the deskrat chronicles

Indefinite Detention: The NDAA and the Enemy Expatriation Act

2012-01-15T23:19:00.000-08:00

Fallujah babies: Under a new kind of siege - Features - Al Jazeera English

2012-01-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

Fallujah babies: Under a new kind of siege - Features - Al Jazeera English

Iran & USA war by Craig Roberts, reasons why US wants war.

2012-01-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

James Brown "Aint It Funky"

2011-12-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

What you don't know about Gaddafi

2011-12-28T15:38:00.000-08:00

INSIDE SECRETS OF THE WHITE MAN- How to rule the world - Everybody HasTo Be Involved In Project Africa.

2011-12-28T12:07:00.000-08:00

INSIDE SECRETS OF THE WHITE MAN- How to rule the world - Everybody HasTo Be Involved In Project Africa.

Bush's Grandfather Led Nazi Coup Against White House in 1933

2011-11-23T09:37:00.000-08:00

Toots Thielemans feat. Djavan - Obi (The Brasil Project 1)

2011-11-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

The Assassination of Gaddafi

2011-11-09T20:14:00.001-08:00

Us drones and french planes specifically seeking gaddafi, bombed the vehicle convoy he was escaping in. british sas special forces on the ground in sirte led rebels to the wounded gaddafi to be executed.

*note that nato was directly involved in the targeting and assassination of gaddafi and his son mutassim in sirte. in late august /early september nato targeted,bombed and incinerated in his bullet proofed land rover suv gaddafi son kamis--leader of libyan special forces group the 'kamis brigade'. and earlier in last summer nato targeted and bombed the home of gaddafi's youngest son saif al arab, killing him and three young gaddafi grand children --all in an attempt to assassinate muammar gaddafi --who only escaped death at that time because he was reportedly out in the backyard feeding the gazelles kept as pets there at his son's home. in the 1980s president reagan killed gaddafi's two year old adopted daughter hanna and dozens of other libyans in an assassination attempt by bombing the libyan presidential compound at bab al aziz in response to a terrorist bombing of a german disco which killed Us service people--a terrorist bombing in germany that was blamed on gaddafi, but in actuality carried out by israeli mossad and dupes at cia. the airline bombing at lockerbie, scotland--blamed on gaddafi was yet another frame job by cia --who controlled the crash site for 24 hours after the plane went down refusing entry to local authorities--in their own country.

Stephane Grappelli & Michel Petrucciani - Flamingo 1996

2011-11-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

Donald Byrd Lansana's Priestess1973

2011-11-02T23:29:00.000-07:00

kickstarter.com

2011-09-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

India's First Large Scale Solar Power Plants

2011-09-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

Site India
Sector Solar power
Challenge Advance India’s goal of generating more power from renewable sources and bring power to rural areas located outside the existing electricity grid.
Solution An initial loan of $6.2 million to Azure Power to construct a 2-megawatt solar power plant in Punjab. Additional loans for the construction of two other plants have followed.
Impact More power generating capacity brought to rural India; carbon emissions reduced; jobs and development spurred.

Despite the rapid growth and development India has seen in recent years, close to half the country’s population lives in rural villages that are “off the grid” and have no access to electricity. But all of India’s residents, urban and rural alike, have access to hours of sunshine every day. In an effort to make the most of that sunshine, the country has identified the development of the solar power sector as a critical priority and has adopted policies targeting sustainable growth in solar.

In 2009, India was producing about 9% of its energy from renewable sources, and most of that was from wind or hydropower. There were multiple solar plants in the country, but all were small demonstration projects that had been built by the government and did not feed into the national utility grid or operate at peak efficiency.

In 2009, Azure Power obtained a $6.2 million loan from OPIC to build India’s largest solar power plant at that time, a 2-megawatt plant in the state of Punjab, becoming the first independent power producer in the country. Azure, a solar power developer with offices across India and California, is headed by Inderpreet Wadhwa, a native of India, and an American citizen who spent 10 years working in the U.S. software industry before forming Azure Power in 2007. Wadhwa’s vision was to take full advantage of the country’s renewable resources and he saw distributed solar, in which power was generated close to the end user, as the key to bringing power to remote regions and improving the overall livelihood of these communities.

The Punjab plant was completed in 10 months in 2009. Comprised of 7560 solar panels, it provides enough power for 20,000 people in 4,000 rural homes spread across 32 small villages in Punjab.

As Azure Power was able to demonstrate with this power plant, solar technology is not excessively complicated, and it does not become more complicated with scale. With sufficient financial backing, significant expansion was possible. In 2010, Azure Power obtained another loan from OPIC for $26.8 million for construction of a second, 10-megawatt solar facility in the Indian state of Gujarat. In 2011, OPIC approved a loan of about $13 million for the construction of a 5-megawatt solar plant in the state of Rajasthan.

To date the Azure Power projects have created 100 permanent jobs in India, together with about 200 temporary construction positions, and about 15 jobs in the U.S. More than $30 million of exports of equipment and engineering services from the U.S. are expected.

Azure expects to increase its total capacity from 7 megawatts today to 12 megawatts by November 2011 and is targeting a total capacity of 100 megawatts in the next three years, as it builds several more power plants around the country.

By supporting Azure Power’s early expansion and helping it demonstrate the success of its business model, OPIC also helped Azure Power attract other investors supporting the clean technology sector in India.

NATO’s War on Libya is an Attack on African Development » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

2011-09-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

NATO’s War on Libya is an Attack on African Development » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Jane Monheit So Many Stars

2011-09-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

Skylark - Lionel Loueke

2011-08-03T16:53:00.000-07:00

Hiroshima After the Rain

2011-08-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

Carnival - Regina Carter 2002.

2011-08-01T22:36:00.000-07:00

Syreeta Wright - Spinnin' and Spinnin' (Video)

2011-07-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

Aint no need to worry 2 - Anita Baker and Bebe Winans.wmv

2011-07-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

Biggest Part Of Me - Take 6

2011-07-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

Cannonball Adderley - Dancing In The Dark

2011-07-20T17:49:00.000-07:00

Pavane by Regina Carter

2011-07-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Summer Madness Live - Kool & the Gang

2011-07-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

Kool & The Gang - Wild and Peaceful (Live)

2011-07-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers - I Remember Clifford (live '58)

2011-07-10T22:23:00.000-07:00

Lee Morgan "You Go To My Head"

2011-07-10T21:45:00.000-07:00

Lee Morgan Quintet - Ceora

2011-07-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

'Arab Spring false flag from start, Libya ultimate goal all along'

2011-07-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

Earth Wind & Fire - I'd Rather Have You

2011-07-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

Leroy Hutson - So In Love With You

2011-07-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

EYEWITNESS: Libya Tour in Harlem, USA

2011-07-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

RT Exposes LIBYA Conflict as an ILLUSION & FRAUD (1-2) Best of RT War Ti...

2011-07-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

RT Exposes LIBYA Conflict as an ILLUSION & FRAUD (2-2) Best of RT War Ti...

2011-07-01T17:27:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson - One More Chance - High Quality (Official Music Video)

2011-06-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

Land Destroyer: Color Revolution's Mystery Gunmen

2011-06-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

Land Destroyer: Color Revolution's Mystery Gunmen: "Cui Bono? by Tony Cartalucci Bangkok, Thailand April 24, 2011 - Imagine you are an embattled regime fighting against a rising tide of for..."

INFOWARS EXCLUSIVE: Military Sources Reveal Ground Force Invasion of Libya

2011-06-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

Saving the world economy from Gaddafi - Gold Dinar

2011-06-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

'Libyan gold was globalist game all along'

2011-06-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

'Summer of War' by NATO: 90 more days of Libya bombing

2011-06-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

Cynthia McKinny - Libya is Being Destroyed 1/2

2011-05-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

Cynthia McKinny - Libya is Being Destroyed 2/2

2011-05-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

blues for salvador carlos santana

2011-05-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson H2O Gate Blues

2011-05-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Miles Davis - On Green Dolphin street

2011-05-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

Miles Davis - My Funny Valentine

2011-05-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

Blue in Green by. Miles Davis

2011-05-26T20:52:00.000-07:00

'US lawmakers forced to support Israel' - Cynthia McKinney on PressTV

2011-05-23T22:03:00.000-07:00

In a sentimental mood - Duke Ellington and John Coltrane

2011-05-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

Louis Armstrong & Oscar Peterson You Go To My Head

2011-05-19T02:39:00.000-07:00

Joe Sample / Fly With Wings Of Love

2011-05-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

The Crusaders "Free As The Wind"

2011-05-19T02:23:00.000-07:00

Brenda Russell - Baby Eyes

2011-05-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

Brenda Russell - You Can't Hide Your Heart From Me

2011-05-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

Brenda Russell - She's In Love

2011-05-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

Brenda Russell Le Restaurant

2011-05-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

accused by famous historian of having a 'euro-centric' mind set for questioning obama's policies, we respond

2011-05-07T12:17:00.000-07:00

malcolm X questioned the motives and suspect actions of other blacks without being being accused of having a 'euro-centric' mind set.

he often recommended blacks read alternative sources of information other than main stream media of his day --one of the publications he advised blacks to read was 'the millitant' which i believe was a weekly newspaper that was not published by blacks.

malcolm would have questioned obama on the bombing of libya, he would have questioned him on this killing of whoever it was that they killed in pakistan last week. malcolm would have been in the forefront of those questioning the government version of 9-11 and its obvious use as a justification for Us gunboat diplomacy --bullying other nations into compliancewith Us demands, he would have qustioned globalization, so-called 'free trade' and the corporate banksters blatant robbery of third world and other nations as well as their victimizing of the poor and middle classes of america , malcolm would have questioned the developed world stealing resources from the third world and then using the developing world as a dumping ground for toxic chemical, radiological and medical wastes .

malcolm would have qustioned the loss of constitutional liberties and human rights here as a result of 'anti-terror' legislation such as the infamous patriot act. malcolm would have questioned the policy of tax breaks for the rich, while unemployment benefits run out for the poor and former middle classes. malcolm would have questioned the Us slavish allegiance to the terrorist state of israel and Us extrajudicial killings of 'enemies' in foreign countries by Us predator drones or covert ops. malcolm would have questioned the use of torture by the Us in abu gharib and guantanamo .

Malcolm would have questioned the buying off of congress and candidates for office by lobby groups and special interest groups. just as he questioned the murder of lumumba, the Us regime change policy towards cuba and the Us intervention in vietnam and connected the dots between Us policy towards blacks and the poor here in the Us with Us foreign policy towards africa and the developing world. and malcolm would never issue obama a pass for all kinds of questionable behavior just because obama's skin is black--malcolm gave no such pass to blacks like tshombe or to blacks here at home like the types malcolm referred to derisively as the 'reverend bishop t chickenwing' types who grinned and scratched their heads when 'boss' said 'grin and scratch'.

malcolm would be constantly after obama, holding his feet to the fire, speaking truth to power doing his job as 'malcolm' pointing out every foolish thing obama did as president --like allowing the banksters to walk away with billions of public dollars unaccounted for--alowing budget cuts to the Women with Infant Children's program while the military gets hundreds of billions to waste .

malcolm would be all over the obama administration --cutting obama and his policies no slack simply because he would not be dazzled by the glitter of the first black man holding the office of the presidency of the Us-- malcolm would have been challenging obama all over the media to come clean about his past and his family's past --especially about explaining his mother's involvement with activities of the ford foundation in indonesia--during the time of the cia inspired death squads of the regime of general suharto that rounded up and executed 500,000 indonesians out fear they were 'communists'--malcolm would have demanded to know what role obama's step father lo lo soetoro had in these cia death squads since it has been reported that obama's step father was an army officer that general suharto specifically requested to return from hawaii to assist him in the coup that brought general suharto to power

malcolm would have taken a special interest in discovering if obama's step father and mother played a role in or after the Cia backed military coup that overthrew indonesia's first president sukarno and installed general suharto because malcolm OFTEN mentioned in his speeches the BANDUNG CONFERENCE which sukarno chaired in bandung,indonesia --designed to form a non-aligned bloc of developing nations in asia and africa to steer a future for themselves free from colonialism , neo-colonialism and not to be pawns in the cold war between east and west. malcolm would have also wondered what obama's mother was doing for five years in pakistan while working for the ford foundation and why his mother had to get little barack up at 4 am to work on english lessons before sending him from indonesia back to hawaii to live with his grandmother while mom went on to do her work in pakistan. malcolm would --like any inquisitive thinking person would have asked obama if it was true that obama's grandmother was a vice president of a bank that was largely a front used by cia to disperse funds to cia backed dictators like general suharto and south vietnam's dictator nuygen van thieu.

malcolm would have questioned the honesty and integrity of ANY Us president--what Us president has not been a slick double dealer? --last i checked they do not hire choir boys for the job

James Corbett: Osama Bin Laden's Death, Another Mass Psyop! - Alex Jones...

2011-05-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

James Corbett: Osama Bin Laden's Death, Another Mass Psyop! - Alex Jones...

2011-05-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

Alex Jones doesn't buy Bin Laden's death

2011-05-03T00:19:00.000-07:00

Wayne Madsen: Bin Laden Death, Looks Like Staged Terror to Escalate U.S....

2011-05-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

Wayne Madsen: Bin Laden Death, Looks Like Staged Terror to Escalate U.S....

2011-05-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

Osama bin Bogeyman? 'CIA getting rid of old asset'

2011-05-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

Drug Lords - The CIA, The Mob and America's Secret History

2011-05-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

The CIA and the Nazis-Full Length Documentary

2011-05-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

Wayne Madsen In-Studio: The Obama Files - Alex Jones Tv 1/4

2011-04-29T19:41:00.001-07:00

Wayne Madsen In-Studio: The Obama Files - Alex Jones Tv 2/4

2011-04-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

Wayne Madsen In-Studio: The Obama Files - Alex Jones Tv 3/4

2011-04-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

Wayne Madsen In-Studio: The Obama Files - Alex Jones Tv 4/4

2011-04-29T19:38:00.000-07:00

Make Your Own Ethanol At Home with the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler

2011-04-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

obama birth certificate, 'ridiculously fake' ?

2011-04-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

bp gulf oil spill-- a planned catastrophe?

2011-04-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

my first movie "barry and georgie" --a dsekou production

2011-03-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

rest in peace basil davidson...

2010-07-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

*one of the first books i read on african history was 'black mother' by basil davidson. davidson was one of the few white historians who dared tell the truth about africa's rich cultural and historical past.

most books about africa then, were written by blatant liars employed at the 'liar's factory' of western academia to spread more lies and disinformation about african people and our supposed 'lack' of any real historical accomplishments.

this was part of the liar's on-going propaganda war against black self esteem and also of course, to justify european slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism in africa.

as a teen searching for and building the identity of a young black man, the book 'black mother' helped open my eyes to the truth about my people and helped clear away the 'tarzan /jungle jim/ buckwheat' lies and lifetime of shame that western schools and media had fed us all our days about black people being 'a race of nothings who had never accomplished nothing' --until the white man so graciously arrived with his shining white science and his white jesus , just in the nick of time to save us hopeless blacks from supposed cannibalism, the worship of rocks, and in general, ignorant savagery barely one step above the chimpanzee.

the black man and black woman are the fathers and mothers of the entire human race and the fathers and mothers of the entire world's civilization--but today are everywhere enslaved and everywhere robbed and degraded by our jealous, unworthy offspring who are unfit to rule .

once the lies are cleared away there is no turning back.

rest in peace basil davidson , ashe.

Basil Davidson obituary

Radical journalist
and historian who charted the death throes of colonialism in Africa

Basil Davidson obituary

Radical journalist
and historian who charted the death throes of colonialism in Africa

Radical journalist
and historian who charted the death throes of colonialism in Africa Basil Davidson obituary

Radical journalist
and historian who charted the death throes of colonialism in Africa

Basil Davidson, who has died aged 95, was a radical journalist in the
great anti-imperial tradition, and became a distinguished historian of
pre-colonial Africa. An energetic and charismatic figure, he was dropped
behind enemy lines during the second world war and joined that
legendary band of British soldiers who fought with the partisans in
Yugoslavia and in Italy. Years later, he was the first reporter to
travel with the guerrillas fighting the Portuguese in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, and brought
their struggle to the world's attention.

For many years he was at
the centre of the campaigns for Africa's liberation from colonialism and
apartheid, endlessly addressing meetings and working on committees.
Extremely tall and with a shock of white hair, and possessing the
old-fashioned courtesy of the ex-army officer that he was – or even of
the country gentleman that he eventually became after his move to the
West Country – he was an unlikely figure at many of these often
incoherent and sometimes sectarian events, usually run by student
activists and exiles.

Among his friends were the historians Thomas
Hodgkin, EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. The Palestinian scholar Edward Said placed him in a select band of
western artists and intellectuals with a sympathy and comprehension of
foreign cultures that meant that they had "in effect, crossed to the
other side".

Born in Bristol, Davidson left school at 16,
determined to become a writer, though he first made his living by
pasting advertisements for bananas on shop windows in the north of
England. Moving to London, he found his way into journalism, working for
the Economist and then as the diplomatic correspondent of the Star, a
now defunct London evening paper.

In the late 1930s he travelled
widely in Italy and in central Europe, and his familiarity with its
geography and his capacity to learn its languages made him an obvious
candidate, when the war broke out, for the Special Operations Executive –
seeking to undermine the Nazi regime from within. His self-reliance,
and lack of interest in received wisdom, soon marked him out. When sent
out to Budapest, to stimulate the resistance forces in Hungary, he
crossed swords with the British ambassador, who ordered him to stop
storing plastic explosives in the embassy cellar.

In Cairo, he
worked on plans to drop agents into Yugoslavia, first to the royalists
and then, after much internal argument, to Tito's communist guerrillas.
Davidson was eventually parachuted into Yugoslavia himself, to join the
communists in the uncompromising territory of the Vojvodina, the plain
of the Danube valley across from Hungary. There, his exceptional
physical strength and bravery were tested to the utmost.

