Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
The Struggle for Lebanon
by Patrick Seale It does not look as if the long-running Lebanese crisis will be resolved any day soon. The main reason is that the election of a Lebanese President is not a purely Lebanese affair. Numerous external powers want a say. To arrive at a consensus between them is no easy task. It will almost certainly need more time.
Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary-general, has exhausted himself in a valiant attempt at mediation between rival Lebanese factions and their external backers -- so far, without success.
In the anti-Bushite movement, there is an ongoing clamor for impeachment. Even when someone as ill-suited to being useful for such an outcome as the out-going congresswoman Cynthia McKinney submits a resolution for impeachment, our movement treats that event –which would be regrettable, given the source and her standing in the body politic, were it not too obscure to matter one way or the other– as something to celebrate.
If ever any president and vice president in American history deserved impeachment, I would certainly agree, Bush and Cheney deserve it most richly. And more. And if ever there were a need in America to defend the Constitution and the rule of law by rebuking some would-be tyrants, now is the time.
But to achieve one’s goals, one must act in accordance with the lay of the land. And one must devise one’s strategies with an understanding of the correlation of forces, and with how the flow of time is affecting that balance of power.
Now that a thumping smack has been delivered by American voters to the backside of the Empire building hallucinations of your sponsors, leaving you presidential future effectively bowdlerized, you are well advised to start learning to say ‘please’ to lessen the pain of the remaining two years.
Learn to say Please Mr. President because with a whole bunch of Repub-mangled Congressmen let loose upon the Capitol Hill, your interaction with the Dem-dominated Congress will tend to be complicated and emotionally draining exercise for you. The ‘please’ word will act like a balm to the political sores that you are likely to get from the chafing.
Learn to say Please Mr. President because control tactics such as threatening, shaming, or fear mongering will not get you what you want from now onward. What is more, regular use of words like ‘please and ‘thank you’ might just numb the sting of being a political outcast and a sitting President.
Learn to say Please Mr. President while giving directions, making requests, or asking questions of this new Congress. Also, while you are at it, learn not to scowl, shake your finger and glare at the new house. That tends to have a goading effect on the addressees and that is not exactly what you want.
Loaded Language and Loaded Guns: The Meaning of Opposites
by Charles Sullivan One can no longer understand US governmental policy on the basis of conventional language or traditional wisdom. Language itself and its long-established meanings were long ago twisted and distorted in order to deceive the people.
Now war is peace and terror and occupation is liberation. In order to make sense of what is happening, it is important to understand everything within the context of a specific economic philosophy, and the distorted capitalist system that spawned it.
Odd, at the height of summer, to consider the inevitable decay of
autumn, but watching the blooms and dry arbutus leaves fall in the
garden today I felt a moment of seasonal depression. Maybe it’s just
the signs of the times catching up to me
I’ve always held a morbid fascination for the 1930’s; its economic
crash, dust bowls, and the rise of fascism. I suppose it was naïve to
believe I would never get the chance to see its revival.
by Eloise Charest Dear Chris, It would be an honor to be on your famous radio show anytime. I' m so thrilled to see the old guardians still in place and standing strong. Compliments on the Pacific Press and the rest, it's refreshing to read real news.
I have just spent most of the summer until late fall blocking the road trying to prevent one of the largest hydro projects from going through. Now that the clearcutting of our old growth has turned the only inland temperate rainforest on earth into a desert that is drying up and prone to fires, they are after our water.
Mass mailings are underway (mine arrived a few moments ago) reporting Korey Rowe, one of the young filmmakers responsible for the runaway internet smash film, 'Loose Change,' (a sequel version rumoured soon to be theatrically released), has been arrested by the American military for "desertion."
The documentary is a potent and crafted exploration of the official 9/11 narrative of events on that dread day, and it's controversial conclusions has fomented a movement to open independent investigations into those events.
Slush funds, oil sheikhs, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney – it's a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you've never heard about it – even though it happened just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is just as thick as the fog of war.
