Get your Rapture hats ready, kiddies! The sky is falling, and our wise gift of nuclear winter will propel us all into the loving arms of the all-knowing and all-everywhere G-d.

2007-09-28


xymphora--AIPACs-Skunk-Bunk

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

----------------below ----------all --- = # page-dump from there

Disappointments

The old stalwarts are disappointing me.

First, Engdahl unnecessarily explains his abandonment of the silly ‘Peak Oil’ theory by taking up the still very controversial – some would say ‘flaky’ – Russian theories concerning the creation of oil. The Russians may well be right, but Peak Oil falls on its own. There’s tons of oil around. In the United States itself, there is enough oil in the oil shales to satisfy current levels of American requirements for over 100 years. The problem is cost of production. Let me state it clearly: the reason why the American Establishment agreed to the attack on Iraq, an attack they knew was going to be a disaster and would indeed lead to insecurity over Middle East oil supplies, was to force the price per barrel of oil up over the amount where exploitation of the Canadian oil sands would become economically viable. There. I’ve said it. The long-term plan is to base American oil security on the sane and dependable Canadians, and not leave it to the whims of the fruitcakes in the Middle East, the fruitcakiest being the Israelis and their American ‘friends’. The Americans don’t get much oil from the Middle East, but it is important oil, and the price of oil remains dependent on decisions made by people who aren’t Americans, and don’t have America’s interests at heart. The war had nothing to do with controlling Middle East oil supplies, something which should, at least by now, be obvious. In the long term, the war was about separating the United States from Israel (the American strategists must find it funny that the neocons fell for it, as the Iraq war created the perfect petri dish to grow the new idea that American national interests are different from those of Zionist colonialists). When the oil sands peter out, we’ll need another war to force the price over the amount required for the Americans to exploit the oil shales (experimentation on oil shales development has already started).

I should note that the general lumpen-leftist view that the war was about forcing the price of oil up doesn’t make sense. The American establishment are both producers and consumers of oil. There is a ‘sweet spot’, where they maximize their profit, but a war is too blunt an instrument to get there, if you could even determine what the sweet spot is. The other point, which I keep making (to no avail), is that the American oligarchs have absolutely no interest in depriving their new manufacturers (the Chinese) from a source of energy. Globalization happened and the strategists are still writing like it’s 1970.

Peter Dale Scott
[** hey - something odd here ** zog / new clue ?? ]
continues with his theory that Cheney’s prevarications about what he was up to on the morning of September 11 relate to the fact he was hiding something, including his involvement in the shooting down of Flight 93. I doubt it. This represents a misunderstanding of the nature of the conspiracy. It was planned in such a way as to minimize – or, preferably, eliminate – connections between the operators of the conspiracy and identifiable politicians. Everybody was terrified about how Iran-Contra played out, and didn’t want to see that happen again. Important people, some of them in the Bush Administration, almost went to jail. One plane falling out of the control of the commandoes was perfectly foreseeable, and there would have been a contingency plan for it, one not involving Cheney having to ad lib a response. The reason Cheney is being deliberately confusing about the morning of September 11 has another conspiracy explanation. Continuity of government. Scott focuses on it, but then tries to tie Cheney’s
actions to the shooting down of the plane, a completely unnecessary connection, and one not supported by what we know. Referring to Flight 93 actually damages Scott’s paper.

Cheney and his ilk are terrified that the next attack will involve the destruction of the United States’ ability to plan a response, so have created elaborate – and no doubt unconstitutional – plans for continuity of government, some kind of dictatorship led by people like Cheney. Those plans collapse if the enemy can determine what people like Cheney will be doing after an attack. Thus the intentional creation of confusion. There is no need to drag Flight 93 into the mix, and doing so detracts from consideration of the wisdom of allowing freaks like Cheney to take over the American government in cases where they can claim, without anything other than their own say-so, that they have to. The evidence actually supports Scott’s thesis about the key role of continuity of government better if we leave out the shooting down of Flight 93. That would leave room for reasonable discussion of the necessity of some sort of doomsday plan for when all the usual ‘deciders’ – Bush’s name for it – were dead.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Weird and Stupid

A list of “The World's Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories”. A few comments:

  1. HIV can’t logically ‘cause’ AIDS, as there are a few people who have HIV but have never contracted AIDS. There is a protocol for determining causation in infectious diseases, and HIV doesn’t meet it. It is entirely possible that HIV was created in a lab. Its release may have been a mistake. Or not.

  2. Jim Fetzer’s [I've talked to him,agreed on most 911 items/ jks zog] stupid and harmful writing on the Zapruder film should be enough to make people run like hell away from anything he writes about September 11.

  3. There’s some weird symbolism going on at Denver International Airport.

  4. The new Middle Ages timeline takes me back.[broken link - a trove for trogus: here--> History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2 (Chronology) (Paperback)
    by Anatoly T Fomenko (Author)
    "Let us recall that under the First Roman Empire we understand the "ancient" kingdom as founded by Romulus and Remus, presumably about 753 B.C. ([72])..." (more) http://www.amazon.com/History-Fiction-Science-Chronology/dp/2913621066 [
    For example, computer assisted recalculation of eclipses with detailed descriptions allegedly belonging to Antiquity shows that they either occurred in the Middle Ages or didn't occur at all. A simple application of computational astronomy to the rules of calculation of Easter according to the Easter Book introduced by the Nicean council of alleged 325 AD shows that it definitely could not have taken place before 784 AD. ]

  5. Aspartame, fluoride, and at least some genetically modified foods are poisons approved and promoted by governments supposedly interested in the wellbeing of their citizens. The conspiracy is not mind-control, but just good, old-fashioned corruption, politicians being paid off so corporadoes can make money.

