingly innocent picture of a train, you will have gone a long way toward explaining why the Warren Commission insisted upon the theory that the fatal shot came from the rear when any examination of the Zapruder film will reveal otherwise. Those who cover up are guilty! Count on it!

Addendum

Here's more about Rosemary Willis from Wikipedia:

Rosemary Willis (born 1953) was a close witness during the assassination of President Kennedy.

Clearly seen in the Zapruder film at the start of the assassination wearing a white, hooded coat and a red skirt, located to the limousine's left, she runs southwestward and parallel with the limousine while she faces for a short time when the limousine was to her direct right.

At circa Zapruder film frame 190 (hereafter "Z-190"), she is seen slowing, then she stops running and, simultaneous with her slowing/stopping, she slightly turns her level-facing head to end up looking towards the southwest corner of the Texas School Book Depository.

Immediately after the sitting upright President Kennedy is first hidden at Z-207 by the "Stemmons Freeway" traffic sign in the Zapruder film, Rosemary suddenly, and beginning at Z-214, snaps her head very rapidly 90 to 100 degrees westward --completely away from the depository southwest corner-- within only 0.16 second to then face Abraham Zapruder and the grassy knoll by Z-217.

Precisely 0.60 second after starting her extremely quick westward headsnap towards Mr. Zapruder and the grassy knoll, President Kennedy's head then emerges back into the Zapruder film view at Z-225 still sitting upright with his face and arms already displaying a physical reaction to having already been impacted by a bullet.

Importantly, in 1978 Rosemary was interviewed by investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations and stated that she heard at least 4 shots during the assassination. She also stated to the HSCA that while she was still facing the grassy knoll picket fence, she was attracted to view the quick movement of a person who quickly dropped down behind a "wall" out of her view. Rosemary was also documented in the HSCA report that her father, military veteran Phillip Willis, became upset when the Dallas policemen, sheriffs, and detectives --who first quickly ran onto the grassy knoll where he thought the shots came from-- then the authorities ran away from the grassy knoll.

Rosemary's sister, Linda, stated to assassination researcher and author Richard Trask (“Pictures of the Pain” 1994) that after the assassination she and Rosemary also saw someone find a piece of the president's head that had landed in the grass located at least twenty-two feet to the left of the president.

After the assassination Willis, along with her sister, father (Phillip), and mother (Marilyn) were present at the Kodak photographic laboratory getting her father’s assassination related photo slides developed when the Zapruder film was also developed and first shown to approximately nineteen persons.

Rosemary Willis was never called to testify to the Warren Commission.
--Wikipedia, Rosemary Willis

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Failed State Update with Krugman and Roberts

2009-10-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

In theory, a near worthless dollar is great for American manufacturers, American jobs. Lower costs for American goods means US exports should rise, reducing our trade deficit and helping pay off the national debt! That's the theory, the rationale behind Richard Nixon's decision to take the US off the so-called 'gold standard' back in the 70s.

The reality is this: despite the right wing's subversion of the dollar, despite the deals Nixon and subsequent GOP regimes cut with China, US exports have decreased, US jobs have decreased, the US standard of living has decreased as just one percent of the population has prospered at everyone else's expense. That has been the case at least since Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982, a tax cut which benefited only this rich base of GOP/right wing supporters. These downward trends have defined US history since the 1970s despite temporary gains made during the Carter and Clinton years. I have previously posted the key 'stats' which prove this to have been the case.

Check out the CIA's World Fact Book which lists the US at the very bottom of the list with the world's largest negative Current Account Balance. China, which pegs the Yuan to the dollar, is at the top of the list with the world's largest positive Current Account Balance. If the GOP had been correct, US exports should have risen! The 'balance of trade deficit' i.e, the NEGATIVE Current Account Balance would have been reduced! If the GOP had been correct, the US could have paid off huge amounts of national debt run up in incompetent and dishonest GOP regimes. The US might have survived decades of conservative budgets which forced the US to borrow from other countries. But --not surprisingly --things have not worked out as the GOP would have you believe.

Many economists, myself included, believe that China’s asset-buying spree helped inflate the housing bubble, setting the stage for the global financial crisis. But China’s insistence on keeping the yuan/dollar rate fixed, even when the dollar declines, may be doing even more harm now.

Although there has been a lot of doomsaying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere.
But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead.
--Palin vs Krugman On The Dollar -- Who Is Right?

Foreign Policy magazine goes on to say that, as dismal as the effects of Chinese policy on the US and US consumers, 'It's the rest of the world -- particularly Europe and the Pacific Rim -- that are getting royally screwed by China's policy.' FB claims these countries now suffer because their products are 'less comptetive' in the US vis a vis Chinese exports.

Keep in mind, that it was Nixon who took the dollar off the gold standard because of 'pressures' on the value of the dollar. Simply, had there been a run on the buck, the gold in Fort Knox would not have covered it. The question is: is there any gold in Fort Knox?

Secondly, it was hoped that by removing the dollar from an unrealistic standard, US products would enjoy greater sales abroad. So what happened? Someone please tell me what the US produces? Cars? Nope, it imports them! Take a look at Flint Michigan if you are interested in knowing the effects this has had! Electronics? Nope! Since the early 1960s, it is Japan that has flooded the US market with transistor radios, calculators, etc! Aerospace? Nope! Ask a Californian! The Aerospace industry which had driven the SOCAL boom, is but a shadow of its former glory. What of 'Silicon Valley'. What of it? IT is outsourced to India!

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.--Paul Craig Roberts, The US as Failed State

Richard Nixon Take US Off Gold Standard

The United States now no longer controls many of its domestic industries. Over the last 10 years alone foreigners have spent $1.2 trillion to acquire more than 8,000 key US companies. As of 2002, foreigners owned fully 20 percent of American manufacturing. In many high-tech and defense-related industries, the proportion is far higher. Such US industries as mining, cement, publishing, engine and power transmission equipment, rubber and plastics, and sound recording and motion pictures are now largely foreign owned. Even in industries like pharmaceuticals, chemicals, industrial machinery, transportation equipment, electronics, metal industries, and coal and petroleum industries, foreign ownership has recently become very high.
Increasingly therefore profits and technological secrets in such industries accrue to foreign owners. Moreover many of the key jobs (in research and development, for instance) go to foreign workers, while the profits that accrue to foreign holding companies boost the tax revenues of foreign governments. We are no longer capable of producing many critical components needed in our high-tech and defense industries.
--Foreign Ownership of U.S. Industries

I tried to learn the truth about those GOP/China deals back in the late seventies when I had a rare opportunity to put a microphone in front of George H.W. Bush in the Grand Ballroom of the Hyatt-Regency in downtown Houston. Had I known then, what I know now, it might have been a much, much better interview. I left unhappy with getting Bush's goofy story about eating 'aeromatic meats' (dog lip) in the Forbidden City.

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Texas Oil Man: US Should Plunder Iraqi Oil

2009-10-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Texas oil man T. Boone Pickets typifies what is dead wrong about America and what passes for 'foreign policy'. Pickens claims the US is 'entitled' to Iraqi oil. How convenient for the oil barons who conspired with Dick Cheney to carve up the oil fields of Iraq before 911 would give Bush the pretext he would need to attack and invade Iraq, a nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with 911.

Nevertheless, it would be claimed that Iraq was --somehow --a part of the 'war on terror'. Is there no end to the lies? Might I remind that on 911, it was a gang of Israelis, perhaps criminals from Mossad, who were seen dancing and celebrating! It was NOT Iraqis who celebrated the deaths of innocent Americans! Clearly --Bush waged war on everyone but the 'real terrorists'.

Mossad is just as crooked as is the CIA about which I have written, possibly, thousands of pages [See: Why the CIA is the world's number one terrorist organization] Secondly, the US is perpetually auctioned off to the highest bidders on K-Street! And the the most powerful lobby on K-street is most certainly the Jewish Lobby. Meanwhile, Israel is breaking every international law with respect to Palestine as we write and post.

Every cover, every rationalization, every pretext for war was a treasonous lie from traitors who betrayed the people of the US, the Constitution, and specific US Codes that make any death resulting from such a war a crime punishable by death. If you are reading this, George W. Bush, you are not out of the woods.

Now for the idiot du jour:

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."
--Reuters, Pickens says U.S. firms 'entitled' to Iraqi oil

T. Boone Pickens is either stupid, ignorant or just doesn't care! I am referring to various kinds of law, specifically English Common Law upon which most US laws and Constitution are based and, secondly, US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441 which makes what the US did in and to Iraq and to the people of Iraq a war crime punishable by death.

That applies, of course, to Bush who ordered the attack and invasion as well as his close associates who conspired with him knowing that Iraq had no WMD. It applies as well to the Army brass in an all volunteer army. They must take responsibility for having willingly participated in the commission of war crimes for which the penalty is death as prescribed by US law.

Now --are we to believe that US laws are no longer valid? Certainly --there must be a reason the Bush crime family is never brought to justice! There must be a reason that a certain 'class' in America is --in fact --above the law! Perhaps the law has become quaint replaced by a sophisticated but unjust two-tiered affair in which the criminal justice system enforces laws on behalf of an elite 'ruling class' which is itself place above the rule of law to which everyone is expected to pay obeisance and tribute! This elite ruling class of just one percent of the total US population own more than about 95 percent of the rest of us combined and is, in fact, the only beneficiary of US wars of aggression and oil theft in Iraq and elsewhere. Big Brother has arrived!

FACT TIME: there is only ONE justification for war under International Law and that is ''imminent threat'. Iraq POSED no such threat to the US or its interests. That's why Bush tried to claim that Iraq was a part of the so-called 'war on terrorism'' though there is absolutely NO EVIDENCE that Iraq had anything at all to do with 911.

I say revolution now! I say bring down this elite! I say arrest the war criminal who continue to rape the sovereign nation of Iraq! I say file capital charges against George W. Bush, his guilty staff and the Pentagon brass who knowingly and willing planned the entire heist on behalf of big oil!

I say charge every member of the Dick Cheney 'Energy Task Force' for planning it all, literally carving up the oil fields of Iraq before the all-too-convenient Riechstag Fire called 911 gave them the broad and wide ranging pretext to begin a perpetual war in which the US would plunder the Middle East.

Secondly, the US has an all volunteer army. Should that army commit war crimes, are not the willing participants of those crime subject to prosecution?

Is the legacy of the GOP/Reagan/Bush era the abolition of the rule of law? Clearly --unless things change, unless Bush and a gang of war criminals in the Pentagon are brought to justice, the very concept of the 'rule of law' will have become a macabre and ludicrous joke.

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."
--Reuters, Pickens says U.S. firms 'entitled' to Iraqi oil

What the US did in and to Iraq and to the people of Iraq is a war crime punishable by death. That applies to Bush who ordered the attack and invasion as well as his close associates who conspired with him in the knowledge that Iraq had NO WMD. It applies as well to the Army brass who must take responsibility for having willingly participated in the commission of war crimes.

A Nation of Laws or Outlaws?

Clearly --unless things change, unless Bush and a gang of war criminals in the Pentagon are brought to justice, the very concept of the 'rule of law' will have become a macabre and ludicrous joke.

Goodbye America, you sold your soul to the likes of T. Boone Pickens!

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Bombs and Bailouts: How the US 'Pissed Away' 14 Trillion Dollars

2009-10-20T06:15:00.001-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

After four years sifting through a morass of US government records, the Brookings Institution reports that the US government has spent $5.1 trillion on the development and manufacture of nuclear weapons, adding that if 'clean up, stockpiling and dismantlement' is included, the cost rises to $5.5 trillion.

US officials have called it: "money well-spent". Having spent trillions threatening the world, the US has recently bailed out the crooked banksters and other robber barons to the tune of $8.5 trillion for the total cost of the bailouts. See the spreadsheet graphic below. Click on it for the complete story.

Since 1945, the United States has manufactured and deployed more than 70,000 nuclear weapons to deter and if necessary fight a nuclear war. Some observers believe the absence of a third world war confirms that these weapons were a prudent and cost-effective response to the uncertainty and fear surrounding the Soviet Union's military and political ambitions during the cold war. As early as 1950, nuclear weapons were considered relatively inexpensive- providing "a bigger bang for a buck"-and were thoroughly integrated into U.S. forces on that basis. Yet this assumption was never validated. Indeed, for more than fifty years scant attention has been paid to the enormous costs of this effort-more than $5 trillion thus far-and its short and long-term consequences for the nation.
--Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, Brookings Institution

Elsewhere, Brookings reports that even as the Cold War ended, the US continued spending some $35 billion a year [$96 million a day], 14 percent of the defense budget on nuclear weapons and maintenance. Even Brookings concedes '..with the benefit of hindsight and objectivity, the waste, the duplication and occasional foolishness.'

