DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Dec 10, 2005 23:50:47 GMT 4
Oh,no,you did NOT just go there,Mr Bush www.whatreallyhappened.com/pieceofpaper.php[/url]"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!" Let us start out with the fact that the Constitution is actually written on parchment, not paper. A trivial point, I grant you, but one that reveals (along with your inability to correctly pronounce the word "nuclear") a shocking lack of education in a head of state. But to get to the point, the Constitution is not the parchment itself, but the ideas written upon it; ideas which form the foundations of our nation, ideas which would carry equal weight if written on stone, glass, metal, or even paper. These ideas are the soul of the nation. They include the recognition that the people of this nation have certain rights, rights which the government does not have the authority to remove. These rights include freedom of speech, to say what we think about the nation at any and all times, to write that opinion down and share it however we choose to. These rights include the freedom to worship as we choose, free from coercion. These rights include the right to privacy, in our homes and businesses, free from government intrusions other than in very specific and well-defined circumstances. Maybe those rights are inconvenient to you, as such rights are always inconvenient to tyrants, but you are not allowed the choice which rights you will abide by or not. That too is spelled out explicitly in the Constitution. The Constitution isn't just a piece of paper or parchment. It's a contract; the original contract with America. It's the contract you yourself swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend against all enemies both foreign and domestic. You attached your name to that promise. You swore that oath before a judge of the United States Supreme Court, with your hand on a bible. That isn't just scenery for the cameras. Swearing an oath before a judge carries legal obligations with that oath, and legal penalties for breaking that oath. The election process by which you claim authority is defined in that Constitution. And as you claim authority by Constitutional process, so too are you limited by Constitutional process. If you act outside the limits of the Constitution, you are no longer acting as the President, but as a private citizen abusing the powers with which you were trusted. A government that acts outside the Constitution ceases to be the legal government of this land. The Constitution exists not only to tell the government what it may do, but more importantly what it may not do. You, as the President, are not allowed to declare wars without the US Congress. You, the President, are not allowed to seize people at random and send them off to be tortured. And most of all, you, the President, and not allowed to lie to the people and to the Congress. Every President before you, including your father, swore that oath to preserve, protect, and defend that Constitution. Millions of Americans died in wars in the firm belief that the form of government describes on that parchment was worth such a sacrifice. To state that the Constitution is just a "dammed piece of paper" is a slap in the face of every American who ever donned the uniform of the military forces of this country. Go over to Arlington National Cemetery. It's not that far from where you live. Look at those tombstones. By your statement, you have written across and every one the words, "Died for a goddamned piece of paper."
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Dec 29, 2005 14:16:38 GMT 4
This from the incomperable Jane Smiley at Huffingtonpost.comNo opologies for the length of this post, I agree with many others that this is the definitive essay on the Bushcrime. In fact,I think I'll try to print a few copies. Some of my freinds don't have the net in their homes. Actually,some of my friends don't have homes... ------------------------------------------- Is Bush in a bubble? Is Bush a dry drunk? Is Bush a drunk drunk? Is Bush a narcissist? Is Bush an idiot? Is Bush a madman? Does Bush have an “Authority Problem”? Theories abound about why Bush does the things he does, but most of them assume that he is making mistakes that he could or would correct if he understood how misguided he was. On Monday, there was an editorial in the New York Times lamenting the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to the rebuilding of New Orleans, the levees in particular. On Tuesday, there was another editorial, excoriating the shameful behavior of the Bush negotiators at the Montreal conference on global warming. The gist of both editorials was that without national leadership, two chances are about to be lost--the chance to rebuild the city of New Orleans and the chance to mitigate the effects of global warming. Then at the end of the week, we learned that Bush has been wiretapping the phones of his own citizens--an impeachable offense. The Times writes as if it is possible still to alter the direction of Bush administration policy, but obviously it is not. The Bushies have a pattern and they stick to it in spite of every apparent reason to change course. It’s not as if we don’t know what pattern it is, and it’s not as if they haven’t advertised what the pattern will be--it is to break down the government so completely that it can’t be put back together again. Let’s take a look at the “mistakes” the Bush administration is said to have made, and, instead, ask ourselves if they are actually realized intentions: 1. Hobbling the government with debt by combining an expensive, prolonged war with perennial rounds of tax cuts. 2. Destroying the bureaucracy by making it impossible for neutral, expert, or objective bureaucrats to keep their jobs, replacing them with incompetents. 3. Destroying the integrity of the election system, state by state, beginning with Florida and Ohio. 4: Defanging the media by paying fake reporters, co-opting members of the MSM (why did the New York Times refrain from publishing stories unfavorable to the Bush administration before the 2004 election?) and allowing (or encouraging) huge mergers and the buying up of independent media operations by known conservative media conglomerates. 5. Destroying the middle class by changing the bankruptcy laws and the tax laws. 6. Destroying the National Guard and the Army by deploying them over and over in a futile war, while at the same time failing to provide them with armor and equipment. 7. Precipitating Iraq into a civil war by invading it. 8. Accelerating the effects of global warming by putting roadblocks in the way of mitigating its effects. 9. Denying healthcare and prescription medication to an increasing number of Americans, most specifically by ramming the prescription drug legislation through Congress, but also by manipulating Medicare and Medicaid so that fewer and fewer citizens are covered. 10. Encouraging the people in the rest of the world to associate the US with torture, military incursion, and fear, by a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation, by vociferously maintaining the right of the US to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and by refusing to accept international laws. Or, to put it another way, the Bush administration apparently wishes for and is working toward a chaotic Iraq, a corrupt American election structure with openly corrupt influence-peddlers like Delay and Abramoff in charge of policy, a world in which people suffer and die from weather-related catastrophes, a two-tiered economic structure in the US (with most people in the lower tier), and the isolation of the US as a rogue state from the other nations of the world. How else are we going to interpret the satisfaction the President continually expresses in the results of his policies so far? As an example, when Bush said, “Heckuva job, Brownie”, outsiders generally assumed he was making a mistake--that he didn’t know what a bad job Brownie was doing. But let’s say that he knew perfectly well that Brownie had abandoned new Orleans to the forces of nature, and that THAT was the essence of the heckuva job he was doing. In the same way, many people assume that the administration is embarrassed that the extent of the American rendition gulag or the techniques of torture used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have gotten into the news along with the use of white phosphorus in Falluja, as if torture and rendition and white phosphorus were something that Bush does not want to do. But let’s say that torture and rendition are something that the Bush administration is happy to do, and doesn’t mind others knowing about. Likewise, many observers, let’s say Jack Murtha, for one, assume that the president does not want to destroy the army. But if the army is destroyed, then the services that the army provides at a relatively moderate expense to the taxpayer can be farmed out to companies like Halliburton. Let’s say that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush have cast their lot not with the draft, or even the volunteer army, but with the mercenary army, which is more profitable, less subject to Congressional and public oversight, and, really, the appropriate army for a rogue state. And, with a mercenary army, there is no problem when a fallen soldier is sent home as a piece of freight. It is only citizen-soldiers who make the ultimate sacrifice out of patriotism. When we get rid of citizen soldiers, then we don’t have to respect them. When Grover Norquist said he wanted to strangle the shrunken government in the bathtub, he was not kidding. He meant that the taxpayers and and voters would not be able to look to the government for any services whatsoever, but also that they would not have any control over the government does. The drowned and strangled government, having ceased to exist, would not only offer no benefits to citizens, it would offer no obstacle to those who wished to break the laws (for example against internal spying), because there would be no law to break. It is for this reason that the Bush administration pays absolutely no attention to the polls--they have already discounted the preferences of the citizens. When the government has been shrunk to nothing and drowned in the bathtub, the citizenry will be entirely powerless--that is the real goal, not an unintended consequence. Norquist and his fellow theorists understand perfectly that in a modern democracy, there are two competing modes of voting: there is “one person, one vote” and there is “one dollar, one vote”. They not only prefer “one dollar, one vote”, they want to entirely get rid of “one person, one vote”. The outcome of such policies will be a dictatorship or a tyranny. Such policies cannot be reconciled with the US as we know it, or with the vision of the Founding Fathers. It is true that rogue elements have stolen elections before, as the slave interest stole the election in Kansas in 1856 by openly ferrying fraudulent voters across the river from Missouri, and then bullying the Congress into certifying the election in spite of plenty of evidence that the election was corrupt. It is also true that the public has been fed lies in the past so that they would support a questionable war (remember the Maine!). Corrupt administrations probably outnumber clean ones in US history. But the ten “successes” I cite above come together to present, I think, the greatest threat to the US since the Civil War. The US is not like much of the rest of theworld: France has always been France, and England has been England for many centuries, and Russia defined itself during the reign of Ivan the Terrible as Russia in contrast to the Tartars and Europe. Chinese history is, supposedly, the longest continual history of any people in the world, but the US is based on an abstraction--a certain set of ideas that divide up and share out power so that it does not become concentrated in the hands of a single tyrannical entity, either party or person. We are expected to participate as citizens in our government at the local, state, and national level, and our government has been expected, from the beginning, to be a shared enterprise, not an engine of power and wealth for a single oligarchic group. Our government was devised as a set of ideas about how to avoid kings, aristocracies, and tyrannies. If it fails at that, or is manipulated into producing tyranny, then we are no longer living in the US, we are living in a no man’s land, without an actual identity. This set of ideas, political techniques, and beliefs that holds together immigrants from every continent and every culture. I began considering the possibility that what we see around us might indeed constitute success, as far as the Bushies are concerned, when I read in a post by Karen Kwiatkowski that three witnesses had confirmed that Bush referred to the Constitution