Prepare for the Overlords!

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Sunday, May 30, 2004

The Smirking Chimp: "An Afghan military official contradicted the Army investigation and told the Associated Press that Tillman died because of a mix-up between two groups of coalition soldiers, composed of both Americans and Afghanis. The official said the two groups became separated and began firing wildly in the confusion following a land mine explosion.

'It was a misunderstanding and afterwards they realized that it was a mine that had exploded and there were no enemy forces,' the Afghan official said.

Unfortunately, 'misunderstandings' don't sound nearly as gallant as 'crested hills' and 'well-armed enemies.' It seems we treat our war heroes just like everything else these days: We want them pre-packaged and artificially augmented.

If you die by accident that doesn't make your sacrifice any less significant.

Just a lot less marketable"

Friday, May 28, 2004

Tet 2004? - The Washington Times: Commentary - May 28, 2004: " This series of occurrences (along with others) collectively paint a scenario eerily similar to that presented LBJ a generation and a half ago. We should be thankful George W. Bush does not appear to have become immobilized by self-doubt and uncertainty as did his Johnson in 1968 (if anything, Mr. Bush may possess a tad too much self-righteousness).
However, the president's recent speech to the Army War College was far too thin on specifics, and far too vague a road map, with which to put to rest the country's doubts about our post-'mission accomplished' strategy. Those doubts, now surfacing with increased frequency and boldness, can eat away at a presidency as surely today as they did 36 years ago.

Bob Barr, a former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, is a columnist for United Press International.
"

Thursday, May 27, 2004

The Cost of Doing Business - Fraysters calculate the value of a Slate contributor's life. Compiled by Kevin�Arnovitz: "A study that determines that people are more afraid of flying than driving does not prove that flying is more dangerous than driving. Humans operate off of perceptions, not necessarily truth"
The Blogging of the President: 2004: "We must face the facts, the cold, hard facts. We illegally invaded another nation, engaging in war crimes to do so, in that we lied to the UN as to the causes for war. We did so without pressing necessity to invade - or to lie at all, since our target was an individual who could have been legally indicted for war crimes by merely stretching forth our hand. We invaded solely because of the electoral time table of George W Bush Jr, and for no other reason. This is worse that a crime, it is worse than a mistake, it is a blot against that most precious object of a free people - our willingness to comply with our own laws"

Our leaders, if we were a defeated nation, would be sent to the Hague or some other tribunal for War Crimes prosecution. That we will not do this insures that our enemies, fortified by the clear bankruptcy of our laws, and our clear willingness to flagrantly break them when it is to our own advantage, and the complete and utter lack of accountability for those that break them, and those who enable breaking them - will strike, with devastating force, at the centers of our commerce and population. The will, rightly, point to the devastation of Baghdad as their reason for attack.

The American public must face this reality, and it must face that the cost of this reality is that it must punish its own criminals, not to the satisfaction of Rupert Murdoch or Grover Norquist, but to the satisfaction of those that they have injured

Yahoo! News Message Boards Top Stories: "Right wing prays for a terrorist attack
by: cat00012000 05/27/04 03:16 pm
Msg: 25 of 25

Fear is their only ally "

Osama and Fox: right wing extremists
by: cat00012000 05/27/04 03:26 pm
Msg: 29 of 29

Do these guys kind of deserve each other?

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

A Foreign Policy, Falling Apart (washingtonpost.com): "Contrary to the Bush administration's stated and implied promises -- 'we will be greeted as liberators' was the vice president's famous version -- we did not achieve a relatively low-cost triumph in Iraq. Instead we have a crisis of still-growing dimensions. Our occupation policy has changed as often as the color of Madonna's hair. Ominously, as became clear with last week's assassination of Iraqi Governing Council president Izzedin Salim, we cannot even protect the Iraqis who have agreed to work with us.
The war has damaged the good name of the United States in every corner of the globe, has cost unanticipated scores of billions (all of it borrowed) and now threatens long-term damage to our Army and National Guard. War has already disfigured the 3,500 American families whose sons and daughters have been killed or seriously wounded in Iraq, and countless Iraqi families as well.
The United States gets itself into this kind of trouble when it turns away from that most fundamental of American values, pragmatism. The Bush administration's initial reaction to the first attacks on U.S. soil since the War of 1812 was highly pragmatic. It identified the source of the attack and went after it forcefully, with the country's and the world's enthus"

Richard M. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. His vanity and that of his principal aide, Henry A. Kissinger, prevented an early end to the war. They insisted on a "decent interval" before acknowledging defeat in Vietnam. It took seven more years, and tens of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives, to bring the war to an end.

