“It appears that many influential people in this country have learned nothing from the last five years. And those who cannot learn from history are, indeed, doomed to repeat it.” — Paul Krugman today
Yes, they’ve learned from the last five years — that they can portray reality any way they like, the corporate media will publish it, and neither the Democrats nor anybody else will ever hold them accountable. And yes, they look like repeating previous successes, and it’s us who are doomed to repeat it.
Can we shake the idea that the corporate media is supposed to portray reality, and the pundits are supposed to analyse and critique it? Both are hired and funded to publish a narrative that will misinform enough people to maintain their support, and confuse and divide the majority. Yes, Mr. Krugman, even The New York Times. The NYTs prints enough information to preserve its reputation as a news source, and it also prints pure political propaganda on Page One as required.
Bloggers keep asking why the corporate media continues to feature commentators who have been wrong on everything for years and to ignore those who have been proven right. Answer: being wrong is their job, and to make enough noise to distract attention from anyone who’s right.
A commenter at the Oil Drum blog came up with the perfect metaphor — in reading the corporate media, they said, we’re “Living in the Hologram.” Corporate news is indeed a holodeck.
And can we stop talking about the war in Iraq. Bush got one thing right — the war was over months ago. It’s now a military occupation, and you can’t “win” an occupation.
(I’ve followed Krugman’s column around the web this morning, posting variations of this comment. Hope that’s all right.)

Posted by: mudduck | Sep 3 2007 20:53 utc | 3

Time to confess to an abhorrent vice. I can lose myself in action movies, if the special effects are suitably over the top without being so disjointed that no one knows what the fuck is going on.
Oh there is one other proviso. The political subtext cannot be too overtly oppressive. I can just stomach the Jason Bourne series since once one is past the whole amerikan empire thing, it becomes a story of the little guy against the security apparatus. The endings fail since the redemption angle has the intelligence apparatus seeing the error of it’s ways and going back to killing ‘real’ bad guys, thereby making the empire benevolent once more.
The Bourne series also fails the first test. The action scenes lack coherence or fluency and it is difficult to see them in any way other than selected pieces of ultra-violence to be observed in isolation. Some would call that pornography.
Anyway last week I decided to download Die Hard #57. I dunno why, I guess it was boredom, I knew that I probably wouldn’t be able to watch more than a few minutes before the screen flew threw the living room at the end of a boot or fist, not only was the premise going to be totally supportive of the corporate oppression of humans, the movie starred Bruce Willis, a low life whose personal politics are even worse than those of the characters he portrays.
Still I did wonder if the ‘production values’ were going to match the hype. Yeah I know cheap cop-out – akin to reading Playboy for the articles a generation ago. So I downloaded the fucker and it took about four days to watch (in small doses to prevent flying monitors). I won’t bore with too much of the premise which has all the holes one has come to expect in this sort of flick, except to say that the terrarist was of the cyber variety, a change up from bombing hotels etc.
This villain was also amerikan born but sported a slight transatlantic inflection to reinforce redneck xenophobia.
Now – seeing as how the character Willis plays couldn’t possibly fight a cyber terrarist, that would make him a geek and he would lose his appeal to the middle aged technophobes that make up his audience, he found an offsider early on in the piece, a young ‘hacker’ who put up tiny resistance to hanging out with a cop on secondment to homeland security. A couple of changes the movie would work as a comedy fantasy of the scary movie variety.
To the point. The Willis character makes some crack about something in the media whereupon the geeky offsider launches into a poorly articulated rant about the media existing only to create a reality sympathetic to corporate capitalism. Then the Willis character glares at him, the offsider shrugs in obedience that he is indeed an immature fantasist, then sets about helping the Willis character arrest and/or murder his former friends.
Every other computer literate is bad apart from one other ‘super-hacker’ who is overweight, in his 30’s and lives at home with mum. He also falls in behind the Willis charcter for no discernible reason.
I suppose I could bore the bejesuus outta everyone with complex deconstructions of exactly how this film sets about ridiculing and demeaning anyone who may think mainstream media is not a benign force in people’s lives.
It is more practical to go back to the nineties and consider the dreadful Forrest Gump I remember having a full on blowout with one of my brothers who fancies himself as a visual media literati over why I wouldn’t go to the movie on any account despite it’s alleged ‘ground breaking’ production techniques.
A couple of reviews pointed out the movie set about creating shared reality that anti-war activists were lying hypocrites who bashed women. After watching the fillum on TV I saw that was so but even worse, the movie made out that those who did as they were told and killed on demand would be rewarded for their loyalty no matter how much the society they had been loyal to marginalised them.
Could BushCo have invaded Iraq without Forrest Gump? Well yeah probably but the distortions that movie created in the mass group-think certainly made the invasion easier. The biggest effect was on those who hadn’t been alive during the Vietnam invasion, but it also gave vets who didn’t resist the crimes a cachet of social acceptance which made them less cautious of allowing their children to follow in their foot-steps.
Why even mention such trashy cellu-pap? Well this is how the media are responding to to the thousands of pin pricks on their veracity. Murdoch et al would love to simply make criticism of official truths illegal but won’t do so until the climate has been adjusted. This movie is one of the opening shots in a cultural manipulation that will end with a 911 type drama and long prepared legislation restricting the net, being pushed through in amerika. this will be followed by bribery , blackmail and extortion to get ‘companion’ legislation thru the UN and everywhere else on the planet.
Yes I do realise that this comes across as a paranoid delusion and cannot be confronted easily because the changes to group think are made so incrementally that most people cannot resist them for ever.
The question is can anything be done to prevent the censorship which will be pushed onto the interweb eventually?

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 3 2007 22:09 utc | 5

Someone posted a link to this piece on Bush yesterday, and when I read it now, this passage jumped out at me:

But in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.
First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers….”
For now, though, Mr. Bush told the author, Robert Draper, in a later session, “I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”

Is it just me, or is that very unnerving? First of all, his choice of the term “playing” is just horrifying to me. Is this a card game? Is he upping the ante, doubling down, etc etc? The cavalier choice of words is stunning. Second of all, the time frame of October-November coincides exactly with the best time, both in the election schedule, and in the weather cycle, for hitting Iran. Is this code for his licking his chops in anticipation of our blitzing Iran?

Posted by: Bea | Sep 3 2007 23:39 utc | 7

Someone posted a link to this piece on Bush yesterday, and when I read it now, this passage jumped out at me:

But in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.
First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers….”
For now, though, Mr. Bush told the author, Robert Draper, in a later session, “I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”

Is it just me, or is that very unnerving? First of all, his choice of the term “playing” is just horrifying to me. Is this a card game? Is he upping the ante, doubling down, etc etc? The cavalier choice of words is stunning. Second of all, the time frame of October-November coincides exactly with the best time, both in the election schedule, and in the weather cycle, for hitting Iran. Is this code for his licking his chops in anticipation of our blitzing Iran?

