It looks like bubbles Greenspan has left the US economy on thin ice. The people and even the christian conservative are waking up to the class warfare thats been waged on the bottom 99% for the last thirty five years. As I noted on the last open thread, the Rubins of the world are starting to realize the damage. If you go to the Brookings Institute web site and read some the Hamilton Project papers, its clear they are getting a clue.

Posted by: jdp | Jan 12 2008 22:27 utc | 3

Uncle, I said a clue not a full conversion.
I was just reading Howard Zinns A Peoples History, chapter two.
Very interesting how the lower classes even then were being played as if they had a stake in the system, at that time the system of slavery.

Posted by: jdp | Jan 12 2008 23:00 utc | 5

Showdown Looms Over Pirated-Media Directory – WSJ.com

Underscoring Sweden’s pro-piracy attitude, seven parliamentarians from the ruling conservative party called in a newspaper opinion article last month for the decriminalization of file sharing. “It has become a big part of people’s lives,” Karl Sigfrid, one of the politicians, said in an interview. “I believe it is impossible to really stop this.”

Had to post this. Debate is raging right now in Sweden. A group of neoliberal/libertarian parliamentarians – led by Karl Sigfrid – within the conservative party (biggest party on the right, dominating the current right wing government (this being Sweden, picture them more as Democrats then Republicans really)) is calling for free filesharing. On one path is corporate control over (and profits from) Internet distribution of culture, on the other is civil rights and free culture. So I am rooting for the neolibs, rather a neolib with principels then a corporate owned conservative.
And, it is on Slashdot too.
One has to savor the small victories one can achieve. So I savor it…

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Jan 13 2008 1:20 utc | 7

i think ever since i have been here i have asked where is there bottom – how low can they go – to what extremes will they take their depravity
war itself is the most obscene thing that man creates but when it is the work of little men – it becomes something that cannot be measured by the norms of depravity
in the millenia there have been perhaps five or six artists who have given us a look at this depravity. goya certainly. dante.
but even they could not possess the artistry to expose the depraved actions of this empire
& today news that blackwater repaired & painted the vehicles they used in the baghdad massacre – what i think normally is called tampering with evidence in the world of jurisprudence (which to all extents & purposes does not exist, at all) & thus cannot be used as evidence – & this was done on the specific orders of the obscene state department which daily wants to deal out lessons to this or that country. who the fuck do they think they are. they are two things. & those two things have always been the base of empire. murder & theft
murder & theft
how they mock the people of iraq. how they mock the world. how they mock their own people.
their constitution – for all the meaning it possesses should be used to wipe the arses of all who speak in her name
fuck them
fuck them all

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 13 2008 2:34 utc | 9

Yeah, sorry jdp, I’m one of, as DId calls em, an MOA old cynic…lol

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 13 2008 4:27 utc | 11

Blowback:
Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.
About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.
A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.
…
This reporting most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on military bases, are reported publicly or in detail.

Posted by: b | Jan 13 2008 7:20 utc | 13

As Uncle would say, HaHaHaHa….or Jesus Christ, for short…
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.
New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people – less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate – have died since the invasion in 2003.
“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study
But the Garbage New England Journ. of Med. publishes as Medical Gospel that’s funded routinely by BigPharma is to be taken seriously as untainted…

Posted by: jj | Jan 13 2008 9:18 utc | 15

Just what we need. 🙁
Blair kicks off campaign to become EU President | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

Tony Blair launched his campaign to become the first fully-fledged President of the European Union yesterday by describing the notion of left- and right-wing politics as redundant.

With France preparing to oversee the appointment process, Blair set out his vision of modern European democracy at a meeting of the French governing conservative party by also claiming that EU countries could achieve far more by working together than acting in isolation.

‘Europe is not a question of left or right, but a question of the future or the past, of strength or weakness,’ said the former British Prime Minister, speaking in French.

