Hmmm, this is not good.
With so much going on in the news recently, I missed this the first go-around. It seems that - on top of all their other woes - New Orleans citizens were locked out from a court-ordered city council meeting called to allegedly discuss the demolition of 4,500 housing units by HUD. Protesting citizens who managed to be present inside the council's chambers were tazered and allegedly clubbed by police.
The upshot of the meeting is that the council voted unanimously to raze the housing; apparently, as far as the city council is concerned, the residents can now return to their tents, if they have them.
In closely related news, federal investigators are looking into possible illegal kick-back activity by HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson and his assistant, Scott Keller, both Republican appointees.
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From the Statement of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/s...current-events
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The Parade of Fools"Then I am astonished that you would think such a -- such a torture would be inflicted on anyone in our -- who we are held captive and anyone could believe that that's not torture. It's in violation of the Geneva Convention. It's in violation of existing law. And, governor, let me tell you, if we're going to get the high ground in this world and we're going to be the America that we have cherished and loved for more than 200 years, we're not going to torture people. We're not going to do what Pol Pot did. We're not going to do what's being done to Burmese monks as we speak.
"I suggest that you talk to retired military officers and active duty military officers like Colin Powell and others, and how in the world anybody could think that that kind of thing could be inflicted by Americans on people who are held in our custody is absolutely beyond me."
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In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level technician for a special job whose details were secret.
[...]
His first inkling that something was amiss came...when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
[...]
"That's when my antennas started to go up," he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.
The job entailed building a "secret room" in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.
"That was my 'aha!' moment," Klein said. "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room."
The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.
"This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style," he said. "The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T's customers but everybody's."
One of Klein's documents listed links to 16 entities, including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern Virginia now owned by Verizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local, long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas; and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange, facilities where telecom carriers hand off Internet traffic to each other.
"I flipped out," he said. "They're copying the whole Internet. There's no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything."
[...]
Klein is in Washington urging Congress not to block Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action suit pending in federal court in San Francisco, as well as 37 other lawsuits charging carriers with illegally collaborating with the NSA. He was accompanied yesterday by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed Hepting v. AT&T in 2006. Together, they are urging key U.S. senators to oppose a pending White House-endorsed immunity provision that would effectively wipe out the lawsuits. The Judiciary Committee is expected to take up the measure Thursday.
- Washington Post (11/7/07) [emphasis mine]
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Rising sea levels will create new seashore in North America
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For some time now I have been tracking the developments as this administration pushes for a strike on Iran, if not a full-blown bombing campaign. While real progressives shy away from any expansion of the conflict in the Middle East, it has become increasingly apparent that many leading figures, including, evidently, the entire Senate (with only a couple of exceptions) buy into the notion of some sort of punishing blow on Iran, probably quite soon.
To name but one prominent Senator who recently voted up the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, on Amy Goodman’s recent “Democracy Now!” radio program, Hillary Clinton actually laughed at Senator Mike Gravel when he violently protested her vote on Kyl-Lieberman. This was followed by Seymour Hersh's observation that she was beholden to "Jewish money", by which he meant AIPAC and the rabid pro-Zionists in her New York constituency. What Senator Gravel (and any number of commentators as well) missed was the full extent of his misapprehension – Hillary’s laughter was of a two natured kind: the laugh of the guilty party who has been found out and affects a cavalier attitude, and hysterical relief that Gravel had not revealed her more basic rational, one that Gravel is either not privy to or has not signed on for.
In her heart of hearts, Hillary Clinton is a fervid believer - along with the majority of the Democrats and Republican leadership in Congress - in the US policy of Full Spectrum Dominance in support of corporate transnationalism, aka “globalization.” [See below]
… the "moderates" in the[Bush] administration, as well as the leading Democratic candidates and virtually everyone in the Democratic Party leadership -- have been supporting the threat of war against Iran for years, in large part because they share the illusions of power that go with being the militarily dominant state in the world. [Their] chief illusion is that one can and should use U.S. power to coerce an uncooperative state.
The entire spectrum of political leadership in this country now appears to accept that idea, which is an indication of just how far U.S. military dominance has tilted the policy debate in this country. - Gareth Porter in The Huffington Post (my emphasis)
Key policy makers going back to the Wilson administration have been pushing for total American military hegemony. In this policy - backed by the über-rich for whom these policies were designed - they were joined by the Neoliberal economic cheerleaders (including the Clintons), because it means complete American military, political and economic control of the world and outer space.
Simply put, this policy is most recent revision of the philosophy - first formulated by President Woodrow Wilson - that the United States must carry “democracy” (not to mention American commercial interests) to less enlightened states, by force if necessary.
President Wilson’s vision was one that some political scientists call “moral.” In modern times, this has been transmogrified and revised into what some call transnationalism, or globalization. These policies are not subject to public debate, by the way, but arise from the secret meetings of economic cabals such as the Bilderberg Group and Rockefeller’s only slightly more public Trilateral Commission. These cabals are not composed of darkly evil people looking to be the masterminds behind One World government; they all believe that they are helping to build a more humane, just and economically-flattened transnational world; to Tom Friedmanize the planet, as it were. To a realist’s eye, it’s all hokum, of course; just gussied-up royal prerogative. On the other hand, it bears repeating that J. Paul Bremer, prior to his appointment as governor pro tem of Iraq, was the president of Kissinger Associates, advisors to transnational corporations looking to make a fast buck in Third World countries. Closely associated with the Clintons is Mack McLarty, a Kissinger alum. As Adam Smith might put it, they are all motivated by pure greed.