as a “just a god damned piece of paper.” Then there was the article in The Guardian in which six American pundits were invited to reflect upon the meaning of the last five years of the Bush administration. Two commentators said interesting things. Howell Raines pointed out that four generations of Bushes and Walkers (since 1850) have shown a willingness to do anything for money and power, but no interest of any kind in the common good. R. Emmett Tyrell implied more than he stated when he maintained that the anger that people like me feel toward Bush is mere psychological projection, expressing “the need of the passing Old Order to have enemies.” What was striking in Tyrell’s section is his assumption that the Old Order (legal elections, citizen soldiers, healthy middle class, commonly agreed upon morality, laws, and regulations, useful beaurocracy) IS passing. He must know something I don’t know, because I had been thinking the country we used to have was still salvageable. In addition to these signs, though, we have several others, among them the fact that Bush and Cheney attempt to communicate only with their base (and remember, in “Farenheit 911”, Bush told a group of wealthy contributors that they WERE his base). Their base is fairly small and getting smaller, but they seem to have no desire, even when campaigning, to enlarge their base. It’s as if they know that the voters don’t matter, and, of course, according to the president of the Diebold Company, the voters don’t matter (see Avi Rubin’s post about voting machine certifcation). In the face of the administration’s successes, it seems that it is the responsibility of the Democrats to save the republic, and to prevent the government from being shrunken and drowned, but they have been very lax about stepping up to the plate. With the nation beginning to wake up to the injustice and futility of bringing chaos to the Middle East, the most prominent Democrats choose to distance themselves from the citizens and to link themselves more tightly to the administration. Hillary Clinton, for example, refuses to denounce the war and takes up the issue of flag burning! John Kerry refuses to confront the probability that his honor was besmirched and his own election was stolen. The DNC takes the time to denounce the peace movement, even though the peace movement was right about the futility of the war. Bill Clinton seems to be of two minds. He’s willing to speak out about global warming, which is a plus, but every time he takes a stand about any other issue, he soon backpedals. How to understand this? Democrats outside of Washington widely infer that Democrats in Washington are simply cowardly or deluded, but it is also a possibility that they are in on the shift from what Tyrell calls the “Old Order” (democracy) to the “New Order” (what shall we call that?). We normally think of American political thought running along a single continuum, from right to left, from, let’s say from the Ku Klux Klan to the American Communist Party. Most Americans fall in the middle. Moderate Republicans live next door to moderate Democrats, and the way moderation expresses itself shifts, and is expected to shift, from region to region. In an ethnically diverse country where ideas, and ideology, are important, Americans generally understand, almost without realizing it, that moderation is what holds things together. But American political thought runs along another continuum, too, not a continuum of ideas but a continuum of power. What differentiates various groups on this continuum from one another is their embrace or rejection of power as a goal in itself. Essentially ideological thought seeks power in order to achieve certain ideas; power-oriented groups use ideas in order to achieve power. In the conservative movement today, this split is evident--old-line conservatives distrust the Bush administration because small government, low debt, and isolationism are about circumscribing the power of government. Bush is about enhancing the power of--well, I almost said government. But any government is essentially a smoothly-operating bureaucracy. Bush is about enhancing the power of himself and his cronies and dismantling any countervailing entity. The Bushies are not shy about acting on their craving for power (as in the K Street Project) or about talking about it--”Permanent Republican control of the three branches of government.” In addition, Bush himself tends to express his desire for power when he’s joking about how it’s easier to be a dictator than a president, or how the Chinese sure know how to treat journalists. The only reason the Bushies are called “conservative”, as many conservatives will themselves tell you, is that the theorists of Bushism managed to graft themselves onto the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s, when the Republican party was the party of disgruntled racists, fundamentalists, workers, and farmers left behind by Civil Rights, feminism, the sexual revolution, the end of the manufacturing sector, and the abandonment of a rural way of life. Many of the neo-cons are former leftist student radicals because when they were student radicals, power was what they wanted. They needed to be converted from one ideology (Marxism) to another (capitalism), but the essential goal--gaining power--remained the same. If we add the power continuum, then, the American political scene starts looking like a coordinate plane. There is the x-axis, from left to right, and the y-axis, from bottom (power dispersing) to top (power consolidating). Institutions and entities that are power dispersing would be the Libertarian Party, the Novel, the blogosphere, and democracy itself. If we plot the Bush administration point, it would be at the top of the y-axis, but not necessarily very far right, in terms of small government, low debt, and isolationism. In fact, it is this apparent moderation in expressed Bush ideas that makes him seem relatively harmless to many Americans. But the ruthless drive for power of Bush and his cronies is really not about ideas, and in fact views ideas as a kind of trash, even, according to witnesses, the ideas expressed in the Constitution. the reason I never support any Bush policy, no matter how “moderate” on the surface is that every Bush policy is designed to enhance thepower of Bush and his cronies. The grab for absolute power must be resisted absolutely. No doubt the Democrats who are in sympathy with the Bush crowd are high on the power axis, too, at least in their own minds. My point is not to psychoanalyze Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. How they came to think as they do, and how things look to them are not actually very interesting. What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous they are, and how destructive their plans are. Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. Can they? If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Do they actually plan for their associates and cronies to skim off vast quantities of the taxpayers’ money? Well, yes they do. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Looks like it. Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? They are making good progress--poverty was up twelve percent last year, and the “booming economy” is strangely low on job growth, at least for Americans. The catalogue of their “successes”, or, as average Americans might term it, their “failures”, is pretty long. Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems--by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: fear, accusations of betrayal, false patriotism, appeals to populist and religious resentments, use of political red herrings like gay marriage. Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections. I also have a philosophical bulletin for the Bush crowd--the “Thousand Year Reich” doesn’t exist, and neither does “permanent Republican control of all three branches of government”, especially if that control is based on stealing elections. Power is the most ephemeral possession of them all because retaining power means exerting ever more control. Control, of course, operates according to the law of diminishing returns. When you threaten and then torture that first guy, it’s shocking and intimidating, not only to the guy himself but to everyone who hears about it. To maintain that level of intimidation, however, requires ever more threats and ever more torture, and pretty soon you have threatened and tortured, and even killed, hundreds (what’s the count on Iraqis who have died in American custody--121?) or thousands of people, and you are actually losing power because the very thing you thought you could toss out the window in your quest for power, namely morality, comes back to haunt you in the form of disgust (the disgust that others feel toward you) and common decency (that quality that others have retained and you have lost). The US has lasted this long, and survived and thrived because of power dispersal, not power consolidation. Which is not to say that the Bushies can’t do a lot of damage--they have and they can. The loss of our moral compass is devastating. The scattering of beaurocratic talent is a huge hidden cost of the Bush plan, as is the destruction of the volunteer army both as a military entity and as a population of young people who have been required to be ruthless themselves and to be ruthlessly preyed upon by the Iraqi insurgency. Our debts to the Chinese are a price we do not yet know the cost of, and our resistance to the idea of global warming might doom us all. Arousing the foot soldiers of the religious right, whipping them up with ideas of “the Rapture”, then arming them with weapons of mass destruction seems on the face of it to be a first class folly. And all for what? Life is short. Reputations are long.
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Feb 1, 2006 14:10:31 GMT 4
[glow=red,2,300]STATE OF DELUSION[/glow] I watched ,out of the corner of my eye, with the volume completely off, my alleged leader's heaping helping of fresh organic methane... I'll probably google the text tommorrow,if only to see how long it took him to say"terror... 911...or terrorists... Tonight,I just wasn't up to it. Don't you just hate knowing you're about to be lied to? He looked like ***t on a paper plate. Can't the most powerful man on Earth find a decent make-up artist?...
WHAT HE DIDN"T SAY
I'm real sorry that Cindy Sheehan can't be with us tonight. Actually,she was until a few minutes ago. She was dragged out and arrested for violating my "free speech zone"or something.
Some americans are hurting,like Kenneth Lay.I will be compassionate. My campaign travel was comped by Ken Lay,and the hard working folks at the Enron corporation.I will pardon him if he is convicted.Hardworking folks:ramen noodles are cheaper by the twelve pack.
My Vice President still recieves money from the Halliburton Corporation,a company which has been enriched billions of dollars since the beginning of my war, and is now contracted for the construction of megaprisons throught the country.
I am attempting to get the focus off of my illegal genocide in Iraq by downsizing and ourtsourcing the Armed Forces. Let Blackwater and cluster-bombs handle it.
The Budget deficit is maxxed out.On my watch,the books,which were plus-balanced, are completely cooked.We are eight trillion dollars in the hole. We are now in technical default on our national debt.
I am recieving massive amounts of information about you,by the N.S.A. ,which I will try not to abuse,by blackmailing opponents or tipping off my friends.Karl told me insider trading is bad. Don't even try to indict Karl.if convicted,I will pardon him.
2,242 of our soldiers have died in Iraq. I will attend ONE funeral ... eventually.
More jobs have been lost on my watch than the past three presidents combined.If I say making hamburgers is a production job,then it is.
I am developing enhanced contingency plans for the rapid implementation of martial law,in the event of an emergency.Any emergency.
I ,Halliburton,Ratheon and Lockeed Martin Corporation,have decided that Iran must be freedomized.
I am hereby rendering the Twenty Second amendment obsolete. That means I am president.For life.
Go back to sleep.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Feb 1, 2006 18:09:33 GMT 4
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
The present civilization is unsustainable. The environment is collapsing and without a platform for life, life ends. The oceans are dying. The forests are diminishing at an alarming rate. The air water and land are becoming toxic. The nuclear waste is now affecting the entire planet. The physical bodies of the Earth are becoming toxic and what you do to the beast, the fish and the fowl, you do to yourself. It is becoming harder and harder to preserve life for the toxins are everywhere. This must cease if you are to continue as a species.