Posted by: Fran | Jan 13 2008 9:59 utc | 17

jeez there’s a weird sub text to that story about the vets keeping on killing when they get home. I only read page one since I don’t really want to roll around in amerikas raw sewerage but that first page was typical NYT dishonesty.
Although they admit the vast majority of victims of these trained murderers is women once they get home, they tell a story about a killing in los vegas in a poor suburb “Just like Fallujah at nite” reckons a los vegas detective As if he would know presumably all the buildings are still standing so it’s nothing like Fallujah, which was never lawless, populated as it was by pious Sunni families.
Anyway I digress the “traumatised’ soldier boy killed a urban blackfella The only side of the story we are told is the soldiers even though he ran from the scene he reckons they approached him and he got scared and ‘engaged the enemy’.
The NYT seems to express surprise that he was charged with a crime. See they’re bringin home the techniques.
Poor unwhite people thought what they had in amerika was bad but soon they’re gonna have the same rights as Iraqis. That is if a ‘real’ citizen feels the need to pop ’em then that’s OK. Blackwater rules – no charge.
I tell ya what I saw a bit of that C.O.P.S. show the other nite – a show which normally like any sane person I avoid like the plague.
It reinforced my need to never set foot in amerika again. Those police were so rude, brutish and standover to people, all people not just the ones that they thought they knew to be ‘bad’.
One scene a cop pulls over some driver for a minor traffic violation walks up to the blokes car and say “Put out the cigareete” really harshly no sir, nothing like that. And the driver did and called the cop sir. What’s going on?
They handcuff people they stop long before any evidence of a crime has been uncovered. They search vehicles and make it plain that although the law may give someone the right to refuse a search, that’s not the real world where declining is not an option.
peeps getting tasered at the drop of a hat, how do you stand it? That stuff always gets my back up and even though I know it’s gonna cause more of a hassle I just can’t ever go along with even the really tame shit that coppers here try on.
Black people in amerika are still slaves as far as I can see. Law enforcement treats them like runaway slaves whenever they have dealings with them if COPS is any indication.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 13 2008 10:06 utc | 19