Posted by: Bea | Sep 3 2007 23:41 utc | 9

Sheesh, I have no clue how that happened. Sorry!

Posted by: Bea | Sep 3 2007 23:42 utc | 11

“This movie is one of the opening shots in a cultural manipulation”
One could argue it began in earnest right after WW2 with all the John Wayne movies etc. (Combat, Rat Patrol, 12 O’clock High) making it seem all heroic, patriotic and glorious. And deliberately antiseptic. Wayne actively avoided serving, which irked Da quite a bit because war is none of those things according to him and WT Sherman iirc
People are conditioned to accept war as a natural thing like a hurricane or eclipse rather than a choice that we allow our dearly elected employees make for us

Posted by: jcairo | Sep 3 2007 23:54 utc | 13

Using entertainment to push war does date back to WW2 at least in Amerika and far before in other cultures but I was alluding to the opening shot of a cultural manipulation to get people to accept that freedom of information exchange on the net is a bad thing. That particular m,anipulation is still in it’s infancy. It is confined to Fox loonies and Bruce Willis movies thus far.
Putting a view like that out there in a movie likely to receive a large and broad audience similar to the Forrest Gump audience would set the movement to crush the interweb back for years.
The notions about anti-war activists propounded in Forrest Gump didn’t hit the mainstream on any scale until there had been a decade of fringe manipulation.
What would the reaction to Forrest Gump have been in 1976? I doubt the sub-text would have escaped as unscathed as it did in 1994.
Maybe the death of the interweb is inevitable, certainly the volume of garbage and corporate bulldust makes it more difficult to exchange ideas, but we shouldn’t just accept the inevitability either.
Crap such as Die Hard #57 needs to be ridiculed for what it is over and above the empire stuff, because people are still listening.
It is difficult to leap to the defence of DailyKos when some Faux-pop such as O’reilly accuses DailyKos of enabling violent overthrow of society, but if we don’t we allow those statements to be reverberated around until they become ‘truths’.
After that DailyKos may live but MoA may not.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 4 2007 2:11 utc | 15

Again today Badger
offers a succinct resumé of new developments in Iraq.
Bottom line: it looks like Maliki is indeed on the way out (and under a cloud of corruption), Ahmed Chalabi remains “alive and well”, and, most interesting of all, Ayad Alawi and Mookie Sadr are said to be in serious talks about dividing the spoils after Maliki’s ouster. Needless to say, for U.S. lackeys to give Maliki the boot on the grounds of alleged softness on corruption would be side-splittingly funny were it not occuring in the midst of a sanguinary tragedy.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Sep 4 2007 6:44 utc | 17

Why the Dora market is “save”: Weighing the ‘Surge’

Nearly every week, American generals and politicians visit Combat Outpost Gator, nestled behind a towering blast wall in the Dora market. They arrive in convoys of armored Humvees, sometimes accompanied by helicopter gunships, to see what U.S. commanders display as proof of the effectiveness of a seven-month-long security offensive, fueled by 30,000 U.S. reinforcements. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military leader in Iraq, frequently cites the market as a sign of progress.
…
Still, the Dora market is a Potemkin village of sorts. The U.S. military hands out $2,500 grants to shop owners to open or improve their businesses. The military has fixed windows and doors and even helped rebuild shops that had burned down, soldiers and others said.
…
Some shopkeepers said they would not do business in the market without U.S. support. “The Americans are giving money, so they’re opening up stores,” said Falah Hassan Fadhil, 27, who sells cosmetics.
1st Lt. Jose Molina, who is in charge of monitoring and disbursing the grant money, said the U.S. military includes barely operating stores in its tally. “Although they sell dust, they are open for business,” said Molina, 35, from Dallas. “They intend to sell goods or they may just have a handful of goods. But they are still counted.” …

Posted by: b | Sep 4 2007 6:58 utc | 19

I’m in a funny mood tonight so I just want to say hello to Bernhard, annie, Uncle $cam wherever you are, Debs, Malooga, Monolycus (I’m on the m’s mono), Alabama (was here recently I think), Truth, jcairo (take it slow my friend), Swedish, Bea (full of news), catlady, b real who is doing the brunt work of bringing Africa to us, Blackie (you know who you are), anna missed who has the skinny on Iraq, all you new posters (welcome!), and those we haven’t seen in a while like Jerome, DeAnander and something174. And yes, I have a bad memory and almost forgot you too.
Anyway, love you all. Here in west canada we are saying goodbye to our labour day long weekend and sending the kids to school and the parents to work tomorrow.
May I wish you all in the northern hemisphere a long Indian summer, and those in the south a good spring. I guess that the equinox was a week or so ago, when we all had 12 hour days and 12 hour nights, and now the sun shifts south.
Good night all.

Posted by: jonku | Sep 4 2007 8:48 utc | 21

@ Jonku NZ does use dollars has done since July 12 1967. The joke may be about the fact that vritually everything in NZ is for sale nowadays. Coincidentally a canadian superannuation fund is currently bidding to buy Auckland airport even after 20 years of this it is still impossible to get the pols to understand that a great asset is worth more in the hand than paying exorbitant rent on it.
We haven’t had a recession since the Tories got thrown out more than a decade ago, but there are plenty worse things than a recession. Being dead is worse than being unemployed and it seems to me that as the economy ‘grows’ infants deaths increase and life expectancy shortens.
Of course when the Tories get back in we will have a recession plus increasing death rates.
But that is far from your question about the shirt. I think Rip Curl are an Oz surf wear manufacturer. Crowded House has it’s roots in a band called Split Enz, a band that was around the traps of Auckland when I was – a long time ago. I’m not what you’d call of fan of this band that song you referred to is the inevitable background music to my small town TV station’s weather report. Of course owning to disliking Crowded House is viewed by some as the closest thing to treason a Kiwi can commit. There is little about the music that indicates where it comes from, to me it is just more white pop. There are plenty of really great musos here same as most places, unfortunately too many of em get caught up in global trends like hip hop rather than finding their own expression. Here’s something with a Pacific feel.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 4 2007 9:50 utc | 23

Someone hacked the Pentagon:
It said hackers from various locations in China had spent several months trying to tap into the system before breaching its cyber defenses, forcing the Pentagon to shut down its network for more than a week.
most of it was probably unclassified
Of course a system serving Robert Gates wouldn’t have much classified data on it.

Posted by: Sam | Sep 4 2007 12:28 utc | 25

Has any news site copped on to the irony that four years after Bush announcing the end of major combat operations (and Dicky C. pronouncing the insurgency to be in its last throes) that Bush still has to sneak into Iraq like a thief returning to the scene of the crime instead of as a president paying a normal diplomatic visit?
I still have the image of General Santa Ana visiting the smoking ruins of the Alamo and strolling up to a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 4 2007 12:37 utc | 27

Petraeus has replaced Blair as Bush’s poodle; but unlike Blair, Petraeus may really get wrecked by some of his subordinate officers. We’ll see….

