Lying Does Matter

Keep Investigating Fitz
Robert Dreyfuss
October 28, 2005

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.

Back in the 20th century, when born-again prosecutor Ken Starr was industriously probing into every nook and cranny of the Clinton administration, it was a very, very big deal to the Republicans that President Clinton committed perjury in his testimony about—well, you know what it was about. Now, of course, we are about to be treated to a chorus of Republicans saying that it really isn’t a big deal at all that Karl Rove, the Scooter and who-knows-who-else in the Bush administration might have lied under oath about the outing of Valerie Wilson.

The irony of that aside, there is an important lesson here. Starr, one recalls, was originally given what seemed to be a very limited mandate to investigate an obscure real estate deal in Arkansas that took place many years before. But Starr, spreading tentacles everywhere, eventually dug into every manner of (unrelated) non-scandal he could find: Travelgate, Filegate, Vince Foster-gate, etc. Eventually, Linda Tripp trundled into his office to tell on Monica. At that point, Starr could have said: “Umm, no. That has nothing to do with Whitewater. Go tell someone else.” But he didn’t. Denying the affair with Monica as the cock crowed thrice, Clinton was nabbed, impeached by the House and his presidency was ruined.

What’s the relevance of this history lesson for 2005? The intrepid Mr. Fitzgerald, who apparently has discovered high crimes (or at least low crimes) in the White House in the Wilson affair, can nail Rove and Scooter, it seems, if he chooses to.

But like Starr, Fitzgerald can choose much more. He can choose to investigate the entire spider’s web of scandals that all overlap in what we ought to start calling Iraqgate.

He can investigate not only the outing of Wilson, but its root cause: the mythmaking about Iraq’s nonexistent nuclear program. And he doesn’t have to stop with the Niger uranium angle, a thread much easier to follow now that La Repubblica has uncorked a lot on the Italian end of that one. He can also investigate the parallel myths of the aluminum tubes, looking at who in the administration’s Office of Special Plans, the Iraqi National Congress, the American Enterprise Institute (see: Michael Ledeen) and other neocon-sponsored entities might have forged documents, passed on false reports and spread alarming bits of nonsense—intentionally—that helped Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Condi Rice issue exaggerated warnings to Americans about Iraqi mushroom clouds.

He can investigate the creation of the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, the forerunner of the Office of Special Plans, and its first two staffers, David Wurmser and Mike Maloof. They, both friends of Richard Perle’s, spun tall tales that helped Bush, Cheney and the propaganda-minded White House Iraq Group link Saddam Hussein (falsely) to Al Qaeda.

He can investigate the burgeoning Larry Franklin scandal involving the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In fact, how can he investigate Rove, Libby and Co. without overlapping their nefarious activities with the Office of Special Plans and the trips to Italy and other places in Western Europe by Ledeen and the OSP’s Franklin and Harold Rhode? The Ledeen who apparently turns up in the Niger hoax is the selfsame Ledeen who bundled Franklin and Rhode off to Europe to meet the lying Manucher Ghorbanifar. It sure looks like the same scandal to me.

He can investigate Mr. Bad Penny himself, Ahmed Chalabi and his ties to the neocon doomsayers. What was Chalabi’s role (while on the U.S. payroll, through the Pentagon-funded INC) in providing fake intelligence so readily gobbled up by Judy Miller, George Slam-Dunk Tenet, and the OSP? What is Chalabi’s relationship to the evildoers in Iran, to whom he reportedly blabbed out top-secret U.S. information in 2004? Who in the Pentagon decided, without telling the CIA or the State Department, to fly Chalabi’s own private militia into southern Iraq while the invasion was still pushing its way north to Baghdad? And what sort of business relationships does Chalabi have with the neocons?

He can investigate the creation of the OSP itself, starting with Douglas Feith, Bill Luti and Abram Shulsky, its titular director. Were crimes committed when Pentagon insiders, outside consultants, and assorted other hangers-on created an entire, parallel intelligence-evaluation group whose mission was to cherry-pick intelligence out of the system and funnel it up to senior U.S. officials through talking points that were based on lies? Surely Fitzgerald can drag those guys before a grand jury and see what they will say about their work—including, of course, efforts to intimidate or discredit people who disagreed with their now provably false conclusions.

