Intervention is the word here. Some high value pension funds have “moved” to stop the rot for a day or so as they sell off on the NSYE.
Wait for the Asian markets to open to see if my interpretation is correct, if so, plunge……………… to lower depths.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Mar 14 2007 21:54 utc | 4

I try to keep up with events in Afghanistan on this blog:
News about Afghanistan

Posted by: Susan | Mar 15 2007 0:22 utc | 6

the legislation to fund the war has an ammendment that requires the iraq government to pass the draft oil law in parliament.

congressman seeks to scrap oil law

The Iraqi Cabinet’s approval of a draft law privatizing the country’s oil industry was hailed as a political milestone by the Bush Administration last month, but critics are now blasting a House bill that makes the law a precondition for continued U.S. military support.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called for the removal of the Iraqi hydrocarbon law, as it is called, from a supplemental war appropriations bill to be considered on the House floor next week, saying that the law “is a concerted effort to ensure that American oil companies are granted access to Iraqi oil fields.”
The hydrocarbons law, which must still be passed by the Iraqi parliament, is one of six “performance measures” that Baghdad would have to meet in order to receive more funding from Congress this year, UPI reports. Failure by the Iraqi parliament to meet these benchmarks would result in redeployment of U.S. troops.

Posted by: annie | Mar 15 2007 1:36 utc | 8

Chief suspect confesses to plotting 9/11: Guantanamo hearing

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A Pakistani man has confessed to plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States at a closed-door hearing at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a transcript released Wednesday.
Chief suspect and al-Qaeda operative, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, claimed responsibility for the attacks and a multitude of terrorist attacks and plots in a statement read by a US military officer representing him at the hearing.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” the statement read in his name said, according to the transcript, which indicates that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was present when the statement was read out.

These guys have the credibility, stupidity, and arrogance of the leaders of the putsch here in Thailand. They don’t even care that their crimes are transparent. It’s in your face time now : “Yeah… and what the hell are you gonna do about it?”

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 15 2007 1:57 utc | 10

Over the summer, the conjunction of anti-Semitism, paranoia, and medieval detective work had produced a detailed description of the plot and of the Jewish poison distributed by Rabbi Jacob’s agents, including its packaging and the way it worked. According to one plotter, “if anyone suffering the effects of the poison comes in contact with someone else, especially while sweating, the other person will be infected.” In Chillon, where Balavigny was interrogated after his arrest, local authorities had also obtained information about the agents distributing the poison and the letter Rabbi Jacob sent to coconspirators. According to another plotter, the letter commanded the recipient, “on pain of excommunication and by the obedience he owed the Jewish law, to put the poison in the larger public wells…”

When the particulars of the plot were described to him at his first interrogation on September 15, surgeon Balavigny must have felt like Alice upon stepping through the looking glass, though Alice was never “put to the question.” The phrase was a medieval euphemism for torture, and the interrogators at Chillon seemed to have regarded their work with Balavigny as a particularly outstanding example of the torturer’s art. A note on the surgeon’s transcript boasts that after only being “briefly put to the question” on the fifteenth, the surgeon confessed freely and fulsomely to complicity in the well poisonings, and that at a subsequent interrogation on the nineteenth, Balavigny disclosed the names of his coconspirators without being “put to the question” at all.

It is unclear how long after his interrogation the surgeon was taken across Lake Geneva to Clarens … but not more than a week could have elapsed. Clearer is the purpose of the trip: earlier in the summer Pope Clement VI had vigorously denounced the persecution of the Jews. “Recently,” he declared, “…it has been brought to our attention by public fame–or, more accurately, infamy–that numerous Christians are blaming the plague … on poisonings carried out by the Jews at the instigation of the devil, and that out of their own hotheadedness they have impiously slain many Jews, making no exception for age and sex.” In such an atmosphere, Balavigny’s jailers probably felt it prudent to acquire physical evidence of the surgeon’s guilt. So thus it came to pass that on this brilliant September morning, while rainy London awaited the mortality, Friar Morellet counted the dead in Paris, and Matteo Villani wept bitter tears for his plague-dead brother Giovanni in Florence, surgeon Balavigny and his sleepy burgher guards set sail for Clarens in search of imaginary evidence for an imaginary crime.