But here's how the deal went down. On Dec. 14, the UK Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain's biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family. SFO bulldogs had just forced their way into the holy of holies of the great global backroom – Swiss bank accounts – when Pete pulled the plug. Continuing with the investigation, said His Lordship, "would not be in the national interest."
It certainly wasn't in the interest of BAE Systems, the British arms merchant which has become one of the top 10 U.S. military firms as well, through its voracious acquisitions during the profitable War on Terror – including some juicy hook-ups with the Carlyle Group, the former corporate crib of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and still current home of the family fixer, James Baker. BAE director Phillip Carroll is also quite at home in the White House inner circle: a former chairman of Shell Oil, he was tapped by George II to be the first "Senior Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil" in those heady "Mission Accomplished" days of 2003. BAE has allegedly managed to "disappear" approximately $2 billion in shavings from one of the largest and longest-running arms deals in history – the UK-Saudi warplane program known as "al-Yamanah" (Arabic for "the dove"). Al-Yamanah has been flying for 18 years now, with periodic augmentations, pumping almost $80 billion into BAE's coffers, with negotiations for $12 billion in additional planes now nearing completion. SFO investigators had followed the missing money from the deal into a network of Swiss bank accounts and the usual Enronian web of offshore front companies.
10. Law Gone South (Opinion/Opinion)
Author : Chris Floyd
Alabama Getaway: Bush-Rove Legal Perversion Goes South
by Chris Floyd Scott Horton has put out a detailed and entirely damning piece about the corruption of the judicial process for partisan gain engineered by Karl Rove and the White House down south: Justice in Alabama. The prosecution -- and persecution -- of former Democratic governor Don Siegelman was a state crime from start to finish, and was clearly orchestrated by Karl Rove and his appointed minions -- themselves hip-deep in sleaze, graft and criminal conspiracy. In a brilliantly apt comparison, Horton likens Rove to Andrey Vyshinsky, the prosecutor of Stalin's show trials, and one of history's great perverters of the law.
The Alabama case is a microcosm of the Bush Imperium at almost every level: financial corruption, subversion of the law, rampant deceit and abuse of process -- and a cowed, co-opted press to help bury the government's wrongdoing. Siegelman is facing up to 30 years in prison for charges which were so transparently false that they had earlier been dismissed, with prejudice, by an honest judge. But Rove and his operatives merely shopped the case around to a more compliant judge -- one riddled with the kind of flagrant conflicts-of-interest that are meat and drink to the Bushist crowd.
11. Let It Come Down: Forcing the Constitutional Crisis of Liberty (Opinion/Opinion)
Author : Chris Floyd
Nat Hentoff, one of our great champions of civil liberties, uncovers the ugly truths behind the Bush Regime's plans for a Nuremberg-in-reverse at the American concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay: war crimes show trials being conducted by war criminals. Hentoff also cites the the remarkable reports by the Seton Hall University School of Law which -- drawing solely on official Pentagon documents -- detail the shameful and criminal system that Bush and his lawless gang of legal perverts have established. As the Seton Hall reports note:
"Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban...."The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that are, in fact, not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist . . . A large majority—60 percent—are detained merely because they are 'associated with' a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. (And members of almost 72 percent of those groups are allowed into the U.S.)....
"Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. Eighty-six percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time when the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies."
This issue must now be brought to the crisis. When the new Congress convenes, it should pass a law repealing the Military Commissions Act and firmly re-establishing Constitutional principles of jurisprudence and civil liberties. Then let Bush veto it if he will, so that it will be plain at last where we stand: Constitutionalists on one side, Authoritarians on the other. These poles are fast becoming the true political divide in this country, a split that runs through all parties. To echo George Washington, "Let us have [a government] by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured; or let us know the worst at once."
by Chris Floyd While the Anglo-American media goes into hyper-drive over a pair of utterly bungled terrorist wannabe attacks in the UK, the actual, highly efficient slaughter of innocent civilians in Afghanistan by American forces continues at a frenzied pace.