He can investigate the rest of Cheney’s machine inside the government—from people like John Hannah and John Bolton to the ever-sly Jennifer Millerwise, who was Cheney’s spokesman in 2003 and who has now slipped over to the CIA to serve as no-commenter-in-chief at that demoralized, Porter Goss-led agency.

Of course, it’s possible that Fitzgerald will issue his indictments, halt any future inquiries and content himself with prosecuting Rove or Libby or a few others ensnared in the Wilson affair. Let’s hope not. At the very least, a special prosecutor snooping around the White House for the next three years will give White House counsel Harriet Miers something to do, now that she won’t have to bother with learning all that constitutional law she’d need on the Supreme Court.

TomPaine.com

Merry Fitzmas?

I hope so.

I hope so.

Will the Bush Administration Implode?

By Tom Engelhardt

Tomdispatch.com

Wednesday 26 October 2005

Bush's October surprise.

Those in the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War were later termed "premature antifascists." Perhaps, in the same spirit, I might be considered a premature Bush-administration implodist.

On February 1, 2004, reviewing the week just passed, I imagined us trapped in "some new reality show in which we were all to be locked in with an odd group of [administration] jokesters," and then wrote:

When we finally emerge will there be a prize for the survivors? Will we discover, for instance, that our President and his administration have headed down a path of slow-motion implosion...?

On February 18, 2004, my optimism briefly surging, I imagined the future as a movie trailer (inviting readers back for the main attraction that spring or summer) and offered this synopsis of the future film - the wild fowl references being to Dick Cheney's hunting habits, then in the news - with:

A wall-to-wall cast of characters. Far too many to absorb in a split second including our President, Vice President, CIA officials, a supreme court justice, spooks and unnamed sources galore, FBI agents, prosecutors, military men, congressional representatives and their committees, grand juries, fuming columnists, an ex-ambassador, journalists and bloggers, sundry politicians, rafts of neocons..., oil tycoons, and of course assorted wild fowl (this being the Bush administration). If the director were Oliver Stone, it might immediately be titled: The Bush Follies... And the first scene would open - like that old Jean Luc Goddard movie Weekend - with a giant traffic jam. It would be epic. All of political Washington in potential scandal gridlock. And (as with Weekend) horns would be blaring, drivers and passengers arguing. It would be obvious that the norms of civilization were falling fast and people were threatening to cannibalize each other.

Sounds a bit like Washington awaiting the Fitzgerald indictments this week, doesn't it? For good measure, I added, "The Bush administration has been in trouble ever since its arrogance met its incompetence at Intelligence Pass last summer; ever since Plame Gate began..."

On January 17, 2005 (hedging my time spans a bit more carefully), I wrote:

The Bush administration has insisted with remarkable success that a vision of the world concocted more or less out of whole cloth inside a bubble of a world is the world itself. It seems, right now, that we're in a race between Bush's fiction-based reality becoming our reality... and an administration implosion in the months or years ahead as certain dangerous facts in Iraq and elsewhere insist on being attended to.

Finally, this July, when matters were more visibly underway, I returned to the subject,

While there is officially no means for the Bush administration to implode (impeachment not being a political possibility), nonetheless, implosion is certainly possible. If and when the unraveling begins, the proximate cause, whether the Plame affair or something else entirely, is likely to surprise us all but none more than the members of the mainstream media.

Shadow Governments and Armed Imperial Isolationists

Now, here we are. So call me prescient or, less charitably, chalk it up to the fact that, if you say anything over and over, sooner or later it may come true. Already we have the first front-page tabloid report - in the New York Daily News - on a President (whose reigning adjectives not so long ago were "resolute" and "steady") beginning to unravel. Under the headline, Bushies Feeling the Boss's Wrath, Thomas DeFrank, that paper's Washington Bureau Chief, wrote, "Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say... 'This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help,' said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. 'This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight.'... Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the 'blame game.'" Frankly, the description already has a touch of Richard Nixon (as his presidency delaminated after Watergate finally hit).