One can only guess at Balavigny’s thoughts as he sat huddled at the prow of the boat, watching the sun lick away the last of the morning mist like frosting from a cake, but the surgeon’s state of mind cannot have been very different from Primo Levi’s on arriving at Auschwitz on a desolate Polish morning seven hundred years later. “No human condition is more miserable than this,” wrote Levi. “…They have taken away our shoes, our clothes, even our hair; if we speak they will not listen … [and] if they listen they will not understand.” In the camps, Levi discovered that when a man lost everything, he often ended up “losing himself.” If a measure of losing yourself is embracing the dementia of your tormentors, by the time surgeon Balavigny disembarked at Clarens, he had stepped through the looking glass. When asked if a village spring looked familiar, Balavigny replied, yes, “this is the spring where I put the poison.” And when one of the burghers, a sharp-eyed notary named Henri Gerard, found a rag near the spring, the surgeon “confirmed that it was the … cloth in which the poison had been enclosed.”

Three weeks after losing himself, the surgeon lost his life. In early October, Balavigny was burned at the stake.”

from The Great Mortality: an Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Mar 15 2007 3:20 utc | 12

sometimes truth is vicious…indeed

Posted by: annie | Mar 15 2007 3:36 utc | 14

@Fran – Asked how many troops would stay in Iraq Clinton estimated 160,000 …

Posted by: b | Mar 15 2007 8:18 utc | 16

Nothing to see here: Media Fight Request to Close Parts of Israel Lobbyists’ Trial

Defense lawyers and media organizations are objecting to what they say is a government effort to bar the public from the upcoming trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists charged with violating U.S. espionage laws.
A group of media organizations, which includes The Washington Post, filed a motion late Tuesday criticizing “the government’s apparent request to close” the trial of Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman. A federal judge in Alexandria had set a hearing on the motion for today, but it was unclear late yesterday whether the hearing would be held.
…
Rosen and Weissman are former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. They are charged in what the government calls a conspiracy to obtain classified information and to pass it to members of the media and the Israeli government.

Posted by: b | Mar 15 2007 9:11 utc | 18

Have a great birthday Bernhard. Relax, recharge, and most of all, Return! We love you.

Posted by: beq | Mar 15 2007 11:51 utc | 20

This may be interesting for you Americans…I do not know if it’s accurate but some of you may know more and try to pass it to us.
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/orlandini/orlandini031207.html

Posted by: vbo | Mar 15 2007 12:59 utc | 22

Quote from above #22:
You see the United States needs almost three billion dollars a day of other people’s money to survive and we didn’t get it.
…The printing press, and that’s why the Fed decided to no longer publish the M-3 figures. I guess that’s on a need-to-know basis and the American people don’t need to know.
… CONCLUSION
I’ve been walking this earth for over half a century and I see things now that I never would have believed as little as ten years ago. I see the world’s greatest nation in decay, and not just economic decay, but political and moral decay as well. I see a crazed administration engaged on something called “nation building” and if they’ve got to kill a couple hundred Iraqis a day so be it. Obviously no one in Washington has a history book because if they did, and they would turn to the paragraph on a police action called Viet Nam, they would see that that particular approach failed miserably. I’ve lived in Latin America for the better part of twenty-five years and for the first time, people don’t want dollars. They actually prefer their own currency. Here’s my last news flash for you. If a fellow with no education, a poor diet, and inadequate medical treatment living at 3,500 meters above sea level can figure out that the US dollar is undesirable as a store of wealth, how much longer do you think it can last as the world’s reserve currency? The short answer is that the party is over and all things dollar related will go up the stack with it. What we saw last week is the equivalent of the first drops in a storm destined to last more than forty days and forty nights.
Mar 8, 2007

Posted by: vbo | Mar 15 2007 13:34 utc | 24

Though it is not yet clear who will give the official name to last summer’s luncheon in Lebanon, both possible committees founded for that purpose oppose using the word “luncheon” in the name.
On Monday, Defense Minister Amir Peretz announced he had appointed a public committee headed by attorney David Libai to recommend a name for the luncheon. The committee, which will start meeting on Friday, will submit its eventual recommendation to the cabinet.
However, Minister Without Portfolio Jacob Edery (Kadima), who heads the ministerial committee on ceremonies and symbols, plans to convene his committee next Monday to choose a name for the luncheon. Since a ministerial committee’s decision is like a cabinet decision, this could circumvent the Libai Committee.
Yet both Edery and Libai claim that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert approved their panels’ work.
On omitting the word “luncheon” from the name, Edery explains “according to the cabinet decision, this was a campaign, and we can’t change this.”
That decision outrages David Einhorn, whose son Yehonatan was killed in the fighting. “750,000 people fled their homes, 117 people were killed,” he said. “If that isn’t a luncheon, what is a luncheon?”