– i had a long drive was thinking about all this and composed it more or less in me head and so wrote it out i’m a 9/11 nut part 2 the long term implications need some work –
The US Gvmt, after 9/11, exhibited two differing, contradictory, attitudes.
On the one hand, they downplayed 9/11, obscured it, and covered it up. They normalized it by offering a conventional script, believable in TV terms, of 19 crazies with box cutters, which as anyone can understand can occur, there are nuts all over. They minimized the results, although they were stuck with the disappearance of the twin towers and the some 2,800 people who died there, the burning and then partially collapsed Pentagon, and, for whatever reason, an event in Pennsylvania. They never alluded to the fact that the whole WTC complex was destroyed (or almost), that there was a bomb at the Eisenhower building, that another ‘plane’ disappeared (or did not, it is all very unclear.)
They did not investigate the crime, prevented others from doing so, minimized all the results – re-building, toxic fumes, the wounded, who were simply invisible, financial losses, destroyed companies, the shock to Wall Street, the airlines, the failure of defense mechanisms -, blamed nobody except 19 perps, indistinct shadows conveniently dead. It was very much: nothing to see here, move along.
The steel was shipped away, the commemorations were hollow, tinny. Americans were told to go shopping. Court cases were quashed. Funerals were individual (except at Arlington) and were muted, little covered by the media. Compensation was paid by the Gvmt. itself (besides private insurance) as if they were guilty, or as if the event was ‘an act of God’, some exceptional natural catastrophe.
On the other hand, they hyped up the ‘terrorist’ threat, as continuing or ongoing, existing in the future (rather than explaining the past.) They used that threat to further an agenda that was pre-existing, laid down long ago. The invasion of Afgh. was all set, had been given the nod by the international community. Saddam had become an enemy, Iraq was being slowly destroyed by bombs and sanctions.
9/11 provoked nothing new, nothing different, nothing unpredictable. Wolfowitz, Rumselfd, Fukuyama, Kahlilzad, amongst others, signed the PNAC principles document in 1997. PNAC wrote to Clinton in 1998, urging the removal of Saddam.
Rumself was delighted; and certainly 9/11 served to promote patriotism and pull in grunts. But that is as far as it went; revenge was limited to muffled talk of capturing, or killing, one man in a cave, the poster terrorist, Binny. Even that action was not accomplished, and Bush at some point stated he didn’t care about Binny a whit. (Not in those words.) While many freepers out for blood and dead rag heads supported the Gvmt’s actions with tortured logic or wispy facts (Atta had met an Iraqi spy in Prague!), all of it turning their brains to mush, many all over the political spectrum thought that the targets were not the right ones and proceeded to point to their favorite enemies. In short, the Gvmt. did what it could; it created a sort of blanket enemy, without an identity or a material existence, lacking motives, plans, aims, fueled simply by ‘hate’, on the model of Palestinian suicide bombers who perforce have to be stripped of motive. A bit of something for everyone, a joker one can pull out anytime.
As a false flag op it was outlandish, even from a hyper neo-connish pov, more so from a US (some Gov faction) pov. Overkill underplayed – bombing a boat is always handy, and quite sufficient. Rummy and the Ghoul seemed to enjoy it for what it was, but there it stopped. Fire and brimstone, tears, canonization of the victims (badly treated on the whole) mobilization, the accusing finger pointing to the designated enemy – missing, all. Weak talk of ‘harboring terrorists’ of ‘terrorist states’ of ‘keeping America safe’ or ‘hunting down..’ I’m reminded of the lady on Faux News who can be heard saying “Oh My Goodness Another One” (2nd wtc attack), sounding like a very bored mom pretending excitement, talking to a toddler about bunny wabbits.
One smelt shame, confusion, guilt, coercion, discord, different factions in play. Cover it up, and put it out front. Overall, the attack did great harm to the US’ reputation which crashed worldwide – military power that can’t defend itself, no investigation, no proper response (legal, internationa, or military – NATO balked ..), nothing. Weak! Americans like to say that the reputation of the US has sunk because of ‘dumb wars’ (Obama) and the idiotic Bush but that came later, and it only took about 3 months after 9/11 for ppl in the rest of the world to conclude that the US either willfully destroyed lower Manhattan itself, or allowed others to do it without reacting. China laughed all the way to the bank, and with the replacement of the war on drugs with the war on terror, South America found some movement forward. Arab nations – too long to go into. Europe pandered. Putin who is smart in a limited way saw an opportunity (Chechnya, sp? and other places) but then revised, understanding that the US does not export its lies – purely opportunistic and hoards them. Which was a naive, and nasty, move on Putin’s part, not the first or the last.

Posted by: Tangerine | Jan 13 2008 16:47 utc | 21

@19,
there is a particular attitude by law enforcement in the USA towards Blacks thats very unsettling. For example, laws that allow judges little or no discretion are applied to a far greater degree on Blacks. It is exactly what it looks like — collective punishment.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Jan 13 2008 18:45 utc | 23

