posted 09-29-2003 09:43 AM            

Molly Ivins On 'Bushwhacked'

NEW YORK, Sept. 29, 2003
(CBS) While recent books by conservative pundits such as Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly have been crowding bookshelves, this fall, liberals are swinging back.

At the head of the pack is President Bush's most vocal doppelganger, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins. "Bushwhacked: Life In George W. Bush's America," co-written with Lou Dubose, is a critical look at the 43rd president and his policies.

Ivins and Dubose is the duo who also wrote the best-selling "Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush," another critical look at President Bush, in 2000 as governor of Texas.

“Bushwhacked,” Ivins tells The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler, is not meant so much as an attack on the president as it is meant to help people understand how their lives connect with decisions made in Washington.

Says Ivins, "Political reporters used to write stories that would begin. 'The government is fixing to do x and here is how it's going to affect you.' And, for some reason, we got so messed up and fascinated by polls and consultants and ad campaigns and all this that we had forgotten that 'Here is how it's going to affect you.'"

Ivins and Dubose went across the United States, looking at how the president's domestic policies affect the average American, or "Doug Jones," a term they often cite to illustrate how the "Dow Jones" rules policy makers opposed to the regular guy.

“Here is an example,” Ivins says, “There's a guy in Washington named Eugene Scalia. His daddy is on the U.S. Supreme court. He has been fighting ergonomic regulations and unions and the Department of Labor and people trying to prevent repetitive stress syndrome. He represents manufacturers. Well, Bush comes in and in a joke he appoints the guy the top job in the Department of Labor. They kill off these ergonomic regulations. That is of no great interest to anyone.

“We went to Mississippi and talked to a number of ladies who worked in a catfish factory down there. They have to skin, kill, 12 fish a minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. They don't all get it, but their hands look like they have rheumatoid arthritis. They have cysts on the back of their wrists.

"We're telling them about this man who killed off ergonomic regulations, which could have prevented this condition they get. We gone in there like good white liberals to play the violin for these victims and, of course, what happened is they, you know, they listened to the whole story and they said... 'You tell Mr. Scalia, I want his ass next to me on the line.' They were funny, feisty and fabulous. That's what it was like everywhere we went.”

Another example is a decision by the Bush administration not to allow emergency funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and several poor people died when they couldn't afford to pay their bills during a particularly brutal cold snap, Ivins points out.

Ivins adds, people who lost money in Enron blame Ken Lay rather than a whole series of government decisions that allowed it to happen.

Read an excerpt from Chapter One:

Aloha, Harken

In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character.

—George W. Bush on Wall Street, July 9, 2001

In the long run, we are all dead.

—John Maynard Keynes on the long run, 1924

There he was. On the Tuesday after a long Fourth of July weekend. In the ballroom of an ornate Wall Street hotel that once housed the New York Merchants Exchange. Standing in front of a blue-and-white backdrop with the words corporate responsibility printed over and over on it, in case you should miss the point. Promising us “a new ethic” for American business. Our president, Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior.

It was like watching a whore pretend to be dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of Theology. But as Luther said, hypocrisy has ample wages.

“Harken,” said the Bush camp over and over, “was nothing like Enron.” Interestingly enough, it was exactly like Enron in each and every feature of corporate misbehavior, except a lot smaller. A perfect miniature Enron.

By the summer of 2002, it had long been known that twelve years earlier Bush made a pile by selling his stock in Harken Energy Corporation just before it tanked. At the time, he was serving both on Harken’s board and on a special audit committee looking at the company’s financial health. As he spoke on Wall Street, stories were surfacing about Harken’s sham sale of a subsidiary to a group of company insiders. The acquisition was financed by an $11 million loan guaranteed by the seller, Harken Energy. In other words, a fake asset swap to punch up Harken’s annual profit-and-loss statement.

The “sale” of Aloha Petroleum, from Harken to Harken, was again Enron writ small and so outrageous that the SEC stepped in, declared the accounting unacceptable, and forced the company to restate its earnings. Bush unquestionably knew about the deal.

Even if he had convinced the public that earlier stories about his $848,560 insider trade, his failure to report it to the SEC, his low-interest loans from Harken to buy company stock (a practice he particularly denounced in his Wall Street speech, as though he had never heard of such an unseemly scam before), and the Enron-esque sale of Aloha Petroleum were all what he described as “recycled stuff,” he was still surrounded by bad stories about to break. Enron was ripe for federal prosecution; Bush and Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay, his single largest campaign contributor, had been tight for years. Halliburton was being investigated by the feds for fraudulent accounting practices put in place when Dick Cheney was CEO. Congress was investigating the secretary of the Army for his role in the collapse of Enron, in the fleecing of electricity customers in California, and for his failure to divest himself of Enron stock in a timely manner.