If you want to understand the present moment, however, it's important to grasp one major difference between the Nixon years and today. In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon had to compete, elbows flying, for face and space time in what we now call the mainstream media. There wasn't any other game in town. (For instance, I suspect that if the secret history of the first op-ed page, which made its appearance in the New York Times in 1970, was ever written, its purpose would turn out to have been to give the hard-charging Nixon administration a space in the liberal paper of record where Vice President Spiro Agnew and other administration supporters could sound off from time to time.)

George Bush arrived at a very different media moment. From Rush Limbaugh and Sinclair Broadcasting to Fox News, the Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard, he had his own media already in place - a full spectrum of outlets including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. As for the rest of the media, his task, unlike Nixon's, wasn't to compete for space, but to pacify, sideline, and, if need be, punish. In this sense, no administration has been less giving of actual news or more obviously tried to pay less attention to major media outlets. The President was proud to say that he didn't even read or watch such outlets. His was a shock-and-awe policy and, from September 12, 2001 to last spring, it was remarkably successful.

The "cabal" of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and their associates that Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, recently spoke and then wrote about - "Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift, not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy." - dealt with the media that wasn't theirs and the government bureaucracy that wasn't theirs in similar ways via those big three: pacification, sidelining, and punishment. Whether it was the hated CIA or the much-loathed State Department, they set up their own small, enclosed structures for governing and attempted to shove the rest of them out into the cold. And again they were remarkably successful - for a while. (Nixon, too, took a stab at setting up a shadow government, loyal only to him, including, of course, those famous "plumbers.")

In fact, the same cast of Bush administration characters dealt with the world in a similar manner. They buckled on their armor, raised their cruise missiles, broke their treaties, distained anything that passed for multi-nationalism or had the letters "U" or "N" in it, unpacked their dictionaries to redefine the nature of torture and international relations, proclaimed world domination to be their modest goal - and, armed to the teeth, sallied forth with their allied corporations in the name of everything good to ransack the globe (and punish any country or government that dared get in their way). In this course, they were regularly called "unilateralists."

In all their guises - in relation to the media, the federal bureaucracy, and other countries - they actually were dominating isolationists. They took a once honorable Republican heartland tradition - isolationism - turned it on its head and thrust it into the world. They acted in Iraq and elsewhere as armed imperial isolationists. Where the elder Bush and Bill Clinton were multi-nationalists and globalizers; they were ultra-nationalists and militarists, focused only on the military solution to any problem - and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

But when you are a cabal, using such close-to-the-breast, not to say mom-and-pop, methods of ruling, and you falter, whether in Iraq or at home, unilateralism becomes weakness. And when it turns out that what you rule is the "last superpower" and you've sidelined, pacified, or punished large numbers of people in the vast, interlocking worlds of the governmental bureaucracy and the media, your enemies still retain the power to strike back.

When something closer to the full story of our moment is known, I suspect we'll see more clearly just how the bureaucracy began to do so (along with, as in this week's New Yorker magazine in the person of Brent Scowcroft, the old multinational ruling elite). In the meantime, it's clear that what the potential implosion moment awaited was the perfect storm of events now upon us. If this moment were to be traced back to its origins, I would, for the time being, pick the spring of this year as my starting point and give the mainstream media - anxious, resentful, bitter, cowed, losing audience, and cutting staff - their due. The Bush slide has been a long, slow one, as the opinion polls indicate; but like that famed moss-less rolling stone, it picked up speed last spring as the President's approval ratings slipped below 50%, and then in the ensuing months plunged near or below 40%, putting him at the edge of free-fall.

If there's one thing that this administration and Washington journalists have in common, it's that both groups parse opinion polls obsessively; so both saw the signs of administration polling softness and of a President, just into a second term, who should have been triumphant but was failing in his attempt to spend what he called his "political capital" on social security "reform."

Vulnerability, it gets the blood roaring, especially when it seeps from an administration so long feared and admired as the "most disciplined" and "most secretive" in memory, an administration whose highest officials (as the Plame case showed) regularly whacked their opponents with anything at hand and then called on their media allies, always in full-battle-mode, for support. Probably the key moment of weakness came in August, when Cindy Sheehan ended up in that famed ditch at the side of a road in Crawford, Texas, and the President and his men - undoubtedly feeling their new-found vulnerability, anxious over an Iraq War gone wrong and the protesting mother of a dead soldier so near at hand - blinked.

