Monday, January 28, 2008

LYING Democrats REID, PELOSI, HOYER join Bush, Cheney, Telecom execs & Corporate Media Whores in CENSORING discussion of Telecom IMMUNITY-for-Spying..


Democrat "leaders" Pelosi, Reid, and Hoyer (far right) have mastered the Bush-Cheney-Rove art of LYING bold-faced to American and especially Democratic voters.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney are counting on the media silence and COMPLICITY of the COWARDLY, LYING Democratic "leadership" in the House and Senate to let Republicans win passage of the TELECOM-IMMUNITY-for-SPYING-ON-AMERICANS bill.
(click here for the DemocracyForAmerica.org post on this betrayal and whitewash/cover-up.)
www.DemocracyforAmerica.com/SupportAction
They all know this is the American people's last chance to hold the Bush administration accountable for warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans - and the COWARDLY "Democratic Leadership" IS NOT IN THE LEAST BIT INTERESTED in HOLDING THE Bush-Cheney administration ACCOUNTABLE... FOR ANYTHING!

Pelosi, Reid, Hoyer, Rockefeller, and other "Democratic Leaders" PRETEND to their Democratic voters that they are OPPOSED to RETROACTIVE IMMUNITY FOR BREAKING LAWS - illegal wiretapping and massive data-mining of ALL American electronic telecom transmissions. This means that the government has your secret business plans the moment you send them to your patent lawyer, business partners, investors, or even within your own company. Make no mistake - Pelosi, Reid, Rockefeller, Hoyer, et al UNDERSTAND THAT THERE WILL BE _NO_ OVERSIGHT for ANY of this illegal wiretapping. This means that government agents could potentially preempt your plans - for example, purchasing shares of a company ahead of your own plans to do so - WITH NO OVERSIGHT or accountability, ever!
REID and PELOSI ARE BASE LIARS. Not only do they have the power to CUT OFF IRAQ WAR FUNDING, but they CERTAINLY HAVE THE POWER TO RUN Bush's Telecom IMMUNITY-for breaking-FISA-surveillance-laws bill into the ditch.

THIS REID, PELOSI, ROCKEFELLER, and the ENTIRE CORRUPTED, COMPLICIT "Democratic" inside-the-beltway "leadership" REFUSE TO DO.

The Democrat "leadership" has one play, and one play only: RUN FOR OFFICE as offering OPPOSITION to Bush-Republican atrocities, and then, once they get re-elected, RULE and VOTE AS REPUBLICANS.

THEY, like JOE LIEBERMAN, run as "MODERATE" Democrats offering OPPOSITION to Bush-Cheney co.... but when they get behind closed doors with K.-St. lobbyists and industry executives, THEY SELL OUT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, and Democratic voters, EVERY DAMN TIME.

PELOSI and REID are guilty of FRAUD and DECEIT, on the telecom surveillance-spying immunity bill, alone!
(And for dozens of other issues as well.)

Sunday, January 27, 2008

TREASON from within the Bush-Cheney government: "A NUCLEAR SPY RING....of US OFFICIALS STEALING NUCLEAR SECRETS to sell on Black Market"

UK Times: Brewster Jennings outed by 'treasonous' US govt official in 2001, not 2003
The UK's Sunday Times has another article today, Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe, in their series about the penetration of US agencies by a criminal network of Turkish, Israeli and US government officials stealing nuclear secrets and selling them on the black market to the highest bidder.
http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/2008/01/uk-times-brewster-jennings-outed-by.html

Friday, January 25, 2008

With a whole raft of Democratic TREACHERY, we are going to have to GO BACK to posting as "COWARDLY DEMOCRATS" as we did before January 2007!


Just ONE SHORT YEAR into the "Democratic" Party controlled House and Senate of the 110th Congress, NANCY PELOSI, STENY HOYER, HARRY REID, JAY ROCKEFELLER, and other "Democratic" senators and House leaders are now brazenly embracing REPUBLICAN WHITE HOUSE TALKING POINTS, and IGNORING the White House's REFUSAL TO COMPLY with Congressional Subpoenas! IT IS AS IF KARL ROVE has morphed in to HARRY REID, and DICK CHENEY has cloned an evil twin into the mind of NANCY PELOSI!

In short, PELOSI, HOYER, REID, ROCKEFELLER, and other "Democrats" ARE FOLLOWING THE Senator JOE LIEBERMAN EXAMPLE: RUN as a "liberal" or moderate DEMOCRATS... but once you get to Washington, SIDE WITH THE BUSH-CHENEY ADMINISTRATION ON THEIR SIGNATURE most abusive, most invasive, most dictatorial, most police-state and EXPAND-WARs agenda... EVEN as the Bush administration makes a horrible mess of the Aghan war, and even as the US invasion of Iraq has turned into nothing short of a huge, nation-wide "FREE FIRE" (aka "license to kill") ZONE!

(Which nation-wide "free fire zone" is JUST what we complained about the Russians doing in Afghanistan two decades ago...but with far more American bombs and explosives unleashed from the air by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, than the Russians ever dropped on Afghanistan.)

"THAT's PROGRESS!" say our war-lobby, oil-lobby, big-finance, AIPAC lobby, and SCARED of the "major media""Democratic" "leaders."
FOR SHAME! THIS 110th Congress puts the "KEATING SEVEN" (which seven senators in the pocket of convicted S&L fraudster included Democrat JOHN GLENN and Republican John McCain back during the Bush1 S&L catastrophe) TO SHAME in the VORACIOUS CORRUPTION, say-one-thing and do-another category!


#1. The Nation -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cleared a key hurdle for the FISA Amendments Act on Thursday, advancing President Bush's preferred version of the spying bill, a move opposed by the majority of Reid's Democratic colleagues. The vote, 60-34, sets the Senate on a course to validate more warrantless spying by the Bush administration and provide retroactive amnesty to telephone companies accused of breaking surveillance laws -- an unpopular approach.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20080124/cm_thenation/15274927

#2. Senator JAY ROCKEFELLER SECONDS Harry Reid's "PRETEND to offer OPPOSITION, but RULE as an agent of Bush-Cheney White House TREACHERY:
here is Jay Rockefeller strutting around declaring Victory and having to battle against feelings of cockiness because, finally, he is about to win something.