Dozens of Afghan civilians -- from 50 to 80 -- were killed in a three-hour bombing raid on the village of Hyderabad on Saturday, local officials of the American-backed Afgan government told the Observer.
One man, Mohammed Khan, lost seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother's children, the paper reported.
Christopher Hitchens Takes a Roll in the Hay
by Chris Floyd
You know, it has long been fashionable to criticize Christopher Hitchens for his appalling adherence to the gangsters of the Bush Regime, whom he for many years painted in the kind of bold, heroic tones we've not seen since the heyday of Socialist Realism.
And while Hitchens is now trying to get back to where he once belonged to some extent -- washing his hands of a war whose failure he now blames largely on the anti-war left and instead shooting a few fish in the barrel of religious absurdities to regain his "contrarian" cred -- he has remained a much-reviled figure in quarters where once he was feted as a prince. (Indeed, no less than Gore Vidal anointed Hitchens as his successor -- but that was many years ago, and as we've seen, the indefatigable octogenarian shows no sign of needing a successor.)
But I think it's time to give over the rancor surrounding Hitchens. Let us exercise compassionate conservatism toward him -- by compassionately refusing to read his embarrassing outpourings, thereby conserving our eyesight and senses for more important tasks. I came to this conclusion after reading his piece in The Guardian last weekend, a florid -- paean, I suppose he would call it -- to the literary festival in the small Welsh border village of Hay-on-Wye.
The American Secessionist Streak
by Christopher Ketcham
Sarah
Palin's secessionist sympathies sparked minor hysteria last week. Her
crime was hailing with round praise the work of the cranky Alaskan
Independence Party, which advocates a statewide plebiscite on the
secession of Alaska from the Union.
"The fires of hell are frozen
glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government," the
party's late founder, gold miner Joe Vogler, once said. "And I won't be
buried under their damn flag."
In a recent poll, one in five agreed that states have the right to peacefully secede from the Union.
Let It Collapse!
by Christopher Ketcham So the tax-payer hand-out will “save” Wall Street from its own
predations. Any reasonable man, of course, would wish the pig-fuckers
to fry in their own feces. Let the free market carry out their corpses
to the gutter. And mine too, perhaps, for as a magazine writer I depend
on the thoughtlessness and blind-mole cupidity of credit-card
consumerism – the credit system now imploding – to feed the ad-market
that feeds the magazines that pay my bills.
Without dumb blondes buying
Manohlo Blahniks and metrosexuals fawning over prawns in overpriced
restaurants, my paycheck turns to dust.
But the fact is that our economic system is a lunatic and suicidal
system, and it deserves to go down. Why lunatic and suicidal? It is
predicated on the delusion, accepted on every level in every modern
society, that unlimited Mahnolo Blahniks are possible on a planet of
limited resources. Growth without horizon is simply not possible, but
the delusion remains in force, a mass glue-huff and consensus trance
hallucination. Endless growth on planet earth is by definition
entropic; it implies its own end. Its pursuit is therefore suicidal.
by Copy Dude Well fancy that. Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service would charge Lugovoi with the murder of Litvinenko. But since they can’t, they won’t.
There will be no extradition, no trial. The trial by media will stand. And black propaganda and dirty tricks wins the day.
As with Dr Kelly, there was no coroner’s report on Litvinenko. That’s so exceptional, by the way, Norman Baker MP has been asking the Government for the truth about Kelly for the last two years.
Since every British tabloid has linked the dissident Litvinenko with Politkovskaya, let’s link on...
As it happens, both Litvinenko and Politkovskaya were virtually unknown in Russia. You won’t find a copy of their ’sensational’ books anywhere here - nor in the Russian language, that anyone can read.
Their combined threat to the Kremlin didn’t add up to the square root of squilch.
All this will come as a shock to Daily Telegraph readers, but there isn’t really a lot of call for ‘fierce critics of Putin’ these days. Putin has a popularity rating of 79% at the last count.
Given Tony Blair’s 22% at the last council elections, one might well ask which country’s citizens are being forced to live under an unpopular regime.