Much is made of an 'atmosphere of tension, ambiguity and fear'! But the fact of the matter is this: much of that 'atmosphere' is traceable directly to the presence of a US nuclear arsenal that threatens the world. Brookings concedes that the moneys were not always well spent but does not go far enough. How many of the starving millions might have been fed with just one percent of some 14 trillion squandered by the US on weaponry and bailouts? How much more goodwill might have been achieved with the investment of just half that amount in peaceful projects that would have benefited all mankind? The US may have blown a golden opportunity forever!

``Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.''
-- Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Baghavad Gita

That might describe as well the ruinous effects of a wastral US fiscal policy, a bloated bailout for banksters, an impending implosion that will directly result from the US enrichment of just one percent of its population as some 95 percent descend into poverty, illiteracy and hopelessness and all of it a result of the right wing export of US industries, jobs, and hope!

Adendum:

The lead headline, in the upper right-hand corner, said: “U.S. Deficit Rises to $1.4 Trillion; Biggest Since ’45.”

The headline next to it said: “Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses.”

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

And we still don’t seem to have learned the proper lessons. We’ve allowed so many people to fall into the terrible abyss of unemployment that no one — not the Obama administration, not the labor unions and most certainly no one in the Republican Party — has a clue about how to put them back to work.
--Bob Herbert, Safety Nets for the Rich

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Michael Moore: How 'Banksters' Bleed America

2009-10-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

I have stats that prove just one percent of the US population owns more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. We are supposed to believe that's just an accident! It was, in fact, a deliberate transfer of wealth to those who benefit from US largesse to the US wealthy, members of the Military/Industrial complex, and, as Michael Moore dramatically demonstrates --a gang of 'banksters' who may have manufactured the recent 'financial crisis'!

Certainly --at the end of this 'crisis', only the 'banksters' will have benefited. Some already have! Everyone else wil be poorer if not poverty stricken. Bluntly --I am not all that excited about the restoration of the 'economic health' of the parasites who have leached upon the labors of those who create real wealth: workers!

It was written recently that Wall Street types were 'mocking' us, 'us' being the people of the US. Well, of course, Wall St mocks us. They're alright! They made out like the bandits they are in fact. Write this down: 1) Rich folk, bankers and elites LOVE recessions; they start them by 'taking their profits' i.e, dumping their holdings and depressing markets. 2) They short sell all the way down. 3) Then, they pick up the bargains when you are forced to sell or have already declared bankrupcy.

The banksters can do this because they control the markets.

Michael Moore 'Shakesdown' the Robber Barons

Clearly, the REAL cause of the economic collapse is the precipitous decline of US productivity over a period of some 30 years. The tell-tale symptom of this decline has been the fall of the dollar since Richard Nixon abandoned the 'gold standard' for the obvious reason that a run on the buck would have emptied Ft. Knox. Given a few ups and downs, the dollar has declined along with purchasing power, wages and living standards since that time.

The truth of my assertions can be found in the CIA's own 'World Fact Book' which lists China at the top of the list with the World's LARGEST POSITIVE 'current account balance'; the US is on bottom with the world's largest NEGATIVE current account balance, formerly known as the 'balance of trade' deficit! The difference between China's positive account and the US's negative account is largely the monies you might have made had not the GOP betrayed the American middle and lowers classes even as it enriched an increasingly tiny, ruling elite!

But it’s not a simple case of flourishing banks versus ailing workers: banks that are actually in the business of lending, as opposed to trading, are still in trouble. Most notably, Citigroup and Bank of America, which silenced talk of nationalization earlier this year by claiming that they had returned to profitability, are now — you guessed it — back to reporting losses.

Ask the people at Goldman, and they’ll tell you that it’s nobody’s business but their own how much they earn. But as one critic recently put it: “There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to the guarantees extended to many of Goldman’s bonds.

So who was this thundering bank critic? None other than Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s chief economist — and one of the architects of the administration’s bank policy, which up until now has been to go easy on financial institutions and hope that they mend themselves.

Why the change in tone? Administration officials are furious at the way the financial industry, just months after receiving a gigantic taxpayer bailout, is lobbying fiercely against serious reform. But you have to wonder what they expected to happen. They followed a softly, softly policy, providing aid with few strings, back when all of Wall Street was on the ropes; this left them with very little leverage over firms like Goldman that are now, once again, making a lot of money.
--Paul Krugman, The Banks are no Alright

The US is now a COW to be milked by 'banksters' at home and the Chinese ruling elite abroad. It was the treacherous, if not treasonous, activities of Bush, Nixon, Reagan and, most recently, Bush JR, who brought the world's great superpower to its knees!

It was Bush Jr who laid the groundwork for Nixon's famous trip China back in the seventies. Today, China props up a worthless dollar so that it can continue to sell US consumers --sheeple --products that were once produced by US industries, US businesses who employed a prosperous US working class that, bluntly, no longer exists. Name a single heavy industry in which the US leads the world (excluding military hardware). Secondly, the US dollar is worthless were it not propped up by China who is just trying to save their own asses by doing so.

Kudos to both Democracy Now and Michael Moore. Beginning with the 1989 classic Roger & Me, the Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore says his films come back to a central core concern: the economic system we have is unfair, unjust and undemocratic.

With his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore tackles the financial system and the interchanging circles of Washington politicians and corporate managers that run it. Moore says 'I thought I'd cut to the chase and propose we deal with this economic system and restructure it in a way that benefits people and not the wealthiest one percent.'

I agree! A 'recovery' in which wealth merely resumes its flow upward to just one percent of the population is just a band-aid on the pulmonary artery. If the flow upward is not stopped, the ultimate collapse of the US economy will make the Great Depression look like a Baptist picnic.

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Limbaugh's Bigoted Bid for an NFL Franchise

2009-10-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Heeeeere's Rush 'I'm a Nazi' Limbaugh:

'I'm a Nazi'

An update:

*Barely a week after talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh announced he was partnering with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts in a bid to buy the NFL's St. Louis Rams, the league's commissioner has responded with a proverbial hell to the no. "I have said many times before that we are all held to a higher standard here,"
Commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday at an owners meeting in Boston. "I think divisive comments are not what the NFL is all about. I would not want to see those kinds of comments from people who are in a responsible position within the NFL. No. Absolutely not."
--RUSH'S RAMS BID SHOT DOWN BY NFL COMMISH: Roger Goodell says 'I think divisive comments are not what the NFL is all about.' Sharpton agrees.

Rush Limbaugh had wanted to buy an NFL football team after having made bigoted comments about black players. Frankly, I haven't watched much NFL since Warren Moon, one of the great NFL quarterbacks of all time, set records for the Houston oilers in the late 80s and early 90s. Rush probably would not like the fact that Moon is black and few but Rush and other bigots would care! Moon must represent to Limbaugh what Jesse Owens represented to that earlier bigot --Adolph Hitler. [See: Jesse Owens, Hitler and Nazi Germany – TV drama to relive 1936 Olympics]

Professional sports has always served to unite Americans across class, creed and race. Now Rush Limbaugh, whose career is driven by dividing Americans precisely along those lines, wants to buy an NFL football team. Limbaugh is a racist and a chauvinist. His values are diametrically opposed to the traditions the NFL stands for. Limbaugh will poison professional football as he has poisoned the culture of American political discourse. We stand with former and current NFL players in urging the league to reject Limbaugh's ownership bid. Sports fans deserve better.
--Brave New Films

Limbaugh has been called 'one of greatest suck asses of all time'. I didn't write that but I wish I had. Like Ann Coulter and, earlier, Adolph Hitler, Limbaugh 'scapegoats' liberals, progressives, Democrats and black people, blaming them for problems created by the GOP.

How Jesse Owens Proved Hitler (and Limbaugh) to be both Stupid and Bigoted!

See my previous article, The Rising Cost of Idiocy, for the proof of that statement. Rush demonizes a perfectly good word --'liberalism', a technique perfected by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Rush and the right wing extremists/bigots who sponsor him are a clear and present danger to anyone not of the ruling one percent. I urge you to boycott anyone sponsoring Rush or advertising on any station carrying his campaign of bigoted trash, odious right wing propaganda, and 'hate messages'.

Sure --Limbaugh has a huge listening audience, or so we are told. So what? I will wager that his demographics suck. In broadcasting, it's demographics that count. Certainly --Limbaugh's overall ratings would decline if educational standards were improved and supported financially. But don't expect that to happen in Texas which beats out Mississippi for dead last in high school graduations.

Only idiots take Limbaugh seriously. If you listen to Limbaugh, you're an idiot if you take him seriously! Get a life! Get a clue! Learn to read books! I have found excellent libraries in poor neighborhoods. Patronize them! Crack open a real book and read it! Chances are Limbaugh hates 'education'; as more folk get smarter, he loses audience.

For example: under Bush Jr, Texas began a precipitous decline in the number of people graduating high school. Texas is now dead last, trailing even Mississippi, in high school graduations. That is Limbaugh's audience and it grows as education declines. Put money on it Rush's Texas audience increases as Texas educational standards decline. I would like to see not just his 'numbers' but the demographic story that explains the rise of a demagogue!

The Nielson company, unfortunately, does not measure the percentage that are hate mongers, whoremongers, neofascists, racists, and off the wall flag waving, tea-bagging hypocrites, essentially illiterate and ignorant of American history, world culture, science, and --most egregiously --the US Constitution and government. Nevertheless, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that there are more idiots in the world than geniuses. Limbaugh, like the Fox network, got filthy rich exploiting American stupidity. As long as there is an idiot 'market', there will be a Limbaugh to bleed it, pander to it, and get rich by lying to it.

I have grown to despise the fuckin' arrogance of idiots who would presume to lecture me about the US Constitution when it is clear that they have never bothered to read a single sentence of it. I wonder: has Limbaugh ever read the Constitution? Someone please pin him down on this issue! If Rush reads this: Hey Rush, you idiot! Have you read a word of the US Constitution? Do you know what it is?

As I updated this article to include the news that Limbaugh's bid is D.O.A., I found the only instance in which Limbaugh may have uttered a true statement:

"Therefore, this is about the future of the United States of America and what kind of country we're going to have."

Indeed! What kind of screwed-up America are we left with when liars are paid millions to tell bald faced fuckin' lies?

A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook.
--Bertolt Brecht

But what of Limbaugh --is he both an idiot and a crook?

Now let's set the record straight about 'black athletes' in the NFL. Warren Moon is a near legendary quarterback, the first and only modern African-American quarterback to have been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He made it to the NFL by way of Canada and, as a result, he is one of only two people to have been enshrined in both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Canadian Football Hall of Fame. Rush won't like that! It upsets his Nazi 'Weltanschauung'.

Moon held the record for 'most passing yardage' in a pro game, a record not broken until September, 2006 by Damon Allen. He also held the record for most passing touchdowns until that was broken in 2007 by Brett Favre. It was Favre again who passed Moon in 'passing attempts' but that was not until December, 2008.

LIMBAUGH: On California contractor C.C. Myers completing repairs 74 days early on the earthquake-damaged Santa Monica Freeway: "There was one key element that made this happen. One key thing: The governor of California declared the [freeway] a disaster area and by so doing eliminated the need for competitive bids.... Government got the hell out of the way." (TV show, 4/13/94) "They gave this guy [Myers] the job without having to go through the rigmarole...of giving 25 percent of the job to a minority-owned business and 25 percent to a woman." (TV show, 4/15/94)

REALITY: There was competitive bidding: Myers beat four other contractors for the job. Affirmative action rules applied: At least 40 percent of the subcontracts went to minority or women-owned firms. Far from getting out of the way, dozens of state employees were on the job 24 hours a day. Furthermore, the federal government picked up the tab for the whole job (L.A. Times, 5/1/94).

LIMBAUGH: "Banks take the risks in issuing student loans and they are entitled to the profits." (Radio show, quoted in FRQ, Summer/93)

REALITY: Banks take no risks in issuing student loans, which are federally insured.

LIMBAUGH: "Don't let the liberals deceive you into believing that a decade of sustained growth without inflation in America [in the '80s] resulted in a bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots. Figures compiled by the Congressional Budget Office dispel that myth." (Ought to Be, p. 70)

REALITY: CBO figures do nothing of the sort. Its numbers for after-tax incomes show that in 1980, the richest fifth of our country had eight times the income of the poorest fifth. By 1989, the ratio was more than 20 to one.

