Bush IS an asshole. Lost someplace in here is the request for unlmitied access to Iraqi oil to pay for whatever. What is included is..."Congress appears ready to provide Bush at least $75 billion for the war effort early next month, but not before it adds additional funds to tighten U.S. defenses against terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, members from both parties are balking at Bush's request for great flexibility in determining when, where and how to spend most of the money in Iraq. The president wants Congress to relinquish its powers to dictate how federal money is spent by allowing his administration to dole out roughly $60 billion in military funds as it sees fit.l here

It seems completely stupid to find support of our actions by the exciled and dissidents: the Iraqis', the Irish, the Cubans, shit, the Amrericans in Canada: everyone on the outside welcomes the overthrow of the country they are exciled from. Duh.
That's a pretty stupid place to start from. Do the Kuwaitiest want Sadam out? Would Al Aqada want the US bombed? Its obvious you can get the answer you want by asking the right people.

From This American life archives
Act Two. What's the Truth Good For, Anyway? For many years, Israeli citizens learned a sanitized version of what happened during their War of Independence in 1948. They learned that 700,000 Arabs fled the country on their own accord. But in the late eighties, a group of Israeli historians gained access to most of the government documents from the war and started writing a truer, less flattering version of the story -- that in some cases, the Palestinians were forced out, or scared away, and then not allowed to return. Ira discusses the real history -- and its impact on the Israeli public -- with some of the men who uncovered it: Benny Morris, author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947 -1949, and Tom Segev, who wrote 1949, The First Israelis. He also talks to BZ Goldberg, one of the filmmakers behind the Emmy-winning documentary about Israeli and Palestinian kids, called Promises. (20 minutes)

a Canadian mea culpa
We imagine that the world sees us much as we like to see ourselves: polite, culturally sensitive and non-aggressive. But in the world of mining, a world we dominate abroad, we are fast becoming global villains.
Where, o country of mine, is ours?

A couple of things surprise me:
1) The prosecution of the war very carefully applies the stick: accident, or planned? I would support this careful application.
2) Frontline reprise of all the Iraq front line programs over the years: toppling Iraq is the right thing to do. I don't know it one could possibly find the perfect set of reasons.
3) Trust just might be everything. If you trust Bush, all is OK. Saddam fought Iran, Saddam held a disparate set of peoples together: good things maybe. And by the way, he runs a dictatorship. And also by the way, so do lots of other countries
4) Then you get to the whole relativity thing: relatively speaking, we do pretty good. I think. Relative to whom? hmmmm.

"Polls show that the public is terribly confused about what's going on, so much so that some 40 percent believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks."
here
Well, duh! and 71% support the war. So, at least 40% are totally full of shit. And they are directly responsible for killing people.
Can you imagine, watching your life and family destroyed because free people just didn't have the time or interest to be informed? How easy it would be to become a terrorist. What a blessed relief to die and be transported from this hell.

What is wrong with the media is perfectly summed up in the Washington Post Ariticle Washington Lists 30 countries supporting war:
the media is a news feed from the government. The publish whatever shit is handed to them. There is NO analysis of what other countries do NOT support the war, just a for instance. Ah, it just sucks. Top of the fold, on the left, and this is called news.

McDonalds is sold without a warning. The absense of a warning plus the strong presense of coercive advertising and offerings will bring McDonalds down, sooner than later. Already, there is an admission that the food is no good for you, and should NOT be part of a regular diet GMB
link here
"If consumers know ... the potential ill-health effect of eating at McDonald's, they cannot blame McDonald's if they, nonetheless, choose to satiate their appetite with a surfeit of supersized McDonald's products."
"If plaintiffs were able to flesh out this argument in an amended complaint, it may establish that the dangers of McDonald's products were not commonly well known and thus that McDonald's had a duty towards its customers," Sweet wrote.
"Every responsible person understands what is in products such as hamburgers and fries, as well as the consequence to one's waistline, and potentially to one's health, of excessively eating those foods over a prolonged period of time," said the food chain's lawyers.