Posted by: alabama | Sep 4 2007 15:24 utc | 29

Lots of stuff for the legal bloggers in this new NYT Magazine piece which is a kind of preview of Goldsmith’s tell-(nearly)-all of his time as head of the Office of Legal Council.
Goldsmith arrived there in fall 2003 and retracked legal opinions on torture and other stuff that his predecessor had made.
Some nuggets:

Goldsmith puts the bulk of the responsibility for the excesses of the Office of Legal Counsel on the White House. “I probably had a hundred meetings with Gonzales, and there was only one time I was talking about a national-security issue when Addington wasn’t there,” Goldsmith told me. “My conflicts were all with Addington, who was a proxy for the vice president. They were very, very stressful.”
…
In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: “They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations,” he writes. Goldsmith’s first experienced this extraordinary concealment, or “strict compartmentalization,” in late 2003 when, he recalls, Addington angrily denied a request by the N.S.A.’s inspector general to see a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel’s legal analysis supporting the secret surveillance program. “Before I arrived in O.L.C., not even N.S.A. lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what N.S.A. was doing,” Goldsmith writes.
…
Goldsmith also witnessed perhaps the most well-known confrontation over the administration’s aggressive tactics: the scene at Ashcroft’s hospital bed on March 10, 2004, when Gonzales and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, visited the hospital to demand that the ailing Ashcroft approve, over Goldsmith and Comey’s objections, a secret program that was about to expire. .. As he recalled it to me, Goldsmith received a call in the evening from his deputy, Philbin, telling him to go to the George Washington University Hospital immediately, since Gonzales and Card were on the way there. Goldsmith raced to the hospital, double-parked outside and walked into a dark room. Ashcroft lay with a bright light shining on him and tubes and wires coming out of his body.
Suddenly, Gonzales and Card came in the room and announced that they were there in connection with the classified program. “Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest,” Goldsmith recalls. “All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed.”
After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room. “At that moment,” Goldsmith recalled, “Mrs. Ashcroft, who obviously couldn’t believe what she saw happening to her sick husband, looked at Gonzales and Card as they walked out of the room and stuck her tongue out at them. She had no idea what we were discussing, but this sweet-looking woman sticking out her tongue was the ultimate expression of disapproval. It captured the feeling in the room perfectly.”

Posted by: b | Sep 4 2007 17:21 utc | 31

So, just to get the proper perspective on that last post, 12 kids were treated for shock, none were injured, and the appropriate response is to cut off electricity, fuel and water for 1.5 million persons who happen to live in the same geographical area as those few who fired the rockets.
Yup. An eye for an eye, all right. Or more like an entire population for an eye.
I know, this rocket was not an isolated incident but rather an ongoing pattern but nevertheless…. doesn’t this seem just a tad disproportionate?

Posted by: Bea | Sep 4 2007 18:14 utc | 33

Catlady, thanks for responding.
I guess I was talking about the solstice, when one hemisphere gets the most sun and the other gets the least:

Either of the two instants during the year when the Sun, as seen from Earth, is farthest north or south of the equator. The summer solstice (when the Sun is over the Tropic of Cancer) occurs around June 21st; the winter solstice (when the Sun is over the Tropic of Capricorn) happens around December 21st. In the Northern Hemisphere, summer and winter officially begin at the instants of the summer and winter solstices, respectively.

So I am mourning the annual passage of us northern people’s warm and bright, and cheering on the same to our southern neighbours.
I’m not even that far north, just over the 49th parallel into Canada but I really do notice the shrinking days even though it is still warm here.
Take heart, friends, the sun is coming!

Posted by: jonku | Sep 4 2007 18:44 utc | 35

This may have been posted before if so apologies.
A diary on Dkos by maccabee, I couldn’t find it there but others, such as alasbabylon, copied it.
I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth.
I asked her why she is telling me this. (…)
more:
yahoo groups

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 4 2007 19:19 utc | 37

Fisk, in the Independent, 4 sept. 2007:
snip:
“So what else do the Americans have up their sleeve for us out here? Well, an old chum of mine in the Deep South – a former US Vietnam veteran officer – has a habit of tramping through the hills to the north of his home and writes to me that “in my therapeutic and recreation trips … in the mountains of North Carolina over the last two weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of F-16 and C-130 activity. They are coming right through the passes, low to the ground. The last time I saw this kind of thing up there was before Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan”.
That was in early August. Two weeks later, my friend wrote again. “There were a few (more) C-130 passes… I know that some 75th Rangers have just moved out of their home base and that manoeuvres have gone on in areas that have been used… in the past before assaults utilizing [sic] aircraft guided by small numbers of special operations people.”
And then comes the cruncher in my friend’s letter. “I think that the Bush administration is looking for something to distract Americans before the mid-September report on progress in Iraq. And I believe that the pressure is building to do something about the sanctuaries for the Taliban and foreign fighters along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border…”
independent

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 4 2007 19:31 utc | 39

men w/ their boats playing let’s contain china?
bbc: Five-nation naval exercise begins
The navies of the United States, Australia, India, Japan and Singapore have begun a massive naval exercise, codenamed “Malabar”, in the Bay of Bengal.
Thirty-four ships and submarines from the five countries have joined the six-day exercise, about 100 nautical miles off the Andaman archipelago.
Some analysts say the war games are an attempt by these countries to contain China’s growing power.
The participants deny this, but Beijing has expressed its concerns.
“This will perhaps be the biggest ever peace-time joint naval exercise in Asia,” Indian navy spokesman Captain Vinay Garg said.
…
India has denied claims that the exercise is aimed at China. “This is simply directed at ensuring security of the sea lanes of communication,” Deputy Defence Minister Pallam Raju said.
The six-day exercise has been fiercely opposed by India’s left-wing parties, who see it as “India’s growing subservience” to the US.
The left, whose support is essential for the survival of India’s Congress-led government, has organised demonstrations to oppose the exercise.
Chanting anti-US slogans, about 80 protestors boarded buses in Calcutta for Vishakhapatnam, a southern port city near the venue of the exercise.