SEC chief Harvey Pitt had so many previous business connections with the firms he was now regulating, he had already had to recuse himself in twenty-nine cases being pursued by the SEC. Bush’s hard-nosed, hard-assed political adviser, Karl Rove, had owned $108,000 in Enron stock and, more important, knew the Enron CEO because he was Bush’s biggest funder. Two of Bush’s economic advisers had worked as consultants for Enron. And the newly disgraced Ken Lay had convinced Bush to dump the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Curtis Hebert, and to replace him with the candidate of Lay’s choice, a Port Arthur, Texas, homeboy. Before giving Bush the word to dump Hebert, Lay had a come-to-Jesus session with Hebert himself, telling him to embrace free markets and deregulation or, Lay said, things would end badly for Hebert. They did.

Considering the circumstances, heckfire and brimpebbles were the best GeeDubya could manage as he wagged his fingers at Wall Street’s corporate criminals. What could he say about Lay: “I never had sexual relations with that man”? What he actually said, as the cock crowed, was, “He was an Ann Richards supporter.” Kenny Boy, I hardly knew ye.

The stock markets responded to Bush in July as they had to bin Laden in September. Three days after Bush’s Sermon on Wall Street, the Dow Jones had lost 7.4 percent of its value and Standard & Poor’s 500 was down 6.8 percent. Three weeks after the speech, with more Harken stuff breaking, the market fell 390 points in one day. It took a corporate-responsibility bill—written entirely by Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes and vigorously opposed by Bush almost until the day it was passed unanimously by the House—to save the president and staunch the stock market’s hemorrhaging.

The Bushies naturally would have preferred to put all this “recycled stuff” behind them and return to their agenda—including shifting Social Security funds into the stock market. But before we leave the subject, consider some wisdom from Jerry Jeff Walker, the Texas singer-songwriter. Walker met the man who inspired his first hit, “Mr. Bojangles,” when they were both in jail in New Orleans. Years later, a reporter for National Public Radio asked Walker if he had worried about winding up in a drunk tank when he was in his early twenties. “No,” Walker said. “It was just one time. You start worryin’ when there’s a pattern.”

With GeeDubya Bush, M.B.A., there was a pattern. The pattern was: after he fouled up, a friend of Daddy’s always showed up to bail him out. Either because Bush managed to seduce the press corps in 2000 or because Al Gore failed to raise the issue, the press started to notice Bush’s business pattern only in the wake of the wrecks of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Adelphia, etc. As the economy contracted and stock values plummeted in mid-2002, reporters began to focus on Bush’s M.O.

Bush walked away from the Texas “awl bidness” in 1990 with almost a million in cash—after a career during which he lost more than $3 million of other people’s money. Here he was advocating “a new ethic” on Wall Street despite his own business dealings, which couldn’t even pass the “old ethic” test. The earlier dealings had been the subject of a pro forma investigation directed by the man President Bush the Elder appointed head of the SEC, and the investigation itself was conducted by a man who had worked as GeeDubya’s personal lawyer before joining the SEC. A few of GeeDubya’s deals, particularly a series of critical bailouts of his ever-sinking oil-field ventures, are truly astonishing—not just because of the volume of dollars flowing out of Northeastern banks and disappearing in Texas but because the transactions made little or no economic sense....

posted 09-29-2003 09:54 AM            

No wonder America has so many enemies

By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor, Toronto Sun, Sept 23, 2003

President Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican-controlled Congress for lying about sex. President George W. Bush and aides lied the United States into a stupid, unnecessary colonial war that has so far killed more than 305 Americans and seriously wounded more than 1,400. It has also cost many thousands of Iraqi dead, and $1 billion US weekly.

Lying about sex is an impeachable offence; lying the nation into war apparently is not.

I was no Clinton fan, but give me his iffy morals any day over Bush's Mussolini-like strutting. Sen. Edward Kennedy is absolutely correct when he calls Bush's Iraq war a "fraud" concocted to win the next elections.

A fraud and an epic blunder.

Last week, Bush received a glacial and scornful reception at the United Nations that symbolized the world's contempt and disgust for his administration. Not since Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the speaker's rostrum has a major leader so embarrassed himself and his nation before the world body.

In his UN speech, Bush again claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and "ties" to terrorism. Days later, U.S. intelligence teams that scoured Iraq for four months reported no traces of weapons or terrorism links - the pretext used by Bush and his neo-conservative handlers for unprovoked war against Saddam Hussein.

The White House was left choking on its own grotesque lies.

Incredibly, VP Dick Cheney, a prime architect of the Iraq war, actually claimed recently that Iraq still had mobile germ labs, though U.S. and British inspectors debunked this claim last June. The "special" intelligence network created by neo-conservatives is still apparently feeding disinformation to America's leadership.