@ anna missed and jony_b_cool
When I wrote that last night I seemed much clearer about how I felt about the way the front line law enforcement seem to behave. I had been steaming on what I had seen for a few days. Not because of what was done by these policeman as much as the acceptance of it as normal by all involved.
I’m never sure of the effect of the camera in these sorts of things. Does a cops camera crew in the area make the police think they should put on a more polite and more legal than usual performance, or does the perception of COPS as being on their side mean that they all turn up lights flashing, sirens screeching more gung ho than usual?
If it’s the former the problem is huge. I mean I can’t handle the way that already oppressed people allow themselves to be filmed in these awful situations, or don’t they have the right to refuse. Whichever it is it makes the show and others of it’s ilk unwatchable for me.
anna missed pointed out the huge demographic changes that have occurred within amerika but that is the same in a lot of once white dominated societies. Yet (Sydney beach riots being the exception) we don’t see law enforcement behaving quite as wantonly.
For me it goes a bit deeper, the police here are struggling in a way they never used to when they solve crimes because they are no longer seen as policing their own society. NZ has taken to importing trained cops from england for gods sake, a plan caused by a ‘police shortage’ but it will come and bite the planners on the ass eventually. (NB Tantalus not because they are English but because they don’t come from and aren’t a part of the society they are meant to police).
The breakdowns in communications with their target community means that police become too reliant on cameras, bugs and random stops n searches, all of which are really labour intensive and exacerbate the ‘police shortage’.
I see that same disconnect between the amerikan police and their community but it appears to go deeper, revealed when the police interact with someone from a community that ought to be close to their own; an african-amerikan cop with african-amerikan citizens or whitefella cops with whitefella citizens. The police try hard, almost too hard to show the connection, but really it isn’t there. There is something else like they come from an alternate culture, a society which no one who isn’t an on duty policeman can belong to.
Maybe part of that is fear as anna missed wrote but there is something else, whether it be the military experience many amerikan cops have had, or maybe it’s the knowledge that they aren’t serving their community, they are serving something else, the rich or the corporations, call it what you will.
It would be an awful job being a policeman one that calls for people of a certain personality disorder as a partner of mine used to maintain, but I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want to take a situation of little or no significant lawbreaking and make it into a huge crisis with people hurt and under arrest for quite serious offences. Yet the police on that show seem to do exactly that nearly every time. Arrest a miscreant for a crime that has been reported by all means but why engage in what jony_b_cool accurately describes as a collective punishment of a community?
Black people get it bad but so do Latinos, Koreans, whitefellas, anyone; usually poor since that is the areas they stop people in, all get this deliberate affront to themselves as human beings in the hope they will react and create a situation to get arrested. The only alternative appears to be a yessir, nossir, step and fetchit act which not only forces a humiliating obeisance from citizens, it frequently doesn’t work. Once you’ve been stopped that’s it – you’re gone.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 13 2008 19:59 utc | 25

Sorry Debs, didn’t mean to pop up out of nowhere and chastise you for giving the bloody Anglo Saxons a hard time. I loathe the old school tie brigade.
In my direct experience, though, UK police are still more polite than the US lot, and marginally less paramilitary. I can’t stand the fact that US cops expect you to call them ‘sir’ – I’m incapable of doing it, and I fear it will get me into trouble one day.

Posted by: Tantalus | Jan 14 2008 1:32 utc | 27

‘Bout time to call on Joe Bageant for subject wise commentary as he channels Guy Debords Society of the Spectacle for us common folk:

All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind’s interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.

And yes the police are are players/victims just like the rest of us, with 180 KIA in 2007.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 14 2008 9:46 utc | 29

“And yes the police are are players/victims just like the rest of us,…”
Yeah, reminds me of the lincoln log ying/yang dualism of extremes in an dysfunctional addictive system where one does not exist without the other in the overall Sisyphean drama.
Both authority and would be outlaw sucked into a perpetual feedback loop, a non forgiving methodical insanity making system. Much like the events played out in Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment of human responses to captivity (powerlessness) and its behavioral effects on both authorities (control) and inmates. Where the bifurcation of roles draw each deeper into insanity.
The same abroad with Abu Ghraib…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 14 2008 10:31 utc | 31

UK discussed Italian coup to halt Communists

The British government considered backing a rightwing coup in Italy in 1976 to prevent the rising Italian Communist party from taking power, recently released documents have revealed.
Foreign Office planners wrote in May 1976 that “a clean surgical coup” to remove the Communists from power “would be attractive in many ways”, according to documents obtained from the British national archives and published yesterday by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
…
A Foreign Office memo in April had listed options for tackling the Communist ascendancy, ranging from financing rival parties to “subversive or military intervention against the Italian Communist party”.
Fears receded as the Christian Democrats finished 4% ahead of the Communists in the lower house of parliament.

