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| Updated-- Mad Cow Greetings! See you in the New Year! |
| 12.29.03 (5:36 pm) [edit] |
[i] Note: when I refer to Global Warming, I don't mean the natural phenomenon of Global Warming on earth that allows life on earth, I'm referring to man's manipulation of the environment to increase the effects of Global Warming. Seems like a small point, but you have to be clear about these things. [/i]
The single Mad Cow disease case in the US that has allowed the media to overreact and the rest of the world to "legally" shut down the US beef market, costing millions and millions of dollars to our economy, apparently did come from Canada, just as I had predicted and took some heat for. The cattle was, from what I hear, sold before the US banned Canadian beef, and the cow was infected with Canadian feed. For some reason, the Left doesn't seem to mind the jobs lost, and the families ruined, by the fallout from this. But then, they don't really care about farmers anyway-- they just say they do.
Barring an emergency, I won't be back blogging until the new year starts. I've been enjoying my Christmas gifts and relaxing more. Among the books I received this Christmas are Robert Bork's [i]Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges[/i] and Bernard Lewis' [i]What went wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East[/i]. The former I recommend, my only real criticism of it being-- so far-- is it is a little slim. Lewis' book isn't bad, either, but it is written in a dry style. His effort does present the rise and fall of the Islamic empire clearly, though, which is good because nothing, it seems, is clear about the Middle East.
So I will be back with more political blogs in 2004. And what a year this is shaping up to be. Some of the major stuff that will happen in 2004, barring a miracle:
*Bush's 9-11 commission will most likely try to haul him in to testify and blame his administration for not
catching 9-11 before it happened, even though the administration inherited Clinton's bureacracy and was in the early stages of reforming the FBI, CIA, etc. Look for Keane's commission to haul in Clinton, too, but throw at him the kind of softball questions that Larry King might throw at Bill Cosby.
*North Korea and China, Japan, Russia, the US, and South Korea will all try, and probably fail, to get North Korea to relinquish its nukes, built in violation of the NPT, a bilateral treaty with South Korea, and the disasterous Agreed Framework. The US will be blamed for the talks' failure. I've read some reports that North Korea plans to storm the DMZ if the talks fail. That should be something.
*The Iraq 'quagmire' will continue, and the Left will continue to lie to the American people through its media and shut out or distort military and foreign policy achievements over there. Meanwhile, the US will be faced with the ultimate challenge: how to make sure that Iraq doesn't turn into a Shiite radical Islamic republic, while at the same time trying to avoid civil war among the Kurds (who now want a federal state), the Sunnis (who feel rejected now and are in fear of Shiite revenge) and the Shiites (who are heavily influenced by Iran and are going around threatening minorities with death). All of this is supposed to happen by June. I hope it does, I hope something gets worked out-- but I fear that the government left behind will only be marginally better than the one we displaced.
*The war on terror, of which Iraq is a part of, will continue. The Left's argument, when not focusing on Iraq, will be either domestic security, bin Laden, or both. Actually, the dream sequence for the Left is for bin Laden to murder thousands of Americans on US soil again, perhaps through Canada or Mexico, so they can blame Bush for not securing anyone and hope to win an election.
*The world-wide war against Israel, or as the media calls it, the "Palestinian-Israeli", or "Arab-Israeli" conflict will continue to rage on, with the world refusing to see the "conflict" for what it really is while treating the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority as legitimate seekers of peace. Look for a major nation other than the US to get involved unilaterally.
*Taiwan will provoke war with China by holding a simple referendum. The US will either get involved and sacrifice many lives in a war with China-- including citizens of the west coast of the US (and remember, the Left wants this-- they keep talking about how Taiwan, a country the US is legally bound to protect, has a right to declare, in the shadow of a hostile nation with 2 million soldiers, its independence from the hostile nation), or it will do nothing, leaving Taiwan out to dry. Either way, Bush is a unilateralist cowboy who hates democracy.
*The US economy will continue to do well, though not as spectacular as the third quarter, and that will be a failure. Also, there will still be job losses because of the nature of our post-NAFTA recovery. The canard (there's that word again!) that Bush's 'policies' made the poor poorer doesn't make any sense, and can't be proven, but that's not the aim of the Left anyway: they just repeat the Big Lie through the media and people wind up believing it.
*The Supremes (SCOTUS) will continue to issue baffling rulings that invent new rights and rely on foreign courts. 2004 could be the year that SCOTUS will finally pull the plug on our brain-dead Constitution. As we saw in 2003, with the squashing of the 1st amendment (you have no right to criticize the government-- Campaign Finance Reform), 14th amendment (reverse racism is ok!-- Michigan case), and the 10th amendment (legislatures cannot legislate, and the majority is evil to the elites-- Texas sodomy case), this so called "right wing" court (only the FAR Left say this, those that would say Marx was of the right) will continue to adventure in despotism over the US.
*The "cease-fire" between India and Pakistan will not last. Never before have there been two nuclear states adjacent to each other at war. Why no one cares about this is beyond me: the next nuclear war will be over Kashmir, between Pakistan and India. And, if Pakistan's president fails to keep dodging bullets and bombs, and a radical Islamic leadership arises in Pakistan, war is almost assured. The US has a contingency plan to invade Pakistan and take over its nuke controls if the country goes to war. The possibility of this happening is very great.
*Look for more heat-related problems in the summer that will cause the world to blame man's affect on Global Warming and, hence, the US. If it gets above 88 degrees someone is going to go ape. Although I am not a "scientist" and, therefore, am not amply qualified to call someone else names, I will say, though that man's affect Global Warming is far from proven, is actually well demolished, and is just a political cause to get the US to destroy its economy via Kyoto (which sane "scientists" have said won't reverse the phenomenon of Global Warming anyway).
*Look for Russia, India, and China to all proliferate in nuclear arms and use US missile defense as a pretext.
*Look for the US or Israel to act in some military capacity against Iran.
*Look for the US to get pounded at the WTO on trade. What the G-20 wants is for the US to redistribute its wealth to the third world, instead of these countries actually redistributing its own wealth to its own poor (why do China, India, and Brazil need space and nuclear programs again???).
*The EU will unilaterally act in the world separate from US. Look for the Left to become apologists for this--
Bush's "unilateralism" with Iraq (60+ countries) bad, the EU's unilateralism (born out of nationalism) good. The EU, at first, was created to become an economic superstate, but France and Germany, the drivers of this new threat to democracy (and that's no joke-- this is not a democratic institution in any form) want to destroy US power and influence. They know the only way to do this is via ruining our economy.
*The International Criminal Court will grow in power and influence, threatening the entire world.
*More of President Bush's judicial nominees will be unconstitutionally barred from having a majority vote in the Senate. The Left has painted all of Bush's mainstream nominees as "radical"-- they've even written strategy memos on how to politicize the process (discovered on a shared server without a firewall, mind you). If there was ever any proof that the real law-making resides with these unelected judges, this is it: the Left knows that it can't get its views passed by majority vote, so they stock the court with folks like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, an ardent supporter of the murder of babies, who also once opined that the age of consent for sex should be reduced to age 12. Ah, progressivism!
*The US election will be held and, no matter the vote tallies, if Bush wins it will be because he rigged the election. This prediction is as easy to make as it is to predict the subject of Winston Smith's next blog. The excuses are slowly locking into place, like a big jigsaw puzzle: Gerrymandering (which is constitutional, and which the Dems did all over the country when they were in power), Diebold electronic voting machines (which won't be in that many places in 2004, but that never stopped a good conspiracy), Bush's big oil interests, Jeb Bush's pull in Floriday, Cheney's big oil interests, and so on. There's always an excuse for the Democrats when they lose-- it is never that they just got beaten.
And if a Democrat wins, God help us all, it will be, in part, because of their Big Lie{s} about Bush. The economy, the war, 9-11. They are all in place, too. The Democrats bemoan the fact that the Republican national convention will be held in September, near the 11th, in New York City. They say this is propaganda. Yet, meanwhile, far more people will watch and read the media, daily, in the run up to the election, and many more will see Michael Moore's Big Lie film "Farenheit 9-11", a true piece of propaganda destined to come out right before the election. Moore, who has never produced a piece of honest filmmaking (read related stories on my blog about this lying "progressive" populist), is already feverishly at work to make sure his Big Lie makes it on time. If Moore was a conservative his films would be compared to Nazi propagand films. His 'documentaries' are anything but documentary.
So as you can see 2004 is shaping up to be a whopper. I'll see you then.
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| Did ISRAEL steal Christmas this year? |
| 12.25.03 (3:32 pm) [edit] |
From HonestReporting.com:
[b]WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS?[/b]
In the days preceding Christmas, media outlets used misleading information to accuse Israel of ruining the holiday for celebrants in Christianity's birthplace, Bethlehem.
? SECURITY FENCE: Editorial cartoonists at the Toronto Star-- http://thestar.com/NASApp/cs/... and Baltimore Sun-- http://www.sunspot.net/news/o...,0,1305433.cartoongallery?coll=bal-o pinion-utility&index=2"Baltimore Sun portrayed the Three Wise Men locked out of Bethlehem this year, due to Israel's anti-terror security fence:
The Age (Australia)-- http://www.theage.com.au/arti... put the claim in words:
Even the Wadi-al-Nar, or Valley of Fire, the only road linking Bethlehem directly to the rest of the West Bank, is controlled by Israeli checkpoints. It was along this steep winding road 2,000 years ago that three Magi, or Persian wise men, climbed on the final stage of their long quest from the east.
But in fact the security fence and checkpoints are not preventing Christians' entry to the city. The real reason that celebrations are down because the [b]PA couldn't find the funds [/b]-- http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... to cover Christmas decoration costs in Bethlehem this year. (Meanwhile, investigations continue to reveal the funneling of millions of dollars into Yassir Arafat's personal accounts-- http://backspin.typepad.com/b..., and direct PA funding of terror organizations--http://www.eufunding.org/EU_F... .)
And here's another reason for depression in Bethlehem this Christmas, completely ignored in world news reports: The PA made the unprecedented demand-- http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/... that media outlets pay a fee of thousands of dollars to broadcast on Christmas from Manger Square!
Meanwhile, from the Israeli side, every effort is being taken to facilitate and ease the arrival of pilgrims to Bethlehem. As Lt. Col. Avivi Feigel, IDF district liaison commander for the Bethlehem area explained: "All soldiers - from commanders down - have received guidelines and are aware of the importance Christmas holds not only for the Christians here but for the entire western world."