This latest humiliation came only days after Bush finally admitted Iraq was not, as most Americans were misled into believing, behind the 9/11 attacks.

No wonder world leaders gave Bush the cold shoulder, and even usually timid UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned against "dangerous acts of unilateralism" - a pointed reference to the bellicose Bush administration.

Unfortunately, many Americans still do not understand how gravely the Bush White House has damaged and sullied their nation's once noble reputation.

Dangerous aggressor

Recent polls show that even among traditional friends abroad, America is no longer regarded as a champion of freedom, democracy and human rights, but increasingly as a dangerous aggressor bent on imperial domination and exploitation.

America's most precious and proudest asset, its moral reputation, has been gravely damaged by the Bush White House. The only positive note: rising anti-Americanism is largely associated in the eyes of non-Americans with the persona of George Bush, a man who projects almost all the negative stereotypes foreigners hold of Americans.

Bush's blinkered core supporters in middle America simply don't understand or don't care what the rest of the world thinks of their nation, which, since 9/11, has wrapped itself in a cocoon of xenophobia and self-righteous rage.

The White House's mouthpiece media, led by Fox News, have simply blanked out world opinion and endlessly chorused administration war propaganda.

A fascinating March study of network TV news by New York's Fairness and Accuracy in Media shows how Americans were misled into war by outrageously biased programming on Iraq.

The analysis found: a) 76% of all commentators about Iraq on TV were present or former government officials; b) only 6% of commentators expressed skepticism regarding the need for war - when 61% of the public supported more time for diplomacy and inspections; c) on the four TV networks, less than 1% of sources were identified with anti-war groups.

And more than two-thirds of commentators were from the U.S., 75% either present or former government or military officials. The small number of foreign commentators mostly came from nations like Britain and Israel which were backing Bush's war policy.

In short, the major networks, under White House prompting, beat the war drums and blatantly excluded commentators with contrary views, giving Americans a badly warped view of world events.

No wonder so few Americans understand what is going on abroad, how the outside world really sees them, or why America has so many enemies overseas. Small wonder many Americans are turning for balanced news to the CBC, BBC and the Internet.

Citizens of the old Soviet Union suffered the same information isolation. Like Americans since 9/11, they were force-fed agitprop and patriotic pap disguised as news, and deprived of all knowledge of the real world around them.

Back to reality. Bush's UN speech was another attempt to mislead Americans into believing the horrid mess in Iraq - entirely the creation of Bush and the neo-cons - is somehow the fault of the UN.

French President Jacques Chirac proposed the U.S. hand Iraq over to UN control. But Bush, still lusting for Iraqi oil and fearful his family foe, Saddam Hussein, would return to thumb his nose at him, foolishly scorned this wise proposal.

posted 09-29-2003 08:08 PM            

What a wonderful thing!

Carville and Begala are working on Dean's campaign and I wonder how they feel about Clark! Before Bill Maher's program on Friday nights on HBO, is an onrunning documentary featuring Carville and Begala with the side drama of Mary Matlin and her gang.

God, I pick up on your anger and disgust, swamp gas, mech, and know this! It's so inspiring. I know that sounds silly, but I'm on a board where most of the members don't even bother to post and one guy in Sweden, who knows nothing about our culture, our peace movement, and the power behind TRUTH and JUSTICE -- that he's constantly expressing anger at Americans instead of realizing that it's the assholes in the White House, not us! He thinks we can storm the White House and kick them out as easy as pie! And at the same time he thinks we have no freedom to protest! He's a two faced psy op! But, you guys, are refreshing! Seriously! ;-)

Here's a writer I've come to know and love. He wrote a book on Iraq with Scott Ritter and he writes for truthout. You've probably read him, but I must post his latest:
http://www.truthout.com

The Most Insidious of Traitors
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 30 September 2003

"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."
-- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1999
Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.

Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003 edition of Esquire magazine carried an article by Ron Suskind which quoted comments from John DiIulio, a domestic policy advisor to the White House who had just retired from his post. On October 24, DiIulio had sent a letter to Suskind describing what he had seen while working for the Bush administration. The meat of the letter described an administration far, far more interested in raw political triangulation and ruthless spin than in actual policy and government functionality. Some excerpts from DiIulio's letter:

"Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this administration on Karl Rove...some staff members, senior and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers. They self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and, in turn, few of the president's top people routinely tell the president what they really think if they think that Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval Office."
Even a casual political observer would have trouble missing the fact that this is one of the sharpest political outfits ever to reside in the Oval Office. Bush's team is a unified wall, cemented to their message-of-the-day, and they have done very well for themselves because of this. All of this can be laid at the feet of Karl Rove, the senior political advisor to George W. Bush. According to DiIulio, the preeminence of political considerations within this administration is so complete that any and all policy considerations or contemplation of actual issues are not so much in the back seat as they are in the trunk below the spare tire and the jack. This, again, can be laid at the feet of Mr. Rove.