But ponder the "win" that is giving him these feelings of immense self-satisfaction. Is he finally accomplishing what Democrats were given control of Congress to do: namely, impose some checks and limits on the administration? No. The opposite is true. Rockefeller is doing the bidding of Dick Cheney. The bill that he is working for is the bill the White House demanded. Rockefeller is supported by the entire Bush administration, urged on and funded by the nation's most powerful telecoms, and is backed by the entire GOP caucus in the Senate.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/01/24/rockefeller/index.html

(Note: Constitutional lawyer Greenwald catches Senator Jay Rockefeller bluntly LYING, Greenwald compares Rockefeller's statements with pertaining law statuttes, and even more dramatically, with Rockefeller's own diametrically opposing statements.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

LIES-to-WAR SOLD to the American public as a PR campaign, by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, & co....


False Pretenses [i.e. LIES-to-WAR by the Bush-Cheney Administration, 2002-2003]
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

January 23, 2008
The Center for Public Integrity... www.PublicINTEGRITY.org
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/Default.aspx?src=home&context=overview&id=945
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.
[continued at- ]
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/Default.aspx?src=home&context=overview&id=945

Cheney wants to extend NO OVERSIGHT SURVEILLANCE on Americans law to infinity....

Cheney Wants Surveillance Law Expanded
by Tom Raum
January 23, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/keep-dancing-chuck_b_82790.html

tags: Warrantless Wiretapping, Wiretapping, Wiretapping Surveillance, Surveillance, Surveillance Law,

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney prodded Congress on Wednesday to extend and broaden an expiring surveillance law, saying "fighting the war on terror is a long-term enterprise" that should not come with an expiration date.

"We're reminding Congress that they must act now," Cheney [urged, repeating the drumbeat he helped create to push America into the Iraq war.]

.....The original FISA law requires the government to get permission from a special court to listen in on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States. Changes in communications technology mean many purely foreign to foreign communications now pass through the United States and therefore require the government to get court orders to intercept them.

...The Protect America Act, adopted in August, eased that restriction. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say it went too far, giving the government far more power to eavesdrop on American communications without court oversight.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

NANCY PELOSI ROBS American citizens of JUSTICE: She REFUSES to hold even HEARINGS on abuses of Law and Constitution by Bush-Cheney administration.

MAKE NO MISTAKE: NANCY PELOSI IS THE BIGGEST ALLY George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have in the entire world.

HER OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE: REFUSING to even ALLOW HEARINGS into CRIMINAL ABUSES OF POWER BY THE BUSH-CHENEY WHITE HOUSE... is a $100,000,000 ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR PR GIFT to the Republican Party.. in THIS COMING YEAR, ALONE.

Just as Bill Clinton's assisting Republicans in sweeping various criminal cases out the door in 1993 ultimately assisted the RESTORATION of the Bush family dynasty with George W. Bush's stolen election in 2000, SO TOO DOES NANCY PELOSI WHITEWASH the record of STOLEN ELECTIONS, pre-9-11 INCOMPETENCE (bordering on Dereliction of Duty), lies-to-war, TORTURE, Kangaroo courts for female privates accused only of "abuse" while the White House insists on the 'right' to torture prisoners to death... At this moment in time, NANCY PELOSI and her "Democratic" Party "leaders" ARE THE BIGGEST ENABLERS of the BUSh-CHENEY REGIME in the world, thanks to BILLIONS upon BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of American taxpayer dollars shipped to Israel, a huge portion which comes right back to America via the AIPAC lobby, oil lobby, and war-industries lobbies, to fill Pelosi & crews' campaign coffers.

NANCY PELOSI January 2008: THE very PICTURE OF SELLING OUT millions of American Democratic voters.

===========================================

Pelosi greeted with “Impeach” Bush and Cheney buttons
filed by Thomas Ferraro
January 18th, 2008
http://blogs.reuters.com/trail08/2008/01/18/pelosi-greeted-with-impeach-bush-and-cheney-buttons

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she’s drawing heat from fellow Democratic lawmakers as well as people across the nation for refusing to move to impeach President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I go through airports, and people have buttons as if they knew I was coming,” Pelosi said with a smile, mimicking a protester pointing to an “Impeach” button on their chest.

But the California Democrat said she is sticking to her position that trying to remove Bush or Cheney would be divisive, and she added, most likely unsuccessful. If the House voted to impeach Bush and Cheney, a two-thirds vote would be needed in the closely divided Senate to oust them.

Many Democrats and civil liberties groups have accused the Bush administration of misleading the United States into the Iraq war and violating the rights of U.S. citizens with its warrantless surveillance program. The White House denies the charges.

In helping Democrats win back control of Congress in 2006 from Republicans, Pelosi said she would not push for impeachment despite a number of calls to do so.

Speaking with reporters, she recalled that she wanted to focus on unifying the nation, passing the Democrats’ legislative agenda — not picking an impeachment fight with the White House.

“It was my belief that an impeachment of the Vice President or the President … would be very divisive in our country, and that is what I believed then,” Pelosi said. “It should have come to no surprise when I became Speaker I said it again, and I continue to hold that view.”

Saturday, January 19, 2008

NANCY PELOSI's 110th Congress SUPPORTS and FUNDS Bush's war in Iraq... BECAUSE THEY WANT TO. Regardless of pathetic, feeble protestations to contrary.


Nancy Pelosi, nominal "leader" of the 110th Congress, captured in a political-photographic masterpiece: her massive pearls illustrate a consumer lifestyle at the very top of the food chain, her smiles for President Bush (at a dinner where he vowed to veto any Democratic bills that didn't align with his goals) illustrate her true "inside the beltway" priorities: "GET ALONG with the Big-Biz and War Lobbies, shell out billions upon billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to keer her lord and master, George W. Bush, happy." Peons, taxpayers, and common citizen are of no concern; Nancy is far more a part of the autocratic Top-2% ruling class that benefits from Bush's tax-cuts for the wealthy, than she is part of the Democratic rank-and-file and working families demographic.