Profit, greed and material acquisition do not equate power. It is a very low state of awareness. Consciousness equates power and those who are awake realize true power comes from within. Selfishness gives way to selflessness and true happiness comes from a consciousness free of guilt, filled with love and service to others. Earth humanity must find itself individually and collectively.
There must be a mass awakening from the ground up and the leadership must be held accountable to the desires of the people. As a collective we do not want war. We do not want the destruction of the environment. We do not want the air, water and land to be polluted. We do not want synthetic over processed food, food should be our medicine. We do not want the diseases that follow incorrect actions within our environment. In our heart of hearts we want to live according to the universal principles and understandings necessary for a healthy society and environment. We want universal peace; we want individual freedom and prosperity for all. This is the will of the people and if the leadership cannot recognize this, it is time for new leadership.
It is up to Earth humanity to clean up its own nest. Are we going to stand up to the offer or continue to be lead on the downward spiral of evolution ending in disease, destruction and environmental collapse? As it is now seen there will be those that choose the upward spiral and support the awakening and healing process and those who will choose the downward spiral receiving their just deserts.
There is prophesy found in all the cultures for those with the ears to hear, eyes to see and the mind to know. Hopefully all of humanity will wakeup before too much damage is done and the reactions to actions in ignorance against humanity and nature come home to roost.
Pass it on
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Mar 6, 2006 1:07:23 GMT 4
HERE'S A LAUGH:Cheney urges Americans to save more WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney urged Americans Thursday to do a better job of saving and challenged policymakers to strengthen pensions and fix Social Security to help people in their golden years. (Related story: How long can households sustain negative savings?) "The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work," Cheney told a conference here exploring how to encourage people to boost savings and be better prepared for retirement. Too often, workers are living paycheck to paycheck and are not saving sufficiently, Cheney said. Last year, Americans' personal savings rate dropped to its lowest point since the Great Depression. The dismal state of savings comes as a big wave of baby boomers will soon start retiring. That wave of retirees will eventually put massive strains on government resources as people draw on Social Security and Medicare benefits, Cheney said. Fewer workers, meanwhile, can be counted on to help bankroll the retirement program. "With an aging population, and a steadily falling ratio of workers to retirees, the system is on a course to eventual bankruptcy," the vice president said. Cheney renewed President Bush's call in his State of the Union address for the creation of a bipartisan commission to study the impact of retiring baby boomers on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The president's modest proposal came after his ambitious plans to revamp Social Security stalled last year amid balking from both Democrats and Republicans. "There will always be a wagon load of excuses for ignoring the problem of entitlements," Cheney said. "But Americans have a right to expect more out of the nation's leaders, especially when it comes to Social Security and other defining national promises." The vice president also called on Congress to complete action on legislation that would strengthen the nation's troubled pension system. Lawmakers in the House and Senate have passed separate versions of pension bills, and have yet to iron out the differences. The bills are aimed at shoring up traditional, employer-based defined benefit pension plans, which pay retirees a fixed amount based on salary and years of service. Millions of Americans are counting on such pension plans to fund their retirement. These defined-benefit pension plans are now underfunded by an estimated $450 billion. To fix this, legislation would tighten pension-funding rules for companies. Cheney said the bills need to be improved to win the president's signature. "Our experts have studied the congressional proposals carefully and they are convinced that unless the bills are strengthened, there will be an even greater risk that workers will lose benefits," Cheney said. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who also spoke at the conference, said he would like to see the pension legislation wrapped up before Congress takes a spring recess, currently slated for April 10-21. Another speaker, former Commerce Secretary Don Evans, said that a poll conducted for the lobby group found that nearly three out of five Americans between the ages of 35 and 49 are saving less than $10,000 a year. "For most, this will prove too little to support a comfortable middle-class retirement," said Evans, who is now chief of the Financial Services Forum. The poll also found that nearly a third of Americans saved nothing for retirement last year. www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-03-02-cheney-saving_x.htm?csp=34Mary MacElveen from my RapidResponse group, who is also a guest commentarist at www.vheadline.com, sent this fax to DICK Cheney today. Here's to you, Mary. Anyone here care to comment on DICK's advice to Americans? Or maybe, you wish to send your own fax, thanking DICK for being so very concerned for our future welfare.....MichelleTo DickCheney, March 5, 2006
I first want to say that I am sending this fax to the White House, but understand you may not be there but in one of your many hiding places or out hunting more liberals, sorry I meant to say, quails.
The reason I am writing you, Dick is for this reason. Just recently you stated in an article, Cheney Urges Americans to save more: “The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work,'' In a perfect world or a world where everyone has a level playing field I would say that is correct, but we are NOT living in such a world today. You then further state: “Too often, workers are living paycheck to paycheck and are not saving sufficiently” Well, Dick welcome to the world you helped create. This is how many Americans are indeed living thanks to the greed that runs through your veins as well as those who believe as you do. What all of you blood thirsty megalomaniacs are saying of the blue collar worker and the poor who live pay check to pay check is that our lives mean nothing to you and the rest of your corrupt and criminal cabal.
Because of your immoral, unjust and illegal invasion into Iraq where we are spending billions of tax dollars to do so, our property taxes continue to rise, our health premiums for health insurance continue to rise and that is if many are lucky to have it, our energy bills continue to rise, our food prices continue to rise and bastards like you just do not get it. How are we to save anything when as fast as the money is coming into our wallets, pockets or purses, it is flying out leaving us with nothing to save? Oh, but all of you in Washington, D.C. have the best health care packages, are paid handsomely at tax payer’s expense and reap the rewards through various PACs.
In closing, don’t you dare go lecturing Americans on how to save since we are growing increasingly angry at being lectured by liars and criminals.
Mary MacElveen Sound Beach, NY
This letter will be circulated around the Internet and to the media.
Article: Cheney urges Americans to save more
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 16, 2006 16:11:26 GMT 4
March 15, 2006
Von Eschenbach is Not Qualified to Lead the U.S.Food and Drug Administration
Statement of Sidney M. Wolfe, M.D., Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach will become yet another Bush appointee whose main reason for being selected is that he is a family friend, someone who has been warmly embraced by the regulated industries – especially the pharmaceutical industry – and someone who has been and will continue to be loyal to the White House agenda.
Von Eschenbach continues to exhibit extraordinarily bad judgment, a lack of being in touch with reality and insensitivity to the hopes and fears of other cancer patients and their friends and families, as evidenced by his oft-stated “plan” to eliminate the suffering and death from cancer by 2015. Eradicating cancer within 10 years is not realisitic, and by making this statement, von Eschenbach is cruelly raising people’s hopes.
He is a very poor choice to head this critical agency, and his nomination must be defeated. Otherwise, the FDA will be further weakened and the public health further damaged by someone who is so unqualified.
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 13, 2006 18:36:55 GMT 4
April 11, 2006, 10:14PM Archives OK'd Removing Records, Kept Quiet By FRANK BASS and RANDY HERSCHAFT Associated Press Writers © 2006 The Associated Press WASHINGTON — The National Archives agreed to seal previously public CIA and Pentagon records and to keep silent about U.S. intelligence's role in the reclassification, according to an agreement released under the Freedom of Information Act. The 2002 agreement, requested three years ago by The Associated Press and released this week, shows archivists were concerned about reclassifying previously available documents _ many of them more than 50 years old _ but nonetheless agreed to keep mum. "It is in the interest of both (unnamed agency) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to avoid the attention and researcher complaints that may arise from removing material that has already been available publicly from the open shelves for extended periods of time," the agreement said. The agreement was originally stamped "secret." The National Archives and Records Administration provided a redacted copy of the agreement to AP under FOIA this week and then posted the document on its Web site. The agreement said the archives "will not acknowledge the role of (redacted) AFDO in the review of these documents or the withholding of any documents determined to need continued protection from unauthorized disclosure." AFDO stands for Air Force Declassification Office. "NARA will not disclose the true reason for the presence of AFDO (redacted) personnel at the Archives, to include disclosure to persons within NARA who do not have a validated need-to-know," the agreement added. National Archivist Allen Weinstein applauded the release of the agreement and said an internal agency review on how best to handle reclassification requests should be completed by the end of this month. "It is an important first step in finding the balance between continuing to protect national security and protecting the right to know by the American public," Weinstein said. Intelligence officials began reviewing documents for reclassification in 1999, The New York Times reported earlier this year. The number of documents that have been removed from public view, however, has soared since President Bush took office in 2001 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred.An estimated 55,000 pages within 10,000 documents have been removed from public view, ranging from information about 1948 anti-American riots in Colombia to a 1962 telegram containing a translation of a Belgrade news article about China's nuclear capabilities. Weinstein announced a moratorium on the reclassification last month so his information security oversight office can audit the process. Historians expressed concern about the secrecy in the reclassification agreement. "This whole activity was effectively concealed," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project. "It's baffling. It's basically a covert action taking place at the National Archives."Aftergood also said he found it odd that the agreement named two of the agencies involved in the reclassification program _ the U.S. Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency _ but redacted the name of a third, arguing it would compromise national security, reveal internal government deliberations and violate statutes against disclosure of specific information. In congressional testimony last month, a historian said the third agency was the Defense Intelligence Agency, but archivists refused to address his assertions. Meredith Fuchs, general counsel for the National Security Archive, a private governmental research group in Washington, said it was unusual that archivists would be involved in hiding valuable history. "It seems odd that they would be so willing to accept this," she said. "But NARA was completely complicit in trying to cover it up." William Leonard, head of the archive's information security oversight office, told lawmakers last month that protecting agency secrets while providing information to the public requires delicate balancing. "When information is improperly declassified, or is not classified in the first place although clearly warranted, our citizens, our democratic institutions, our homeland security, and our interactions with foreign nations can be subject to potential harm," Leonard said. "Conversely, too much classification ... or inappropriate reclassification, unnecessarily obstructs effective information sharing and impedes an informed citizenry, the hallmark of our democratic form of government."___ On the Net: National Archives: www.archives.gov/FAS government secrecy project: www.fas.org/sgp/index.htmlNational Security Archive: www.gwu.edu/nsarchivSource: www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/3788202.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 18, 2006 17:40:30 GMT 4
History Ambushes the Bush AdministrationIn The Rubbleby Tom Engelhardt SNIP:What makes the last few years so strange is that this administration has essentially been losing its campaigns, at home and abroad, to nobody. What comes to mind is the famous phrase of cartoonist Walt Kelly's character, Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Perhaps it's simply the case that -- in Rumsfeldian terms -- it's hard for people with the mentality of looters to create a permanent edifice, even when they set their minds to it. And yet, it wasn't so long ago that every step the Bush people took on either "front" came up dazzling code orange, brilliantly staving off rising political problems. As a result, it took just short of five miserable years, which seemed a lifetime, to reach this moment -- years which, historically, added up to no time at all. Is there another example of the rulers of a dominant global power -- who fancied themselves the leaders of a New Rome -- crashing and burning quite so quickly? In less than five years, Bush and his top officials ran their project into the ground. In the process, they took a great imperial power over a cliff and down the falls, without safety vests, rubber dinghies, or anyone at the bottom to fish us all out. Read the article: www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=77789
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 21, 2006 14:56:02 GMT 4
The Worst President in History? One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush From: RollingStone Part 1 of 2
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
* * * *
How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
* * * *
THE CREDIBILITY GAP
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.