All of Washington and the country has been buzzing for the last few days over a report that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate the White House regarding a matter of important national security. The wife of a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson, it has been alleged, was 'outed' as an active CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak by this White House in an act of political revenge.

Joseph Wilson was the man dispatched to Niger in February of 2002 by the CIA, after Vice President Dick Cheney asked CIA to figure out whether there was any substance to the charge that Iraq was attempting to procure uranium "yellow cake" from that nation for the purpose of starting a nuclear weapons program. Ambassador Wilson went, investigated, and returned eight days later to state flatly that the evidence was garbage. He has claimed since that his analysis was one of three intelligence reports debunking the Niger story. Ambassador Wilson told this to Cheney's office, the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council. Despite the fact that Wilson made it clear that these allegations were untrue - it was revealed that the 'evidence' to support the Niger uranium charge was a pile of crudely forged documents - George W. Bush used the Niger uranium evidence dramatically in his 2003 State of the Union address.

In July, Ambassador Wilson went very public, criticizing the White House for using evidence to support war that they knew was patently false. One week later, Robert Novak reported that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. As it turns out, two senior White House officials cold-called six different journalists and informed them of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent, according to an anonymous administration official quoted by the Washington Post. None of the journalists ran the story. That same administration official was quoted about these revelations as saying, "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge." Joseph Wilson likewise charges that this act was done as an act of revenge for his vocal criticism of George W. Bush and the administration's actions leading up to the Iraq war. Specifically, he views Karl Rove as being possibly involved in, or at least condoning, the cutting down of his wife.

The facts of this story are singularly grotesque. Taken at the top layer, you have a White House that appears perfectly willing to go after the family members of its critics. Valerie Plame's career is destroyed, period. The act itself displays a level of viciousness that is dangerous to the functioning of this, or any, democracy.

Peel the second layer and you discover the rank illegality of it all. Section 421 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 reads as follows:

"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."
The third layer is where the darkness truly lurks, and where the deadly importance of this situation lies. Valerie Plame was not simply an analyst or a data cruncher. She was an operative running a network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. That sentence deserves to be written twice. She was an operative running a network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

The Bush administration pushed very hard the idea that America is in danger from WMDs being placed into the hands of terrorists. This was one of the central arguments behind the war in Iraq. Yet in order to protect Bush's political standing, a couple of "administration officials" blew Valerie Plame, and by proxy her network, completely out of the water in an attempt to shut her husband up. In short, in order to protect Bush from the ramifications of using fake evidence to support his war, this White House destroyed an intelligence network that was protecting us from the threat posed by chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

We are less safe now that Valerie Plame is no longer performing this vital task, and the members of her network are in mortal danger of being revealed and destroyed. Beyond that, we are facing a level of hypocrisy that shatters any and all previously known boundaries. This administration ginned up a war in Iraq based upon manufactured evidence and wildly overstated threats, all of which was painted over with rhetoric about defending the country from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The fate of Valerie Plame, and her network, shows without doubt that the moral standing of this administration is as empty as Saddam Hussein's WMD cache.

In Ambassador Wilson's words, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."

The current spin from administration defenders within and without the mainstream media is that Valerie Plame was only an analyst, and not an operative. This, somehow, is supposed to lessen the blow of an administration willing to attack the families of its critics. Yet the characterization of Plame as an analyst is factually incorrect. For one, Robert Novak himself indicated that she was an operative in the original report that birthed this scandal. "Wilson never worked for the CIA," wrote Novak, "but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Ray McGovern, who was for 27-years a senior analyst for the CIA, further confirms the status of Plame within the CIA. "I know Joseph Wilson well enough to know," said McGovern in a telephone conversation we had today, "that his wife was in fact a deep cover operative running a network of informants on what is supposedly this administration's first-priority issue: Weapons of mass destruction."

McGovern further elaborated on the damage done when such an agent has their cover blown. "This causes a great deal of damage," said McGovern. "These kinds of networks take ten years to develop. The reason why they operate under deep cover is that the only people who have access to the kind of data we need cannot be associated in any way with the American intelligence community. Our operatives live a lie to maintain these networks, and do so out of patriotism. When they get blown, the operatives themselves are in physical danger. The people they recruit are also in physical danger, because foreign intelligence services can make the connections and find them. Operatives like Valerie Plame are real patriots."