When he
returned to Yugoslavia at the end of the war, his companion on the
visit, Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, recorded how "as we
entered the villages, people would run out crying 'Nicola, Nicola!'
(Davidson's partisan name) and, after kissing him on the cheek, carry us
both into their houses, where it was hard without offence to avoid
getting drunk on Slivovitza."

Davidson fought in Yugoslavia from
August 1943 to November 1944, then transferred to the Ligurian hills of
northern Italy. He and his partisan band seized Genoa before the arrival
of American or British forces.

The war years marked him for ever.
He fell in love with the comradeship, the trust and the spiritual force
of endurance in the service of an ideal that he found with the
guerrilla fighters. The lessons he learned about the muddle of war were
important for his later work in Africa. In Angola and Guinea-Bissau in
the early 1970s, and in Eritrea almost 20 years later, he found
those same life forces and loved them. The subjective nature of his
response to this history in the making,
to deep friendships made and lost, made very painful the eventual
unravelling of so much that he believed in.

The political lessons
were less personally rewarding, since his willingness to collaborate
with communists in battle would lead him in later life to be labelled by
the Foreign Office as a dangerous "fellow traveller". Davidson had
never been attracted to Marxism, but his wartime experiences with
Communist partisans coloured his general attitude towards the cold war
struggle, first in Europe and later in Africa. If communists were
prepared to fight against the Nazis, or later against South African
apartheid and Portuguese colonialism, that caused him no problems.

At
the end of the war, a lieutenant-colonel awarded the Military Cross and
twice mentioned in dispatches, he turned again to journalism, working
first for the Times as one of its correspondents in Paris and then
as chief foreign leader writer in London. Out of tune at the Times, and
especially unhappy with the western intervention that crushed the
communist partisans in Greece, he left in 1949 to work for three years
as the secretary of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC),
the campaigning foreign affairs organisation set up by ED Morel during
the first world war.

At the same time he joined the staff of the
New Statesman, where he was soon viewed as Martin's heir apparent. It
was not to be. At both the UDC and the New Statesman, he earned the
undying hatred of Dorothy Woodman, Martin's companion, and was accused
of being a fellow traveller – "or worse". Unable to return as a
journalist to the Balkans, because of the cold war, he was taken by
chance to Africa, and the continent soon caught his imagination, never
to let go. Then, through an invitation from a group of South African
trade unionists, he met Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and other leaders
of the African National Congress, about to launch its campaign
of defiance against the apartheid laws of the Nationalist government.

Injustice,
western hypocrisy and a whiff of revolution were enough to get him
firmly engaged: later, from 1969 to 1985, he was a vice-president of the
Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. He produced an important series
about his African journey for the New Statesman, and then wrote a book
about the crimes of apartheid. Soon he was listed as a "prohibited
immigrant", both in South Africa and in other parts
of white-ruled Africa. That area of work was now closed for him.

So
too was the New Statesman. On his return, Martin told him he was "proud
to publish the articles, [but] if you have to hive off to another
paper, I shall obviously understand".

When he was offered a job as
an editor at Unesco, the British government vetoed his appointment.
Again, it was alleged that he was a fellow traveller, and that his
articles were quoted consistently in Moscow. Doubtless they were, since
they were very good, and Soviet reporters had even less access to Africa
than those from the west. Far from being soft on communists, Davidson
was accused during the treason trial of László Rajk in Hungary in 1949
of being an agent of the British secret service, as indeed he had been.

Davidson
was rescued by the Daily Herald (1954-57) and then taken up by Hugh
Cudlipp at the Daily Mirror (1959-62). Encouraged to take an interest in
the Mirror's publishing activities in Nigeria, Davidson made regular
annual journeys through west, central and east Africa on the brink of
independence from colonialism. Soon he was plunged deep into unwritten
African history.

For a family man with three small sons, this was
not an ideal profession. It was unfashionable, badly paid and meant long
periods away from home. Davidson was no longer a journalist, yet nor
was he a tenured academic. His wife, Marion Young, whom he had married
during the war – she had also worked in SOE in Italy – somehow held
their life together.

Books now began to pour out. The self-taught
Davidson had an elegant prose style, at home with both fact and fiction.
He wrote five novels and more than 30 other books. These were mainly
about African history and included classic textbooks still in use
in both east and west Africa. Davidson was enthused early on by the end
of British colonialism and the prospects of pan-Africanism in the 1960s,
and he wrote copiously and with warmth about newly independent Ghana and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He
went to work for a year at the University of Accra in 1964.

Later
he threw himself into the reporting of the African liberation wars in
the Portuguese colonies, particularly in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde
and Guinea-Bissau. Following in the steps of the great campaigning
journalist Henry Nevinson, who had reported from Angola in 1905, he made
an epic journey on foot half a century later that took him into the
liberated areas of eastern Angola with the Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola. The MPLA became the government at independence in
1975 and the epicentre of the cold war struggle in Africa.

Over
the years the elaborate, CIA-run propaganda campaigns in favour of the
MPLA's main rival movement, Unita, led by Jonas Savimbi and aided by the secret
invasions of the apartheid regime, frequently stumbled against
Davidson's authoritative counter-version. His scorn for the mainstream
journalism that swallowed the western line on Angola was legendary. On
Rhodesia, too, both the media and British government's equivocation and
connivance with South Africa's support for the white regime found no
more scathing critic than Davidson.

In the 1980s, with most of the
African liberation wars now won – except for South Africa's – Davidson
turned much of his attention to more theoretical questions about the
future of the nation state in Africa. He remained a passionate advocate
of pan-Africanism. In 1988 he made a long and dangerous journey into
Eritrea, writing a persuasive defence of the nationalists' right to
independence from Ethiopia, and an
equally eloquent attack on the revolutionary leader Colonel Mengistu and
the regime that had overthrown Haile Selassie. Davidson was invited to
Havana to discuss the long-running Ethiopia-Eritrean war after the
Cubans threw their weight behind Africa's latest revolution. He was
irritated by the personal enthusiasm of Fidel Castro for Mengistu, and
by the large numbers of Cuban troops sent to help him in his border war
against Somalia – although they did not fight in Eritrea. Davidson
expressed no surprise at Cuba taking on a new African protege, but he
retained his own unfavourable view of Mengistu.

The eventual turn
towards repressive government taken by his friends in the Eritrean
leadership, when other leaders to whom he had been close were imprisoned
in Asmara, was a sad rerun of a similar political trajectory he had
witnessed in post-independence Angola. He did not like talking over
these matters, but he did not disguise his disappointment. Critics from
the right were swift to condemn the early judgments that he had made
about these revolutions that had turned sour, and even some of his
friends would have welcomed more debate.

In 1984 Davidson embarked
on a new career in television, making Africa, an eight-part history
series for Channel 4. He was excellent on screen, bringing to an
unexpectedly wide audience a vision of Africa far from the usual
famine-and-corruption cliches that annoyed him so much. His alternate
version of African reality reached further and deeper than he had
imagined possible, though he continued to write, producing notably The
Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (1992); the
collection of essays The Search for Africa (1994); and his final book,
West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850 (1998).

He
received honorary degrees and appointments from many universities,
including Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Turin, Ghana and
California, and was also decorated by Portugal and Cape Verde for his
services to their history. Apart from his military medals, the British
state was studiously uninterested in recognising his talents and his
service.

He relished the irony of being decorated with great
warmth in 2002 by the prime minister of Portugal – once an activist
against the fascist regime that Davidson had done so much to bring down.
And when the Cape Verde government chose to decorate him in 2003 in an
Angolan embassy where the ambassador was a former prominent official of
his old opponent Unita, he remarked drily on the surprising
reconciliations demanded of those who live long enough.

He is
survived by Marion and his sons.

• Basil Risbridger Davidson,
historian and campaigner, born 9 November 1914; died 9 July 2010

admitting the obvious...

2010-03-02T17:55:00.000-08:00

Sarkozy admits France's role in Rwandan genocide

President acknowledges that 'errors' were made but stops short of formal apology..By John Lichfield in Paris..

President Nicholas Sarkozy admitted yesterday that French "errors" had contributed to the Rwandan genocide which killed an estimated 800,000 people in 1994.

On the first visit by a French leader to Rwanda for 25 years, Mr Sarkozy did not formally apologise. Nor did he accept allegations thatFrance had played an active role in training and arming the Hutu militias and troops who led massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

But he suggested that the entire international community – and France in particular – should accept that its response had been culpably weak. "What happened here is a defeat for humanity," Mr Sarkozy said. "What happened here left an indelible stain. What happened here obliges the international community – including France – to reflect on the errors which prevented us from foreseeing, or stopping, this appalling crime."

Previously France has always insisted that it could not have foreseen the genocide and that the intervention of its troops helped to save many Hutu and Tutsi lives. Mr Sarkozy's visit to Kigali, and joint press conference with the Rwandan President Paul Kagame, were the most dramatic symbols to date of efforts to repair relations. Diplomatic ties were restored in November, three years after they were severed amid mutual recriminations and allegations.

In 2006, a French investigating judge issued international arrest warrants for eight Tutsi officials close to President Kagame, suggesting that they had deliberately provoked the genocide of their own people by assassinating a moderate Hutu president in May 1994. The accusations brought renewed allegations from Mr Kagame's Tutsi-dominated government that France had armed and trained Hutu militias and soldiers knowing that genocidal attacks were likely or possible.

In 1998, a French parliamentary investigation rejected these accusations but admitted that the late President François Mitterrand and the then centre-right government in France had been blinded by supposed French interests in the region into siding with radical, and eventually murderous, Hutu groups.

The eight arrest warrants against Kagame aides are still active but the Rwandan government now accepts that they were drawn up by an independent investigating magistrate and not the French government.

Before his press conference with President Kagame, Mr Sarkozy was taken on a tour of Kigali's genocide museum. On two occasions, the official guide made references to alleged French complicity in the massacres, including a photograph of a French military vehicle driving past armed Hutu civilians. President Sarkozy ignored the remarks.

He later placed a wreath on a memorial to the dead and said that "in the name of the people of France" he "bowed" to "victims of the genocide of the Tutsis". "Errors of appreciation, political errors, were committed here which had consequences which were absolutely tragic," Mr Sarkozy said. Although he spoke of the cumulative guilt of the international community, the implication was clear. France was – for the first time – admitting that its own actions had contributed to the calamity.

On his way to Rwanda, Mr Sarkozy visited Gabon and made an unscheduled stop in Mali to greet a French aid worker, Pierre Camatte, released this week after almost three months as the hostage of an extreme Islamist group. Friday, 26 February 2010

*note from sekou--now if the Us would admit its part --in particular not only how Us green berets helped train rwandan military , but also how the Us trained rwandan president colonel paul kagame and crew at a Us air force base in the shooting down of aircraft through the use of surface to air missiles. then the Us supplied kagame with surface to air missiles captured by the Us in the first gulf war. these missiles were used by kigame and crew to shoot down the plane carrying the presidents of both rwanda and neighboring burundi who were on their way to an emergency summit to head off simmering ethnic violence between hutus and tutsis to prevent the boil over--the shooting down of the presidential plane, killing both presidents, led to the almost immediate eruption of the ethnic violence that ended in 800,000 dead in rwanda and an estimated 6,000,000 killed in the following regional war to dismember the vast and extremely mineral rich nation of congo --killing which is still going on to this day.

deskRat's comments at google video on john hankey's film 'dark legacy'

2009-10-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

i was operating under a 500 character limitation for each comment thus observations had to be limited, abbreviated & broken into little bite sized chunks of information.

grandaddy prescott bush was part of the project that put hitler into power BECAUSE hitler promised war. the arms merchants and bankers on both sides of the atlantic and pacific made billions supplying arms to ALL sides in WWII--just as they had done in WWI. they created a boogeyman and then went to war against what they helped create. the same can be said of the cold war--they created a 'red menace' that was in reality 'the mexico of europe' and then made 10 trillion in defense contracts against

the boogeyman they helped to create. the soviets were deathly afraid of a Us nuke or chem/biological first strike and built their entire strategy for potential war with the Us on scenarios where the Us made the first strike and not them. the arms merchants and bankers actively sought war between the Us and Ussr --the cuban missile crisis was one of at least three attempts where they actually did try to force a confrontation. they create a boogeyman and then go to war against what they created.

saddam hussein began his career as a hitman in a Cia plot to assassinate colonel kassim --the leaer of iraq because he was too Soviet friendly for Us war party tastes. kassim said iraq's oil profits should benefit the iraqi people and not big oil companies. also kassim began buying his weapons from the soviets instead of the west. when young saddam failed and only killed kassim's driver Cia helped him escape iraq and kept him on the payroll in jordan and egypt until kassim was finally killed.

saddam returns to iraq and works his way up the ladder in the baath party that is given lists of iraqi 'communists' by the cia to 'eliminate' -which saddam does. finally saddam is in power in iraq and goes to war against Us enemy iran. under reagan/bush the Us supplies him not only with the materials and know how to make his chemical weapons , but also a team of DIA analysts to feed saddam satellite info on where the iranian troops are concentrated in order to magnify the weapons killing effect

later bush 1 as president goads saddam into war with kuwait by secretly promising kuwait that he has their back in any confrontation with iraq. the Us continues to sell saddam the know how and materials for his weapons programs while telling him 2 his face his dispute with kuwait is none of the bush administration's concern . it's a tacit green light to invade because saddam had summoned the Us ambassador to baghdad in order to warn bush that iraq would fight if kuwait continued to slant drill

saddam takes the bait & invades kuwait . bush 1 sends in dick cheney with fake satellite photos to saudis showing iraqis mobilized at saudi border. saudis and other arab states -- scared spitless of boogeyman saddam --get on board gulf war 1 . saddam with "the 4th largest army in the world" is the "new hitler" in the western media--bent on taking over by force all arab oil producers "to bring western industry to its knees". am i exaggerating here? they create a boogeyman to go to war against

bush 2 administration is asleep at the wheel. ignores warnings from israeli , german, jordanian , russian intel orgs that attack using planes is imminent on Us. putin tells his intel to warn Us "in the most strongest terms" that terror attack is imminent . not one finger lifted in the Us. a group of Fbi agents issue warning about terrorists taking flight lessons in the Us! nothing is done. drills and simulations draw most of the air force fighters away towards canada .

on or about the time of the 9-11 attacks the airforce and Fema are running drills in which attacks using hijacked airliners crash into Pentagon and WTC towers? coincidence ? what the fluck! while the towers are being struck, chairmen of both the house and senate intelligence committees porter goss &bob graham are having breakfast with head of pakistani intel group the ISI --who also happens to be the guy who gave the order to wire $100,000 to head hijacker mohammed atta earlier that summer .

before the attacks are even over george tenent head of Cia announces it could only be bin laden. Us & allies go to war with Cia's 'al qaeda' afghan boogeyman creation--in an amazingly quick amount of time--because brits& Us luckily have planned wargames for that region & just happen to have warships &men & materials already in motion. what a coincidence! while bush 2, cheney, condoleeza, colin &rumsy link saddam with 9-11 & grow fears he's got chem-weapons& nuke in works 2 whip up war frenzy

7-7-05 london subway bombings take place in exact locations where brit intel is running drills about bombs planted in the subways??? bibi netanyahu scheduled 2 make a speech that morning but cancels at last moment due 2 warnings from intel. BUT scotland yard & israeli mossad can't decide who warned who 1st about the attacks because whoever was 1st has 2 explain how they found out in the nick of time 2 keep bibi safe. they create big boogeyman &go 2 war with their creation 2 make big profits .

a brother titled this pic "last meeting of the neanderthals''

2009-09-27T15:13:00.000-07:00

he commented to the effect that during this last meeting before they became extinct the neanderthals decided to decide at their next round of meetings what talking points would be considered to be included in the following round of discussions about what to include in any future discussions concerning the following rounds of discussions coming up about the survival of their highly endangered species...alas so similar to black people today, as the brother's post so clearly hinted.

and we responded...

it's been speculated that the first genocide was homo sapiens neanderthal being wiped out by the rapidly spreading, better communicating, better organized homo sapiens sapiens. one branch of the hominid family killing off another branch in competition over who's progeny would one day rule the planet.

100,000 years later, branches of the homo sapiens sapiens would begin their now 6000 year old campaign to eliminate the branch of humanity known as the black race--the true fathers and mothers of the entire world's civilization.

"i am indra, destroyer of the one hundred cities--indra who scatters the black faces." 1500 bc-- vedic commentary on aryan genocide against the black dravidians... Read More

1200 bc-"-he might one day become a king of troy --and we want no more kings of troy" --son of achilles as the triumphant greeks sack and burn the city of troy, explaining why he threw the infant heir to the throne from the city walls to his death.