In this regard, one only has to look at Bill Clinton’s bombing and invasion of Bosnia to confirm that the Clintons are of the same mind on the use of military might in pursuit of foreign policy goals. It’s also worth mentioning that this is one of the core beliefs of the Neoconservatives: the promotion of democracy and Neoliberal economic policy to benighted régimes, regardless of the social or cultural milieu that underlie monarchial, authoritarian, and/or theocratic states such as Iran or even Saudi Arabia.
As for our relations with democratic states whose economic policies aren’t in sync with ours, it is significant that when it was revealed that the Bush administration actively helped plan and finance the military coup that ousted democratically-elected Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in 2002, Hillary – or any other leading senator for that matter - didn’t utter so much as a squeak.
The whole point is, of course, control of the oil, and with it, the economic destiny of the world.
Additional sources:
1) Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992)
2) Simon Reich, What is Globalization? Four Possible Answers (The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, 1998)
3) Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
4) Howard Zinn, The Uses of History (from a broadcast on Democracy Now!, 11/24/06)
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General David Howard Petraeus“Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven bigger than the entire continent of Europe.
“Needless to say, this is nonsense. Israel has fought war after war in the Middle East. Result: no regional conflagration. Iran and Iraq fought one of the bloodiest wars of the second half the 20th century. Result: no regional conflagration. The Soviets fought in Afghanistan and then withdrew. No regional conflagration. The U.S. fought the Gulf War and then left. No regional conflagration. Algeria fought an internal civil war for a decade. No regional conflagration.
“So where does this bogeyman come from? Hard to say. Probably a deep-seated unwillingness to confront the fact that the United States can’t really influence a course of events we originally set in motion. But Iraq is already fighting a civil war, and that civil war will continue whether we stay or go. If we go it will likely become more intense, but also shorter lived. The eventual result, however, will almost certainly be the same: a de facto independent Kurdistan in the north and a Shiite theocracy in the south. The rest of the Middle East will, as usual, watch events unfold without doing much of anything about them, and will accept the inevitable results. The U.S., for its part, will remain in the north to protect Kurdistan, in the east in Afghanistan, in the west in the Mediterranean, and in the south in its bases in the Gulf. We’ll hardly be absent from the region.
“I think it’s worthwhile for proponents of withdrawal to be honest about the likely aftermath of pulling out: an intensified civil war that will take the lives of tens of thousands and end in the installation, at least in the short-term, of an Iran-friendly theocracy. This is obviously not a happy outcome, but neither is it the catastrophe the Chaos Hawks peddle. The alternative is to babysit the civil war with American troops, spilling blood and treasure along the way, without truly affecting the course of events in any substantial measure."
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Cold War air warrior returnsWith a range of thousands of miles (approx. 15,000 kilometers) and capable of delivering megatons of nuclear bombs - or several atomic-warheaded cruise missiles - into the heartland of America, the Tu-95 Tupolev (NATO code name "Bear") gave the boys at Strategic Air Command their paycheck's worth of interception training, not to mention keeping their radar skills sharp.
As an aircraft buff, it's nice to see these relics up and flying and providing the Air National Guard with some real-time training.
Look for contrails near you soon.
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There are only two months to go until General Petraeus presents his assessment of the Surge; Senate Repugs are battling Dems to a standstill in the ongoing debate about defunding the troops preparatory to a withdrawal from Iraq; and we're hearing lots of paranoid noise across the Internet about a possible false flag operation that would allow the Shrub to assume dictatorial powers and Take Over the World.
This operation would theoretically take the form of a terrorist incident of such scope and mendacity that all Americans will quake in their collective boots and will cry out for a total lockdown of the country. The scenario calls for the Shrub to declare a National Emergency and invoke his authority under the Warner Appropriations Act of 2007 (HR-5212) to federalize the National Guard – or what’s left of them; he then sends Congress home and begins the roundup of the usual suspects while simultaneously nuking Iran with bunker busters.
Granted, there’s lots of craziness going on lately and people who worry about these things have lots of things to be worried about; presidential hopeful Senator John McCain recently sang - to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” - “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” to a cheering American Legion audience; Department of Homeland (sic) Security chief Michael Chertoff recently announced that he had an attack of stomach gas and this inspired him to announce with near-certainty a terrorist attack on the Homeland - wherever that might be - “sometime this summer.” Adding fuel to the paranoia is the existence of Executive Order 12919, an obnoxious piece of gobbeldygook originating in the Clinton administration. (You really need to follow that link; the list of executive orders concerning federalization of private property alone is enough to make one very, very nervous.)