In their former mode, they would undoubtedly have swept her away in some fashion; instead, they faltered and sent out not the Secret Service or some minor bureaucrat, but two of the President's top men, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin. For forty-five minutes, they negotiated over her demand to meet George Bush the way you might with a recalcitrant foreign head of state - and then she just sent them back, insisting she would wait where she was to get the President's explanation for her son's death.

Trapped in no-news Crawford with a President always determined to offer them less than nothing, hardened by an administration whose objective for any media outlet not its own was only "rollback," and sympathetic to a grieving mother from Bush's war, reporters found themselves with an irresistible story, ratified as important by the administration, at a moment when they could actually run with it - and they headed down the road.

Not long after, hurricane Katrina swept into town; the President refused to end his vacation; FEMA began twisting, twisting in the wind; Tom DeLay went down; Rita blew in (to be followed by Wilma); Senator Frist found himself blinded by his trust; the President nominated his own lawyer to the Supreme Court - at this point, even some of his conservative allies began peeling away - and then, of course, waiting in the wings, there was the ultimate October surprise, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald - backed by a reinvigorated media and an angry bureaucracy - ready to lift the lid on a whole can of worms not likely to be closed for years to come.

Our Imploding Future

To me anyway, this looks like a potential critical-mass moment. Of course, there are a few missing elements of no small import. The most obvious is an opposition party. The Democrats are essentially nowhere to be seen. In fact, whether or not they even remain a party is, at this point, open to serious question. Their leading candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, still wants to send more (nonexistent) American troops into Iraq and, like most other Democrats in Congress, has remained painfully mum - this passes for a strategy, however craven - on almost everything that matters at the moment. Even on the issue of torture, it's a Republican Senator, John McCain, who is spearheading resistance to the administration.

The other group distinctly missing-in-action, as they have been for years now, is the military. Many top military men were clearly against the Iraq War and, aghast at the way the administration has conducted it, have been leaking like mad ever since. But other than General Eric Shinseki, who spoke up in the pre-invasion period, suggesting the kind of troop strength that might actually be needed for an occupation (rather than a liberation) of Iraq and was essentially laughed out of Washington, and various retired generals like former Centcom Commander Anthony Zinni and former Director of the National Security Agency retired Lieutenant General William Odom, not a single high-ranking military officer has spoken out - or, more reasonably, resigned and then done so. This, it seems to me, remains a glaring case of dereliction of duty, given what has been going on.

As for the implosion of this administration, we have no idea what implosion would actually mean under the present circumstances. Even with a Republican Congress partially staffed with the American version of the Taliban, will whatever unravels over many months or even years, post-the Fitzgerald indictments, lead to hearings and someday the launching of impeachment proceedings? Or is that beyond the bounds of possibility? Who knows. Will this administration dissolve in some fashion as yet undetermined? Will they go down shooting (as, points out Robert Dreyfuss in a striking if unnerving piece at Tompaine.com, they already are threatening to do in Syria)? Will Daddy's men be hauled out of the pages of the New Yorker magazine and off the front-lines of money-making and called in to save the day? Again, who knows. (Where is Bush family consigliere James Baker anyway?)

As you consider this, remember one small thing: So far, hurricane Katrina aside, this administration has largely felt tremors coursing through the elite in Washington. The real 7.9 seismic shocks have yet to happen. Yes, in Iraq, the 2,000 mark in American dead has just been breached, but the Iraqi equivalent of the 1983 Lebanon barracks suicide bombing in which 241 American servicemen died, hasn't happened yet. Yes, gas hovers near $3.00 a gallon at the pumps, but the winter natural-gas and heating-oil shock hasn't even begun to hit; nor has next summer's oil shock (after the Bush administration bombs Iran); nor has the housing bubble burst; nor have foreign countries begun to cash in their T-bills in staggering quantities; nor has oil sabotage truly spread in the Middle East; or unemployment soared at home; or the initial wave of a recession hit; nor have we discovered that next year's hurricane season is worse than this terrible one; nor... but I'm not really being predictive here. I'm simply saying that, once upon a time not so very long ago, this administration had a fair amount of room for error. Now, it's no longer in control of its own script and has next to no space for anything to go wrong in a world where "going wrong" is likely to be the operative phrase for quite a while. The Fitzgerald indictments, in other words, are probably just the end of the beginning. Whether they are also the beginning of the end is another question entirely.