Mr. Rove has done this kind of thing before, specifically using Robert Novak in that one notable attempt to cut down Mosbacher. Rove is a disciple of the undisputed heavyweight champion of political assassins, Lee Atwater, and has often reached into a deep bag of dirty tricks to accomplish his political ends. He knows no ideology beyond power, and has no bones about using it to wreak havoc on anyone who gets in his crosshairs. The Esquire article about DiIulio finds him recounting a singular Rove moment, as he overheard a conversation happening in another room: "Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. 'We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!'"

Guess who was doing the cursing and threatening.

One last bit of inside baseball. When the Niger scandal erupted, the Bush administration went out of its way to blame the CIA for the mess, despite the fact that the CIA, along with the entire intelligence community, had been cut out of the loop by Don Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans. The OSP, and its pet Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, became the source for all of the information regarding Iraq's weapons capabilities, and a number of intelligence insiders have publicly blamed that group for the preponderance of highly erroneous data about Iraq. For the Bush administration to completely usurp the CIA by depending solely on data manufactured by the Office of Special Plans, and then to turn around and blame CIA when the OSPs data did not turn out to be true, is as insane as it is laughable. Yet this is what they have done. The CIA's calling for this investigation is nothing more or less than the Agency defending itself, proving out the oft-repeated warning that one scapegoats the CIA at their mortal peril.

Also, the fact that this data came to the Washington post from a White House official means that another Deep Throat may have just been born.

The White House has denied the allegation, and promises a full investigation. A great many people find it laughable to believe this White House is capable of investigating itself, and are demanding an independent investigation. A quick look at the White House telephone logs will reveal who called whom, and when. It may well be the case that Rove was not involved; there are several administration officials - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Card - along with a constellation of administration associates and media mouthpieces, who had a vested interest in shutting Ambassador Wilson's mouth. The White House phone logs will be revelatory. If this administration fails to hand those logs over, they will stand in taint of high treason.

J'accuse.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New York Times and international best-selling author of three books - "War On Iraq," available from Context Books, "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available from Pluto Press, and "Our Flag, Too: The Paradox of Patriotism," available in August from Context Books.

-------

posted 09-29-2003 08:16 PM            

They are definately NOT an alternative to the NEO-CONS.

Just a variation on the same theme...

They love to bash the right and yet they support the SAME globalist NWO agenda.

posted 09-29-2003 08:56 PM            

Heres some books on the REAL Criminals.

Order out of Chaos
Paul Watson

Bloodlines of the Illuminai
Fritz Springermeyer

Project Lucid
Texe Mars

Circle of Intrigue
Texe Mars

9-11 Descent into Tyranny
Alex Jones

Behold a Pale Horse
William Cooper

posted 09-29-2003 09:24 PM            

It's just that the layers can work from top to bottom and also bottom to top. When the top stinks anyway, to high heaven, getting them out is top priority. If we could sweep away the system with its corporations in an instant -- I would be the biggest witch with the biggest broom. But the next best thing has to be attending to right now. Oh dear person, we're in a mess, but it's not all that bad. If we get even a Dem White House and at least one house of Dems, at least we can start to turn the behemoth around and go from there. But if we can't even do that ---

what do you suggest?

We are entrenched in this country with large business, we have stretched around the globe. As I said, the cat's out of bag and if we could just tame it, groom it, and keep it contained we'll do more for the world than a violent revolution could do.

I know what you think and I know you have no faith in the Dems and see them as globalist corporatist lackies, but please realize that all of the layers will affect all the other layers and change is better than no change at all.

Getting the oil- Nazi's out is primary now. The other stuff about space weaponry and HAARP and global domination can come later. We have to save the nation for now, rather than "go down" with the illuminati plan.

I will not accept that Dems, all Dems, are in the pocket of Satanists! Never! And as I said, light overcomes the dark and at the deepest level, this is a spiritual battle.

The top level of 3D, the realm of propaganda and controlling the people through the media is being broken! The lies and manipulations are seen! Now the action must be taken! Reading all this is only taking away from the activism we all need to do! I will never give the "dark side" power! You see? Never!

I can know they're there, but I can also do my best on all levels to promote the light and the good. You can believe what you want, Mech, and spend your time learning about this cabal and that Nazi, and the shadow elements, but the stink is reaching the treetops! This is a gift to the people! If we can't kick them out or impeach them (but who wants Cheney in the driver's seat when he really is but we just can't stand his face?) we'll have to massacre them at the polls.

I've expressed myself on this before and I hope you allow me the freedom to be where I am. I've come a long way and I respect you and give you the freedom to hold your views, too. You've obviously learned a lot as well.