Why might tourists be fearful in Bethlehem? Since the IDF withdrew from the town last summer, Palestinian terrorists have begun using Bethlehem as a safe haven. As one Islamic Jihad leader recently told a reporter in Bethlehem, "We've gone into hibernation here." The LA Times reports:
The day before Christmas Eve, the Bethlehem commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militant group with ties to Arafat, sat in an idling sedan at the edge of Manger Square, slumped low in his thick jacket. The trunk of his car was stocked with a tangle of M-16 rifles. Abu Hussein was relatively comfortable. "I'm sitting here talking to you, and the people can see me," he said. "This wouldn't have happened before, with the Israelis."
Indeed, the PA is not doing what's required of them to lessen the need for IDF restrictions on Bethlehem. After two IDF soldiers were killed in an ambush next to Bethlehem last month, local PA police refused to arrest the perpetrator, who was himself a PA police officer. Only when the IDF threatened to send in tanks did the PA comply in his arrest.
And let's not forget the use of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in 2002 as a refuge for 128 wanted (Muslim) Palestinian terrorists, who spent five weeks holed up inside the historical church. -- http://www.foxnews.com/story/...,2933,52445,00.htm
? CHRISTIAN FLIGHT: Many articles lamented the steep fall in the Christian population of Bethlehem, and attributed it to Israeli pressures, or even to Israel's very existence. From Scotland on Sunday: "Adding to the gloom is more evidence of a dwindling Christian presence in the town. The exodus of Christians began with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and eventually Muslims became the dominant religious group in Bethlehem."
But in fact, for years under Israeli rule, Bethlehem was a peaceful tourist attraction for Christian pilgrims. Now, under Palestinian rule, it a hotbed of radicalism and terror.
? In 1995, Bethlehem was 62% Christian, but today is less than 20% Christian. Before 1995, Bethlehem had a majority-Christian municipal council, but when the Palestinian Authority took over the town, Arafat replaced the municipal council with a predominately Muslim council. Today Christians have virtually no political power in Bethlehem.
? Christian Arabs fled Bethlehem in droves after a radical Islamic wave began inciting against them. For example, in a Friday sermon on October 13, 2000, broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya proclaimed-- http://memri.org/bin/articles... : "Allah the almighty has called upon us not to ally with the Jews or the Christians, not to like them, not to become their partners, not to support them, and not to sign agreements with them."
? Physical violence followed: On February 6, 2002, the Boston Globe reported "a rampage of Palestinian Muslims against Christian shops and churches in Ramallah...Police made no attempt to stop the mob, which besieged and damaged a widely respected youth center associated with the Boy Scouts of America after torching the Christian properties...'The truth is this is a problem between Christians and Muslims,' said one Christian businessman."
? National Review reports-- http://www.nationalreview.com... : "The draft Palestinian constitution says, 'Islam is the official religion in Palestine,' and makes the 'principles of the Islamic sharia' a 'main source for legislation.' Textbooks, PA television, and government-sponsored preachers now stress Islamist rather than nationalist themes...Under this pressure, Christians throughout the Middle East are fleeing their homeland."
(For more on the treatment of Christian Arabs under Muslim Palestinian control, see the report from The Prism Group-- http://www.theprismgroup.org/... .)
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| How to close a market-- turning Mad Cow safeguards into protectionism |
| 12.24.03 (7:58 am) [edit] |
Before I begin, can I give a shout out to Canada, likely source of the single (so far) case of Mad Cow disease we have here in the US?
They want to be like the Brits so much they even adopt their failed ag policies....
So now that a single case of Mad Cow has been discovered, a case that, according to the Ag Department, doesn't hurt the food supply, Russia, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have all banned US beef.
Expect this safeguard to turn into a WTO violation.
Russia-- they don't like US beef, they want to raise their own. Though they signed an agreement with the US, they can and will break it using the excuse of Mad Cow.
Mexico-- Honest to God, these guys care about ag safety? There is nothing safe to consume in Mexico, but they'll gladly ban US beef in order to prop up their own domestic supply (sure it costs more for Mexican consumers, but the farmers rake it in).
Japan, S Korea, and Taiwan have less of a reason to manipulate the US beef market, but expect China-- which raises or grows everything-- to replace the US beef market. Or expect Australia to do so.
This SINGLE case of Mad Cow could devastate the US beef market because a lot of countries resent the market and choose to overreact or pretend that they're looking out for their constituent's health. We'll see on down the road if the beef market can recover.
And once again, thanks Canada.
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| The weird world of Gore Vidal |
| 12.23.03 (3:48 am) [edit] |
[b]The Weird World of Gore Vidal[/b]
By George Shadroui
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 23, 2003
I should quote, for a moment, one of the finest essayists of our time:
?On September 16, 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died. The Empire was seventy-one years old and had been in ill health since 1968. Like most modern empires, ours rested not such much on military prowess as on economic primacy.?
Thus wrote Sir Gore Vidal, the closest thing to Mordred you are likely to find these days in the world of letters. He is even related to King Arthur?uh?President Kennedy, by way of marriage.
He and his friends on the left, Norman Mailer and Noam Chomsky, have been bewailing the American empire for half a century. They have also warned us, repeatedly, that virtually every American president was ready to catapult the world into a nuclear black hole as the slightest provocation.
In the case of Reagan and our current president, the critique introduces a religious dimension that is particularly appealing to leftist doomsayers, who are absolutely certain that the little man behind the imperial curtain is Jerry Falwell or perhaps Pat Robertson, but certainly a crazed fundamentalist who would find the Apocalypse an entertainment of the highest order.
Vidal is a case in point. In the same essay in which he foretold the end of American Empire, he wrote: ?Our masters would have us believe that all our problems are the fault of the Evil Empire of the East, with its satanic and atheistic religion, ever ready to destroy us in the night. This nonsense began at a time when we had atomic weapons and the Russians did not?..what was the reason for the big scare? ?
Vidal?s opinion then was pretty much the same as it is now: big business. ?Well, the Second War made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic, with many a wink, in the people?s name.? (At Home, p. 106)
In short, the military industrial complex was an institutional device aimed at keeping the rich and powerful rich and powerful, even at the expense of decency, common sense and the American taxpayer.
Vidal then jumps to Reagan, pounding a familiar theme. ?By accident, the producers of that one-time hit-show the United States of America picked for the part of president a star with primitive religious longings. We cannot blame them. How could they have known? They thought that he was giving all that money to defense simply to reward them for giving him the lead, which he was doing, in part; but he was also responding to Ezekiel, and the glory of the coming end.? (At Home, p. 103)
All of this was written in the 1980s. We can breathe a sign of relief, can?t we, that President Reagan not only did not ordain and demand the war to end all wars, he actually negotiated arms reductions with Gorbachav, and brought the ?evil empire? down with nary a shot being fired. Vidal, of course, never got around to admitting how alarmist his fears were.
Instead, he published more collections of essays, one of which continues the tale that America not only craved the Cold War, it created it. In his essay "The Last Empire" he argues that the Cold War was basically an American-made conflict, the better to further the goals of our military industrial complex and our capitalist interests.
?Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, now horrendous communist enemy. ?.although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons.?
You will search without success for some mention of the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland. You will find no mention of the stated aim of world communism to destroy the West and the capitalist system, which intention even the dissolution of the cominterm during World War II did not long deter. You might think our concerns were possibly rooted in Stalin?s ruthless treatment of his own country, or his expressed desire to dominate Eastern Europe. Might it be that the Soviet Union?s support of radical movements responsible for millions of deaths was a real concern? This is all illusory, according to the gentlemen of the left.
John Lewis Gaddis, a reputable historian, makes the relevant objection in his study, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, which is hardly an anti-Soviet polemic. Gaddis would agree with Vidal to a point that the United States might have misread Stalin?s intentions. But he added: ?Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945...caused Western observers to fear that they had been misled. Just at the moment of victory over the Axis, the old specter of world revolution reappeared.? (Gaddis, p. 355).
Alas, all of this, of course, is prelude to the Gore Vidal of today, who in the autumn of his life has enjoyed a reverence he would have loathed in years past. But though perceptions of him have mellowed in some quarters, he has not put aside his critique of American foreign policy. His target today is not Reagan or even Nixon, who he actually applauded for bending to the idea of co-existence with the communists, but George W. Bush, the leader who has toppled the Taliban and Saddam.
Once again, Vidal argues that this is all done in the service of the military industrial complex which, after the end of the Cold War, needed to justify its privilege and power. We found a convenient enemy, apparently, in Saddam, whose invasion of Kuwait we secretly encouraged and whose violation of United Nations resolutions we exploited. That we suffered the worst attack in our history during 9/11 is almost an after thought for Vidal, who cannot be distracted from the real evils of our world, the American military and its industrial partners.
But Vidal is not as witty or as entertaining these days. In an interview published in Counterpunch, which originally aired on Dateline, SBS TV Australia, he explains why he has become a full-time political polemicist. ?I?ve spent most of my life marinated in the history of my country and I?m so alarmed by what is happening with our global empire, and our wars against the rest of the world?.?
So much for the end of the empire announced two decades earlier. Vidal goes on to completely misrepresent reality to a foreign audience. He hammers the president: ?We?ve never had a kind of reckless one who may believe ? and there?s a whole theory now that he?s inspired by the love of Our Lord ? that he is an apocalyptic Christian who?ll be going to Heaven while the rest of us go to blazes. I hope that isn?t the case. I hope that?s exaggeration.?
We will give him some credit for the qualifier at the end, but does this not sound remarkably like the same argument targeted at Reagan almost 20 years before? Vidal tells us that the American people, what a relief, did not deserve what happened on 9/11. He adds: ?Nor do we deserve the sort of governments we have had over the last 40 years. Our governments have brought this upon us by their actions all over the world.?
In other words, the people didn?t deserve it, but our government did. What did the government do, by the way, that prompted 19 Muslim men to crash airlines into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, killing 3,000 innocent people? We saved Kuwait from a tyrant and left our troops in the Gulf as a security measure on behalf of our allies there. We helped Afghanistan resist a Soviet invasion. We sought to help Muslims in Somalia and Kosovo. But in the worldview of America?s enemies, any projection of American power is, by definition, criminal.
Vidal embraces almost without qualification this perspective. That is why the Soviet Union, in his view, was an innocent victim of the American military build-up under Truman. Likewise, Gorbachav was the hero of the 1980s, not Ronald Reagan or the first President Bush, who deserve credit for their careful management of the Soviet Union and the eventual liberation of a good part of the world. And, in his most recent polemic, Dreaming War, Vidal actually suggests that the Bush administration might have allowed the attacks on 9/11 to occur, the easier to impose their control over Middle East oil.