If only they had known, as they sat down for lunch at a London sushi nosherie, that their meeting would launch the biggest propaganda hit on Russia since the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games.
Actually, I didn’t mind that boycott at all, since the most beautiful East German girls ever to wear swimsuits won a trunk of Olympic medals. A breast stroke on steroids was something to behold. But there’s nothing pretty about the Litvinenko case. And now, for an encore, the amazing duo have launched an Italian black op-eretta.
In Italy, the dirty tricks of Berlusconi’s Mitrokhin Commission are currently the mama of all scandals. Beleaguered Senator Paolo Guzzanti has had to set up his own blog to bat back the flack. So you can all follow, a quick historia della intrigue.
As yet more London restaurants and hotels are found contaminated with Polonium 210, murder isn’t most likely.
The amount of Polonium needed to leave a month long trail over three countries, four hotels, assorted homes, offices and eateries - not to mention Arsenal football stadium - is simply too much for a simple poisoning.
Especially when any amount over a speck of dust is overkill.
British police aren’t using the phrase ‘dirty bomb’ yet but it’s clear they’re thinking about one. The UK Daily Pundit details their recent shopping list.
As you can see, Escape Hoods and Protective Suits were hurriedly commissioned at the height of the Litvinenko affair in December. Coincidence? Perhaps, but Scotland Yard was certainly shamed when its own investigators suffered contamination, while German officers had all the right gear.
Yet in the face of all evidence and logic, the media is still spinning the same tired script. The Daily Telegraph now believes Litvinenko was, quote, ‘attacked’ twice. Hmmm. Polonium is only 250 billion times deadlier than cyanide. The ‘assassins’ really thought they should slip him another one, just for luck? And considering Polonium only costs 10 million a shot, what the hell? Meanwhile, exactly how you attack someone with a speck of dust, the Telegraph can’t say.
"We rely on Hezbollah and these other countries who are helping
us now because it's all we have," Said Abu Khalil, an unemployed
construction worker injured by bomb sharpnel during the war told IPS.
"And we rely on Hezbollah to protect us again from the next Israeli
aggression, because our own government can't and won't do that job."
Fallujah Now Under a Different Kind of Siege
by Ali al-Fadhily
Three years after a devastating U.S.-led siege of the city, residents of Fallujah continue to struggle with a shattered economy, infrastructure, and lack of mobility.
The city that was routed in November 2004 is still suffering the worst humanitarian conditions under a siege that continues. Although military actions are down to the minimum inside the city, local and US authorities do not seem to be thinking of ending the agonies of the over 400,000 residents of Fallujah.
"You, people of the media, say things in Fallujah are good," Mohammad Sammy, an aid worker for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Fallujah told IPS, "Then why don’t you come and live in this paradise with us? It is so easy to say things for you, isn’t it?"
The Lights Have Gone Out, Who Cares
by Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail
Lack of electricity in Baquba has shattered businesses, and the lives of families. Months of power failures has darkened morale everywhere.
In Diyala province, just north of Baghdad, a generation has grown up in dark. The province, and its capital Baquba 40 km north of Baghdad has lived with intermittent electricity supply since the times of the sanctions under Saddam Hussein in the 1990s.
I was sitting on the floor of a radio studio in Denver, watching Air America host Thom Hartman interview David Sirota, syndicated journalist and author of The Uprising, while they talked about the presidential election and the politics to follow soon after. As David explained;
"It is up to the people to hold our leaders' feet to the fire; we cannot simply assume that they will take care of the issues that matter most to us."
This was my purpose in accompanying Dad to the Democratic National Convention.
New Study Claims Mistruths Shaped Rush To War
by Danny Schechter It took almost five years for major studies to come out to confirm what most of us knew a long time ago about Iraq.The conclusion: the lies “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
So now it’s “official” with two top journalist organizations documenting that the war in Iraq was facilitated and sold with a whopping 935 misleading assertions. May we ask: Why is it that truth takes so long come out in a land which proudly claims to have the freest media in the world?