Bullshit
Iraqi Oil Money Plan Set for Relief Use
36 minutes ago
By DAFNA LINZER, Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS - The United States and Britain are drafting a plan to use Iraqi oil proceeds from a $40 billion account to pay for humanitarian relief supplies during a war, The Associated Press has learned.
Here comes the lies and the theft.
its about the oil, stupid!

wolfowitz,perle,fleisher,kristol,kissenger,greenspan: these are not names you are happy to see if you don't like us-israel policy. (not a lot of muhammeds on the staff)
Now I start to see another problem: who will discuss this series of names?

Machu Pichu, another posh palace
A curious dilemma: we want equality and democracy but we are unerringly attracted to what is accomplished by enslaving men to ones own creations. How many great things are created that are NOT based on misery and exploitation?
There are some. Many of them are within our own country. And some of the bad ones are too.

dowd's column
"The hawks of Bush II are not afraid of disorder in the pursuit of American dominance. They have no interest in any coalition � except their own. They see the international "we" as an impediment to joy � and to destiny. The Bush doctrine is animated by "the big I." That self-regarding doctrine, concocted by Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle back when W. was still merely a presidential gleam in Karl Rove's eye, preaches preventive pre-emptive preternatural pre-eminence."
GMB:a reasonable person might find the Jews a bit overrepresented in this war. And we didn't count Kissenger yet. This would look very very bad if you were not a friend of Israel. Like, if you opposed settlements.

"But Mr. Rumsfeld, backed by his senior military advisers, decided that bombing an Arab nation from a vector over the Jewish state was politically tone deaf, and risked further alienating large segments of the Islamic world."
The strange state of Jews and Israel
Tell me again that peace in Israel wouldn't have solved the wholel fucking problem?
Oh sorry, that and ending this oil nonsense.

Homer Simpson lives! His name is George Bush. Homer Simpson is our president.
The opposition to the invasion of Iraq cannot be based solely or so extensively on the risks, which are unpreeictable. It is precisely this kind of scenario that the president has used, in its opposite form, to support his invasion:"what if" and then follows a litany of the silly and improbable.( it is not a war, since that means two countries engaged, and not merely one invaded, and there is a presumption of some equality: thus, we could never have gone to war against Grenada). No, we are reduced to a nation of quivering Hamlets while people die for want of our actions.
A case could be made for the rapid invasion and removal a nation badly ruled and opressed and therefore the UN should intervene.
As to the forces of the US? they are overgrown and on steroids, but that is not our fault alone: others have been happy to let the US shoulder the burden. But others are out of play quite at the request of the United States:
We have not gotten here all of a surprise, but a long road has lead us here and for many, this is the anticipated and desired outcome.
There were other things this planet could have done with this money, this time. But what has been most clearly shown is that man is NOT a creature of the 21st century, remains socially inept and backwards.

Bush calls for unconditional surrender
He says Saddam has to flee. No one would has asked Bush if the opposition to the war has in anyway compromised his expectation of success.
The newspapers are thoroughly useless.

Doublespeak
1441 calls for serious consequences if Saddam did not disarm.
What Bush wanted to say, but did not have the balls to say was that
1) serious consequences meant overwhelming invasion and overthrow of the government
2) there was no way that Iraq could disarm to satify the sick wet dreams of Bush

Goodbye, dear Rachel.
Rachel Corrie, 23, of Olympia, Wash., was declared dead of skull and chest fractures at al-Najah Hospital in Rafah.
The official comment of the great and moral state of Israel, the god given home of the chosen people can be summed up as "oops".
That was a state sanctioned murder. It was done by Jews.

American Christians in Action
The relationship between "Christian" and "christian" is tenuous at best.

Bush the uniter
Bush is a poor example of what a man should be.