I'm not a Pollyanna, but I am a positive thinker and I have access to knowledge about aliens and what's going on at the spiritual level. Beyond all this, we might have to deal with great earth upheavals, as you know. So I highly recommend that in order to stay calm and together for others and ourselves, we get connected to our core beliefs. For now, I'm liking the Dems as they're honest in their disrespect and outrage at the Bush administration, it's not hard to hate them, you know. It's no play, no game, no ruse!

How do you feel, Mech? And what are you doing personally to fight the "dark side?"

BC

posted 09-29-2003 09:35 PM            

Disclosure of THE SYSTEM to the sleeping masses at every opportunity.

But mostly..I'm just trying to SURVIVE.

Electing a Democrat will not fix this problem.

That's all I have to say.

The SYSTEM needs to be fixed.

I try to focus on "The vehicle"...not just the "waterpump".

posted 09-29-2003 10:45 PM            

If we don't make at least small changes we won't be able to change the system back at all and the steamroller might smash us all. I know.

Even a third party could have a chance in the election after this next one. But for now, our only hope is to derail this runaway train.

I know the system sucks, the laws that were enacted, the elite rich and the dwindling of the middle class -- I know. But it's up to us to change it all -- the whole system! You think the Bushites aren't worse than the Dems? Come on!

Surviving is good! We're thinking that way too! But we can do more than survive by participating in change.

posted 10-02-2003 12:57 PM            

Soros calls for 'regime change' in US


Soros's Foundations Network works throughout the world
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros has called for an end to the Bush administration ahead of next year's presidential elections.
Mr Soros - whose Foundations Network has given $1bn around the world to various causes to help tackle poverty and disease - told BBC Radio 4's United Nations Or Not? programme that the US would only stop pursuing "extremist" policies if there was a change at the White House.

"It is only possible if you have a regime change in the United States - in other words if President Bush is voted out of power.

"I am very hopeful that people will wake up and realise that they have been led down the garden path, that actually 11 September has been hijacked by a bunch of extremists to put into effect policies that they were advocating before such as the invasion of Iraq."

Imposing power

Mr Soros added that there was a "false ideology" behind the policies of the Bush administration.

The US is now discovering that it is extremely painful and certainly costly to go it alone

George Soros
"There is a group of - I would call them extremists - who have the following belief: that international relations are relations of power, not of law, that international law will always follow what power has achieved," he said.

"And therefore [they believe] the United States being the most powerful nation on earth should impose its power, impose its will and its interests on the world and it should do it looking after itself.

"I think this is a very dangerous ideology. It is very dangerous because America is in fact very powerful."

He added that he felt US actions in the build-up to the war on Iraq was evidence of an extremist element in the Bush administration.

"Probably President Chirac would not disagree with this philosophy but he is not so powerful - so I am not so worried about what France is doing," Mr Soros said, referring to France's opposition to the war.

"But America being really the dominant power to be in the grips of such an extremist ideology is very dangerous for the world and that is my major concern."

However, he added that he felt the rift between the US and the United Nations over the war - which President Bush referred to as a "difficult and defining moment" for the UN - had in fact strengthened the UN, rather than weakened it.

"I think that the United States has over-reached," he said.

"What happens to extremists is that they go to extremes and the falsehood in their ideology becomes apparent.

"In a democracy the electorate - which is not extremist - will punish them and they know it, so they have to retreat.

"I think there is a good chance that the US will yet turn to a greater extent to the United Nations because they are now discovering that it is extremely painful and certainly costly to go it alone so in the end the outcome may be to strengthen the United Nations."

State interests

Mr Soros was, however, critical of the UN for what it sees as its inability to function well as a collective of states.

Soros only once gave money to the UN - in Bosnia
"The United Nations is not an organisation that is terribly effective in promoting open society because it is an association of states... states always put their national interests ahead of the common interest.

"So it is not a very effective organisation for changing conditions inside states."

Mr Soros has a history of donating great sums of money to areas in need around the world - but only once has he done this through the UN.

"In Bosnia we gave it to UNHCR - but that was really quite the exception.

"We do interfere in the internal affairs of states, but based on supporting people inside the country who take a certain stance.

"We have actually been quite effective in bringing about democratisation, democratic regime change in Slovakia, Croatia and Yugoslavia, but that's by helping civil society in those countries to mobilise."

Positive response

Mr Soros is highly critical of much government bureaucracy, preferring to make his donations directly to those in need as much as possible.

In June this year he announced he would be drastically cutting back the money he gave to Russia.

And he said that money his fund was pledging to the fight against HIV/Aids would be "more effective" because it was going "only through a governmental organisation."

He conceded too that President Bush's policies on the HIV/Aids pandemic were positive.

"There is some response in America, in the Bush administration, to pressure from some of their constituencies - so there is the Millennium Challenge account, the contribution on fighting HIV/Aids," Mr Soros said.