LOOKING AT US FROM "OUT THERE" - Last Thoughts From The Glorious Republic; Heading Back To The USSA
by Danny Schechter
When you slip outside the empire, and travel as I try to do when others are kind enough to pay my way, I see the world through other eyes.
Yes, gang, there is more to the world than the overheated passions between the Obama and Clinton camps.
First, you experience the decline of American power right away. Our dollars are a joke in terms of purchasing power. The privileges of being an American, if they every existed, are long gone. Some still admire us, but many, too many, pity us.
If the Democratic Party were a real opposition party--a party of principle filled with fighters--I'd say maintaining control of the Senate, even with by a margin of a single, fragile vote, would be important and valuable.
But that's not what we have.
The Democratic Party, particularly the actual elected congressional delegation and the leadership of the party in the two houses, is so washed out, so gutless, so calculating, and so self-serving, that it hardly rates as a second party.
Because of this, the role of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, recently re-elected by the voters of Connecticut while running as an independent after losing his own party's nomination to an upstart anti-war candidate, Ned Lamont, is dangerous in the extreme.
Lieberman, who won re-election by stealing the votes of Connecticut's Republicans from the GOP's official candidate (Lieberman only won about a third of the Democratic vote), has been a closet Republican for years. He was a Republican in all but name when he ran as Al Gore's vice presidential partner in 2000, and since helping that campaign go down in flames has been one of George Bush's most stalwart supporters in Congress.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that, barring some incredible act of criminal cynicism such as the bombardment of Iran by the president, the Democrats are going to take over the House of Representatives.
That being the case, I propose that it's time all those patriots and lovers of liberty, all those who oppose the administration's mad imperial military policies, all those who recognize the so-called War on Terror for what it is--a War on America, all those whose stomachs turned at the sight of the fatal drowning of New Orleans, all those who are outraged at a president who claims the right to violate laws at will, to ignore acts of Congress and to snub rulings of the Supreme Court, all those who are sick of seeing their government function like a whorehouse for corporate Johns, all those who are angry at having a government that tortures and kidnaps people, including children, in our name, all those who know that there are dark secrets about 9-11 being buried by traitors in the White House, all those who despair at seeing the Bill of Rights ripped out of the Constitution article by article, begin a mass campaign to make impeachment of President Bush item one on the agenda of the next Congress.
by Dave Lindorff The looming collapse of the US military in Iraq, of which a number of generals and former generals, including former Chief of Staff Colin Powell, have warned, is happening none too soon, as it may be the best hope for preventing military rule here at home.
From the looks of things, the Bush/Cheney regime has been working assiduously to pave the way for a declaration of military rule, such that at this point it really lacks only the pretext to trigger a suspension of Constitutional government. They have done this with the active support of Democrats in Congress, though most of the heavy lifting was done by the last, Republican-led Congress.
There is a decent chance that within the next month or two the New Mexico State Legislature will ask the U.S. House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney. And there is the definite possibility that a Congress Member from New Mexico will take up the matter when it gets to Washington. The Jefferson Manual, rules used by the U.S. House, allows for impeachment to be begun in this manner. It only takes one state legislature. No governor is needed. One Congress Member, from the same state or any other, is needed to essentially acknowledge receipt of the state's petition. Then impeachment begins.
Last year the state legislatures of California, Minnesota, Illinois, and Vermont introduced but did not pass resolutions to send impeachment to the U.S. House. The State Senator who introduced the bill in Minnesota is now a member of Congress, Keith Ellison. He is one of many Congress Members waiting for the right moment to impeach Bush and Cheney. The state of New Jersey has a strong activist movement working to introduce and pass impeachment this year. There's a race now to see which state can do it first, which state can redeem these United States in the eyes of the world. New Mexico is jumping into the contest in a big way, with a terrific leading sponsor of the bill, strong Democatic majorities in both houses, and a citizens' movement ready to hold its government to account.