In another of his recent pamphlets, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Vidals lists all the military strikes we have made against other countries since the late 1940s. According to Vidal, that number is about 250. That comes out to about five per year, during a period when we were engaged in virtual war with a despotic regime. Our actions in Panama (now enjoying democracy), Grenada (also a democracy), against Libya (which had sponsored terrorism around the globe) and against Saddam's regime in Iraq are all, apparently, indications of our horrific intentions.
Vidal goes on to complain that if people just knew the truth about America, they would appreciate just how deranged our government is. ?The censorship here is so tight in all of the newspapers and particularly in network television. So nobody?s getting the facts.?
If you find this hard to believe, let me confirm your incredulity. Gore Vidal has been reviewed in the New York Review of Books just in the past month. His interviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Weekly, and Solon, his columns in the Nation and C-Span has on a number of occasions devoted serious air time to his books and his political views. Norman Mailer, another critic of U.S. foreign policy, has gotten even more air time than Vidal, including a cover interview for the American Conservative and numerous pieces in newspapers and magazines around the country.
Chomsky is a little more fringe, but his books are published and available in virtually every bookstore and library in the nation. If this be censorship, they are certainly making the most of it.
Vidal is a fine essayist. His literary pieces are often insightful and readable. He is one of those old-fashioned men of letters who actually thinks criticism should be written for readers, not for academics engaged in promulgating obscure theories about the nature of meaning and texts. He even raises some legitimate questions from time to time about the uses of American power and its consequences for our republic.
But his criticism quickly sinks into a cesspool of conspiracies, out of context charges and reckless claims that would rightly earn a lesser intellect the label of crackpot. On page 879 of his huge collection of essays, United States, he suggests that in 1972 George Wallace posed a threat to Nixon?s re-election. Consequently, he implies that the man convicted of trying to assassinate Wallace, Arthur Bremer, might well have been a puppet of Republican operatives who wanted to ensure Nixon?s victory.
?Want to assassinate a rival? Then how about the Dallas scenario? One slips into reverie. Why not set up Bremer as a crazy who wants to shoot Nixon (that will avert suspicion)? But have him fail to kill Nixon, just as Oswald was said to have failed to kill his first target, General Walker. In midstream have Bremer ? like Oswald ? shift to a different quarry. To the real quarry.? (p. 883).
We interrupt this reverie for a moment of reality. For the uninitiated, General Edwin Walker was purportedly a right-winger Oswald tried to shoot months before Kennedy?s visit to Dallas, this according to Oswald?s widow, who learned of that attempted murder directly from her husband. Note the language Vidal uses in describing Oswald?s actions, as if there is doubt about this story, as if the attempt on Walker was all a put up job, even though the source of the story was the assassin?s widow, who had nothing to gain by volunteering this information.
This strange fantasy about Bremer also includes a theory that perhaps E. Howard Hunt was the mastermind behind a diary left in Bremer?s car, which Vidal subjects to textual analysis. This is the weird world of Gore Vidal, a man who can entertain any conspiracy except the one that really existed ? the Soviet Union?s stated aim to undermine the West and dominate much of the world. But why should we be surprised? In addition to being a fine essayist, Vidal is also one of America?s most celebrated writers of fiction.
Copyright 2003 Frontpage Magazine
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| Clinton believed in a link between al Qaida and Iraq, Lieberman confirms a connection |
| 12.23.03 (3:44 am) [edit] |
[b]Clinton Monitored Iraq-Al Qaeda Ties [/b]
By Stephen F. Hayes
The Weekly Standard | December 23, 2003
ARE AL QAEDA'S links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection.
For nearly two years, starting in 1996, the CIA monitored the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. The plant was known to have deep connections to Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation, and the CIA had gathered intelligence on the budding relationship between Iraqi chemical weapons experts and the plant's top officials. The intelligence included information that several top chemical weapons specialists from Iraq had attended ceremonies to celebrate the plant's opening in 1996. And, more compelling, the National Security Agency had intercepted telephone calls between Iraqi scientists and the plant's general manager.
Iraq also admitted to having a $199,000 contract with al Shifa for goods under the oil-for-food program. Those goods were never delivered. While it's hard to know what significance, if any, to ascribe to this information, it fits a pattern described in recent CIA reporting on the overlap in the mid-1990s between al Qaeda-financed groups and firms that violated U.N. sanctions on behalf of Iraq.
The clincher, however, came later in the spring of 1998, when the CIA secretly gathered a soil sample from 60 feet outside of the plant's main gate. The sample showed high levels of O-ethylmethylphosphonothi oic acid, known as EMPTA, which is a key ingredient for the deadly nerve agent VX. A senior intelligence official who briefed reporters at the time was asked which countries make VX using EMPTA. "Iraq is the only country we're aware of," the official said. "There are a variety of ways of making VX, a variety of recipes, and EMPTA is fairly unique."
That briefing came on August 24, 1998, four days after the Clinton administration launched cruise-missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan (Osama bin Laden's headquarters from 1992-96), including the al Shifa plant. The missile strikes came 13 days after bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 257 people--including 12 Americans--and injured nearly 5,000. Clinton administration officials said that the attacks were in part retaliatory and in part preemptive. U.S. intelligence agencies had picked up "chatter" among bin Laden's deputies indicating that more attacks against American interests were imminent.
The al Shifa plant in Sudan was largely destroyed after being hit by six Tomahawk missiles. John McWethy, national security correspondent for ABC News, reported the story on August 25, 1998:
[i]Before the pharmaceutical plant was reduced to rubble by American cruise missiles, the CIA was secretly gathering evidence that ended up putting the facility on America's target list. Intelligence sources say their agents clandestinely gathered soil samples outside the plant and found, quote, "strong evidence" of a chemical compound called EMPTA, a compound that has only one known purpose, to make VX nerve gas.[/i]
Then, the connection:
[i]The U.S. had been suspicious for months, partly because of Osama bin Laden's financial ties, but also because of strong connections to Iraq. Sources say the U.S. had intercepted phone calls from the plant to a man in Iraq who runs that country's chemical weapons program.[/i]
The senior intelligence officials who briefed reporters laid out the collaboration. "We knew there were fuzzy ties between [bin Laden] and the plant but strong ties between him and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Sudan and strong ties between the plant and Iraq." Although this official was careful not to oversell bin Laden's ties to the plant, other Clinton officials told reporters that the plant's general manager lived in a villa owned by bin Laden.
Several Clinton administration national security officials told THE WEEKLY STANDARD last week that they stand by the intelligence. "The bottom line for me is that the targeting was justified and appropriate," said Daniel Benjamin, director of counterterrorism on Clinton's National Security Council, in an emailed response to questions. "I would be surprised if any president--with the evidence of al Qaeda's intentions evident in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the intelligence on [chemical weapons] that was at hand from Sudan--would have made a different decision about bombing the plant."
The current president certainly agrees. "I think you give the commander in chief the benefit of the doubt," said George W. Bush, governor of Texas, on August 20, 1998, the same day as the U.S. counterstrikes. "This is a foreign policy matter. I'm confident he's working on the best intelligence available, and I hope it's successful."
Wouldn't the bombing of a plant with well-documented connections to Iraq's chemical weapons program, undertaken in an effort to strike back at Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, seem to suggest the Clinton administration national security officials believed Iraq was working with al Qaeda? Benjamin, who has been one of the leading skeptics of claims that Iraq was working with al Qaeda, doesn't want to connect those dots.
Instead, he describes al Qaeda and Iraq as unwitting collaborators. "The Iraqi connection with al Shifa, given what we know about it, does not yet meet the test as proof of a substantive relationship because it isn't clear that one side knew the other side's involvement. That is, it is not clear that the Iraqis knew about bin Laden's well-concealed investment in the Sudanese Military Industrial Corporation. The Sudanese very likely had their own interest in VX development, and they would also have had good reasons to keep al Qaeda's involvement from the Iraqis. After all, Saddam was exactly the kind of secularist autocrat that al Qaeda despised. In the most extreme case, if the Iraqis suspected al Qaeda involvement, they might have had assurances from the Sudanese that bin Laden's people would never get the weapons. That may sound less than satisfying, but the Sudanese did show a talent for fleecing bin Laden. It is all somewhat speculative, and it would be helpful to know more."
It does sound less than satisfying to one Bush administration official. "So, when the Clinton administration wants to justify its strike on al Shifa," this official tells me, "it's okay to use an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. But now that the Bush administration and George Tenet talk about links, it's suddenly not believable?"
The Clinton administration heavily emphasized the Iraq link to justify its 1998 strikes against al Qaeda. Just four days before the embassy bombings, Saddam Hussein had once again stepped up his defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors, causing what Senator Richard Lugar called another Iraqi "crisis." Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, one of those in the small circle of Clinton advisers involved in planning the strikes, briefed foreign reporters on August 25, 1998. He was asked about the connection directly and answered carefully.
[i]Q: Ambassador Pickering, do you know of any connection between the so-called pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum and the Iraqi government in regard to production of precursors of VX?
PICKERING: Yeah, I would like to consult my notes just to be sure that what I have to say is stated clearly and correctly. We see evidence that we think is quite clear on contacts between Sudan and Iraq. In fact, al Shifa officials, early in the company's history, we believe were in touch with Iraqi individuals associated with Iraq's VX program.[/i]
Ambassador Bill Richardson, at the time U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, echoed those sentiments in an appearance on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," on August 30, 1998. He called the targeting "one of the finest hours of our intelligence people."
"We know for a fact, physical evidence, soil samples of VX precursor--chemical precursor at the site," said Richardson. "Secondly, Wolf, direct evidence of ties between Osama bin Laden and the Military Industrial Corporation--the al Shifa factory was part of that. This is an operation--a collection of buildings that does a lot of this dirty munitions stuff. And, thirdly, there is no evidence that this precursor has a commercial application. So, you combine that with Sudan support for terrorism, their connections with Iraq on VX, and you combine that, also, with the chemical precursor issue, and Sudan's leadership support for Osama bin Laden, and you've got a pretty clear cut case."
If the case appeared "clear cut" to top Clinton administration officials, it was not as open-and-shut to the news media. Press reports brimmed with speculation about bad intelligence or even the misuse of intelligence. In an October 27, 1999, article, New York Times reporter James Risen went back and reexamined the intelligence. He wrote: "At the pivotal meeting reviewing the targets, the Director of Central Intelligence, George J. Tenet, was said to have cautioned Mr. Clinton's top advisers that while he believed that the evidence connecting Mr. Bin Laden to the factory was strong, it was less than ironclad." Risen also reported that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had shut down an investigation into the targeting after questions were raised by the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (the same intelligence team that raised questions about prewar intelligence relating to the war in Iraq).