  6. There probably is at least one conspiracy angle to the Atlanta child murders, which have never been properly investigated as the victims were black.

What about the idea that the Dead Sea Scrolls are medieval forgeries? There is something deeply suspicious about Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, another area, like Holocaust studies, where you have to be glatt kosher in order to sit at the table. Dead Sea Scroll scholarship is part of the pseudoscience that attempts to show the links between early Christianity and Judaism, links with an obvious political purpose. At least some of the scrolls were stolen from a Palestinian museum, and all of them are arguably the property of the Palestinian people. Their provenance is shrouded in enough mystery, with a discovery at exactly the time that the new State of Israel was building its arsenal of myths and legends, that you have to wonder what they really are.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Judymillerization II

The Sunday Times is back to its old tricks, more of the same lies with more of the same neocon agenda regarding the Israeli attack on Syria. Had the Israelis really found anything in Syria, we would have heard about it immediately, or immediately after the attack. The Israeli lack of immediate response to allegations by Syria follows no known propaganda pattern. The Israelis are making up excuses as they have to. It appears that my original guess was right. The attack, in northern Syria, was intended to test the Russian defenses for their new port/base. Apparently, the defenses worked well, as the Israelis had to leave in an embarrassing hurry, leading to the reticence in admitting that anything had actually happened, and the ad libbed flow of excuses we are now seeing. The latest Murdoch lie is based on:


  1. “informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem”;

  2. “well-placed sources”;

  3. “Israeli sources”; and

  4. “A senior American source”.

Despite the fact the Syrians were allegedly caught red-handed with North Korean nuclear material, and the Israelis told the Americans, who blessed the Israeli attack, Condi just invited the Syrians to participate in Middle East peace talks!

Monday, September 24, 2007

A good week It has been a good week for t-shirt slogans:

  1. Don't tase me, bro (for John I’d-like-to-respond-to-the-question-of-the gentleman-who-is-being-murdered-in-the-back-row Kerry). unwviewed...BUT a closed_case of fascism no matter what was real. I told you in 2003 - this country will be like Cuba- and now in less than 2 decades. Alternet has deep comments - and I did SELECT & archive lots of data that day.

  2. M-Fer, I want more iced tea.

  3. (for Rudy Giuliani’s t-shirt) We do not support that the tragedy that happened on a site where so many people lost their lives be used as a photo op.

Meanwhile, Scott Adams’ politics is as sound as his grasp of the comedic timing in the use of the three-panel comic strip. It’s lucky he doesn’t have to write a column explaining each one (although Ted Rall might consider doing so, as about a third of his comics are incomprehensible!).

Following the logic of the Zionist campaign to stop discussion of the Lobby issue by insisting that ‘fairness’ require that Walt and Mearsheimer carry an Israeli on their back whenever they speak in public, an oud player was not allowed to perform in San Diego because there was no Israeli available to appear with him.

Lynn Margulis

There are an amazing number of loser academics from the University of Podunk associated with the September 11 ‘truth’ movement (together with a marked absence of legitimate structural engineers). For the first time, a world-class scientist has come out as a sceptic. Lynn Margulis is the real deal

Sunday, September 23, 2007

The big problem: Lite Zionism

From a short and surprisingly boring interview with Norman Finkelstein by George McLeod (emphasis in red):
McLeod: What do you think about the recently-released book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt?

Finkelstein: Parts of it I agree with, parts of it I don’t.

For example, I don’t think there’s any evidence that the is lobby [ didnt need to b/c the evangelical zionist zombies did all the 'political approval ratings work' there - for free c/o their Scofield apostasy ]
was a crucial factor in the decision for the US to go to war in Iraq and I don’t think that there is evidence that US policy in the Middle East in general is shaped by the lobby.

However, I do think that the lobby is a crucial factor in determining US policy towards the Palestinians.

I don’t think it determined US policy in Iran, in Turkey or in Iraq. But on the Israel-Palestine conflict – the building of settlements and the colonisation of Palestine, I think it is a crucial factor.”

The line in red is simply outrageous. Why does a guy like Finkelstein, prepared to put his neck on the line for the truth, balk at the most obvious truths about the very peculiar relationship of the United States to Israel? Finkelstein, for all the sense he makes, is still a lite Zionist (that’s why he can be interviewed in that hotbed of lite Zionism, ZNet).

In the bigger scheme of things, the Palestinians are irrelevant to Greater Israel. They have to be ethnically cleansed, but that is just the first step of many. The lite Zionists are, fundamentally, Zionists, i. e., advocates of an Israeli Empire. They disagree on tactics and timing, not Zionist imperialism. Blaming the Americans for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is pure Noamism, simultaneously laying responsibility at the feet of the American Establishment while hiding the real threat to Zionism, the upsetting of the Lobby’s stranglehold over American politics. Honest people who really want to solve the problems of the Middle East have to start by dealing with the most important problem, the Lobby. Ending Lobby influence solves at least 90 per cent of the problem. If the Lobby is outed, there will be no more wars for Israel, which will constitute the end of the Zionist dream. It is thus vitally important for Zionists, and lite Zionists, to hide the truth, no matter how silly they look in doing so. Finkelstein is very useful to the Zionists, as his public fight with them has given him the credibility that crazies like Foxman, Dershowitz, and Pipes don’t have. You have to wonder what happened behind the scenes at DePaul, where Finkelstein, talking of hunger strikes and revolt, suddenly caved, and allowed DePaul to issue a self-serving press release. Was the whole DePaul mess just a Lobby stunt?