Of course, it is cities, not states, that have really taken the lead on impeachment, as on ending the war. Dozens of cities have already passed resolutions for impeachment. Dozens more have introduced them, and they are pending. A handful have introduced them and voted them down. On March 6th about 100 towns in Vermont will vote at public meetings for impeachment. But by March 6th, impeachment may already be underway.
9:15 a.m. ET, 12/5/2006 -- The hearing hasn't started yet. Ray McGovern is sitting in the front row. If the questioning is lame, he and I will try to get everyone chanting "You won the elections! Now ask real questions!" unless one of you has a better chant idea. That's the best we've thought of on our own so far. Out on the street in front of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington DC, the World Can't Wait is protesting along with the Bush Chain Gang. I have a video camera, but anything I shoot won't be posted until tonight at the earliest.
9:45 a.m. Sen. John Warner, Chair of Senate Armed Services, introduced Gates, saying that he became director of the CIA after 21 witnesses produced 2500 pages of testimony and he was confirmed by the Senate. He then "served with distinction." Then Warner started bragging on his own military service. Now he's quoting his own recent muddled pseudo-tough words on Iraq: "no option off the table." To further clarify, he quoted Gen Peter Pace from yesterday: "We're not winning but we're not losing."
Warner plans a hearing at 9:30 on Thursday following Wednesday's release of the Baker-Hamilton plan to support the war before opposing it while supporting it. Warner urged the President to consult with Congress, even while using Bush's new euphemism: "the way forward." Warner refers to Gates as his longtime friend.
9:55 Carl Levin spoke next. Didn't say much, but did so at length. Praised Warner's service as chairman. Now, former Senator and Viagra salesman Bob Dole is speaking.
A Candid Interview with GREEN’S Victoria Running Candidate
by Diane Walsh Adam Saab is a new guy on the election scene. Not surprisingly, people are curious to know, “what’s this dude really about anyway?” As the Green Party’s candidate for the electoral district of Victoria, he’s got his work cut out for him.
"Without referring to specific journalists or media
organizations, I would agree that there is a hesitancy to give credit
or even thorough coverage as well as some degree of accepted
patronizing that takes place. I am optimistic, however, that this will
improve to some degree in this election."
Every so often, something emerges from D.C. that is SO outrageous; it gives you the intellectual equivalent of freezer burn. Such was the case, this week, when “The Washington Post” ran a guest editorial by Liz Cheney entitled “Retreat Isn’t An Option.”
It wasn’t so much an opinion piece as a pouty, barely post-pubescent exercise in petulance. (Not particularly well written, either.)
To any of you unfamiliar with Ms. Cheney, up until recently, she was known, in some circles, as “Dick’s Draft Deferment Daughter.”
Back in ’04, “Slate” unearthed a timeline put together by “The Washington Post’s” Phil McCombs in 1991. It went something like this:
by Elizabeth de la Vega Ninety-seven years ago this month, just eight days after the March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire , in which nearly 150 young men and women suffered horrific deaths, Rose Schneiderman rocked the Metropolitan Opera House.
She was not singing. But her voice, pellucid and sharp, carried the house:
"I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting."
Doin' the Karl Rove Dance:
A Chorus Line of "Loyal Bushies"
by Elizabeth de la Vega Last week, Americans with access to YouTube were subjected to a once-in-a-lifetime performance by President Bush's senior political adviser Karl Rove. At least, I fervently hope that this event will only happen once in our lifetimes. Watching Rove, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, bobbing and weaving awkwardly in a pathetic parody of a rapper was painful. However, more excruciating than his routine -- "MC Rove: Doin' the Dance, the Karl Rove Dance" to lyrics supplied by comedian Brad Sherwood -- was the sight of the members of our so-called independent Washington press corps laughing amiably at the antics of a senior presidential aide whose conduct is so universally considered despicable that no one even flinches at ill-timed lines like: "Don't get the jitters/but MC Rove tears the head off of critters." That scene was the stuff of nightmares.