LIMBAUGH: Comparing the 1950s with the present: "And I might point out that poverty and economic disparities between the lower and upper classes were greater during the former period." (Told You So, p. 84)

REALITY: Income inequality, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau, fell from the 1940s to the late 1960s, and then began rising. Inequality surpassed the 1950 level in 1982 and rose steadily to all-time highs in 1992. (Census Bureau's "Money Income of Households, Families and Persons in the United States")

LIMBAUGH: "Oh, how they relished blaming Reagan administration policies, including the mythical reductions in HUD's budget for public housing, for creating all of the homeless! Budget cuts? There were no budget cuts! The budget figures show that actual construction of public housing increased during the Reagan years." (Ought to Be, p. 242-243)

REALITY: In 1980, 20,900 low-income public housing units were under construction; in 1988, 9,700, a decline of 54 percent ;Statistical Abstracts of the U.S).In terms of 1993 dollars, the HUD budget for the construction of new public housing was slashed from $6.3 billion in 1980 to $683 million in 1988. "We're getting out of the housing business. Period," a Reagan HUD official declared in 1985.

LIMBAUGH: "The poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe." (Radio show, quoted in FRQ, Spring/93)

REALITY: Huh? The average cash income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans is $5,226; the average cash income of four major European nations--Germany, France, United Kingdom and Italy--is $19,708.

LIMBAUGH: "There's no such thing as an implied contract." (Radio show, quoted in FRQ, Spring/93)

REALITY: Every first year law student knows there is.

LIMBAUGH: "Ladies and gentlemen, we now know why there is this institutional opposition to low tax rates in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. It's because [low tax rates] are biblical in nature and in root. When you can trace the lowering of tax rates on grain from 90 percent to 20 percent giving seven fat years during the days of Pharaoh in Egypt, why then you are tracing the roots of lower taxes and rising prosperity to religion.... You can trace individual prosperity, economic growth back to the Bible, the Old Testament. Isn't it amazing?" (Radio show, 6/28/93)

REALITY: Amazingly wrong. Genesis 41 is about the wisdom of instituting taxes, not cutting them. After Pharaoh had a dream that prophesied seven fat years to be followed by seven lean years, Joseph advised him to "appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years...and lay up corn under the hands of Pharaoh." In other words, a 20 percent tax on the grain harvest would put aside food for use during the famine. Pharaoh took Joseph's advice, and Egypt avoided hunger during the famine.
Weird Science
LIMBAUGH: "It has not been proven that nicotine is addictive, the same with cigarettes causing emphysema [and other diseases]." (Radio show, 4/29/94)
REALITY: Nicotine's addictiveness has been reported in medical literature since the turn of the century. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's 1988 report on nicotine addiction left no doubts on the subject; "Today the scientific base linking smoking to a number of chronic diseases is overwhelming, with a total of 50,000 studies from dozens of countries," states Encyclopedia Britannica's 1987 "Medical and Health Annual."

LIMBAUGH: "We closed down a whole town--Times Beach, Mo.--over the threat of dioxin. We now know there was no reason to do that. Dioxin at those levels isn't harmful." (Ought to Be, p. 163)

REALITY: "The hypothesis that low exposures [to dioxin] are entirely safe for humans is distinctly less tenable now than before," editorialized the New England Journal of Medicine after publishing a study (1/24/91) on cancer mortality and dioxin. In 1993, after Limbaugh's book was written, a study of residents in Seveso, Italy had increased cancer rates after being exposed to dioxin, The EPA's director of environmental toxicology said this study removed one of the last remaining doubts about dioxin's deadly effects (AP, 8/29/93).

LIMBAUGH: "The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent. Would you get on a plane -- or put your children on a plane -- if one of five passengers would be killed on the flight? Well, the statistic holds for condoms, folks." (Ought to Be, p. 135)

REALITY: A one in five AIDS risk for condom users? Not true, according to Dr. Joseph Kelaghan, who evaluates contraceptives for the National Institutes of Health. "There is substantive evidence that condoms prevent transmission if used consistently and properly," he said. He pointed to a nearly two-year study of couples in which one partner was HIV-positive. Among the 123 couples who used condoms regularly, there wasn't a single new infection (AP, 8/29/93).

LIMBAUGH: "Most Canadian physicians who are themselves in need of surgery, for example, scurry across the border to get it done right: the American way. They have found, through experience, that state medical care is too expensive, too slow and inefficient, and, most important, it doesn't provide adequate care for most people." (Told You So, p. 153)

REALITY: "Mr. Limbaugh's claim simply isn't true," says Dr. Hugh Scully, chair of the Canadian Medical Association's Council on Healing and Finance. "The vast majority of Canadians, including physicians, receive their care here in Canada. Those few Canadians who receive health care in the U.S. most often do because they have winter homes in the States--like Arizona and Florida--and have emergent health problems there." Medical care in Canada is hardly "too expensive"; it's provided free and covered by taxes.

LIMBAUGH: "If you have any doubts about the status of American health care, just compare it with that in other industrialized nations." (Told You So, p. 153)

REALITY: The United States ranks 19th in life expectancy and 20th in infant mortality among 23 industrialized nations, according to the CIA's 1993 World Fact Book. The U.S. also has the lowest health care satisfaction rate (11 percent) of the 10 largest industrialized nations (Health Affairs, vol. 9, no. 2).

LIMBAUGH: Denouncing Jeremy Rifkin of the Beyond Beef campaign as an "ecopest": "Rifkin is bent out of shape because he says the cattle consume enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people. The reason the cattle are eating the grain is so they can be fattened and slaughtered, after which they will feed people, who need a high protein diet." (Ought To Be, p. 110)

REALITY: Sixteen pounds of grain and soy is required to produce one pound of edible food from beef (USDA Economic Research Service). As for needing a "high-protein diet," the World Health Organization and U.S. Department of Agriculture recommend that from 4.5 percent to 6 percent of daily calories come from protein. The amount of calories from protein in rice is 8 percent; in wheat it's 17 percent (USDA Handbook No. 456).

LIMBAUGH: "Do you know we have more acreage of forest land in the United States today than we did at the time the constitution was written." (Radio show, 2/18/94)

REALITY: In what are now the 50 U.S. states, there were 850 million acres of forest land in the late 1700s vs. only 730 million today (The Bum's Rush, p. 136). Limbaugh's claim also ignores the fact that much of today's forests are single-species tree farms, as opposed to natural old-growth forests which support diverse ecosystems.

Brotherhood...and Sisterhood

LIMBAUGH: "The videotape of the Rodney King beating played absolutely no role in the conviction of two of the four officers. It was pure emotion that was responsible for the guilty verdict." (Radio show, quoted in FRQ, Summer/93)

REALITY: "Jury Foreman Says Video Was Crucial in Convictions", read an accurate Los Angeles Times headline the day after the federal court verdict (4/20/93).

LIMBAUGH: "Anytime the illegitimacy rate in black America is raised, Rev. Jackson and other black 'leaders' immediately change the subject." (Ought to Be, p. 225)

REALITY: Jesse Jackson has been talking about and against "children having children" in speeches and interviews for decades. So have many other black leaders, especially in the clergy.

LIMBAUGH: Praising Strom Thurmond for calling a gay soldier "not normal": "He's not encumbered by being politically correct.... If you want to know what America used to be--and a lot of people wish it still were--then you listen to Strom Thurmond." (TV show, 9/1/93)

REALITY: In the America that "used to be," Strom Thurmond was one of the country's strongest voices for racism, running for president in 1948 on the slogan, "Segregation Forever."

LIMBAUGH: "There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history. Does this sound like a record of genocide?" (Told You So, p. 68)

REALITY: According to Carl Shaw of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, estimates of the pre-Columbus population of what later became the United States range from 5 million to 15 million. Native populations in the late 19th century fell to 250,000, due in part to genocidal policies. Today the U.S.'s Native American population is about 2 million.

LIMBAUGH: "Women were doing quite well in this country before feminism came along." (Radio show, quoted in FRQ, Summer/93)

REALITY: Before feminism, women couldn't even vote. [Cowboy's two cents worth: women were expected to stay at home. Many could not get any other job but prostittion or, in the west, dance hall girl. In New York, female immigrants were exploited in sweat shops. At Triangle Shirtwaist, they were slaves forced to work in locked up, over crowed rooms. They were not allowed to bring or go to lunch. There were no fire escapes and no way in which fire could be fought or prevented. When fire did break out, 125 of 140 girls were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.. ]

LIMBAUGH: "Anita Hill followed Clarence Thomas everywhere. Wherever he went, she wanted to be right by his side, she wanted to work with him, she wanted to continue to date him.... There were no other accusers who came forth after Anita Hill did and said, 'Yeah, Clarence Thomas, he harassed me, too.' There was none of that." (TV show, 5/4/94)

REALITY: Hill could not have continued to date Thomas, since they never dated. Two other women, Sukari Hardnett and Angela Wright, came forth in the Thomas case with similar charges.

LIMBAUGH: "Now I got something for you that's true--1972, Tufts University, Boston. This is 24 years ago--or 22 years ago. Three year study of 5000 co-eds, and they used a benchmark of a bra size of 34C. They found that the--now wait. It's true. The larger the bra-size, the smaller the IQ." (TV show, 5/13/94)

REALITY: Dr. Burton Hallowell, president of Tufts in the '60s and '70s, had "absolutely no recollection" of such a study, according to Tufts' communications office. "I surely would have remembered that!" he exclaimed. Limbaugh's staff was unable to produce any such study. A search of the Nexis database--while revealing no evidence of a Tufts study--did produce a number of women theorizing that the presence of large breasts caused a lowering of IQ in some males.

The Clinton Obsession

LIMBAUGH: On Whitewater: "I don't think the New York Times has run a story on this yet. I mean, we haven't done a thorough search, but I--there has not been a big one, front-page story, about this one that we can recall. So this has yet to create or get up to its full speed--if it weren't for us and the Wall Street Journal and the American Spectator, this would be one of the biggest and most well kept secrets going on in American politics today." (TV show, 2/17/94)

REALITY: The New York Times broke the Whitewater story on March 8, 1992, in a front-page story by Jeff Gerth that included much of the key information known today. The investigative article ran over 1700 words.

LIMBAUGH: "You know the Clintons send Chelsea to the Sidwell Friends private school.... A recent eighth grade class assignment required students to write a paper on 'Why I Feel Guilty Being White". '... My source for this story is CBS News. I am not making it up." (Radio show, quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, 1/16/94.)

REALITY: When Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called CBS, the network denied running such a story. Ellis Turner, the director of external affairs for Sidwell Friends, told Roeper: "There is no legitimacy to the story that has been circulating.... We're anxious to let people know that this story is not true." The essay topic would be particularly difficult for the 28 percent of the school's student body that is not white.

LIMBAUGH: "You better pay attention to the 1993 budget deal because there is an increase in beer and alcohol taxes." (Radio show, 7/9/93)

REALITY: There were no increases in beer and alcohol taxes in the 1993 budget.

LIMBAUGH: The lead item on a page of "Stupid Quotes" in the May '94 Limbaugh Letter--subtitled, "Folks, I don't make this stuff up"--was a quote attributed to Eleanor Clift on the McLaughlin Group: "Hillary and Bill Clinton cheating on their taxes was a protest against the Reagan era tax breaks for the wealthy.... They knew... the IRS would catch up to them and tack penalties.... If more people had been as far-sighted and altruistic as the Clintons, we could retroactively erase the deficit." Limbaugh commented, "It's only May, folks, and we've got our Stupid Quote of the year."

REALITY: Rush Limbaugh, April Fool. The item came from the April Fools Day issue of a right-wing newsletter Notable Quotables. Each item in the newsletter was dated April 1 and the issue signed off with the words "April Fools." (The Limbaugh Letter later printed a correction on this and another April Fools quote used as fact.)

Fractured History

LIMBAUGH: Quotes President James Madison: "We have staked the future...upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." (Told You So, p. 73)

REALITY: "We didn't find anything in our files remotely like the sentiment expressed in the extract you sent to us," David B. Mattern, the associate editor of The Madison Papers, told the Kansas City Star (1/16/94). "In addition, the idea is entirely inconsistent with everything we know about Madison's views on religion and government."

LIMBAUGH: "And it was only 4,000 votes that--had they gone another way in Chicago--Richard Nixon would have been elected in 1960." (TV show, 4/28/94)

REALITY: Kennedy won the 1960 election with 303 electoral votes to 219 for Nixon. Without Illinois' 27 electoral votes, Kennedy would still have won, 276-246.