Saturday, September 22, 2007

It's a small world, White Russian division

I’ve been calling the neocon millenialist cult a Polish cult, but I’m off the mark, a bit. From an article on the next American attorney general (emphasis in red; it’s a small world!)

“Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the Mukasey appointment was ‘wise’ and he expects ‘bipartisan support’ for confirmation, but admitted to his own personal bias.

His family comes from the same town where I was born. My parents knew his parents over there,’ he said, referring to a town that was then part of Poland but now is part of Belarus.”

Historic White Russia covers not only Belarus but parts of Poland, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and Russia.

It is difficult not to be reminded of the group of White Russians involved in the Kennedy assassination, guys like Abraham Zapruder and Jack Ruby. Perhaps those who throw the slur around know something we don’t, which is that the conspiracy isn’t a Jewish one, but a White Russian one!

The Official Lobby Response

Daniel Pipes, completely incapable of giving a cogent response to the devastating Walt and Mearsheimer book, instead offers the Official Lobby Response, an airy wave if the hand that it is not worth commenting on. The “two obscure academics” he refers to are two of the most important political analysts in the United States, and the only reason the original essay was published in an “obscure publication” was due to political pressure applied by the Lobby. It is abundantly clear that the Lobby has decided to play down the issue, using its overwhelming control over the American media to try to bury any discussion of the book. Meeting it head on, the original plan, is hopeless. At least Pipes managed to make his comment while somehow – what self-control! – avoiding the slur.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Wreath pettiness

President Ahmadinejad wanted to lay a wreath at the site of the World Trade Center, but American authorities, with typical pettiness (Rudy and Hillary leading the way, of course), denied him. Digg asks: “WHICH MIDDLE EAST COUNTRIES HELD CANDLELIGHT VIGILS FOR 9/11???” The answer is here (also scroll down for more photos here; Israelis didn’t hold the spontaneous vigils, but they did build a lot of monuments to commemorate the four Jews who were killed). Needless to say, Americans have squandered every bit of international sympathy caused by September 11, and then some.

There’s always an upside, and this embarrassing incident for the American people has produced one of the most hilarious quotes in American history, from the Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad:

“We do not support that the tragedy that happened on a site where so many people lost their lives be used as a photo op”

Wurmser the traitor

The comment “Why Bush won't attack Iran” is still marred by a lack of appreciation of the effects of globalization on the thinking of the strategists, and misses the Big Plan with respect to oil, but is still much better that just about anything else you’ll read on the subject of ‘Iran talk’. I like the fact he gave Bush a litt credit:

“To try to discern what the president himself thinks, however, is very difficult. It's particularly hard when Bush is trying to convince Iran that the military option is real, and that if Iran doesn't work out a mutually acceptable deal with the U.S., he will launch a strike.

To date, however, nothing suggests Bush is really going to do it. If he were, he wouldn't be playing good cop/bad cop with Iran and proposing engagement. If the bombs were at the ready, Bush would be doing a lot more to prepare the nation and the military for a war far more consequential than the invasion of Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence that he has decided bombing may be too costly a choice.”

and:

“Even if Bush wanted to make the Iranians believe that he could go either way – diplomacy or military strike – Bush would not so clearly knock back one side in favor of the other to the point where the ‘bad cops’ in a good cop/bad cop strategy would tell anyone on the outside that they did not enjoy the favor and support of the president.”

If Bush is trying to bluff the Iranians, it would make no sense to reveal his bad hand. Unfortunately for Bush, the Iranians know his ‘tell’, and have called the bluff. In fact American belligerence has made it more difficult to deal with Iran, which is one of the reasons why we should all can the ‘Iran talk’. While we can give Bush a little credit, we shouldn’t give him too much.

Clemons also catches Wurmser – wasn’t he supposed to be gone by now? – in a little treason (oh, and here’s Glenn Greenwald catching Ledeen out on another treason):

“One member of Cheney's national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was ‘losing the policy argument on Iran’ inside the administration – and that they might need to ‘end run’ the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus ‘hopefully’ prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf. When queried about Wurmser's alleged comments, a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times, ‘The vice president is not necessarily responsible for every single thing that comes out of the mouth of every single member of his staff.’”

There is no way around it. Wurmser, within the White House, is advocating a conspiracy to trick his President and the United States – I was going to write ‘his country’, but his country is Israel – into a monumentally disastrous war. Shouldn’t he be arrested for treason?

posted at 9:29 PM permanent link Comments (25) | Trackback

The Hebron tactic

From an article by Amira Hass (found via here):

“For about 25 minutes, they behaved liked lords of the land: One man, followed later by a young guy, descended from Mitzpeh Yair, one of the unauthorized outposts in the southern Mt. Hebron area, and prevented a United Nations jeep from traveling. UN directives prohibit leaving the vehicle in such cases, in order to avoid an escalation of friction. And so we, three Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) staffers and two Haaretz journalists, were forced to watch them demonstrate their lordliness from inside the car: The older one blocked the vehicle, in the middle of the unpaved road, with his body. Using hand movements, he ordered the engine shut down. When that didn't happen, he jumped on the hood and then on the roof and back on the hood, and finally lay back on the windshield and played with the wipers, taking them apart. The driver progressed slowly down the track, and the man leaned back on the windshield with force, until it broke and shards went into the driver's eyes.