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

: "Back in August 2002, Newsweek hawk Fareed Zakaria argued: 'Done right, an invasion would be the single best path to reform the Arab world. Were Saddam's totalitarian regime to be replaced by a state that respected human rights, enforced the rule of law and created a market economy, it could begin to transform that world.' And if done right, tax cuts could have stimulated the economy. But Bush hadn't done anything right when Zakaria wrote that. The Administration's brazenly dishonest and inept post-9/11 record--not the right's fictional knee-jerk 'Bush-bashing'--is why half the country never trusted his blandishments about WMDs, the fictional Saddam-Osama link, or nation-building.
Ah, but the new and improved Zakaria finally gets it: 'On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.'
We're supposed to be grateful that Zakaria and his fellow war pimps are--finally!--recognizing reality. At least they're better than Bush, who still thinks torture can convert the Iraqis to democracy: 'I won't yield,' he said May 13. But these prominent pundits too have blood on their hands"
TAPPED: "The Republican party is now committed to chronic fiscal irresponsibility, the micro-managing of people's private lives, the subjugation of political to religious discourse, and the politicization of the Constitution. In so many ways, it is an insult to the word 'conservative.'"
Yahoo! News Message Boards Politics News: "No divine rights for the rich
by: cat00012000 05/19/04 06:33 pm
Msg: 2124 of 2124

We got rid of the monarchy. Now we need strip the upper crust of their power. "
New Scientist: "they found that the Universe's expansion began to accelerate about 6 billion years ago.
This agrees with the supernova and microwave measurements. All three methods imply that about 75 per cent of the energy in the Universe is in this repulsive form. 'It gives us much more confidence that dark energy is real,' says Allen.



Subscribe to New Scientist for more news and features

Related Stories

Biggest map of Universe clinches dark energy
28 October 2003

Astronomers claim dark matter breakthrough
1 October 2003

Big Bang afterglow reveals dark energy's repulsion
22 July 2003


For more related stories
search the print edition Archive



Weblinks

Chandra X-ray Observatory

X-ray Astronomy, Cambridge

Dark energy, NASA





Empty space

But what actually is dark energy? The new measurements are consistent with a kind of dark energy that is not changing very much with time. That could be an energy inherent to empty space, Einstein's 'cosmological constant'.
But the constraints are not tight, leaving numerous alternatives. These include a kind of weakening dark energy field called quintessence. Another option is a kind of energy that is getting more intense, which could eventually become so powerful that it tears everything apart, even atoms."
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 16, 2004 - May 22, 2004 Archives: "But for now it's salutary for the Democrats to have President Bush the focus -- near exclusively -- of attention. There is, I think, a coalescing sense that President Bush is a failed president -- that key and grave decisions he has made have been the wrong ones and that his leadership and management have been deeply flawed on many fronts. The public mind -- though in a sense a fiction to describe the individial cogitation of three hundred million individuals -- is a powerful reality. And if we look into the 'internals' in these recent polls I think we can see it turning against the president"

The Iraqi people, even my 150 staff think the Americans are essentially not welcome anymore. They fear for their security but would rather go through a cataclysm with a new Iraqi police and army as their security force, rather than be occupied by the Americans. Then they could work through the system and know that their security was in their hands ... Trust me I am training 40 Iraqi bodyguards and the demand is getting serious. Listen Josh, EVERYONE outside of the Green Zone, Iraqis Westerners and Americans alike refer to the CPA and the US Army as "The AMERICANS" as if they were a third-party nation.

No one sees them as part of the solution anymore but as a foreign entity that does as it likes and pisses everybody off in the process. The thinking in the usually suspicious Iraqi mind is that this is still being staged to seize control of their oil... Well that's been done but now they think the domestic troubles like the bad electricity (3 hours on, three hours off) the major Dysentery outbreak in the tap water this week (all of us have been ill due to our cooks washing with tap water) and the inability to drive down the street without having a Hummvee point rifles at you (or worse yet explode next to you) is punishment or, more accurately, incompetence.

Abu Ghuraib was always part of their belief that the Bush Administration would "do anything" to defeat the Baathists. One guy said "you hired the Baathist Intelligence back and now you are doing as they are doing." Well that's not exactly true. We're more open about it. But as long as we are seen as occupiers we will never earn the trust of the Iraqi people. Turning over in a month to a new set of lackeys (here they call them Lougies ... Iraqi Arabic for "fawning Brown-noser") and asking them to invite us to stay and continue our ways is absolutely laughed at.