LIMBAUGH: On how to stop riots: "Richard Daley, in 1968, in the Democratic National Convention, issued an order--where there were rumors of riots--he issued a shoot-to-kill order. And there were no riots and there was no civil disobedience and no shots were fired and nobody was hurt. And that's what ought to happen." (TV show, 6/10/93)

REALITY: Mayor Daley's shoot-to-kill order was issued not at the Democratic Convention, but following the April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King assassination. Daley wasn't reacting to "rumors of riots" since riots had already broken out. The shoot-to-kill order hardly put an end to unrest--since four months after Daley's order, protestors flocked to Chicago's Democratic Convention and engaged in riotous civil disobedience. Protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching." Except for Rush Limbaugh.

LIMBAUGH: In an attack on Spike Lee, director of Malcolm X, for being fast and loose with the facts, Limbaugh introduced a video clip of Malcolm X's "daughter named Betty Shabazz." (TV show, 11/17/92)

REALITY: Betty Shabazz is Malcolm X's widow.

LIMBAUGH: "Those gas lines were a direct result of the foreign oil powers playing tough with us because they didn't fear Jimmy Carter." (Told You So, p. 112)

REALITY: The first--and most serious--gas lines occurred in late 1973/early 1974, during the administration of Limbaugh hero Richard Nixon.

LIMBAUGH: On Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh: "This Walsh story basically is, we just spent seven years and $40 million looking for any criminal activity on the part of anybody in the Reagan administration, and guess what? We couldn't find any. These guys didn't do anything, but we wish they had so that we could nail them. So instead,we're just going to say, 'Gosh, these are rotten guys.' They have absolutely no evidence. There is not one indictment. There is not one charge." (TV show, 1/19/94)

REALITY ]

LIMBAUGH: Explaining why the Democrats wanted to "sabotage" President Bush with the 1990 budget deal: "Now, here is my point. In 1990, George Bush was president and was enjoying a 90 percent plus approval rating on the strength of our victories in the Persian Gulf War and Cold War." (ToldYou So, p. 304)

REALITY: In October 1990, when the budget deal was concluded the Gulf War had not yet been fought.

LIMBAUGH: On the Gulf War: "Everybody in the world was aligned with the United States except who? The United States Congress." (TV show, 4/18/94)

REALITY: Both houses of Congress voted to authorize the U.S. to use force against Iraq.

LIMBAUGH: On Bosnia:

"For the first time in military history, U.S. military personnel are not under the command of United States generals." (TV show, 4/18/94)

REALITY: That's news to the Pentagon. "How far back do you want to go?" asked Commander Joe Gradisher, a Pentagon spokesperson. "Americans served under Lafayette in the Revolutionary war." Gradisher pointed out several famous foreign commanders of U.S. troops, including France's Marshall Foch, in overall command of U.S. troops in World War I. In World War II, Britain's General Montgomery led U.S. troops in Europe and North Africa, while another British General, Lord Mountbatten, commanded the China-Burma-India theatre.

Personal Attacks

LIMBAUGH: Limbaugh constantly tells his audience that he doesn't make personal or ad hominem attacks. To a caller who had a problem with his personalized attacks, Limbaugh responded with a denial: "Give me a specific example: who, what, when, where, and what exactly did I say?" (Radio show, 2/18/94)

REALITY: One hour before that call, Limbaugh was telling his audience that a 5,000-year-old man found buried in ice--pictured on the cover of Time magazine--was really Sally Jesse Raphael: "This is just what Sally Jesse Raphael looks like without makeup!"

MORE REALITY: Columnist Molly Ivins reported (Arizona Republic 10/17/93) this incident from Limbaugh's TV show--"Here is a Limbaugh joke: Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?" And he puts up a picture of Chelsea Clinton. Chelsea Clinton is 13 years old.

LIMBAUGH: Assailing a journalist who had criticized Nixon: "Michael Gartner, portraying himself as a balanced, objective journalist with years and years of experience faking events, and then reporting them as news--and doing so with the express hope of destroying General Motors in one case and destroying businesses that cut down trees, the timber industry, in another." (TV show, 4/27/94)

REALITY: Gartner, the NBC News president who resigned in the wake of the GM truck explosion episode on NBC's Dateline, had no hands-on role in it--nor had he expressed a hope of destroying any company.

LIMBAUGH: Equally accurate when denouncing a fellow conservative, he said of right-wing journalist Cliff Kincaid: "He's written all kinds of pieces about how I don't go make speeches for free, for the cause.... He's just one more of these little gnats out there trying to sink a Boeing 747 that's leaving him in a cloud of dust." (Radio show, 11/19/93)

REALITY: Kincaid's only published piece on whether Limbaugh does speeches "for the cause" was in Human Events (7/27/91): "He does his bit for conservatives when the movement calls. He waived his fees, for instance, when he emceed at roasts for Oliver North and Paul Weyrich and addressed the National Right to Life convention."

Limbaugh vs. Limbaugh

LIMBAUGH: Limbaugh frequently denies that he uses his show for political activism: "I have yet to encourage you people or urge you to call anybody. I don't do it. They think I'm the one doing it. That's fine. You don't need to be told when to call. They think you are a bunch of lemmings out there." (Radio show, 6/28/93)

REALITY: Just an hour after making the above claim, he was--as usual--sending his troops to the trenches: "The people in the states where these Democratic senators are up for reelection in '94 have to let their feelings be known.... These senators, you let them know. I think Wisconsin's one state. Let's say Herb Kohl is up in '94. You people in Wisconsin who don't like this bill, who don't like the tax increases, you let Herb Kohl know somehow."

LIMBAUGH: On the poverty line: "$14,400 for a family of four. That's not so bad." (Radio show, 11/9/93, quoted in FRQ, Winter/94)

REALITY: Just a few months earlier, Limbaugh was talking about how tough it was to make 10 times that: "I know families that make $180,000 a year and they don't consider themselves rich. Why, it costs them $20,000 a year to send their kids to school." (Radio show, 8/3/93, quoted in FRQ, Winter/94)

LIMBAUGH: On Bill Clinton: "Never trust a draft dodger." (Radio show, quoted in FRQ, Summer/93)

REALITY: Although a supporter of the Vietnam War, Limbaugh used a minor physical impairment to avoid the draft (Minneapolis Star Tribune, 9/27/93).

LIMBAUGH: In frequent broadcasts, Limbaugh offers impassioned advocacy for Paula Jones, who charged Bill Clinton with sexual harassment. (TV and radio, April-May/94)

REALITY: Limbaugh boasted that a sign on his office door reads, "Sexual harassment at this work station will not be reported. However...it will be graded!!!" (USA Weekend, 1/26/92).
Sidebar:
Rush Limbaugh: Champion of the Overdog
Who says Rush Limbaugh is abusive to minorities? He champions various minority interests: multi-millionaires, bankers, owners of private planes and yachts, drug companies. It's only those other "minorities"--women, workers, the poor, racial minorities, gays--that he has no use for. Here's a sampling:

"One of the things I want to do before I die is conduct the Homeless Olympics... [Events would include] the 10-meter Shopping Cart Relay, the Dumpster Dig, and the Hop, Skip and Trip." (L.A. Times, 1/20/91)

On NAFTA: "If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people--I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs, let the kinds of jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do--let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work." (Radio show quoted in FRQ, Fall/93)

Speculating on why a Mexican national won the New York marathon: "An immigration agent chased him for the last 10 miles." (USA Weekend, 1/26/92)

This is asinine! A Caesar Chavez Day in California? Wasn't he convicted of a crime?" (Quotedin FRQ, Winter/94)

"Kurt Cobain was, ladies and gentleman, I just--he was a worthless shred of human debris..." (TV show, 4/11/94)

"When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult ; it's an invitation." (Quoted in FRQ, Summer/94)

"Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream." (Quoted in FRQ, Summer/93)

"Militant feminists are pro-choice because it's their ultimate avenue of power over men.... It is their attempt to impose their will on the rest of society, particularly on men." (Ought to Be, p.53)

"Why is it that whenever a corporation fires workers it is never speculated that the workers might have deserved it?" (Ought to Be, p.275)
--Macri's Place

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

The Rising Cost of Idiocy

2009-10-10T02:45:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The dumbing down of America began with Ronald Reagan who made idiots feel good about being idiots. Reagan proved that not only was intelligence not required to be President, it might even be a handicap.

Reagan proved that any politician ignoring the 'idiot' voting block [the GOP] imperils his/her political future. Thus, Sarah Palin, who became an expert on Russia by observing its coast line from across the Bering Strait, is assured a growing constituency: the legion of idiots! She is the poster bimbo of idiocy! Its champion!

'Dumbing down' implies that the US still has a way to go before bottoming out! But that observation smacks of intelligence and may safely be ignored. The real idiot i.e, a GOP idiot, does not know where the f_ck we are or how we got there and is not smart enough to care! The word 'idiot' summons up images of Ronald Reagan and, more recently, George W. Bush. Unlike Bush, Reagan had essential Presidential skills. He could read cue cards. Bush could not or did not read! Reagan taught the GOP that how you say something is much more important than what is said. Bush, by contrast, was challenged to speak.

Reagan spouted racist crap about a welfare 'grandma' who drove a Cadillac. There was no such person. It was Reagan's kindly, grandfatherly head nod that sold it. Bush, by contrast, said: "Who cares what you think?"Had a smart person told that story, he would have been pilloried as a bald-faced liar. The story was untrue but Reagan's telling of it was not only tolerated by most of us but embraced by the increasingly stupid and psychotic GOP.

Because of that and numerous other whoppers, the GOP was thus set free to roll out their every whopper. Reagan had taken the GOP into new and unexplored territory. Think of it: there was no whopper so outrageous, no lie so egregious, no bullshit theory so incredible that it could not be sold with help from a focus group, a head nod and a smarmy, 'grandfatherly' smile.

Reagan's idiocy became an insurmountable political advantage, an advantage that would --one day --give us George W. Bush. Reagan was not evil, they said; he was just senile! Give him a break! With this bit of GOP-logic, we should all be thankful. We are --after all --still alive. The US survived eight years in a which a senile idiot might have plunged us into nuclear war. When he thought his microphone was off, he 'reported' that he had just ordered a nuclear strike on Russia.

The US was as close to nuclear armageddon as during the Cuban missile crisis or the little publicized incident in which the Soviet Union mistook a research launch for a MIRV heading their way. Someone had forgotten to notify them. The hero was Yeltsin who wisely waited for confirmation before launching a counter-strike that would have obliterated the US. Indeed, there is a price to be paid for idiocy, and one day we will pay it.

Others have noticed what has been called the 'dumbing down' of America. Bill Maher decried the trend; blogger Tom Degan responded:

"We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon."While I admire Bill Maher a great deal, I am forced to take issue here.
This pitiful America of which he speaks is very real - of that there can be little doubt to anyone who has bothered to pay attention. But like a lot of people on the Left (I am sorry to say) he totally ignores - whether by accident or design - the undeniable advantages of living in the America of the first decade of the twenty-first century.For example:I never finished High School. In fact I dropped out at the very beginning of my Junior year. In spite of this unfortunate fact, the I.Q. of my country has dropped to such a horrifying degree in the last thirty years, whenever I arrive at a gathering of, say, two or three-hundred people, I am reasonably confident that I am the smartest person in the room.Do you have any idea how utterly cool that is? Lighten up, Bill.
--Tom Degan, the Rant

The mass media must accept responsibility for often making idiocy cute, quaint, cool, or funny. Idiocy is none of those things. Idiocy is a clear and present danger. Idiots will impoverish us all if an idiot has not plunged us into a nuclear holocaust in the meantime.

Karl Marx applied Hegel's dialectic to economics and concluded that 'capitalism' would die of its own inconsistencies i.e, idiocies! Lately, it is only dyed-in-the-wool wingnuts who are blind to the inherent 'contradictions' that have now brought the world to the brink of yet another great depression.

Karl Marx was absolutely correct with regard to the class struggle which he believed followed inexorably from the division of the world into 'capital' vs 'labor'. Bush's America is the LAB study that proves Marx to have been absolutely correct on this point. Never has the the US been so divided. Just one percent of the US population owns more than about 95 percent of us combined. I have REAMS of official stats from the US Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Commerce Dept-BEA, and various think tanks and University Studies which PROVE --beyond any refutation --that following EVERY GOP tax cut, this increasingly tiny elite was enriched. If the trend continues, the ruling 1 percent will become just one half of one percent owning more than about 99 percent of the rest of the population. No nation can sustain that kind of inequality unless by the application of coercion and dictatorship incomprehensible to Americans.