In the meantime, the younger guy appeared. He tried opening the doors of the jeep, screaming, ‘show me your identity cards’ and placing big rocks in front of the wheels. By the time the army and police drove up, the older man yelled at Haaretz photographer Alex Levac: ‘Go back to where you came from.’ When he realized that Levac was a Jew and born in this country, he shouted: ‘Traitor, going with the UN.’ Both the older man and younger guy living at the outpost were born abroad. The younger man, a British citizen, has not yet been given new-immigrant status.

But what does that matter? It also didn't matter that the soldier described them as ‘problematic’ and that the police are familiar with the older man from previous incidents of harassment. Nor did it matter that the police officers did not believe their absurd story that we had been in their olive grove and that we had tried to run the older man over. The tactic is one that is well-known from Hebron, the same tactic that helped to cleanse the Old City of most of its Palestinian residents: Jews harass and bully and then threaten to lodge complaints against their victims with the Israeli police.”

and

“It is easy to blame the two men, or those like them. But they practice terrorizing Palestinians because Israeli authorities let them do so.

In their own way, they do the same thing the ‘legitimate’ occupation authorities do: They drive the Palestinians off their land to make room for Jews. In other words, they are following orders.”

The official attitude towards the UN by the Israeli government is similar. Of course, relative to the treatment the settlers give the Palestinians, the UN employees got off easy.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Pipes Lidice

Pipes Lidice. After the Nazis killed the ‘murderers’ in the Czech town of Lidice, and seized many others, the rest of the population of Lidice dispersed. This is Pipes’ solution for the Palestinian villages from which – allegedly – Palestinian insurgents are firing rockets in the general direction of Israel. Pipes is now a foreign policy advisor to Giuliani. Do you think Rudy will drop Pipes for advocating Nazi-style collective punishment?

Curiously, Lidice is often listed in Holocaust commemorative websites, although the victims were not Jewish and the people hosting the websites take the position that only Jews died in the Holocaust. It is such a good story they just can’t resist deceiving people

The slur in action

The Lobby, which doesn’t exist, and if it did, would have no power, never operates without a big plan, and the big plan to counter the John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt paper, now a best-selling book, is two-pronged. The second prong is an attempt to pretend to battle the thesis of the book on its merits, which we can see in the efforts of Foxman and Dershowitz. The danger in the second prong is that engaging in the debate puts the silly arguments of the Lobby to the test, and at least some of the Lobby big brains – I don’t include either Dershowitz or Foxman in that number – know that the Lobby can’t meet the test

Hence the second prong, which is an attempt at censorship. The more sophisticated form of this is a demand that any speech by Mearsheimer and/or Walt be met by an immediate chance of rebuttal by a Lobby member, who of course will be unaccountably busy that day. The less sophisticated form of the censorship consists of the usual behind-the-scenes pressure coupled with the usual slur tossing. This is a bit ironic, considering Alan ‘Free Speech’ Dershowitz:

“For responding to Mearsheimer and Walt's false charges, I was accused by The Nation contributer and Huffington Poster Philip Weiss of being a ‘vigilante’ and by Dissident Voice as being one of ‘the attack dogs of the lobby.’ So much for the marketplace of ideas! Free speech for me but not for thee!”

The reality of Lobby speech and thought control is a bit uglier. Via Informed Comment, the experiences of Richard Drake, chair of the History Department at the University of Montana, at trying to book Walt for a speech a year ago (emphasis throughout in red of the typical pattern of attack – we only see the slur throwing, but miss the real exercise of power from the dark back rooms):

“Soon after the publication of their article, I invited Walt to be the opening speaker in the 2006–07 President’s Lecture Series. I reasoned that our audience would profit from hearing a distinguished scholar’s arguments on a topic of moment. Not everyone in Montana thought the way I did. At the start of the school year, our publicity campaign for the series, announcing Walt’s participation, immediately produced a vehement reaction. In the twenty years that I have coordinated the lecture series, I have invited more than two hundred speakers to the campus. Walt was the first one to be welcomed with a preemptive barrage of defamatory invective from faculty members.On September 7, 2006, four days before Walt’s scheduled arrival, three tenured full professors—two of them from my own department—denounced him in an open letter to the president of the university, George M. Dennison. The letter appeared in the student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin. Comparing his views to those expressed in the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they castigated Walt as the author of an ugly racist diatribe and demanded that the university invite Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz or some comparable defender of Israel to offer a rebuttal. Failure to do so would ‘leave a dark stain on the President’s Lecture Series and the university itself.’

One of my critics told me before startled witnesses that he would not rest until I had been stripped of my position of power, which manifestly had corrupted me. Someone as insensitive to Jewish issues as I was could no longer be entrusted to coordinate a university lecture series. He initiated a campaign to bring about my dismissal. [red= by WR, font by js]

As the controversy over Walt’s visit heated up in the campus newspaper during the next few days, a student and a retired professor publicly defended my decision to invite Walt. any people expressed their private support for me, and some of them wrote letters to the president on my behalf. He also heard plenty from the other side, as we all did, about the loosing of anti-Semitism on the UM campus. In addition to charging Walt with being a vile anti-Semite, his detractors said that he lacked basic skills as a researcher and writer. The neoconservative media had attacked Walt for carelessness as a scholar, and letters to the Montana Kaimin echoed those criticisms.”