HERE'S A HINT, NANCY: DON'T TRY TO TAKE THE BLAME FOR THE IRAQ WAR on yourself or on Democratic voters. HOLD IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS on Mr. Bush's vast CORRUPTION and ABUSES OF POWER, and put the onus for INCOMPETENCE and CORRUPTION in the prosecution of the war ON HIM and his Vice President.
(Which tack "AIPAC GIRL" Pelosi will most certainly not take,
http://www.postchronicle.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=11&num=70952
thereby ROBBING Democratic voters, activists, and candidates of well over $100,000,000 ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in PR/Campaign issues. (John Kerry and the Democratic Party raised $100 million for campaign 2006, but Kerry's incredibly anemic, NON-CONFRONTATIONAL campaign not only did not give Democratic voters an issue to "hang their hat on," but even despite his pathetic campaign, the Republicans STILL had to steal votes to garner Ohio's electoral college votes, and thereby "win" re-election - which Kerry cowardly refused to contest or even deign to notice, Kerry reneging on his campaign-season-long pledges to "fight until the last vote is counted.")
Just as Senator Joe Lieberman ROBBED Democratic voters, activists and candidates of their best issue in the 2002 mid-term election - the opportunity to TIE President George W. Bush to Enron FRAUD and massive accounting corruption - when Lieberman "WET BLANKETED" the Enron investigation Senate Majority 'Leader' Tom Daschle foolishly threw in to the Lieberman chaired Senate Govt. Affairs Committee. (ENRON Chairman Ken Lay had been George W. Bush's NUMBER ONE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTOR through Bush's two Texas gubernatorial elections, his Republican presidential primary campaign, his 2000 general election campaign, the Florida vote recount battle, and the 2001 inaugueration committee. In return, Bush and Cheney had pushed away federal oversight of Enron, even allowing Enron to manipulate and rig California and Washington state electric utility markets, robbing consumers of tens of millions of dollars.)
LIEBERMAN, DASCHLE, John Kerry, HARRY REID, and NANCY PELOSI KEEP RUNNING THE SAME TIRED PLAY on American citizens and Democratic voters: THEY REFUSE TO STAND UP FOR JUSTICE in America, thereby SELLING American citizens and taxpayers DOWN THE RIVER to K-Street, big-business, and now War Lobby lobbyists.

It follows directly that up to this point the continued prosecution of the war has served the leaders’ interests. They may say they are trying to end the war. They may have secured their election or reelection, as many of the Democrats now serving in Congress have, by promising to do whatever they can to end the war. Yet the truth is that they’ve sold the public a bill of goods.


=======================================

Iraq War: 1,760 Days and Counting

By Robert Higgs
January 17, 2008
http://consortiumnews.com/2008/011608b.html

Editor’s Note: Sen. John McCain may have stunned some Americans with his projection that the U.S. occupation of Iraq could last 100 years or more. But the political pressures in Washington sometimes make ending a war more difficult than starting one.

In this guest essay, the Independent Institute's Robert Higgs discusses what it might take to bring the troops home:

On Oct. 19, 2001, in speaking about the new government controls and heightened surveillance already being clamped on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the new war “may never end. At least not in our lifetime. . . . The way I think of it is, it’s a new normalcy.”

We should have taken his grim forecast more seriously.

The U.S. attack on and occupation of Iraq, represented by the Bush administration as a critical element in the larger Global War on Terror, began nearly five years ago, and it shows no signs of ending soon.

Indeed, if John McCain is elected president and (with help from his successors) carries out the not-so-veiled threat to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for a hundred years, then we can confidently expect that the war will not end in our lifetime. Such a prospect is so seemingly preposterous, however, that one’s mind does not readily assimilate it.

It is difficult enough to absorb the reality that the United States has now been at war against the Iraqis for almost five years. An engagement sold to the public as a “cakewalk” and represented just six weeks after it began as a “mission accomplished” has now (as I write) continued for 1,760 days.

Compare this duration with the time the United States was formally engaged in World War I (589 days) or World War II (1,365 days). In the 1940s, the U.S. forces (with important allies, to be sure) defeated two major economic and military powers in a globe-circling war in less time than the U.S. forces have been engaged in Iraq.

And after all this time, where does the U.S. venture stand? Evidently it is no closer to the “victory” the president has repeatedly said he seeks than it was immediately after the occupation began.

The 901 U.S. troops who lost their lives in Iraq during 2007 were the largest number in any calendar year since the war began.

As 2008 begins, we read reports of a U.S. air strike on the outskirts of Baghdad in which B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives, an attack described by Major Alayne Conway as “one of the largest airstrikes since the onset of the war.”

The attack came only a day after six U.S. soldiers participating in a major ground offensive were reported killed in the “biggest one-day loss in Iraq since May.” These events do not epitomize minor “mopping up” activities. The war obviously has no end in sight.

Notwithstanding these inauspicious developments and Sen. McCain’s bizarre pronouncement, we might well think in a more focused way about what will ultimately bring the war to an end, because it almost certainly will end someday.

Given its nature, it cannot be ended as each of the world wars was ended, by the formal capitulation of an enemy state. Loosely organized insurgents and guerrillas do not stop fighting in that fashion.

In view of the particulars on the ground in Iraq, it would seem that no complete cessation of armed hostilities can occur there until the United States withdraws its military forces. So the question becomes: What will induce a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress to act decisively to bring the troops home?

In the abstract, the answer is easy: U.S. authorities will extract their occupation force when they perceive that doing so is in their interest. Note well that I said, “in their interest.”

Whether a U.S. withdrawal serves my interest, or yours, or that of 95 percent of the American people is not necessarily important, because government leaders do not act to serve other people’s interests.

Anyone who has advanced beyond infancy in his understanding of political affairs knows that despite all the dutiful claptrap that political leaders and their functionaries spout in public, they invariably pursue their own interests. Those interests may be material, political, institutional, or ideological, but in any event they are their own interests, not yours or mine.

It follows directly that up to this point the continued prosecution of the war has served the leaders’ interests. They may say they are trying to end the war. They may have secured their election or reelection, as many of the Democrats now serving in Congress have, by promising to do whatever they can to end the war. Yet the truth is that they’ve sold the public a bill of goods.

When the leaders have considered all the personal consequences they expect to follow from acting to end the war, they have concluded that, all things being considered, doing so does not serve their interest, and therefore they have refrained from doing so.

After all, it’s not as though the U.S. war effort has a mind of its own. Whenever the president wants to remove the troops, he can do so; he has the power. Whenever the members of the majority in Congress want to remove the troops, by stopping the funding to support them there, they can do so; they have the power.

The posture of powerlessness that our leaders often affect―my goodness, what can I do? my hands are tied―is a disingenuous pose. They can stop the U.S. engagement in the war whenever they want to do so. Thus far, they simply have not wanted to do so.