Locked in Abu Ghraib - The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration. By Fred�Kaplan: "The knives are out all over Washington�lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away"

Monday, May 17, 2004

Guardian | A new American dream: "In 2001, the main reason the New York and Washington attacks produced so traumatic an effect in the US was that they defied the notion of America as the morally righteous fulfilment of history. Americans were abruptly made to see themselves as victims of what they interpreted as the hate and envy of people who obstinately refused to acknowledge (as George Bush angrily complained) 'how good we are'.
Americans were under attack by enemies who not only were multiple and elusive, malevolent and inventive, but who asserted their own outrageous claim to moral superiority over Americans, as well as a divine mandate of their own. The war on terror, with its adjunct war in Iraq, was meant to reconfirm this pre-eminence. Both, of course, have done the opposite. They have demonstrated the inability of badly overextended military power even to impose stability on the two countries in the developing world which the US has invaded.
The prospect of stabilising and reforming what Washington now calls the 'Greater Middle East' seems slight, to put it politely. Terror has multiplied, rather than been disarmed. Now an American moral disaster has been revealed, composed of torture, secret prisons and international illegality. No one in Washington anticipated this. Certainly not the neo-conservatives, the most aggressive promoters of a 'righteous' imperialism, who drove the march to war in Iraq. They have dropped from sight. "
TheStar.com - Insult-happy Web guns fall quiet: "Other members of the neocon blogging pantheon include Glenn Reynolds (http://www.instapundit.com), James Lileks (http://www.lileks.com) and Andrew Sullivan (http://www.andrewsullivan.com) � at least until Sullivan felt the anti-gay wrath and hatred of the Bush regime.
Probably the most venomous of all is Charles Johnson. His site (http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com) is the toilet in which all sorts of misinformation and malice about Arabs and, in particular, Palestinians are dumped. Anybody who writes favourably � or even in a half-balanced manner � about them is slimed"
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Tyranny of the Minorities: "'A zealous, religious and messianic minority already led the people of Israel to the destruction of the Second Commonwealth 2,000 years ago. Now the struggle is over the Third Commonwealth.' "
Yahoo! News Message Boards Entertainment News: "We just needed to strike backafter 9/11
by: cat00012000 05/17/04 05:30 pm
Msg: 3606 of 3607

It's sad but true. We had a little boy president and vice president. They had their own group, the program fora new american century. We asked for it, and boy did we get it."

Iraq will look like Iran soon
by: cat00012000 05/17/04 05:39 pm
Msg: 1435 of 1435

One year, five years, it's just a matter of time
Yahoo! News Message Boards Top Stories: "When you're as poor as the palistinians elections are a luxury, but Israel wouldn't be interested in helping out. They'd rather blow up people's homes. It makes them about the most repulsive nation on earth. "

87558 We send money to these people
cat00012000 2 05/17/04 04:24 pm
87557 Did the Nazis treat the Jews this bad?

Blow up a house make a friend
by: cat00012000 05/17/04 04:56 pm
Msg: 87590 of 87590

Can you imagine the day Israelis and palistinians get along?
Yahoo! News Message Boards Top Stories: "When you're as poor as the palistinians elections are a luxury, but Israel wouldn't be interested in helping out. They'd rather blow up people's homes. It makes them about the most repulsive nation on earth. "

87558 We send money to these people
cat00012000 2 05/17/04 04:24 pm
87557 Did the Nazis treat the Jews this bad?

Blow up a house make a friend
by: cat00012000 05/17/04 04:56 pm
Msg: 87590 of 87590

Can you imagine the day Israelis and palistinians get along?

Thursday, May 13, 2004

War Management Follows the Wrong Corporate Model (washingtonpost.com): "Such generalizations are dangerous. But over the years I've noticed that companies that get into trouble, or lose their edge, have many of the same characteristics at the top: an overemphasis on hierarchy and orderliness; a penchant for secrecy and keeping decisions closely held; an instinct to discount information or dismiss views that don't comport with the company line; a habit of pronouncing rather than engaging intellectually with those outside the inner circle; an unhealthy arrogance and sense of entitlement.
When something goes wrong, the all-too-typical corporate response is to downplay its importance or bury it in bureaucratic processes. And if that doesn't work, the next line of defense is to pin it all on a few 'bad apples' and move aggressively to 'put the issue behind us,' without ever really admitting serious error.
That should sound familiar to anyone who has watched Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Snow on C-SPAN, or read Paul O'Neill's account of his ill-fated attempts to warn of the budgetary fallout from a second tax cut, or heard what Richard Clarke told the 9/11 commission about warnings of terrorist attacks that fell on deaf ears. It also describes to a T the process by which the administration has dealt with Iraq, from the original decision to go to war to the handling of the prison scandal.
Here's a little test: You are president of the United States and revelations about abuse of Iraqi prisoners has created the biggest crisis since Sept. 11, inflaming the Arab world, undercutting support at home and undermining our moral authority in the world. How do you spend the weekend?
If you answered 'spend it at Camp David as planned, then drop in at the Pentagon on Monday to praise the defen"
Yahoo! News Message Boards Top Stories: "Puke on Bush and Rummy...
by: foo_fighter007 05/13/04 07:22 pm
Msg: 5766 of 5777

thats what I feel like doing every time I see them"

Has a President been more despised?
by: cat00012000 05/13/04 07:27 pm
Msg: 5899 of 5899

I doubt it

WHO SENT AMERICANS TO IRAQ?
by: willneverforget00 05/13/04 07:28 pm
Msg: 5926 of 5987
1 recommendation

Who made up a lie and sent Americans to Iraq to be killed and beheaded for those lies?