It’s a funny coincidence that these uncoordinated letter writers seem to all simultaneously come up with the idea of a chance for a rebuttal, with the rebutter always being Dershowitz! Afterwards, the slur:

“After Walt’s visit, the seminar that he had given on the Israel lobby completely upstaged his lecture on the broader issues of U.S. foreign policy. In letters to the Montana Kaimin, to me, to the president of the university, and to the city’s main newspaper – the Missoulian – individuals who had not attended either of his presentations to hear what he actually said called him a liar and likened him to a Holocaust denier and Ku Klux Klansman. The vehemence of these attacks had no precedent in the twenty-year history of the President’s Lecture Series.

The charge that Walt was the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier seemed little less than grotesque, but there it was in black and white on University of Montana stationery in one of the many bitter letters that this affair inspired: ‘It is much as if the university had brought a Holocaust denier to campus and accorded him the honors of a respected guest.’”
and:

Walt was also accused of having brought to campus ‘in a suit and tie what used to be the province of those who burned crosses while wearing sheets and hoods.’ To associate this eminent scholar with the church and school burnings, beatings, castrations, shootings, lynchings, and political assassinations carried out by the Ku Klux Klan required a willingness to say anything, no matter how irresponsible, against an adversary marked not for intellectual defeat but for moral destruction.

and:“The attempt to group Walt and Mearsheimer with the likes of Faurisson and Duke reveals the real aims behind the campaign of denigration that began on my campus last September: to shut down critical inquiry into the activities of the Israel lobby and to blacken the name of anyone with the temerity to speak up about them. In an open society, however, anti-Semitism cannot be made to include the public investigation of highly effective lobbies. It is long past time to part with the idea that the only foolproof method of defense against the charge of anti-Semitism is 100 percent support for whatever the Israeli and American governments want in the Middle East.
The founders of this country understood that public life must include discussion of the ways power works. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison wrote about factions ‘who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.’ He feared that the ‘cabals of the few’ would be a permanent problem for the republic. The invasion of Iraq is not the first war in our history to have been started by ‘men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs.’ The evidence that Mearsheimer and Walt provide constitutes a reason for a civilized debate on the role of the Israel lobby in helping to bring about the Iraq war.”
Of course, this kind of thing is happening all over the United States and, in a more subtle form, has happened for decades. It constitutes one of the main bases of the overwhelming power of the Lobby. Drake is one of the few angry enough, and brave enough, to write about it. Another very brave man to fight the slurring is Jim Moran, who received the same treatment for having the balls to state the glaringly obvious fact that the Lobby played a large part in leading to the disastrous American attack on the people of Iraq. Moran nails the issue, which is that the slur is intended to block real discussion of the power and influence of the Lobby:

“The problem with addressing the groups who have argued strongly in favor of a long-term American military presence in the Middle East is that they raise arguments that are not related to the point. I would like to have a reasonable, objective discussion about AIPAC's foreign policy agenda. But it's difficult to do that because any time you question their motives, you are accused of being anti-Semitic."

The Lobby even denied it was in favor of the attack on Iraq, a game they have been playing for some time (a particularly outrageous denial, coming at the same time we are seeing another monstrous Lobby push for an attack on Iran), but a bit of a joke to anyone who has been paying attention.

As usual, Lobby critics who make specific arguments about specific organizations, individuals and actions are met with claims that they are using “several age-old canards that have been used throughout history that have brought violence upon Jews” such as “Jewish control of the media and wealthy Jews using their wealth to control policy.” People aren’t that dumb, and the Lobby is fooling itself if it thinks that Americans are buying this (although the – ahem – Jew-controlled media will be filled with attacks on Lobby critics following exactly the same lines). The Jews do control the media, and are proud of it, and wealthy Jews did use their wealth to control policy, easy due to stupid American political financing laws and the power of a group of extremely rich ‘one-issue guys’. The slur is having to bear all the weight of protecting the awesome power of the Lobby, and it is no longer up to the task. As I’ve been saying all along, if the Lobby apologists keep pushing the misuse of the slur, they are going to permanently ruin the ability of future generations to use the term ‘anti-Semitism’ for cases of real anti-Semitism.

Judymillerization

Further to my posting of this morning on the use of judymillerization to advance yet another preposterous Zionist lie, and via Naqniq and the comments, a suitably skeptical article on the situation, noting the convenience of the timing and the fact that the sources are interested parties with an obvious reason for lying (the article leans towards the Korean angle, but you can always kill two birds with one stone, and, as we’ve discussed here, conflict of any kind, for example with North Korea, leads to the general rise in American militarism and tension which has been identified as one of the key goals of Zionism). This kind of ‘journalism’, starting with a misleading headline followed by paragraphs of credulous retyping of the lies, with reference to the anonymous intelligence sources buried at the end for technical ass-covering purposes, should be identified as the worst possible sin in journalism. We have to start embarrassing these assholes.
#3] All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.