What might cause them to reach a new conclusion about what serves their personal interest? Several developments might turn the trick. Nearly all of them work by heightening the public’s anger with their leaders’ decisions.

Historically, the decisive development in similar instances has been the cumulation of public costs, especially the costs in life and limb. In both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the public’s disfavor of the engagement closely tracked the cumulation of casualties.

As political scientist John Mueller showed in his book War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, “every time American casualties increased by a factor of 10, support for the war dropped by about 15 percentage points” in the polls.

One reason the public has continued to tolerate their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war in Iraq is that the casualties have not been nearly so great, by an order of magnitude, as they were in Korea and Vietnam.

So far, not quite 4,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq. That’s only one death for every 75,000 persons living in the United States, and therefore the loss of life has not cut deeply into the public psyche―most Americans have not been personally acquainted with anyone killed in the war.

(The vastly greater loss of Iraqi lives seems to have made even less impression.)

Sad to say, the public may not turn decisively against their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war until many more American soldiers have died.

Economic costs have also mounted, and they have loomed relatively much larger in this war than in the earlier wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Who says the military leaders never learn? They’ve certainly learned how to increase hugely the financial costs of fighting a war.

Estimates of the costs to date vary widely, depending on how one accounts for various joint, indirect, and implied costs, but a total cost to date in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars is not implausible, and later costs, including those associated with decades of care for the war’s legions of physically and mentally disabled, will add enormously to the total.

In earlier wars, even though the costs were relatively greater in blood than in dollars, the public eventually wearied of the economic sacrifices entailed by the financial expenses of continued fighting.

Economist Hugh Mosley concluded that the Johnson administration “was reluctant to resort to increased taxes to finance the war for fear of losing public support for its policy of military escalation.”

Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote that President Richard Nixon “realized that for economic reasons (the war was simply costing too much) and for the sake of domestic peace and tranquility he had to cut back on the American commitment to Vietnam”; the retrenchment was “forced on [him] by public opinion.”

As the recession that has just begun deepens, the public may well object more strenuously to the government’s squandering of such vast amounts of tax money on a senseless continuation of the war in Iraq.

When their purses are not so full, people may resent every additional dollar spent on the war more than they did previously. Ultimately, they may become so angry that they will take actions to punish severely the political leaders who continue to support the war.

Serious political challengers may attract a mass following by embracing the example of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who promised in the 1952 campaign to end the enormously unpopular war in Korea and, after he took office, kept his promise expeditiously.

When substantial negative feedback begins to jeopardize the personal job security, not to speak of the respect and fawning, the electorate affords incumbents, they will begin to take notice, and to discount more heavily the contributions from defense contractors, big financial establishments, petrochemical companies, and other high rollers who have encouraged them to stay the hopeless course―though not hopeless for these special interests, of course; for them it has been a bonanza.

George W. Bush parlayed a campaign of fear-mongering into his reelection in 2004, but unless another major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, the public will grow increasingly resistant to such appeals and more eager to throw the rascals out as the war’s costs continue to mount.

It is extremely unfortunate that escalating costs in blood and money are the only proven means of bringing the general public to resist strongly their political leaders who are committed to a continuation of unnecessary, unwise, and immoral war.

Some of us wish that rational argument, cogent evidence, and humane sentiment would persuade a preponderance of the public to demand an end to the war. History suggests, however, that only personal grief and economic pain will induce the American public to act against their perfidious leaders.

Needless to say, if the public remains as passive and as easily bamboozled as it has been during the past seven years, the war will continue, maybe even for the hundred years in which Senator McCain declares that a U.S. occupation of Iraq would be “fine with me.”

Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague. He is the author of many books, including Depression, War, and Cold War.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Nancy Pelosi SET TO ROLL OVER for MORE TAX CUTS FOR WEALTHY, Bush's "economic stimulus" package..


Nancy Pelosi COWERS in her San Fran Penthouse as Bush glowers at her in person. Bush wants TAX CUTS FOR MILLIONAIRES to "stimulate" economy, Pelosi will have her entire Democratic grovels at his feet, because providing "leadership" (much less CONFRONTING the economic, political, and executive abuses) is NOT what Nancy Pelosi or her increasingly lame 110th Congress are about.


As the BUSH-2 RECESSION threatens to take up where the Bush-1 recession left off - in 1991, when Defense Secretaries Cheney and Rumsfeld squandered the economic "Peace Dividend" before the dust from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain had settled, NANCY PELOSI and her fellow 'Democratic' "Leaders" have NOTHING TO SAY as George W. Bush lobbies for ANOTHER ROUND OF TAX CUTS FOR BIG BUSINESS - to the tune of fifty-billion dollars - with a sweetner of $100 billion for "individual taxpayers", of which we can all bet a week's salary that the lions share will go to the top 10% of income earners.

TRANSLATION: As American DROWNS in BUSH DEFICITS, NANCY PELOSI and the Democrats COWER IN FEAR from holding Mr. Bush responsible for those deficits, and indeed are set to grant him ANOTHER 10% of the nation's entire GDP that will almost certainly go to the top-tier wealthy, with yet another dose of "TRICKLE DOWN" in your face TREASURY LOOTING, with the Democrats AWOL, VOICELESS, and COWERING - YET AGAIN!

NANCY PELOSI ISN'T QUALIED TO GUARD A CHICKEN-COOP! Aside from keeping Dick Cheney from launching nuclear bombs at Iran (which we will concede is an important accomplishment, but one that Pelosi, "The AIPAC girl," can hardly take full credit for) about the only thing that Ms. Pelosi can show for her year as Speaker is an UNENDING STREAM OF BILLION-DOLLAR BUDGET APPROPRIATIONS that are hardly a dime smaller than the Bush White House requested in the first place!

And, far worse than that, Ms. Pelosi, like Democrat "leaders" TOM DASCHLE and Joe Lieberman before her, has ROBBED Democratic voters of the good, hard, fighting issues that make voters turn out at the polls: Issues like "BUSH DEFICITS," "KATRINA Reconstruction CORRUPTION" and "billions missing in Iraq war spending."