"Those are positive aspects of the Bush administration. I am very supportive of the Millennium Challenge account - this is the new development aid that they are putting in - and I am very supportive and delighted that President Bush is willing to contribute to the global fund on Aids.

"So I am critical on some aspects of the Bush administration but not every aspect - and here I am actually very supportive."

posted 10-02-2003 03:24 PM            

Anatomy of a Lie -- Wolfowitz at the New School
exclusive to CLG --by Mary Titus, CLG contributing writer

I attended an event last week at the New School Univeristy in New York and listened as Paul Wolfowitz lied his way through the entire 'interview' with the New Yorker's golden boy, Jeff Goldberg.

When a question involved the hideous designs of the Dr. Strangeloveish Project for a New American Century Wolfowitz calmly lied. The PNAC's infamous "Rebuilding America's Defenses" paper is certainly authored by the diabolical Deputy Defense Secretary (see p. 90) along with others. His lame excuse was he may have a attended a meeting or two and he implied he really wasn't part of the project.

I beg to differ.

Wolfowitz isn't just a passive participant at PNAC. He's a founding father.

See:

The Project for the New American Century --by William Rivers Pitt

"Rebuilding America's Defenses" -- A Summary

Rebuilding America's Defenses (PDF) the entire white paper. He is credited on page 90. The goulish quote "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." is on page 63.

ABC News (hardly a "Ramparts" of the news biz) reports "The group, the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, was founded in 1997. Among its supporters were three Republican former officials who were sitting out the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz . "

Paul Wolfowitz is described as a "leading participant", a "high profile sympathiser", "founding member", "a leading member", an "early backer of the group", author of the draft that became the Bush (Jr.) Doctrine, "contributor", a supervisor, an "early PNAC member ", etc., etc., for the Project for a New American Century. He also is a signer of the statement of principals for PNAC.

That he didn't intimately know, or contribute to, the fiendish white paper is simply not credible.

The neo-cons take the American people for fools. The steadfast lying about his own professional life is easy to refute. How is it that this bold faced falsehood gets overlooked by the corporate press?

This shouldn't be an exclusive. This should be old news by now.

posted 10-03-2003 01:08 PM            

Audio link to interview with Grover Norquist. Listen and be afraid!

http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?display=day&todayDate=10/02/2003

posted 10-05-2003 12:49 PM            

New disquise.

They all want the same thing.

posted 10-15-2003 12:28 PM            

Michael Moore's latest book, "Dude, Where's My Country?", is the latest in a line of Bush-bashing books.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Bookstore display tables give the distinct impression there is a lot of lying going on in America these days, with President George W. Bush and his top advisers portrayed as the main culprits.

Bristling with indignation at the conservative Republican president and his policies, the books by liberal commentators include: "The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception" by David Corn, "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" by Joe Conason and "Bushwhacked" by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.

Michael Moore's new book, "Dude, Where's My Country?", is due Tuesday. The filmmaker and gadfly's last work, "Stupid White Men," was the bestselling nonfiction book of 2002.

And if readers can't figure out who is lying about whom and about what in these books, they can turn to "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" by acerbic political humorist Al Franken.

In various ways, these authors and others accuse Bush and his right-wing backers of telling big whoppers since winning the White House for the Republican Party almost three years ago by virtue of the razor-thin Florida vote.

Washington literary agent Jeff Kleinman, who said he receives one anti-Bush book "pitch" a week, said that in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, hijacked plane attacks on America, publishers tended to turn them down.

"Anything that was seen as anti-American was almost impossible to sell and I think the publishers' feelings were reflecting the marketplace, that people were not going to buy," Kleinman said.

But that has changed. Industry publications and best-seller lists show that some anti-Bush books are now selling well as the former Texas governor prepares to run for a second term in November 2004 and 10 Democrats vie for the challenger's mantle.

'Most presidents lie'

Controversy about a Fox lawsuit against Al Franken's book helped drive it to the top of the bestseller list.
Liberal writers have unsheathed their sharpest pencils to accuse Bush of lying about the effects of his tax cuts, the impact of his policies on the environment and the justification for his declared war on terrorism. They also contend he distorted intelligence about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction to wage war on Saddam Hussein.

"George W. Bush is a liar," Corn, Washington editor of the left-wing newsweekly The Nation, writes in his introduction. "He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. He has mugged the truth -- not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly."

Corn, whose weekly's October 13 cover depicts Bush's with a long Pinocchio nose, concedes in his book that "a liar in the White House is not a remarkable development. Most presidents lie, many brazenly and with impunity."