probably not sent to you this was --appended for PWH to explicate:
Ver.2/ US's evangelical syndrome illumiNATED by James Carroll "American Fundamentalisms"
What does "no comments-just BOLDs" mean ?
Hi P. - You are correct that is unclear - and it means I didn't write any comments inside the text, just BOLDEDor made RED some of the original words. Sometimes I insert comments within a text, and use teal-coloredfonts for that, but didn't do comments here. It is a good story, although I should add some references where I see a deep connection to Chris Hedges 2003 book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning SUPERB_excerpts_at: 1] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chris%20_Hedges/War_Force_Gives_Meaning.html
and 2] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chris%20_Hedges/CHedges_AFascists_AGoodman.html
interview with Amy Goodman about his book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America"
which CSPAN /Book TV covered by showing him [I happened to watch and tape the program]
give this speech at a chain bookstore. #3]
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/ChristianRight_AmerFascism.html
I don't know if these ideas challenge your Religion or your Politics - but that could be constructive.
I went to a singles-group for 3 years at the nearby megachurch, and agree with this sharp quote from link #3]:
[typed above this box]

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TPM Book Club

An Incomplete Argument

Thanks to the folks at TPMCafe for giving all of us this chance to spend some time in self-reflection through the lens of Matt Bai's The Argument. And thank you, Matt, fellow moderator, for the topic.


http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/bookclub/2007/sep/27/an_incomplete_argument
.../...
That foundation is, essentially, the common good. From an articulation of the common good expressed by Rep. Jim McDermott in an interview at Daily Kos with Armando over two years ago, to Michael Tomasky's key article, much thought has been paid in the online world
.../...All of which is to say, as engaging and informative as The Argument is on many levels, it barely scratches the surface on what the netroots is and what we hope to achieve. The book encapsulates a sliver of the movement in a moment in time that is quickly slipping by;

another comment:On September 27, 2007 - 2:25pm Rick B said:

With the conservatives we have a group openly contemptuous of Civil Rights and personal individual equality before the law and government. (Our dollars are equal. We are not.) Instead they offer us a government that has unlimited power, the power to pick people up off the street and to "disappear" them.

The idea of the Unitary Executive is a codification of what they believe, and something less Constitutional and less Liberal is unimaginable. When Yoo wrote the document, the White House acted on it, but kept it secret. This runs counter to the critical idea of transparent government.

In fact they implement their vision of the anti-Liberal America in as much government secrecy as they can arrange. This, probably more than oil, is what they needed the war for. It replaces the Cold War as justification for shifting control of the government to the Executive and hiding its actions behind "National Security."

These are not the actions of a group who are defending the American Constitution. Instead they are gutting it.

That leaves America with two competing visions of what America is and is to become. One vision was written into the Constitution and was fought over during the Civil War. The other is the current conservative government and has Yoo's vision of the "Unitary Executive" as one of its founding documents.

Is there really any room left to compromise with the conservatives? Doesn't that make the right-wing left-wing political continuum a dangerous fiction?
-----------down ~ 2more----
If the Republicans can't buy or co-opt pundits and journalists as they did with Judith Miller, then leaving them like feral neutered cats to occupy territory is the next best thing.

That neutered territory also becomes good safe territory for risk-averse Democratic office holders to hide out away from the political storms that the right-wing extremists have brought. Those office holders will have to be made aware that the territory they think is safe is in fact even more dangerous to them than getting out and mixing it up with the extremists. That's why the money has to be sent to Moveon.org and other outsider organizations. The real information flow in Washington is the votes that elect the politicians, and the flow of money to the challengers is the only real advance warning they get of those votes.


On September 27, 2007 - 1:15pm mcjoan said:

Ah, but that's a big part of the story--almost no one has heard of the Democracy Alliance. Here's some big money being contributed to a group that isn't at all transparent in how it functions, or that it even exists. Or existed--there's been significant movement within the DA, apparently, to open up a bit.

It's illustrative of how a lot of things work, and have worked for a long time in progressive and liberal interest groups, and that Markos and Jerome take on in Crashing the Gates. There's limited money, huge competition for it, and a carving out and defending of territory that often works at cross-purposes to a healthy, larger progressive movement.


On September 27, 2007 - 2:53pm JRBehrman said:

The central element of Democratic Party politics is not our self-important media but pimp-consultants, originally lawyer-lobbyists but, since 1994, mostly auto-didact ad-men, policy-peddlers, pollsters, and race-hustlers.

They are essentially intermediaries who have wrecked the party in the course of peddling gimmicks and pretty faces to government concession-holders, mafiya capitalists, and private-equity commissars.

This is hardly new, although the scope and scale of it on the Georgetown Plantations today has been vastly expanded since the end of the Great, World, and Cold Wars by the "strong dollar" bubble.

So, for instance, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or AIPAC are now each more important in Washington or, for that matter, Houston, today, than say the Republican Party of Harris County or the Democratic Party of Texas.

What is missing are what the Young Foundation in London calls "Parties for the Public Good". These would be instruments of political formation, mobilization, discipline, and action, as well as what was notionally "responsible, two-party," not coalition, government.

In a previous era, parties also provided a well regulated militia, dating services, choral singing, and other personal or collective benefit, especially for men and women of military or child-bearing age as well as for patriotic middle-class families, as distinct from, say, for a predatory rentier class with its clerical factors and precious heirs.

Instead of parties today, we have the cringing-liberal Democrats' "Permanent Campaign" and the chicken-hawk Republicans' "politics as war".