Truthout.org

Just for me

Bookmarks for myself:

Food Blog Central

Food Porn Watch

Zen Foodism

Wine Blog Watch

Proof there might just be a god? Cheese Diaries

Gothamist Food Index

The Domestic Goddess

If you want to read some good commentaries

on the Miers withdrawal, see SCOTUSblog.

Go Sox!

Now Chicago is one game from sweeping its way to its first World Series title in 88 years and equaling the 1999 New York Yankees as the only team to complete the postseason with just one loss in the wild-card era.

Now they get it

I suppose, better late than never.

Majority of Americans now feel Iraq war was wrong: poll

sigh

Chickens coming home to roost

Cheney 'Cabal' Hijacked Foreign Policy

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

I've been awaitin' for this a long time now. Many have.

Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.

"He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."

I'm sorry for you Mr. Wilkerson. I admire the General's loyalty as well - but there is such as thing as being too loyal. And, his Commander in Chief never returned that loyalty.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Miers Is Asked to Redo Reply to Questions

The Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers suffered another setback on Wednesday when the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to resubmit parts of her judicial questionnaire, saying various members had found her responses "inadequate," "insufficient" and "insulting."

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A Web of Truth:

Bunny Greenhouse was once the perfect bureaucrat, an insider, the top procurement official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know.

Interesting

But I don't think it's totally true:

The Sonnet Deliberate Gentle Love Dreamer (DGLDf) Romantic, hopeful, and composed. You are the Sonnet. Get it? Composed? Sonnets want Love and have high ideals about it. They're conscientious people, caring & careful. You yourself have deep convictions, and you devote a lot of thought to romance and what it should be. This will frighten away most potential mates, but that's okay, because you're very choosy with your affections anyway. You'd absolutely refuse to date someone dumber than you, for instance. Your exact opposite: Genghis Khunt Random Brutal Sex Master Lovers who share your idealized perspective, or who are at least willing to totally throw themselves into a relationship, will be very, very happy with you. And you with them. You're already selfless and compassionate, and with the right partner, there's no doubt you can be sensual, even adventurously so. You probably have lots of female friends, and they have a special soft spot for you. Babies do, too, at the tippy-top of their baby skulls. ALWAYS AVOID: The 5-Night Stand, The False Messiah, The Hornivore, The Last Man on Earth CONSIDER: The Loverboy Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating.

I'm getting nothing done today.

Obviously.

Spotted the test below on animaltalk's lj and decided to take it.

Difficult Your life has been 45% difficult.

Based on your family, money, political context, and personal situation -- during the important years of your development -- it appears your life was DIFFICULT. What does this mean? Well, the "difficulty" of your life is a measure of how rough you had it. Relative to the world, you had a very, very difficult childhood. I'm not sure what "success" means to you, but whatever it is, you can achieve it. When you do, it'll be that much more impressive. I have a new test! Straight males and gay/bi females, check out my brand new How Low Are Your Sex Standards Test

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on difficult

Link: The How Difficult Is Your Life Test written by chicken_pot_pie on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

I doubt many people score above difficult. It's often a matter of perception as much as reality.

Take me out to the ball game

Nearly everyone who knows me knows I'm a Yankee fan. Ever since the Yankee's lost out on the chance to go to the WS again people have been offering my their condolences.

It's as if someone died.

I appreciate it. I'm always sad when the Yanks lose. The upside is that at least the devils lost too.

But I'm still following the post season. I've developed a love of the White Sox. It's temporary. It amounts to "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

And don't think I can't hear the mutterings

slut

But it's not true. I'd be a slut if I stooped low enough to follow the Team That Shall Not Be Named in post season.

But if I did that I would hope my family would have me sedated and carted off to the nuthouse.

Then again, with my family, they'd probaby have contract taken out on my life.

In any event, I'm glad the White Sox have won and I'm hoping the Cardinals beat the Astros and go to the WS. What can I say? I'm a sucker for the under-dog. But who am I rooting for to win? I'm not sure yet. Most likely the White Sox.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"This is all tied to Jack?" Sheldon said. "I'm shocked out of my socks."