Tax cuts for the wealthy --we are told --will stimulate investment and thus jobs. The official stats prove that that has never, EVER happened. Rather, windfall tax cuts wind up in offshore tax havens and other 'shelters' which HAVE NEVER INCREASED US jobs nor have they helped, in any way whatsoever, to diversify the US economy. 'Tax havens' --available only to the very, very privileged --are just one reason supply side or 'trickle down theory' has never worked and will never work. It was all a PR campaign, a focus group approved strategem --not a legitimate or valid economic theory. There is a name given the outflow of monies from an economy: contraction. Contraction of the money supply is not merely the cause of 'depression', it is the very definition of it.

The GOP rank and file told us that while US industries had all but vanished during the Reagan nightmare years, HI TECH and US expertise would save us. It didn't! IT is done in India and China. Steel is produced in Japan. Cars, it seems, are produced everywhere BUT in the US. The US boasts the world's largest NEGATIVE Current Account Balance; China --the world's largest POSITIVE Current Account Balance. Being at the bottom of that list tells me that if the US produces anything at all these days, the rest of the world does not buy it.

China literally 'owns' us. It is China primarily that props up the buck so that the impoverished US can buy Chinese made stuff at Wal-Mart. How smart is that? Was it intelligence that got us into this mess --or was it GOP idiocy? Don't answer; that is a rhetorical device!

Clearly, the Reaganite goppers --idiots to a person --lied to us and got away with it because we had become the bigger idiots for their cut backs in education, their domination of the mind-numbing media, the assaults made on logic and common sense. We are idiots for getting stuck with the tab run up by the idiots in power. Bottom line: idiocy is no longer an option. Get Smart!

Intrepid writer, communications expert and guest columnist Doug Drenkow observes:

As I read the -- surprised and surprising -- reactions to Pres. Obama's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, I am reminded of something that happened ten years or so ago, when my father was still alive. I was complaining about one thing or another that then-Pres. Clinton had done. Dad, who had first voted for FDR and had years later become very embittered by Pres. Nixon -- in other words, he had seen and lived through the best and worst that our nation had to offer -- told me something I'll never forget: "A leader can't control everything. He has to work with what he's got. So he can't make everything right overnight. And he'll make some mistakes, too; he's only human. But the thing to watch is the direction he's taking us. It might be slower than you'd like, but are things generally headed the right way or not? That's how you judge a leader."
By the way, that was part of my dad giving his approval of Pres. Clinton's actions, in general and in particular for his achieving the first growth in real (inflation-adjusted) wages for American working people in a great many years. In awarding the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee cited Pres. Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
Against the background noise of insane but persistent cries from the "birthers," Pres. Obama fulfilled his campaign pledge and spoke to the world's billion Muslims shortly after attaining office, to reassure them that -- despite what the bin Ladens (and some of the "crusaders" in our nation) say -- Americans want peace in the world, including with Islamic peoples. That was indeed "extraordinary." (Can one image Pres. Obama's predecessor making the same speech or impact?)
And yes, Pres. Obama has inherited wars in the heart of the Islamic world. But I believe he is doing everything humanly possible to not fight a "dumb war" -- as he said in his famous speech opposing intervention in Iraq -- while securing the safety of Americans, and others, in uniform and at home. He is drawing down our forces in Iraq, and even somewhat faster than had originally been thought possible, while trying to retain some sense of stability in the "Pottery Barn" we broke.
The strategy he is formulating for Afghanistan is admirably being based first and foremost upon helping everyday Afghan people stabilize their own economic and political situation (despite the apparent corruption of their leaders), which unavoidably requires security -- by our forces for now and by Afghan forces being trained -- as to protect otherwise defenseless humanitarian assistance. At the same time, American drones, special ops, and other forces are as surgically as possible disrupting and destroying al Qaeda command and control centers, leaders, and networks, now based primarily in Pakistan, which of course poses dicey problems and limitations of its own. There is no easy fix.
Whether or not we agree with his decisions, I think all of us should appreciate that Pres. Obama and his national security team, including Secretary of State Clinton, are doing their very best to be responsible, for all concerned. Remember, our allowing al Qaeda to have a safe haven previously cost us dearly, and led to the situations we are in now. Preventing further disaster prevents further war. Pres. Obama's efforts to curb nuclear proliferation are also being cited for his receiving the Peace Prize.
Every day the catastrophic potential of this threat becomes more real, as nuclear materials and technology are being disseminated and developed at an increasing rate, by nations and groups that openly and clandestinely threaten us and our allies. Pres. Obama's working with all parties -- including making agreements already with Russian Pres. Medvedev and holding the first (tentatively promising) talks between our nation and Iran in decades -- is a mark of good faith on the part of the American people in the world, after years of our -- disastrously -- "going it alone."
Pres. Obama is trying to regain -- re-earn -- for America the international good will that the previous administration squandered in the wake of 9/11. Pres. Obama has dispatched George Mitchell, who helped make the peace in Northern Ireland, to help make the peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, another conflict that has persisted stubbornly for decades, and that inflames and complicates all the other issues in the Middle and Near East. Like Al Gore (and unlike the previous administration), Pres. Obama has taken leadership and agreed to cooperation in alleviating global climate change, another problem too big for one nation to solve alone.
And finally, remember that Pres. Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen ... cooperation between peoples" does not just apply to international efforts. Like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pres. Obama I believe has won the Peace Prize for his leadership in helping make peace between people of different races -- and every other description -- here in our country, where such differences have long divided us and thus weakened us, socially, economically, and morally. America is more at peace with itself because of Pres. Obama's leadership -- and really, for what he represents to so many of us. The Peace Prize often helps give impetus to international movements that are gaining momentum, such as the fight against Global Warming. As Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said of Pres. Obama's award: "He got the prize because he has been able to change the international climate. ... Some people say, and I understand it, isn't it premature? Too early? Well, I'd say then that it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond -- all of us."
It is obvious that Pres. Obama represents a new face, ethnically and figuratively, of America -- the most powerful nation -- to the world: a vision of hope through working together with, not against, one another. And that indeed is the only road that leads to peace. Pres. Obama says he is "humbled" by the Prize; I am proud of the honor he has brought to America. And I'm sure my dad is smiling down on us all.
--Doug Drenkow, Communications Consultant, Columnist

In another time, before we were 'dumbed down', someone winning the Nobel Prize would be lauded for his/her achievement. Not so, today! Since 1980, the US has entered a world on the other side of the looking glass. Idiocy is preferred over intelligence; screw ups are 'cool' and real achievement just means you're a nerd.

We used to hear a lot about 'values' from the party that now flouts every 'value' worth having, affirming or nourishing. If the media --Fox and CNN particularly --seem shallow, obnoxious, stupid, it's because they are but mirrors held up to this cowardly retreat from excellence.

An additional resource: Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy: The History of the United States You're Not Supposed to Know

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Psychologists Conclude: the GOP is Nuts!

2009-10-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The GOP is not a political party; it's a crime syndicate! It is also described as an irrational, kooky cult that cannot deal with facts or logic but is freaked out by 'scary images', 'boogiemen' and vague or even non-existent threats like terrorists, commies, liberals or normal sex.

"Conservatives respond instinctually [sic], not rationally, to scary images, "facts," and institutions. Whether this is innate and biological or cultural seems still up in the air. Democrats can't win with logical arguments or even appeals to the innate rightness of concepts like "diversity" and "tolerance," because those aren't considered essentially good and important by the voters they're trying to appeal to. This does suggest that an appeal to old New Deal institutional concepts like the Welfare State might actually be effective, if they're wrapped in the flag and a sense of duty. Also scientists still consider the majority of Americans to be like a fascinating exotic backwards tribe and the fucking country is doomed."
--Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans

Much of this new research is consistent with Carl Jung's 'The Undiscovered Self" in which he said that about one third of any population is certifiably psychopathic.

Psychopaths are often defined by their 'utter lack of empathy', a phrase used by Dr. Gustav Gilbert who was given the task of keeping Nazi war criminals alive until they could be hanged.

Conservatives Are Scared A Lot

Rice University Political Scientist John Alford published some research in the creatively named journal Science about a possible biological basis to liberalism and conservatism. Basically, "46 mostly white Midwesterners who self-identified as having strong political beliefs" were shown "threatening images" ("a large spider on someone's face, a bloodied person and maggot-filled wound"). The conservatives were more scared, of all of the images. Or, as Newsweek puts it, "illegal immigrants may = spiders = gay marriages = maggot-filled wounds = abortion rights = bloodied faces. " Liberals were not sensitive to the scary images. Which means they're [conservatives are] biologically inferior, because they'd die if a gay spider tried to abort their faces to death.
--Scientists Explain Why People Vote For Republicans

Republicans are more sensitive to the 'scary images' which they equate with political issues -immigration, gun control, gay marriage, abortion rights and pacifism. As a result, the 'conservative mentality' is more likely to support greater levels of military spending, warrantless searches, violations of Constitutional rights and/or protections. Conservatives readily believed the pretext for war on Iraq: WMD. None were found yet many still believe the lie.

The rise of Ronald Reagan, a comforting, 'grandfather figure', confirmed this principle on a grand scale. It was a Republican, interviewed on the floor of the GOP national convention in Houston in 1992, who gave the game away: "He [Reagan] made us feel good about ourselves'. They were quite right. Reagan, indeed, made them 'feel good' about being greedy, bigoted, selfish and self-centered, and psychopathic.

It was shortly thereafter, as I recall, that Stanford University released its study indicating that conservatives, the GOP in particular, have more and more terrifying nightmares and night terrors than do normal folk. Nightmares are believed to be the manifestation in dreams of one's fears and irrational anxieties. [Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams]

John Dean's Conservatives Without Consciences, inspired by some very serious research, asserts that the conservative mind-set is characterized by the recurring qualities of 'the unbridled viciousness toward those daring to disagree with them' as well as by big business favoritism that has cost taxpayers billions. Dean's book is inspired by other studies identifying an 'authoritarian, conservative mindset', specifically Robert D. Hare's now-standard text on psychopaths, Without Conscience of 1993.

As I have charged, this 'type' is challenged to make valid inferences from premises. Observations by professional psychologists and psychiatrists repeatedly confirm my allegations that 'psychopathic' Republicans work backward from conclusions. A mentality that reverses logic cannot be expected to ever get anything right. This mentality may be expected to deny science, evolution, or pragmatic approaches of any type. This mentality may be expected to support wars of aggression against Iraq and elsewhere and for all the wrong reasons. This group has embraced or has inherited from authoritarian parents an ideology into which it will 'shoe horn' the evidence of science, experiment or statistics. Anything not conforming is discounted. It is not surprising, therefore, that every GOP politcial program has failed; that's everything from 'trickle down' theory to wasteful military spending which has made the US less safe, more vulnerable in fact to terrorist attack or foreign aggression.

This group will never admit its failures; it will rationalize even worse atrocities if it is believed they will cover up past mistakes. It is a moral and psychological black hole. The American Psychiatric Association's 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' description of antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders, for example, provides a diagnostic context for behaviors that Dean describes as characteristic of "social dominants" and "double highs." Anti-socials, for instance, "show little remorse for the consequences of their acts.... They may be indifferent to, or provide a superficial rationalization for, having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from someone (e.g., 'life's unfair,' 'losers deserve to lose,' or 'he had it coming anyway')... They may believe that everyone is out to 'help number one' and that one should stop at nothing to avoid being pushed around." Conservative defenses of George W. Bush were most often of these types.

Conservatives were often encouraged to believe and overtly told that Iraq was somehow involved in the events of 911. If a survey were conducted now, I suspect that about half the GOP 'base' still believes Iraq had something to do with 911. Some will still repeat the WMD lie despite the facts that proved Bush a liar.

How Bush got away with it: conservatives refuse to believe facts

The conservative mentality will often label a 'fact' a 'theory' if it happens to be one they don't like. But conservatives are not opposed to all theories. In fact, the GOP still embraces the kookiest and least believable of all theories --Bush's official conspiracy theory of 911, more full of holes than Swiss cheese.

Evolution, on the other hand, is not believed because it is seen as a threat. The most prominent, text-book example is Sarah Palin, the poster bimbo for idiocy! Palin believes early man walked with Dinosaurs less then 10,000 years ago. I propose that we put Palin and Richard Dawkins, avowed atheist and evolutionist, in the same room!

Roll the cameras!

We've just produced a hot new series.