* * * *
BUSH AT WAR
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
See part 2, next reply
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 21, 2006 15:03:35 GMT 4
The Worst President in History? One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush From: RollingStonePart 2 of 2* * * * BUSH AT HOMEBush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona. The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent. The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place! The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove. The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history." Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends." The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover. Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number. * * * * PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCTVirtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation. Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive. The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers. History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power. By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws. Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening. The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry. * * * * Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history. The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces. No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead." Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation." SEAN WILENTZ Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM Source: tinyurl.com/zeuw4
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Post by DT1 on May 4, 2006 9:38:04 GMT 4
[glow=red,2,300]Bush's Nuclear Madness[/glow] Posted by: Joshua Holland on Thursday, May 04, 2006 - 12:06 AM If George Bush gets his way, the USA is going nuclear -- and he won't let a little thing like radioactive waste stand in his way.
George W. Bush has a vision for a strong, independent nuclear America. He wants nuclear weapons for everyday use -- deterrence is for Democrats -- and he wants to build dozens of new nuclear energy plants across the United States.
He'll also ship thousands of tons of nuclear waste across the country, first to a huge storage facility in Yucca Mountain, Nev. But that will only contain a little more than what we already have sitting around. We'll need nine more Yuccas by the end of the century if Bush's plans go through.
Filling the one we already have means shipping highly radioactive waste through 44 states -- coming within a half mile of 50 million Americans. The most toxic, deadly substances known to humanity would pass through Boston, Baltimore, Newark and Miami.
A 1982 study by Sandia Labs -- the country's premiere nuclear research facility -- found that a containment breech in one plant in Pennsylvania would kill 74,000 people within a year and another 34,000 later from cancer. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster spewed more radiation across Europe than was released in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, took out 486 villages in Belarus and left a region that had been inhabited by 100,000 people a glow-in-the-dark no-man's land.
But don't worry. According to the administration and the deep-pocketed nuclear lobby, it's all perfectly safe. Sure, there's no human invention that's foolproof and, yes, we're talking about making dozens of ripe new targets for terrorists to attack, but haven't the administration and its corporate partners earned our trust?
Nuclear Renaissance
According to Bush administration spin, the mighty atom is a 21st century panacea for the United States' -- and the world's -- most intractable problems. Nuclear energy will free us from our dependence on those "tyrannical regimes" that sponsor global terror, bail out the planet from global warming and avert a new superpower struggle by giving fast-industrializing behemoths like China and India an endless supply of "renewable" energy. Nuclear weapons that we can deploy freely in small conflicts will lock in our global dominance for the rest of the century. And, of course, all this will create lots and lots of high-paying jobs.
It sounds great on paper. But if you look behind the dramatic shifts in U.S. nuclear policy over the course of Bush's presidency, you find an intense lobbying and public relations campaign by a handful of firms that stand to rake in billions from the construction of new civilian reactors, and by a generation of Cold Warriors that lusts after new, more "usable" nukes for their toy chest.
The administration has offered up a series of initiatives that will reshape decades of nuclear policy, both civilian and military. Bush scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and undermined the Test Ban Treaty. And it's not just plans for new bombs and new reactors; he's shifted U.S. policy towards countries like India and Pakistan that developed nukes outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And Bush plans to use Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a repository for the world's nuclear waste, not just our own. It's the linchpin of what the administration hopes will become a new economic order -- superseding OPEC with a nuclear cartel that reads "Made in the USA."
At the heart of Bush's atomic dreams is the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) announced in February. Under the plan, we'll dramatically expand nuclear energy production at home, encourage new nuclear generation abroad and import other countries' spent fuel for reprocessing in the United States.
The idea is to limit the two most sensitive parts of the nuclear cycle -- enrichment and disposal -- to a handful of sites in the United States, Russia and perhaps France and Japan. In January Vladimir Putin announced that one piece of the puzzle -- a joint waste initiative between the United States and Russia -- was a done deal.
The GNEP constitutes a sharp break with decades of American nuclear policy, dating back to Jimmy Carter. He banned nuclear fuel reprocessing in 1977, concluding -- along with the American public -- that the costs were too high and the hazards too great.
According to the administration, GNEP will incorporate "new proliferation-resistant technologies to recover more energy and reduce waste" from spent fuel -- there are an estimated 55,000 tons of the stuff sitting around -- which will "reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation worldwide." But while the first moves have begun -- in addition to the deal with Russia, Bush signed a major, possibly illegal, nuclear agreement with India just last month -- those "proliferation-resistant technologies" are still on the drawing board. As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told the Christian Science Monitor: "What seems rather fanciful about this project is that the fuel-supply aspect appears contingent on proving some highly advanced technology."
It's a different kind of faith-based initiative; Bush is barreling full-speed ahead with his programs and assuming that we'll invent the technology we need to do it all as we go along.
It may be Bush's boldest vision yet, but it's nothing new; like so much we've seen from this administration, Nixon's presidency is the source of inspiration, and his old staff are the agents. In his 1974 State of the Union Address, during the height of the great oil shock, Nixon touted his proposed "Operation Independence," declaring that "1974 must be the year in which we organize a full-scale effort to provide for our energy needs." The plan would have increased the United States' use of nuclear energy in order to break the back of OPEC.
But Nixon's vision of "independence" suffered a meltdown of public opinion and political opposition after the near disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979 -- the most serious accident in the history of American nuclear energy. Since then, the domestic nuclear agenda has been in deep freeze, and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster only strengthened public resolve against restarting it.
On the military side, Bush wants to shrug off decades of constraints and develop a new generation of nukes. Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, noted some of the overlooked provisions in Bush's 2004 defense budget, including the repeal of a 1992 ban on the research and development of "low-yield" nuclear weapons. Our cash outlay for new nukes, given the United States' military supremacy, is stunning:
[T]he Department of Energy is spending an astonishing $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons and President Bush is requesting $6.8 billion more for next year and a total of $30 billion over the following four years. … Measured in "real dollars" (that is, adjusting for inflation), this year's spending on nuclear activities exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent -- again, in real dollars -- throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War.
The military energy complex
While the administration's civilian initiatives have been launched with great fanfare, Bush's revolutionary nuclear weapons policies have been low-key -- no grand pronouncements, no media rollouts. But the line between military nukes and civilian energy is not a clean one. A network of advocacy groups, lobbyists and corporations link the nuclear community together. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) -- known to be firmly in the pocket of the industry -- is charged with overseeing both sides of the atom.
The military and civilian programs are joined by companies like General Electric, a major defense contractor that builds and services civilian reactors (GE stopped manufacturing nuclear weapons in 1992) and Bechtel, which despite an atrocious safety and environmental record, has a $6 billion contract to develop Yucca Mountain, services two-thirds of the civilian plants in the United States (and more overseas), and is part of a consortium that manages the military's Nevada Test Site, where advanced nuclear weapons tests are conducted. Another key player is defense giant Lockheed-Martin -- also part of the Nevada Test Site Team --which runs Sandia National Labs, where both civilian and military research is conducted. Westinghouse, the world's leading manufacturer of civilian reactors, was the government's third-largest nuclear weapons contractor as recently as 1995. The United States' last full-scale nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge Tenessee is managed by a consortium including Bechtel. It took over the contract from Lockheed-Martin in 2000. Bechtel and Westinghouse are both making a fortune cleaning up nuclear facilities across America, both civilian and military.