When CNN, FOX 'news,' and George Bush tell Nancy Pelosi and the "Democratic" Congress to JUMP, Nancy, Steny Hoyer, and Harry Reid ask "HOW HIGH?"
===========================================


Recession fears unsettle markets
Fears of a recession have gripped markets in recent days
BBC news, Jan. 18, 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7195262.stm

Fears of a recession sent US shares reeling again, after weak manufacturing data and a massive loss at investment bank Merrill Lynch unsettled investors.

The benchmark Dow Jones industrial average fell 306.95 points, or 2.46%, to close at 12,159.21.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Nevada Dem primary polls tighten up to 3-way dead heat...

Nevada Dem primary polls tighten up to 3-way dead heat...
But unfortunately, in a year when Democratic voters want "change," the 2 candidates (Kucinich and Edwards) with the campaigns most centered on direct CONFRONTATION of corporate excess and vast government corruption, are being smothered by cash flowing in to the two "pretty" Democratic Senators still in the race... Senators who between them couldn't FILIBUSTER a single atrocious bill, budget boondoggle, extra-legal policy, or Bush administration nominee, if their lives depended on it.

The bottom line is, Voters may TALK that they want change, but until they are feeling the pain of economic or social dislocation, voters actually prefer good looking candidates who "make them feel comfortable," over those who promise to fight and stir up the system.
=====================================

New Poll: Democratic race in Nevada a dead heat
http://www.rgj.com/blogs/inside-nevada-politics/2008/01/new-poll-democratic-race-in-nevada-dead.html

A new poll by the Reno Gazette-Journal shows a neck-and-neck three-way race among Democrats for Saturday's caucus. On the Republican side, U.S. Sen. John McCain has taken his first lead in Nevada of the election season, and Mitt Romney, who has been working Nevada harder than any other Republican, is trailing in fourth place.

A look at the top line results (more will be posted later this morning):

Barack Obama: 32 percent
Hillary Clinton: 30 percent
John Edwards: 27 percent

Friday, January 11, 2008

PELOSI'S RECESSION, PELOSI'S DEFICITS: Under Speaker Pelosi's lame 'leadership', DEMOCRATS get BLAME for Bush's deficits and recession....


Pelosi, Pearls, and (near) Kisses for Bush: or,
"The Plutocrats celebrate their stranglehold on American government."
Uber "tax cuts are Heaven!" Bush-lovers Merrill, Goldman-Sachs roll out the "R" word, "recession."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hale-stewart/2008-begins-with-an-econo_b_81213.html

Nancy, the Republicans and "conservatives" hate you, and despise the Democratic Party which you nominally "lead." (Just read the first dozen comments on this Baltimore Sun article, "Pelosi, Reid Ask Bush to Meet on Economy.")
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2008/01/pelosi_reid_ask_bush_to_meet_o.html
If you were too smug and arrogant in your position to figure it out, they (Repubs and 'conservatives') have been planning on blaming the Bush2 Recession on Democrats for years now, as these current comments so nicely illustrate.
Which of course is nothing new. When Timmy McVeigh was involuntarily discharged from the US Army after Gulf War1, he was unable to find decent employment in upstate New York, due to tough economic times from the Bush1 (1990-1993) Recession. Driven to desperation by an Army bill demanding repayment of $1,000 that the Army claimed he had been "overpaid", McVeigh went over the edge... and planned and carried out his murderous attack on the Murrah federal building, symbol of the hated government then led by President Bill Clinton that had fired him, conducted the siege of David Korsh's child-using cult at Waco, and was the object of fear and loathing by right-wing Hate-government militias. . In 1995 at the time of McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton was in the process of turning the Bush recession into the Clinton economic boom... but Democrats, "liberals," and the US government were still despised by the Right-Wing for Reagan and Bush's economic policies, the Right-Wing blaming Democrats for the Bush1 recession, brought on by the looting of Savings & Loans that cost taxpayers an estimated one TRILLION dollars.
(We don't know if that one trilion dollars in S&L losses was the actual cash amount, or the sum taxpayers paid out over the course of installments to pay down the huge losses. Being American citizens with lame "democratic" representation, and a weak financial media, we are not entitled to know how much the Bush1 Recession/Savings&Loan debacle cost us.)

WELL, SPEAKER PELOSI, CONGRATULATIONS!

YOU HAVE ALLOWED the Republicans, their corporate backers, and the up-dated (not to say "modern") Savings-and-Loan sharks to DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN - ROB American taxpayers of BILLIONS of dollars, while SADDLING YOUR OWN PARTY with the blame!

Of course, much of the Democratic "leadership" was complicit in the Savings and Loand scandal (even astronaut hero Senator John Glen was one of the Keating Seven) just as today the Kerrys, Reids, Rockefellers, Clintons, Feinsteins, and Liebermans (et al) have little to say about the new Bush (Jr.) deficits, and will happily look the other way to GROSS, IN-YOUR-FACE CORRUPTION in Iraq war, New Orleans reconstruction, and other major budget-busting items of the Bush agenda.

Speaker Pelosi, you have had a full year to PIN THE RESPONSIBILITY for Bush's TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICTS on his administration, on his policies, on his White House and on his Republican Party. This you have REFUSED to do for the past year, since you prefer to be ACCOMODATING to Bush, over standing up for the American voters and taxpayers paying for his reckless spending, corrupt conduct of the war, and constitution-gutting police state powers.

While Republicans stoke "hate Democrats" rhetoric, you sell out the working-class, the middle-class, and those who have truly paid for the one-trillion dollars Mr. Bush has squandered since becoming president. by spouting empty platitudes about "BIPARTISANSHIP."

The Democrats made a farce out of the 9-11 Commission - millions spent on an "investigation" that produced not one reprimand, much less firing, much less admission of responsibility from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice "national security" team about the gross failures of security that led to the 9-11 attacks - and we have the disgrace of 9-11 Commission co-Chairs Keane and Lee Hamilton crying "The CIA (i.e. White House) WITHHELD DOCUMENTS from us that we requested!"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/washington/22intel.html

You got that, Speaker Pelosi? American citizens ENTRUST their Congress to SPEND MILLIONS of dollars investigating the root causes and failures that led to the horrendous loss of life and property on 9-11... and your Democratic Party commission co-Chair is reduced to crying "We didn't get all the documents we requested."

