Osama, Saddam and the Ports

Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt : Message to Congress proposing the monopoly investigation, 1938

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BushWatch: C-in-C AWOL. Again
by emptypockets

Sat Feb 25, 2006 at 12:19:13 PM EST

"Make no mistake about it, we are at war."
--Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush

30 people were killed this morning, and 140 more people were killed since Wednesdday in the war in Iraq.
7 American troops were killed by two separate roadside bombs on Wednesday.
Iraqi political talks were "in ruins" as the Iraq defense minister warned of a never-ending civil war. There are about 150,000 U.S. troops under the command of President George W. Bush in that country today.
And where was their Commander-in-Chief?
AWOL.



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"It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion."- Aristotle in Politics, J. Sinclair translation, pg. 226, 1962


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{It Failed Long Before It Even Started}

February 24, 2006, 2:51 p.m.
It Didn’t Work
William F. Buckley

"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."


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"...it is a government by the corporations, for the corporations."--Rutherford B. Hayes 19th President of the USA

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Bill Moyers | Restoring the Public Trust

Bill Moyers speaks on the issue of money and politics: Watching these people work is a study of the inner circle at the top of American politics. It is a Dick Cheney world out there - a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests. It is time to fight again. It's not their government, it's your government.

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Number Of Iraqi civilians Slaughtered In America's War 100,000 +

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Slaughtered (Officially acknowledged) In Bush's War 2287

The War in Iraq Costs $240,888,746,378 See the cost in your community

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More documents prove that top defense officials approved of abuse at Guantanamo detention center
The American Civil Liberties Union has released documents that prove that top Department of Defense officials endorsed interrogation methods at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that the FBI described as both abusive and illegal.


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"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so." : Josh Billings - [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer

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Jason Leopold | Plame Whistleblowers Targeted by Administration
Two top Bush administration officials who played an active role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson nearly three years ago have been removed from their jobs. They were career State Department weapons experts, who disagreed with the White House's pre-war Iraq intelligence and have spoken to investigators during the past two years about the officials' role in the leak, according to a half-dozen State Department officials.


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"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -­ kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour ­- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.": General Douglas MacArthur - (1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander 1957

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Mark Engler | How Costly Is Too Costly?

Mark Engler writes: In the center of the CostOfWar.com home page, an upward-racing ticker, presented in a large, red font, keeps a steady tally of the money spent for the US war in Iraq. Every time I visit, it takes a moment to sort through the counter's decimal places and make sense of it. The hundreds of dollars fly by too quickly to track. The thousands change a little faster than once a second. As I write, the ticker reads $239,302,273,144.

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"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it: Milton Mayer - Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955


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Paul Krugman | Osama, Saddam and the Ports

Paul Krugman writes that Mr. Bush assures us that "people don't need to worry about security." But after all those declarations that we're engaged in a global war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts declared whenever the national political debate seemed to be shifting to questions of cronyism, corruption and incompetence, the administration can't suddenly change its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

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"A radical is one who speaks the truth." : Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. - Congressman, father of famous aviator - June 15, 1957

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The Crime of Opposing War
UK Law Lords yesterday completed a hearing in a case involving over 20 people charged with activities arising from non-violent civil disobedience at military sites designed to stop the rush to war in Iraq.