I think there is a certain justified irritation with young-earth creationists who believe that the world is less than 10,000 years old. Those are the people that I'm really talking about. I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education. And that's what I'm trying to do.
--Richared Dawkins, Darwin's Rottweiller: Richard Dawkins' Tense Relationship with those who believe in God

Sarah Palin's only rival in idiocy is Joe, the Plumber! Alaska leads the US in global warming! As for Polar Bears --Alaska's entire population of Polar Bears will be killed off by the year 2050 unless Palin's policies are stopped now. These developments are concurrent with the increase of oil exploration and drilling in Alaska. Palin is lying about Alaska, about oil, about Polar Bears and about Global Warming. [See: Washington Post, Polar Bear Population Seen Declining; ]

As a result of these efforts, polar bears are more numerous now than they were 40 years ago. The polar bear population in the southern Beaufort Sea off Alaska’s North Slope has been relatively stable for 20 years, according to a federal analysis.
...
In fact, there is insufficient evidence that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future — the trigger for protection under the Endangered Species Act. And there is no evidence that polar bears are being mismanaged through existing international agreements and the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act.
--Sarah Palin, New York Times

In fact, the polar bear population in Alaska is declining.

Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be killed off by 2050 _ and the entire population gone from Alaska _ because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic, government scientists forecast Friday.
Only in the northern Canadian Arctic islands and the west coast of Greenland are any of the world's 16,000 polar bears expected to survive through the end of the century, said the US Geological Survey, which is the scientific arm of the Interior Department.
--The Associated Press, Washington Post, Polar Bear Population Seen Declining

Palin denies that human activity --including the drilling, production and refining of oil --has any effect on environments, a position that puts her to the right of George W. Bush. In fact, Alaska is where it's 'at' in terms of global warming.

We have billions and billions of barrels of oil and trillions of feet of natural gas. We have so much potential from tapping our resources here in Alaska. And we can do this with minimum environmental impact. We have a very pro-development president in President Bush, and yet he failed to push for opening up parts of Alaska to drilling through Congress — and a Republican-controlled Congress, I might add.
I thought when we hit $100 a barrel for oil it would have been a psychological barrier that would have caused Congress to reconsider, but they didn't. Now we are approaching $200 a barrel. It's nonsense not to tap a safe domestic source of oil. I think Americans need to hold Congress accountable on this one.
Sarah Palin, Newsmax

Palin has put short term economic and monetary gains above the longer term concerns about quality of life, the environment, and renewable energy. It is not only her positions that are wrong, it is the attitude and mindset that places shallow and short-term values of this generation above those of the longer term concerns of future generations, indeed, life on earth.

Palin is either wrong or lying about Alaska and the harm that is done to the environment by an oil industry that she is in bed with. Palin should have talked with folk in Texas, an environment that has been raped and despoiled since Spindletop. Some parts of the world --like Iraq --are simply bombed and waged war upon for oil! But there is a word for those folk, like Palin, who just do it for the money.

Though warming is happening faster in Alaska than anywhere else in the US — average temperatures in the country's biggest state have risen 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 50 years — Palin is on record doubting that human action is the main driver behind climate change.
...
More pertinent might be Palin's positions on oil drilling in Alaska, where rich petroleum reserves paid each citizen over $1,600 in dividends in 2007. Though the McCain campaign has made much of Palin's willingness to stand up to the powerful energy industry in Alaska — last year she adjusted the state Petroleum Profits Tax to close loopholes exploited by oil and gas companies — on the whole she's been a staunch supporter of fossil fuels. She opposes strengthening protections for beluga whales in Alaska's Cook Inlet, where oil and gas development has been proposed, and she spent $500 million in state money to encourage the development of a 1,700-mile pipeline that would transport natural gas from Alaska's rich North Shore. When the Department of the Interior in May listed the polar bear as a threatened species due to warming—an action that could interfere with drilling in Alaska's coastal waters, where the polar bears live —Palin sued the Federal Government in response. "Our main concern with Sarah Palin's positions are that they are based on doing what is best for the oil industry, and not what is best for Americans," says David Willett, national press secretary for the Sierra Club.
--Time, Palin Far Right on the Environment

Conservatives Have a Different Moral Code

There is often a pragmatic, reality-based price to be paid for believing lies. If an architect or engineer gets the math wrong, a building or a bridge may collapse with tragic loss of life. Similarly, there is a tragic price to be paid for being wrong on issues. Because George W. Bush was wrong about both Afghanistan and Iraq, millions are dead. After two years of war, I stopped posting the rising body count, the tragic price paid daily because a 'conservative', a 'Republican' was dead wrong!

Unfortunately, then, these fundamental differences are not merely the topic of academic speculation. There is, for example, a reason terrorism increases during every GOP regime. The GOP is but the political of arm the ruling elites. The 'ruling elites' benefit from the exploitation of terrorism. Certainly, the level of terrorism, since 1980, has always increased during GOP regimes.

The specific manner in which these 'elites' benefit from terrorism is not so easy to pin down. The archives of the Houston Chronicle, however, provide a clue. I am referring specifically to the BCCI scandals and numerous revelations about the Bin Laden/Bush partnerships in West Texas. A key player in this extremely complex web of partnerships, conspiracies and swindles is Khalid bin Mahfouz who built a multi-billion dollar mansion of imported Cararra marble in Houston's posh River Oaks area.

US moneys financed the Bin Ladens and/or Al Qaeda by way of an intricate web that is clearly intended to deceive the American people and, of course, the world. For the moment it is enough to know that US Foreign policy is insane! It wages 'war' on terrorism as it finances it. Ronald Reagan, for example, laundered the US financial support of the Contras by way of Iran. It was a series of 'off the books' treasons! Certainly, someone put some serious pressure on Lawrence Walsh who, nevertheless, managed to write a very carefully worded conclusion to his report. Clearly --Walsh believed that Reagan himself had committed high treason. Reagan should have been tried for 'high treason' but was, in fact, let off the hook.

Is the GOP Evil?

Hannah Arendt, a New School (NY) founder who 'covered' the trial of Adolph Eichmann, wrote of the 'banality of evil'. Arendt's conclusions are consistent with what is lately called 'ponerolgoy', the study of evil. Dr. Gustav Gilbert, who was assigned the task of interviewing the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg concluded that 'evil' was the 'utter lack of empathy', a defining symptom of what we call 'psychopathy'. Carl Jung had likewise identified a sub-set of about 30 percent in every population that were, in Jung's opinion, certifiably psychopathic.

Worst case conservatives often see no evil where 'liberals' are appalled. The meeting of Nazi bureaucrats at Wannsee, for example, never addressed whether or not the mass murder of European Jews was right or moral. The issue, rather, was how efficiently the genocide might be accomplished, what technology should be set up to the task, and, at last, how many could be 'exterminated' in a given time period and at what cost! It was all very businesslike, not unlike a GOP luncheon. The pate de fois gras was superb; the wine was of an excellent vintage, I am quite sure.

Between Wannsee and Nuremberg, a 'state'' murdered millions in order to make bigots feel good about themselves. At Nuremberg --top Nazis were tried for their very lives. As in a classical drama, the 'right wing' blind spot --its fatal flaw --would, in fact, convict them. I refer those who are interested to the 'film' (now transferred to video) of Justice Robert Jackson's examination of Hermann Goring. Earlier, Goring had already condemned the proceedings. 'Victor's Justice', he called them.

Addendum:

Facts About Global Warming

What we know:
Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It allows light to pass through but traps heat. Here’s how it works: CO2 absorbs certain wavelengths of energy. This means that radiation from the sun can enter the atmosphere as light. Once this radiation hits the ground, it turns into heat. This heat then radiates back into the atmosphere and out into space. CO2 traps some of the heat.
CO2 has gone from roughly 280 ppm (parts per million) in the atmosphere before the industrial revolution to about 380 ppm now. Each year humans pump out about 6 billion tons of CO2 with an annual growth rate of about 1.9% predicted between 2001 - 2025 (although actual emissions growth was 3.2% per year from 2000 to 2005).
CO2 remains in the air for about 100 years, so even if we stopped emitting it right now we would still feel the effects for decades.
CO2 and temperature have increased and decreased together over the history of the planet.
There is more CO2 in the atmosphere now than there has been in 650,000 years. The rate of increase is unprecedented over the same period.
Svante Arrhenius estimated 100 years ago that a doubling of CO2 would create a 4 degree C rise in temperature. In 1979 the Charney report predicted global warming of 3 degrees C if CO2 doubled in the atmosphere (we are a quarter of the way there). In 1988 James Hansen of NASA predicted to Congress that temperature would increase over the next decades.
Temperature has increased since those predictions were made. The top 5 hottest years according to NASA are, in order, 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2004.The World Meteorological Association claims 2005 as the second hottest year on record. The difference is because NASA includes data from the Arctic. The top ten warmest years have been since 1990.
Since 1850, we have seen temperatures increase at a rate of 1.1 F per century (about 1.5 - 1.8 F total). The rate increased to 3.2F per century since the mid 1970s (click here for more information).
Species around the world are reacting to climate change: Since 1950, species distribution has shifted to the north 4 miles per decade, shifted to higher altitudes by 20 feet per decade, and Spring has advanced by 2.3 days per decade. In America, butterflies have moved their ranges north. They are no longer found in the southern parts of their old range. Costa Rican birds have extended their range northward. Tropical fish have been seen for the first time off the British Coast, and animals such as the Pied Flycatcher and the Winter Moth are finding their food supply affected by earlier Springs.
Climate has changed rapidly in the past. The common example of rapid climate change is the Younger Dryas, when temperatures suddenly plunged, interrupting the warming trend at the end of the last ice age.
What we think we know:
Temperatures are most likely warmer now than they have been at any time in the past 400 years. They are probably (slightly less certain) warmer than in the past 1200 years, perhaps (less certain) warmer than in the past 12,000 years, and new evidence suggests that we are approaching the warmest temperatures this planet has seen in a million years.
Models predict that Earth’s average temperature will rise somewhere between 2 to 4.5 degrees C in the 21st century.

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

David Griffin's New Book Exposes a 'New Leviathan'

2009-10-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

I believe that there is probable cause to indict and charge top government officials, George W. Bush himself, for the capital crimes we call '911'. There is, I believe, no 'statute of limitation' on the crimes of mass murder, high treason, or the war crimes 'justified' upon the pretext of a great 'war on terrorism'. [see: US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441] or high treason!

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
--US Codes, TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441. War crimes

Now --Prof Griffin may or may not share my conviction with regard to the probable cause to indict high level members of Bush's administration, his new book most certainly strikes deep into a conspiracy to defraud the American people even as it waged treasonous war against it. Therefore, we should not be surprised that the government of the United States is 'pimped out' to huge multi-national corporations and foreign nations who take a proprietary interest in it. Why would they not? They own it; they own us; they own you, having bought the US and with it the awesome power of the Military/Industrial Complex. While the Praetorian Guard auctioned off the Roman Empire to one Didius Julianus the government of the US has since perfected, 'improved' upon Julianus' one-time sale. The US government is an on-going auction in which the US is routinely 'pimped' on 'K-street, sold to the highest bidders the services of Congress, the White House and even the US Supreme Court.

'K-Street' should have red lights

This is the essential 'deep background' that one must understand if one is to understand the crime of '911' in which the government of the United States, having sold out the people to special interests and foreign entities like the Jewish Lobby, may have exploited the manpower and equipment necessary to stage a phony terrorist attack by which it would later justify the attack and invasion of a sovereign nation for its oil and its strategic position in the middle east!

Hitler required, doubtless planned and pulled off the Reichstag Fire; Bushco would exploit a 'catalyzing event' which the radical Project for the New American Century compared to Pearl Harbor. [See Rebuilding America's Defenses; toward the end of this PDF document you will find a picture of the US Global Hawk which, I believe was 'the missile', as Rumsfeld called it, that hit the Pentagon --'this building' as Rumsfeld called it!]

Only the terminally disingenuous dare feign shock or surprise upon learning that the crime of 911 was the work of the US government, specifically the CIA in cahoots with Mossad. The Jewish lobby is among the well-heeled patrons of K-Street!

The prostitution of the US government is documented and against that background. For thousands of years, every government has found it necessary to raise the specter of a 'foreign threat' in order to repeal a people's ancient liberties, rights, and even its property. At least since the fall of Rome, governments have sold themselves out and/or operated elaborate 'protection rackets'. Presaging the many ways in which the US government has betrayed the American people, The Praetorian Guard auctioned off the Roman Empire to a nobleman. That Didius Julianus did not long survive his treachery is either tragic or deserved depending upon your view of history and the depths of depravity associated with the Roman ruling classes. The same is written about America now!