Other questions persisted as well. Clinton administration officials initially scoffed at the notion that al Shifa produced any pharmaceutical products. But reporters searching through the rubble found empty aspirin bottles, as well as other indications that the plant was not used exclusively to produce chemical weapons. The strikes came in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, leaving some analysts to wonder whether President Clinton was following the conspiratorial
news-management scenario laid out in "Wag the Dog," then a hit movie.
But the media failed to understand the case, according to Daniel Benjamin, who was a reporter himself before joining the Clinton National Security Council. "Intelligence is always incomplete, typically composed of pieces that refuse to fit neatly together and are subject to competing interpretations," writes Benjamin with coauthor Steven Simon in the 2002 book "The Age of Sacred Terror." "By disclosing the intelligence, the administration was asking journalists to connect the dots--assemble bits of evidence and construct a picture that would account for all the disparate information. In response, reporters cast doubt on the validity of each piece of the information provided and thus on the case for attacking al Shifa."
Now, however, there's a new wrinkle. Bush administration officials largely agree with their predecessors. "There's pretty good intelligence linking al Shifa to Iraq and also good information linking al Shifa to al Qaeda," says one administration official familiar with the intelligence. "I don't think there's much dispute that [Sudan's Military Industrial Corporation] was al Qaeda supported. The link from al Shifa to Iraq is what there is more dispute about."
According to this official, U.S. intelligence has obtained Iraqi documents showing that the head of al Shifa had been granted permission by the Iraqi government to travel to Baghdad to meet with Emad al-Ani, often described as "the father of Iraq's chemical weapons program." Said the official: "The reports can confirm that the trip was authorized, but the travel part hasn't been confirmed yet."
So why hasn't the Bush administration mentioned the al Shifa connection in its public case for war in Iraq? Even if one accepts Benjamin's proposition that Iraq may not have known that it was arming al Qaeda and that al Qaeda may not have known its chemicals came from Iraq, doesn't al Shifa demonstrate convincingly the dangers of attempting to "contain" a maniacal leader with WMD?
According to Bush officials, two factors contributed to their reluctance to discuss the Iraq-al Qaeda connection suggested by al Shifa. First, the level of proof never rose above the threshold of "highly suggestive circumstantial evidence"--indicating that on this question, Bush administration policymakers were somewhat more cautious about the public use of intelligence on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection than were their counterparts in the Clinton administration. Second, according to one Bush administration source, "there is a massive sensitivity at the Agency to bringing up this issue again because of the controversy in 1998."
But there is bound to be more discussion of al Shifa and Iraq-al Qaeda connections in the coming weeks. The Senate Intelligence Committee is nearing completion of its review of prewar intelligence. And although there is still no CIA team assigned to look at the links between Iraq and al Qaeda, investigators looking at documents from the fallen regime continue to uncover new information about those connections on a regular basis.
Democrats who before the war discounted the possibility of any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda have largely fallen silent. And in recent days, two prowar Democrats have spoken openly about the relationship. Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana who sits on the Intelligence Committee, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD, "the relationship seemed to have its roots in mutual exploitation. Saddam Hussein used terrorism for his own ends, and Osama bin Laden used a nation-state for the things that only a nation-state can provide."
And Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat and presidential candidate, discussed the connections in an appearance last week on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews." Said Lieberman: "I want to be real clear about the connection with terrorists. I've seen a lot of evidence on this. There are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. I never could reach the conclusion that [Saddam] was part of September 11. Don't get me wrong about that. But there was so much smoke there that it made me worry. And you know, some people say with a great facility, al Qaeda and Saddam could never get together. He is secular and they're theological. But there's something that tied them together. It's their hatred of us."
[i]Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.[/i]
Copyright 2003 Frontpage Magazine
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| Brazil ushers in sweeping new gun laws-- for "democracy" |
| 12.22.03 (9:30 pm) [edit] |
Once again, gun control nuts go ape. Criminals don't buy guns from a gun store. They are criminals-- they get their guns illegally anyway. What will a law outlawing gun ownership among civilians do to stop that? Not a damn thing. It will, however, take away one of the primary rights of a true democracy-- the right to defend yourself and your freedom.
I wonder if civies will be able to get a gun permit from the government when it pushes the people around with its police-state tactics. Surely they'll be in physical danger then, right?
Oh yeah, and look for crime to remain the same or actually go up. Like everywhere else it is tried.
Brazil Gets Sweeping Gun-Control Law
Mon Dec 22, 4:21 PM ET
BRASILIA, Brazil - President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a sweeping gun-control law Monday in an effort to rein in what he called "an epidemic of murder by firearms."
Under the so-called disarmament statute passed Dec. 9 by Congress, only the armed forces, police, prison guards and private security personnel can possess firearms in Brazil.
The law was "a landmark for Brazilian (news - web sites) democracy," Silva said. "An important aim of the law is to choke off one of the sources of organized crime by denying them access to firearms."
According to World Health Organization (news - web sites) data, a Brazilian is murdered every 12 minutes, with more than 90 percent of murders committed with firearms, the president said.
"This is a disgraceful record for us," Silva said.
Exceptions to the no-guns rule can be made as long as an individual is at least 25 years old and can prove he needs a weapon "because his physical integrity is in danger," according to the new law. Gun owners have 180 days to petition police for such status.
The new law provides for prison sentences of up to four years for illegal possession of a firearm.
The law also provides for a national plebiscite, set for October, 2005, in which voters may choose to eliminate all exceptions.
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| Winston crashes and burns again. |
| 12.22.03 (4:41 pm) [edit] |
Winston attempts to link a bad economy with George Bush's policies, but he can't name the policies. In his latest blog he says it doesn't take a nobel prize to see that the 'needs of the people' are ignored. Needs that he can't identify in the first place, that is.
Winston cuts and pastes another article that talks about a falling dollar, deficits, etc. Things that were answered by my last post on this topic. What he hasn't done yet-- and can't-- is link any Bush "policy" with a)making the rich richer and b)ruining the economy. Posting articles that talk of the deficit being bad but don't explain it is no better-- there is no link between a bad economy and deficits.
According to Winston, it seems, a 2004 that is "both positive and negative" means it's all negative, it is all a failure. Winston just keeps digging a hole here on basic economics-- and his challenge remains: prove that a Bush "policy" is doing all the things he says it is.
ANd while he's at it he can explain how Clinton "created" 22 million jobs.
note: Paul Krugman has been proven wrong so many times that even liberal economists disregard him now. His anti-Bush obsession gets in the way of being objective. Much like Winston.
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| Libya's "disarmament" an Arab smokescreen to destroy Israel |
| 12.22.03 (4:26 pm) [edit] |
Does anyone think that Libya is really going to disarm? Or do they, like North Korea and Iran, seek to abuse the international system by appearing to legitimately take part in it?
Does anyone think Iran, sitting on some of the world's largest oil reserves, needs nuclear power for "electricty"? Or do we overlook their nuclear- ready missiles with their "death to Israel" and "death to America" slogans?
The current power play by the corrupt Arab world is to appear to have a change of heart-- to agree to "dismantle" its WMD programs and keep the United States off its back. These leaders, most of them unelected, and others "elected" (if ya know what I mean) will therefore remain in power to spread anti-Semitic, false, jihadist propaganda while at the same time assuring the world that it does not have WMD to obliterate Israel with (at least not above ground, that is).
By doing this, then, the Arab world will call on Israel to relinquish its WMD in the hopes that the Israeli state will disarm. By doing this, international pressure in the UN-- from the anti-Semitic EU, Russia, and China, will grow. This will allow those peaceful savages in Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, etc. to brandish their WMD at the right time-- a la N Korea-- and force Israel to either take in the "Palestinian" "refugees" and essentially kill Israel by population, or simply nuke/gas Israel out of existence.
By appearing to participate in the international system and "give up" its WMD, the Arab world figures it can create a smokescreen to avoid US punishment and achieve victory over Israel. Already this past weekend Egypt's Mubarak called on Israel to follow Libya's "example" and get rid of its WMD.
Don't count on Israel to trust an Arab world that still doesn't recognize it (Egypt only politically recognizes Israel to get US billions). Textbooks all across Arabia, and sermons in all the Mosques proclaim that the destruction of Israel-- and the US at some point-- is nececssary, that jihad is every Arab (and Muslim's) duty. The Arab world has started all of its wars with Israel and rejected every Israeli attempt at peace.
The Arab world is not a peace partner, and ever will be.
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| Palestinian propaganda in US High Schools-- "Jihad against US High School Students" |
| 12.22.03 (4:26 am) [edit] |
[b]Jihad Against U.S. High School Students[/b]
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 19, 2003
On Dec. 4th, 2003 the ?Wheels of Justice Tour? appeared during school hours on the grounds of Ukiah High School in Northern California. What was this tour? It was the PLO, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and other leftist groups such as International Answer packaged to teach your 15 year-old child that the Israel must be dismantled and the US must get out of Iraq to aid the comeback of Saddam Hussein. Passing themselves off as objective ?peace? advocates, the tour group spoke at Ukiah High to three class sessions during school hours and had their bus, as a sort of rolling museum, on school grounds all day for the students to look at.
?The bus is really a mobile classroom?, says Ceylon Mooney, the tour?s national coordinator. ?It comes complete with [i]teachers[/i] (italics mine) and a wide range of instructional materials: videos, photographs, essays, fact sheets, etc?.[1]
Teachers? Fact sheets? When I first learned of this event I contacted Ukiah High School Principal Phil Gary to ask him if he knew just what he was exposing his students to during school hours. On the school?s website Gary lists as the ?greatest single asset? of Ukiah High being its ?quality teachers?.[2] Yet Principal Gary expressed total ignorance of the groups sponsoring the tour. When I asked him if he knew the ISM is led by the PLO and openly supports armed resistance and works to aid terrorists in the Middle East, he professed ignorance of his visiting lecturers.3 After I gave him a synopsis of just who was appearing and the usual content of their presentation, the principal called it ?freedom of speech?.
[b]Freedom of speech is fine, but not freedom to libel and lie with the intent of spreading sedition among US high school children against the US and its democratic allies. Nor to indoctrinate them with those lies on the taxpayer?s dime.[/b]
Voices In The Wilderness, which runs the tour, is yet another leftist front group created by the [b]militant Islamists of the PLO allied with anti-globalists who seek the overthrow of the US government and capitalism.[/b] 4 The group really represents the goals of and even accepts donations by checks made out to Al Awda , a.k.a. The Palestine Right To Return Committee (PRRC) and allies itself with International Answer and the International Action Center, Ramsey Clark?s outfits.5 Al Awda means ?the Return? in Arabic and is really [b]a front for the PLO that advocates unconditionally that 5 million Palestinians be allowed to move inside Israel displacing the Jewish population and dismantling the Jewish state. The Texas chapter used to have a website extolling the glory of suicide bombers[/b]. 6The other groups just want the US out of Iraq to enable the comeback of Saddam Hussein. (Happily, that won?t happen with the announcement of Hussein?s capture as this article went to press). Ramsey Clark was Saddam Hussein?s personal attorney and represented Iraq prior to the war. The PLO has always been the dictator Hussein?s closest ally in the Middle East.