The nuclear power industry is snuggled up tight with government -- even more cozily than most. The NRC -- supposedly the public's watchdog -- is financed not with tax dollars but by rate payers, meaning through the companies themselves. All the while, a revolving door between business and government spins like a top. According to the National Catholic Reporter, the NRC has seen its "senior staff regularly moving into the nuclear industry as employees and consultants." A General Accounting Office survey in 2000 showed that more than a quarter of all NRC staffers "are considering leaving the agency within a year." "Everyone in any NRC position who can goes to private industry," said one whistleblower.
That's pretty much true across all of the sectors of nuclear technology. Only weeks after the passage of last year's energy bill -- which showered billions on nuclear power operators in direct subsidies and other giveaways-- eyebrows were raised when NBC reported that a key Senate staffer "who helped steer those billions through" did so "in between stints representing nuclear power companies like Exelon" as a major lobbyist. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom ridge joined Exelon's board soon after leaving the administration. According to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign contributions, Dick Cheney, who as former defense secretary and CEO of Halliburton is intimately connected with both the military establishment and the energy industry, is "by far, nuclear power's biggest ally." The Cheneys are heavily invested in Lockheed-Martin; Lynn sits on the company's board of directors.
It's just one big, happy nuclear family.
Who's bold vision is it?
Most of the provisions of GNEP started not in the Department of Energy, but in the corporate suite of the Sandia Corp. Sandia is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin and runs much of the National Nuclear Security Administration's research infrastructure at two enormous campuses in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif.
According to Sandia Lab News, a company newsletter, the GNEP started with a presentation then Vice President (and now Sandia's president) Tom Hunter made to the Department of Energy in 1996:
"Basically, if you run through the chronology, we have been urging some of the things that came out of GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) since 1996," he says. "Our concern as a national security lab has always been that you can't influence nuclear safety, security and proliferation risks at the global level if you're not in the nuclear business [We have to] have an American-based nuclear supply industry that is capable of being a leading supplier across the globe."
"Our role has been invisible leadership," Hunter told the newsletter. The company spent a decade "organizing and articulating the arguments for US leadership from the perspective of … what might happen, domestically and globally, if we don't go forward with nuclear energy." And legislators like Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Harry Reid, D-Neb., and Rep. Joe Barton. R-Texas, were more than receptive to the message -- executives like Sandia's Hunter got exactly what they wanted.
The dollars at stake are massive, and energy deregulation -- predating Bush -- provided huge windfalls for the industry. In the 1990s staid, highly regulated utility companies gave way to nuclear wildcatters. Layers and layers of Limited Liability Companies with no liquidity shielded parent corporations from litigation, and they began to use America's aging nuclear infrastructure to shake some silver out of the treasury.
One of the schemes -- or scams -- that resulted from deregulation is known as "gold mining." The gold is in the form of billions of dollars in funds -- paid by utility ratepayers -- that were established to clean up nuclear generator sites at the end of their life spans.
Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service gave the National Catholic Reporter an example of the money to be made in the shakedown: "AmerGen, which bought [GPU Nuclear Corp.'s] Oyster Creek reactor, basically in a garage sale atmosphere, paid $10 million and intends to inherit over $400 million in decommissioning trust funds."
The new owners operate the reactors as long as they can, and when the plants are decommissioned, they clean up the sites on the cheap (which means poorly). Unused funds aren't returned to the ratepayers -- the firms pocket them.
Buried in K Street's 2005 Energy Bill, along with a mountain of production tax credits and loan guarantees, is a rule change that will free up $1.3 billion in decommissioning funds.
But the most important initiative so far has been the development of Yucca Mountain. Waste disposal is the prerequisite for everything -- for building new plants, for upgrading the nuclear arsenal and for implementing the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.
Lobbying on the project has been hot and heavy since the site was selected in the late 1980s. The location is problematic. According to Public Citizen (PDF):
Yucca Mountain has not proven to be a geologically suitable site to store radioactive waste, which remains deadly for thousands of years. The Yucca Mountain Project would entail tens of thousands of shipments over the nation's roads, rails and rivers, posing innumerable questions about transportation safety in towns and neighborhoods nationwide.
Despite the potential hazards -- Yucca Mountain is perched above a freshwater aquifer in an active earthquake zone -- Public Citizen's report finds that the scientific and safety questions about the project have been "smothered under a mountain of lobbyists," and concludes that "the nuclear industry no doubt anticipates that there is no economic problem, no public health threat, no long-term form of irrational energy policy idiocy that can't be overcome by spending 'what it takes' to influence Congress."
Invisible leadership
Nuclear energy's lobbying arm on Capitol Hill is the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and it's doled out millions to friendly officials. According to Open Secrets, George W. Bush got more money from the nuclear energy industry in 2000 than any other federal candidate. In the 2002 election cycle, "the nuclear power industry [gave] $8.7 million to federal candidates and committees." Seventy percent went to the GOP.
But the nuclear lobby has to do more than buy off legislators; its real challenge is convincing people that a production process that produces tons of the deadliest substances on earth -- waste that stays dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years -- is safe enough to have in their communities. NIMBY is a tall hurdle to clear.
But they're trying. Industry talking points have become ubiquitous on Capitol Hill and in the media; a legion of industry spokespeople repeat the phrase "clean nuclear energy" like a mantra. "Clean" and "green" are always the words of the day.
As the administration's GNEP moves forward, they've stepped up the PR. In January NEI retained PR giant Hill & Knowlton to handle an $8 million campaign to build "policymaker and decision-maker support for nuclear energy broadly and specifically for the Yucca Mountain project.'" In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that NEI was preparing to launch its "clean air campaign," a "multiyear advertising campaign to build public support for a generation of new plants."
But more disturbing than the industry's traditional public relations efforts is the "silent leadership" it's taken in influencing public opinion. The lobby has been caught paying reporters to present "industry's side of the story" and getting university professors to submit op-eds to local newspapers that were "ginned up, assembly-line style, by a Washington, D.C., public relations firm." The lobby helped develop a new curriculum for high school physics students that was put out by the Department of Energy to promote new nukes. Just this month the lobby set up a big-money faux environmental group to shill for its policies; it's already jumped into the debate with a splash.
A potentially fatal lack of imagination
What makes Bush's grand nuclear strategy all the more preposterous is that since 1950, we've been trying -- with zero success -- to figure out what to do with the nuclear waste we already have.
Jon Lamb, writing in Green Left weekly cited a 1996 National Academy of Sciences estimate that found the cost of reprocessing irradiated fuel from U.S. reactors would easily exceed $100 billion. Again, that just covers our existing waste.
And that's probably a very low figure. In 2000, the estimated cost of cleaning up just one site, the Hanford nuclear reprocessing facility, was $4.3 billion. The contract was awarded to Bechtel and, according to Lamb, six years later the estimated cost is "a massive $50 billion to $60 billion, with completion of works by 2035."
In 1993, the Department of Energy estimated that the cost of cleaning up the environmental damage from its enormous nuclear weapons complex could run as high as one trillion dollars. Nobody really knows how much it would actually cost.
Nuclear energy, despite what its boosters say, isn't cheap. There's a global shortage of uranium, and prices have skyrocketed from around $7 per pound to over $40. In addition to enormous cleanup costs, the capital investment in new plants is high -- too high to get Wall Street to bite. So Joe and Jane Taxpayer will subsidize those capital costs heavily, as they have for years. According to Public Citizen (PDF), the government shelled out $115 billion in direct federal subsidies to the industry between 1947 and 1999. To give you a sense of priorities, federal subsidies for wind and solar energy over the same period totaled just $5.7 billion.
What's more troubling than the fact that corporate interests are driving this "nuclear renaissance" -- the NEI's term -- is that these bankrupt policies appear to be the best our government can come up with. They show us the outer limits of our leaders' imaginations, of their political will to effect real change.
We have real energy problems -- global warming, dwindling petroleum supplies and an unhappy marriage to petro-dictatorships. The grotesque tragedy is that this costly, cavalier, Nixon-era nuclear vision constitutes the most ambitious proposal we've seen to address them so far. Dwight Eisenhower once said, "If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it," and that's just what we're doing.
The good news is that Americans have a good deal of horse sense; despite the "clean nukes" campaigns, polls show that two-thirds of Americans oppose new nuclear power. The idea of using nukes for first strikes, or in anything less than an all-out conflagration, is too nutty to even merit a polling question. And Bush's other grand visions have fizzled out and died. Think about Social Security. And who even remembers our epic journey to mars? As the Congress looks at massive deficits and a president that's trying to borrow a nickel's worth of "political capital" from Fox News broadcasters, the bulk of Bush's "nuclear renaissance" will probably, thankfully, die on the vine.