Books hammering Bush mirror best-seller lists of the 1990s that were crammed with books bashing President Bill Clinton, the Democrat who was impeached for perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

New York Times columnist David Brooks said the partisan books on Clinton and Bush marked a shift in America to the "presidency wars" from "culture wars" of preceding decades.

"To the warrior, politics is no longer a clash of value systems, each of which is in some way valid. It's not a competition between basically well-intentioned people who see the world differently," Brooks said in a September 30 column. "It's not even a conflict of interests. Instead, it's the Florida post-election fight over and over, a brutal struggle for office in which each side believes the other is behaving despicably."

'It is particularly contentious'
John Baker, editorial director of industry newspaper Publishers Weekly, said Franken's book and one by Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman were selling "extraordinarily well."

In "The Great Unraveling," Krugman said Bush lied during his 2000 presidential campaign, lied once he took office, turned a record budget surplus into the biggest deficit to line the pockets of the rich and abused the public's patriotism after the September 11 attacks.

It's the Florida post-election fight over and over, a brutal struggle for office in which each side believes the other is behaving despicably.
-- New York Times columnist David Brooks on the culture wars


"There is always a flurry of books leading up to the election time, but this time it is particularly contentious because the parties are further apart than they usually are," Baker said.

One Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked that "liberals are fighting back" against liberal-bashing from right-wing commentators on TV, radio, online and in print.

For some background on the media wars, book readers can also consider buying conservative commentator Ann Coulter's "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right" -- her take on liberal lies -- or liberal Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News."

In the latest slew of books to hit the market, Coulter is one target of liberal authors, but most reserve their strongest statements for Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

posted 10-15-2003 12:51 PM            

Fox News Sells Franken's Book

MidSeptember Issue 2003

By Andrea Wood

No one at Fox News Channel dares tell Bill O'Reilly he's wrong. What other conclusion can be reached after reading the laugh-out-loud lawsuit the cable channel filed against humorist Al Franken?

At O'Reilly's insistence, it's been widely reported -- and apparently
using personal insults dictated by the shout-over king to plead its case -- Fox News filed a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement and asking a federal judge to stop publication of Franken's new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

The legal leg Fox thankfully failed to stand on was the book's glossy cover. It features a subhead, "A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," as well as pictures of O'Reilly, Ann Coulter (who Franken slams as the diva of "political pornography aimed directly at her readers' basest instincts"), President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Lawyers argued that since the cable news channel trademarked the words "fair and balanced" and O'Reilly's picture is on the cover of Franken's book, people might confuse it with a book published by Fox News.

Yeah, right.

Fox News saved the big laughs, however, for the lawsuit's description of Franken, and here's where you hear O'Reilly shouting, just as he does on TV, as if he had the power to cut Franken off.

Franken was "either intoxicated or deranged" when he verbally attacked Fox News and O'Reilly at an event for the Washington press corps, the lawsuit claims. Franken is "neither a journalist nor a television news personality," the pleadings argued. "He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight."

You've got to be kidding, the judge ruled. Personal attacks to make your case? Trademarking a phrase? Not only does the legal language read like the taunts of an eighth-grade bully (we wish the judge had said), it undermines the First Amendment that news organizations hold near and dear (the judge actually said).

So now, thanks to Fox News' inability to tell O'Reilly to "shut up" (the talk show host's favorite phrase), publicity over the lawsuit has skyrocketed Franken's book to No. 1 on The New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller lists.

The book is very funny and very telling -- a must-read for news junkies but particularly for those who believe everything they hear (or read).

Regarding the veracity of O'Reilly, Franken handily reveals his false spin on claiming to have won prestigious journalism awards and registering to vote as an independent. Franken documents that not only did O'Reilly lie when he said he won two Peabody Awards (in broadcasting akin to publishing's Pulitzer Prize) when he hosted the tabloid show Inside Edition, he also is a registered Republican (the actual registration document is reprinted in Franken's book). Moreover, Franken reveals, O'Reilly continues to lie about being reared in a working- class neighborhood (actually he grew up in country club suburbia).

Some of the biggest jabs -- "punches and punchlines," writes the Washington Post media critic, Howard Kurtz -- are reserved for the Fox News program Hannity & Colmes.

This talk show, you might recall, sent Jim Traficant off to prison with a best-of Jimbo soundbite rendition to the tune of "You're Still the One" (and we're still having fun).

Colmes, the liberal half of the program, is always referred to by Franken in a smaller size type. "Colmes' rhetoric may not be fiery, but at least there's not much of it," he writes.

Using 14 Harvard students assigned to him during his stint as a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Franken documents eight big lies Hannity consistently tells and Colmes fails to correct.

Don't believe it's true? Read for yourself.

Want to read what other newspapers are writing about the Federal Communications Commission's bid to relax media ownership rules? Click here: www.iwantmedia.com