Rounding out this tour?s sponsors is the Middle East Children?s Alliance in Berkeley, run by Barbara Lubin.7 [b]Her group has yet to provide any aid to Middle East Israeli children maimed for life by suicide bombers and terrorist attacks. She plies her ?charity? mainly in Gaza, Hamas country. It never ceases to amaze me how many Arab ?charities? have been closed down to date when it was learned they really are fronts for funding terrorism.
[/b]
Her group advocates the dismantling of Israel also and opposes US forces in Iraq.
Half the presentation was given over to Lauren Anzaldo of the International Solidarity Movement which is ?Palestinian-led? per its own admission and [b]whose leadership, despite claiming to be nonviolent, endorses violence as acceptable to destroy Israel ?by any means necessary? on its website[/b].8
Which is exactly what this tour did. Ms. Anzaldo, speaking as an experienced ISM volunteer, told various classes of 12th graders that Israeli soldiers shoot into schools of children like themselves as normal procedure. ?Soldiers come in the middle of the night and shoot at schools?during the day too?.9 On earlier occasions she has told stories that the Israeli army sprays DDT into Palestinian homes as part of a deliberate Israeli plan to promote Palestinian birth defects.10 Of course, [b]Ms. Anzaldo, who calls herself an ?anarcha-feminist? and has no teaching degree or educational qualifications but was allowed to address students as if she was speaking facts, described atrocities that always began with ?Somebody told me?? despite her appearing as someone who was relating real experiences as an ISM volunteer in the West Bank. [/b]This is usually how the ISM and their affiliates tell stories of made up Israeli and American ?abuses? of civilian populations.
Her co-speaker was John Farrell, affiliated with International Answer, who told of how American troops routinely commit atrocities on Iraqi civilians.11 [b]He also related the canard that Iraqi children are experiencing birth defects due to the uranium tipped shells used by the US in the 1991 Gulf War. That propaganda story was put out by Hussein?s propaganda ministries before the current war began, and [u]the real truth is Iraqi children with birth defects are the result of Saddam Hussein gassing their villages. [/u][/b]
I interviewed the bus tour on their cellphone where Ms. Anzaldo, who also bills herself as a nonviolent ?peace? advocate, told me how she considered suicide bombers as ?martyrs?. ?This is an armed struggle situation when someone seeks to colonize another country, armed resistance is acceptable?. She continued, ?I support the people?s right to armed struggle?. [b]When I asked her if Israelis have a legitimate fear of being murdered she forgot herself for a moment and said,[u] ?the Jews have no rights?Oops, I mean the Zionists?. [/b][/u]
?Oops? indeed.
Despite the tour?s claim that they represent all points of view on any type of agreement to seek ?peace? in the region, she stated she supports only a one state solution, that pushed by Al Awda, (The Return in Arabic) the front group for the PLO. [b]In other words, the dismantling of Israel to create an Arab-Muslim majority dictatorship by flooding Israel?s 1948 borders with Arabs to displace the Jewish majority demographically is the aim, and packaging it as a ?peace? group seeking to promote human rights is just a ploy.[/b] Al Awda offers no compromises on its website and clearly is behind the tour.
[b]Ms. Anzaldo, also calls herself an ?anarcha-feminist?, which she defines as an ?objection to the oppression of women? but doesn?t mind running around lying for the Palestinian Authority where over 40 ?honor killings? of women occurred this past year. That?s when a male family member murders a female member for losing her virginity, even if she was raped . She explained it wasn?t her ?business to interfere with their religion or culture?.[/b]
But interfering with Israelis besieged by suicide bombers or smearing American soldiers in Iraq are another story. She explained, ?we should focus on things the American military does such as experiments with poisons on our own people (sic)?.
[i]This[/i] is a guest teacher or even a lecturer in the view of Ukiah High School?
[b]She did admit that Yasser Arafat steals from of his own people but hedged her comment by continuing, ? Just like George Bush is an ***hole?. She crowed that the Ukiah High Students ?were really taken with what we told them, really shocked with what we said?.[/b]
They told her they ?never hear such things when they get the mainstream point of view?. [b]Could that be because much of what she ?teaches? is not true and professional news sources verify their stories with sources, dates and facts whenever possible?[/b]
Social Studies teacher Miles Gordon arranged to bring the bus tour to campus during school hours, supposedly as a presentation to educate the student Progressives Club on campus. When I interviewed him the first time he claimed ignorance about the ISM and the real movements behind this ?peace? tour during public school hours. When I asked if the students had requested this tour, he replied that it had been arranged because someone ?from the local community? had approached him about it. That someone was a David Smith-Ferri, an active participant in International Answer events. Ferri who claims to support himself as a ?poet?, works with a local leftist group in Ukiah called Parents For Peace.12 He called Gordon and sent him brochures and ?fact sheets? about what Voices In The Wilderness and the ?Wheels Of Justice? tour were about. [b]A quick trip to the sponsors? websites can probably tell someone what this tour is really all about and that it certainly wasn?t going to be objective for a high school class.[/b]13 I asked Miles Gordon why he would allow such groups to mount anti-Israel as well as anti-US presentations during school hours without at least procuring people from the other side to dispute what was said. He replied that he provides the counterbalance to his class. [b]When I next asked him if he believed Israel had a right to exist, he refused to answer. ?I am just against violence?, he said. ?But not against those who preach it then present his students a different face to get their support??, I asked him. Apparently ?violence? does not include the suicide bombers and terrorists of the PLO and their closest ally Saddam Hussein and his fedayeen Saddam.[/b]
Admittedly, the speakers cleverly bill themselves as ?peace? advocates to adolescents which might take people in who are not ?in-the-know?. Someone could be fooled. [b]But when I asked Gordon if he was affiliated with any anti-Israel or anti-US groups personally he refused to answer.[/b] Just how objectively his presentation of the ?other side? really would be is questionable.
The Superintendent of the Ukiah Unified School District, James Brawley, also defended the presentation as ?freedom of speech?. However, after I supplied him with some information on the ISM?s links to terrorism, as well as the other affiliates of Voices In The Wilderness he stonewalled any further contact and refused to be interviewed.
[b]Principal Gary to his credit offered to allow a visit from representatives from the other side and the Israel Center of San Francisco sent a 25 year-old intern to speak on Israel?s behalf.[/b] Although Miles Gordon was supposedly to handle his coming, the event was passed to Dan Stearns, an English teacher on campus who supervises the Conservatives Club. Apparently Mr. Gordon found dealing with the other side objectionable even though he was the point of contact assigned by Principal Gary. [b]Stearns commented after the presentation that the students had been ?completely turned around? from what they thought was going on in the Middle East due to the previous week?s presentation.[/b] But what if Principal Gary had not been contacted by people who objected to the bus tour?s indoctrination attempt of high school students?
I asked Social Studies instructor Miles Gordon if he regretted inviting Voice In The Wilderness to campus, given their portrayal as peace advocates yet their connections to groups that engage in terrorism and desire to overthrow the US government, as well as their lying about atrocities being committed by US soldiers and the Israeli army in the War On Terror. He replied no. ?There?s always a different perspective on the same truth?, he said. In other words, if someone wants to believe something, it is as valid as if it were true. [b]The idea that education is a means to indoctrinate the citizenry regardless of facts to achieve political ends is something standard in the Arab educational world where people are still taught that Jews use children?s blood to make matzoh or that America is responsible for all the world?s ills.14 [/b]
Allowing the Wheels Of Justice tour to indoctrinate high school kids during school hours because the speakers perceive what they say to be truth when there is evidence there are [b]no facts to back it up[/b], or when such people say the opposite in private yet deliberately lie to indoctrinate or trick vulnerable high school students into pushing their agenda, certainly doesn?t speak much for the quality of instruction at Ukiah High School. And the parents of those students most likely knew nothing about it. Look for the bus tour to come to your local high school in the near future.
Notes:
[1] Ukiah Daily Journal-- http://ukiahdailyjournal.com/...,1413,91%257E1802340,00.html?search=filter
[2] http://www.uhs.uusd.k12.ca.us...
[3] ISM-- http://home.comcast.net/~jat.action/ISM_essay.htm
[4] Wheels of Justice Tour-- http://www.al-awda.org/wheels...
[5] http://www.frontpagemag.com/A...
[6] http://www.frontpagemag.com/A...
[7] Meca for Peace-- http://www.mecaforpeace.org/
[8] Palsolidarity.org-- http://www.palsolidarity.org
[9] http://www.ukiahdailyjournal....,1413,91%257E3089%257E181 1618,00.html?search=filter
[10] Palestinian Report-- http://www.angelfire.com/fl5/...
[11] http://vitw.us/weblog/archive...
[12] Parents for Peace-- http://www.parentsforpeace.ne...
[13] International Answer, Fando blog, Socialist worker-- http://www.internationalanswe... ;
http://fando.blogs.com/fando/2003/week12/" title="http://fando.blogs.com/fando/2003/week12/" target="_blank"http://fando.blogs.com/fando/... ;
http://www.socialistworker.org/2003-2/465/465_02_Fir edResisting.shtml" title="http://www.socialistworker.org/2003-2/465/465_02_Fir edResisting.shtml" target="_blank"http://www.socialistworker.or...
[14] http://www.campus-watch.org/a...
[i]Lee Kaplan is a contributing editor to Frontpagemag.com.[/i]
Copyright 2003 Frontpage Magazine
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| Coming soon-- A UN TAX tailor-made to DESTROY AMERICA |
| 12.22.03 (4:09 am) [edit] |
[b]The UN Tax?[/b]-- http://www.frontpagemag.com/A...
By Daniel J. Mitchell
Heritage Foundation | December 22, 2003
Many politicians seem to think that the answer to every alleged problem is higher taxes. Howard Dean, for instance, has said he would repeal the Bush tax cuts -- even though this would boost the average family?s tax burden by nearly $2,000.
This initiative sounds radical, and it is. But some proposals out there are even worse.
The United Nations, for instance, wants to create an International Tax Organization (ITO) that would have the power to interfere with national tax policies.
This crazy idea first surfaced two years ago in a report from the world body?s ?High-Level Panel on Financing for Development.? Since then, the U.N. has been working to turn it into reality. For instance, U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan recently called for the creation of a global tax commission. But no matter what it?s called, an international bureaucracy with power over tax policy would be an assault on American sovereignty.