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Post by DT1 on Jul 10, 2006 10:34:48 GMT 4
WORST.PRESIDENT.EVER. If Repubs do not feel a slight twinge of buyer's remorse by now,they should.. If any more proof is required to reach the conclusion that the lights are on,but nobody's home at 1600 Pensylvania Avenue....Bush's Startling Admission to Larry King by Missy Comley Beattie www.opednews.comHave I missed an article about this or did nobody tune to "Larry King Live" for King's "exclusive" and "candid" conversation with George and Laura Bush last Thursday night? I couldn't watch because everything about the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue makes me want to hibernate until they are sent packing. I did, however, read the transcript of the show. King talked with the First Couple in the Blue Room of the White House on the president's 60th birthday, opening the interview with a question about Bush's age: "What does it feel like?" George said, "I feel pretty good, you know. Feel real good, as a matter of fact, really." I kept reading because I wanted to see what the president would say about the Iraq war, a disaster now opposed by the majority of Americans. It was no big surprise that King would only probe Bush's epidermis about the occupation: "Concerning Iraq, do you ever have doubts about it?" And when both Bushes agreed that they haven't lost resolve and that the war in Iraq is making the United States more secure, Larry missed an opportunity to dig a little with a reference to a recent study showing that American terrorism experts say the opposite-that the incursion in Iraq has made us far less safe. George, then, went on to assert that "it's important to deal with problems before they become acute." This was an opportunity for Larry to ask why Bush split for Crawford after papers crossed his desk, warning that terrorists wanted to hijack planes within the United States and fly them into buildings, killing thousands of Americans. Maybe, just maybe, 9/11 wasn't quite "acute" enough. At the least, King should have reminded Bush that Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. After a commercial break, King asked Bush about the war again. "Do you ever go to the funerals?" "No, I don't," Bush replied. When Larry wanted to know why, George continued, "Because it's hard...I want to honor those who sacrificed. I think the best way for me to honor them is to complete the mission..." No confrontation from King that it makes no sense to honor the fallen by sending more to fall. And, then, one of the most illuminating moments-Larry asked Bush, "So there is no doubt, if you had it to do over again, knowing the WMDs weren't there, you'd still go in?" And Bush said, "Yes, This is-we removed a tyrant, who was a weapon-he was an enemy of the United States who harbored terrorists and who had the capacity, at the very minimum, to make weapons of mass destruction. And he was a true threat. Yes, I would have done the same thing." This is an astonishing revelation. After all, the original premise to invade Iraq was to find the WMD and eliminate their threat to Americans. Most assuredly, if Congress had not been convinced by Bush's fabricated intelligence that weapons existed, its members would never have voted to give George Bush the authority to wage a preemptive war with Iraq. Surely, the American public would not have endorsed Bush's actions either. So, here we have George Bush, saying on national television that if he'd known then what he knows now, he'd still have waged this war that's sent almost 2,550 American troops to their deaths and thousands to be wounded (some with severe brain injuries and others with multiple amputations) to take down a tyrant who didn't possess WMD. Where is the outrage over this? Where is the call for justice? I remember watching Larry King when he interviewed Mark Lunsford a couple of days after nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford's body was discovered. King asked the grieving father if he'd done anything to change his murdered daughter's room. I shook my head in disbelief and said, "Yeah, Larry, I boxed up all the stuffed animals, removed everything pink, and put in a pool table and decorated the walls with sports posters." King's questionable and anemic interviewing skills are reason enough that more isn't being made of Bush's startling disclosure-an admission that is characteristically Bushian in its righteous certitude. But there's the added truth that George Bush is painful to watch and hear. Had more Americans listened, there would be a louder, stronger demand for the impeachment of a president who has betrayed the trust of our military, the American people, and the citizens of Iraq. Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She's written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she's a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,'05, she has been writing political articles.
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Post by DT1 on Jul 13, 2006 13:20:28 GMT 4
Just Trust Us! Diary Entry by Jard DeVille An army of clever spin doctors, speaking for a narcissistic triad of radical financial, reactionary political and fundamentally religious power brokers, have long deceived millions of naïve Americans into betraying themselves and the United States. Trust us, is their shameless message. :::::::: You must trust those of us, whom God has blessed with great wealth, wisdom and political power, to do what is best for America. We are God's true believers, who have only this nation's interests at heart, which is why we love and believe our noble, born again president. You must obey him also, because the Cosmic Creator personally selected George W. Bush, giving him the awesome political, financial and spiritual power needed to save our land from ruthless liberal enemies who cannot be trusted. Even wounded veterans such as John Kerry, Max Cleland and John Murtha, who dare to challenge God's anointed leader, lost the respect that shedding their blood in the service of the United States gave them. God called we the power elite to lead the United States back to righteousness through religious traditions and secular values from a glorious age when women were dominated as housewives and broodmares: While minorities sang Old Man River in four part harmony, as they cheerfully dug ditches, chopped cotton and hewed wood for those stronger and more ambitious than they seized the land. Trust us as we replace the messy processes of political and religious democracy with more efficient methods from business and industry, where one right thinking executive has the power to make decisions. Every ambitious person understands that a chaotic Republic must be replaced by a carefully organized empire if America is going to profit ultimately from globalized capitalism. Trust us, even though the creation of a democratic Iraq, while the American Republic is replaced by an empire only appears to be mutually exclusive. Trust them? We are relentlessly propagandized to stoically accept thousands of American kids bleeding to death in a land wracked by ancient tribal hatreds, hobbling home on artificial legs or babbling incoherently with ghastly head wounds. The first rule of warfare is that soldiers suffer and die in combat. The second rule is that their parents and relatives can do nothing to change the first rule -- not when selfish power players of our society delude themselves into believing they are God's chosen rulers of the peasants. This delusion of righteousness brings the narcissistic triad of manipulators face to face with a current dilemma. Even though the oil barons and media moguls, virtually all of them card carrying members of the self-serving aristocracy who are supporting the slaughter, most American men and women have finally seen through their scams. More than two thirds of Americans now realize that George Bush has stupidly blundered into a bloody quagmire of unintended consequences. Three fourths of us understand that the Congress has abandoned any pretense of making responsible decisions. Even as proto-fascist propagandists trumpet every minor success as proof that the Iraqis are winning the conflict, those of us who lived through the Nixon Vietnamization scheme of the Indio-china war, remember how futile a shift to conscript soldiers who hate their corrupt aristocracy, becomes in the face of world class warriors. Although the inconvenient body count from Iraq is now buried on the inside pages of newspapers and disastrous reports are routinely spiked and reported casually by television news programs, resistance to and revulsion with Bush's war is widespread across the country. Obviously, the proto-fascist plan has shrunk to a getting decent interval between our withdrawal and the complete collapse of the Iraq society so the spin doctors can recast our withdrawal as a great and glorious victory. A great many people see that our kids have become bloody sacrifices to a world wide financial scheme that the neo-cons fantasized during a hash pipe dream when the Cold War faded and the Soviet Empire was no longer an opponent to their reactionary dreams of world conquest. I have said all of that to make this point. The only antidote to the abuse of power, whether in interpersonal relationships, in financial institutions, in political organizations or even in religious denominations -- is the application of counter-power. Powerless men and women are by far the most likely to be used and abused by the powerful. The often culturally neurotic or psychopathic manipulators of the world neither hear powerless protests nor respond to complaints, until they are hit between the eyes with a fence post. Or what do you think the American Revolution against the British aristocracy, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution against their elites was all about? Of course, because no privileged class willingly surrenders power or wealth, because our proto-fascists are too narcissistic to surrender their illicit advantages, they continue operating under the pretense of protecting us from whomever they can sell to us as evil enemies at a given time. Manipulators understand that fear always sells better and more immediately to anxious persons than hope does. Actually, the public's fear of terrorism is the only firm grip the Bush administration still has on has on Americans who do not share his scheme of world conquest or at least the creation of a religious theocracy dominated by fundamental clergy and reactionary politicians. Obviously power-brokers who are psychopathic enough to sacrifice thousands of dark faced ghetto and white faced rural farm kids, have their own neurotic reasons to rationalize and justify the slaughter. Nevertheless, their motives are often more complex than simple financial greed. Most high end abusers compromise so much while grubbing for wealth and power that they lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, among decent decisions and evil choices. As George H. W. Bush once muttered, it's a good thing the people don't know what we are really doing or they would hang us from the nearest street light. Of course, this neurotic eagerness to force innocent persons to suffer for one's own wealth, prestige and power, isn't limited to a few aristocratic users and abusers. Narcissism appears to be a near universal aspect of human nature, as it was during slavery, share cropping, segregation of the races in order to insure cheap labor, the wage slavery enforced by robber barons and the schemes of virtually every powerful politician. As the British scholar, Lord Acton observed -- Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more unrestricted powerful many individuals and most groups acquire, when the people they dominate are powerless to resist them, the more dangerous users and abusers become to society. I am convinced that the only antidote to narcissistic behavior is a personal lifestyle that includes spiritual virtues, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices. For example, a generation or so ago a pair of college psychologists recruited a group of college sophomores to role play prisoners and guards from a Friday afternoon until the following Sunday evening. The researchers had set up a mock prison in the basement of a campus building and in order to avoid any self-selection by the kids chose about twenty prisoners and twenty guards in a double blind random process. The newly selected guards were given control of the prisoners by the professors who offered a few guidelines and then faded away to let the kids determine the outcome without any interference. The experiment produced a real revelation about the use and abuse of power. Almost immediately the good kid guards began to tighten the screws on the bad kid prisoners, who actually were their boy and girl friends, team mates, lab partners and etc. with whom they interacted often on the campus. The guards elected a hard nosed football star as their captain and developed a set of rules to control the prisoners. They first prepared a simple document -- the prisoners were instructed to call the guards boss and stand at attention when they were receiving instructions. But -- the use of power didn't level off with those rules. The list grew longer and more restrictive as the guards acquired a taste of power and invented new methods to dominate the prisoners. Soon, they could speak only if spoken to, must obtain permission to eat or get water and could not speak among themselves unless a guard was present. Only with a guard's approval could they sleep, shower or use the toilet. By Saturday noon, permission was being given erratically and capriciously. Prisoners weren't allowed to read or play cards or study for their exams, as the professors had originally planned. The situation became a nightmare of group dynamics gone bad. The guards seemed to have no insights into what would happen in their campus relationships once the exercise ended and they returned to their daily activities. Their hubristic behavior continued to increase swiftly. Many quarrels occurred and several fights broke out and the guards started restraining prisoners physically in their cells in order to maintain law and order. The violence escalated until the appalled professors cancelled the program late Saturday afternoon rather than continuing it for another day. Then, a more revealing lesson was learned a few weeks later when the professors developed several safeguards and resumed the research with reversed roles for the previous guards and prisoners. The psychologists soon discovered they had not chosen an aberrant group of students through the luck of the draw, because the new group of guards, formerly the prisoners, also behaved badly. In other words, the research revealed the conventional wisdom that Lord Acton was right -- Power does indeed tend to corrupt. And this occurs more often when groups assume power, than when individuals interact, because of competition for status and a desire for prestige. A competitive mob mentality really