"hiv-aids is a pentagon bio-weapon"

dr robert gallo won the nobel prize as the first to identify the mysterious new virus that was destroying human immune systems--HIV. the late boyd graves' investigation into government documents identified dr. gallo as one of the researchers for the pentagon's special virus cancer program --a congressionally funded bio-warfare program to develop ... a virus-weapon that kills by destroying human immune systems. boyd graves also said dr gallo admitted under intense questioning that he and the pentagon researchers had been capturing, injecting and then releasing monkeys into central africa since the 1960s. dr graves (ashe, ashe) died from the damage that hiv did to his body over the years, about the same time that michael jackson (ashe) died. thus little to no publicity about it. the cure for hiv that he took, as i understand it, stopped the spread of the disease but too much damage to his body had already been done .

yes temi , the "ccr5 delta 32" gene is both hiv and bubonic plague's gateway into the human immune system. i first heard about it from anti-fascist researcher dave emory's site (google dave emory or look for his spitfire archives)

when emory said that the nazis were experimenting with bubonic plague as a bio-weapon and found that certain northern europeans ("aryans") had a natural immunity to it, and both hiv and bubonic plague use the same gene as the gateway into the human immune system ... well, 2 + 2 = 4 ....

the "C-eye-A" brought over hundreds of nazi "scientists" into the Us after the War and Congress funded their research as part of the cold war arms races.

included in that group of "scientists" was eric traub hitler's chief bio-warfare researcher. the nazis disguised their bio-warfare work as cancer research --traub was their top expert on "cancer" or virology . understand that hitler was little more than a "ronald reagan". the guy people thought was in charge but just a front man brought out to give... the speeches and rev up the troops. hitler was PUT into power by a group of german/british/dutch/american industrialists to slaughter the communists and take germany into war--the industrialists made a trillion dollars selling arms to all sides in the war.

they later made 10 trillion dollars in government contracts after WW2 in 50 years of phoney cold war that THEY started.
in 1933 they put hitler in power, armed him and set him loose to make war--a good book on-line for free is webster tarpley & anton chaitkins ' "george bush the unauthorized biography at www.tarpley.net read the chapters on "race hygiene" and "the hitler project

understand that american eugenicist fascists helped finance the nazis, armed them with hundreds of smuggled remmington revolvers and thompson submachine guns to insure they would win in their street battles against the political opposition in germany --400 political killings --assassinations-- took place in germany as the nazis terrorized their way... into power. the" who's who" of america openly supported the nazis BEFORE, DURING and AFTER the war. no trials for treason because after the war they TOOK control of the executive branch of Us government launched the cold war and branded opposition as "reds" . this "eugenicist war faction" as i call them included the fords, harrimans, du ponts, rockefellers, rj reynolds tobacco fortune,hanes underwear fortune, eastman kodak,IBM, general motors, sears & robuck, hearst media fortune,Us steel, carnegie , singer sewing machine fortune--the list goes on and on -- the who's who blue bloods of america --supported the nazis and TAUGHT the nazi's

the who's who of america supported the nazis and taught them about race hygiene based on america's laws ALREADY in place governing blacks and miscegenation. the nazis studied and perfected their "race hygiene laws" with help from the american klans of the south and racist "black legions" of the north and midwest. On both sides of the atlantic, these groups all opposed the labor movement as "communist inspired" and democratic reforms like child labor laws, the 8 hour workday, free public education and social safety nets as government interference in nature's divine plan to weed out (kill off) the inferior races and beings and purify the human gene pool through death. if the inferiors did not die out soon enough it was the duty of those with superior genes (blue bloods) to take necessary steps to ELIMINATE them. key players in the american faction of the hitler project were the rockefellers ,harrimans, dulles brothers and the harriman servant fellow skull n bones man--Prescott Bush

prescott bush ran day to day operations of wall street banking house "brown brothers, harriman" he personally handled a $300,000 account ($10,000,000 to $30,000,000 in today's money ?) set up for the nazi party by german petro-chemical--heavy industry IG farben's corporation owner fritz thyssen. (prescott's own stock in IG farben--the major player in nazi germany's military industrial complex would make the bush family millionaires after the war.) prescott invested the money in the nazi account and sent the profits back to the nazis through a dutch bank. Prescott and friends were also part of the "wallstreet putsch" the rightwing industrialist coup plot to force franklin roosevelt from power and set up a Us government modeled on nazi germany and fascist italy. the dulles brothers--allen and john foster were part of the law firm that repackaged germany's world war one debts into a form that would free up the funds hitler needed to build germany's armies and rearm germany for war

understand the importance of this --no funds to rearm would have meant that germany even with hitler as head, could not have started WW2. --no money= no armies =no war= no 50,000,000 dead from the slaughter of the second world war and that would have meant no lucrative war profiteering no-bid contracts. The Us war faction not only helped hitler into power with guns and money,once he was firmly in power, they then restructured his nation's debts so that he could build his armies and launch his war. once the Us was in the war they pretended to be patriots and dubiously served the war effort in various roles .
allen dulles served in the Oss--the Us intelligence/spy apparatus of its time. by 1942 it was clear that germany could not defeat the combination of russia and the Us and britain. their combined man power and industrial capacity was too much for germany to outlast and the defeats in stalingrad and north africa proved the nazis could not deliver knockout shots to their enemies.

by 1942 OSS officer allen dulles was in switzerland sending out feelers to the nazi intelligence apparatus attempting to recruit its members for his "war faction's" hoped for post world war 2 conflict of the Us vs russia. also by 1942 the head of the nazi party, martin borman was already organizing for the survival of the reich in the post war world. the infamous "ratlines" escape routes out of german controlled territory into Spain, Turkey, into south america, south africa, Mexico and even into the Us were set up. Hundreds of holding companies and dummy corporations were set up in switzerland and other banking havens as dumping grounds for the billions and billions in wealth looted from nazi conquered territories. as the war turned worse for the nazis their junior varsity team prepared for their eventual escape out of europe as the nazi varsity team prepared for the worst.in the "war party american fascists" the junior varsity found welcoming arms.

upon the death of franklin roosevelt the Us war party fascists took control of the executive branch of the american government and began the cold war and domestic "red scares" . allen dulles became head of the new CIA and smuggled into the Us hitler's head of military intelligence for the eastern front general rhinehart gehlen. gehlen told congress that the russians were ready and able to march from berlin to the atlantic and take over all of europe. it was all lies --russia was exhausted after having lost 30,000,000 people in the fight against germany. these two devils scared congress and the president and the american people into the cold war mentality that existed until the fall of communism in 1990. arms races against the phoney threat of russia--"the red menace" cost Us taxpayers about 10 trillion dollars. cold war against a nation that was "the mexico of europe" was even better business than real war. we find after the cold war that moscow never even wanted to fight the Us

Moscow feared and spent most of its military resources to be prepared for a massive Us first strike followed by american invasion--the same strategy used by hitler when he launched his invasion of russia. and this was exactly the war plan the Us warhawks with help from their ex-nazi scientists and military experts had prepared for the war they hoped for against moscow. the plan called for massive nuke first strikes, or chemical bioweapons first strikes against russia that would kill 40,000,000 people followed by green berets parachuting into russia to grab key points and hold them until arrival of the Us army. then once subdued the USSR would be divided into 10 regions the civilians would be forcibly conscripted for clean up or containment of nuclear/ bio-war contamination and Us ,western and german corporations brought in to make use of the vast natural resources. what's the difference between this and hitler's plan for russia?

"what we intend for the inferior slavic peoples of russia--we need not hesitate to call it slavery" --hitler-- "mein kampf"

what's the difference between the Us war plan for russia and hitler's ? it's the same thing because they were both planned by the same people. nazi bio-war research continued because the Us brought the nazi researchers onto the Us cold war payroll and made many of them Us citizens. politically the "new americans" congealed around the extreme right wing of the republican party. the republicans took back the whitehouse in 1952. john foster dulles --allen's brother became Us secretary of state under eisenhower.allen of course was CIA chief. eisenhower was like reagan , his vice president ran the day to day government. his vice president was richard nixon. nixon's patron was prescott bush. the war party had a lock on the government.

as i understand it, nixon during the war worked with naval intelligence unraveling the interlocking connections between Us corporations and those of nazi germany. he knew where the bodies were buried. in 1946 prescott bush began backing nixon's political career into congress and finally the whitehouse.
in 1960 eisenhower ordered the "neutralization" of newly elected president of Congo patrice lumumba. joseph mobutu (later renamed mobutu sese seko) was installed by the Us as new president. the Us has quietly maintained a military/research base in Congo ever since. if memory is correct former nazi eric traub worked for a time for the Us at that base. so this even places the chief ex nazi researcher in central africa doing bio-war research for the Us. now that we have the background set, on to CCR5 delta 32. to review, during the war the nazi bio-weapons researchers found some people--northern europeans-- had an immunity to bubonic plague. they believed that 'aryans' had this immunity

later it was discovered that bubonic plague attacks and kills the victim by entering through the gene gateway CCR5 delta 32. northern europeans are the only people on earth who have a recessive version of this gene gateway. bubonic plague cannot enter through this recessive version of the gateway and attack the immune system. thus northern europeans, 'aryans' ,can carry and pass the disease but it cannot destroy their immune system. thus they have natural immunity. according to the dave emory website, Aids researchers discovered that HIV also enters the immune system through that very same gene gateway--CCR5 delta 32. people with the recessive gene can carry Aids and pass it to others but it cannot attack and destroy their immune systems because the gateway is closed by the recessive trait. no africans or asians have the recessive trait.

to sum up. lethal bio-weapons research on concentration camp inmates during the war by nazis to find ethnic specific bio-weapons indicates a natural immunity by 'aryans' to bubonic plague. the chief nazi researcher and his teams, instead of being tried and executed for warcrimes are imported into the Us and Us facilities and funded to continue their bio-weapons research on live humans during the cold war hysteria created in large part by these same ex-nazis and their Us collaborator patrons. by about 1969 bio-war researchers tell the pentagon they can create a bio-weapon that kills by destroying the human immune system. Congress votes $550 million for development of this bio-weapon. roughly a decade later a strange 'new' disease emerges in central Africa and the Us at almost the same time. the disease kills by destroying the immune system. the 1st 'scientist' to identify this disease later admits he did gov bio-weapons research on a virus that kills by destroying the immune system.

he also admits that he and fellow 'researchers' have been capturing injecting and releasing monkeys into central africa since the 1960s. later, it is 'discovered' the 'new' virus enters the immune system through the same gene gateway as the bubonic plague. CCR5 delta 32. only northern europeans, the people the nazis called aryans , have a recessive version of this gene and thus natural immunity to both diseases. and both diseases hiv and bubonic plague are connected to purely EVIL research done by the same nazis and associates who believe aryans are the "superior race" . what are the statistical probabilities of this being mere coincidence? think about it. sorry for being so long winded but we need to know what we face.

dr ivan van sertima has gone on to the ancestors --rest in peace --ashe ashe

2009-05-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

dr van sertima, historian from guyana,and professor at rutgers university in the Us, was best known for his book about the early african presence in the americas, "they came before columbus"

part 2

part 3

dr. van sertia is referring to the "ta seti" artifacts found in nubia that show that the building blocks of pharonic egypt were well established and in place in nubia before the dynastic period of egypt began. these cultural and physical building blocks were long established south of egypt by the blacks of nubia, thus refuting forever the european and asian claims that egyptian civilization was anything other than black african in origins. no evidence of any of these cultural and physical building blocks are found in europe or western asia, thus proving the source of egypt's civilization was black, african, and directly from the south. the western archeologist who recovered the ta seti artifacts buried them in the university archives for 17 years saying nothing of this discovery trying to hide our history. it was upon his death that one of his students finally brought the ta seti artifacts to light.

why would an archeologist cover up a discovery that would have made him famous in his field? racism in a "scientific" field that has sought to erase black history from world history promoted by a culture that has sought to physically marginalize and erase black people from the world, is the only realistic answer.

to physically erase a people you must also erase their history. from ancient times to modern, this is what has and is being done to black people. the global life and death struggle to save us all will be that much harder without dr. ivan van sertima.

"when one of our enemies dies, two more step forward to take his place. when one of us dies, there is a gap left in our ranks and a sorrow in our hearts." - chiksika the brother of tecumseh the shawnee warrior and leader of the united indian resistance circa 1800

part 5

part 6

part 7

what i'd intend to spend my taxpayer bailout bonus on

2009-03-16T19:26:00.000-07:00

now if i could just get a job as an AIG exec, plunk down from my undeserved bonus about $600,000 in taxpayers' hard earned dollars for this ocean worthy "Africat" luxury catamaran and then sail off into the sunset...AIG not hiring right now? guess i'll just have to get one the old fashioned way --and earn it!

some contracts more 'sacred' than others: auto workers' contract wages cut, yet AIG execs get bonuses

2009-03-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Sanctity of AIG's Contracts
By Glenn Greenwald

March 16, 2009 "Salon" --- Larry Summers, Sunday, on AIG's payment of executive bonuses:

We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system.

Associated Press, February 18, 2009:

The United Auto Workers' deal with Detroit's three automakers limits overtime, changes work rules, cuts lump-sum cash bonuses and gets rid of cost-of-living pay raises to help reduce the companies' labor costs, people briefed on the agreement said today.

The UAW announced Tuesday that it reached the tentative agreement with General Motors Corp., Chrysler LLC and Ford Motor Co. over contract concessions, as GM and Chrysler sent plans to the Treasury Department asking for a total of $39 billion in government financing to help them survive.

Concessions with the union are a condition of the $17.4 billion in government loans that the automakers have received so far.

Apparently, the supreme sanctity of employment contracts applies only to some types of employees but not others. Either way, the Obama administration's claim that nothing could be done about the AIG bonuses because AIG has solid, sacred contractual commitments to pay them is, for so many reasons, absurd on its face.

As any lawyer knows, there are few things more common - or easier -- than finding legal arguments that call into question the meaning and validity of contracts. Every day, commercial courts are filled with litigations between parties to seemingly clear-cut agreements. Particularly in circumstances as extreme as these, there are a litany of arguments and legal strategies that any lawyer would immediately recognize to bestow AIG with leverage either to be able to avoid these sleazy payments or force substantial concessions.

Since the contracts are secret and we're apparently just supposed to rely on the claims of AIG and Treasury Department lawyers, it's impossible to identify these arguments specifically. But there are almost certainly viable claims to be asserted that the contracts were induced via fraud or that the bonus-demanding executives themselves violated their contracts. Independently, it's inconceivable that there aren't substantial counterclaims that AIG could assert against any executives suing to obtain these bonuses, a threat which, by itself, provides substantial leverage to compel meaningful concessions. Many of these executives were, after all, the very ones responsible for the cataclysmic losses.

The only way a company like AIG throws up its hands from the start and announces that there is simply nothing to be done is if they are eager to make these payments. One might expect AIG to do so -- they haven't exactly proven themselves to be paragons of business ethics -- but the fact that Obama officials are also insisting that nothing can be done (even while symbolically and pointlessly pretending to join in the populist outrage over these publicly-funded "retention payments") is what is most notable here.

Legal strategies aside, just as a business matter, one of the first things which every compnay in severe distress does is go to its creditors, explain that it cannot make the required payments, and force re-negotiations of the terms. That's as basic as it gets. To see how that works, just look at what GM and other automakers did with their union contracts - what they were forced by the Government to do as a condition for their bailout. Obviously, if a company goes into bankruptcy, then contracts to pay executive bonuses are immediately nullified, but the threat of bankruptcy or serious financial distress is, for obvious reasons, very compelling leverage to force substantial concessions. And the idea that, in this economy, AIG executives (of all people) will be able simply to leave and go seek employment elsewhere unless they receive their "retention bonuses" (even assuming that's an undesirable outcome) is nothing short of ludicrous.

There may be other reasons why the Treasury Department decided it wanted AIG to pay these bonuses (Marcy Wheeler considers some of those reasons here), but this claim from Larry Summers that the sanctity of contracts precludes any alternatives is not just false, but insultingly so. It's difficult to recall anything quite so vile as watching hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money flow to AIG executives. One would expect the Obama administration to do everything possible to prevent that from happening. Instead, they seem to be doing the opposite

1000 year war revisited

2009-03-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

i found this pic of a painting on an old etruscan piece of pottery . circa end of the 4th century bc and beginning of the 3rd. it is a depiction of the greek hero achilles killing a trojan prisoner. the funny looking guy with the hammer is supposed to be charun the etruscan death demon. note the afro and wide nose of the trojan being executed by achilles. (click for hopefully larger image)

who were the etruscans?

they were the people who civilized the romans .

much of what is roman is actually etruscan. according to their own legends they arrived in ships to the italian pennisula from asia minor ( now turkey) fleeing an invasion of barbaric greek tribes who destroyed the etruscan cities in turkey.

being a civilized, seafaring, commercial people they fled the wild, death-crazy, highly warlike greeks (see the movie '300' about the spartans for a view of the warlike character of these people )

after settling in italy, the etruscans taught agriculture, architecture--in particular the "roman" arch, aqueducts, road building, and the building of WALLED CITIES ,as well as "greek" writing, government ship building , military organization etc etc--the arts of civilization to the latin-speaking peasants of the italian peninsula.

the latins would one day violently turn on their benefactors and the etruscans , like the trojans, phonecians and lastly the cartheginians--failing to present a united front in the face of genocide--would disappear from history.

when athens went to war against carthage over the commercially strategic island of sicily--a carthiginian commercial outpost, the etruscans allied themselves with the cartheginians against the athenian greeks.

in their artwork the etruscans depict themselves as a mixed black people --similar to minoans of crete-- believed to be "europe's" oldest civilization.

why would the etruscans ally themselves with the north african civilization and commercial empire of carthage against the european greeks of athens? probably because they were relatives of the africans.

was one of the etruscan cities destroyed by the warlike greeks in turkey --the ancient city of troy?

the european oral tradition says that after troy was destroyed, a contingent of trojan refugees led by prince aeneas fled in ships landing eventually in carthage. carthage was a phonecian city ruled at the time by queen dido who supposedly fell in love with aeneas and asked him to stay and rule the city with her.

according to the legends, when his destiny was reveald that he would leave dido and build civilization in italy, prince aeneas was "supervising" infrastructure projects in carthage--also a walled seaport, commercial city.

so if he is supervising infrastructure projects then carthage and troy--both walled ,commercial, seaport cities--must have been on similar technological footing?

all this is to say what?

the minoans,trojans, cartheginians and etruscans have too much in common not to be related. they are part of the mixed african extended family of the mediterranean. the first civilization built in what is now europe.the northern side of what was once an african dominated mediterranean basin.

they appear to be branchs of the phonecians--the cousins of the egyptians who maintained ties and loyalties to egypt and serving as eypt's seafarers mixed their blood with the caucasians they came in contact with as they civilized and set up commercial outpost cities throughout the mediterranean.

the nile flows south to north and empties into the mediterranean serving in ancient times as the commercial highway for egypt--as the gulf of mexico and the mississippi river serves the Us today .

the oral and later written traditions of both the greeks and romans attribute being taught the arts of civilization by the phonecians- in the case of the greeks, and later the etruscans-- in the case of the romans.

both greeks and romans would violently turn upon their benefactors and in long wars of annihilation defeat and eventually erase the civilizations of their benefactors and take control of the mediterranean basin and its enormously lucrative commerce.

it was a bloody and determined long range struggle beginning with the trojan war in 1200 bc and ending with the roman destruction of carthage about 200 bc --the 1000 year war.

the alphabet used to type this post is called the "phonetic" alphabet. the europeans themselves say that the alphabet we use today came from the romans who borrowed it from the greeks.

but, cadmus the phonecian prince is credited by greek oral tradition with teaching the greeks writing --the phonecian alphabet--borrowed and adapted from the phonecian's egyptian cousins' writing systems.

the roman oral tradition, confirmed by modern historians, says the etruscans taught the romans writing --and the modern historians hide the origins of this writing by saying the etruscans taught the romans "greek" writing. but we know the greeks did not invent "their" alphabet --it is the "phonetic"--as in "phonecian" alphabet.

and if the etruscans arrived in italy after fleeing an invasion of greek barbarians who destroyed their cities and civilization in turkey (the location of the ancient city of troy) does it make any sense that a higher civilization like the etruscans would learn writing from a much less civilized people --the greeks --who are sacking and burning every city in sight?

the etruscans taught the romans the phonecian writing because likely they themselves were a branch of the phonecian civilization-- a commercial empire of walled city-state seaport outposts that dominated the commerce of the mediterranean basin --acting as seafarers for their cousins, the egyptians --of north eastern africa.

as a result of the 1000 year struggle of the greeks and then romans to gain control over the mediterranean basin and the commerce of northern africa and access to trade with the once black civilizations of the "middle east" , europe and the europeans would be vastly changed.

they would be lifted from relative poverty and technological backwardness and worldly ignorance into great wealth, education and eventual world dominance.

possibly the greatest change was in the mindset and character of the europeans who sought by the most ruthless of means to eliminate ,erase and replace the very people who were the source of europe's civilization. "and we want no more kings of troy" said neoptolemus the son of achilles as he threw the infant heir to the throne, from the walls of troy to his death.

in 300 bc the europeans through alexander the great--who memorized the illiad--the story of the trojan war and believed himself a direct descendant of achilles and neoptolemus, made war against and conquered the old phonecian cities , as well as the empires of persia and egypt --- and later around 200bc through the roman empire--that would totally destroy carthage and later through conquest, end 3000 years of egyptian dynasties--the europeans gain the wealth and technology they would need to build european civilization and the blueprint and disposition and desire for global conquest that would reemerge after the renaissance and finally succeed as a resut of the discovery of the americas in 1492.

this new phase of "modern european civilization" would begin 1000 years after the fall of rome , fueled by the violent destruction of west african civilization--the songhai empire and the violent destruction of native american civilizations--the aztec , incan and choctaw empires.

it would result in the death and enslavement of millions of africans and native americans whose blood and bones would be used as the water and fertilizer to grow the world we live in today.