An international tax organization, of course, would mean higher taxes and bigger government. Indeed, U.N. officials have been quite open about their intentions. The chairman of the U.N. panel that first endorsed the creation of an ITO said that it would ?take a lead role in restraining tax competition.? According to this mentality, it?s unfair for America to have lower taxes than places such as France and Germany, especially if it means that jobs and investment flee Europe?s welfare states and come to America.
For all intents and purposes, the U.N. wants to create an ?OPEC for politicians.? Governments would conspire to keep taxes high, and countries with free-market tax systems -- such as the United States, Switzerland, Ireland and Hong Kong -- would be targeted for persecution.
The U.N. also wants the power to levy its own taxes. The original report looked at two options, a tax on currency transactions and a tax on energy consumption. Both of these proposals would hit America hardest. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the past, the U.N. has endorsed new taxes on the Internet, including a tax on e-mail. Again, the U.S. economy would pay the lion?s share if this reckless idea took effect.
But the prize for the worst U.N. idea probably belongs to the proposal to give governments permanent taxing rights over emigrants. You see, the U.N. thinks it?s unfair when talented people leave high-tax socialist nations and move to places such as America. But since even the U.N. realizes it would be unacceptable to prohibit emigration, the bureaucrats are instead proposing to let governments tax income earned in other nations.
This scheme is a direct attack on American interests because of our high levels of immigration -- particularly the well-educated portion of the immigrant population. For instance, if a doctor from the Caribbean moves to America, his home government would get to tax income he earns here. If a Chinese entrepreneur moves to Silicon Valley, the Chinese government would get to tax his U.S. income.
Foreign-born workers in the United States, including both citizens and resident aliens, earn nearly $600 billion each year. Imagine the damage if foreign governments could tax that income. Even if they imposed only a 15 percent tax rate, foreign governments could drain nearly $100 billion from our economy.
There is an understandable temptation to dismiss these U.N. proposals as silly. After all, the United States can veto any bad initiatives. But this passive approach is a mistake. [b]What would happen, say, if Howard Dean were president when the U.N. was voting whether to create an International Tax Organization? Could we trust him to veto this nutty scheme?[/b]
Another reason we should worry: The U.N. is just one of several international bureaucracies working to undermine fiscal sovereignty. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) targets ?harmful tax competition? and the Brussels-based European Union enthusiastically backs ?tax harmonization.?
What?s particularly troubling is that U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for much of this nonsense. [b]We don?t belong to the European Union, but we pay 25 percent of the costs at the U.N. and the OECD.[/b]
Fortunately, some members of Congress are trying to address this. For example, Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., has introduced legislation that [b]would end U.S. funding of these bureaucracies if they insist on pursuing policies that undermine America.[/b] Bureaucrats at the U.N. and OECD don?t want to risk their bloated budgets and tax-free salaries, so this is a good approach.
Clearly we have to do something -- unless we want to see our tax bills soar.
Copyright 2003 FrontPage Magazine
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| Winston Smith's "financial analysts" fail to answer a thing |
| 12.22.03 (3:19 am) [edit] |
Winston Smith never addresses me, he's too arrogant for that (after all, he drinks Cognac and has travelled the world, as opposed to little ole me). I find it severely ironic that this guy claims to yearn for truth and political discourse, but he actually searches for neither-- he can't face the truth because he sees everything from a neo-marxist lens, and he only cares about his own political discourse. The man marches right ahead without shame-- he simply can't admit he is wrong.
So it is no surprise that Winston comes up short again with his answer to my blog which basically told him to put up or shut up-- for him to prove that Bush is responsible for the economy-- that his policies have ruined the economy.
Winston begins with saying that wealth is being redistributed to that evil top 5%, but of course, he has no idea what he's talking about. Whose wealth are the rich taking, the poor? How on earth is a rich man doing that? Even if you're going to argue that tax cuts to the wealthy are bad, you certainly can't say it is wealth redistribution-- it's their money to begin with.
On the other hand, we do have a redistribution of wealth in this country to this very day-- we have the money from people who make money subsidizing the lives of the poor and elderly-- through welfare, social security, and child credits. That's not to say this is bad, but it is 180 degrees from what Winston is saying.
So the big proof that Bush is ruining the economy comes from a news article that states that, essentially, we need to massively raise taxes in order to avoid economic peril. Again, there is no connection between higher taxes and economic prosperity, and it is still Winston's challenge to prove this-- but I doubt he can anymore. Apparently he can't fess up to this truth (even though he is searching!).
The article states that the budget deficits are bad because they will crash the stock market, devalue the dollar, and cause investors to stop buying dollars. The Republican mouthpiece in the article states, without any proof whatsoever, that deficits do matter, and the Democrat mouthpiece in the article states that Bush's tax cuts will make it worse.
Before I get to the real problem with our budget deficit, which is stated and glossed over in the article, some clarifications:
[i]Budget deficit[/i] The economy was tanking before Bush took office-- only leftists still deny this. As people lose jobs because of the economy tanking (which Winston Still has to prove Bush of causing), there are less tax revenues-- hence deficits. The US government has increased spending every year for the past 4 decades.
But we also had a terrorist attack on the US, which definitely exacerbated the economic situation. Our response to the attack via the war on terror made investing in the dollar risky and, what with our Euro-trash friends not doing a thing to help stop world terrorism, their currency looks more attractive. Hence the Euro rises and the Dollar falls. This is not the first time this had happened, nor will it be the last.
While the Euro is rising, there isn't much else going on in Europe. Unemployment is still much higher than US unemployment, and the higher value of the Euro makes their deficits higher, while our lower dollar value shrinks the deficit while also making our goods cheaper, which means more jobs. In the short term, a lower dollar is good, in the long term it could cause problems. But President Bush has nothing to do with the value of the dollar-- or would Winston argue for more terror attacks against America in the hopes that the dollar would stay strong? (it wouldn't because America would still be seen as a risky place to invest in)
So it's Bush's nefarious tax cuts that are going to hurt the economy, that's the argument. Again, this is not proven, it's just stated as fact by Winston and the Left. If deficits are a problem, there's a way to stop them-- cap, cut, and eliminate spending programs. But the tax cut has increased demand in this country-- it has allowed the middle class mobility, and allowed those evil rich to reinvest and restructure to remain competetive.
But the real bugaboo here, that neither Winston or the rest of the Left cares to admit is that SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE, two left-wing utopian programs, are going to break the government budget. The logical solution would be to reform both, but every attempt to substantially reform these programs so that they actually make money and work have been squashed by utopians like Smith, who think the answer to everything is a 65% tax rate (meaning that all those poor Winston laments will have even less of their money).
The recent medicare 'reform' bill is a left-wing bill. It was even praised by Ted Kennedy as a nice 'down payment' before he and the rest of the left figured they could get away with calling this bloated piece of useless government spending a "payoff to the pharmaceutical companies". On the road to breaking the government in the first place, this bill will make that happen faster-- but it is not a conservative bill.
Bush chose to support this bill because he thought it would take an issue away from the Democrats. As usual, he is mistaken about the power of left-wing spin. It is a terrible piece of legislation, a huge spending bill-- but let's not for a moment think that the Democrats care about fiscal conservatism. They don't. ON the contrary, they care about redirecting all of your wealth to pay for these programs and more.
Tax cuts work-- they help the economy. Tax cuts helped Ireland in the 1990s rise out of economic despair, and tax cuts helped make the US economy (those 22 million jobs Clinton had nothing to do with) grow. Even Germany, which is bound by EU rules to maintain a balanced budget, recognizes that tax cuts work-- they just passed a package of tax cuts (about 19 billion) to help get their economy-- the largest in Europe-- growing.
If we eliminated Social Security to private 401k-like accounts and made similar measures with Medicare, we wouldn't be having a discussion about deficits.
From all of this, the challenge to Winston remains the same: how does raising taxes help the economy and bring back jobs, how do tax cuts "redistribute" wealth to the rich, and how do tax cuts hurt the economy.
None of it has been proven. Which is pretty much what I expected.
I would certainly love to have one of those "passionate debates" that Winston loves so much. Given his desire to avoid the truth he yearns for and blame Bush without evidence, I doubt he'll be up for that.
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| Krugman's leftist lies about "income inequality" in America |
| 12.21.03 (5:03 pm) [edit] |
From Donald Luskin's blog "The Conspiracy to Keep you Poor and Stupid"-- http://www.poorandstupid.com :
(all relevant links are in original)
KRUGMAN LIES TO THE NATION It seems as though we have caught Paul Krugman in another substantive misrepresentation of economic data. Now that he has completed the transition from "professor" to "policy entrepreneur" -- a distinction he made in his 1994 book Peddling Prosperity, back when he was still a "professor" -- he needn't be constrained by what he then called "obscure professorly ethics." Now, apparently, there is no need to cite exact sources for data -- mere allusion will do. And data need not be presented in its full context, or even accurately. Instead, it's "whatever it takes" to score the partisan point of the moment.
So we find in Krugman's new article, "The Death of Horatio Alger" in the January 5, 2004 edition of The Nation, this statement in support of his thesis that there is dramatically increasing "income inequality" in America:
"According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.)"
Our friend Steve Antler published on his Econopundit blog some correspondence from Jim Glass, in which Glass notes that he can't find any such estimates in Piketty and Saez's paper, "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998" (NBER Working Paper, No. 8467, September 2001). Actually they are there, at least through 1998 (in Table A4). And Emmanuel Saez pointed me to a comparable table available on his website that has been updated through 2000.
Table A4 shows average real income of the bottom 90% of American taxpayers declining by 6.74% from 1973 to 2000. OK, it's only a minor sin that Krugman rounded up to 7% to make it look that much more dramatic (but I've never once seen a case in which Krugman's rounding didn't sex up whatever case he was trying to make). But there are more significant distortions in the way Krugman presents this evidence.
First, why did Krugman pick 1973 of all years as a starting point? Because -- well, what do you know! -- that year just happens to be the high water mark for real income in the entire history presented in the table, from 1917 to 2000. If he'd chosen, say, 1955 (a year in which real income was about at the average value for the entire series), we'd see not a 6.74% drop but a 43.13% increase. Or if he'd chosen 1993 (a recent low point), we'd see an 11.4% increase (and in just seven years, too). We've seen this classic Krugman fraud before -- remember in his New York Times Magazine article "The Tax-Cut Con," in which he invented his own private business cycle peak and trough in order to make GDP growth under the Reagan tax cuts look bad?