In Iraq, the Bush regime would act on behalf of the huge oil companies to whom the Bush family had owed its livelihood for several generations. The result: a 'shocking' terrorist attack on US soil, the pretext Bush needed to attack, invade and steal the petroleum resources of another nation. It did not matter that the target nation had been an ally of the US and posed no 'imminent threat' to the US. The eventual attack and invasion of this nation is a war crime punishable by death.

The Leviathan Re-visited

We are too often overwhelmed by the Leviathan that oppresses us and threatens the world. We have on our side the most powerful weapon of them all: truth. 'They' have only lies. The truth explains everything. Lies explain nothing. Lies betray those who tell them, those who live by them, those who depend upon them for their very livelihood. It is the lies told about 911 which have betrayed the perpetrators. 911 was covered up with a most pernicious lie: the destruction of evidence.

The absence of evidence is not probable cause to indict George W. Bush or any member of his administration. However, when the criminals who pulled off 911 are brought to jail, you can be sure that a skilled prosecutor may ask a jury: what motivates a man to cover up the crimes of mass murder and treason if not guilt? What motivation has an innocent man to order the destruction of evidence if it might clear him of all charges? Certainly --no rational man would order the destruction of evidence that would clear him of all charges leveled against him.

There are those who believe that Bush, Cheney and a gang of NEOCON crooks representing the new ruling Leviathan of just one percent of the US population conspired to attack and invade Iraq for its oil! If Bushco were innocent, would it have destroyed the evidence that would clear them? It will not help the defense that surviving documents prove that Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' literally carved up the oil fields of Iraq before Bush would have the pretext he needed to attack, invade, and loot oil!

Earlier this year a BBC Newsnight report claimed to have uncovered documents showing the Bush administration made plans to secure Iraqi oil even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Based on its analysis of PSAs in seven countries, it said multinationals would seek rates of return on their investment from 42 to 162 per cent, far in excess of typical 12 per cent rates.
--American And British Oil Companies Ready To Carve Up Iraqi Oil Fields

As Hitler needed a Reichstag Fire, Bushco needed a pretext --a 'catalyzing event' that the Project for the New American Century would compare to Pearl Harbor. [See Rebuilding America's Defenses; toward the end of this PDF document you will find a picture of the US Global Hawk which, I believe was 'the missile', as Rumsfeld called it, that hit 'this building' as Rumsfeld referred to the Pentagon!]

It is telling that this document, prepared as it was by a cadre of 'neoconservatives', had designs upon a Clinton surplus though it is 'conservatives' who are always most vocal with regard to 'big spending liberals'.

New circumstances make us think that the report might have a more receptive audience now than in recent years. For the first time since the late 1960s the federal government is running a surplus. For most of the 1990s, Congress and the White House gave balancing the federal budget a higher priority than funding national security. In fact, to a significant degree, the budget was balanced by a combination of increased tax revenues and cuts in defense spending. The surplus expected in federal revenues over the next decade, however, removes any need to hold defense spending to some preconceived low level.
--PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses

This paragraph is revealing for its sheer hypocrisy. It was Ronald Reagan who doubled the federal bureaucracy and tripled the national debt though he cut taxes but ONLY for the upper quintile if not the mere one percent who, in fact, have benefited from GOP policies in the regimes of Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. , Because of inequitable tax cuts for an increasingly tiny, ruling elite, Ronald Reagan presided over a depression of some two years, the deepest and longest since Herbert Hoover's 'Great Depression'.

It was Ronald Reagan who dismissed the complaints of the poor that were left behind during his dreary years. Mentally ill, he called them. Reagan lied about a Cadillac driving 'welfare queen' in Detroit (as I recall). There was no such person. Ronald Reagan lied. Clearly --the GOP is more interested in waging wars for Israel than it is in representing responsibly the needs of US citizens, Americans who were deceived throughout the Twentieth Century.

As the work of Professor David Ray Griffin over the greater part of a decade has proven: 911 may be the most evil deception yet issuing from the whorehouses on K-Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The most obvious fraud --the collapse of WTC 7 not even struck by aircraft of any sort --is Griffin's most recent salvo. His book is a both a history and the utter refutation of a series of interim NIST studies. Under Griffin's bright light, the NIST assertion that WTC7 was the first steel-frame building in history to be structurally demolished by fire alone is utterly collapsed.

It was at 5:20 PM, September 11th, that WTC 7, a skyscraper of some 40 stories, suddenly collapsed. Inexplicably, a BBC correspondent reported a collapse that had not yet happened.

Tales Told by 'Symmetricality'

The collapse of WTC is memorable for its 'text book' symmetricality, its near seamless fall into its own footprint hours after the larger building had already collapsed.

Amazing, incredible, pick your word. For the third time today --it's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen too much on television before, where a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down.
--Dan Rather, CBS News

Rather's comments were supported by photographs and video depicting horizontal squibs and windows blowing out as the collapse began. It was this appearance of a 'controlled demolition' at WTC 7 that inspired my own doubts about the official theories. Even if what had been said about airliners striking the 'twins' had been true, none of that was relevant at WTC 7. It became clear to me that officialdom would need a new theory --and fast! Subsequently, officialdom still has not come up with a credible explanation that connects WTC with the fall of the twins that does not implicate very 'important' people.

Offialdom, eventually represented by the NIST, was stuck, having committed to a 'fire theory'.

Some of the evidence ignored by NIST is physical evidence that explosives were used to bring down WTC 7. Swiss-Cheese Steel: I will begin with the piece of steel from WTC 7 that had been melted so severely that it looked like Swiss cheese. Explaining why it called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation,” James Glanz wrote: “The steel apparently melted away, but no fire in any of the buildings was believed to be hot enough to melt steel outright.” [15] Glanz’s statement was, in fact, quite an understatement. The full truth is that the fires in the building could not have brought the steel anywhere close to the temperature – about 1,482°C (2,700°F) – needed for it to melt. [16]
The professors who reported this piece of steel in the appendix to the FEMA report said: “A detailed study into the mechanisms [that caused] this phenomenon is needed.”[17] Arden Bement, who was the director of NIST when it took on the WTC project, said that NIST’s report would address “all major recommendations contained in the [FEMA] report.” [18]
But when NIST issued its report on WTC 7, it did not mention this piece of steel with the Swiss-cheese appearance. Indeed, NIST even claimed that not a single piece of steel from WTC 7 had been recovered. [19]
This piece of steel, moreover, was only a small portion of the evidence, ignored by NIST, that steel had melted.
--Prof. David Ray Griffin, Why NIST’s Final 9/11 Report is Unscientific and False

Thus, from the outset, the NIST was compromised! Commiting to a 'theory' a priori is not how science is done. Scientific conclusions are, by definition, a posteriori, resulting only from empirical evidence and/or verified fact. For about seven years, NIST gnomes tried to shoe-horn facts into a pre-conceived lie. They sweat blood over computer simulations in search of the Holy Grail of officialdom: a fire theory that would explain the utter collapses of three monumental buildings. The NIST, having already committed, could not afford the luxury of a dispassionate inquiry, a scientific approach. Because it had to, the NIST would settle for smoke and mirrors to which the Wizard of Oz could only aspire. The NIST tried to re-write science to please Bush and a gang of guilty mass murderers, traitors, liars and usurpers.

It is much easier now to write: 'WTC 7 looks like a controlled demolition because it was a controlled demolition' than it was at the time. Certainly, Occam is vindicated in that sentence: 'the collapse of WTC 7 looks like a controlled demolition because it was a controlled demolition'. It is my hope that the truth of that statement will result in bringing the truly guilty to justice as it liberates a nation that was lost on 911! On the other hand, it is my fear that the only lesson culprits will have learned is that next time, they will rig a much less symmetrical treason, a less 'tidy'' mass murder!

Following --Michel Chossudovsky interviews David Ray Griffin on the Global Research News Hour in which Prof Griffin refutes the 'official narrative', the so-called 'official conspircy theory'. Griffen's new book is about WTC 7.

Prof Griffin's new book is: The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False

David Ray Griffin on Global Research News Hour from Global Research on Vimeo.

Prof David Ray Griffin on 911

This just in:

RNC Tied To Website That Promoted Military Coup Against Obama

September 30, 2009 4:25 pm ET by Matt Finkelstein

Yesterday, Newsmax columnist John L. Perry brought up the possibility of a military coup against President Obama. Most chilling, perhaps, was the fact that Perry seemed to offer tepid support for the idea. "A coup is not an ideal option," he acknowledged, "but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible."

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic. [...]

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

Newsmax eventually unpublished the column, but only after receiving several reader complaints. Additionally, a spokeswoman for Newsmax tried to downplay the website's relationship with Perry.

But more significant than a radical opinion piece is the fact that the Republican National Committee appears to provide financial support to the website that published it. Indeed, the RNC has recently borrowed Newsmax's email list (presumably for a fee) so Michael Steele could fear-monger about the Democrats' "desire for socialist control over our lives."

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Brecht: Truth as Weapon

2009-09-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy/Bertolt Brecht excerpts

Huge corporations and foreign nations take a proprietary interest in the government of the United States because they own it. They bought it at the on-going auction called 'K-street' where is sold to the highest bidders the services of Congress, the White House and even the US Supreme Court.

Our capital is a whore house.

Those intrepid bloggers, progressives, activists who oppose this new Leviathan are understandably frustrated by the impressive 'arsenal' that is summoned against us. Nevertheless, we have among our weapons, the most powerful and it is one that the PR flacks and spin-doctors will never have access to. It is --simply --the truth. Against a multitude of lies, spin, distractions and bullshit, the truth must always triumph. It may be our only weapon. But it is the most powerful.

Below the ruled line follows an except from Bertolt Brecht's essential essay on 'truth'. Readers of the Existentialist Cowboy have often read my quote of Brecht:

A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!

Following --Bertolt Brecht:

The truth must be spoken with a view to the results it will produce in the sphere of action. As a specimen of a truth from which no results, or the wrong ones, follow, we can cite the widespread view that bad conditions prevail in a number of countries as a result of barbarism. In this view, Fascism is a wave of barbarism which has descended upon some countries with the elemental force of a natural phenomenon. According to this view, Fascism is a new, third power beside (and above) capitalism and socialism; not only the socialist movement but capitalism as well might have survived without the intervention of Fascism. And so on. This is, of course, a Fascist claim; to accede to it is a capitulation to Fascism.

Fascism is a historic phase of capitalism; in this sense it is something new and at the same time old. In Fascist countries capitalism continues to exist, but only in the form of Fascism; and Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism. But how can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? What will be the practical results of such truth?

Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties

Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat.

Outcries against barbarous measures may be effective as long as the listeners believe that such measures are out of the question in their own countries. Certain countries are still able to maintain their property relations by methods that appear less violent than those used in other countries.

Democracy still serves in these countries to achieve the results for which violence is needed in others, namely, to guarantee private ownership of the means of production. The private monopoly of factories, mines, and land creates barbarous conditions everywhere, but in some places these conditions do not so forcibly strike the eye. Barbarism strikes the eye only when it happens that monopoly can be protected only by open violence.

Some countries, which do not yet find it necessary to defend their barbarous monopolies by dispensing with the formal guarantees of a constitutional state, as well as with such amenities as art, philosophy, and literature, are particularly eager to listen to visitors who abuse their native lands because those amenities are denied there. They gladly listen because they hope to derive from what they hear advantages in future wars. Shall we say that they have recognized the truth who, for example, loudly demand an unrelenting struggle against Germany “because that country is now the true home of Evil in our day, the partner of hell, the abode of the Antichrist”? We should rather say that these are foolish and dangerous people. For the conclusion to be drawn from this nonsense is that since poison gas and bombs do not pick out the guilty, Germany must be exterminated—the whole country and all its people.

The man who does not know the truth expresses himself in lofty, general, and imprecise terms. He shouts about “the” German, he complains about Evil in general, and whoever hears him cannot make out what to do. Shall he decide not to be a German? Will hell vanish if he himself is good? The silly talk about the barbarism that comes out of barbarism is also of this kind. The source of barbarism is barbarism, and it is combated by culture, which comes from education. All this is put in general terms; it is not meant to be a guide to action and is in reality addressed to no one.

Such vague descriptions point to only a few links in the chain of causes. Their obscurantism conceals the real forces making for disaster. If light be thrown on the matter it promptly appears that disasters are caused by certain men. For we live in a time when the fate of man is determined by men.

Fascism is not a natural disaster which can be understood simply in terms of “human nature.” But even when we are dealing with natural catastrophes, there are ways to portray them which are worthy of human beings because they appeal to man’s fighting spirit. After a great earthquake that destroyed Yokohama, many American magazines published photographs showing a heap of ruins. The captions read: STEEL STOOD. And, to be sure, though one might see only ruins at first glance, the eye swiftly discerned, after noting the caption, that a few tall buildings had remained standing. Among the multitudinous descriptions that can be given of an earthquake, those drawn up by construction engineers concerning the shifts in the ground, the force of stresses, the best developed, etc., are of the greatest importance, for they lead to future construction which will withstand earthquakes.