Navies hold exercise in Indian Ocean

An international naval drill is underway in the Indian Ocean focusing on anti-piracy, reconnaissance and rescue missions.
A total of 27 ships and submarines from the United States, Australia, Japan and Singapore joined seven from India in the Bay of Bengal, at the northwestern entrance to the Malacca Strait, for the six-day exercises.
It is the biggest peacetime joint military exercises in recent years and includes the super-aircraft carriers USS Nimitz, USS Kitty Hawk.
Some 160 fighter planes backed by reconnaissance aircraft, will be constantly in the air during the wargames.
The exercises will also touch the Malacca Strait, a 805-kilometre channel between Malaysia and Sumatra that accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s maritime energy transport.

wrt men w/ boats “securing” africa, here’s a checkin on the nato flotilla’s circumnavigation of the continent
Nato, SA in naval-warfare exercise

Forget the blazing guns of yesteryear — these days naval warfare is a high-tech and sophisticated operation.
This became clear on Monday as an exercise involving Nato warships and the South African Navy got under way off the South African coast.
…
It is the first time that South Africa’s new submarine and two of the four new frigates — the SAS Amatola and the SAS Isandlwana — have been involved in a combined exercise.
Other South African Navy ships as well as aircraft of the South African Air Force will also be involved in taking on Nato’s Maritime Group One.
Besides the Portuguese, frigates from Canada and The Netherlands as well as ships from Germany, the United States and Denmark also form part of the Nato flotilla.
The Nato group is travelling around the African continent making port calls at several African nations, but it is only with the SA Navy that it is conducting full naval exercises.
…
Another sign of the increasing importance of a security operation in African waters comes from the US Navy, which plans from 2008 to have a “big-deck” presence in the Gulf of Guinea.
“My aspiration is to have a ship there 365 days a year,” said Admiral Harry Ulrich, commander of US Naval Forces Europe and Africa.

you, a boatload of private oil company officials & their supporting thinktank crews, admiral. no doubt.

Posted by: b real | Sep 4 2007 21:40 utc | 41

1) Nobody is willing to challenge me when I asy that I think the US IS accomplishing its objectives in Iraq. I wish someone would, be cause I’m not really sure, but many signs point this way.
2) Assuming there were approximately 6M Sunnis in Iraq pre-invasion (22% of 27M), and assuming that almost 2M of those were forced to flee the country and another 1M were forced to flee their homes and relocate, primarily those in Baghdad, and assuming that 50% of the 1M killed were Sunni, and assuming that the serious injury rate is equal to the death rate, but could be included in the other statistics above, and assuming that perhaps 1//2M Sunnis have been through the jail system or are still being held….
Well, you see where I’m going with this. Assuming that over 5M of those were from Baghdad and the areas surrounding it, and Anbar — what do we have? A relocation rate of over 50%? A devastation rate of perhaps 80% of that population, having lost almost everything. Do these figures sound correct based upon what we know? Is this ethnic cleansing? If the US was able to accomplish this while losing less than 4K in troops, what is to stop them from finishing off all of the Sunni resistance, and then turning to the Shiite/Mahdi resistance and doing the same?
Help me out here folks, is my thinking and calculating way off?

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 4 2007 22:56 utc | 43

ralphieboy:
Has any news site copped on to the irony that four years after Bush announcing the end of major combat operations (and Dicky C. pronouncing the insurgency to be in its last throes) that Bush still has to sneak into Iraq like a thief returning to the scene of the crime instead of as a president paying a normal diplomatic visit?
Actually yes there are exeptions:
This time, Bush visited Al-Asad Air Base — an enormous, heavily fortified American outpost for 10,000 troops that while technically in Anbar Province in fact has a 13-mile perimeter keeping Iraq — and Iraqis — at bay. Bush never left the confines of the base, known as ” Camp Cupcake,” for its relatively luxurious facilities, but nevertheless announced: “When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like.”
Dan Froomkin

Posted by: Sam | Sep 5 2007 0:01 utc | 45

I would say, that not only is the ‘US accomplishing its objectives in Iraq’ it is also doing so here at home if the following is any indication:
Executive privilege for whole Corporations?
You really want to take some time and wrap your mind around this one, and understand the astounding implications thereof, because, this may very well be one of the most important posts that I have ever posted at MOA now or in the future, and how this plays out in the near future will determine for all just exactly where we really are as a nation and as a free country and democratic society. And may determine the boundaries of Democracy itself.
Indeed, threads/posts, discussions like this very well may, kill Americans!
Do yourself a favor and take some time to understand this and read the comments there such as this one:

I myself am taking various kinds of actions (and preparation) against a variety of governmental deeds (and future expected deeds) – in this case though you have direct suppression of the response.
That is, these folks brought a lawsuit over illegal violation of their civil liberties. Bushco wants to grant them immunity so those folks can’t sue them.
The beef isn’t that or rather isn’t just that the companies in question will go under, it’s that presidential orders were given to those companies ostensibly to fight terrorists.
So – is it a corporations responsibility to make sure orders from the highest levels of government are legal – given that they haven’t been run through the courts yet?
Or should they comply with the executive branch when the country appears to be under duress and give the benefit of the doubt that the orders coming from the executive branch are legal?
It sort of boils down to the “I was just following orders” defense.
But I’d have to split the difference between Wyden and Bond – you can’t grant blanket immunity because that destroys any chance of investigation into whether the original orders were legal or not and what the actual permutations were (who knew what, when?)
By the same token you can’t hold those companies liable for a crime when they reasonably believe they’re complying with what is essentially a law enforcing body.
If a cop tells you “Hey, help me pick this up, it’s evidence” and you help him load something into his police car and it later turns out you just helped him steal something, that’s a big problem.
It gets knotty if, at the time you helped him, it was in fact evidence and he only later decided to steal it.
And more tangled still if prior to this it was legal for him to take the thing home with him because the law was changed shortly before you helped him but now everyone realizes this ‘cops can take people’s stuff home with them whenever they want’ law might not be in the best interest of society.
What needs to be done here is, apart from support of the ACLU, to make sure the laws that created this situation are rescinded. That takes contact with your local senator, organization devoted to such a focus, lobbying perhaps, etc. etc. not the least of which is contact with the companies involved – obviously the change in the law would protect them from future lawsuits and, more importantly, ill will and bad pr and possible boycott by you and your group(s) etc. so I’m sure their people would want to know about that angle instead of taking it in the keister in the press and they might even help with their lobbiests.
The key is to get the momentum going that way no matter how the ball is rolling now or how big and heavy it looks.
Money, support, all that, easy as pie if you’re willing to examine all the elements rather than just get angry or partisan.
Or, y’know, you could just go at ‘em with guns and stuff.
(But hell, the time for that comes it’s crystal clear. It’s like knowing when you’re going to sneeze or have an orgasm, pretty unmistakable usually.)