Rove's rap performance was disturbing, yes; but, in the end, it was also relatively brief and harmless. The same cannot be said of the danse macabre he has been directing since the Bush administration took over the White House. We know that Rove is a master of the quick-step and the hustle, but he almost never makes his moves in public. Instead, he has been directing the Bush production from the Office of Political Affairs whose purpose is, according to the White House website, to ensure "that the executive branch and the President are aware of the concerns of the American citizen."
I hope I can be forgiven if animal images kept coming into my mind during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week. On the eve of the first such hearing to be held by the newly-elected Democratic majority, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Committee Chairmen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) announcing that, henceforth, the President's Terrorist Surveillance Program would be conducted under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Listening to Alberto Gonzales "answering" questions about this development during the hearing, the thoughts I kept having were of seals and snakes: Had the administration really flip-flopped on warrantless electronic surveillance — like, say, a seal — or was it merely attempting to slither away — like, say, a snake?
Unfortunately, it appears to be the latter. As with so many of its other activities — pre-invasion intelligence fraud, detention of enemy combatants, systematic torture — the closer the Bush administration comes to intersecting with the law and with Congress on its illegal spying, in the words of Paul Simon, "the more you're slip-slidin' away."
Well, Where Have We Been?
Unbeknownst to the American people and Congress — the phrase that should begin so many stories about the Bush administration — the President, starting in late 2001, authorized a secret domestic surveillance program to be run by the National Security Agency (NSA). By the time the secret wiretapping was revealed in a New York Times article on December 16, 2005, George W. Bush had issued more than 30 orders authorizing surveillance for what the administration claimed were foreign intelligence purposes, without ever attempting to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA"). A law Congress enacted in 1978 to prevent the Executive Branch from conducting such surveillance without any court supervision whatsoever, FISA was simultaneously to provide a more expeditious procedure than that required for a standard search warrant.
I hope I can be forgiven if animal images kept coming into my mind during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week. On the eve of the first such hearing to be held by the newly-elected Democratic majority, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Committee Chairmen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) announcing that, henceforth, the President’s Terrorist Surveillance Program would be conducted under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Listening to Alberto Gonzales “answering” questions about this development during the hearing, the thoughts I kept having were of seals and snakes: Had the administration really flip-flopped on warrantless electronic surveillance — like, say, a seal — or was it merely attempting to slither away — like, say, a snake?
Unfortunately, it appears to be the latter. As with so many of its other activities — pre-invasion intelligence fraud, detention of enemy combatants, systematic torture — the closer the Bush administration comes to intersecting with the law and with Congress on its illegal spying, in the words of Paul Simon, “the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.”
Well, Where Have We Been?
Unbeknownst to the American people and Congress — the phrase that should begin so many stories about the Bush administration — the President, starting in late 2001, authorized a secret domestic surveillance program to be run by the National Security Agency (NSA). By the time the secret wiretapping was revealed in a New York Times article on December 16, 2005, George W. Bush had issued more than 30 orders authorizing surveillance for what the administration claimed were foreign intelligence purposes, without ever attempting to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (”FISA”). A law Congress enacted in 1978 to prevent the Executive Branch from conducting such surveillance without any court supervision whatsoever, FISA was simultaneously to provide a more expeditious procedure than that required for a standard search warrant.
Banners 
In the anti-Bushite movement, there is an ongoing clamor for impeachment. Even when someone as ill-suited to being useful for such an outcome as the out-going congresswoman Cynthia McKinney submits a resolution for impeachment, our movement treats that event –which would be regrettable, given the source and her standing in the body politic, were it not too obscure to matter one way or the other– as something to celebrate.
Now that a thumping smack has been delivered by American voters to the backside of the Empire building hallucinations of your sponsors, leaving you presidential future effectively bowdlerized, you are well advised to start learning to say ‘please’ to lessen the pain of the remaining two years. 
One can no longer understand US governmental policy on the basis of conventional language or traditional wisdom. Language itself and its long-established meanings were long ago twisted and distorted in order to deceive the people. 