If anyone wishes to describe Fascism and war, great disasters which are not natural catastrophes, he must do so in terms of a practical truth. He must show that these disasters are launched by the possessing classes to control the vast numbers of workers who do not own the means of production. If one wishes successfully to write the truth about evil conditions, one must write it so that its avertible causes can be identified. If the preventable causes can be identified, the evil conditions can be fought

--Bertolt Brecht, The Skill to Manipulate the Truth as a Weapon

It is easy enough to identify the lies told by Bush Jr, but cloaked by passing time and various revisions of history it is more difficult to learn the truth about previous regimes, primarily Ronald Reagan whose bankruptcy of the US was --literally --papered over with new debt and old propaganda. Paul Craig Roberts, who should know a thing or two about the Reagan years, must surely understand that the US economy has been a magician's illusion at least since the Reagan years.

Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down. Except for the super rich, there has been no growth in consumer incomes in the 21st century. Statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com reports that real household income has never recovered its pre-2001 peak.

The US economy has been kept going by substituting growth in consumer debt for growth in consumer income. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan encouraged consumer debt with low interest rates. The low interest rates pushed up home prices, enabling Americans to refinance their homes and spend the equity. Credit cards were maxed out in expectations of rising real estate and equity values to pay the accumulated debt. The binge was halted when the real estate and equity bubbles burst.

As consumers no longer can expand their indebtedness and their incomes are not rising, there is no basis for a growing consumer economy. Indeed, statistics indicate that consumers are paying down debt in their efforts to survive financially. In an economy in which the consumer is the driving force, that is bad news.

The banks, now investment banks thanks to greed-driven deregulation that repealed the learned lessons of the past, were even more reckless than consumers and took speculative leverage to new heights. At the urging of Larry Summers and Goldman Sachs’ CEO Henry Paulson, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bush administration went along with removing restrictions on debt leverage.

When the bubble burst, the extraordinary leverage threatened the financial system with collapse. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped forward with no one knows how many trillions of dollars to “save the financial system,” which, of course, meant to save the greed-driven financial institutions that had caused the economic crisis that dispossessed ordinary Americans of half of their life savings.
--Paul Craig Roberts, The Economy is a Lie, Too

The following is from 'Core of Corruption: In the Shadows'. 'Core of Corruption' is a multi-part series. This is part 1. There is more information and a newsletter at CoreOfCorruption.com. .

911 Prior Knowledge: Using Planes as Weapons

Cowboy on Facebook

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word

Why the 911 Truth Movement 'Cannot be Stopped'

2009-09-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

There remains probable cause to indict and charge top officials, George W. Bush himself, for the crimes we call '911'. And, last time I checked, there was no 'statute of limitation' on mass murder, war crimes [see: US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441] or high treason!

The evidence against Bush, Cheney and a gang of NEOCON crooks will prove in court that Bushco conspired to attack and invade Iraq for its oil! It will not help the defense that documents of Cheney's meeting of his 'Energy Task Force' survive and prove that the Cheney and 'big oil' literally carved up the oil fields of Iraq before Bush would have the pretext he needed to attack, invade, and loot oil!

Earlier this year a BBC Newsnight report claimed to have uncovered documents showing the Bush administration made plans to secure Iraqi oil even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Based on its analysis of PSAs in seven countries, it said multinationals would seek rates of return on their investment from 42 to 162 per cent, far in excess of typical 12 per cent rates.

--American And British Oil Companies Ready To Carve Up Iraqi Oil Fields

As Hitler needed a Reichstag Fire, Bushco needed a pretext --a 'catalyzing event' that the Project for the New American Century would compare to Pearl Harbor. [See Rebuilding America's Defenses; toward the end of this PDF document you will find a picutre of the US Global Hawk which, I believe was 'the missile', as Rumsfeld called it, that hit 'this building' as Rumsfeld referred to the Pentagon!]

Bush conspired with 'rich men' --his elite base --in order to perpetrate the capital crimes of aggressive war, mass murder and high treason!

On this eighth anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11. the movement of concerned citizens who do not believe the U.S. government’s official explanation of those events (the clear majority in poll after poll after poll) only continues to grow, emboldened by breathrough after breakthrough in their efforts to bring the glaring inaccuracies of that official explanation to the attention of the general public.
Perhaps no greater sign of the success of the 9/11 Truth movement can be found than the fact that the discredited corporate media has begun another round of ferocious and transparent hit pieces designed to sling mud at those seeking real answers to the still-unanswered questions of the victims’ family members and real justice for the first responders who are dying as a direct result of government lies. From Psychology Todays ridiculous hit piece insisting that skepticism about government explanations is a form of insanity to National Geographic firing explosives into a fiberglass chicken coop, it seems that the corporate media is becoming more and more desperate (and even downright comical) in their attempts to stop people from questioning the very 9/11 commission that has been called a fraud by six of its own commissioners.
Most of these attacks on 9/11 end up focusing not on the evidence itself, but on one inevitable question: “Why do ‘conspiracy theorists’ believe what they believe?” Of course, this question is coming from the self-same media conglomerates who speak in unanimity against 9/11 Truth and then wonder why newspapers are going the way of the dodo and people are turning off the TV in droves, so we can assume the question is either disingenous or that the corporate media bigwigs are, shall we say, intellectually challenged.
--James Corbett, The Corbett Report

The biggest hole in the official theories is the fact that there is absolutely no forensic evidence supporting the Bush conspiracy theory. Certainly --no airliner wreckage was recovered in New York and the surviving steel was ordered destroyed by Bush but not before traces of thermate were recovered and subsequently tested, analyzed and confirmed. The presence of thermate is very nearly the smoking gun. Without thermate, the steel girders of WTC would never have weakened, collapsed or melted as they were, in fact, photographed.

WTC 7 is another fatal flaw, a nail in the Bushco coffin. WTC 7 was not struck by any airliner of any size. It was seen standing behind a BBC correspondent even as she reported its collapse. Clearly --she had gotten the official 'release' but screwed up by reporting this planned event before it, in fact, occurred. The fall of WTC 7, never struck by airliners, is a classic example of a controlled demolition.

At the Pentagon, only one engine rotor was found --not the two that would have survived to be recovered had an airliner struck the Pentagon. Moreover, the only rotor found was about one third the size of two rotors that would have been recovered had a 757 struck the Pentagon. There was no fuselage, no airliner wreckage! Unless the laws of the conservation of matter and energy have been repealed, a 757 weighing some 80 tons or more would have left behind just that much debris. Certainly, the small of amount of debris might have been carried off in wheelbarrows.

Desperate 'officialists' concede that no airliner fuselage was found. It 'vaporized', they 'explain'. Nonsense! The fuselage is of aluminum and according to every scientific, official or university source I have found, aluminum will not 'vaporize' at temperatures less than 11000 degrees F. According to NASA, 11000 degrees F is 1000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. So --you can rule that out!

Officialists also claim that DNA testing confirmed both passenger and 'hijacker' IDs. There are at least two things wrong with that assertion: 1) there are NO Arab names on the official autopsy report released to Dr. Olmsted in response to his FOIA; 2) if the fuselage vaporized as is claimed, then no DNA IDs would have been possible. DNA is often said to decompose when heated but, in fact, the effect is even worse: it literally melts. As heat is applied, bonds that join the two nucleotide strands may break.

The two molecules [nucleotides] are stabilized in this structure due to noncovalent bonds, mostly hydrogen bonds and vanderWaals forces. These bonds are not strong; accordingly, when the temperature rises sufficiently, the double helix is said to "melt" into its two component molecules, and will reassociate upon slow cooling under appropriate salt conditions. So, the issue is not decomposition so much as disassociation upon exposure to too high a temperature; and the reason for the disassociation is that the energy input of the heat overcomes the ability of the noncovalent bonds to keep the molecules together.

--US Energy Department, Molecular Biology Archive, DNA Decomposition

At the 11000 degrees F required to 'vaporize' the fuselage, I dare say no DNA would have survived, no DNA ids would have been possible at all. So --which is it? Did the fuselage vaporize or not? Were the DNA ids performed or not? The officialists simply cannot have it both ways.

The truth, however, explains everything. Lies explain nothing. The truth is: no airliner struck the Pentagon. The only 'official autopsy report' known to exist was released to Dr. Olmsted via his FOIA request. There were NO ARABS on the list!

Take the case of Flight 93. Saeed Alghamdi has been protesting his innocence of 911 since the event. If Saeed were guilty, he would be dead! If Saeed were guilty he would have been blown to smithereens over PA. A dead Saeed might be evidence of Bush's theory. Alive, he is living proof that Bush's official conspiracy theory is a pack of black hearted lies that have harmed the American people, the world and, most certainly, the cause of peace.

Bush is the primary suspect for several reasons:

Those who lie about crimes do so to cover up guilt. Bush has never told the truth about 911.
Bush has not merely lied; he has actively, consistently and deliberately tried to cover up the crime of 911 with overt and identifiable instances of obstruction of justice, lies, and overt intimidation. This --I believe --is persuasive evidence of his guilt and/or complicity.

Tim Roemer let the cat out of the bag when, like Donald Rumsfeld, he referred to a 'missile' that struck the Pentagon. And that, I believe, is the truth that Bush would cover up and lie about.

If Bush had been innocent of the crime, he would have ordered every scrap to be placed in evidence. Instead, he obstructed justice by ordering destroyed the evidence of mass murder an high treason. If Bush had been innocent, why would he have ordered the destruction of evidence that might have proved his innocence in court? Within months of WTC collapse, tons of metal from the collapsed towers were sold to scrap yards in New Jersey where it was then sold to recyclers in the US and overseas. As the recent discovery of thermate proves, every shred, every scrap of 911 metal was evidence which, if examined, might have explained the collapse or pointed an accusing, indicting finger! Perhaps it is that last fact that explains the haste with which this 'evidence' was destroyed.

If Bush were innocent, then why would he have ordered the destruction of evidence that might have exonerated him? The only answer is that Bush is not innocent and ordered the destruction of evidence that would, in fact, prove his guilt of the crimes of mass murder and high treason against the sovereign people of the United States, the Constitution, US Criminal Codes and every moral code known to mankind since leaving the caves and savannahs.

Let's get on with the trials. Let's bring the guilty bastards to justice! There is no future until the demons of the past are dealt with, resolved and put to rest. No future is promising that is built upon a foundation of lies, high treason and the mass murder of US citizens by its own government.

See also: A Challenge to American Journalism

This just in:

[US officials, Congressmen, State and Defense Dept. officials Bribed for Nuclear Secrets! Can you say wide spread high treason in the US Government? ]

Broke the news on air tonight. 4,000 word cover story on FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in The American Conservative to hit stands and web tomorrow, by former CIA agent Phil Giraldi.

We'll pick this up tomorrow after I get a look at it. You East Coasters will likely beat me to it. But here's the teaser from TAC...:
There’s a new issue of The American Conservative going to press today, and it includes a story that will make more than a few congressmen and foreign lobbyists intensely uncomfortable: an in-depth interview between Phil Giraldi and FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. She tells us exactly how Turkish intelligence have penetrated national secrets, suborned government officials, and blackmailed Congress. It’s going to be explosive.
Good. Rightwingers are covering it. So hopefully that means the "liberal media" will now pay attention!

UPDATE 9/18/09 1:15pm PT: Sibel posted the cover over at her site, and I've added it above. She also notes that the story is currently online available online to subscribers only until Monday when they'll release "a major press release" along with the print version out the same day. The story should then be available to all online on Tuesday.

The cover title: "Whose Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?: The gagged FBI whistleblower on espionage, al-Qaeda, and secrets for sale"

In an email she just sent me just now, she notes: "We've been getting foreign
MSM inquiries; tons. Zilch here; so far..."
Not much of a surprise by now. After all, what U.S. media would possibly care about members of the U.S. Congress and high-ranking State and Defense Dept. officials taking bribes, being blackmailed, and enabling the theft and sale of U.S. nuclear secrets? Even if the allegations came under sworn and video-taped deposition by a former FBI translator who overheard such things first hand. Non-story, apparently.
--Explosive' Sibel Edmonds Cover Story at 'The American Conservative'

911, War, and Paul O'Neill

Also see:

Published Articles on Buzzflash.net

Subscribe

Add to Google

Add Cowboy Videos to Google

Spread the word