This EO is a controversial (but not controversial enough, IMHO) document which theoretically streamlines federal governmental response (and executive consolidation of power, e.g. the “unitary executive”) in the event of a catastrophic event such as a nuclear war or asteroid strike, although it presumably could be triggered by something as minor as a threat to poison the water supply of a major American city. The signing of this document was enough to trigger mass hysteria and hand-wringing among the more sensitive of civil libertarians, and perhaps rightly so, as members of Congress apparently never even heard of this stealth EO until it hit the blogosphere. (The “liberal” mainstream media ignored it completely.)
Unasked in all this anxiety and fretting is the question, who’s going to do all this taking-over and martial-lawing? Have any of these people (whether conspirator or anti-conspirator) ever looked at a map of the United States? Its one thing for a president to declare martial law for a continent-spanning country and quite another to have it actually go into effect.
Consider this: It’s about 3,100 miles from Washington, D.C. to Seattle, Washington. (That’s roughly the distance from London to Teheran, Iran.) Let’s say some idiot terrorist bombs the Holland Tunnel in New York state, the Shrub declares a national emergency and calls out the troops. According to the paranoids, the plan is to bring in National Guard units from distant states; this reduces the odds that the troops will be likely to resist orders to shoot “dissenters” and “protesters” because they are not fellow staters; further, out-of-state Guardsmen will have no compunction in shooting, clubbing, or herding non-fellow states-people into “internment camps.”
But is that true? It seems to me that the National Guard of any state has just about had it with this president. And anyway, how do you get these Guardsmen across the country? How do you get the governor of Washington state (for instance) to release the troops to federal control, or better yet, why would the governor of Washington state even call the Guard up in the first place, only to have it federalized right out from under him?
Governors aren’t stupid; they can very plainly see what the feds have done with their Guard units in Iraq. Ditto for the officers and certainly ditto for the Guardsmen themselves. In the event of a true national emergency, any sane governor will want his Guardsmen at home where he can use them when and as he (or she) sees fit. Additionally, how do you force a governor to call out the Guard? Have a federal marshal put a gun to his or her head? No, this “martial law” thing is one big can of worms for all concerned and, I submit, an unnecessary worry.
So how about a military coup? Considering that most of the paranoid scenarios call for – simultaneously - a declaration of martial law, a nuclear attack on Iran, and the rounding up of civilians all over the country, we’re talking about a fucking revolution right there. It’s far more likely that the governor of a big state (or several governors of several states) calls out the National Guard and sends it to Washington, D.C. to arrest the president and anybody else hanging around the White House.
And about bloody time, if you ask me.
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Shiva Lingam
Those darn furriners are invading the Senate with their heathen religion, gosh darn it.
And oh-oh, watch out: thems is live hyperlinks.
July 10, 2007
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Hindu to open Senate with prayer
Send an email to your senator now, expressing your disappointment in the Senate decision to invite a Hindu to open the session with prayer.
Dear GLENN,
Please read this news report from OneNewsNow.com.
On Thursday, a Hindu chaplain from Reno, Nevada, by the name of Rajan Zed is scheduled to deliver the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate. Zed tells the Las Vegas Sun that in his prayer he will likely include references to ancient Hindu scriptures, including Rig Veda, Upanishards, and Bhagavard-Gita. Historians believe it will be the first Hindu prayer ever read at the Senate since it was formed in 1789.
WallBuilders president David Barton is questioning why the U.S. government is seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god. Barton points out that since Hindus worship multiple gods, the prayer will be completely outside the American paradigm, flying in the face of the American motto "One Nation Under God."
TAKE ACTION – Call your Senators at 202-224-3121
"In Hindu, you have not one God, but many, many, many, many, many gods," the Christian historian explains. "And certainly that was never in the minds of those who did the Constitution, did the Declaration [of Independence] when they talked about Creator -- that's not one that fits here because we don't know which creator we're talking about within the Hindu religion."
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Barton says given the fact that Hindus are a tiny constituency of the American public, he questions the motivation of Senate leaders. "This is not a religion that has produced great things in the world," he observes. "You look at India, you look at Nepal -- there's persecution going in both of those countries that is gendered by the religious belief that is present there, and Hindu dominates in both of those countries."
And while Barton acknowledges there is not constitutional problem with a Hindu prayer in the Senate, he wonders about the political side of it. "One definitely wonders about the pragmatic side of it," he says. "What is the message, and why is the message needed? And will it actually communicate anything other than engender with folks like me a lot of questions?"
Barton says he knows of at least seven cases where Christians have lost their bid to express their own faith in a public prayer.
Zed is reportedly the first Hindu to deliver opening prayers in an American state legislature, having done so in both the Nevada State Assembly and Nevada State Senate earlier this year. He has stated that Thursday's prayer will be "universal in approach," despite being drawn from Hindu religious texts.
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Om, padme, om
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Credit: iamtherevolution[dot]org"No one wanted to see a fare increase and it's probably true that we'll probably will lose some riders," said [LA County] County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who co-authored the plan with Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. "But I think in the long run, we owe to this community a stable organization." - Long Beach Press-Telegram
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"We are aware that the US bears high responsibility for the situation in the world, and I would like to stress that the United States and President Bush have our support in that." - Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus
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