"profits from the atlantic slave trade financed the industrial revolution."

response to tavis smiley--what does obama becoming president mean to you?

2009-01-25T12:49:00.000-08:00

Tavis Smiley is listed as one of my Blackplanet friends, so i was notified by e-mail that he has updated his blog at black planet. He asked readers to give a response to the inauguration and obama being the new president. i had written a response last wednesday --the day after the event but had not bothered to post it. so i penned this comment to tavis' request.

"While a part of me was for the first time proud to say I live in America, another part of me was saddened back into reality knowing that some of the same old devils who created this economic mess for obama to clean up are in his cabinet.
How much can he really do with these millstones tied around his neck? Joe biden is owned by the banks and credit card companies. hillary clinton ---is who she is .

Neither hill ,or her husband , the drug dealing , servant of daddy bush, bill clinton, are friends of black people.

Personally i think one of the reasons Ted kennedy backed Obama instead of hillary in the primaries was because of bill's role as president in allowing the death of John kennedy junior to be blamed on "pilot error" when his flight instructors said kennedy was a capable, experienced and very careful pilot who had passed the written and performance tests for instrument certification--and only needed to log sufficient hours at the controls while being observed by another instrument certified pilot , to get fully credentialed for instruments.

And less than 15 miles from the airport, a plane that Kennedy bought because it had extra safety features and could coast for miles to a soft landing-- in the event that the engine failed --radioed the control tower and then moments later, suddenly went into a nose dive and crashed into the ocean-- on a clear summer night-- for no identifiable reason.

kennedy junior's death ended any speculations of him running for elected office, or any investigations he and his magazine were planning into the murders of his father and uncle --and the trail in at least the murder of jfk sr, appears to point directly to daddy bush as one of the "bay of pigs" culprits involved.

I also do not expect from Obama any new investigation into the 9-11 attacks --although no one has adequately explained how six to ten trillion dollars worth of taxpayers money spent on defenses since the cold war era began --all failed at the same time ,on that same day --including any anti-aircraft batteries surrounding the pentagon and dedicated solely to its protection.

not one official lost his or her job , or even received a reprimand for the worst breakdown in security in modern history ? it's hard to believe, isn't it ,Tavis?

you know, Tavis, Breszhev , Khurschev and Stalin must be turning over and over in their graves to discover that all the old Soviet union really needed to have done to knock out the pentagon and defeat america all those decades of the cold war, was send in to do the job, a bunch of , vodka swilling, cocaine snorting, lap dance buying, lousy piloting , islamic FUNDAMENTALISTS with boxcutters from Walmart.

will obama reopen the investigation into 9-11 ? will bush and daddy bush be at least investigated for their numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity? will the election thefts in 2000 and 2004 be honestly looked into? at least so it doesn't happen again?

Will the scoundrels who created this sub-prime mess be investigated ?
will there be sufficient oversight to keep an eye on these same criminals who have their hands out for more bailout money from the taxpayers ?

and isn't it ironic that we taxpayers, who have been told since ronald reagan --not to expect any help from government, are being asked to foot the bill in bailing out these same advocates of reagonmics ? The side who did every thing they could to gut our social safety nets. Now they are screaming for us to break their fall and catch them .

will they be investigated and prosecuted by obama for their greed , lies and irresponsibility?

looking at the bunch of criminals surrounding him --i seriously doubt it. What do you think , Tavis. ? "

october surprise time again ...

2008-10-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

" The October Surprise conspiracy was an alleged plot that claimed representatives of the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign had conspired with Islamic Republic of Iran to delay the release of 52 Americans held hostage in Tehran until after the 1980 U.S. Presidential election. In exchange for their cooperation, the United States would supply weapons to Iran as well as unfreeze Iran's monetary assets being held by the US government.

Jimmy Carter had been attempting to deal with the Iran hostage crisis and the hostile regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini for nearly a year. Those who assert that a deal had been made allege that certain Republicans with CIA connections, including George H. W. Bush, arranged to have the hostages held through October until Reagan could defeat Carter in early November and then be released, thereby preventing an “October surprise” from the Carter administration. The hostages were released the day of Reagan's inauguration, twenty minutes after his inaugural address.

After twelve years of news reports looking into the alleged conspiracy, both houses of the US Congress held separate inquiries into the issue, and journalists from sources such as Newsweek and The New Republic looked into the charges. Both Congressional inquires, as well as the majority of investigative reports, found that the charges were groundless. Nevertheless, several individuals — most notably former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and former Reagan-Bush campaign and White House staffer Barbara Honegger — continue to claim otherwise."

reportedly a photo of vera baker

the tv news talking heads were busy at work this morning analyzing the presidential campaign. Karl "turd-blossom" Rove, that great political genius --at dirty underhanded tricks -- was on fox doing exactly what i thought the republicans would do . but still to see it in action, it was eerie, even for one as jaded by Us politics as i.

when the polls reported that obama began to clearly pull farther ahead, after the third debate and the economic meltdown, and the sarah palin alaskan ice follies all took their toll on john mcCain's campaign, i figured the republican strategy would be to to publicly repudiate the polls .

all morning long beginning with turd-blossom rove on fox and repeated from program to program and channel to channel, the republicans and neo-con pundits, almost like a collective mantra, began discounting and scoffing at the accuracy of the polls.

the republicans and neo-cons couldn't deny that mcCain was dragging along in the polls --they couldn't deny the obama lead with only 9 days left in the campaign .

they couldn't deny that according to all of those tv newshow maps that obama was leading in enough states so that if the election were held today, obama would have over 300 electoral votes --needing only 270 to win.

according to those tv news show maps, even if mcCain were to somehow grab up all the electoral votes from the states that were still too close to call a leader in , their combined total would still leave mcCain falling noticibly short of the 270 mark.

"if you can't beat 'em , cheat 'em" has been the neo-con game plan inherited from the days of nixon and the watergate plumbers . from south carolina and florida in 2000, to the swiftboat campaign and ohio in 2004--it's been one dirty trick after another by the repugnantcans. that it has worked for them in a so-called democracy made up of an educated and literate population, is the most surprising thing.

my immediate feeling was that it's the political version of football's 2 minute drill. here's what it looks like :

1. spread the lie on tv news shows that the widening gap between obama and mcCain in the polls is an exaggeration. obama's not up by 13 points. he's not up 10 points. he's not up by 8 or even 5 points--according to karl rove , those polls, even though there are more than one third more of them being used now than in 2004-- "the polls are all wrong."

2. after attempting to create and keep the public perception that mcCain is still within striking distance of obama, bring on more of the "let freedom ring" type ads- the "swiftboat" ads of 2008-- that accuse obama of helping to cause the economic meltdown and then linking the fannie mae and freddie mac management to obama's campaign and claim he benefitted politically from them and the economic collapse.

3. spread to the "overseas press" the unsubstantiated rumors that even the Us media won't touch, that obama had an affair with a young and beautiful campaign worker in his 2004 senate race --enter the afore-mentioned vera baker -- then also spread the rumor that michelle obama had the woman "exiled to the carribean" to keep her away from barack--then add the rumor that hustler and penthouse magazines are vying to pay millions for her story and to do a "photo-spread" of her in their publications.

4.rely on the circulating scandals and negative "swiftboat" ads and labels like "liberal", "leftlane" , and "socialist" to creat enough doubt among voters so that the "latest" polls the neo-cons commission can claim the gap between the candidates has narrowed to where it is only 1 to 3 points-- within the margin of error for polls

5. then at this point, using the election rigging software the repugnantcans commissioned back in 2000, described by clint curtis, and used in previous elections ,will guarantee a 51% to 49% come back victory for mcCain and his ditzy palin. the polls the evening of election day in 2004 indicated bush would lose by a landslide --when told this by some of his own staff, bush laughed it off --he knew the fix was in. the next day the headlines read bush 51 kerry 49.

on election day 2008 i hope we don't end up this time reminded of the immortal words of yogi berra "it looks like deja vu all over again"

who should madonna date next ?

2008-10-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

maybe this guy ...especially "if he did it" ...

Who Should Madonna Date Next?Today 1:37 PM PDT

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images Yeah, yeah, we know. That question might feel kinda sudden considering it's only been a day since Madonna and Guy Ritchie announced their split, but we can't help it. Obsessing over such things is what we do around here.

While all the rumors out there suggest that Madge and Alex Rodriguez are a hot item, that doesn't necessarily mean we think she should be with the Yankee slugger. Nothing against the guy, but the pop icon should keep her options open.

Maybe she needs a creative multihyphenate type, say, George Clooney, or someone who will make her laugh, like Vince Vaughn, or even a fellow musician. Kanye West, perhaps?

Well, those are some of our suggestions. Now it's your turn. Let us know who would make for a good Madonna matchup in the comments section below.

Comments

Corbo Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 1:43 PM
Madonna should date Antibiotics....lots of them.

sillyboi Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 1:45 PM
tom welling. Hot babies

madonna Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 1:56 PM
Satan

Huh? Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 1:56 PM
She should date Pee Wee Herman...they were made for each other.

Chowder Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 2:06 PM

Someone her own age. hmmmm, King Tut maybe..

Tranny Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 2:14 PM

Yuck. She looks like a transvestite troll.

Grip Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 2:15 PM
Lindsay Lohan

JG25 Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 2:16 PM

The question should be, Who hasn't she dated?

Kate Thu, Oct 16, 2008, 2:16 PM

A mortician. She looks like she needs one. Ick! Guy is free! Run, Guy, RUN!!! Free, free, FREE AT LAST! I'm so sick of hearing about this woman. She's nothing but a b with an itch and a saggy one at that.

the look of loss-- more faces in meltdown

2008-10-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

ruppert murdoch leaving wallstreet
tokyo's nikkei plunges stunning 10%

wallstreet trader
indonesia

japan

the look of loss--faces in meltdown

2008-10-12T05:25:00.000-07:00

$4 trillion evaporates from the Us market in 10 days

2008-10-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

Wallstreet took a bad beating with an estimted $2,400,000,000,000 dollars of value evaporating into thin air this past week. how much of that loss was eaten by the pension and retirement plans of the working classes ? how many nest eggs were devoured by the crooked casino known as wallstreet ?

to make matters worse, mainstays of waning Us manufacturing power, ford, gm and chrysler have been rumored in serious trouble, struggling just for enough cash to keep their plants open amidst deeply slumping new car and truck sales during the credit crunch resulting from the subprime housing crisis. the dow jones dipped below 8000 this week from a high of 14,000 only a year ago.

japan's nikkei dropped 10 percent in single day. egypt's caes index dropped close to 30% in two days.

indonesia, russia, and ukraine were forced to suspend trading on their respective stock markets as a result of steep plunge in prices. for russia it was the 10th time since mid september that trading had to be suspended.

brazil's bovespa index dropped about 21% in the past five trading days.
according to bloomsberg's , russia's key micex index has lost 66% of its value this year while china's key economic index, the csi300 lost 62% , and india's sensex has dropped by 44% .

iceland's banking industry collapsed despite an $8 billion emergency bailout from russia. as mentioned, brazil took steep loses in its market also, while mexico's peso plunged about 13% in value. hungary's budapest stock exchange fell to it lowest level in 3 years and latvia's key index fell to the level of it's 4 year low.

france and germany are attempting to coordinate efforts in firewalling against this financial contagion as england announces plans to increase its own bailout fund to shore up its troubled banks.

strangely now , talk in the euro-zone includes options of individual governments in the euro-zone each nationalizing interests in their troubled banks. governments would step in buy up shares in the troubled banks and own them in the name of their citizens to protect their national interest.

it is perhaps ironic that in the frenzy of globalization at the lead into and beginning of this millennium, the Us and the europeans were highly insistant that developing nations abandon any attempts they had made to protect their own precarious industries , businesses and resources through the vehicle of nationalization.

loans from the world bank and the imf ( "world bank" and "imf" read as "the developed nations" ) were made contingent upon already desperate third world nations giving up the nationalization of industries as a means of protecting the interests of the developing nations' citizens' ownership of their nation's industries and resources.

the west demanded that developing countries open up nationalized industries to western investment --exposing these once protected fragile vital industries and resources to western speculation, western manipulation and exploitation --all in the name of "freemarkets" --a term which we now painfully see means the wealthy loot the poor and middle classes for the benefit of the west's gaggle of wealthy amoral plutocrats who never play the game fairly or in a way that is equitable and beneficial to the most people.

this banking collapse shows we have socialism for the rich and dog eat dog "free market dynamics" for the middle class and poor. the crisis shows the developed , economically powerful nations of the world reserve nationalization and protection of THEIR vital industries, businesses and resources for themselves as an option while demanding that developing nations give up the option of nationalization when it blocks the west from sucking third world nations dry.

a nationalized oil industry once created by the baath party in iraq that financed universal free education for every iraqi from kindergarten to university and clean drinking water and universal health care for every citizen in iraq, has been ripped apart by the Us in an iraqi constitution written in part by neo-con strategist grover norquist.

this global crisis and financial meltdown illustrates once again that the plutocrats and developed nations constantly admonish the rest of us about individual responsibility and the glory of free market forces , but when those same market forces punish them for their greed and lack of due diligence --pointing out their own hypocrisies, we can clearly see they live by the credo, "do as i SAY not as i DO."

Investment | 08.10.2008
Germans Stockpiling Gold Amid Market Panic
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Gold dealers can't keep up with the demand
German gold dealers have stopped taking new orders for the precious metal as demand has skyrocketed. Gold is seen as a safe investment during the market turmoil.

In uncertain economic times, Germans are dumping stocks and shares to take refuge in precious metal, according to a Wednesday article in a Berlin newspaper.

German gold dealers report running low on stocks of gold bars and coins.

Heiko Ganss, head of the Berlin branch of gold merchant Pro Aurum, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that most gold traders were refusing new orders, as they couldn't meet the current demand.

"Demand is running well above our capacity to supply," he was quoted saying, saying retail banks in Germany were also unable to meet demand.

"Exploding demand"

Gold traded in London at $913 (656 euros) per troy ounce on Wednesday morning, up from $876.75 late Tuesday.

"Demand has exploded in the past few days," said Stephan Henkel, a gold broker at Umicore, which presses gold bars and coins and puts them on sale. Delivery times were running at two to four weeks.

"Currently, demand is about 10 times what it is at normal times," he said.

100k reward offered : connect rove with election rigger

2008-10-04T04:14:00.000-07:00

Non-profit offers $100k reward for info tying Rove to election rigging
10/03/2008 @ 9:59 pm
Filed by Andrew McLemore

A non-profit organization has offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who can supply information tying Republican strategist Karl Rove and computer expert Michael Connell to illegally manipulated elections, according to a Friday press release.

The group is called Velvet Revolution and is looking for evidence of criminal activity and Connell's relationship with Rove.

Citing testimony from another technology expert named Stephen Spoonamore, Velvet Revolution accuses the Republican Party of rigging elections for years by using Connell to exploit electronic voting systems.

Spoonamore filed an affidavit warning that the coming presidential election will be stolen by the GOP unless it is exposed. A colleague of Connell, Spoonamore gives evidence explaining Connell's involvement with past election rigging.

"Mr. Connell is a devout Catholic," Spoonamore wrote. "He has admitted to me that in his zeal to 'save the unborn' he may have helped others who have compromised elections."

The statement by Spoonamore also ridicules the Diebold voting system as "riddled with exploitable errors." The system was created by Diebold Election Systems Inc. and has been used in several elections accused of illegal meddling.

Connell was subpoenaed September 22 to testify under oath in a federal lawsuit in Ohio regarding election rigging and vote manipulation in past elections as well as the upcoming presidential race, according to Raw Story.