The demented Mr. Bush
And a country of fools to support him.

We know for a fact that Mr Bush does not give a fuck for anyone but himself...
That he should object to crimes of Saddam but not for crimes the US or Turkey or any number of American allies commit is purely disgusting
here

Show your support for Helen by e-mailing her at Helen Thomas
I'm sure you know that Helen Thomas (helent@hearstdc.com) is the most senior White House
journalist. She may go back to Harry Truman.
In honor of her seniority, she has always been given a front row seat at presidential press conferences and she exercises her seniority by starting and ending ("Thank you. Mr. President") the conferences. Recently Helen Thomas stated that of all yhe presidents she's known, G. W. Bush is the worst. Now she's being punished.
Come the so-called presidential press conference of a couple of days ago, Helen Thomas was assigned a third row seat and, essentially, was told to keep her mouth shut. Journalists sat in assigned seats and Dubya had a seating chart on his lectern and called on journalists of his liking, all carefully crafted, managed, and directed by Karl Rove.
Usually, in press conferences, one hears journalists yelling out: "Mr.President, Mr. President" in an attempt to get the attention of thepresident and, hopefully get called on to ask a question. There was none of that. Dubya was like a headmaster calling on his (now) well-behavedjournalists. One wouldn't want to take the chance that somebody like
Helen Thomas would ask an embarrassing question, now would one?
So Dubya once again proves what a spoiled, vindictive brat he is. If he doesn't get his way . . . or if somebody DARES to criticize him, he punishes them. The 1st amendment be damned.
"Folks, show your support for Helen by e-mailing her at helent@hearstdc.com."
Let's send her tons of e-mail support letters.

Jews for Jesus
or Jews for Israel
or Jews with too much money.
And you imagine Republican Jews? That's disgusting.
The Jewish vote is in play. And the Jews are jumping right onto the back of the Tiger.
What goes around comes around.
Judaism is a religion. Israel is a country. Sharon is a murderer. So is Bush.

.
Us "intelligence" uncovers Iraq secret weapon
...revealing a makeshift contraption with wooden propellers, duct-taped wings and a dinged-up fuselage

A mission of rescue demands sacrifice, personal risk. Whatever forces may be applied, the risk must be shared. We will find the military miles away on ships, thousands of feet in the air, sending missles and bombs from a safe distance, with an unseemly emphasis on self protection. This has a direct bearing on the collateral damage, which is the death and destruction of the peoples who are supposed to be being limited.
We have seen NO battle plan that is directed to saving people, only a battle plan to topple an unpopular dictator. We see no sacrifice from the people of the US, only a bitter cheer for destruction with liberation as a cover. "We are from the United States and we are here to help you" becomes a very chilling message.

What the world WOULD support is the UN occupation and liberation of Palestine. Not from Israel, which is surely not their friend and hardly in a position to be so, but from the radical and deadly groups within that control the Palestinians.
Can you imagine: UN troops protecting the Palestinians, policing the country, shepherding them into the democracy the people really really want. There could be a settle democracy in Palestine within a year, and from there, there could be no opposition on any grounds to a Palestinian state and peace in Palestine, peace in Israel.
In the absence of order, the lands belong to violent on all sides.

All the news that's fit to print
Big ad in the NY Times for fa22 raptors today. Got milk? Got nuclear delivery capability?

to glenn reynolds, instapundit.com
You are supporting a religious fanatic. At some point
you will admit to that. Then you will attempt to
dismiss the leader but claim the cause was true. You
will do most anything short of accepting how very
primitive you are.
But it isn't "you" per se. If that were the problem,
hell, you could just kill yourself. The problem is
you must extrapolate from that and find mankind no
more than apes with tools, and murderous at that.
(with apologies to the apes)
yours truly,
Gerald Berke

Time to clean the temple
This morning, I think I understand why the despair: at the dawn of the 21st century, mankind is not ready. It has not progressed, not really: the religious superstitious zealots are still among us and can still rule. Moreover, there is a vast reservoir of primitive peoples who are ready to parrot and follow and kill for God.
Christianity is a frightening thing. Jesus had best clean his own temple: it is filthy.