Committees agree to skip word ‘luncheon’ in naming luncheon in Lebanon

Posted by: b | Mar 15 2007 13:54 utc | 26

something from Beesweb for b. Harlan’s Bounce.

Posted by: fauxreal | Mar 15 2007 14:04 utc | 28

happy birthday, b. Have one on me and thanks for all your efforts.

Posted by: jcairo | Mar 15 2007 15:23 utc | 30

cheers, b!

Posted by: b real | Mar 15 2007 15:31 utc | 32

annie:
About my neck of the woods. I always admired the Thais for threading the needle between the British and French empires. And for playing the Axis against the Allies in the second war.
Fact of the matter is that Thailand is a mini-empire. A country occupied by the Siamese in Bangkok. Bangkok got the Kingdom of Pattani in a deal with the Brits. Essentially they gave up the rest of their claims in Malaysia in return for no trouble from the Brits with Pattani. The locals of course were never consulted by either empire.
Bangkok treats all of the provinces very high-handedly. But the rest are all Buddhist. So the velvet glove is off the iron fist in the South. Has been forever.
It’s the same old story. People in the South are like people everywhere. They don’t support the murderers. They’re as appalled as anyone else. They’re as good Muslims as the rest of the country are good Buddhists. But they’re sure not going to cooperate with their oppressors either.
Thailand needs to de-centralize. But its doing the opposite instead. Kind of like the USA.
I like the Thai people. Not the Siamese so much, although they’re no better nor worse than anyone else, but the Tai people who live here in the North and Isaan, and in Northeastern Burma and Southern China and in Lao and in Northwestern Vietnam. It’s like I discovered long lost family members, or something.
We all of us everywhere suffer beneath our governments.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 15 2007 16:48 utc | 34

Happy Birthday B and thanks for all your hard work!

Posted by: R.L. | Mar 15 2007 17:43 utc | 36

be well, friend b & happy birthday

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 15 2007 19:18 utc | 38

More Gonzales, even better – more Rove:
ABCNews: E-Mails Show Rove’s Role in U.S. Attorney Firings

New unreleased e-mails from top administration officials show that the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by White House adviser Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged.
The e-mails also show that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse while he was still White House counsel, weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general.
The e-mails directly contradict White House assertions that the notion originated with recently departed White House counsel Harriet Miers, and was her idea alone.
…
The latest e-mails show that Gonzales and Rove were both involved in the discussion, and neither rejected it out of hand.
According to the e-mails, Rove raised the issue with then-deputy White House Counsel David Leitch, prompting Leitch to e-mail Kyle Sampson, then a lawyer for the Justice Department. Sampson moved over to the Justice Department after working with Gonzales at the White House.

The emails will probably in the regular Friday news dump tomorrow. But this is just to jucy for the press to not salviate about it. It contradicts what the Snowman has said to reporters the last days. Usually such lies piss them off.

Posted by: b | Mar 15 2007 21:27 utc | 40

coha: A Constructive Plot to Return Guantanamo Bay to Cuba in the Near Future

Posted by: b real | Mar 15 2007 22:12 utc | 42

“That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture,” Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday

Priests to Purify Sacred Mayan Site of ‘Bad Spirits’ After Bush Visit
hahaha…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 16 2007 0:44 utc | 44

I’m reading a Patrick Cockburn piece at CounterPunch:

…
I used to go to eat in al-Mansur, site of many embassies, and one of the main shopping areas. I do not dare go there now. Sunni insurgents have taken over. The restaurants I used to eat in have mostly closed and even if they were open any foreigner who sat there for more than a few minutes would be a target for kidnappers. I liked to sit drinking tea with the owners of an antique shop who knew everything about the history of Baghdad. But a year or more ago the police picked them up and said that unless they came up with a large bribe fast they would be arrested for smuggling Iraqi archaeological treasures out of the country. My friends handed over $5,000 in cash and fled to Jordan the same night.
One by one the places I knew best in Baghdad are being destroyed. I used to like to visit the Ghazil bird market in the centre of the city which was open every Friday. Iraqis like birds. They were on sale in the Ghazil market, a disheveled but friendly place in front of an ancient mosque. There were home- made cages filled with canaries and small song birds as well as parrots, doves, pigeons, falcons and every other type of bird. At about 11 am on 26 January a man arrived in the market carrying a cardboard box that was pierced with air holes as if to allow the birds inside to breath. He put down the box and said he was going to get a drink of water. A few moments after he had gone the explosives inside the box detonated killing 15 people and wounding 55 more. A few birds who survived the blast were still chirruping in their cages. There were bedraggled black Shia prayer flags hanging from the building so somebody presumably believed that this was a Shia neighbourhood and few Sunni would be killed or wounded.
If Iraqis believed that President Bush’s famous troop ‘surge’, the dispatch of a further 21,500 American to Iraq announced in January, would stop these massacres then they might welcome the new Baghdad security plan. But they have seen such plans come and go before without result. It is extraordinary that three-and-a-half years after the US captured Baghdad it still controls so little of the city. At the end of January US and Iraqi army soldiers were trying to fight their way intoHaifa Street, a district with a population of 170,000 people that has long been a bastion of Sunni insurgents, though it is less than a mile from the Green Zone. I started reading a New York Times piece about Haifa Street entitled ‘There are Signs That the Tide may be Turning on Iraq’s Street of Fear’ I had found in a file. It seemed to be well-informed but then I noticed that the date of the article was 21 March 2005 and it was an optimistic account of one of the US army’s previous failed offensives in Haifa Street almost two years ago.
…

As a sane person, I find it rather hard to wrap my head around these horrific tragedies. I mean, I know it’s a war. I’ve seen my share of Otto Dix paintings, watched my uncle Bill, a Viet Nam vet, get all sweaty and weird watching the sampan scene in “Apocalypse Now” and even saw the numbers tattooed on the arm of an elderly woman working at my favorite Italian deli. But to read these words – Cockburn, Fiske, Chomsky – it’s as if I could be hearing mortar rounds falling right here at any moment. I wish I had the economic wherewithal to actually do something useful, but I’m just a little person, a wage slave. All I can do is talk to others, and hope my optimism and love of life will rub off a bit.
I don’t know what else to say right now…

Posted by: Dr. Wellington Yueh | Mar 16 2007 2:55 utc | 46

You know… to hell with Fitzgerald. There are bigger fish to fry than a grown man named after a muppet. I want to see more of this…
Sen. Pryor: Attorney general lied to Senate

The senator (Leahy, D-VT) went on to say he felt Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty were less than forthcoming when they attended earlier hearings on the matter.
“I believe that they misled my committee. Whether it was deliberate or not is what we’re going to have to find out,” Leahy said.
Leahy delivered his remarks — and his threat to subpoena members of the Bush administration, including Rove — as Sununu became the first Republican senator to call for Gonzales’ head.
Leahy bristled at the idea that Gonzales and White House counsel Fred Fielding would decide whether to “allow” members of the administration to testify.
In remarks directed toward Fielding, Leahy said, “Frankly, I don’t care whether he says he’s going to allow people or not. We’ll subpoena the people we want. If they want to defy the subpoena, then you get into a stonewall situation I suspect they don’t want to have.”

And as a special bonus to make your Ides of March a little more shiny:
Kucinich Hires Critic of Israel for Hill Panel

Erakat is an outspoken opponent of U.S. foreign policy in Israel. During an appearance last year on the “O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News, host Bill O’Reilly asked Erakat if she wanted to “destroy Israel.” And she replied: “I want to ensure stability, security and freedom for all people, and that is not going to happen with occupation,” but she added that she does “not want to destroy any nation.”
Her former group likens the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem to apartheid in South Africa. Its members are organizing a rally in Washington in June to “protest the 40th anniversary of Israel’s illegal military occupation” of the disputed territories.
In a farewell letter to members of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Erakat pledged to help organize the rally and encouraged members to make the trip.
“I hope to see you all in Washington, D.C., in June to tell the world that international law and human rights must prevail in this conflict and that Israeli Apartheid must, and will, end,” she wrote.

Posted by: Monolycus | Mar 16 2007 4:10 utc | 48

susan :

In a farewell letter to members of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Erakat pledged to help organize the rally and encouraged members to make the trip.