He has refused to testify and tried to quash his subpoena.

Connell ran the Florida Government computer network during the presidential election of 2000 and the Ohio Secretary of State election computers during the presidential election of 2004.

Attorney Cliff Arnebeck filed a motion in July to lift the stay on the 2004 Ohio election case in order to expedite investigations that could discover those responsible for the corruption and "protect the integrity of the 2008 election," the Brad Blog reported.

"We anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio," Arnebeck said.

Rove is also suspected of connections to Connell in the wake of a scandal surrounding the firing of eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons, The Free Press reported.

The GOP strategist allegedly sent emails that detailed plans to dismiss the attorneys using the e-mail accounts set up by Connell. Rove has also ignored a subpoena mandating he testify about his alleged role in the firings.

Velvet Revolution asks for all tips to be directed by phone at 1-888-VOTE or at Web site velvetrevolution.us.

greg palast :"armed madhouse-bush election fraud mechanics"--part one

>

pakistan marriot bombing

2008-09-24T17:29:00.000-07:00

marriot hotel bomb crater

September 23, 2008

The Deadly Blast in Islamabad
Why was the Marriott Targeted?
By TARIQ ALI

The deadly blast in Islamabad was a revenge attack for what has been going on over the past few weeks in the badlands of the North-West Frontier. It highlighted the crisis confronting the new government in the wake of intensified US strikes in the tribal areas on the Afghan border.

Hellfire missiles, drones, special operation raids inside Pakistan and the resulting deaths of innocents have fuelled Pashtun nationalism. It is this spillage from the war in Afghanistan that is now destabilizing Pakistan.

The de facto prime minister of the country, an unelected crony of President Zardari and now his chief adviser, Rehman Malik, said, "our enemies don't want to see democracy flourishing in the country". This was rich coming from him, but in reality it has little to do with all that. It is the consequence of a supposedly "good war" in Afghanistan that has now gone badly wrong. The director of US National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, admits as much, saying the Afghan leadership must deal with the "endemic corruption and pervasive poppy cultivation and drug trafficking" that is to blame for the rise of the neo-Taliban.

The majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the US presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace. Why, then, has the US decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military's nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply Washington was determined to break up Pakistan, since the country would not survive a disaster on that scale.

In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush administration's disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is hardly a secret that President Karzai's regime is becoming more isolated each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul.
When in doubt, escalate the war, is an old imperial motto. The strikes against Pakistan represent - like the decisions of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, to bomb and then invade Cambodia - a desperate bid to salvage a war that was never good, but has now gone badly wrong.

It is true that those resisting the Nato occupation cross the Pakistan-Afghan border with ease. However, the US has often engaged in quiet negotiations with them. Several feelers have been put out to the Taliban in Pakistan, while US intelligence experts regularly check into the Serena hotel in Swat to meet Maulana Fazlullah, a local pro-Taliban leader.

Pashtuns in Peshawar, hitherto regarded as secular liberals, told the BBC only last week that they had lost all faith in the west. The decision to violate the country's sovereignty at will had sent them in the direction of the insurgents.

While there is much grieving for the Marriott hotel casualties, some ask why the lives of those killed by Predator drones or missile attacks are considered to be of less value. In recent weeks almost 100 innocent people have died in this fashion. No outrage and global media coverage for them.

Why was the Marriot targeted? Two explanations have surfaced in the media. The first is that there was a planned dinner for the president and his cabinet there that night, which was cancelled at the last moment.

The second, reported in the respected Pakistani English-language newspaper, Dawn, is that "a top secret operation of the US Marines [was] going on inside the Marriott when it was attacked". According to the paper: "Well-equipped security officers from the US embassy were seen on the spot soon after the explosions. However, they left the scene shortly afterwards."

The country's largest newspaper, the News, also reported on Sunday that witnesses had seen US embassy steel boxes being carried into the Marriott at night on September 17. According to the paper, the steel boxes were permitted to circumvent security scanners stationed at the hotel entrance.

Mumtaz Alam, a member of parliament, witnessed this. He wanted to leave the hotel but, owing to the heavy security, he was not permitted to leave at the time and is threatening to raise the issue in parliament.

These may be the motivations for this particular attack, but behind it all is the shadow of an expanding war.

Tariq Ali's latest book is 'The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.'

Because You'll Believe Anything: Unknown Terrorist Group Claims Responsibility For Marriot Bombing
Winter Patriot

September 23, 2008

In a phone call to an Islamabad TV station, "a group calling itself Fedayeen-i-Islam" has claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad, according to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.

Fedayeen-i-Islam is "a little-known group" according to Bloomberg. But just how little-known?

Dawn's report quotes "a senior [Pakistani] government official" as saying:

"We have not heard the name of the organisation but we are trying to locate its network."

Amazing.

Ever since Saturday night's bombing the media have been wrestling with the big question: "Why did al Qaeda do this?"

But now they have to deal with a different question: "How is Fedayeen-i-Islam related to al Qaeda?"

It goes without saying that Fedayeen-i-Islam must be a violent radical Islamofascist group and that they must have bombed the hotel. And they must have been assisted, if not directed, by al Qaeda, and probably the Taliban as well. After all, who else but the world's most violent Islamic terrorists could make an anonymous phone call to a TV station?

It's nice to know the big questions are looked after. That gives us leeway -- here in the frozen corners of the blogosphere -- to ask meaningless little insignificant questions, like:

What were US Marines doing in the Marriot Hotel just before the attack?

According to Pakistan Daily, after the blast, a fire broke out on the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel.

Why these floors and not the others? The official explanation didn't make much sense. On the other hand, according to an eyewitness report from a member of Pakistan's Parliament, a group of US Marines had recently visited the hotel, while Admiral Mike Mullen was there.

According to the eyewitness, all access to the hotel was closed off while the Marines unloaded steel boxes from a white US Embassy truck, bypassed both Pakistani and hotel security, and took these boxes directly to the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel -- just where the fires mysteriously broke out.

Were the Marines loading the building with incendiaries? It certainly wouldn't be the first time a building was primed by insiders for a subsequent "terrorist attack".

I wasn't kidding in my prior post when I called the Marriot bombing "Pakistan's 9/11". But I didn't explain myself particularly well, either.

There's a long list of similarities between the two attacks, including the rush by both politicians and the media to cast the event as "an attack on democracy", when in both cases the attacks came at critical times for governments which falsely claimed to have been legitimately elected.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari can now claim to be in an all-out war against radical Islamic terrorists, and he may even be able to build up enough "political capital" to drag his nation in a direction in which it doesn't wish to go.

As usual, the attack has been followed by a barrage of media nonsense, such as a report from the Financial Times which says men with ties to al Qaeda have been arrested in Pakistan in connection with the Marriot bombing.

Pakistani investigators yesterday said they had found new evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement in the suicide truck bombing of Islamabad's Marriott hotel. Intelligence officials also reported the arrest of up to five militants in connection with planning attacks [...]

According to an intelligence official, two of the five arrested men "came with conclusive evidence of close links to al-Qaeda. Their connection to the militant group is beyond any doubt."

Let's see now: The police are arresting members of one group while another group claims responsibility. Does this not undermine the claims of the police?

If you were tripped up by this little bit of logic, you must be a Democrat, since according to the Republicans, the Democrats have failed to learn the lessons of September 11th, 2001.

And the primary lesson from September 11th, of course, is that logic, evidence, and science are all past their prime.

Therefore, we don't use forensic evidence to solve crimes anymore; we label the crimes acts of war, destroy the forensic evidence, and attack defenseless countries instead. For revenge. Or something.

If you believe that this massive bombing attack was perpetrated by a Pakistani terrorist group that the Pakistani government has never even heard of, then it's not much of a stretch to believe that this hitherto-unknown group must have hitherto-unknown ties to al Qaeda, as well.

As the AP reported (via the Toronto Star):

Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik said "all roads lead to FATA" in major Pakistani suicide attacks – referring to Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where U.S. officials fear Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda No.2 Ayman al-Zawahri are hiding.

And there you have it; it doesn't matter who did it; it doesn't matter who claimed responsibility; it doesn't matter why Marines were acting mysteriously (and evading security) in the building shortly before it was attacked; it doesn't matter what evidence is collected during the investigation; it doesn't even matter whether there is an investigation.

What matters is that the media and the politicians have already decided who's going to be blamed, and who's going to pay the price. And once again -- just like 9/11 -- it won't be the perpetrators.

September 24, 2008, 15:21 Russia Today

NATO accused of sheltering Afghan heroin trade

Since NATO forces invaded Afghanistan, the production of heroin in the country increased by 2.5 times and Afghanistan has become the world leader in heroin production. Eighteen tonnes of heroin from Afghanistan ends up in Russia each year.

Russia at war with heroin

As a result of this war Russia has become one of the main markets for Afghan opiates, involuntary acknowledged Russian Federal Drugs Control Service, and drug traffickers are financing terrorist organizations worldwide, says the Interfax news agency.

The Director of FDCS, Viktor Ivanov, tolds journalists that a drug addict's life is limited to 5-7 years from the moment he becomes one.

He also said that those 400,000 drug addicts officially registered in Russia in 2001 are already dead and the number of new ones is growing by 30% every year. That is why the losses should be regarded as Russia's direct casualties in the war that NATO wages on Afghanistan.

"The problem of Afghan opiates has a geopolitical character," stressed Ivanov.

While in Russia up to 90% of drug addicts depend on Afghan opiates, in Europe this volume is up to 10%.

Strategic drug trafficking

The head of the FDCS insists that it is not just the Taliban that manages the heroin traffic but the Afghan governmental and security services' officials known by name.

The fact that dozens of high-ranking Afghan officials are known to be involved in the drug industry means that corrupted authorities work hand in hand with the Taliban terrorist movement, which in turn means that NATO military forces support the current Afghan regime.

Within the framework of the Russia-NATO Council Russia is financing and conducting special training for Afghan police squads dealing with drug trafficking. Unfortunately, for more than a year not a single Afghan policeman came to Russia for training which is no wonder considering the fact that all actions of Afghanistan's security services should be sanctioned by the U.S.

What Was Mysterious Activity Going on in the Marriott Hotel Islamabad by United States Marines

Sunday, 21 September 2008 12:18 www.daily.pk

Marriott Hotel has now become a ghost house which was yesterday the most beautiful and prestigious hotels in the Islamabad. While the condemnation of the blasts and the deaths and the loss of property is going on from all the quarters, some intriguing news is also pouring in.

After the blast, mysteriously fire was started at the fourth and fifth floors. It was said that this fire was the result of gas pipeline burst running through the hotel. The million dollar question is that was the gas pipeline not running through the other floors? Why the fire broke out from the fourth and fifth flours? That is the question which perhaps holds the key to the mystery as why the hotel was targeted yesterday, in which more than 60 people died including many foreigners.

Though it would never get confirmed but the fire on the fifth and fourth floor of the hotel broke out because those flours were housing the mysterious steel boxes under the heavy guard of United States marines and no one including the Pakistani security forces and the security men of the hotel were allowed to go near with the them. These boxes were shifted inside the hotel when the Admiral Mike Mullen met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and others in Islamabad.

It is said that one member of parliament Mumtaz Alam who belongs to the PPP, the ruling party was there eye witnessed the whole scene when the white truck of US embassy came to the gate of Marriot Hotel and US marines themselves unloaded the steel boxes from the trucks and shifted them to the fourth and fifth floors without passing through them the scanners at the entrance of the hotels. When the truck was there, all the entrance and the exit passage way to the hotels were closed.

And now this blast has occurred at the Marriott, while that mysterious activity was going on.

Was Marriott Hotel Islamabad an attack on US Marines and What Was Stored On Floors 4 And 5 U.S. military equipment?

Sunday, 21 September 2008 11:32 www.daily.pk

Was there a top secret and mysterious operation of the US Marines going on inside the Marriott when it was attacked on Saturday evening? No one will confirm it but circumstantial evidence is in abundance.

Witnessed by many, including a PPP MNA and his friends, a US embassy truckload of steel boxes was unloaded and shifted inside the Marriott Hotel on the same night when Admiral Mike Mullen met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and others in Islamabad.

Both the main gates (the entrance and the exit) of the hotel were closed while no one except the US Marines were either allowed to go near the truck or get the steel boxes unloaded or shift them inside the hotel. These steel boxes were not passed through the scanners installed at the entrance of the hotel lobby and were reportedly shifted to the fourth and fifth floors of the Marriott.

Besides several others, PPP MNA Mumtaz Alam Gilani and his two friends, Sajjad Chaudhry, a PPP leader, and one Bashir Nadeem, witnessed this mysterious activity to which no one other than the PPP MNA objected and protested.

A source present there told that after entertaining them with refreshments at the Nadia restaurant at midnight when Mumtaz Alam, along with his friends, was to leave the hotel, he found a white US embassy truck standing right in front of the hotel's main entrance.

Both the In-gate and the Out-gate of the hotel were closed while almost a dozen well-built US Marines in their usual fatigues were unloading the steel boxes from the truck. No one, including the hotel security men, was either allowed to go near the truck or touch the steel boxes, which were being shifted inside the hotel but without passing through the scanners.

Upon inquiry, one of the three PPP friends who was waiting for the main gates of the hotel to open to get his car in, was informed that the suspicious boxes were shifted to the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel. Mumtaz Alam was furious both at the US Marines and the hotel security not only for the delay caused to them but also for the security lapse he was witnessing.

On his protest, there was absolutely no response from the Marines and the security men he approached were found helpless. Mumtaz Alam told the hotel security official that they were going to endanger the hotel and its security. He was also heard telling his friends that he would never visit the hotel again. He also threatened to raise the issue in parliament.

One does not know whether the PPP MNA revisited the hotel after that mysterious midnight but his brother Imtiaz Alam, who is a senior journalist, was in the same hotel when the truck exploded at the main gate of the hotel. Imtiaz Alam had a lucky escape and found his way out of the hotel with great difficulty in pitch darkness.

One of the lifts he was using fell to the ground floor just after he forced the door open on the 4th floor and got out of it.

Pakistan leaders escaped Marriott bomb at last minute

Pakistan's president and prime minister were scheduled to eat at the Islamabad Marriott the night it was bombed, but changed plans at the last minute, a top official has said.

By Isambard Wilkinson in Islamabad
Last Updated: 3:04PM BST 22 Sep 2008

President Asif Ali Zardari (right) and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani (left) had both intended to be at the Marriott hotel Photo: EPA

A suicide bomber rammed a truck packed with over half a tonne of explosives into the outer security gates of the luxury hotel on Saturday night, killing at least 53 people and wounding more than 260.

"The national assembly speaker had arranged a dinner for the entire leadership, for the president, prime minister and armed services chiefs at the Marriott that day," interior ministry chief Rehman Malik told reporters.

"The president and the prime minister changed the venue to the prime minister's house. The function was not held at the Marriott, thus the whole leadership was saved," Mr Malik added.

President Asif Ali Zardari only took office earlier this month after forcing out his predecessor Pervez Musharraf, who was himself subjected to several assassination attempts.

Mr Zardari's wife Benazir Bhutto was killed in a bombing last December that some of her supporters blamed on elements close to the country's secret service.

The car of prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was shot at in early September on a road near Rawalpindi.

Speculation has mounted over how the highly powerful RDX and TNT explosives were procured. Some analysts pointed to the disappearance last month of a truck of explosives manufactured at the military munitions factory at Wah.

Investigators are trying to track down an Islamabad-based al-Qaeda cell believed to have carried out the devastating bombing of the Marriott Hotel, according to security officials.

Amir Mir, a Pakistani terrorism expert, said that suspicion had fallen on a leading jihadi, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, who has strong links to the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan's military intelligence establishment.

The hunt came as British Airways announced that it was suspending all flights to the beleaguered country amid security fears sparked by Saturday's attack.

Investigators said they believed the attackers constructed the massive truck bomb at a safe house in the capital, since all lorries entering the heavily-guarded city are searched at checkpoints.

Pakistan's army is in the midst of an offensive against militants in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border, while the United States has intensified attacks on militants on the Pakistani side of the border, infuriating the Pakistani army.

A security official said troops had fired at two US helicopters that intruded into Pakistani air space on Sunday night, forcing them back to Afghanistan.

Elsewhere, troops were attacking militant hideouts, a military spokesman said.

"Our security forces are engaging militants with artillery fire and targeting their hideouts," said the spokesman, Major Murad Khan.

Tensions flared in other areas of the country, as Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged fire across a de facto border dividing the disputed Kashmir region, wounding a Pakistani woman, police and security officials said.

The exchange was the latest in a spate of recent small clashes along the border, known as Line of Control, after a period of calm since a ceasefire in late 2003 and a peace process between the nuclear-armed rivals was launched in 2004.

"It was a brief exchange. Maybe a few rounds but unfortunately, a woman received a bullet in her leg," a security official, who asked not to be identified, said of the exchange in the Madarpur sector in the south of Kashmir.

Unidentified gunmen also kidnapped an Afghan diplomat after shooting dead his driver in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, police said.

Taliban denies role in hotel attack
AlJazeera.net

Sdeptember 22, 2008

A senior commander of the Taliban in Pakistan has denied that his group was responsible for a bomb attack at Islamabad's Marriott hotel, in which at least 53 people died and 270 were injured.

Baitullah Mehsud said on Monday that the Taliban had no role in Saturday's attack, Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, reported.

"Mehsud said that their group does not believe in killing so many locals in the attack," Hyder said.

"RDX was used in the attack, which is a very volatile substance. The big question is: Where did such a large amount of RDX come from? In previous attacks, militants have not used this substance."

In addition to the dozens killed, at least 270 people were injured in the attack on the hotel, a favoured place for foreigners and the wealthy elite.

British Airways announced on Monday that it was temporarily suspending flights to and from Pakistan, citing security concerns after the hotel bombing.

The airline, which offers six flights to Pakistan each week, did not face a direct security threat, but took the step out of caution, Suhail Rehman, a BA spokesman, said.