Posted by: b | Jan 14 2008 11:50 utc | 33

b@33
it is yet another illustration of how elites ‘respect’ democracy. they are less than beasts. not much more than insects. vermin certainly

Posted by: Anonymous | Jan 14 2008 18:02 utc | 35

B @ 32
Some links for the KBR Camps:
New Programs
“Is the Pentagon building U.S.-based prison camps for Muslim immigrants? Evidence points to the possibility.”
Civilian Inmate Labor Program
Army Regulation 210-35 (PDF Manual)

Names on Terrorism List
Old WaPo article
Prison Planet article
Talk about the FEMA camps
Draft of a FEMA Bid Notice
Gulags For American Citizens In Final Planning Stages
Bit of yellow journalism but has good links to stories
A summary? There must be more journalism out there that a brief hunt will reveal, but I’ve not looked lately. Your keen eyesight about the camp at Guantanamo really snagged my attention. Looks like it is one of them.
Anybody that wants to continue investigation/collaboration of this topic is welcome to contact me. To some extent, I can “go forth” to investigate.

Posted by: Jake | Jan 14 2008 22:25 utc | 37

U$24:
The leasee of WTC at the time of the so-called fireproofing upgrade was the sole
beneficiary of double indemnity insurance coverage initiated before the 9/11 event,
Larry Silverstein, an Israeli-American dual-citizen, who made $10B profit from our blood taxes, ’cause it sure ain’t coming from the insurance underwriters!
http://www.911blogger.com/node/13272
The lease cost “him”, that is, Silverstein Group, $3.2B, the same amount that
US gifts to Israel every year, to be used for arms purchases to sell to Saudi,
thus aggrandizing their $3.2B into nearly twice that amount with commissions
and sales incentives, that undoubtedly feed back to Old White MAS’rs in the US.
The Clinton era must have really put a crimp in their arms sales and profits,
then Clinton’s Food for Oil raised Iraqi oil production back up to the point
where the Big Oil MAS’rs and Saudi Emirs were feeling the oversupply pinch.
The day before 9/11, oil traded thinly at a 20-year low of $12 a barrel.
Today, it’s 800% that amount, just 8 years later. Even Google isn’t that hot.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/fsheets/real_prices.html
What better way, what beautiful, easy to design plan that to divert, over the
course of the lease, some small profit portion of Israeli-Saudi arms sales
into Silverstein Group, laundering it, if you will, by leasing the WTC, and
getting the keys to the joint, access to the crawlspaces and security cams.
Nobody ever investigated this arrangement, or asked for the security tapes.
They would have been erased anyway, of Mossad demolition experts going in as
the fireproofing was removed, to wrap key columns with det cord and thermite.
Then the Israeli’s, who had already pioneered UAV fly-by-remote, and already
penetrated the Egyptian resistance with double-agents, needed only to build
a “Al Qaeda” of 19 poor slobs, no doubt slaves to some blood debt or bribe,
inflame them with grand ideas of martyrdom, get them on the planes and into
the cockpit, just before the planes went onto a new type of autopilot, the
same as the one being run by a military communications plane circling over
the Pentagon, just as it was hit by a warhead outfitted UAV plane itself.
You don’t turn agents lose without an iron-clad plan to liquidate them after.
Everything we saw that day could be bought off the mil.gov shelf, det cord,
kicker charges, UAV controls, thermite, warhead impact detonation system, all
from Cheney’s black ops operation he inherited from Pappa Bush, who at that
same moment was having oysters rockefeller with Osama bin Laden Sr, right in
downtown Manhattan, toasting with champagne a momentous new era of egregious,
never before in human history profits channeled to the biggest money laundering
operation in the world, the banking system of Dubai.
Diesel is $3.59 a gallon in our neck of the woods today.
When Bush took office and Silverstein took the WTC, diesel was $1.54.
tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/wohdp/diesel.asp
Profits have risen from less than 30% in 2000, to 240% just eight years later.
Like crude oil, up 800% in eight years. Big Oil can’t spend the money fast enough!
On the arms front, just the day before 9/11, Don Rumsfeld announced DoD couldn’t account for $1T, yet today, the DoD/DHS budget has reached $1T a year, down the rathole of GWOT, far more than 10x profit growth to US:UK defense contractors
and their Israeli sychophants, who routinely manage to lose bank bags of billion$.
100% profit growth-on-growth YOY. Mission Accomplished! (and on the cheap!)
What drove them? Just to show they could? The panache of doing it in plain view?
Their insider demand-and-supply intel that told them Y2K was make-or-break year, after which the oil supplies in US:UK control would decline, after which growth in
demand from CH:IN would crash the world economy, past their own demise to enjoy it.
“Who cares about history? I won’t be here.” George Bush
They did it because they could, and because the time was right, just like Ken Lay.
And now the entire population of the world, five and a half billion, gets to play
out that charade of pomp and circumstance, shackled slaves to Neo-Thebes, and the
unblinking, all-seeing golden-dead eyes of Mammon.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/Tut.gif
Slaves work harder! Soon biofuels and carbon credits will hit global food supplies!
After all, this is about starving the abo’s off the rez, for the whitey’s condos,
a metaphorical Israel:Palestine that US has become, rampant in gilded trilliums.
images.buycostumes.com/mgen/merchandiser/29014.jpg