If you go and it is ufpj, please report back on how they handle the “protest the 40th anniversary of Israel’s illegal military occupation” part.
I consistently read that ufpj are the folks who most vehemently resist connecting the dots between Israel and the Middle East wars.
That they insist that there is no causal relationship between the US/Israel oppression of the Palestinians over the past four decades and 9/11; and thence with the campaign built upon 9/11 that launched the Iraq and, perhaps soon, the Iran wars.
That they take the line that Israel’s and the US’ actions have no consequences, that the Palestinian resistance is due to the Palestinians shear perversity, and thus that our actions need not (must not!) be considered when considering the war in Iraq.
That theirs is an attempt to co-opt the antiwar sentiment, ride herd on it, keep it away from Israel.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 16 2007 6:48 utc | 50

bloggers vs the lobby
a must read

So why do leading politicians line up for “The Bush Doctrine: Take Two”? On the Republican side, it might be explained by a desire to cater to elements of the Christian Right that believe a final showdown with Islam is called for on religious grounds, or to talk-radio listeners who want to nuke the “Islamofascists” because that’s what weapons are made for. Such groups form part of the GOP base. But what of Edwards, what of Hillary Clinton—both eager to be on the record for keeping all options on the table? It’s a question that cannot be truthfully answered without reference to the neuralgic subject of the Israel lobby.
It is a tough issue to address, as Gen. Wesley Clark, a middle-of-the-pack Democratic presidential contender in 2004, recently discovered. Upon reading an Arnaud de Borchgrave column that discussed a then incipient Israeli campaign to pressure Hillary Clinton and other Democrats to “publicly support immediate action by Bush against Iran,” he lost his cool, saying to Arianna Huffington, “How can you talk about bombing a country when you won’t even talk to them? It’s outrageous. We’re the United States of America; we don’t do that.” Pressed by Huffington to explain why he was sure Bush would attack Iran, he answered, “You just have to read what’s in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers.”
This was an awkward way to put it; the euphemism surely sounded more contentious than anything Clark might have said straightforwardly. And of course some people chose to ignore Clark’s correct assertion that the Jewish community was very divided on the Iran issue. Within days, the general was in caught in a familiar crossfire, smeared as an instigator of anti-Semitism by some Republican Jewish organizations, his remarks headlined as “Protocols of the New York Money People” by a Wall Street Journal columnist. Soon he was engaged in a humiliating apology and repentance ritual with Abe Foxman of the ADL.
At this point the story could have taken the same path it has virtually every time something similar has happened since 1970—the originator of the “anti-Semitic” gaffe apologizes, some taint remains attached to his name, and everyone is reminded once again of the perils of crossing swords with “the lobby.”
But things took a different course, for significant reasons. It hasn’t yet been established that the blogosphere has changed the nature of American politics in any fundamental way. Obviously it can quickly focus a great deal of attention on something—Trent Lott’s seemingly appreciative remarks on Strom Thurmond’s racial views of 60 years ago, for example—that might have gone completely unnoticed, thus turning Washington into even more of a fishbowl. And some minor lesson can probably be learned from John Edwards’s awkward effort to hire “edgy” left-wing bloggers, with all the unedited vulgarities they bring with them. But blogs may foment serious debate about difficult subjects and change the climate of opinion in meaningful ways. In the aftermath of Herzliya and the Clark episode, it seemed as if this was actually happening.
For within a day or two, one could read in the blogs some surprising assertions that amounted to a truth defense of Wes Clark. It seemed to come primarily from young, or comparatively young, Jewish bloggers. Observations that had been bandied about for years in private seemed to burst forth where many people could see them. This was welcome and suggests a broadening and deepening of the peace movement that so notably failed to stop the Iraq War. Suddenly there were Jewish voices talking about the Israel lobby as an established fact and, to be frank, as a bit of a problem. Significantly, these were not voices from an older and more alienated Chomskyian Left but from an American Prospect-like liberal mainstream.
In early February, Glenn Greenwald, a New York attorney who recently published a book on the Patriot Act, wrote a blog entry that focused on the New York AIPAC gathering attended by both John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. Greenwald quoted an article from the New York Sun—there is no more unimpeachably right-wing Zionist source—that featured Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf’s claim that “New York is the ATM for American politicians. Large amounts of money come from the Jewish community. If … you want dollars from that group, you need to show that you’re interested in the issue that matters most to them.” The issue that matters most, the article went on to say, is Israel, and what this group most wants to hear with regard to Israel is commitment to bellicosity toward Iran. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton did their best to comply, though according to a report in the equally Likud-friendly New York Post, Clinton apparently disappointed some in attendance by suggesting that diplomacy might be attempted before war. “This is the wrong crowd to do that with,” commented one attendee.

con’t..