Second, Krugman notes that these "numbers exclude capital gains," and he's got his rationale for that all ready: "so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble." But if you include capital gains -- again, well, what do you know! -- it turns out that the decline in real income for the bottom 90% is only about half of the number Krugman cites: 3.49%. This is classic Krugman -- excluding (or including) inconvenient details that get in the way of the conclusion he'd already reached in his mind before he even looked at the data. In fact Antler chides Krugman for brushing aside studies that show that upward income mobility is alive and well by including "as the economist Kevin Murphy put it... 'the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real job by his early 30s.'" Krugman prefers "Serious studies that exclude this sort of pseudo-mobility," and thus come up with the answers determined by Krugman to be politically correct.
Third, Krugman chooses not to point out a critical deficiency in the Piketty and Saez data. Emmanuel Saez pointed out to me that his numbers are based only on the kinds of income that gets reported on tax returns "and hence exclude[s] all transfers... such as Social security, unemployment benefits, welfare, etc... Transfers have grown pretty fast since the 1970s." Well, what do you know! It's gruesomely hypocritical for Krugman not to have noted this, considering that he has accused the Bush administration's Treasury Department of being politically corrupt for not using the holistic definition of income that includes transfers (more on that subject here).
Fourth, it appears from all the evidence I have at this time that Krugman is lying when he says that Piketty and Saez's estimates are "confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office." A highly placed Congressional Budget Office official told me that the only recent CBO data of this type was presented in the agency's August 2003 report, "Effective Federal Tax Rates, 1997 to 2000." That report only looks at household incomes from 1979 to 2000 (not from 1973, Krugman's hand-picked starting year) and it defines income as "comprehensive household income," which includes all the elements that Piketty and Saez exclude (transfer payments, capital gains, and others). Also, the CBO report does not directly give the income of the bottom 90%. However, it reports the income and income share of the top 10%, so the income of the bottom 90% can be unambiguously computed.
Given all that, what does the CBO say that would "confirm" Piketty and Saez? According to Piketty and Saez, using their definition of income (but from the table that includes capital gains, to make the data as comparable with the CBO as possible), real income for the bottom 90% grew 1.81% from 1979 to 2000 (remember, Krugman said it fell 7% from 1973 to 2000). The CBO report, on the other hand, says that real income for the bottom 90% grew 21.61%. So, yes, the CBO "confirms" Piketty and Saez in the sense that their numbers for comparable periods at least point in the same direction (and the CBO certainly confirms Saez's comment to me that "Transfers have grown pretty fast since the 1970s"). But -- well, what do you know! -- the CBO certainly does not confirm Krugman's version. If there is some other CBO study that tells a different story, no doubt Krugman will let us know in a self-righteous posting on his website (in which he will no doubt ignore all the other criticisms being made here).
Fifth, Krugman fails to point out that Piketty and Saez's estimates are all based on pre-tax incomes. Considering that in his article in The Nation Krugman goes on at length about how Republican tax cuts for "the rich" are impairing economic mobility, you'd think he'd have mentioned this -- and perhaps even have asserted that "shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear most heavily on people with lower incomes" has made the plight of the bottom 90% even worse than Piketty and Saez suggest. But -- well, what do you know! -- the CBO data that supposedly "confirms" Piketty and Saez contradicts this supposition. The CBO data includes an after-tax series that shows real income for the bottom 90% rising even faster after tax -- 22.45% since 1979 -- than before tax.
None of this stuff should be any surprise. Krugman's not a serious force in economics anymore. He's just another policy entrepreneur, the very thing he was writing about a decade ago as the lowest form of life. But there are compensations. Well, what do you know! -- that's Krugman's book The Great Unraveling on Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi's bookshelf.
Posted by Donald Luskin at 4:42 PM
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| Yeah, let's talk about 'intellectual dishonesty' -- the case of Winston Smith |
| 12.21.03 (6:59 am) [edit] |
Winston Smith wrote a blog recently assigning Bush as the evil mastermind behind a rise in poverty and homelessness. He failed to mention off the bat that poverty 'rose' partly because our evil GW Bush extended the poverty level in his evil scheme to give back more child tax credits to those who already don't pay any taxes.
But there's more. Amid all the hyper-paranoia, Winston writes:
[i]Between 9-15 million citizens are unemployed and looking for work (Dubya destroyed over 3 million jobs-- while Clinton created 22 million jobs ...) [/i]
Any factual evidence that would prove any of these amazing statements would be welcome. Unfortunately, only yours truly get questioned for not providing evidence for everything I state.
How, exactly, did Clinton "create" 22 million jobs? Did his tax increase do this, and if so, how? Can Winston, for once and for all, explain this? And how, exactly, did George W. Bush "destroy" 3 million jobs? What was the 'evil' policy that keeps getting referenced, but never gets stated? It seems to me that Clinton was sitting in a chair getting a blow job while the economy soared, while George Bush was trying to win the war on terror while the economy sank (and it started sinking at the end of the year 2000).
It is this man's opinion that neither president had much of an impact on the economy-- except for NAFTA and tax cuts. NAFTA, which Clinton signed, is responsible for the slugging economic recovery we are experiencing now-- because the demand is there, but it seems to be going overseas. Meanwhile, the demand is there because Bush gave everyone a tax cut, even those who didn't earn them, from the middle class person that can demand more to the evil rich man that can use his tax cut to restructure and invest in new hires. (How bad is that?)
Winston states that 15 million Americans live below the poverty line (though it is much worse! he tells us) and that 3.5 million citizens are homeless. As if 1)there were not millions in poverty and homeless during the last administration and 2)Bush personally had something to do with this number (partially affected by Bush's generous income-tax bracket restructuring).
Former CBS news producer Bernard Golberg in his book [i]Bias[/i] states that the homeless suddenly disappeared from news reports during the Clinton administration because left-leaning networks did not want t make the administration look bad. And it is also widely known that the main problem with homelessness is not the lack of jobs (5.9% unemployment means that 94.1% of America has some sort of a job), but the fact that most of the homeless suffer from mental problems and/or suffer from drug abuse. It's certainly not due to an economic policy-- and if it is, it's up to Winston Smith to stop flappin' his gums about it and provide real evidence.
(lots of luck on that one, by the way)
Winston says:
[i]Between 45-85 million citizens lack health care coverage and are unable to be treated if they fall ill-- Dubya's corporate rapists (HMOs, Pharmaceuticals, Insurance corporations & other private groups) are gobbling & swilling profits and making families ill, destitute and in pernicious debt their entire life ... so that these goons & thugs can live like neo-emperors.[/i]
Interestingly, HMOs were an invention of Ted Kennedy, Democrat blow-hard, not GW Bush, and if you're going to throw around the term "rapist", you'd better be prepared to offer something of that kind of magnitude. "Making families ill"? Does Winston know-- or even care-- what the hell he is saying?
What kind of health care do you want, Winston? Canada's? They ferry folks here to the US to get MRIs. Britain's? They have lotteries just to get basic dental work. France's? Even though they were nominated by the WHO to have the world's best health care, somehow they let 15,000 people die because it got hot-- temperatures that occur regularly out west.
Winston, most people that don't have health care [i]do[/i]have jobs. So perhaps there's a problem with making insurance affordable, but I think it beats the alternatives of socialized medicine (which affects everyone, not just the poor). Before you go accusing Bush of "making families" ill, you'd better know damn well what you're talking about.
I would like Winston to explain just this simply cornerstone of his economic view: even if true that Bush gave the rich a huge tax cut while giving nothing to anyone else (a demonstrable lie), how in God's name does giving a rich person a tax cut make someone else poor? Figure that one out before you fly off your rocker-- my guess is it will be something as asinine and jaw-dropping as your report that the fed lowering the interest rate was some sort of evil neo-con plot to get people to buy things they shouldn't! To make them part with their money!
Even the article you CUT AND PASTED (gasp) shows that you have no idea what you're talking about:
"The administration provided $35 million in new homeless grants to 11 cities this summer, and President Bush requested $70 million in his 2004 budget."
But maybe this attempt by Bush to solve a problem that has existed since man first walked the earth (and certainly existed during the Clinton and Carter administrations) is another neo-con attempt to rule the world! Yes, the CIA is going to use that money to train the homeless to die on the front-lines of our Bush/Cheney junta robber-baron neo-con imperialist land grab for enron and oil war with the world!
And Winston rounds out his factless, slanderous, diatribe by using a Molly Ivins column. Honestly-- I get flack from every leftist on this site for my sources-- which are evil, according to Sam Adams, and Winston thinks he can pass off Molly Ivins, and most every other source he uses, all extreme left, all politically slanted, all biased, as an appropriate source.
So your challenge, Winston, aside from trying to set a record for adjective use in your propaganda, is to actually prove your lies-- prove that Bush's "policies" have made people homeless, prove that Bush is actually "making families ill", [i]prove[/i] it. Prove that Clinton's policies created 22 million new jobs. Prove it.
Why the hell can't Jimmytherighteous assail you with his smart-ass rebukes? My God, I don't write anything as off-base as you do.
"We the people" my ass. That kind of populism is total bunk in the face of your lies.
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| Reuters article: AIDS, SARS, nuke war all the fault of US because we discovered flight. |
| 12.21.03 (2:31 am) [edit] |
Any remaining questions about Reuters' anti-American bias have been effectively put to rest by this unbelievable article. Reuters blames the US for the spread of SARS and AIDS, and nuclear war, all because we discovered flight. This article is Reuters' way of commemorating the Wright brothers.
CUT AND PASTE ALERT! I DID NOT WRITE THIS!
[b]The Mixed Blessing of Wright Brothers' Milestone [/b]
Tue Dec 16,10:55 AM ET
By Jim Loney
KITTY HAWK, N.C. (Reuters) - The world was fairly warned of the peaks and perils of human flight by the daring mythical adventure of Daedalus and Icarus, the father and son who flew to freedom on wings of feathers and wax.
Daedalus survived his first flight, while Icarus, overcome by the joy of flying, ignored his father's admonitions, flew too close to the sun and perished after the wax melted.
Orville and Wilbur Wright's historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903, in an airplane fashioned from wood, wire and cloth, realized the age-old dream of human flight and transformed the 20th-century world.
And for all its profoundly positive impacts, human flight unleashed unforeseen and unintended miseries.
The birth of aviation ended geographic isolation. It was the foundation for some of the greatest achievements of the last 100 years, as airplanes bridged oceans at supersonic speed and rockets carried astronauts to the moon.
It also transformed warfare, giving people new and more efficient ways to kill each other.
"At our core, we humans are explorers. In the last 100 years, we have ... become the dominant species in the air," said Peter Diamandis, an aerospace entrepreneur and a founder of the International Space University, hailing the Wrights' achievement as a milestone in human evolution.