Speaker Pelosi, Lee Hamilton's lame protestation is the perfect metaphor for your 110th Congress: pearls for you, pleasant smiles for the president, while taxpayers are forced to bear the burden, like oxen hitched to a wagon, of paying of those millions, billions, and trillions of Bush deficts, no, make that PELOSI DEFICITS - and now THE PELOSI RECESSION. Congratulations, Madam Speaker! You have BOUGHT YOURSELF A RECESSION!

=========================================

Pelosi, Reid ask Bush to meet on economy
by Matthew Hay Brown
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2008/01/pelosi_reid_ask_bush_to_meet_o.html


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are asking President Bush for a bipartisan meeting on a stimulus package to bolster the economy after he returns from the Middle East next week – and before anyone starts announcing proposals unilaterally.

“Prominent economists associated with Republican and Democratic Administrations have called on us to supplement monetary policy with an immediate fiscal stimulus,” the Democratic leaders wrote today in a letter to Bush. “These same economists have stated that the most effective and responsible stimulus policies adhere to three simple principles: they must be timely, targeted and temporary.

“We want to work with you and the Republican leadership of the Congress to immediately develop a legislative plan based upon these principles so it can be passed and implemented into law without delay.”

With market indexes continuing to drop, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday signaled further interest rate cuts. White House officials say they are watching conditions, and Bush is considering a stimulus package that he could announce in his State of the Union address later this month.

In a letter absent of the criticism with which they regularly address the president, Pelosi and Reid wrote that they “would strongly urge” a bipartisan meeting with Bush and congressiojnal Republicans “before any economic packages are announced by either the Administration or Congressional leaders.

“We look forward to working together to develop a sound plan that injects demand into the economy, restores consumer confidence and purchasing power, and addresses the severe strains being felt by millions of our fellow Americans,” they wrote.

White House Press Seretary Dana Perino said this week it was “too early to tell” where Bush and congressional Democrats might find agreement on a package.

“One thing this President won't do is increase taxes in order to concede to anything that the Democrats might put out,” Perino told reporters. “Now I don't know what the Democrats would propose, or if they would propose anything. … Obviously there are different ideas and different approaches to lots of different problems in Washington.”

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Fear, Loathing, and WARMONGERING Rule the 'Democratic" Party: Dems BLIND to America's ENCOURAGING TERROR in Pakistan....

Over at HuffingtonPost.com, Bob Cesca points out that Hillary herded in her Democrat votes in the New Hampshire primary by playing the very Karl-Rovian FEAR card that has helped Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party steal elections for the past 8 years (what Cesca calls "Cheney-ish fearmongering"): invoking the war on terror, and her experience, 'expertise', and determination to do something, ANYTHING! should "something" happen to America as a result of the GWOT, "Global War on Terrorism."

But Hillary joins her fellow Democrat "leaders," the entire national pundit class, and the lead of the Cheney-Bush administration, in PRETENDING NOT TO NOTICE that America's insane GWOT policies are actually ENCOURAGING TERRORISM in Pakistan.

To put it bluntly, Pakistan is where the rubber of Washington's insane greed, corruption, and Byzantine lies hits the road. As this UK-Guardian article explains, despite BILLIONS in US funding to Pakistan, dictator Pervez Musharraf has SLASHED funding for public education and other democratic institutions there, putting tremendous stress on that ever growing society, and forcing Pakistanis seeking literacy and higher education to look to SAUDI FUNDED WAHABI madrass religious schools.... the fundamentalist Islamic schools which encourage "despise America and the decadent west" religious fundamentalism and authortarianism.

Even America's Jewish neo-cons, who dominate the Arthur Sulzberger-owned New York Times (with editors and 'reporters' like Safire, Brooks, Freidman, Judith Miller, Risen, Gerth, and others with a long record of encouraging the Bush-Cheney Republicans in general, and whitewashing the Dereliction-of-Duty leading up to 9-11 attacks, and supporting the invasion of Iraq in particular) TURN A BLIND EYE to Pakistan's vast corruption, to the growing influence of the Saudi funded "hate the west" Madrasses there, and to the Bush-Cheney administration's insane neglect of Al Qaida there these past 7 years!
Because the Neo-Cons (even the Jewish ones), like Dick Cheney and George Bush, are now so wedded to the police-state and war-powers agenda of the Neo-Con/Radical-Right alliance that pumps billions of dollars from American consumers and taxpayers into the GWOT spending and defense industries, that they not only look the other way to US policies that undermine democracy in America, but they actually encourage and support policies that are now ACTIVELY ENCOURAGING TERROR in Pakistan.

---------------------------
Bob Cesca points out Hillary's Cheney-eque campaign appeal:
"In other words, the terrorists will surely attack us if a 'less experienced' president is elected. So vote for Senator Obama if you want the evildoers to kill us all."

We've heard this line before:

"If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again -- that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."
-Vice President Dick Cheney, 9/07/04

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/senator-clintons-fearmon_b_80782.html

===============================================

The west has not just repressed democracy. It has aided terror

by Simon Jenkins in Lahore
Wednesday January 9, 2008
The Guardian
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/senator-clintons-fearmon_b_80782.html

Pakistan has as many paradigms as pundits. What is clear, however, is that meddling will only ever foment disorder
The Pakistani senator gazed at the headline in despair. It read: "US weighs new covert push in Pakistan". Washington was authorising "enhanced CIA activity" in the country while US Democratic candidates declared they were all ready "to launch unilateral military strikes in [Pakistan] if they detected an imminent threat". Hillary Clinton wanted "joint US-UK oversight" of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. In a country where anti-Americanism is almost a religion, said the senator, this is "an answer to a Taliban prayer".

I am convinced that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first curse with foreign policy. For the third time in 20 years, the west is meddling with the world's sixth most populous state. It did so to promote the Afghan mujahideen against the Russians in the 1980s, then to attack al-Qaida after 9/11, and now to "guard" Pakistan's bombs against a fantastical al-Qaida seizure. Needless to say, the sole beneficiaries are the Taliban and the forces of disorder.

That said, few other conclusions can be drawn from a country that, more than any I know, is Churchill's riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Pakistan has as many paradigms as pundits. You can take your choice. Thesis A is that President Pervez Musharraf is a well-meaning dictator who sought rapprochement with Benazir Bhutto to "transit" to democracy, and who still remains the best hope for guiding his country to civilian rule. Thesis B depicts him as a popinjay dictator who kills people, locks up judges, censors the media and runs a brutal fascist party, the MQM. He had no intention of working with Bhutto, whom he detested, and has so much blood on his hands as to be easily capable of consenting to her death.