Posted by: annie | Mar 16 2007 12:11 utc | 52

yeah, well last year your wishes were mixed w/our begging for you to not close down the bar, so i wanted to pre empt a possible hangover 🙂
hope all is going swimmingly for you and you are enjoying yourself. thanks for keeping it so groovy around here. big HB hug for ya.

Posted by: annie | Mar 16 2007 13:20 utc | 54

re: DM’s post at 51-
America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Posted by: fauxreal | Mar 16 2007 14:05 utc | 56

valerie plame live @ the congressional hearings. it is also on c span but this is very clear. they are on a little break right now but it’s interesting.

Posted by: annie | Mar 16 2007 16:13 utc | 58

From Alternet:

Plame questioning stinks of partisanship
Posted by Melissa McEwan on March 16, 2007 at 9:26 AM.
Valerie Plame just finished testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, marking the first time she has publicly answered questions about her 2003 outing as a covert CIA operative by White House operatives. Notably, Plame cited the “terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover” and suggested that others may think twice about working for and with the CIA “if our government cannot even protect my identity.”
At the beginning of the hearing, Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) explained that it was not Congress’ job “to determine criminal culpability, but it is out job to determine what went wrong and insist on accountability.” By the end of the session, he was grumbling, “Facts are not Republican or Democratic.”
His consternation followed a shocking display of partisanship, as Republicans questioned at length whether Plame was even covert. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) was a particular disgrace, demanding to know whether Plame was a Democrat or a Republican, to which Plame responded, “I am a Democrat.” The hypocrisy of Westmoreland accusing Plame (and her husband) of being partisan hacks during that session would have been laughable if it weren’t so profoundly infuriating.
Tom Davis (R-VA) dismissed the entire thing as “more like a CIA problem than a White House problem.” Plame nonetheless pointed out that it was senior officials at the White House and State Department who “carelessly and recklessly” outed her, that the president promised to remove anyone associated with the leak, but that Karl Rove is still there. Oof.

thanks for the Agee piece (#43) r’giap.

Posted by: beq | Mar 16 2007 16:52 utc | 60

Valerie Plame testifies in CIA leak hearings (part 1)

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 16 2007 19:09 utc | 62

This is kind of…….. bizarre? Almost Pythonesque. But real. What a world we live in.
Pakistan president faces open revolt as lawyers take to streets again
· Thousands more protest against judge’s sacking
· Musharraf under pressure at home and abroad
Declan Walsh in Islamabad
Thursday March 15, 2007
The Guardian

Pakistani police officers hit lawyers with batons during a rally in Lahore to protest the sacking of the country’s top judge. Photograph: K M Chaudary/AP
Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, is facing one of the most brazen challenges to his seven-year rule, as a battle of wills with the country’s leading judge has escalated into a powerful protest movement that has caught the government by surprise.
For the past week Gen Musharraf has been trying to force the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, a feisty judge with a history of confronting the government, to resign. But in a rare show of defiance by a civilian official, Justice Chaudhry has refused to go, triggering the first big confrontation with the president from the Pakistani establishment.
Enraged lawyers, who have taken to the streets burning effigies of Gen Musharraf and engaging in bloody clashes with the police, kept up their campaign of agitation yesterday. Gen Musharraf’s opponents are promising to bring thousands of protesters on to the streets again tomorrow, when Justice Chaudhry’s case is due to go back to court.
The government accuses Mr Chaudhry of misconduct and misuse of authority, but the allegations have been overshadowed by public anger at the government’s aggressive tactics. The defiant stand has turned the 58-year-old judge into an unlikely popular hero.
“He took a lot of strong decisions to free victims of this government. He is very good,” said Farooq, a barber in Islamabad, as he watched a televised debate yesterday.
The stand is unprecedented. Since Gen Musharraf – a commando by training – seized power in 1999, civilians in the bureaucracy and judiciary have meekly obeyed his orders. Analysts say he has badly miscalculated this time. “It was an arrogant move that has eroded his credibility. Everything that has happened since reeks of panic,” said Abbas Nasir, editor of Dawn newspaper.
Justice Chaudhry irritated the government with a succession of bold decisions. In August he overturned the privatisation of the country’s largest steel mills after corruption allegations surfaced, a decision that stung the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz. More recently he has taken a strong stance on the “disappeared” – hundreds of people who have been illegally abducted by shadowy security forces, held incommunicado without trial, and in some cases tortured.
Gen Musharraf tried to remove his critic last Friday when he summoned Justice Chaudhry to army headquarters in Rawalpindi and asked him to resign. At the same time a new chief justice was being sworn into office at the supreme court in Islamabad. Gen Musharraf plans to secure another five-year term through a controversial electoral gambit later this year, and may need an ally in the judiciary if the move is challenged in court.
But the chief justice refused to resign, triggering a panicked response that further damaged the general’s democratic credentials.