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 5 2007 1:22 utc | 47

noirette/tangerine & malooga
yes yr right about the shifts here in the media but it is all that murdochian equation of fear & celebrity. murder & mode
however, there are still good filmmakers & this night being confined to a bed because of the heart not being so good today i watched a doco on the parti communiste française & i am reminded of the giants that walked this earth & i have met them on all continents & in nearly every country i have visited or worked or struggled
i suppose i can be sanguine because i really believe – in the historical & dialectical materialism i just mouthed as a young man. in the last 15 years that conbception of the world while not providing comfort has provided comprehension. hopefully i do not use it as a baton to wack you over the head but it allows me to see through the emptiness of this particular moment of history & to at least touch on its real character
& i am convinced that imperialism is on its last legs. that it is falling apart. that one day material & immaterial workers willl unite as they are doing throughout latin america. they will unite because even a poor man does not want to live an impoverished internal life – something that is necessitated by the needs of empire
because for the empire we do not exist- our communities of resistance – & the affinity groups that sites like moon become – but we do exist & we do change tangentially enough to benefit others & that is surely the point
the little men that hold sway in the western worl have never been so peurile, have never been so, so little – there is nothing in them – they are like rohm & bormann – crumpled bags of shit held together with bad suits
they are nothing
& for all the violence they wield in the world & in our symbolic orders – they are still nothing
we coonect – they disassociate. we deconstruct – they destroy & destroy even the crates of civilisation they stand on
they will scream as they are doing today but they will fall. they will fall

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 5 2007 1:37 utc | 49

bea @ 7
Keith Olbermann today used that specific quote of Bush that Robert Draper got for the autobiography (‘I am playing for October/November’) as the base for his special comment.
If you can listen to it, you will see you were not the only one, who was “very un-nerved”.
Sad, that KO’s comment will probably just go under.

Posted by: mimi | Sep 5 2007 2:36 utc | 51

What “free market democracy”?
Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, details the rise of disaster capitalism with painstaking care, showing how big business often steps in after global misery.

Examples range from the way in which the Friedman doctrine was implemented in Chile after the 1973 coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, to the more recent displacement of Sri Lankan fishers who were prevented by resort developers from returning to their villages in the aftermath of the 2003 tsunami.
Klein began connecting the dots in her own mind at the start of the Iraq War in 2003. At the time she and her husband, filmmaker and former TV host Avi Lewis, were living in Argentina, a country then emerging from its own period of economic shock therapy. She was struck by how closely the original reconstruction plans for Iraq conformed to the shock formula.

Posted by: catlady | Sep 5 2007 3:12 utc | 53

Help! can’t find a post, and I’m not even sure it was here that I read it…
but. it had something to do w/ employees of a company having access to ‘transparency'(?) software and the reaction of middle management finding out? Does that ring a bell w/anyone? I looked but can’t seem to find it, which leaves me to believe it wasn’t here that I read it, as I was very sleepy at the time…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 5 2007 3:39 utc | 55

RE #55 – Can’t help you Uncle, but I remmber reading that too. It was a company that made the data available to employees on the production line and the result was improved productivety. Mangement fearing this could make their job reduntant put a stop to it. Hopefully this helps jog someone’s memory.

Posted by: Sam | Sep 5 2007 3:56 utc | 57

reuters: Somalia’s Islamic Courts movement “intact”

NAIROBI (Reuters) – A senior Somali Islamist leader said on Tuesday the Islamic Courts movement ousted from Mogadishu in a brief war at the end of 2006 remained unbroken and better-supported than before among the population.
“The movement is intact. The leadership is still there. Many of them are inside the country, in Mogadishu and elsewhere, in hiding. Others are abroad,” said Ibrahim Hussein Adow, foreign affairs pointman for the Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC).
Adow, who has made Yemen his home in exile, said Somalis had seen the contrast between violence by the Ethiopian military backing Somalia’s interim government, and the stability the Courts brought during their six-month rule of the south in 2006.
“When the Islamic Courts came in, things changed. Tribes were united, the port and airport opened, weapons were collected, we even stopped piracy,” he said by telephone during a trip to Doha.
“The movement changed people’s lives for the better…The Ethiopians and Transitional Federal Government have created violence and genocide…So the support for the (Islamic Courts) movement is more than before.”

it was the unpopular rule of the warlords (backed in part by the CIA) that led to the success of the islamic courts in the first place, and the warlord-led TFG (backed by both ethiopia & the u.s.), which has restored many of those same warlords back into positions of power, is hardly making any better impression on somalis.

“It is not the Islamic Courts organising this, but the population organising itself,” Adow said of the daily attacks.
“The Ethiopians killed so many people with their indiscriminate bombing and their tanks. Their violence is behind the problem, they have alienated the population.”
Adow said the recent National Reconciliation Conference in Mogadishu was a failure as it was run by the Ethiopians and government, and never intended to bring opponents on board.
A U.S.-educated lecturer in education and international affairs, Adow, in his mid-fifties, said he advocated peaceful engagement of all the Somali factions at a neutral venue.
“We will go anywhere, provided talks are inclusive, there is an independent body present, and the place is safe,” he said.

the opposition conference — the somali congress for liberation and reconstitution — is now scheduled to begin this thursday in asmara, eritrea.
Somali opposition seeks ‘new political platform’

ASMARA (AFP) – Opposition Somali leaders will create a “new political platform” to liberate their war-torn Horn of Africa nation from Ethiopia, they said late Monday.
Speaking to reporters ahead of a delayed Somali opposition conference in the Eritrean capital – now due to open Thursday – senior Islamic Courts Union (ICU) leader Omar Imam Abubakar appealed to “Somali patriots” to work together.
“The conference will discuss how to create national unity and reconciliation among the Somali people, in order to stop the violence caused by the foreign occupation,” said Abubakar, a top Islamist official.
“The leadership will serve the national interests of Somalia, and give the Somali people a leadership to face the problems that the foreign occupation and their Somali allies are creating,” he added.
…
British-based Somali diaspora representative Abdirahman Warsame said the Asmara conference … aimed to create a more inclusive opposition.
He said the conference aimed to establish a political platform involving the diaspora community, civil society groups, intellectuals, and eminent Somali politicians, as well as the ICU.
“The policies and strategies of the new political alliance will be decided by the new leadership, not by the Islamic Courts,” he said.

which presents a serious threat to those backing the TFG, so there will likely be different attempts to undermine and/or discredit the conference. here’s one,
Ethiopia soldiers to stop delegates from attending opposition conference

DHUSAMAREB, Somalia Sep 4 (Garowe Online) – Ethiopian troops backing Somalia’s transitional government deployed into a provincial capital Tuesday, a day after unknown gunmen attacked the town’s deputy police commander, sources said.
The troops entered Dhusamareb, capital of Galgadud region, Tuesday morning. A local journalist told Garowe Online that the troops and 6 armored vehicles came from Guri EL, a town further south.
…
Inside sources in Dhusamareb said the Ethiopian troops’ arrival coincides with emerging reports that a group of people, including reporters, were preparing to depart from the town en route to Eritrea.
The group that includes delegates plans to participate at a “reconciliation conference” organized by opponents of the Ethiopia-backed interim government in Mogadishu.
Fearing Ethiopian arrests, the group postponed their secretive trip to Eritrea, the sources said. Ethiopian military officers met with clan elders and local government officials in Dhusamareb to discuss security arrangements.