Foreign diplomatic missions and non-governmental organisations operating in Pakistan have also reviewed their security status.

Question over bomb

One of the lines of inquiry taken by Pakistani investigators is that the bomb attack was carried by an al-Qaeda cell operating in Islamabad.

They said that the attackers constructed the 600kg truck bomb at a safe house in the capital because vehicles entering the city are subject to routine searches.

"Our focus at the moment is to track down the network in Islamabad which must have facilitated the movement and construction of the bomb," a senior official said.

Video footage of the attack showed the truck failing to break down a security barrier at the entrance to the Marriott hotel.

Security guards at the five-star hotel tried to put the resulting fire with extinguishers before the full bomb detonated, devastating the complex.

Two Americans, the Czech ambassador to Pakistan and a Vietnamese woman were among those killed in Saturday's attack.

A Danish intelligence agent is still missing after the blast.

"Carrying 600 kilos of explosives over long distances and through checkpoints is not possible, so our immediate suspicion is that the bomb was loaded in Islamabad," the official said.

It is possible that the explosives used in the bomb could have been sneaked into Islamabad in small quantities from the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, he said.

Military operation

A senior Pakistani security official said on Monday that the explosives used in the bombing were like those used in two recent deadly attacks.

"We are collecting evidence. The explosives were similar to those used in the Danish embassy, which was claimed by al-Qaeda, and the attack on the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) camp in Rawalpindi last year," the official said.

An al-Qaeda leader claimed responsibility for the attack on the Danish embassy, but no group said it had targeted the ISI facility.

Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, said after the Marriott attack that the government will take a tough line against fighters linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Pakistan's military is currently trying to bring under control of the country's tribal region bordering Afghanistan, an area long considered to be a safe haven for opposition fighters.

mom, you are missed --nov 1931 --sept 11, 2004-- rest in peace

2008-09-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

almost all of my life you were always here. that one day you would be gone ---it never entered my mind ...

sarah palin strongly supports aerial hunting of wolves

2008-09-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

aerial wolf hunting

"Palin has also drawn heat from conservationists for pushing to let citizens shoot wolves from the air, and for supporting looser bear-hunting rules aimed at reducing bear populations in order to inflate numbers of moose and caribou, which draw big-game hunters to the state. She opposed a ballot initiative to change the law so that only Department of Fish and Game personnel could shoot wolves or bears from the air. She drew even more criticism for using $400,000 of taxpayer money to "educate Alaskans" about "predator control." The ballot initiative was voted down last week.

"Decimating them with ongoing perpetual programs is in no way in line with environmentally responsible predator management," said Toppenberg of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. "The ecosystems up here are intact, but they certainly won't be if we decimate the population in order to artificially inflate the population of moose and caribou."

sarah who? sarah now? sarah ever? sarah in wonderland-- the smell of victory, smells

2008-09-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

So america's all a flutter over sarah . the alaska governor who failed . in a state at the top of the list for providing funding for contraceptives sarah failed to successfully guide her own daughter past the dangers of teen pregnancy . now she is asking for a chance to help guide a nation of 300 million people.

yes, we know kids don't listen and they make mistakes , but every parent of every kid knows from day one that the teen pregnancy thing is one of the crucial life-limiting obstacles that every parent must help their child avoid as part of the successful transition from teen to adult . team palin failed to get the job done.

it's good that the republicans --long time self-appointed champions of "individual responsibility" --can find it in their hearts to embrace unwed teen mothers --well , at least , embrace the unwed teen mothers from white republican families .

i'm sure they'll eventually find that the best way to help these unwed teen mothers is to further cut taxes on the wealthy and increase the military budget. of course, in an ideal republican world, the job of helping unwed teen mothers would likely be outsourced to haliburton .

now , we must ask, if news came out that an obama daughter was 17 , pregnant and unwed , wouldn't his campaign for president be floating facedown and lifeless in the water?

republican attack dogs would be screaming from every headline and tv screen , " if he couldn't lead his own daughter past the pitfalls of teen pregnancy --something every parent is responsible for --then how can the nation have confidence that he can successfully lead us anywhere? "

if mcCain wins the election , at 72 he'd be 2 years older than reagan when "the raygun" took office. a vice president able to step up and lead the nation if events require , would be an even more crucial necessity if mcCain managed to win the oval office.

if sarah , as a parent--as a female-- couldn't successfully lead her own daughter past the dangers of early pregnancy --a responsibility shared by every parent-- is she the one , AT THIS TIME--especially as the mother of another very young child with very special needs , requiring significant amounts of parental care--is sarah palin the one to be potentially next in line --a heartbeat from the big chair?

and if , as mcCain said , he knew all this before choosing her as his Vp , then what does this decision to pick her --said to have been a snap judgement , made quickly like a fighter pilot, on gut instinct , say about mcCain's leadership abilities?

mc Cain --maybe right for a dogfight-- but wrong for the white house.

the oval office is a place where more deliberative thinking --like a chessplayer rather than a kneejerk -- is often needed.

republican Vp nominee sarah palin believes in creationism and believes it should be taught to children in schools. in other words, she believes the earth is 6000 years old and all the scientific data on evolution and global warming is false.

palin told high school students to support Us troops in iraq because they were carrying out "god's mission". she's definitely another right wing-nut, bible-fascist fundamentalist .

she let it be announced her daughter WILL marry the boy who got her pregnant. shotgun marriages don't work. at 17, her daughter is about as ready to be a wife as she is ready to be a mother and parent to an infant child. one mistake doesn't correct another. why force a scared , confused kid into marriage? who at 17, is mature enough and able to choose their primary companion , business partner and soulmate for the next 50 years?

palin does not believe in a woman's right to choose whether to continue, or end a pregnancy-- even in cases of rape or incest . she said in 2006 that if her own daughter was raped and became pregnant, she would not support an abortion.

in her state of alaska the number of rapes was twice the national rate and pregnancy from rape was 25 % higher than the national average.

whether you believe HUMAN life begins at conception, or only the POTENTIAL for human life begins at conception, no one has the right to force their belief in this matter on every woman--especially if you are a man.

each woman has the right to make her own decision without being coerced by religion , government , men , or other women --it's her body not theirs.

palin's state of alaska pays bounties for hunters who shoot animals from helicoptors --palin herself strongly supports and apparently participates in aerial wolf hunts. she says bears should be included as the objects in those hunts because they, like wolves, are natural checks on moose and caribou populations.

in her reasoning , less wolves and bears would mean more moose and caribou for big game hunters to bag in alaska and at the same time drop more traveling sportsmen's dollars into the state coffers.

as touted , palin "took on big oil" , she increased their taxes by about 6 billion in alaska and then gave out about $1000 each in energy rebates to alaskans to help offset rising oil costs--but that sounds like she adopted obama's plan to tax windfall oil profits and then rebate the public. why are the republicans hiding the fact that sarah palin raised taxes?

from an article titled : Alaskan Greens Say McCain's VP Pick Has Anti-Environmental Record

"Gov. Palin will simply continue the failed policies of the Bush-Cheney administration and their Big Oil friends -- policies that could make us even more dependent on foreign oil," said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski. "Gov. Palin characterizes McCain's flip-flop on drilling offshore as a positive step in his transformation from maverick to Big Oil's best friend."

the environmentalists in her own state distrust sarah palin.

"Most people in the Alaskan environmental community see her as an ally of Big Oil, willing to set aside both science and the public good to benefit the industry."

"Palin has also opposed efforts to protect Cook Inlet beluga whales, a genetically distinct population of whales located only in this Alaskan inlet. Scientists estimate that they numbered 1,300 in the '80s; now they're down to just 375. Environmental groups have been pressing for a listing to protect the whales, but Palin has urged the federal government not to list, again citing threats to the oil and gas industry. 'I am especially concerned that an unnecessary federal listing and designation of critical habitat would do serious long-term damage to the vibrant economy of the Cook Inlet area,' said Palin in a statement last year."

"Another major concern for enviros is Palin's stance on endangered species in the state. After the Bush administration's Department of Interior listed the polar bear as a threatened species in May, the governor sued the department. 'We believe that the ... decision to list the polar bear was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available,' said Palin, who also penned an op-ed in The New York Times on the subject. "

"Palin and other state officials expressed concern that listing polar bears as threatened would impair oil and gas development in the state. Palin argued that the listing decision was based on 'the unproven long-term impact of any future climate change on the species' and that a 'comprehensive review' of the federal science by state wildlife officials found no reason to support listing the bears as endangered."

"But emails released via a public-records request later showed that Alaskan state scientists agreed with federal researchers that polar bears are threatened by shrinking ice. 'Overall, we believe that the methods and analytical approaches used to examine the currently available information supports the primary conclusions and inferences stated' in federal reports, wrote Robert Small, head of the marine mammals program for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game."

" 'This was the Bush administration Fish and Wildlife [Service]. It's not like these people are bear-huggers,' said Van Tuyn. "State scientists looked at it and said that's the best science, and Palin said, 'Keep your mouths shut,' and she turned around to the public and said, 'I do not support listing the polar bear, the science doesn't support it.'"

and finally , on foreign policy , palin and mcCain and all the right wing-nut, neo-press talk about the success of the surge and STILL talk about victory in iraq . either they are idiots, liars , or completely in denial .

do a google for the arabic word "jizyah" if you think the "decrease" in violence in iraq is some kind of Us victory.

since they had done nothing to the Us to warrant an invasion , the sunnis in iraq were obligated by quran to fight the invaders , the aggressors, the oppressors .

"slaughter is better than oppression ...oppression is worse than slaughter...allah loves not the oppressor ...allah loves not the aggressor " .

once the invasion took place, iraqi resistance had to begin. once begun, it had to continue as a matter of religious , national and personal honor.

how does it end? the aggressor leaves , or accepts islam --under which, hostilities are "supposed" to cease, or the aggressor ceases to attack and pays the jizyah as a sign of being vanquished .

the "surge" is paying 70,000 sunni insurgents in iraq $10 each man, per day, NOT to kill americans.

the Us is paying iraqi sunnis the "jizyah" --the tax , or in old roman empire terms , the "tribute" monies a defeated subject people pays to their vanquishers and masters, not to kill them.

"The tax that is taken from the free non—Muslim subjects of a Muslim government whereby they ratify the compact that assures them protection, as though it were compensation for not being slain ." --e.w. lane

"Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book (Christians and Jews), until they pay the jizyah (tribute, tax) with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued." --Holy Quran (Al-Tawbah 9:29)

victory in iraq ?

victory by whom?

the smell of victory smells like de-feet

recent polytricks

2008-09-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

Surprising everyone , john mcCain picks a female running mate !

a failed mediation involving henry kissinger , jimmy carter and a cantankerous john mcCain takes place--but no room for henry in the campaign...

and then, only days after her selection as john mcCain's VP, sarah palin's 17 yr old daughter confides...

"mama, i'm pregnant !"

To rebut rumors, Palin says daughter, 17, pregnant

By Steve Holland
Mon Sep 1, 12:03 PM ET

The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin's five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.

"We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us," the Palins' statement said.

"Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support," the Palins said.

The Palins asked the news media to respect the young couple's privacy.

"Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media, respect our daughter and Levi's privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates," the statement concluded.

MCCAIN KNEW

Senior McCain campaign officials said McCain knew of the daughter's pregnancy when he selected Palin last week as his vice presidential running mate, deciding that it did not disqualify the 44-year-old governor in any way.

In the short period since she was announced last Friday, Palin has helped to energize the Republican Party's conservative base, giving the McCain camp fresh energy going into the campaign for the November 4 election against Democrat Barack Obama.

McCain officials said the news of the daughter's pregnancy was being released to rebut what one aide called "mud-slinging and lies" circulating on liberal blog sites.

According to these rumors, Sarah Palin had faked a pregnancy and pretended to have given birth in May to her fifth child, a son named Trig who has Down syndrome. The rumor was that Trig was actually Bristol Palin's child and that Sarah Palin was the grandmother.

A senior McCain campaign official said the McCain camp was appalled that these rumors had not only been spread around liberal blog sites and partisan Democrats, but also were the subject of heightened interest from mainstream news media.

"The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama's name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,"' a senior aide said.

biden / hill 2012 ?

2008-08-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

"As soon as I ditch the 'soul brother' , it's you and me, baby--the real 'dream team' ...uhh BTW... when are you going to tell old 'has been' Bill, it's over?"

meanwhile...

"Citizens for McCain is an organization within the McCain campaign for people who put country before political party and support the candidate for President who has a proven record of bipartisanship.

I have worked with John McCain for many years in the U.S. Senate and know from experience that he can unite Democrats, Republicans and Independents like no one else in this country. He did it in the United States Senate and he can do it as President of the United States.

Thank you for your willingness to help me expand this new organization. Together, we will make history." --Joe Lieberman democrat from Connecticut

"McCain /Lieberman 2008--Bigger Oil, Bigger Israel, Bigger Bombs"

geo-strategic-energy wars... iran , georgia , poland --stakes grow higher in Us-israel-Eu/russia confrontation

2008-08-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

from FARS news agency

Urgent:

Iran Sends First Satellite into Orbit
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran successfully orbited its first home-made satellite Sunday morning.

The satellite named Omid (Hope) has been designed and built by Iranian specialists and was orbited by an Iranian carrier rocket.

In February Tehran successfully launched the Explorer-1 research rocket, which is capable of carrying a satellite into orbit, and unveiled the country's first domestically built satellite, Omid.

The achievement has drawn much attention from around the world, specially from among Muslim nations, as Iran is under heavy sanctions by the West and the UN Security Council making it develop the technology and build every part and equipment needed in the field of aerospace.

The satellite was sent into orbit today on the occasion of the birthday anniversary of Shiites' 12th Imam (May God Hasten His Reappearance).

Joint Chief of Staff on Sunday congratulated Supreme Leader of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei and brave Iranian nation on successful launching of the rocket carrying the country's first satellite.

In a message issued on Sunday, the Joint Chief of Staff said the rocket carrying the country's first satellite, was successfully fired on the birth Anniversary of the last Imam of Shiites, Hazrat Mahdi (May God Hasten His Reappearance), thus illustrating the auspicious name of the Imam in the space.

The message said the launching marks the second instance of successful tentative firing of such rockets.

Russia: Poland risks attack because of US missiles By JIM HEINTZ, Associated Press Writer
Fri Aug 15, 7:16 PM ET

A top Russian general said Friday that Poland's agreement to accept a U.S. missile interceptor base exposes the ex-communist nation to attack, possibly by nuclear weapons, the Interfax news agency reported.

The statement by Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn is the strongest threat that Russia has issued against the plans to put missile defense elements in former Soviet satellite nations.

Poland and the United States on Thursday signed a deal for Poland to accept a missile interceptor base as part of a system the United States says is aimed at blocking attacks by rogue nations. Moscow, however, feels it is aimed at Russia's missile force.

"Poland, by deploying (the system) is exposing itself to a strike — 100 percent," Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of staff, was quoted as saying.

He added, in clear reference to the agreement, that Russia's military doctrine sanctions the use of nuclear weapons "against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons if they in some way help them." Nogovitsyn that would include elements of strategic deterrence systems, he said, according to Interfax.

At a news conference earlier Friday, Nogovitsyn had reiterated Russia's frequently stated warning that placing missile-defense elements in Poland and the Czech Republic would bring an unspecified military response. But his subsequent reported statement substantially stepped up a war of words.

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski was quoted Friday by the Polish news agency PAP as saying that Poland is open to Russian inspections because it wants to give Moscow "tangible proof" that the planned base is not directed against Russia.

U.S. officials have said the timing of the deal was not meant to antagonize Russian leaders at a time when relations already are strained over the recent fighting between Russia and Georgia over the separatist Georgian region of South Ossetia.

Russian forces went deep into Georgia in the fighting, raising wide concerns that Russia could be seeking to occupy parts of its small, pro-U.S. neighbor, which has vigorously lobbied to join NATO, or even to force its government to collapse.

"I think the Russian behavior over the last several days is generally concerning not only to the United States but to all of our European allies," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, when asked about Russian threats against Poland as a result of the missile defense agreement.

He also suggested that earlier U.S. offers for broad cooperation with Moscow on the missile defense program may be reevaluated considering the latest developments.

Under the agreement that Warsaw and Washington reached Thursday, Poland will accept an American missile interceptor base.

Washington says the planned system, which is not yet operational, is needed to protect the U.S. and Europe from possible attacks by missile-armed "rogue states" like Iran. The Kremlin, however, feels it is aimed at Russia's missile force and warns it will worsen tensions.

In an interview on Poland's news channel TVN24, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the United States agreed to help augment Poland's defenses with Patriot missiles in exchange for placing 10 missile defense interceptors in the Eastern European country.

He said the deal also includes a "mutual commitment" between the two nations to come to each other's assistance "in case of trouble."

That clause appeared to be a direct reference to Russia.

Poland has all along been guided by fears of a newly resurgent Russia, an anxiety that has intensified with Russia's offensive in Georgia. In past days, Polish leaders said that fighting justified Poland's demands that it get additional security guarantees from Washington in exchange for allowing the anti-missile base on its soil.

"Simply the existence of this installation increases Poland's security," Polish President Lech Kaczynski said Friday.

___

from the israeli news papers

Source: Secret IDF material went unguarded in GeorgiaFormer Israeli soldier returns disillusioned from training Georgian soldiers for company owned by Brig.-Gen. Hirsch in preparation for war with Russia; says confidential army material such as charts, officers' names was revealed to foreign troops
Nava Tzuriel

Tomer (alias), formerly a soldier of an elite IDF unit, returned from Georgia a short while ago. He was enlisted by Defensive Shield, a company owned and operated by Brigadier General (Res.) Gal Hirsch, to help train Georgian soldiers for battle, but returned disappointed in the manner in which the company handles secret army material.

Hirsch's company was responsible for training an elite search and rescue unit, and training was handled by the companies of two other reserve officers, all of which hired ex-soldiers like Tomer. This resulted in hundreds of former IDF soldiers working as trainers in Georgia over the past few months.