Would you believe it??? Bush has committed the United States of America to a holy war.
I guess there never is going to anything more dangerous than organized religion. Its the worlds best ever killing machine. With the ethics of a corporate CEO and the weapons of a country who's number one produce is weapons, Christianity will once again vie for the most murderous of all religions. Mere governments and tyrants aren't even in the running.

Would SOMEBODY please get it %%$#$%%! straight?
Liquid anthrax is NOT a weapon, powdered anthrax is HARD to manufacture and expensive and big (we and the Russians are the ONLY ONES who have done it)
US Army Admits To Making
Powdered Anthrax Strain
"Anthrax spores are easy enough to obtain. But before spores can be made into a mass inhalation threat, they need to be converted to a powdered form." Liquified anthrax would fall to the ground and be ineffective. Iraq is accused of having liquid anthrax. Nothing quite so good as this except Monty Python: how to defend yourself if being attacked by a person with a banana... quite on point, the instructor shoots the person, the student: "He was attacking me with a banana!"
"In contrast to producing spores, "powderizing" anthrax is no trivial task.
Even assuming would-be terrorists had the technical know-how for producing mass quantities of powdered anthrax�without killing production workers and surrounding populations�the necessary facilities and development would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Purchasing a few unemployed, ex-Soviet bio-weapons experts is not enough."

Injudicious.
That characterizes Bush and come to think of it, that is pretty much how stocked trout behaved in the wild: unused to having to gather food in the wild, they overexpended their energy in gathering food, and died. In the process, they took in too much food from the more cautious natural trout: many of them died too. Bush the hand fed president.
So, he has tossed tax money around that he never earned, deployed a massive overkill army that has sucked the oxygen out of the military, and put the nation on an anti terror alert that has frightened the citizenry and will sure kill the airlines, not that they haven't positioned their heads on the block quite willingly.
Talk about giving the terrorists exactly what they wanted.

God damn the dems: others may mislead, but they have walked off the field
"But where are the Democrats? As the Republicans were coming back from the wilderness - lean, mean and hungry - Democrats were busy assimilating their opponents' belief system. In no small part because they coveted the same corporate money, Democrats practically walked away from the politics of struggle, leaving millions of working people with no one to fight for them. We see the consequences all around us in what a friend of mine calls "a suffocating consensus". Even as poverty spreads, inequality grows, and our quality of life diminishes, democrats have become the doves of class warfare."

Bill Moyers asked Mr Hedges: If the NY Times asked you to cover the war, would you! No, he said. I'm finished. You didn't doubt that. It all came out in just those words.
In his book, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, Chris Hedges reflects on what he calls "the myth of war" � the idea of heroism, patriotism and glory in battle that doesn't necessarily match the reality of combat. He writes, "In mythic war we fight absolutes. We must vanquish darkness. It is imperative and inevitable for civilization, for the free world, that good triumph, just as Islamic militants see us as infidels whose existence corrupts the pure Islamic society they hope to build."

I listened to Bush last night. I listened to his words. I listened to the questions. I listened to the answers.
I don't like Bush, so I made an real effort to shut that down, to listen, to be prepared to learn, to accept.
I did NOT hear a coherent policy.
I did hear a real plea for support.
I heard a string of disconnected nonsequiters, with no logical link from one phrase to the next, blatant and crude avoidance of key questions, a disability to even provide answers when there WERE answers that could have been given AND kept the party line.
Some of the statements were simply ludicrous on their face. This is a man who truly knows what he wants to do, but truly does not know why, not with clear logically framed reasons that are utterly demanded of leaders in the post enlightenment arena. Mr. Bush is not the rennasaince man: this is medieval man.
Mr. Bush is a fool. He will get us killed. Unfortunately, deaths will not be confined to his strongest supporters.

Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, 1998
We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power.

Some of the people who signed the letter...
Bush was an emtpy slate, ready to be written on. He may not be empty just now, but he remains a slate.

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

Canada apologizes
Its about time!

not far from the tree
No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
George H.W. Bush (1987), daddy of G.W. Bush.

The mongol hoards are alive, well, and invading Iraq.
On second thought, no: its more like living with a bunch of body snatchers.
God, Satan and the media
"President Bush has said that he doesn�t believe in evolution (he thinks the jury is still out). President Ronald Reagan felt the same way, and such views are typically American."

The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan.
nytimes.com/2003/02/27
Heroes are undertandably rare.

I see in todays NY times letters that Mr. Bush does NOT accept the theories of evolution, but belives in the biblical divine creation. I see further that Mr. Bush Sr. would not confer citizenship to atheists, as this is one nation "under god". This is quite well aligned with Mr. Fallwells prononcement that "god does not hear the prayers of Jews".
When I was in high school, we wondered that the official line of Russia was Larmarkian theory.

"Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest woman whom you have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to her. Will she gain anything by it? Will it restore her to a control over her own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to help for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away."
�Gandhi.
I do not know that this at all slams the door against invasion into Iraq. Indeed, it could have supported it. But if were worthy, but could not be accomplished through rational leadership, what then? Jefferson would say only the the citizens need to be better informed.
I do know that Mr. Bush has done anything but be civil, consistent, and forthright to any citizen of any democracy anywhere. Those who support and believe Mr. Bush can only do so from shadows they have seen on the cave wall. Not long ago there was an axis of evil up there.

Shake, Rattle, but Roll???
Shake up the players, rattle the bad guys, when you roll in the military, all the earlier stuff just becomes demonstration of prior intent to bad acts. The invasion of Iraq makes even less sense. 6 carrier groups? Six??
The apprehension of the bad guys in Pakistant shows a couple of things, maybe:
1) military activities did NOT stop the pursuit of the terrorists: the big guys got nailed, and while it took a year and a half, its timliness cannot be assailed: no similar event has occurred. On the other hand, played out a year earlier and Iraq have no attractiveness, no excuse.
2) maybe all that really needs to be done is to cut the heads off? Thats how you "invade their country" when it appears that they are stateless.
3) Iraq was and is irrelevant. It has nothing at all to do with terrorism.
4) Invasion is a good demo on one hand, a very bad one on the other. A lot of hate, lies, and red tape has been spewed by Bush AND the American people on this one.

I see that the anti Saddam stuff continues on its own momentum. The rationale and urgency changes, Saddams actions change, opposition grows, and nothing changes. Some might call this leadership. I see a lot of mindless following. Meantime, wpm is a great strategy for leaving war in the hands of the money class, with weapons on the cheap not being allowed.
I'm surprise they haven't gotten on Saddam for violating the land mine treaty, the kyoto accords, the nuclear non proliferation treaty. We forget that the 1990 argument was over Kuwait stealing Iraq oil and that we clearly gave them the go ahead on the invasion. We forget that we supported Iraq while it was gassing the Kurds. We forget that we abandoned the uprising against Saddam and got what, 50K people killed? That pull out dwarfed the bay of pigs change, and didn't even have the moral rectitude of Kennedy's reason: there the military had pushed and the cilivian authority reversed. Here the cilivian authority pushed and reversed, nary a word from the military. They had to be professionally embarassed.

America one, Mexico 0
nytimes
According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis, American corn sells in Mexico for 25 percent less than its cost. The prices Mr. Hern�ndez and others receive are so low that they lose money with each acre they plant.