and we have already seen how the u.s. has ratcheted up the demonization of eritrea in the past couple of weeks, so asst sec frazer will probably waddle back out before the microphones to disseminate more disinformation – remember, it was she who told the press back in december that 2,000 eritrea troops were in mogadishu and that the top ranks of the ICU were made up of AQ affiliates, both baseless charges calculated to justify the invasion of somalia to effect a regime change in order to restore the warlords to power.
the behavior of DoS this year — favoring the meles regime, which will do its bidding in the region, while punishing the eritreans for not keeping silent — is further pushing eritrea into the welcoming arms & coffers of the chinese.
Eritrea boosts economic ties with China

September 4, 2007 (ASMARA) — Eritrea is looking east. Frustrated with the Western nations it blames for a border feud with arch-foe Ethiopia, this east African nation is boosting economic and political ties with China and Arab nations.
Exports to Eritrea from China jumped over 350 percent last year from the previous year to some 35 million dollars (26 million euros), according to Chinese statistics.
“We have long relations with Eritrea from during its independence war, as well with other regional countries such as Djibouti, Sudan and even Ethiopia,” said Shu Zhan, China’s ambassador to Eritrea.
“We hope to build and improve on these,” he told AFP.
…
Eritrean President Issaias Afeworki, who developed close ties with China when he trained there during Eritrea’s 30-year liberation war against Ethiopia, has turned increasingly towards China and away from the West.
China, which earlier this year cancelled part of Eritrea’s debt, has focused efforts on construction — including developing a cement factory and a college — as well as upgrading Eritrea’s telecommunication network.
In an interview earlier this year with Chinese media, Issaias said that current links may only be the “tip of the iceberg.”
“In the last ten years we say our trade partnership was more with Europe rather than with China,” Issaias said in the interview, posted on an Eritrean government website.
“In the last few years dramatically everything has shifted to China,” he said.
…
While Asmara receives an 88-million-euro (119 million dollars) five-year development package from the European Union, relations have grown frosty with several Western nations, particularly the United States.
Washington, which ordered the closure of Eritrea’s Californian consulate in August, accuses Asmara of supporting Somalia’s Islamist insurgents battling Ethiopian and Somali interim government troops.
Dismissing those claims, Asmara in turn accuses the US administration of failing to pressure Ethiopia into implementing a UN border commission ruling granting a key border town to Eritrea.
Instead, Eritrea has asked China, as a veto-wielding UN Security Council member and as a strong trade partner of Ethiopia, to help break the deadlock.
…
Eritrea’s shift east follows a pan-African trend, seen in a Beijing summit last November attended by leaders from more than 40 African countries.
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said at the summit that Beijing intended to more than double trade with Africa to 100 billion dollars a year by 2010.
Analysts say China is eyeing upbeat exploration reports of Eritrea’s lucrative gold and mineral deposits, which Asmara hopes will provide a crucial foreign currency income when production begins, potentially as early as next year.
But while Eritrea and its 4.4 million population may be a minnow compared to the Asian giant, observers say that fiercely self-reliant Asmara will be unlikely to simply cede its mineral rights away.
Issaias has warned that Eritrea must be “very cautious” to avoid a repeat of the historical “exploitation of resources by highly developed industrialised countries.”
“If it is a matter of selling raw materials to China and not getting any benefit by developing a partnership for the long term, that may become a problem,” Issaias said.

Posted by: b real | Sep 5 2007 4:09 utc | 59

or mayhap it were Monolycus…

Posted by: catlady | Sep 5 2007 4:28 utc | 61

i can see why STRATCOM is not charging for this “intelligence” rpt — their analysis is that the recent announcement by the SADC rejecting a u.s. military presence on the continent is a move by south africa to preserve its power. heh.
South Africa, U.S.: Dueling for Hegemony in Africa

South Africa recently expressed opposition to the proposed U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), in a move to prevent Washington diplomatically from challenging Pretoria’s dominant position in southern Africa.
…
South Africa sees itself as the natural power in southern Africa. It is thus seeking to re-establish its hegemonic position, which during the apartheid era reached as far north as southern Angola and the Katanga province area in southern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

this really misses the whole message, doesn’t it? the p.m. stated that the AU was on-board w/ this rejection of AFRICOM being based on the continent.

South Africa’s limited influence outside southern Africa means Pretoria cannot be expected to block the bilateral agreements under which the United States will secure AFRICOM basing privileges.
…
Strategy and enforced circumstances thus will result in a small but flexible AFRICOM footprint in a limited number of locations in West Africa and the Horn of Africa, something that does not directly clash with South African interests. Less pressing AFRICOM priorities in southern Africa resulting in the U.S. command’s focus being directed elsewhere removes a possible major rival to South Africa’s return as the dominant power in southern Africa.

dream on, neocon

Posted by: b real | Sep 5 2007 5:02 utc | 63

Quite the chain of events:
If the United States attacks Iran, they may face three problems: they can not predict “the volume of our response”; they don’t know what would happen to Israel and Washington will not know what will the oil flow look like at that time, General Rahim Yahya Safavi was quoted as saying.
Iran warns U.S. not to launch military attack
“Certainly we would hope that reasonable individuals in Iran would see the positive opportunity given to it by the international community to enter negotiations and be able to achieve a peaceful nuclear program while still reassuring everyone else that it is not simply a cover for building a nuclear weapon,” said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.
US calls for ‘reasonable’ Iran nuclear talks
FOR SOME time Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian diplomat who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, has made it clear he considers himself above his position as a U.N. civil servant. Rather than carry out the policy of the Security Council or the IAEA board, for which he nominally works, Mr. ElBaradei behaves as if he were independent of them, free to ignore their decisions and to use his agency to thwart their leading members — above all the United States.
Rogue Regulator

Posted by: Sam | Sep 5 2007 7:06 utc | 65

500 years ago, the missionaries warmed the hearts of savage African cannibals with Bibles. Africom should bring more Bibles, this time on iPods. That should be enough to get them dumb-darkies screeching, grinning and jumping up & down.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Sep 5 2007 8:49 utc | 67

AFRICOM must not stop at just bringing them Bibles, but teach them American virtues like privatization, “abstinence only” and the unlimited right to bear arms.
Then we would have a continent that only America could possibly keep under control.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 5 2007 11:22 utc | 69

Arriving at the APEC conference Mr Bush perhaps summed it up best when the Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile greeted him at the airport and asked “How was Baghdad?”
“We’re kicking ass” Mr Bush responded.
1. He wasn’t in Baghdad.
2. This will go down just as well as “Bring ’em on!”