Odd, at the height of summer, to consider the inevitable decay of
autumn, but watching the blooms and dry arbutus leaves fall in the
garden today I felt a moment of seasonal depression. Maybe it’s just
the signs of the times catching up to me
Mass mailings are underway (mine arrived a few moments ago) reporting Korey Rowe, one of the young filmmakers responsible for the runaway internet smash film, 'Loose Change,' (a sequel version rumoured soon to be theatrically released), has been arrested by the American military for "desertion." 
highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you've never heard about it – even though it happened just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is just as thick as the fog of war.
Scott Horton has put out a detailed and entirely damning piece about the corruption of the judicial process for partisan gain engineered by Karl Rove and the White House down south: 
While the Anglo-American media goes into hyper-drive over a pair of utterly bungled terrorist 
You know, it has long been fashionable to criticize Christopher Hitchens for his appalling adherence to the gangsters of the Bush Regime, whom he for many years painted in the kind of bold, heroic tones we've not seen since the heyday of Socialist Realism. 
Well fancy that. Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service would charge Lugovoi with the murder of Litvinenko. But since they can’t, they won’t.
Since every British tabloid has linked the dissident Litvinenko with Politkovskaya, let’s link on...
What a great double act! 
As yet more London 
"We rely on Hezbollah and these other countries who are helping
us now because it's all we have," Said Abu Khalil, an unemployed
construction worker injured by bomb sharpnel during the war told IPS.
It took almost five years for major studies to come out to confirm what most of us knew a long time ago about Iraq.The conclusion: the lies “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
If the Democratic Party were a real opposition party--a party of principle filled with fighters--I'd say maintaining control of the Senate, even with by a margin of a single, fragile vote, would be important and valuable. 
That being the case, I propose that it's time all those patriots and lovers of liberty, all those who oppose the administration's mad imperial military policies, all those who recognize the so-called War on Terror for what it is--a War on America, all those whose stomachs turned at the sight of the fatal drowning of New Orleans, all those who are outraged at a president who claims the right to violate laws at will, to ignore acts of Congress and to snub rulings of the Supreme Court, all those who are sick of seeing their government function like a whorehouse for corporate Johns, all those who are angry at having a government that tortures and kidnaps people, including children, in our name, all those who know that there are dark secrets about 9-11 being buried by traitors in the White House, all those who despair at seeing the Bill of Rights ripped out of the Constitution article by article, begin a mass campaign to make impeachment of President Bush item one on the agenda of the next Congress.
The looming collapse of the US military in Iraq, of which a number of generals and former generals, including former Chief of Staff Colin Powell, have warned, is happening none too soon, as it may be the best hope for preventing military rule here at home. 
Every so often, something emerges from D.C. that is SO outrageous; it gives you the intellectual equivalent of freezer burn. Such was the case, this week, when “The Washington Post” ran a guest editorial by Liz Cheney entitled “Retreat Isn’t An Option.”
Last week, Americans with access to YouTube were subjected to a once-in-a-lifetime performance by President Bush's senior political adviser Karl Rove. At least, I fervently hope that this event will only happen once in our lifetimes. Watching Rove, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, bobbing and weaving awkwardly in a pathetic parody of a rapper was painful. However, more excruciating than his routine -- "MC Rove: Doin' the Dance, the Karl Rove Dance" to lyrics supplied by comedian Brad Sherwood -- was the sight of the members of our so-called independent Washington press corps laughing amiably at the antics of a senior presidential aide whose conduct is so universally considered despicable that no one even flinches at ill-timed lines like: "Don't get the jitters/but MC Rove tears the head off of critters." That scene was the stuff of nightmares. 
I hope I can be forgiven if animal images kept coming into my mind during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week. On the eve of the first such hearing to be held by the newly-elected Democratic majority, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Committee Chairmen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) announcing that, henceforth, the President’s Terrorist Surveillance Program would be conducted under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Listening to Alberto Gonzales “answering” questions about this development during the hearing, the thoughts I kept having were of seals and snakes: Had the administration really flip-flopped on warrantless electronic surveillance — like, say, a seal — or was it merely attempting to slither away — like, say, a snake? 