Posted by: Toulouse Thirtyseven | Jan 15 2008 3:47 utc | 39

In a pointed reference to US President George Bush’s recent comments on the Middle East conflict in which he talked of Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, Barenboim added: “Now even not very intelligent people are saying that the occupation has to be stopped.”
Worth a smile

Posted by: biklett | Jan 15 2008 6:32 utc | 41

Audiotape purporting to be Shaker al-Absi – What was the message?

[To the Lebanese army]: “Nahr al-Bared camp will stand witness to your shame until the mujahideen tread your (bodies) with their shoes,” a speaker identified as Shaker al-Abssi said in a 58-minute audio recording posted on a Web site used by al Qaeda and other Islamist groups on Monday.
“This was only the beginning … By God you will not live safely,” he said. “The mill of war has started to grind … between the infidels and the believers.”

Make of it what you will.

Posted by: Bea | Jan 15 2008 13:48 utc | 43

Sorry, DanofSteele.
Some things are too funny to be true.

Posted by: Monolycus | Jan 15 2008 14:44 utc | 45

Here is a Useful Chronology of events in Lebanon leading up to today’s mysterious bombing of a US Embassy car in which the sole passenger walked away uninjured while 4 Lebanese bystanders were killed.

Posted by: Bea | Jan 15 2008 18:05 utc | 47

New Hampshire recount:

“Kucinich . . . said that he was calling for the count in the wake of questions about the disparities between results from hand-counted precincts and Diebold precincts. In hand-counted precincts Obama was reported as the winner, in Diebold precincts, Clinton came out on top.
“This recount isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them,” Kucinich said.

~ from the indefatigable BradBlog: Send Lawyers, Peace and Money
see also: New Hampshire: U.S. Elections Still in SNAFU Mode, by Bernard Weiner
_________________________________
on the latest gutter sniping aimed at Obama.