Before you go out and buy some new socks for Mr. Sheldon, read one of the better summations of DeLay's problems, and the whole eLottery/Abramoff scandel, at TruthOut.org: How a Lobbyist Stacked the Deck, by Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi of the Washington Post, originally published on October 16, 2005.

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US caught re-gifting. Oh, the Horrors! Miss Manners will have the vapors when she reads this.

Unconstitutional? You decide.

The Heart of the Matter
By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

One name that has been lost in the shuffle of history is that of Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement. Kwiatkowski charged two years ago that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith's office, and particularly those of the OSP, constituted "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress."

"What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote after her retirement. "If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense."

According to Kwiatkowsky, the political appointees assigned there and their contacts at State, the NSC, and Cheney's office tended to work as a "network." Feith's office often deliberately cut out, ignored or circumvented normal channels of communication both within the Pentagon and with other agencies. "I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the NSC because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel," wrote Kwiatkowsky.

Read the entire article please.

"Faith crosses borders. It says, This world is our world, for all of us."

Communities Without Borders

By David Bacon

Originally published in the October edition of The Nation

"Another amnesty is part of the alternative also," Sosa adds, "but ten years from now we're going to face the same situation again, if we don't change the way we treat other countries. Treaties like CAFTA insure that this will happen." Today working people of all countries are asked to accept continuing globalization, in which capital is free to go wherever it can earn the highest profits. He argues that migrants must have the same freedom, with rights and status equal to those of anyone else. "I come from a faith tradition," he concludes. "Faith crosses borders. It says, This world is our world, for all of us."

So deeply does President Bush feel our country, despite all its treaty commitments, has a right to torture that he has threatened to veto the bill if it passes. This would be the first time in five years he has ever vetoed anything. by Molly Ivins.

Lighter is better

:).

Nothing will come of it.

Poll: Americans Favor Bush's Impeachment If He Lied about Iraq.

The poll was conducted by AfterDowningStreet.org.

It's an interesting poll and analysis, but it will mean nothing. The Republican dominated Congress and a blind, caring-less American public, will ensure Mr. Bush will never pay for the crimes against humanity he's committing.

Reading List

Soren Kierkegaard : A Biography, by Joakim Garff. So far, it's excellent.

Up next:

Reformation: Englands House Divided, by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I read his The Reformation: A History when it first came out and it was excellent, so I've picked up House Divided. Be warned: he is not a "light" read. I'm also going to get The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603.

Next will be Queen Isabella : Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England, by Alison Weir.

I'm thinking of ordering Sex with Kings : 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge, by Eleanor Herman and Heloise & Abelard : A New Biography, James Burge. next.

I've been waiting on Catherine of Braganza: Princess of Portugal Wife to Charles II, which is out of print, for months now. I may be dead and buried before it arrives.

Pictorial

Operation Eden

It's raining, it's pouring

I woke up around 2am to the sound of pouring rain. I woke up nearly every hour on the hour and still it was coming down in buckets. The condenser for my air conditioner is right outside my window and the rain sounded more like hail bouncing off it. It kept me up most of the night.

sigh

So, now I'm sleepy. And, it's still pouring out there, the rain still sounds like hail, so there's no point in napping.

I'm just sort of putzing around, getting nothing much done.

"No Supreme Court nominee in the last 35 years has exceeded Harriet Miers' overall range of experience in courtroom litigation; service in federal, state and local government; leadership in local, state and national bar associations and pro bono and charitable activities," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Right... and there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq too.

If you missed it last week, TruthOut.org has the transcript of former VP Al Gore's speech to a gathering at The Media Center last week, entitled The Threat to American Democracy.

At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.

It's a fascinating speech and I hope you can take the time to read it in full.

Holy Cow!

The Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible

The bishops say: “Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about how many will be saved and about when the end will come.”

The Bible wasn't a big part of my Catholic up-bringing, but I still find this article amazing.

The only thing we have to fear

Bush is fear-mongering again. See also Bush Tries To Sell Skeptical Public On War In Iraq.

For an interesting read, I suggest The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.

No, I don't get a percentage of the profits or know the author :)