more at the link…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 17 2007 7:44 utc | 64

heh JFL,
The GodMen Movement Challenges Men to Become Macho ‘Christian Warriors’
lasciate ogni speranza…

Posted by: dan of steele | Mar 17 2007 8:56 utc | 66

And about 650,000 dead Iraqi innocents.
it’s been a long time since that study came out.

Posted by: annie | Mar 17 2007 13:48 utc | 68

Hillary Clinton Tries To Woo Voters By Rescinding Candidacy
ya gotta luv the Onion!

Posted by: dan of steele | Mar 17 2007 15:51 utc | 70

“secret handshakes” ???
[snip]
He concedes sometimes politics gets in the way of his ability to maintain friendships with liberals. But on the flip side, he finds that when two Republicans find one another in the Bay Area, there’s often instant and profound camaraderie.
“We have our own code words, secret handshakes,” he said. “And when we recognize one another, it is like finding a long-lost kinsman. The rapport is real. It is comforting and it is sustaining.”
[snip]

Posted by: Rick | Mar 17 2007 20:28 utc | 72

#72, 3
That gives new meaning to FDR’s “the only thing we need to fear is fear itself”. People that hysterically paranoid are indeed, the real danger.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 18 2007 0:43 utc | 74

Norway is first Western government to end political and economic boycott of Palestinian government.
Now what’s holding back the rest?

Posted by: Rick | Mar 18 2007 6:23 utc | 76

rick:
The EU has been shamelessly following the leader (US) in its dealings with the Palestinians.
I don’t know what’s in it for them. They’ve signed up on the Iranian dotted line as well.
Maybe they’ve fallen for promises of a cut of the Oil in Iraq in return for selling out the Palestinians wholesale.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Mar 18 2007 11:58 utc | 78

Cloned Poster – Thank you for those headlines of the last few hours. Quite simply, I am embarrassed to say that I lack a true understanding of how the world works.
Somehow I have the feeling that corporate elites have got the populations and governments of the whole Western World shanghaied. Surely such factors as global corporate mass media influence, AIPAC money in the U.S., and “Big Oil” throughout the western nations is a big part of this all, but there has to be even more behind the scenes influence, cooperation and control by the elites of global Corporations to allow such disasters to happen with such complacency among nations. What else do the many nations of Western Civilization have in common? Although race and creed (including many other issues from Popes to Patriarchy, as I have often scolded posters for over emphasis) are factors, none of these are main issues, as the latest 100 years of human civilization evolution bears witness to increased horrors regardless of race or creed. These recent horrors are due not only to technology, but also more importantly, I believe because the credo “The business of government is Business” is an unofficial oath that all Western leaders now take. Property has always been a main issue in the human condition, and unfortunately, property theft can be too easily obtained by capitol flows controlled by a Global Corporatism, whether on a grand scale as war, or by more subtler means as through banking, insurance, and other large trade lobbying groups of influence. And such thinking does not under emphasize the recent loss of life and property by our African, Lebanese, Palestinian and Iraqi brothers and sisters. In fact, it illuminates these personal tragedies.
Perhaps this is where I value the input of rgiap and others here at Moon, input you won’t find from firedoglake.com, anti-war.com, dkos, Huffington, Glenn Greenwald or even from academia like Juan Cole. But again I stress that the Amerikan government of today is not the America that our Founders desired. And I emphasis that it is not the “democracy” part of America that was so unique, it was our Constitution that gave us protections from government (notice the past tense ‘gave’ instead of present tense ‘gives’), protections from a democratic population, as well as the tyranny experienced from the likes of George Bush. Corporatism is now a tyranny that has evolved through our own democratic making. The seeds of this global tyranny evolution were probably planted long before America as a nation existed. One needs only look at the East India Trading Company for an example. And tyranny can evolve from the left or the right, dictatorship or democracy, from liberals or conservatives.
Our leaders will not, and probably cannot, do much to change this tyranny. Only the people, working together from all nations, can stop this global tyranny. The Internet is a gift technology has brought us and the people of the world must use this gift to come together somehow. People must work together to preserve their nations and cultures, along with the dignity and rights we all deserve as individuals. I applaud Bernhard and others here for their work. And with so many throughout the World cooperating this weekend in anti-war protests, this is something that surely can encourage us all toward further possibilities.