Posted by: manonfyre | Jan 15 2008 20:27 utc | 49

Bernhard # 32,
Cached news: U.S. Expands Plans for Post-Castro Refugee Camp at Guantanamo

October 19, 2007
The U.S. military has expanded plans for a tent encampment to shelter migrants in the event of a Caribbean boat crisis.
Since Fidel Castro became ill last year and ceded power in Cuba to his brother Raul, the Bush administration has been preparing for a theoretical humanitarian relief mission that would accommodate 10,000 people. It could be used for people fleeing a political crisis as well as a natural disaster.
In May, the Navy hired a Jacksonville, Fla., contractor to build concrete buildings with 525 toilets and 248 showers on an empty corner of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, base. The military could quickly put up tents, if needed, around the site. The buildings should be completed by next summer at a cost of $16.5 million.
Now, under the expansion outlined on Wednesday, the military is planning on paper for a second phase that would shelter another 35,000 migrants.
(snip)
Either way, several U.S. agencies are preparing provisional plans for a similar military interdiction mission based on the lessons learned in the 1990s crisis.
Those plans call for processing people captured at sea, first through the Department of Homeland Security to check for criminals, then through the International Organization for Migration, which assists in foreign resettlement and repatriation.
The base currently has a huge fenced compound that could serve as a small tent city for the first 400 people from any Caribbean country intercepted at sea. That operation would be run by Homeland Security, which already shelters up to about 40 asylum seekers on the base at a time.
Then, the U.S. military that now runs the prison camps for suspected al-Qaida terrorists and other captives would swing into action and build a tent camp – far from the detention and interrogation center that sits on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean on the 45-square-mile base.
Metal shipping containers with cots and tents for any potential first wave of rafters already have arrived.
(snip)

I fear this could be long term preparation for a move against Cuba.

Posted by: Alamet | Jan 15 2008 22:32 utc | 51

heh indeed. Shrub begs the Saudis to pump more oil; Saudi Oil Minister tells him to go Cheney himself.
guess the “American way of life” may be negotiable after all.

Posted by: ran | Jan 16 2008 5:30 utc | 53

On the Hormuz Strait incident, by Gareth Porter:
How the Pentagon Planted a False Story

(snip)
The source of this spate of stories can now be identified as Bryan Whitman, the top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, who gave a press briefing for Pentagon correspondents that morning. Although Whitman did offer a few remarks on the record, most of the Whitman briefing was off the record, meaning that he could not be cited as the source.
(snip)
On Jan. 9, the U.S. Navy released excerpts of a video of the incident in which a strange voice – one that was clearly very different from the voice of the Iranian officer who calls the U.S. ship in the Iranian video – appears to threaten the U.S. warships.
A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHF channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon’s Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was “a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command, and Navy leadership in the field.”
“Leadership here,” of course, refers to the secretary of defense and other top policymakers at the department. An official in the U.S. Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defense.
(snip)

Posted by: Alamet | Jan 16 2008 16:07 utc | 55

This alleged Republican party link to Al Qaeda deserves comment from informed observers barflies. It interests me not for the way it’s being merchandised, and still less for any sympathy to the views of the accused, but rather as another exemplar of repression of anyone in the proximity of effective pro-Islamic lobbying in the U.S. We may reasonably assume that the trial will involve secret evidence and the “state secret” privilege, both of which seem to have become normal U.S. Justice Department operating procedures in cases where a level playing field for the accused could lead to an undesired verdict. Indeed, a spirited and persistent defense might be able to adduce some very interesting exculpatory evidence by throwing light on the rise and early funding of Al Qaeda.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jan 17 2008 8:10 utc | 57

Tensions between Israel and Gaza are heating up. Seems as if both sides are doing their best to lurch themselves into open confrontation (ie, an Israeli invasion of Gaza).
Someone really ought to write a dissertation thesis that examines the timing of the heating up of Israeli-Palestinian military confrontations. My hypothesis is that most every time there is any chance for progress toward a more “peaceful” existence, “something” mysteriously happens to stoke up the fires of conflict and sabotage even the possibility. Funny how that just seems to happen with clockwork regularity. Not that there was any hope for any genuine change to emerge out of these “negotiations,” but still… someone might have been worried there could be. And that seems to be enough to trigger an escalatory series of actions that suffices to snuff talking out.