That sucks, and the blogosphere is awakening to what is wrong.

But, for a lack of cryptographic provsion for "digital identity" in the TCP/IP stack, for "micropayments" in in the money supply, and the fact that Robert's Rules cannot be implemented on a pornography distribution system, the blogosphere has only barely begun to contribute to re-building strong, competitive parties.

So, the GOP is now a dangerous cult, but the Democtratic Party is still a corrupt and ineffectual whorehouse.

In the US Senate, Joe LIEBERMAN leads the majority, chicken-hawk "War Party", as distinct from say Jim WEBB or Chuck HEGEL. In the House, Steny HOYER rules the nearly unanimous Pork Party or, in fact, a frat-house of aging gas-bags and juvenile spokes-models seeking better gigs from their pimp-consultants.

What we have here is the disgusting "lifestyle" politics of lifetime office-squatters and "post-constitutional" government that should have "finned" with the "siecle".

I am a loyal, lifelong, Democratic ward-heeler.

But, I am in a seriously bad mood. My oldest son leaves for his second tour in Iraq next week. The mercs have state-of-the art German machine-pistols and people shooting at him have the very latest Russian heavy machine-guns. He will be a moving target in a clapped-out dune-buggy with the latest model of Lee-Enfield musketry thanks to generations of Democratic committee-barons, lately Dick DURBIN and John MURTHA, who have preserved Admiral MAHAN's navy and General McCLELLAN's Army only bigger and brighter with less tooth and more tail than ever plus Brazilian rank-inflation.

And, of course, we are paying for all sides of the civil war in question the Fourth Generation warfare in prospect.

Thankfully, no pimp-consultants or bond-lawyers have been killed in this latest war of sheer vanity -- an insult to the morality and proficiency of imperialists everwhere.

Congress has increased the level of whining since 2006, but nothing has been cut and nobody has been punished for a war both parties are pretending is not lost and no party has any notion of a purpose for other than preservation of its members' vanity and Blazing Saddles jobs or, more importantly, retirement benefits.

But, retribution and more will come soon enough, if "New Direction" remains just another empty slogan of corrupt, cowardly, utterly ineffectual "Hold Harmless!" and "Jes' He'p Ever'body!" -- ever cornpone but still politically-correct Democrats.

The GOP may wink out first. But, as long as there is a rentier class, there will be a Whig party or what the DNC/DCCC seeks to restore, a Whig, aka "Jim Crow", coalition.

But, when those Whigs in one party or both have done their worst, there will be at least attmpted civil war or revolution before republican democracy gives up the ghost.

::JRBehrman


On September 27, 2007 - 5:04pm esmense said:

Thank you for this:

Indeed, we can't stop globalization or trade. But we can, and most definitely should, learn from the New Deal.  .../...

I think it is also good to remember that many of the progressive ideas we associate with the New Deal weren't new at all. They were populist ideas that had been kicking around for quite some time, born out of experience (most often the experience of people held in as low or even lower repute than today's bloggers and netroots) rather than in Think Tanks. It was only the desperation of the elites of that era, born from their own failures, that provided an opportunity for putting those ideas into practice.

There's a real reluctance, today as there probably was in that earlier time, to allow that economic populism -- the rough voice of experience -- has any legitimate place in the on-going political "argument." Populism, it is assumed, is always and only reactionary, resistent to change, unrealistic in its demands, and naive in its understanding and expectations of the modern economy. And politicians who would represent populist concerns are only pandering.

What we are told is that globalization changes everything, and working and middle class Americans must be more adaptable, flexible and willing to embrace risk. But what is meant is that, rather than agitating for mechanisms and institutions that can help them get more from new economic realities, working and middle class people have to learn to accept less.

Frankly, I think it is naive to assume that working people don't understand, perhaps better than many more affluent Americans, that our capitalist economic system -- not only today but ALWAYS -- requires flexibility, adaptability and a willingness to risk. And not just "risk" as our affluent elite usually mean it -- disposable income "risked" in the stock market or other investments -- but more substantial kinds of risk. The risk involved in putting life and health on the line in difficult but necessary work. The risk involved in leaving everything you've known and loved behind to seek possible, but not guaranteed, opportunities among strangers. The risk (and trust) involved in devoting years of time, talent, energy, expertise and sweat to someone else's bottom line.

Globalization is just a new wrinkle in an old state of affairs. There's nothing new in capitalism's creative destruction, the stresses it places on communities, the demands it makes on individuals, or the requirement it places on us to come together to create institutions that help us find opportunities in the destruction, and creative ways to deal with the stresses and demands.

But as the electronic media and professional consultant industry began to dominate our political discourse in recent decades, union halls began to disappear, etc., etc., opportunties for coming together became more rare, and the variety of voices that could participate in our political dialogue became more limited. Many, many people were left feeling voiceless, isolated and unrepresented.

Now, opportunties to connect created by the internet are beginning to change that.

I wish journalists like Bai, and more of our political class, in and out of office, had a better appreciation, than they seem to, for not only how positive, but how absolutely necessary (for the health of our nation), that is.





disturbing facts of now : [DfW]1561


From: DemocracyforWisconsin@yahoogroups.com
Date: 28 Sep 2007 10:51:41 -0000
Subject: [DemocracyforWisconsin] Digest Number 1561

Re: The Police State Is Right Here, Right Now

Thu Sep 27, 2007 1:18 pm (PST)

I agree. Critics said that John Kerry would be an ineffectual and out of touch leader. His actions that day at the Univ. of Florida made that quite obvious. It's too bad when the critics are right, but I kind of had the same worries myself after seeing him on the campaign trail.

