Tuesday, September 24, 2002
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BUSH EAGER TO START WAR TO PRESERVE PEACE
---Logic typical of undergrowth---
We have to strike first if we want to keep putting food on our families, opines shrubbery...
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Thursday, September 12, 2002
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
TALK ABOUT CONSERVATIVE!!!
Revealing excerpt from Newsweek, in the words of Nelson Mandela, no less:
...But people like Dick Cheney�c I see yesterday there was an article that said he is the real president of the United States of America, I don�ft know how true that is. Dick Cheney, [Defense secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, they are people who are unfortunately misleading the president. Because my impression of the president is that this is a man with whom you can do business. But it is the men around him who are dinosaurs, who do not want him to belong to the modern age. The only man, the only person who wants to help Bush move to the modern era is Gen. Colin Powell, the secretary of State.
I gather you are particularly concerned about Vice President Cheney?
Well, there is no doubt. He opposed the decision to release me from prison (laughs). The majority of the U.S. Congress was in favor of my release, and he opposed it. But it�fs not because of that. Quite clearly we are dealing with an arch-conservative in Dick Cheney.
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002
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Chicken Hawks Rule!!
An interesting snippet from Jim Lobe's revelatory article on Alternet
...At the moment, the vast majority of the men pushing for war in Washington are what The New Hampshire Gazette defines as "Chicken Hawks": "public persons -- generally male -- who (1) tend to advocate military solutions to political problems, and who have personally (2) declined to take advantage of significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime."
That "significant opportunity" for most of Bush's war party faced was, of course, the Vietnam War. Dubya famously avoided the draft by getting a posting with the Texas National Guard, the kind of dodge that Powell referred to in his memoirs as being reserved for "the sons of the powerful." Cheney, however, avoided the uniform altogether, mumbling to one reporter that he "had other priorities in the Sixties than military service." Rumsfeld, the other leading Cabinet hawk, flew jets for the Navy between the Korean and Vietnam wars but never saw combat...
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Cheney, hiding in a secret location for 9/11, never saw a weapons system he didn't like. What he's up to is quite clear from here.
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Thursday, September 05, 2002
Another munchie:
Fuel For the Anti-Bush Fire
By John Passacantando, AlterNet
"And George W. Bush has put a face to all that we find wrong: Political corruption. Corrupt influence from big business. A deaf ear to science. Deaf to the will of the people. The only thing green that matters is the buck.
Trust me on this, the center cannot hold. You cannot treat nature this way without it snapping back, and you cannot treat a democratic populace this way without it snapping back. The anger I am finding out there toward Bush -- from rank-and-file environmentalists, but also from firemen, cops, those coveted soccer moms, surfers, cabbies, anarchists and Republicans -- is unlike anything we have seen in modern times. You have to go back to the dark days of Richard Nixon to find such widespread fury toward a U.S. leader.
And yet compared to our sitting president, Nixon was a smarter and more agile politician who gave the people what they wanted: an end to the Vietnam war, once he politically had no alternative, and good environmental laws, once he saw the mandate from the people. Instead, Bush is out in front running the agenda of the dirtiest and most corrupt corporations in America, full speed ahead. I think the day is not far off when the inner circle of puppeteers working around Bush will envy the problems that Nixon had once his Watergate Plumbers got caught.
So, I will tip my hat to Bush's success so far. He has bested all of us who care about the environment. But I will also toast his rocky future and the eventual victory of the environmentalists. For Bush is a leader without a base, without a following, with only the dirty campaign contributions of America's most retrograde companies to his name."
John Passacantando is executive director of Greenpeace USA.
See full article here
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A little thought food for malnourished righties, from Project Censored at Alternet.org
#4. Bush Administration Ordered FBI Off Bin Laden Trail
Shielding the Saudi royal family and their friends from bad press is a veritable presidential tradition, as Greg Palast learned when he launched an investigation into why the FBI took its agents off the trail of bin Laden family members residing in the U.S. Drawing on information he uncovered in classified FBI documents, Palast reported that bin Laden's brother, Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in Washington, was a suspect in terrorist activities as long ago as 1996 but high-up intelligence officials pressured the FBI to discontinue its surveillance. "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis," an intelligence source told Palast, who broke the story just two months after 9/11. Those restrictions were tightened considerably when George W. Bush took office.
Both the Bush and the bin Laden families have significant holdings in the Carlyle Group, the enormous private investment firm that has grown bloated off U.S. defense contracts. It seems as if the U.S. government is more in the business of protecting the Saudis and its own oil interests than of finding the perpetrators of 9/11. Change is in the wind, however; recent public opinion polls show that Americans are growing increasingly disenchanted with Saudi policy -- and perhaps, by extension, Bush's financial ties to the royal family.
Sources: Greg Palast and David Pallister, The Guardian, Nov. 7, 2001; Rashmee Z. Ahmed, Times of India, Nov. 8, 2001; Amanda Luker, Pulse, Jan. 16, 2002.
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Tuesday, August 27, 2002
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GREEDMAG GIVES REASONS FOR LIVING/NOT LIVING
"Faceoff: Who's Younger? Who's Richer?
Ah, to be young AND rich. What could be better? Maybe to be younger and richer. With FORTUNE's annual 40 under 40 list launching Sept. 3, see how much you know about this year's contenders. For each of the following 8 pairs of celebrities, select who you think is younger and who's richer. Then see how well you score."
-----FORTUNE magazine, working hard to find readers who know less about what just happened.
Thus the fawning babble from Fortune magazine, whose raison d'etre is the shallowest and emptiest of all things and ambitions: money. Is it clear to you what GARBAGE this is? Perhaps not if you're under 40, getting your ass kissed by the fawning greedmag scrambling for the loss-inexperienced "youth market." Here in the nuttiest of nutshells is the core problem with America today: the profit-grubbing concept that youth and money are the epitome of endeavor and worthiness. One would think we were just getting over that for the nth time. Add a dash of 'celebrity' (ridiculous concept) and you have a DISASTROUS teaching, by the basest of teachers. To any intelligently experienced mind (i.e., elder), such rubrics are utter nonsense, and will lead inevitably to great disappointment at the individual level and disaster at the societal level. To teach that youth is the worthiest part of life (and by inference that aging = loss) and that money is the worthiest objective (and that its lack = unworthiness) is to betray very basic principles, and enable a very few to make a FORTUNE (most often the rather thick offspring of those who have already made insider fortunes, like America's current corporate-tool president and his puppeteers). Fight back. Age with natural confidence and sever your pleasures from pieces of paper with dead people's pictures on them; find the true fortune.
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