can develop during times of stress. During the thousands of Negro lynching from 1880 to 1950 across the south, many polite and mild manner men and some women ran amok when hidden within the anonymity of a mob. And the vast majority of lynching occurred, when the price of cotton was low or the temperature over a hundred degrees for weeks without relief. Groups give aggressive persons cover and concealment that are not available to them when standing alone to be judged and challenged. A majority of groups that take political, religious or financial control over men and women who are powerless to defend themselves, move step by step, pausing between increments to consolidate their power before making more egregious demands when they discover they can get away with them. American slavery created great wealth for two centuries as financial, political and social control over the helpless laborers grew ever greater. Floggings, emasculations, amputations of runaways' feet, brandings of lazy workers, lynching and sexual assaults became more frequent as abolitionists encouraged slaves to rebel. Virtually no teen age Negro girl was safe from sexual coercion by her owner or his sons. Or where did you think so many light skinned slaves came from? During the civil and gender rights movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies, many politicians and virtually every southern police force grew more violent with black citizens who tried to vote. Many cops escalated their attacks from psychological abuse, to the physical use of fire hoses and police dogs, through blowing up churches with children inside and executing voter registration workers. In other words, an escalation of violence is almost inevitable when psychopathic power brokers dominate people who cannot cause them pain in return. Obviously, that is where we Americans currently find ourselves, given the financial, political and religious situation that currently exists in our country. A financial, political and religious band of true believers have seized control of the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, a Justice Department that refuses to enforce inconvenient laws, a Supreme Court overrun with reactionary justices and even a national health establishment that interferes in our bedrooms. When it was announced that a vaccine had been developed to block the growth of deadly cervical cancer among women, several organizations of fundamental clergy called for it to be suppressed. They claimed anti-viral protection would lead to greater promiscuity among women who would think they were getting a free pass. Evidently, they decided that the death of some thirty thousand American women annually from cervical cancer was more acceptable to God than the unlikely possibility of increased sexual activity due to the vaccine. Not one man or woman in ten thousand, while in the throes of passion, is thinking about a vaccine and only an ideological idiot would think so. Obviously, something beside the health of women is roiling around in the unconscious aspects of such men's souls. Sigmund Freud was absolutely right when he observed that there is something about menstruation, ovulation, intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth and lactation that drive many fundamental preachers and orthodox priests into neurotic attitudes and activities. Really, those who don't play the game have no right to make the rules! Because the Supreme Court is now dominated by political reactionaries, who are appointed for life with no real recall process, they are free to reward the manipulators who have placed them in so prestigious a situation. Neither they nor the power elite have much motivation to deal honestly with the ordinary people of the world who are helpless before them. Quite the opposite occurs as power players take more advantages by consolidating their power through better and better technology. One need not be a psychologist or psychiatrist to understand that a rough reactionary senator of an oil state who insists: Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people -- is a creature of his state's oil barons to whom the concept of global warming is terrifying to say the least. Obviously, the neo-con has made so many self-serving compromises that he can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction. Our youngsters continue to die in a war of Imperial conquest, the world's distrust of the United States increases apace, the middle class is withering away and our children and grandchildren shall be forced to repay a criminal national debt. If the administration's eagerness to repay oil barons, manufacturing moguls, and banking plutocrats, increases global warming exponentially through polluting power plants, automobiles and factories, the unintended consequences may well submerge every coastal city on earth. After all, we have no way of knowing how much damage is already built in the system, even if we stopped the warming processes tomorrow. Global warming along the equator could scorch every crop from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn. Then too, the melting of Greenland's fifty thousand year old glaciers could block the flow of the warming Gulf Stream and start another ice age that would destroy European agriculture for ten thousand years. Not only do the users and abusers of society become more and more domineering as they subdue resistance, they and their spin doctors invent better and better lies in order to convince naïve men and women that black is white, that evil is righteous and that the disastrous decline of America are the natural shifts of capitalism, rather than their systematic betrayal of our nation for their own vested interests. Now do you understand why Thomas Jefferson wrote that America was going to need a political revolution every generation? Narcissistic individuals and their groups grow to powerful and manipulative unless they are thrown down from time to time. The current bunch is firmly in the saddle, and to change the analogy, with the bit in their teeth, there has been almost nothing frustrated citizens could do about the continuous abuse of power. Because of the anxiety that gripped Americans after the attack on 9/11, most citizens gave free rein to the Bush faction in order to protect America -- while the neo-cons seized the opportunity to harness that fear so as to finalize their power first in the United States and then across the world. They understood there would be swift military victories in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Unfortunately, they also convinced themselves that our troops would be accepted as liberators rather than as infidel occupiers. It was the worst display of unintended consequences since the Vietnam debacle when about two hundred thousand Americans were slain or wounded for all the wrong reasons. Of course, it is never the aristocracy's boys and girls bleeding to death in the sand. Every war is a rich man's war but a poor boy's fight. The smoke from the 9/11 attack was still rising over Manhattan when his decades long plan to invade Iraq was dusted off by Dick Cheney. His scheme was use the attack as an excuse to create an American financial and military center in an oil producing nation firmly under our control in the Middle East old patch. From those bases the oil companies would be able to dominate Middle Eastern petroleum production. Of course, since that scheme wouldn't persuade the voters, the spin doctors invented a search for fictional weapons of mass destruction. Fear is always more persuasive than hope in threatening situations. Then, when the U M D's proved to be a spurious scam, the propagandists switched stories -- gracefully or otherwise, to sell a Jeffersonian democracy plan more to American voters than to tribal Muslims who have been at one another's throats for a thousand years. Surely, you can see the declining cooperation between classes as our citizens lose more and more power to the proto-fascists who are manipulating us without fear of retaliation because of their financial and political clout. But, the longer we stay in Iraq and the more the three warring factions there battle one another, the greater shall be the influence of the Iranian mullahs. They are just as convinced as fundamental Christians are of their creation of an American theocracy, that they have been called by God to establish a vast Islamic empire that stretches from Syria and Turkey to Malaysia and Indonesia. Of course, Bush and Cheney et al are completely capable of commanding another invasion, against Iran now that it is far more powerful than Saudi Arabia, Iraq and all the smaller oil nations lumped together. This is why the administration is so determined to block the enrichment of weapons grade uranium by Iran. Not even a mad president would dare attack a nation that could detonate nuclear weapons in half a dozen American seaports from innocent appearing freighters. Everything vicious the narcissistic Bush proto-fascists concocted for foreigners, has potentially devastating consequences for ourselves. The elitists and their violent hatchet men see no difference between Muslins who challenge them overseas and Quakers or Methodists who oppose them at home. Many of the manipulators have become global in attitude and behavior -- they'd as soon live in Monaco or London as in America. Abusers may begin their battles against dark skinned Arabs but they seldom have great spiritual epiphanies that turn them into saints. This slippery slope downward leads to constant electronic surveillance, the obscenity of secret courts without legitimate charges, imprisonment with no evidence required, a lack of legal counsel and with torture cells in lands where state sponsored terror is the rule and midnight redaction is a way of life and death for anyone who annoys the power brokers. Only the most naive of Americans would accept this from our home grown users and abusers, in order to punish foreigners, if they understood that the shift of abuse from foreigners to themselves is but a single vote in the Congress away. Even so, most of the politicians who almost automatically vote against their constituents, have so artfully redistricted the states that it seems doubtful they can be unseated in time to save our democracy from deteriorating into a world empire that intends to fight countless wars and may destroy our civilization through global warming. Lord MacCaulay was the leading historian of the First British Empire. He wrote that of the twenty-two civilizations that left their footprints on Earth, all but two of them collapsed from internal pressures created by their aristocratic groups. He concluded that virtually all civilizations, empires, kingdoms, nations, corporations, cities and clans commit suicide because they create so many selfish vested interest groups that they cannot adapt when they must change their values, assumptions and practices or perish. When the Confederacy was running out of manpower late in the Civil War, Robert E. Lee tried unsuccessfully to have his Rebel Congress offer freedom and small farms to several million male slaves if they would enlist and fight in his Army of Northern Virginia. The vested politicians dithered and dallied for a year, arguing about a plethora of excuses, including the fiction that Negroes were too cowardly or too ignorant to become soldiers. Actually, Lee's plan was blocked because the Congressional slave owners were unwilling to admit their slaves really were men who could fight for their freedom and of course, resisted the changes that would put their property in harm's way. The United States Congress on the other hand, decided that since the war was being fought to free the slaves, Negroes could form regiments and fight alongside white Union forces. The young black men whom the southern political and financial aristocrats assumed wouldn't volunteer and were not brave enough to fight, formed seventy or more infantry regiments of a thousand men each and fought like tigers to defeat the slave holders from whom they'd found another avenue to freedom. History might have turned out differently, had another seventy or eighty thousand courageous men been fighting for their freedom with Lee, when Grant came south to Richmond in July of eighteen sixty-four. Perhaps General Hayden is an honest American whose only offense when creating his secret telephone surveillance system was having played the bureaucratic power game well enough to satisfy George Bush's fear of strangers coming into his administration. I do indeed hope he is a patriot who can resurrect the C I A after a viciously reactionary Goss almost strangled it. It could be that Gonzales is an unrecognized legal eagle rather than a Texas lightweight who invented justifications to torture prisoners who may or may not be guilty by cleverly parsing definitions. Perhaps Cheney didn't intend to give the store to the oil barons with his energy policies -- and then planed the invasion of Iraq in order to plant the emerging American Empire in the center of the Middle East's oil reserves. It isn't impossible that Chief Justice Roberts will lead the Supreme Court toward a commitment to justice for all Americans once more. It isn't his lack of intelligence or his charm that comes to mind, but his proto-fascist rulings that determined who would win the spoils of globalization. Perhaps Rumsfeld actually planned a brilliant victory in Iraq -- one that his ignorant generals botched. Then, just maybe, George Bush isn't selling the middle class down the river into the cane fields of globalization -- in order to enrich the aristocracy that already controls almost ninety percent of American wealth. Just possibly, a bit of those vast American riches the Administration's pet economists boast so much about, shall trickle down to the people. Perhaps, but with the almost universal collapse of morality by self-centered power brokers who have seized unlimited reactionary political, proto-fascist financial and fundamental religious control over the United States, only naïve idiots and the wannabe abusers who share their ruthless mind-sets, believe them willing to do what is right for America. To trust these narcissistic power players with something as precious as the future of the American Republic -- who are you kidding? JARD DeVILLE is the author, founder and co-owner with his daughter, Dee, of THE FULFILLMENT FORUM. The FORUM is the publisher and purveyor of the list of fine e-books at www.fulfillmentforum.com. He has published more than a score psychology books, seminars, assessment instruments and novels and was psychology professor and chair at Olivet and Westminster Colleges. He taught leadership psychology seminars for years at the Universities of Wisconsin, Indiana, Purdue and Arizona and for executives and managers of major firms from New York, Chicago, Seattle, Miami, Los Angeles, Singapore, Brisbane, Auckland et al. He served as a pastor in a fundamental religious denomination for seven years before resigning because of the cruel racism and sexism rampant there.