Thesis C has Bhutto herself as a perfidious and corrupt hereditary monarch in thrall to a monster husband whose base was limited to Sindh province and London's media drawing-rooms. She indulged Washington's John Negroponte in his ham-fisted attempt to prop up Musharraf last year, but only so as to escape corruption charges and enjoy a modest taste of power. Thesis D says this is outrageous. Bhutto was the one Pakistani politician with experience and stature at home and abroad. She knew she could rule only with army permission but could have faced down the military, negotiated with the Taliban districts and steered Pakistan to democracy. Her going is a catastrophe.

Forget that, says thesis E. The US-backed Pakistan army, responsible for almost a quarter of the country's economy, will never cede power. It is the sole embodiment of central control in this 60-year-old federal state, and its guarantor against another partition like Bangladesh in 1971. It cannot afford to trust unruly politicians such as Bhutto and her ilk and must be trusted by Pakistan's allies abroad.

Rubbish, says thesis F. Pakistan's army makes Saddam's Republican Guard seem a bunch of pansies. Its Punjabi oligarchs and their agencies kill at will and feud even with their Taliban allies, as in last year's slaughter at Islamabad's Red Mosque. It has failed to curb the Taliban and nobody, not even Musharraf, is safe from it.

As for Pakistan in general, thesis G has it teetering on the brink of breaking apart, as the army readies itself to nullify next month's election with rigging and corruption. A bloodbath will follow, in which Sindh province breaks away and the north-west becomes an al-Qaida enclave, lowering over Kabul. No it will not, says thesis H. Pakistan is made of rubber, bouncing back from every reverse. It has a mature "civil society" of lawyers, businessmen, politicians and even some generals, sensitive to their image abroad and deeply ashamed of their dictatorship. The elections may be a mess but they will somehow move Pakistan, stumbling and trembling, to eventual civilian rule. Religious parties are supported by barely 10% of the electorate, and even the army is overwhelmingly secular. An Islamist state is inconceivable.

Since there are grains of plausibility in all these theses, much turns on the fate of next month's elections. Musharraf, weakened by his November 3 coup, still has 60 top judges imprisoned, including the nation's chief justice, locked up with his disabled son. With the charismatic Bhutto dead and the Negroponte intervention shattered, he is in a tight spot. He may yet cancel the vote and invite mayhem on to the streets.

There is certainly an openness to Pakistan's dictatorship compared with other Islamic states, and some westerners have appeased Musharraf as "our" dictator, operating a "doctrine of necessity". But there is nothing in this man's track record to suggest that he is not a paid-up member of the dictatoring classes. His agents treat democrats with contempt and he funnels huge sums into his pockets and those of his generals. About 80% of US aid to Pakistan since Musharraf came to power has gone on military assistance, less than a quarter of it used even remotely against the Taliban. The virtual collapse of the state school system has followed a fall in education spending from 4% to 1.8% of GDP, one of the lowest in Asia. In its place have mushroomed the free madrasas, from a few hundred to over 10,000, financed by Wahhabist Saudi money and formerly in league with American-financed mujahideen training camps. Intended to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, they have since become a network of "faith training" for the poor, teaching little but the Qur'an. This is Musharraf's (and America's) most lethal bequest to Pakistan's political economy.

America's clodhopping sponsorship of Musharraf drove him to renege on the treaties with the tribal states, fomenting a Pashtun insurgency. The Afghan frontier has duly proved al-Qaida's juiciest hunting ground, aided by every American bombing raid and every Pakistan army atrocity. The Pashtun mujahideen (whose American backers are well-documented in the film Charlie Wilson's War) is a Frankenstein monster that has turned its vengeance on Musharraf, Afghanistan and Washington alike.

Whatever the defects of democracy, and in Asia they are legion, it remains the least worst way of curbing authoritarian power. There is no alternative. America's handling of Musharraf since 9/11 - essentially to capture one man, Osama bin Laden - has rendered swaths of his country, from Baluchistan in the south to Swat in the north, wholly insecure. Even the Grand Trunk Road from Islamabad to Peshawar is patrolled by the Taliban. The idea that Musharraf's troops, let alone the CIA or the US airforce, might suppress a people who have worsted every empire from the Mughals to the British is ludicrous. Modern armies are no agents of pacification. Civilian negotiation in a context of democratic assent is at very least worth a try.

Backing Musharraf has always seemed "a good idea at the time". The next person to be cursed with Washington's favour appears to be Musharraf's successor as army chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani. However, by opting for the realpolitik of dictatorship the west has not just repressed democracy but aided insurgency and terror. It has yielded no security benefit to anyone. If Pakistan becomes a "failed state", the failure will, in large part, be one of democratic imagination in Washington and London. We simply refuse to practise what we preach.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

Sunday, January 6, 2008

On the Defensive in New Hampshire Debate, Hillary all but Admits that LOBBYISTS RULE the Democratic Party....




On the defensive after her 3rd place finish in Iowa on January 3rd, Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire last night went on the attack against BARAK OBAMA's ties with big corporate donors... But in doing so, Hillary all but admitted that the Democratic Party is RULED BY LOBBYISTS, and that no matter how awful the bill that Republicans try to impose on the Democrats in the House and Senate, neither she nor any other Senator has sought to use THE FILIBUSTER power of the senate... much less in an aggressive fashion.

In criticizing Barak Obama for "changing positions over the course of four years," Hillary points out that the entire Democratic Party has a faceless, retreating agenda of "CHANGING ISSUES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-dQ4U-sRUI
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/05/AR2008010502732_pf.html

- sometimes against the Patriot Act, then voting for it
- sometimes against universal health care, now for it,
- sometimes AGAINST funding FOR IRAQ WAR, then voting $300 billion for it

Hillary:
"I just think it is fair for people to understand, that many of the charges that have been levelled not just at me but also at Senator Edwards are not totally unrelated to the very record you [Barak Obama] have"


THAT IS INDEED TRUE, Hillary: Barak Obama, John Edwards, AND YOU have ALL been guilty of "CHANGING [your position on] ISSUES" which means that 9 out of ten times, you either start out or end up on the side of Corporate America and their hired-gun lobbyists AGAINST American citizen, workers, students, and children - Americans who have little voice in the Bush-dominated Republican government that America has had to endure for the past half-dozen years.
And "obviously" (to steal Hillary's word), Hillary has a ZERO record of FILIBUSTERING ANYTHING from the (previous) 108th or 109th Republican dominated Congress, even though Republicans in the minority OR majority can FILIBUSTER ANYTHING THEY WANT, ANYTIME THEY WANT, and Democratic self-proclaimed 'leaders' like Hillary Clinton are POWERLESS, if not UNWILLING TO TRY, to CONFRONT that Republican OBSTRUCTION with similar methods. (i.e. use of veto, pocket-veto, not bringing war-funding bills to floor of House or Senate, etc.)