"We will always find new and novel ways to kill ourselves," he added. "Every invention has a positive and negative."
Airplanes helped create the huge global tourist industry. They provided a speedy way for disease to spread and a new weapon for terrorists.
FEAR OF FLYING
They bottled some of the greatest human fears, of heights, of falling, of enclosed spaces -- a mix that is fear of flying.
Those who have it might step easily into a car, where tens of thousands of people die each year, but be terrified by the prospect of travel by plane, reputed to be the safest mode of transport.
Planes were used in some of the century's worst disasters.
The B-29 Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Days later, another fell on Nagasaki. Together they killed more than 200,000 people.
Airplanes spared warriors personal contact, allowing them to kill with efficiency from thousands of feet up.
"You have (bomber) pilots who never see the effects what they do. They never know the civilians on the ground that they killed," said Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action, one of the largest U.S. anti-war groups. "That certainly has a dehumanizing effect on the pilots."
In the United States, the birthplace of human flight, aircraft were used for the two attacks seared into the consciousness of every American -- the Dec. 7, 1941, assault by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Airplanes have allowed doctors to take medicine and healing to the ends of the Earth. But they have also allowed disease to hop a quick ride to a new place.
Researchers have identified a promiscuous airline flight attendant as "Patient Zero," a key carrier in the early days of AIDS (news - web sites), a disease blamed for more than 20 million deaths.
SARS (news - web sites) moved within days from Hong Kong to Singapore and on to Toronto on airplanes. In some cases, SARS was transmitted between passengers on airplanes.
"Disease spread before the airplane. But it's happening now with a much more rapid spread and that's making it more difficult to contain," said Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the communicable disease section of the World Health Organization (news - web sites).
***
Damn you Wright brothers! Damn you flight! Damn you America!
(AIDS came from Africa, SARS came from China, and our use of the nuke was better than the German use of the nuke-- which was why we raced to get the bomb before they did. Using it against Japan may seem in today's revisionism horribly unnecessary, until you realize the millions that would have likely died from an invasion of the Japanese mainland. The Japanese in many ways surpassed Germany's brutality-- the landing of Okinawa, for example, was much more brutal and larger than the allies' invasion of Normandy.)
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| Dean's spin, and the reality behind Bush and veterans. |
| 12.21.03 (2:05 am) [edit] |
CUT AND PASTE ALERT! I DID NOT WRITE THIS!
December 18, 2003, 9:10 a.m.
[b]Marching On
Don't worry: Dean's got a new anti-Bush, post-Saddam zinger.[/b]
--Rich Lowry
Howard Dean and the boys might have just lost one of their favorite anti-Bush lines on the stump ? "He can't even find Saddam Hussein" ? but not to worry. Dean still has another biting criticism of Bush national-security policy echoed by other Democratic candidates as well ? that President Bush has supposedly slashed veterans off of their benefits and cut combat pay. As it happens, these charges have as much merit as the can't-find-Saddam taunt in the wake of the dictator getting pulled from a hole.
Dean has said of Bush routinely on the campaign trail: "One night, Friday night ? he hoped the media wouldn't notice ? he announced that combat pay was being cut because 'mission accomplished.' One day last January he went to a Veterans Administration hospital and said that veterans deserve the best pay, the best health care that money could buy. That was the day after he cut 164,000 veterans off their health-care benefits. This president doesn't get that the defense of the United States depends on the men and women he sent to Iraq and depends on the veterans who came home."
In today's free-spending Washington, the charge that anyone is being cut off from anything or that any spending is being reduced has, shall we say, an inherent implausibility. Indeed, no one is being cut off from their veterans benefits.
Here's the background: For 80 years, the rule was that the VA would take care of veterans with medical problems related to their military service or veterans without the means to purchase their own health care. In the mid-1990s, Congress decided to open the VA health care to all veterans, prompting a flood of new entrants into the system. Today, the VA treats a million more patients than it did three years ago, for a total of about five million. This sure doesn't sound like cutting veterans off benefits, but maybe they reckon such things differently in Vermont.
Dean's charge does have a wisp of a connection to reality. Because the VA system was overwhelmed by a flood of new patients ? many of them relatively well-off ? it established a new rule saying that veterans with no medical problems relating to their service and an income above a certain threshold are not eligible for VA care. The rule affects an estimated 164,000 people. These are Dean's 164,000 veterans "cut off" from benefits. But they can't be cut off from benefits, because they never received them. The VA grandfathered in everyone already receiving care to make sure no one would be cut off.
The idea that the Bush administration is somehow stingy with the VA is simply absurd. The VA budget has increased by about a third, going from $48 billion a year to $64 billion a year. This year, the VA will provide educational assistance to more than 400,000 people, and guarantee home loans of another 300,000 people, with the total value of about $40 billion. If Dean thinks this is ungenerous, what would be his alternative ? giving veterans lifetime everything-for-free cards?
Dean's combat-pay charge is just as deceptive. The Pentagon earlier this year opposed extending recent Bush-instituted increases in "imminent-danger pay" and "family-separation allowances." It wanted to maintain the current pay of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but through different means. This was all rendered moot when Bush signed into law in November a bill preserving the imminent-danger and family-separation pay increases. So no cut in combat pay had been proposed or took place, but Dean goes his merry way, charging otherwise.
There's a lesson here about the recklessness of Dean and the other Democratic candidates who ape his anti-Bush rhetoric. But that these charges are presented by Dean as a telling critique of Bush national-security policy also demonstrates a certain lack of seriousness about foreign policy. Dean seems to imply that we are going to wage the war on terror with really, really generous veterans health-care benefits. Yeah, right ? and we can't find Saddam Hussein.
[i]? Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.[/i]
(c)2003 King Features Syndicate
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| The Left's simplistic, black-and-white foreign policy |
| 12.21.03 (1:51 am) [edit] |
Since George Bush rebuked Taiwan's leader for seeking a referendum sure to put the US at war with China, the Left has criticized this as yet MORE evidence that Bush opposes democracy!
That's about as absurd as Iran's government, ruled by clerics, lecturing the US about the need for "free and fair" elections in Iraq.
When Bush was elected in 2000 one of the first things he said upon taking office was that he would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan-- no president had taken such a pro-Taiwan stance. Bush restarted massive military sales to the island, backing up his words.
But then September 11 happened, something the Left thinks doesn't matter, and out entire foreign policy had to change. In short, we need China to help us reel in North Korea, and in order for the US to focus on its own national security, and while we support Taiwan's rights as a sovereign entity, now is definitely [i]not[/i] the time to rock the boat. Seeing as the US has pledged American blood to defend the island, we should have some say in the provocations of Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan's president.
Not fair, say the Democrats, left-wing pundits and certain neo-con hawks (like William Kristol). I find it ironic that Bush gets called a "unilateralist" and a "cowboy" when he is trying to avoid in Asia a war with (nuclear) China and another war with (nuclear) North Korea.
One of the arguments against the Iraq war from the Left was that (nuclear) North Korea was such a huge problem, we should be focusing solely on that. The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times editorialized a year ago that (nuclear) North Korea should be priority number one and that we should consider using military force against it.
Failing to miss the main point about Iraq, that we were trying to make sure it didn't turn into a North Korea, the Left fails to miss the second point, too-- going after a country after it has nukes is a wee bit tricky. Know what I mean?
With Taiwan, the logic is similar. "Democracy is good for Iraq, why isn't it good for Taiwan?" is the lament from the Left. What an asinine view. Of course, Democracy is good, and so is avoiding a war with (nuclear) China. Taiwan's quest for sovereignty should not-- post 9/11 or not-- come at the expense of a melted Los Angeles, and a loss of millions of lives.
What Bush is trying to do in both North Korea and Taiwan-- multilateralism, dialogue-- is suddenly something the Left wants no part of. We should be engaging in wars all over the globe, according to these people.
But unlike Clinton, Bush's multilateralism has teeth behind it-- we won't accept a nuclear North Korea, we won't accept a "promise" from Kim Jung Il. Lost in the reviews of Bush's Taiwan speech is that he also warned China, too, against any unilateral moves. Does anyone really think that overtly supporting Taiwan's drive for democracy, in the climate today, will help anyone? The US will be stretched too much to help the Taiwanese, and the Chinese will have no compunction about making the invasion brutally swift and deadly.
Give Bush some credit for not acting like a Leftist and plunging the country into nuclear war.
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| Christmas comes early for terrorists-- thanks to the 9th Circuit |
| 12.21.03 (12:17 am) [edit] |
In 1996 Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that made it a crime for a US citizen to support a terrorist group financially. Makes sense, doesn't it? But the Leftist 9th Circuit Court ruled recently that portions of this act were unconstitutional.
Yes, of course they would. Judge Harry Pregerson, a Carter-appointed judge said that a person has constitutional right to aid "personnel", provide "training" and financially support groups and organizations that are on the US terrorism list. Pregerson said in his majority opinion that "'a person who simply sends a check to a school or orphanage run by [a U.S.-designated terrorist group] could be convicted under the statute, even if that individual is not aware of the [group's] designation or of any unlawful activities undertaken by the [group].''
I don't know, is it too much to ask someone to investigate the organization that he/she is sending money too? And if he/she truly is 'ignorant' about the state of an organization, won't that play out in the courtroom anyway?
What's more, this ruling (like the other two federal rulings this week that enabled terrorists, treating them as criminals instead of soldiers in a war and, thus, giving them legal protection from interrogation) aids terrorists and those that sympathize with them. Now, anyone that knowingly gives money to Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. through their fake charities can claim ignorance. And next thing you know a dirty bomb kills 10,000 people instantly.
Consider how, in just two weeks, the court has come out for terrorists: two federal judges ruled that enemy combatants, one a US citizen, the others foreign,part of an organization that killed 3,000 Americans, led by a man who declared war on this country in 1998 can be protected with all the comforts of the US justice system, instead of the laws of war. This means that terrorists cells in the US will flourish under their abuse of our civil rights-- just like they did before 9-11. On top of this, those fifth columnists in America, the Leftist 'rights' groups, the Leftist professors that indoctrinate our students with neo-Marxist bunk in a university environment completely hostile to other viewpoints (including the conservative one) may, with the protection of Uncle Sam, aid and abet those that wish to destroy us.
This is a war against people committed to destroying us. Was 9-11 not a big enough statement? Do we have to have thousands more civilians killed?
Of course, the Left is very proud of itself now. Left-wing "law" professor David Cole of Georgetown University, a regular on PBS (your tax dollars at work!) said the ruling ''declares unconstitutional one of the linchpins of the Ashcroft domestic anti-terrorism strategy.''
And there, right there, in that sent | |