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DT1
Moderator
You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
Posts: 428
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Post by DT1 on Jul 23, 2006 23:20:34 GMT 4
The Ballad of Dumb George By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Perspective Friday 21 July 2006 I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. - "The Ultimate Flame," author unknown George W. Bush is a good man, word has it. He's plain-spoken, they say. A regular fella. A good guy to have a beer with, except he supposedly doesn't drink anymore. I wish, more than anything, that he were drinking. I wish he were drinking all the time. I wish, oh how I wish, that he were stand-up-fall-down-ralphing-down-his-shirt loaded every minute of every day. It would be a comfort, simply because it would explain a great many things. Having a drunk for a president is, after all, a fixable situation. Put him to bed at Camp David for a few weeks and surround him with Secret Service agents. Let his body clean itself out. Problem solved, and really, would anyone actually notice his absence? I don't believe Bush has gotten off the sauce, if truth be told. I know more than a few boozers who, like George, periodically show up with odd wounds on their faces they got from falling over or running into walls. The injuries that appear on George's mien from time to time can perhaps be explained away - maybe Dick Cheney is stalking the halls with a shotgun loaded with rock salt and blasting anyone, even the boss, who gets in his way - but if "George still drinks" were up on the big board at the MGM Grand sports book, I'd take the bet no matter what the oddsmakers had to say. Having a drunk for a president is manageable. Having a stone bozo for a president, on the other hand, is a calamity of global proportions. Let's take a walk through the last few days. George winged off to Russia for trade talks at the G-8 summit, and managed in the course of 100 hours to embarrass himself and our entire country. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is smarter than Bush by several orders of magnitude, insulted George in front of the international press corps with a tight quip about "democracy" in Iraq. No trade deal got done. The whole thing was a humiliating waste of time, captured best by all the photos of Bush and Putin together. In each and every one of them, Putin is looking at George with an expression that somehow conveyed disgust, disdain and awe simultaneously. Putin's disgust and disdain are easily understood - the poor guy was trapped in a room with our knucklehead president for hours, after all - but the awe requires notice. What, Putin must have thought, is this fool doing running a country? After that came the much-noted open-mike gaffe, during which George dropped an s-bomb while discussing the Middle East crisis with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The cussing doesn't trouble me - those who know say that John F. Kennedy swore like a sailor whenever he talked shop - but the rest of the scene was like something out of a high school cafeteria. Bush sat there, talking with what looked like seventeen doughnuts stuffed into his gob, while poor Tony tried to discuss matters of life and death. You have to listen to the audio to get a full grasp of what transpired. It wasn't just the dialogue. It was the tone in Blair's voice. He sounded for all the world like a teacher attempting to explain something to an exceptionally dull student. His tone suggested infinite patience and a touch of true sadness, as if he could not quite believe he was speaking this way to an American president. "It takes him eight hours to fly home," said George at one point during the open-mike massacre. "Eight hours. Russia's big and so is China." He was, presumably, speaking to someone about Chinese President Hu Jintao's travel requirements, but really now. Huffington Post writer Cenk Uygur captured the unbelievable vapidity of the discourse. "Russia's big and so is China?" exclaimed Uygur. "This guys sounds like a third grader. Do you know anyone who would have a conversation like this with their neighbor, let alone a business associate, let alone a world leader? Who's proud to know that Russia is big and so is China? If someone is this ignorant, they're usually embarrassed and try not to talk much. But this guy is so dumb he has no idea how dumb he is. This sounds like a conversation you might have with a child, a mentally challenged child. Johnny, do you know how big Russia is? How about China? This would all be unfortunate if George were your dentist, or worse yet, your accountant. But he is the leader of the free world. This man makes life or death decisions every day. If you say you're not scared about that, you're lying." Then came the pig-roast thing. Newsday described it best: "As Israeli warplanes were preparing an attack on Lebanon Thursday afternoon, and a Lebanese militia was aiming a rocket at the ancient Israeli city of Safed, President George W. Bush was bantering with reporters in Germany about a pig. Bush kept bringing up the roast wild boar he was about to dine on at a banquet that night, even when asked about the swelling crisis in the Middle East, where pig meat is forbidden to religious Jews and Muslims. 'Does it concern you that the Beirut airport has been bombed?' a reporter asked. 'And do you see a risk of triggering a wider war?' 'I thought you were going to ask me about the pig,' Bush replied blithely. Then he brought the pig up again - for the fifth time - before giving a long answer that ended with his saying Israel needed to protect itself." After this came the moment when George tried to give German Chancellor Angela Merkel a back massage while she was speaking to someone at the summit table. He sidled up behind her and just started rubbing. Merkel's reaction was instantaneous and dramatic: she flinched, flailed her arms up and basically waved the president of the United States away from her. Her reaction would have been no different if Bush had dropped a live catfish down the back of her shirt. What's next? Will George go to the United Nations, sit on Kofi Annan's head, and fart like some bratty brother tormenting a sibling? Will the cameras catch him playing penny hockey during Middle East peace negotiations? You can't say it'll never happen. It reminds me of the scene from "Caddyshack" where the golfers are hiding in the bushes and betting on whether the Smails kid picks his nose. It is not too farfetched a concept to believe that the other G-8 leaders were doing something very similar while watching Bush. There were, by my count, no less than twenty different moments in the last few days where George brought shame and disgrace upon this country. He did not do this by being too tough, or too soft, or too strident. He did this simply by being himself. His head is an echo chamber where very stupid bats roost. He has the intellect of a bag of rocks. Maybe it's impolite to say this, but it has to be said. And yeah, Mr. Uygur, it is really, really scary. I wish the man were a drunk. I'd sleep better, and so would the world. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
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DT1
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You know, it's not like I wanted to be right about all of this...
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Post by DT1 on Sept 2, 2006 8:22:56 GMT 4
PENTAGON MOVES TOWARDS MONITORING MEDIA
WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. command in Baghdad is seeking bidders for a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for monitoring the tone of Iraq news stories filed by U.S. and foreign media.
Proposals, due Sept. 6, ask companies to show how they'll "provide continuous monitoring and near-real time reporting of Iraqi, pan-Arabic, international, and U.S. media," according to the solicitation issued last week.
Contractors also will be evaluated on how they will provide analytical reports and customized briefings to the military, "including, but not limited to tone (positive, neutral, negative) and scope of media coverage."
The winner of the contract will likely also be required to develop an Arabic version of the multinational force's web site.
Attempts by The Associated Press to contact officials connected to the project via telephone and e-mail were not successful Thursday night.
The program comes during what has appeared to be a White House effort, before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, to take the offensive against critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq.
President Bush addressed the American Legion's national convention in Salt Lake City on the issue Thursday, stressing that a U.S. pullout from iraq would lead to its conquest by America's worst enemies.
He continued a theme set by both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when they spoke to the administration-friendly group earlier in the week.
The military last year was criticized for a public relations program in Iraq that included hiring a consulting firm that paid Iraqi news media to carry news stories written by American troops.
Pentagon officials have defended the program as a necessary tool in the war on terror. But critics have said it contradicts American values of freedom of the press.
Mod's note:If you like how these guys handle the press,you will love how they handle(our)money... ""The budget caps were busted, mightily so. And we are reviewing with people like Judd Gregg from New Hampshire and others some budgetary reform measures that will reinstate—you know, possibly reinstate budgetary discipline. But the caps no longer—the caps, I guess they're there. But they didn't mean much." —GW Bush,Washington, D.C., Feb. 5, 2001
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