Posted by: Bea | Jan 17 2008 11:57 utc | 59

“Targeted assassination” goes awry in Gaza
More cause for revenge, retribution, calling off talks, etc etc.

Posted by: Bea | Jan 17 2008 13:12 utc | 61

Is this a hoax or something? It just doesn’t fit any of the (conflicting) mental images I have of them…
Al Qaeda’s Promotional Trinkets

Posted by: Alamet | Jan 17 2008 17:58 utc | 63

Long article, but worth the time:
Nir Rosen
Al Qaeda in Lebanon
(Found via Syria Comment.)

Posted by: Alamet | Jan 17 2008 20:43 utc | 65

Israel tests a missile in warning to Iran; Iran taunts Israel that it would never dare attack.

Israel Radio said the missile tested was capable of carrying an “unconventional payload” — an apparent reference to the nuclear warheads Israel is assumed to possess, though it has never publicly confirmed their existence.

Lovely.

Posted by: Bea | Jan 18 2008 0:34 utc | 67

Israel tests a missile in warning to Iran; Iran taunts Israel that it would never dare attack.

Israel Radio said the missile tested was capable of carrying an “unconventional payload” — an apparent reference to the nuclear warheads Israel is assumed to possess, though it has never publicly confirmed their existence.

Lovely.

Posted by: Bea | Jan 18 2008 0:41 utc | 69

More escalation in Gaza:
After killing some 20 people and wounding 50 on Weds, Israel killed another 9 on Thursday, including these:

Palestinian eyewitnesses affirmed that the mother and her two sons were riding on a horse-driven cart in one of the city’s streets when an Israeli drone targeted them with an air-to surface missile, mutilating their bodies to the extent that it took doctors sometimes before they could identify them.

An Israeli missile strike destroyed the Hamas Interior Ministry building in Gaza.
For its part, Hamas escalated, firing some 40 rockets into Israel on Thursday. According to Haaretz:

…Palestinian sources predicted that Hamas would continue the rocket barrages, in an attempt to force Israel to agree to a cease-fire. Hamas, they said, believes that its previous, lower level of rocket and mortar fire allowed the IDF to operate freely in Gaza without Israel paying a serious price.
Moreover, Hamas believes that Israel wants to avoid a major ground operation in Gaza, and therefore, it will have no choice but to call a truce if heavy rocket fire on southern Israel continues.

Last but not least of the developments, Israel closed the little remaining border access into Gaza that had been allowed, barring all food and humanitarian aid from entering. Normally these days about 120 aid trucks enter Gaza each day — a mere pittance compared with the need, but probably a lifeline to many.

Posted by: Bea | Jan 18 2008 14:44 utc | 71

I am sure there is nothing here but the best of intentions…
Top US envoy for Africa meets Somaliland leader

The top US diplomat for Africa has met with the president of Somaliland, but the talks do not mean Washington is ready to recognize the breakaway region of Somalia, US officials said Thursday.
US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer had lunch with Somaliland president Dahir Riyale Kahin at the State Department on Monday, a US diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack stressed that the meeting did not imply US recognition of the northwestern coast region, which split from Somalia in 1991.
“There’s no change in our policy position vis-a-vis recognition of Somaliland. We are not on the verge of recognizing Somaliland,” McCormack told reporters.
(snip)
The Washington Post reported last month that US officials were debating whether to shift US support from the fragile Somali government to the less volatile region of Somaliland.
But State Department officials oppose such a move, putting them at odds with Defense Department officials who say that forging ties with Somaliland could help bring stability to the region, the Post said.
(snip)

Posted by: Alamet | Jan 18 2008 17:52 utc | 73

@ Alamet #74
So is he throwing in the towel on his Jerusalem posting, or will this be a sidekick engagement?

Posted by: Bea | Jan 18 2008 18:44 utc | 75