Mr. Friedman and the un president
Friedman has at least twice (that I've seen) has started with George Bush, and then sort of replaces Bush will all the things Bush should have done, and by then: there IS no Bush! He could have done better putting his requests onto a lump of hot wax.
START Friedman:
What do I mean? I mean that if taking out Saddam and rebuilding Iraq had been my goal from the minute I took office (as it was for the Bush team), I would not have angered all of Europe by trashing the Kyoto global warming treaty without offering an alternative. I would not have alienated the entire Russian national security elite by telling the Russians that we were ripping up the ABM treaty and that they would just have to get used to it. (You're now seeing their revenge.) I would not have proposed one radical tax cut on top of another on the eve of a huge, costly nation-building marathon abroad.
I would, though, have rallied the nation for real energy conservation and initiated a Manhattan Project for alternative energies so I would not find myself with $2.25-per-gallon gasoline on the eve of this war � because OPEC capacity is nearly tapped out. I would have told the Palestinians that until they stop suicide bombing and get a more serious leadership, we're not dealing with them, but I would also have told the Israelis that every new or expanded settlement they built would cost them $100 million in U.S. aid. And I would have told the Arabs: "While we'll deal with the Iraqi threat, we have no imperial designs on your countries. We are not on a crusade � but we will not sit idle if you tolerate extremists in your midst who imperil our democracy."

Most brutal dictators... everyone has Saddam on the list. I wonder who else is on the list, and how you get to make the list in the first place. Seems when and what and how many and to whom? Or is it a popularity contest.
Mostly, I think its like lots of places in the world that we don't know exist until we read about it in the paper: if its not in the paper, it doesn't exist.
It helps that the president repeats the Saddam line. It helps that the press and speakers repeat the line without question. It helps that there simply is no list, no second, third, forth place candidates for dictators. That seems, well, rather dictatorial.

The unpuncitilious pundit
Some exchanges with glenn reynolds, the pundit of instapundit.com, show to me what is a darker side of the man.
Reynold has a unique and creative style that depends of brief comments that serve to frame the content of an included link t writings, issues or examples published on the web. He is able to embrace many topics, many points of view, In my earliest encounters with this blog of blogs (instapundit's accessibility contributed, I think, to the popularity), I found the writing well balanced, but not bent on balance per se.
But a recent link and then an exchange following a barage of posts in contempt of anything and anyone who might oppose the Iraq invasion juggernaut has rendered the site uninteresting, given more to cleverness and pizazz without careful regard to truth.
In one noteable post, Gleen linked as truth to a totally bogus posted letter from a Naval officer to the president informing him of the success of deploying operatives as human shields in Iraq with the intent, and the letter notes, success, of pinpointing those most valuable Iraqi targets. Glenn concludes that this is a traitorous leak endangering the operatives, and fails to see that the note is bogus and really intends to discredit and endanger those who would put their lives where there mouths are. Glenn is first pawn, then willing pawn, then simply a purveyor of what he knows to be false:
when informed of the error, Glenn is evasive.
Glenn also dismissed people who would find living in Iraq under Saddam Hussein worse than any invasion scenario, not to mention the post invasion scenario as people of "no consequence morally speaking." Those are not strongly held differences expressed against a view, they are a contemptable dismissal of any persons along with their view.
Email exchange follows:
As far as that human shield thing: you didn't really believe that
was real, did you???
Geeeez.
Uh, no. I didn't think it was real.

If you think your country is doing something terribly wrong, you
want your country to lose. If you're really into the evil thing, then
you want it to fail, even if its your evil.
You fear it might get worse.
And if they think that a U.S. invasion of Iraq is more evil than the
dictatorship that's there, then they are people of no consequence,
morally speaking.

Oh, and cameraman number 2: the great defender of the Jews? The
implications of that are profound.
(Glenn had linked to a noisey outburst of a an angry threatening cameraman who, angered by an anti-invasion presentation, linked the invasion to a righteous protection of gods Jewish people... not something the south is famous for, where Jews, niggers and Catholics were and often still are unwelcome... Glenn was cheered by the outburst.)