Tomer said he and his friends had at first received guidelines for the handling of covert material, listing what they could and couldn't tell Georgian soldiers about IDF activities. But in actuality, he said, the Georgians were told top secret information.

"When I arrived in the operations room I saw a book of IDF safety instructions that shouldn't have been there," he said. "There were IDF CDs that explicitly said, 'Confidential' documenting army activities, charts from special units' operations, and officers' names." He added that the room was not guarded, making this information easily obtainable to everyone.

Tomer said the main reason for the infidelity was mercenary. "The training companies wanted to finish the projects as quickly as possible in order to create more projects and make more money," he said. "We knew the training had to be completed quickly because the soldiers would soon have to get into real military activity."

He added that the Georgian officers told their soldiers they would be going to help NATO forces in Iraq, while the real objective was Ossetia and Abkhazia.

According to Tomer, Gal Hirsch came to visit the trainers now and then, but was mostly absent. And when the training was officially over, Tomer did not feel that his soldiers were ready for war. "By Israeli standards, the soldiers had almost zero capability and the officers were mediocre," he said. "It was clear that taking that army to war was illogical."

By keeping in touch with one of his soldiers, Tomer discovered that most of the men he had trained had indeed been killed in the war. "Some of them became good friends of mine and invited me into their homes. It's hard to digest that these people have suddenly vanished from the face of the earth," he lamented.

Defense Shield stated in response that "all of the company's actions were approved by the Defense Ministry, including the materials transferred to the training companies. The information security standards were set, emphasized, and maintained by experienced security officers, and we have no knowledge of these claims."

Nasrallah: Georgia lost because of Israel

In speech marking two-year anniversary of Second Lebanon War, Hizbullah secretary-general mocks Israeli political, military leadership: 'Gal Hirsch was defeated in Lebanon, and now lost the war for Georgia'
Roee Nahmias

In a speech marking the two-year anniversary of the Second Lebanon War, Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah mocked Israel's political and military leadership.

"The entire front line of the army's brass stepped down because of the war. Gal Hirsch, who was defeated in Lebanon, went to Georgia and they too lost because of him," laughed Nasrallah.

Hirsch, a brigadier-general in the reserves, served as commander of the IDF's Galilee Division during the war and resigned in its wake. In recent years he consulted the Georgian army on the establishment of elite units and rearmament, and gave various courses in the fields of combat intelligence and fighting in built-up areas.

"Relying on Israeli experts and weapons, Georgia learned why the Israeli generals failed," proclaimed Nasrallah, "what happened in Georgia is a message to all those the Americans are seeking to entangle in dangerous adventures."

'Israel plotting to kill Hizbullah leaders'
Nasrallah accused Israel of seeking to assassinate Hizbullah commanders. "I tell the Zionists: We don't fear you. Say whatever you want and do whatever you want. We know that you are planning new assassinations of resistance leaders. But this will not make us retreat," he said.

Nasralla said that keeping the group's arsenal a "secret" is part of its battle against Israel, and made a point of not disclosing whether his guerrillas now have anti-aircraft missile systems.

"There has been an Israeli uproar about the reinforcement of Hizbullah's strength. There has been talk of sophisticated arms and an air defense system and threats if Hizbullah uses this kind of system," Nasrallah said.

"No one can expect me to stand up and say (whether) we possess new weapons or we don't," he added. "Keeping (weapons) secret is part of ... (Hizbullah's) strength. This is part of directing the battle of liberation and resistance against this enemy."

'Barak ran from Lebanon in 2000'
Nasrallah asserted that "the results of the Second Lebanon War are evident even today, in both the military and political fields in Israel." He said Israel is facing the worst leadership crisis in its history.

The Hizbullah chief also addressed recent comments by Defense Minister Ehud Barak regarding the importance of having an experienced leadership. "Ehud Barak admits that the reason for losing the war

was a lack of military experience. So who is there left in Israel with military experience if not all those failed generals? Those who stand against us today are the same failures who have already suffered blows from us before."

He also ridiculed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, quoting an Israel newspaper as saying Olmert "died two years ago in Lebanon and will be brought to political burial in two months."

"Is it Barak or Ashkenazi who failed against the resistance as head of the Northern Command? ."

"This September we will see the end of Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's rule. I remember Barak's speeches back when he was the enemy's prime minister in 2000. Need I remind him that he set the date of the withdrawal (from Lebanon) in July and we forced him to pull out in May?"

He opened his statements with words of condolence to the families of those killed in Tripoli and went on to welcome the establishment of a new government in Beirut this week, in which Hizbullah is a prominent partner. The Hizbullah chief also hailed the visit to Syria, which backs his movement, by Lebanon's President Michel Suleiman, calling it "a new stage" in relations between Beirut and Damascus.

War in Georgia: The Israeli connection

For past seven years, Israeli companies have been helping Gerogian army to preparer for war against Russia through arms deals, training of infantry units and security advice
Arie Egozi

The fighting which broke out over the weekend between Russia and Georgia has brought Israel's intensive involvement in the region into the limelight. This involvement includes the sale of advanced weapons to Georgia and the training of the Georgian army's infantry forces.

The Defense Ministry held a special meeting Sunday to discuss the various arms deals held by Israelis in Georgia, but no change in policy has been announced as of yet.

(Advice

Foreign Ministry warns Israelis against traveling to Georgia / Roee Nahmias

Ministry ups travel warning due to ongoing military conflict with Russia, asks Israelis already in Georgia to contact embassy in Tbilsi or ministry's situation room in Israel
Full story )

"The subject is closely monitored," said sources in the Defense Ministry. "We are not operating in any way which may counter Israeli interests. We have turned down many requests involving arms sales to Georgia; and the ones which have been approves have been duly scrutinized. So far, we have placed no limitations on the sale of protective measures."

Israel began selling arms to Georgia about seven years ago following an initiative by Georgian citizens who immigrated to Israel and became businesspeople.

"They contacted defense industry officials and arms dealers and told them that Georgia had relatively large budgets and could be interested in purchasing Israeli weapons," says a source involved in arms exports.

The military cooperation between the countries developed swiftly. The fact that Georgia's defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli who is fluent in Hebrew contributed to this cooperation.

"His door was always open to the Israelis who came and offered his country arms systems made in Israel," the source said. "Compared to countries in Eastern Europe, the deals in this country were conducted fast, mainly due to the defense minister's personal involvement."

Among the Israelis who took advantage of the opportunity and began doing business in Georgia were former Minister Roni Milo and his brother Shlomo, former director-general of the Military Industries, Brigadier-General (Res.) Gal Hirsch and Major-General (Res.) Yisrael Ziv.

Roni Milo conducted business in Georgia for Elbit Systems and the Military Industries, and with his help Israel's defense industries managed to sell to Georgia remote-piloted vehicles (RPVs), automatic turrets for armored vehicles, antiaircraft systems, communication systems, shells and rockets.

According to Israeli sources, Gal Hirsch gave the Georgian army advice on the establishment of elite units such as Sayeret Matkal and on rearmament, and gave various courses in the fields of combat intelligence and fighting in built-up areas.

'Don't anger the Russians'

The Israelis operating in Georgia attempted to convince the Israeli Aerospace Industries to sell various systems to the Georgian air force, but were turned down. The reason for the refusal was "special" relations created between the Aerospace Industries and Russia in terms of improving fighter jets produced in the former USSR and the fear that selling weapons to Georgia would anger the Russians and prompt them to cancel the deals.

Israelis' activity in Georgia and the deals they struck there were all authorized by the Defense Ministry. Israel viewed Georgia as a friendly state to which there is no reason not to sell arms systems similar to those Israel exports to other countries in the world.

As the tension between Russia and Georgia grew, however, increasing voices were heard in Israel – particularly in the Foreign Ministry – calling on the Defense Ministry to be more selective in the approval of the deals with Georgia for fear that they would anger Russia.

"It was clear that too many unmistakable Israeli systems in the possesion of the Georgian army would be like a red cloth in the face of a raging bull as far as Russia is concerned," explained a source in the defense establishment.

For inctance, the Russians viewed the operation of the Elbit System's RPVs as a real provocation.

"It was clear that the Russians were angry," says a defense establishment source, "and that the interception of three of these RPVs in the past three months was an expression of this anger. Not everyone in Israel understood the sensitive nerve Israel touched when it supplied such an advanced arms system to a country whose relations with Russia are highly tense."

In May it was eventually decide to approve future deals with Georgia only for the sale of non-offensive weapon systems, such as intelligence, communications and computer systems, and not to approve deals for the sale of rifles, aircraft, sells, etc.

A senior source in the Military Industry said Saturday that despite some reporters, the activity of Georgia's military industry was extremely limited.

"We conducted a small job for them several years ago," he said. "The rest of the deals remained on paper."

Dov Pikulin, one of the owners of the Authentico company specializing in trips and journeys to the area, says however that "the Israeli is the main investor in the Georgian economy. Everyone is there, directly or indirectly."

Georgian minister: Israel should be proud
"The Israelis should be proud of themselves for the Israeli training and education received by the Georgian soldiers," Georgian Minister Temur Yakobashvili said Saturday.

Yakobashvili is a Jew and is fluent in Hebrew. "We are now in a fight against the great Russia," he said, "and our hope is to receive assistance from the White House, because Georgia cannot survive on its own.

"It's important that the entire world understands that what is happening in Georgia now will affect the entire world order. It's not just Georgia's business, but the entire world's business."

One of the Georgian parliament members did not settle Saturday for the call for American aid, urging Israel to help stop the Russian offensive as well: "We need help from the UN and from our friends, headed by the United States and Israel. Today Georgia is in danger – tomorrow all the democratic countries in the region and in the entire world will be in danger too."

Zvi Zinger and Hanan Greenberg contributed to this report

"and we want no more kings of troy"--1000 year war revisited

2008-06-22T17:25:00.000-07:00

mediterranean basin

"Because my father killed his father , the boy might one day seek revenge. he might also one day become a king of troy--and we want no more kings of Troy" --from the Iliad , Neoptolemus ,the son of Achilles speaking to Andromache, the widow of the Trojan prince hector, as Neoptolemus murders her infant son.

As mentioned numerous times , by this blogger's reading of history it becomes plain that in part because the Nile river flows south to north and empties into the Mediterranean , the early Mediterranean sea lanes were not only important commercial and transportation hubs between the ancient civilizations of north Africa and western Asia , it was also the scene of an epic struggle lasting 1000 years over who would control and dominate this crucial region of the world --the crossroads of the world --where three continents meet.

I've grown to believe that this struggle's early phases were described by Homer's Iliad , recording the legendary war between the coalition of Greek states in their conflict with the city state of Troy .

the 1200 BC story of the Greek vanquishing of Troy, told in the Iliad ,would serve as inspiration , blueprint and model for Alexander the Great some 900 years later in his imperialistic ventures as he conquered and plundered the rich and ancient cities of western Asia and lower Egypt.

as part of his education , Alexander like thousands of youth before and after him, would be required to memorize the Iliad--Alexander slept with the copy given him by his teacher Aristotle under his pillow and when he invaded western Asia to begin his conquests , landed his armies at the exact site where ancient Troy was believed to have stood and Alexander prayed at what he believed to be the tomb of his ancestor Achilles.

the culmination of this 1000 year struggle between the Europeans and the Africans and their extended family, was the Punic wars and the final defeat and destruction of Carthage by Rome. by destroying Carthage, control of the Mediterranean basin shifted from the hands of the ancient northern Africans and their extended family of civilizations, into the hands of the Europeans .

Rome's victory and destruction of Carthage clears the way for Rome's domination of the Mediterranean , it's commerce and access to the wealth and technology flowing on what historian Jarred Diamond in his popular book " Guns ,Germs and Steel" refers to as a type of east-west highway from the civilizations of the middle east --ultimately enabling the Europeans to amass the technologies and immunity to germs and diseases that would eventually --after 1492 ad, play a vitally crucial role in western Europe's wholesale takeover of the western hemisphere --ultimately making in the modern era , the Europeans fabulously wealthy and technologically powerful enough to colonize Africa and much of Asia--making inroads into the same areas of ancient civilizations that Europe's Greek ancestors 3200 years ago sought through brutal wars of annihilation , to establish a beach head into.

but where Jarred Diamond seems to give the impression that this modern day preeminence of Europeans and their offspring was more accident of history than any plan or persistent desire conceived by them , this blogger's reading of history indicates the early Europeans were highly warlike as well as barbaric and sought from the beginning to forcibly insert themselves into that "east west highway" of civilizations established by the ancient blacks of north east Africa and their extended family of the Mediterranean and the middle east.

if the ancient Greeks--the earliest of civilized Europeans did not reach their zenith of "civilization" until about 300 BC and the flow of ideas, technologies, innovations and commerce on this "east-west highway of civilization" had been flowing back and forth for at least 3000 to 5000 years BEFORE the Greeks emerged from savagery --then it becomes clear that the Greeks were not a part of initiating or participating in that flow of ancient commerce and civilization--so the question must be asked , who was the western end of that east-west highway of civilization other than the blacks of Africa and their extended family of the Mediterranean--the Phoenicians, the Minoans, the Colchians , the Etruscans, the Carthaginians, and in the Iliad , the people called the Trojans--aided in their fight against the Greeks, according to the legend ,by their cousin the Ethiopian warrior prince, Memnon and the Colchian warrior princess, Penthesilea?

the Greeks ,Agamemnon , Achilles ,and later Alexander and finally the Romans were hijackers raiding that highway of civilization, technology , and wealth seeking to plug themselves into it and divert it for entirely their own enrichment at the expense of its creators.

as long as they were able to suck wealth and technology from that "highway" , the Greeks and Romans enjoyed "golden ages". when they physically lost that connection --when Rome fell , western European civilization collapsed and fell again into poverty and backwardness--the so-called "dark ages".

from that fall to the present the critical theme in European history was, who among them would rebuild the "glory" of Rome and ancient Greece ? which king , or nation , or empire of Europe could forcibly plug them back into that east-west flow of commerce and knowledge?

this is what Marco Polo's tales of his adventures were about--getting Europe plugged back into that east-west flow of wealth and knowledge.

this is what the crusades were about. this is what the European renaissance was about. this is what the Portuguese prince Henry "the navigator"and his school of navigation was about. this is what Columbus's voyages and the age of exploration and subsequent empire were about . this is what the Atlantic slave trade was about. this is what the Napoleonic wars were about.

this is what the industrial revolution , the grab for colonial empire, the first and second world wars, the cold war, the Vietnam war , what the wars between Israel and the Arabs are about.
It's what the present day war on terror , wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about. This is what the big war in Congo and all the little civil wars in Africa are about.

The early Greek and Roman contact with the east-west corridor of wealth and civilization of the blacks and their extended family and the subsequent conflicts by the ancient Greeks and Romans to forcibly inject themselves into that corridor of wealth and civilization, left an indelible stamp on European culture and how the Europeans view, relate and interact with the rest of the world--they interact through persistent ruthlessness, through trickery -- being "the man who says one thing and holds another in his heart", and they interact by the sword.

all of this because bottom line , they, "want no more kings of troy." napoleon and french army at sphinx 1798

"THE AFRICAN STAR OVER EUROPE

This book is devoted to a chapter of African history that is little known. It deals with the migration of black peoples to Europe and their impact upon the people of that continent, not as servants and colonials of Europe but as the fathers of its first inhabitants, the creators of its first art, its first tools, and, in some places and historical periods, its masters and teachers, invaders and traders, its most venerated madonnas, saints and popes....We see Africa, in fact, when it stood as a star over the dark continent of Europe." --Ivan Van Sertima, The African Star Over Europe

MIGHTY MEMNON
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN GREEK & ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

By RUNOKO RASHIDI

The fabled story of the ancient and stupendous African general and warrior-king Memnon and his display of courage and prowess at the Greek siege of Troy was one of the most widely circulated and celebrated epics in the annals of Greek and Roman mythology. Memnon, described as "black as ebony, and the handsomest man alive," is mentioned repeatedly in the works of such early writers as Hesiod, Ovid, Pindar, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo and Virgil. Arctinus of Miletus composed an epic poem entitled Ethiopia in which Memnon was the leading figure. Quintus of Smyrna credits Memnon with "bringing the countless tribes of his people who live in Ethiopia, land of the black man," to Troy in support of its war against the hostile coalition of Greek city-states. It was written that: "Memnon came to help them. Memnon was lord over the dark Ethiopians, and the host he brought seemed infinite. The Trojans were delighted to see him in their city."

According to Homer, "To Troy no hero came of nobler line, Or if nobler, Memnon, it was thine." In more recent times (late in the nineteenth century), Dr. Rufus Lewis Perry pronounced that:

"The distinguished Cushite whom Homer calls Memnon came and went like a meteor in the galaxy of illustrious Ethiopian monarchs. But the poet in classic song and the historian in legendary tradition, have preserved enough of his brightness to indicate his rank and power among the contemporary potentates of the earth. He was king of the Ethiopians. He fought against the Greeks in the Trojan war; and after he had slain Antilochus, son of Nestor, was killed by Achilles."

Dr. Perry concluded that, "Through slain by Achilles, Memnon is so embalmed in verse and prose by Homer, Hesiod, Virgil and others, that his name will last as long as the writings of these imperishable authors."

SOURCES:
The Cushite, by Rufus Lewis Perry
Ethiopia and Ethiopians as Seen by Classical Writers, by William Leo Hansberry

MINOAN CRETE
AFRICAN INFLUENCED FORERUNNER OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS

By RUNOKO RASHIDI
entrance to palace at knossos

"The first civilization of Europe was established on the island of Crete. It is called the Minoan Culture, after King Minos, an early legendary ruler of the island. The ancestors of the Cretans were natives of Africa, a branch of Western Ethiopians." --John G. Jackson

Minoan Crete, the forerunner of Greek civilization, is the earliest known European high-culture. Although modest in size (170 miles east to west, thirty-five miles north to sourth), Crete exercised immeasurable influence on the Aegean archipelago, Western Asia and the Greek mainland. Throughout Crete the vestiges of complex palaces, paved highways, aqueducts, terra-pipes for drainage, and irrigation canals provide plentiful proof of Minoan ingenuity in the areas of scientific and technical innovation. The Minoans possessed registed trademarks, uniform weights and measures, calendrical systems based on precise astronomical observations and advanced writing systems. Interestingly enough, there were few fortifications on the island.