What is the name of the guy that did that?

700+ U.S. Servicemen killed for nothing
by: yabutte (48/M/Issaquah, WA) 05/13/04 07:28 pm
Msg: 5956 of 6056
4 recommendations

Other than to satisfy the ego of Bush and profits for Halliburton.
This is insanity and an affront to the civility of our great country.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Just Trust Us: "Mr. Bush, despite all his talk of good and evil, doesn't believe in that system. From the day his administration took office, its slogan has been 'just trust us.' No administration since Nixon has been so insistent that it has the right to operate without oversight or accountability, and no administration since Nixon has shown itself to be so little deserving of that trust. Out of a misplaced sense of patriotism, Congress has deferred to the administration's demands. Sooner or later, a moral catastrophe was inevitable.
Just trust us, John Ashcroft said, as he demanded that Congress pass the Patriot Act, no questions asked. After two and a half years, during which he arrested and secretly detained more than a thousand people, Mr. Ashcroft has yet to convict any actual terrorists. (Look at the actual trials of what Dahlia Lithwick of Slate calls 'disaffected bozos who watch cheesy training videos,' and you'll see what I mean.)"
NEWS.com.au | Top brass 'picked man who ordered torture' (May 10, 2004): "The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, sent General Miller from Cuba to Baghdad in August last year to suggest changes to prisoner interrogations"
Yahoo! News Message Boards World News: "Hasn't this been a great four years?
by: cat00012000 05/11/04 03:55 pm
Msg: 9009 of 9009

Hate is such a traditional value "

Religious Extremists are Liberals?
by: cat00012000 05/11/04 03:59 pm
Msg: 9146 of 9146

The last time I checked Conservatives kind of held the corner on religious extremism.


Islamic militants want to run their own
by: cat00012000 05/11/04 04:05 pm
Msg: 9264 of 9266

country
Yahoo! News Message Boards World News: "Thank Rumsfeld for our reputation
by: cat00012000 05/11/04 03:51 pm
Msg: 8913 of 8913

The world considers us to be right wing nazi trash. It makes me wonder how wrong they are"
Yahoo! News Message Boards World News: "A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site showed the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq, and said the execution was carried out by an al-Qaida affiliated group to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.

Rumsfeld said the Geneva accords didn't
by: cat00012000 05/11/04 03:44 pm
Msg: 8644 of 8644

apply"

Sunday, May 09, 2004

The New York Times: Thomas L. Friedman (Forum/Message Board): "infomaniac8 - May 9, 2004

Jew vrs Arab, Rich and Poor, Man against machine

Did you ever notice that there is always a problem? Yeah, We're going to fix this one, but there is going to be another one that grows directly out of this one. Get a grip! We've got the money. They've got the oil. This problem will end. A new one will grow out of it. Get used to it. Accept it. Revel in it. This is what life is all about. "
Warblogger Watch: "NEW YORK--Now it's official: American troops occupying Iraq have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America's victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers."

Friday, May 07, 2004

Democrat says Bush war doomed - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics - May 07, 2004: "the way President Bush is pursuing the war in Iraq makes it 'unwinnable,' drawing a stern rebuke from Republicans who said Democrats essentially declared victory for terrorists"

Saturday, May 01, 2004

Yahoo! News Message Boards World News: "Yahoo! News - Message Boards Search News StoriesNews PhotosAudio/VideoFull CoverageThe New York TimesAll of Yahoo! Advanced



Iraqis Hail Falluja 'Victory' as U.S. Changes Tack - 05-01-2004
Soldiers of the old Iraqi army led by one of Saddam Hussein's generals patrolled Falluja on Saturday, a year after George W. Bush declared 'mission accomplished' in ousting the Iraqi regime.



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WHAT HAS THIS WHOLE YEAR BEEN ABOUT
by: fool_me_1ns 05/01/04 04:53 pm
Msg: 99416 of 99452
3 recommendations

anyway? What the hell were we there for if not for the oil? We haven't freed the Iraqi's, we have just replaced one terrible torturing dictator with the coalition on the killing. And now we are putting Saddam's Generals back in place.
Why did people die for this? "

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eureka, California, United States
As Popeye once said,"I ams what I am." But then again maybe I'm not