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Sep 5 2007 11:45 utc | 71

For those who appreciate Paul Craig Poberts writings at Counterpunch, as I do, it is quite revealing to read his absolutely rascist review of Amy Chua’s World On Fire — could have been written by Jefferson Davis.
Oddly enough, I can’t find a decent review of it from the left, but it seems to me that critiques should not focus on red herrings like ethnic differences, rather, they should be focussing on critiquing what we commonly call democracy — which, as we know, is nothing of the sort, as the emphasis is on Malthusian competition and domination, rather than participation. Countries like the US make clear that different ethnic groups can get along — The Jewish neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists love each other even more than Clinton and Vernon Jordan love each other — as long as each is buttering the other’s bread. But we should not critique ethnicity; we should be critiquing the system which forces us to dominate others in order to survive. In any event, the logic of arguing for ethnically pure societies is Nazism of the worst kind, where we will need to eventually kill off every “mixed breed” person in the world.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 5 2007 12:48 utc | 73

What about North Korea, Monlycus et. al.?

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 5 2007 12:53 utc | 75

djfnsjfbjbjhbdf dv
sjkvbjsvjkv
AH, oh sorry
hearing the name of that woman or her music causes me to pass out.
What kind of Canadian are you?
Music is either going to reach you or it isn’t. While appreciation can be taught, I doubt it would be easy to teach someone to like exactly the music you do.
Told my father-out-law I don’t like the music of that which must not be named or her schtick.
FOL – oh ya, what about frank sinatra? do ya like him?
me – ya, i grew up listening to Da play him on the victrola. His voice is OK and when I hear it, it reminds me of Da.
FOL – well, he’s all mobbed up you know. that’s the only reason he’s successful. and so on…
Jonku – if you have a dvd player check out – Seven Worlds Collide
I don’t think you’ll be disappointed

Posted by: jcairo | Sep 5 2007 13:48 utc | 77

Did
Thanks for Fat Freddy.
I don’t watch music videos very much and to be honest, sittin here with my eyes closed and the music up, I wouldn’t have known that had a Pacific feel at all or that the singer (nice voice) wasn’t melanin challenged.
Like the tune though. gonna look them up.
thanks

Posted by: jcairo | Sep 5 2007 14:18 utc | 79

#73
too add my two cents:
Amy Chu tackles a very important subject and one thats rarely discussed. Note I have not read her book, just reviews.
and I would refer to this subject as the class-dynamics of culture
one thing that both Amy Chu & objecting critic of her book, Paul Craig Roberts seem to agree on is that multi-culturalism should be handled with care. Theres far too many examples of people living together, but polarized along cultural & religious lines, to conclude otherwise.
but is it enough to attribute these polarizations solely to the particular cultural nature of the contending groups. How about the prevailing influence of Culture-Eurocentrism ? If Amy Chu were to delve too critically into examining Eurocentrism as a factor, would she be able to get her book published ?
this is not to slam Eurocentrism. However, Eurocentrism is the only culture today thats held supreme & sacred. Hence when other peeps stumble or fail, its their culture or religion. But when Eurrocentrics fail, its some individual/s.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Sep 5 2007 15:01 utc | 81

the class-dynamics of culture
Gramsci did it far better a century ago, only he held tenure in a prison cell rather than an ivory tower. Sharpens the intellect a bit.
that multi-culturalism should be handled with care. Theres far too many examples of people living together, but polarized along cultural & religious lines, to conclude otherwise.
Perhaps that is because is serves the interests of the elite to let the proles battle each other, rather than organize collectively against them. Pretty basic stuff. Nixon’s Southern Strategy, etc.
In any event, when “culture” means the food you eat and the music you listen to, everyone gets along fine. But when “culture” means the ability of those to come in to another culture with their laws, capital, and weapons, and change the economic and social structure of that culture to channel wealth towards themselves and away from others — well, that’s when so-called multi-culturalism can get a little rocky.
But his is all obvious; one hardly needs a PHD to surmise all of this.
this is not to slam Eurocentrism.
Why not? Although you do not define the term, I can only take it to mean a culture that sees itself as better than all others, creates better weapons, and goes around the world taking others wealth at the point of the knife. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Michelangelo, and Rembrant were pleasant by-products of this rape, so clearly Eurocentrism benefitted its own people, if not Africans, per say. Unfortunately, even this small recompense has withered down to cultural artifacts like The Spice Girls.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 5 2007 15:57 utc | 83

rgiap at 49 wrote:
i am convinced that imperialism is on its last legs.
I believe this as well, I want to.
However, one vision is that it will take an extraordinary amount of pain and death, as well as a long time. What arises from the ashes may be rather fundamentalist and say medieval, in its forced group-think and allegiance to both doctrine and leaders. Or not. Possibly not. Or not so everywhere.
The crux is use of resources, and taking them from others, ‘growth’ in a capitalistic sense, expressed in GDP for ex., the need to always have more ppl, more cars, more bedrooms, more medical care, more toys, more food, more narcissistic glitter, more everything, all of it is dependent on natural processes (rivers, water, rain, sunlight, plant growth, etc.) and energy laid down through the millenia (oil, etc.)
We are sucking at the upcoming last dregs of fossil fuels, soil, water, minerals, etc. The natural world is not just a backdrop there for exploitation. If that exploitation was infinitely possible, everyone, the workers, the poor, would have enough. No or few babies would die. No family would go hungry. No wars would break out. No camps would be set up. Everyone could play the ukulele.
The overlords would throw more than crumbs and ppl would not object.
Yes, management and renewal are possible to some extent. A possibility that won’t emerge.
Besides that, yes the French media – films, books, etc – are tops. But the mainstream media does influence, though it will be an uphill job in France. I hope.

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 5 2007 16:24 utc | 85

Stan Goff: The Ends Begins
How this war will end has never been a decision that can or would be made by the leadership of either American political party, any more than the defeat in Vietnam was the result of politicians and protesters. The occupied people made the decision. It was not revoked in Vietnam. It will not be revoked in Iraq.
The puzzle that will preoccupy both parties now, since neither knows who will inherit this dilemma, is how to salvage what is left of waning American imperial power. You won’t be able to slide shim-stock between Rudy or Hillary on this question… and neither of them will have the power to stand before the historical macrotrend of US power dissolution.
The first that acknowledges and learns to deal with the fact of Iranian ascendancy will be the one that will suffer least… but that’s about it. In less than a decade, we will see Russia, China, and Iran at the head of a re-set Central Asian chessboard, and they will contend with a descendant American empire.
The end of all empires is inevitable. The Great City always exhausts the rural soils and eats the seed-corn, and its debilitated, dependent rulers will always be usurped by “the barbarians” who were formerly bent before the Great City’s plunder. As Dr. King — once himself called one a barbarian — said, “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”
History will record that a decisive misstep in the crash of the American Empire was taken on March 19, 2003. September 3, 2007 will be a historical place-holder for a kind of death-gasp of empire … former guerrillas sitting the Prez down as an equal across the table at Al Asad.
We haven’t reckoned the body count yet, because it is still rising. That’s the sinful part.
It’s over. Admit it. Get over it. Get out.
Bring them home now.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 5 2007 17:01 utc | 87