British archaeologist Arthur Evans (1851-1941), who conducted excavations on the island, was convinced of African migrations to ancient Crete and noted "the multiplicity of these connections with the old indigenous race of the opposite African coast." The late African-American cultural historian John G. Jackson (1907-1993) advocated the view the Minoan civilization was rooted in Africa, and believed that the ancestors of the Minoans "dwelt in the grasslands of North Africa before that area dried up and became a great desert. As the Saharan sands encroached on their homeland, they took to the sea, and in Crete and neighboring islands set up a maritime culture."

The research team of C.H. and H.B. Hawes, the latter of whom, like Evans, conducted important archaeological excavations in Crete, support John Jackson's argument, and noted that: "Anthropologists are inclined to the view that the Neolithic people of Crete were immigrants, and probably came from North Africa."

Arthur Evans was convinced of North African migrations to Neolithic Crete. He pointed out that:

"The multiplicity of these connections with the old indigenous race of the opposite African coast, and which we undoubtedly have to deal with in the pre dynastic population of the Nile Valley, can in fact be hardly explained on any other hypothesis than that of an actual settlement in Southern Crete."

Historian H.R. Hall, also Oxford trained, shared Evans' position on the early population of Minoan Crete:

"While the majority of the original Neolithic inhabitants of Crete probably came from Anatolia, another element may well have come in oared boats from the opposite African coast, bringing with them to the southern plan of Messara the seeds of civilization that, transplanted to the different conditions of Crete, developed into the great Minoan culture, a younger more brilliant, and less long-lived sister of that of Egypt."

Whether the Minoan culture was more brilliant than that of Egypt is highly questionable at best, but on the other points Hall seems to just about to hit the mark. Evans, again, indeed considered Egypt and Libya as the springboards of Minoan civilization; so much so that he structured his own Minoan chronology on that of dynastic Egypt. He was particularly struck by the similarities in the contents of the of the tombs of the ancient Minoans and Egyptians:

"So numerous, in fact, are the points, of comparison presented by the contents of these early interments with those of pre dynastic Egypt that, far-fetched as the conclusion might appear at first sight, I was already some years since constrained to put forth the suggestion that about the time of the conquest of the lower Nile Valley by the first historic dynasty some part of the older population had actually settled in this southern foreland of Crete."

Gordon Childe also commented on the relations between Crete and pre dynastic Egypt:

"At least on the Mesara, the great plain of southern Crete facing Africa, Minoan Crete's indebtedness to the Nile is disclosed in the most intimate aspects of its culture. Not only do the forms of early Minoan stone vases, the precision of the lapidaries' technique and the aesthetic selection of variegated stones as his materials carry on the the pre dynastic tradition, Nilotic religious customs such as the use of the sistrum, the wearing of amulets in the forms of legs, mummies and monkeys, and statuettes plainly derived from Gerzean ..block figures,' and personal habits revealed by depilatory tweezers of the Egyptian shape and stone unguent palettes from the early tombs and, later, details of costumes such as the penis-sheath and loin-cloth betoken something deeper than the external relations of commerce."

Cretan/Egyptian contacts pick up again in the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries B.C. During the reigns of Egyptian monarchs Makare Hatshepsut and Thutmose III (1504-1447 B.C.) the people of Crete, whom the Egyptians called Keftiu, were graphically portrayed as tribute bearers on the walls of the tombs of the Egyptian nobility.

SOURCES:
African Presence In Early Europe, Edited by Ivan Van Sertima
Man, God And Civilization, by John G. Jackson

minoan youth practice boxing

minoan burial sarcophagus

T R A V E L N O T E S

KNOSSOS AND THE ARCHEOLOGICAL MUSEUM ON THE ISLAND OF CRETE

Greetings Family,

It is my second day in Crete and I saw my first African today. I was beginning to think that I was the only one here and I was going to compose you a long dramatic letter to that effect. But as I was contemplating the situation over a Greek lunch an African street vendor passed by and we briefly mumbled pleasantries. If I wasn't so shocked and he did not have a handful of products I probably would have invited him to lunch. Today was a good day. I finally got to the archaeological site called Knossos. It is only about eight kilometers from the city center. I took a taxi to the place and a bus back. You know that I have reached a comfort zone when I start using public transportation. Knossos is a heavily restored site and heavily reconstructed also. The work was begun by the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans with his own money I think back in the 1920s or so. It is a lovely site, an ancient palace with vivid frescoes and bright red pillars, set amidst hills and trees. A gentle breeze was blowing and most of visitors were young school children. I liked Knossos and thought the closest comparison was to Great Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. The same kind of energy I experienced in both places.

The island of Crete, for those of you who might not know, was the basis, according to Cheikh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal, of the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Try reviewing Diop's Civilization or Barbarism and volume two of Black Athena by Bernal. My old brother and research partner Dr. James E. Brunson also did some very good work on the subject back in the 1980s. You can find it in Ivan Van Sertima's African Presence in Early Europe anthology.

According to the legends, the Greek god Zeus saw a beautiful Phoenician princess named Europa. He wanted her so much that one day when Europa (an African woman?) was at the sea shore Zeus turned into a white bull and laid down in front of her. Europa was entranced by the bull, jumped on his back and away Zeus flew with her to the island of Crete. On Crete Zeus raped Europa. Does this sound like a familiar story? Apparently this is where the name Europe derives from. Anyway, from this union came three sons, one of which was named Minos who became the island's ruler. It is from the name Minos that we derive the name for the civilization of Crete called the Minoan. John G. Jackson writes about this in his Introduction to African Civilization.

The Minoans were a great maritime power in the second millennium BCE. They had many palatial cities and traded far and wide, and even had relations with ancient Kmt. Apparently during the reign of the mighty Thutmose III Crete was an Egyptian vassal state and Knossos was an extremely important Minoan center. Evans actually believed that the impetus for Minoan civilization came from the arrival of African settlers from Libya and Lower Egypt who moved to Crete when Upper and Lower Egypt were unified towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE. So there are a lot of connections. You don't think that I am spending all this money to be here on a humbug do you?

So I enjoyed my visit to Knossos today and it is something that I have wanted to do for a very long time. In my first book, way back in 1983, a self-published manuscript that I called Kushite Case-Studies, I wrote a chapter on Crete and it is that chapter that I am going to develop in my new book. Well, there is nothing quite like seeing a place for yourself with your own eyes and so, following Knossos, I went to the Archaeological Museum. It too was well worth the visit, and as I am here try to fill in my missing historical pages and gathering data for the new book,

I saw several important things. First, the prominence of the female. If anything, in ancient Crete the female enjoyed a status at least the equal to that of a man. Indeed, she seems to have been far more important. The goddess, in particular, not the god, reigned supreme. All of the evidence corroborates this. This does not sound like white folks to me. Secondly, the Kamite/Minoan connection was pronounced. I even found a reproduction of a Minoan wall painting in a north Egyptian palace of the great Ahmose I, founder the illustrious Kamite dynasty XVIII. Even the color schemes seemed familiar with people generally painted a chalky color for the women and reddish-brown for the men. Third, I found a depiction of a Black man from Knossos dated around 1400 BCE. He is in a piece of art called "The Captain of the Blacks." I took a bunch of photos of the piece as I could not find it any book and certainly none of the post cards. And, point number four, I found another good Africoid depiction of Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. So I had a very good day, this day, possibly my best day ever in Greece.

Well, it is Friday night in the city and the music is jumping. I guess that this is my signal to return to my hotel as I never was a jumper anyway and certainly don't figure to jump here. Let me just send an email to my biological family to let them know that I have not disappeared from the face of the earth, although I travel so much now that I figure that they stopped worrying about me a long time ago. And there does not seem to be much to worry about anyway. The cyber cafe is just across the street from my hotel and people do not seem unfriendly.

Tomorrow I will try to visit at least one, perhaps two more archaeological sites. I will post if you if I can. If not, just look for me in the whirlwind. So far it is a very positive experience.

In love of Africa,

Brother Runoko

By RUNOKO RASHIDI

COLCHIANS, PHOENICIANS AND CANAANITES
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN CLASSICAL WEST ASIAN CIVILIZATIONS

By RUNOKO RASHIDI

"It is undoubtedly a fact that the Colchians are of Egyptian descent. I noticed this myself before I heard anyone mention it."

--Herodotus, The Histories

We now know that modern humanity originated in Africa, and that all modern humans can ultimately trace their ancestral roots back to the African continent. Herodotus, the European father of history, regarded Colchis, a land located along the western slope of the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea, as an African colony. He not only pointed to the Colchians' black skin and woolly hair, but also to their oral traditions, language, methods of weaving, and practice of circumcision. Saint Jerome, writing during the fourth century, called Colchis the "Second Ethiopia." Two hundred years later, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, described an "Ethiopian" presence in the same region. Even today, in the same district about which Herodotus wrote, lives a numerically minute black-skinned, woolly-haired community.

Phoenicia was the name given by the Greeks, in the first millennium B.C.E., to the coastal provinces of modern Lebanon and northern Israel, although occasionally the term seems to have been applied to the entire Mediterranean seaboard from Syria to Palestine. Phoenicia was not considered a nation, in the strict sense of the word, but rather as a chain of coastal cities, of which the most important were Sidon, Byblos, Tyre and Ras Shamra. To the Greeks the term Phoenician, from the root Phoenix, had connotations of red, and it is likely that the name was derived from the physical appearance of the people themselves.

The Phoenicians were a coastal branch of the Canaanites, who, according to Biblical traditions, were the brothers of Kush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Kmt)--members of the Hamite ethnic group. In other words, the Bible states that the ancient Canaanites, Ethiopians and Egyptians were all African nations. Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop claimed that "Phoenician history is therefore incomprehensible only if we ignore the Biblical data, according to which the Phoenicians, in other words, the Canaanites, were originally Negroes, already civilized, with whom nomadic, uncultured white tribes later mixed." While acknowledging the Biblical data, Diop cautioned that the economic relations shared by the Kamites and Phoenicians should not be minimized in explaining the strong sense of solidarity which generally existed between them. There was frequently a Kamite presence: military, diplomatic, religious or commercial, both in the Canaanite hinterland and the Phoenician city-states themselves, and Diop goes on to state that, "Even throughout the most troubled periods of great misfortune, Egypt could count on the Phoenicians as one can count more or less on a brother."

The Phoenicians were the great seafarers of their time and dominated the Mediterranean shipping lanes. Phoenician inscriptions have been found as far north as central Turkey and as far west as Tunisia where the famous ancient city of Carthage was founded. It was among the Canaanites that one of the most important and meaningful inventions in human history is attested--the alphabet.

SOURCES:
African Origin of Civilization, by Cheikh Anta Diop
African Presence in Early Asia, edited by Runoko Rashidi and Ivan Van Sertima

ROME BEFORE THE ROMANS

By ARTHUR LEWIN

Rome, why Rome? Why did Rome rise to such great heights in ancient times? Much of the credit must go to the Etruscans. In fact, much of what we think of as Roman is, in reality, Etruscan...

The Etruscans fled Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) around 1000 B.C. They were part of the Mycenaen culture of the Eastern Mediterranean. This Mycenaean civilization was thoroughly disrupted as primitive Greek bands came pouring in from the north around 1000 BC, and so, one element of the Mycenaeans, the Etruscans, fled eastward across the Mediterranean, eventually landing in Italy.

In essay 33, of the Global African Presence Home Page, "Minoan Crete African Forerunner of European Civilizations," Master Teacher Runoko Rashidi describes the pivotal role of Crete in European history. Crete was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Thera around 1400 B.C. This cataclysm badly damaged every city in the Western Mediterranean, and was also felt as far away as Egypt. It took centuries for the region to get back on its feet, and when it did, the new culture that developed has come to be called Mycenaean. The Etruscans, living in Lydia in Asia Minor, were a key Mycenaean element. Their statues show them to be dark complexioned and resembling the Cretans, who were related to their forbears.

At any rate, the Etruscans migrated to Italy, in the face of the invasion of primitive Greeks around 1000 B.C. (Note the Greek "Classical Era" would not arrive for 600 years.) The area where the Etruscans settled, immediately to the north of Rome, came to be known as Etruria, sometimes called Tuscany, both derivatives of the word "Etruscan."

Note that Etruria is on the western, or far, side of the Italian peninsula, when approaching from the east. It is also Italy's most fertile quarter. This indicates that the Etruscans doubtless probed the peninsula before picking out the most desirable area. Etruscan technology was far in advance of the natives they encountered. They easily conquered them, conscripted them and then used them to further their conquests. (Howe, 301)

The area immediately to the south of Etruria, across the Tiber River, was called Latium. Its inhabitants were called Latins. Around 600 BC the Etruscans conquered Rome, and an Etruscan king ruled the city. Rome emerged as the pre-eminent city in Latium precisely because it was closest to Etruria. Here are a series of direct quotes from, Albert Trever's 1939, History of Ancient Civilization, taken from pages 22 & 23, Volume II, The Roman World, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company. He was a "mainstream," conservative historian, and what he says is supported by any number of writers, and can be found today in standard encyclopaedia entries on the Etruscans and the early history of Rome:

"Since the Etruscans brought with them from the Orient, an advanced culture, they may be truthfully called the civilizers of early Italy... They introduced into Italy and Rome an urban civilization where before had been only scattered, agricultural villages.. They transformed Rome from a loose group of farm villages to a powerful, populous city (urbs), gave the city its name, Roma, and started it on its later career of expansion and power in Italy.... the judicial ceremonial, religious ritual, and much in the Roman festivals and shows, were Etruscan before they were Roman.

"The Greek alphabet came to Rome probably through the medium of the Etruscans, early in the seventh century, as did many other of Rome's loans from Greece. In religion, also Rome owed much to the Etruscans. Her Capitoline tradition of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, her use of augury and divination...(and also) her gladitorial contests.

"One of the greatest debts of Italy and Rome to the Etruscans was in building, for from them they learned to build permanently with hewn stone, and to undertake great public works such as temples, fortifications, aqueducts, bridges, dikes and sewers.... it was under Etruscan influence in the sixth century that Rome was first fortified by a wall. The fruitful principle of the arch was also introduced into Italy by the Etruscan immigrants." (Trever, pp. 22, 23)

So we see that much of what we today call Roman was, in fact, Etruscan. We must also note that they were trading partners and allies of African Carthage. And there is evidence that they shared the same divinities as the Carthaginians (Davies, p. 154) Five centuries after fleeing the Greeks, the Etruscans again encountered them in Italy. "In opposition to the Hellenic (Greek) colonial expansion in the West, which tended to encircle them, they were allied with Carthage against the Greeks in the Battle of Alalia in 538 B.C." (Trever, p. 18)

What eventually happened to the Etruscans? It is an old story. Their pupils, the Romans eventually conquered, and incorporated them. The Etruscans had a league of 12 cities, but it appears to have been mainly a religious confederation. As Rome grew in size and power, she attacked and conquered the Etruscan cities one-by-one. They failed to unite, and re-take Rome, and so were thus swallowed by their offspring. (Sound familiar?)

SOURCES:
Davies, Norman. 1996. Europe: A History. Harper Collins: New York

Howe, Herbert. "The Etruscans," World Book Encyclopaedia. Chicago: 1975.

Rashidi, Runoko. "Minoan Crete - African Forerunner of European Civilizations," Global African Presence Home Page, 33

Trever, Albert A. 1939. History of Ancient Civilization, Volume II, The Roman World. Harcourt, Brace: New York.

what was obama talking about ? they don't look bitter to me

2008-04-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

Guns, fun for the whole family!

..

former cia analyst ray mcgovern-- "cheney and petraeus didn't know? that's a crock ! "

2008-04-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

was cheney behind iraqi army's recent failed offensive ?

is there a resemblance ?

2008-04-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

the similarity in nose and moustache. the stocky body type ...was one of saddam's hangmen actually muktada al sadr ?

john mc cain just doesn't get it ...

2008-04-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

i’m watching the fox sunday morning talking heads political show when they feature a segment where john mc cain is interviewed by chris wallace . (that annoying little right wing shill is mike wallace’s son ? )

though clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, mc cain seems like a sincere grandfatherly type. i admit after he confessed that he made a mistake when he voted against establishing a holiday for dr king , it was not easy to dislike him despite the goofy grin he repeatedly flashed at inappropriate points during the interview .

from what i saw , at first i thought he was simply a bad liar, but was later forced to believe that mc cain honestly just does not get it.

he reminded the audience that he had supported the "surge" and he insisted that the surge has been a "big success" so we need to stay the course.

even after the rightwing reporter pointed out that it was the sunni stand down and muktada al sadr’s six month ceasefire, and not the surge that resulted in violence levels in iraq reducing to the levels they were at in 2005, mc cain seemed as if he didn't hear it.

also mc cain needed to be reminded that reducing violence to 2005 levels does not really add up to progress since saying that you’re only as broke as you were in 2005 still means broke as hell --thus it couldn’t be honestly counted as "progress" .

mc cain again flashed that goofy grin like the lounge lizard singer who falls off the piano, yet doesn’t miss an off-key note , and went right on to say that the recent iraqi government offensive was a big success and showed the al maliki government’s growing strength.

even the right wing fox guy is incredulous at this remark and blurts out that one thousand al maliki soldiers defected almost en mass, turning over weapons and vehicles to al sadr’s forces during that campaign --how can you say the al maliki government was successful ?

another shit-faced grin from mc cain the gold lame-wearing lounge lizard who from the floor , segues right into his next cover tune, "al sadr lost because HE called for the cease fire, not al maliki"-- followed by that top 40s oldie but goody hit , " only losers call for ceasefires in war, not winners."

that’s when i knew --the guy is clueless .

the interview ended and like one of many fox network featured silverhaired elvis-imitators who’ve played "the world famous tuxedo lounge here in beautiful downtown boise " --mc cain grinned , and said goodbye .

"you’ve been a wonderful audience --thank you very much !"