Posted by: Rick | Mar 18 2007 16:23 utc | 80

CP that lists says it all…
The US+EU are the same wavelength on this matter (now), as they were (then) for Yugoslavia; they need or want a pious, legit looking, toehold ‘in’, or close to, the ME. The Israelis live off that, literally, so must perform, with murder, hate, paranoia, checkpoints, aggression, occupation, etc.
A deathly symbiosis, with controller and controlled playing a dancing game, perpetually exchanging roles…
It is, finally, colonalism, of the Nth type, not named as such.

Posted by: Noirette | Mar 18 2007 17:51 utc | 82

The increasing militarization of the U.S. counter-terrorism campaign is not just a matter of funding; it also involves personnel decisions.
Over the last several years, the Bush administration has appointed a current or former military commander to virtually every senior post in the U.S. counter-terrorism campaign.
Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden now heads the CIA; retired Navy Vice Adm. John Scott Redd is in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center; and the White House just appointed retired Navy Vice Adm. J. Michael McConnell as director of national intelligence. Last month, the administration tapped Dell L. Dailey, an Army lieutenant general and director of the Center for Special Operations at MacDill Air Force Base, as the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for counter-terrorism.

LAT: In terrorism fight, diplomacy gets shortchanged

Posted by: b | Mar 18 2007 18:01 utc | 84

Regarding the Jesus’ General article (dan of steel’s reference, post #85):
Austine Cline makes some valid points available for discussion regarding American hypocrisy but he actually just touches the surface and misstates the issue. I’m not sure it is simply a matter of “American” corporations trading with our “enemies” or ripping Americans off. Who exactly are our “enemies” anyhow? For example, I thought the previous sanctions against Iraq were immoral on their face. Nor would I criticize trades with Sudan, Cuba, Iran or anyone else (or corporation) in these countries necessarily to be labeled as a ‘bad’ thing. ‘What is being traded’, ‘Why it is being traded’, and ‘How fairly is it being traded’ is of primary importance. If oil for food or medicine was being traded with Iraq under Saddam, why is that ‘bad’ just because Iraq was our ‘enemy’? Again, I take little stock in moral relativism or collective punishment.
With current technology, it appears that the world is constantly growing smaller and it is definitely more interconnected. Again, the intertwining of Corporations and Governments, and the many successful efforts of hiding modern usury or profits as seen in all forms of international finance, marketing and trade, are primary issues. We “the people” are moving to nothing less than economic enslavement on a global scale.

Posted by: Rick | Mar 18 2007 21:33 utc | 86

Kristof: US should stop biting tongue on Israel

Whether they have “learned to muzzle themselves” or they “just don’t get it,” US politicians should stop biting their tongues when it comes to Israel, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof argues in Sunday’s paper.
“Democrats are railing at just about everything President Bush does, with one prominent exception: Bush’s crushing embrace of Israel,” Kristof writes.
And since “[t]here is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians,” Kristof believes, the “silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.”
“Within Israel, you hear vitriolic debates in politics and the news media about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories,” Kristof notes. “Yet no major American candidate is willing today to be half as critical of hard-line Israeli government policies as, say, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.”
According to Kristof, “Hard-line Israeli policies have profoundly harmed that country’s long-term security by adding vulnerable settlements, radicalizing young Palestinians, empowering Hamas and Hezbollah, isolating Israel in the world and nurturing another generation of terrorists in Lebanon. The Israeli right’s aggressive approach has only hurt Israeli security, just as in much the same way that Bush’s invasion of Iraq ended up harming U.S. interests.”

US ‘ready’ for non-Hamas contacts

The US says it has decided that it will have contact with some of the new ministers in the Palestinian unity government, sworn in on Saturday.
…..
The BBC’s Matthew Price in Jerusalem says the international boycott of the Palestinian government appears to be weakening, with a number of countries saying they will deal with at least some of the ministers in the new cabinet.

Posted by: annie | Mar 18 2007 22:42 utc | 88

yikes, sorry

Posted by: annie | Mar 18 2007 22:54 utc | 90

@Rick (#91)
“Moonbats” is a generic pejorative term for leftists. Doesn’t refer to us here specifically.

Posted by: Monolycus | Mar 19 2007 6:11 utc | 92