its over for the empire but i also agree with both tangerine & malooga that we will pass through an unprecedented level of barbarism
in cultural terms – in the west – we have already arrived there
& tangerine/noirette – you are absolutely correct that the thrust of mass cultrue in france has become totally integrated to thye politics of a le pen or a madelaine or sarkozy. they do not call tf1 – television front national for nothing. constantly calling up carnage in the name of security – something that rupert murdoch has refined to a tee
but oppositional culture gere has a long history & is integrated into the associative life – which is profound in every quartier. 1936 is not so long ago – & those things that have been fought for are still relatively close to the french heart
but we will see – i’m sure the right wants the thatcherite blair broom to wipe france clean – i hope it cannot happen
the left as a force remains potentially powerful -it still is at a local level – but it must really represent the interests of those who are suffering most – in the presnt but more importantly those in the near future
i think that was the classicla mistake of the communist party – it was right to reject – the so called necessities & benefits of modernism but what it was required to do was to analyse the concrete conditions that exist in france. it still can
when this culture as a culture opposed the immoral & illegal invasion & occupatiuon of iraq – i was very proud & not a little surprised that the most vocal at a political level were the old right centrists like chirac & co

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 5 2007 17:27 utc | 89

Adding to the discussion of science versus belief 🙂

Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due the problem.
The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at Nepal’s only international airport in Kathmandu in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said.
“The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights,” said Raju K.C., a senior airline official, without explaining what the problem had been.

link

Posted by: b | Sep 5 2007 17:29 utc | 91

Interesting read, even if everyone already knows it: David Bromwich talking about Bush, the spineless Dems, AIPAC and the inevitable war with Iran in the Huffington Post.

But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno, it threatens “to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.” He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has “authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.” Those words come close to saying not that a war is coming but that it is already here. No lawmaker who reads them can affect the slightest shock at any action the president takes against Iran.
Admittedly, it was a showdown speech, reckless and belligerent, to a soldier audience; but then, this has been just the sort of crowd and message that Cheney and Bush favor when they are about to open a new round of killings. And in a sense, the Senate had given the president his cue when it approved, by a vote of 97-0, the July 11 Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran. It is hardly an accident that the president and his favorite tame senator concurred in their choice of the word “confront.” The pretext for the Lieberman amendment, as for the president’s order, was the discovery of caches of weapons alleged to belong to Iran, the capture of Iranian advisers said to be operating against American troops, and the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources–claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified. Still, the vote was 97-0. If few Americans took notice, the government of Iran surely did.
That unanimous vote was the latest in a series of capitulations that has included the apparent end of resistance by Nancy Pelosi to the next war. After the election of 2006, the speaker of the house declared her intention to enact into law a requirement that this president seek separate authorization for a war against Iran. On the point of doing so, she addressed the AIPAC convention, and was booed for criticizing the escalation of the Iraq war. Pelosi took the hint, shelved her authorization plan, and went with AIPAC against the anti-war base of the Democratic party.

Snip…

How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: “there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except in Israel–from the rest of the population.” When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand “apart…from the rest of the population.” Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.

The original Mearscheimer article is here in PDF format… but I have to confess I haven’t read it yet, so I won’t be able to skip to the good parts for you.
On an unrelated note, Representative Gillmor (R-Ohio) died on Tuesday which will necessitate a special election to fill his seat. Apparently he died in his home, and possibly on his toilet, so the jokes linking him with Senator Craig should practically write themselves.

Posted by: Monolycus | Sep 5 2007 18:06 utc | 93

Hamas Flag Goes up in Lebanon Camps

BADDAWI CAMP, Lebanon, 5 September (IPS) – There is a new look to the entrance of the Palestinian refugee camp Baddawi in northern Lebanon. Hanging above the armed man who guards the entrance are posters of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the slain spiritual leader of Hamas, and other fighters from the Palestinian guerrilla group. Nearby, a huge Hamas banner covers the side of a house, and down the road Hamas flags flutter in the wind.
Just months ago, such banners and posters would have been torn down by supporters of the rival Fatah party. But many residents here say that they have grown disillusioned with Fatah (known in Lebanon as Fatah Abu Ammar) after its defeat in Gaza in June and its handling of the crisis at the nearby refugee camp Nahr al-Bared.
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in Lebanon, led by members of the Fatah party, sided with the army, despite what many here perceive as indiscriminate shelling of Nahr al-Bared.
On Sunday, the Lebanese army declared victory, after more than three months of fighting, and everywhere Lebanese are waving flags and honking horns in support. But instead of rejoicing, many Palestinians here are angry with Fatah and the PLO for failing to protect civilians.
“These politicians allowed the Lebanese army to destroy the whole camp,” said former Nahr al-Bared resident Abdel Salaam Khader, who lost a brother in the fighting. “We have been exposed many, many times to Israeli bombs, but even the Israelis destroyed certain places and not a whole camp.”
He added, “They could have dealt with the fighters in a different way, not in a military way. The Palestinian leaders made an agreement with the government that caused us to lose our homes and possessions.”

Blowback…

Posted by: Bea | Sep 5 2007 20:33 utc | 95

Colombia, Israel and rogue mercenaries

Outside assistance with Colombian ‘counterinsurgency’ efforts in the form of Israeli ‘expertise’ has created dangerous rogue mercenaries and prolonged a bloody conflict.

Posted by: Alamet | Sep 5 2007 21:01 utc | 97

Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily
Government Death Squads Ravaging Baghdad

US-backed government is running death squads that follow the Latin America model from the 1970s and 1980s.

Also on AlterNet, making some good points,
Big Oil in Iraq: “World Class Racketeering”

(snip)
GAO’s Joseph Christoff, a key witness at the hearing, explained that Iraq is being pressured to pass the hydrocarbon laws at a time when we don’t even know, for example, what regions will even exist that might lay claim to a portion of the oil revenues.
The committee responsible for drafting changes to the country’s constitution has not even been formed. Thus, the role of the regions and whether or not new regions will be formed, such as a Shi’a region in the South, has not yet been determined, and defining the regions will have some bearing on how the oil revenues would be divided.
Other issues that Christoff says should first be resolved include the disposition of Kirkuk and what census would be used to define the populations for purposes of revenue percentages.
(snip)

Posted by: Alamet | Sep 5 2007 21:59 utc | 99