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

9-11 Commission Co-Chairs confess: "The CIA STONEWALLED our Investigation.. our report was a SHAM"!

It YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE of how SERVILE, SUBMISSIVE, COMPLICIT, CORRUPT, and COWERING the "Democratic" "leadership" is, the 2 Co-Chairs of the 9-11 Commission,
Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton, have reported in a letter to the New York Times today, Jan. 2 2008, that their Congressional Commission into the 9-11 attacks was "STONEWALLED" and "OBSTRUCTED" by CIA officials who DID NOT PRODUCE DOCUMENTS and videos under LAWFUL DEMANDS AND REQUESTS by the 9-11 Commission!

The TENS of Millions of dollars that American taxpayers PAID to have a thorough and competent investigation of the 9-11 terror attacks, THE INVESTIGATION WAS COMPROMISED, made into a WHITEWASH FARCE, by LIES and DENIALS from CIA officials!

When the press reported that, in 2002 and maybe at other times, the C.I.A. had recorded hundreds of hours of interrogations of at least two Qaeda detainees, we went back to check our records. We found that we did ask, repeatedly, for the kind of information that would have been contained in such videotapes.


OF COURSE, ANYONE who has paid ANY attention to the 9-11 Commission KNOWS that it was a WHITEWASH FARCE in the first place, just from several outstanding facts that the whore American media (corporate/major media) REFUSED TO INFORM AMERICAN VIEWERS ABOUT.
#1. That former Dem. Indiana Representative (Congressman) LEE HAMILTON is the Republican's "Democrat of choice" for ANY WHITEWASH investigation or commission that the public insists on running.
#2. That the Republican DOMINATED Congress (both House and Senate had Republican majorities in the 108'th and 109'th Congresses) TRIED TO ASSIST the Bush-Cheney White House in OBSTRUCTING the creation of a 9-11 Commission, until public outrage, and the leadership of "The Jersey Girls" 9-11 widows forced the Congress to create a commission;
#3. That NOT ONE PERSON, ANYONE in the US Government, was DISCIPLINED, DEMOTED, OR FIRED for the GROSS NATIONAL SECURITY LAPSES during the 9-11 attacks... including the fact that United Flight 93 and American Flight 77 WERE STILL IN THE AIR and HOUR after the first airliner (American Flight 11) crashed into the North Tower.... AN HOUR after the first 9-11 attack, and longer than that after the first hijacking! - and THERE WAS NOT ONE US AIR FIRCE FIGHTER JET ANYWHERE IN THE SKIES over New York or the Nation's capitol! FOR A FULL HOUR after that first AA flight 11 crashed into the North Tower, (wiki) FOUR HIJACKED AIRLINERS WERE ROAMING AMERICAN SKIES, indeed, AA Flight 77 and United Flight 93 might not have been airborne before the hijackers siezed the first aircraft that day... AND THERE WAS NO NATIONWIDE ALERT OR ADVISORY PUT OUT!
#4. When (Vice) President Cheney and President Bush were finally forced to testify about what they knew before about a potential Al Qaida attack before the day of the attacks (9-11-2001) they testified to Congress, TOGETHER, NOT UNDER OATH, as if they were discussing nothing more important than a White House garden party! Of course under their 'conversational' testimony, they neglected to mention that THEY HAD BEEN WARNED, IN PERSON, by CIA DIRECTOR GEORGE TENET "As of July 2001, Al Qaida has NOT been punished for their SUCCESSFUL suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole in a Yemen harbor in October of 2000, and NOW THEY ARE PLANNING A BIGGER, MORE SPECTACULAR ATTACK _IN AMERICA"!_
#5. And of course the 9-11 Commission didn't even discuss or mention - much less INVESTIGATE - THE MOST DAMNING 9-11 evidence of all, the fact that then ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN ASHCROFT was "ordered" to STOP FLYING ON PUBLIC AIRLINERS because of a (get this) "THREAT ASSESMENT" - but that neither Mr. Ashcroft, then-Secretary of War Don Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, nor President George W. Bush, BOTHERED TO INFORM THE AMERICAN FLYING PUBLIC or flight crews ABOUT THAT "THREAT ASSESMENT"!

Which we now know was, indeed, those FIRST PERSON CIA BRIEFINGS then CIA Director George Tenet GAVE TO RUSMFELD, ASHCROFT, AND CHENEY... IN PERSON!

And that DCI (Director, CIA) Tenet GAVE THOSE "TERRORIST THREAT ASSESSMENT" briefings to Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and Cheney... AT THE SPECIFIC INSISTENCE of then NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR CONDOLEEZA RICE, who had been receiving REPEATED and URGENT WARNINGS about a potent Al Qaida terrorist threat froM ALL DEPARTMENTS THAT ANSWERED TO THE office of NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR!

To put the above "complex" (not!) three paragraphs into plain English, Vice President DICK CHENEY was INFORMED OF A POTENT, PERSISTENT, and beyond-planning stage TERRORIST ATTACK THREAT by AL QAIDA... and he DID NOTHING, EXCEPT TO YANK Attorney General Ashcroft OFF of those public airline flights... WHILE LEAVING THE AMERICAN FLYING PUBLIC AND AIRCREWS EXPOSED TO THAT THREAT, as "BAIT!"

"BAIT," that is, for an excuse for Cheney's real "priority #1." his desire to go forward with the PNAC proposed INVASION OF IRAQ!


In an amazing instance of ONE DOCUMENT showing the ABJECT FARCE of MILLIONS OF DOLLARS of US Government investigations and taxpayer spending being spent in an attempt to DISTORT, OBSCURE, and COVER UP BASIC FACTS, this CBS


created 5 years ago at the insistence of outraged Americans and the "Jersey Girls" 9-11 widows,