The best thing about that incident were the actual questions. Too bad Kerry didn't even have the balls or respect to write up an answer to them and respond to Andrew Meyer, the questioner, who was dragged out by police as Kerry said he would answer them. Kerry is weak to put it nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CheY0jYXJjY&NR=1

Stephen Kastner <stephen.kastner@gmail.com> wrote: The saddest thing about the tazr incident in Florida is that John Kerry stood there on stage and watched silently, as did the students in the audience. I saw similar incidents spark riots in Champaign, Madison, Berkeley and Ann Arbor during the Viet Nam era, but then we had the draft, a life-threatening motivator. And John Kerry did not have a butler laying out his suits each day.

The Police State Is Right Here, Right Now
Carolyn Baker
carolynbaker.net
Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:30 EDT

Axis of Evil Another publicity stunt! Israel agrees to free 90 Palestinian prisoners Bush to ask 195 billion to fund Iraq, Afghan wars: report U.S. DoD To Outsource $15B, so corporations can profit off the supposed 'War on Narcoterror' GOP Madness: 'The Big Con' Bush Madness: The scruffy charms of an insecure president Bush's stairway to paradise - the president has entered a phase of decadent perversity As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In
both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air-however slight-lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness.
~Justice William O. Douglas~
In April, 2007 I was pleasantly surprised to find Naomi Wolf's article, "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps " posted in several places online. I have been a fan of Wolf for many years, greatly appreciating her works and especially her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth. I had been looking for a list-or more specifically, an encyclopedia of the losses of civil liberties in the United States that might clarify for my history students the extent to which America has become a fascist empire. Wolf's "10 Easy Steps" was perfect, but her just-published book, The End Of America: Letter Of Warning To A Young Patriot, from which the 10 easy steps was compiled, offers an even fuller picture-a succinct and engaging explanation of how our civil liberties have been hijacked in the past decade. It is the most poignant, powerful, genuinely patriotic piece of literature I have encountered since Thomas Paine's Common Sense. No wonder then, that the book's cover greatly resembles that 46-page
tract by Paine written in 1775-as well it should.
One of the most frightening realities of teaching college history is that most students rarely have a clue what fascism is. They know about Hitler and the extermination of Jews, but they see little connection with Nazi rule in the 1930s and 40s and the current political milieu in the United States. Overwhelmingly, they cannot define fascism, nor can they define socialism or democracy. After all, they were pre-occupied during grammar school with becoming standardized human beings by way of taking standardized "No Child's Behind Left" tests, five hours a day, four days a week. So why would they know the definitions of fascism, socialism or democracy?
Refreshingly, Wolf is not shy about using the term fascism and lets the reader know why. "I have made a deliberate choice in using the terms fascist tactics and fascist shift when I describe some events in America now. I stand by my choice. I am not being heated or even rhetorical; I am being technical." She explains that where Americans tend to see the various political "isms" as all-or-nothing, that perception is often inaccurate because of what she calls a "range of authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, and varieties of Fascist states...there are many shades of gray on the spectrum from an open to a closed society."
Comment: And this is one of the problems with the way reality is spoon fed to Americans via the controlled media - as simple black/white, yes/no choices. In reality there are generally many shades of grey as Wolf decribes, there is 'good' there is 'evil' and between them there are the specific conditions in each case that define the two. Unfortunately it requires the individual to take the step of thinking for themselves, rather than absorb the hypnotic message of Fox et al.

Wolf also emphasizes that America has flirted with fascism openly in the 1930s when numerous corporations and robber barons helped finance Hitler and when as Edwin Black notes in IBM And The Holocaust, some American corporations assisted the Nazi regime in carrying out its "final solution" to the "Jewish problem." In fact, several of these corporate tycoons attempted to stage a coup d' etat to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and restructure the American government under fascist control. A thorough investigation of American politics and society from the end of the Civil War until the present moment reveals, as I have carefully traced in my book U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, that much of recent American history is replete with a preference on the part of corporations and the politicians they own for an economic and political system on the far right end of the spectrum. In fact, resistance to fascism in the United States has
been an arduous and daunting struggle for those who have been able to understand and oppose the appeal that fascism has to the corporatocracy, and in fact, take seriously Mussolini's fundamental definition of fascism: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Comment:
Which should more properly be called Pathocracy: a totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

As an historian who views American history as the complex unfolding of events that it is, I feel invigorated upon hearing someone like Wolf - especially the Wolf of feminist Beauty Myth fame - part company with the presentation of the Founders as "dead white men" inwardly tormented by various hypocrisies, such as the ownership of slaves and the subordination of women. Yes, Jefferson owned slaves and fathered six children by one of them, but what gets lost in that drama and other colorful stories of the Founders is that they were also thinking, speaking, and writing highly subversive thoughts. "You are not taught," says Wolf, that "these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were wiling to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see." I do not
wish to romanticize the Founders and their generation living in a milieu replete with racism, misogyny, and classism, but neither will I throw their achievements out with the bathwater of political correctness, nor is Wolf willing to do so in her examination of them.
In the "10 easy steps" outlined by Wolf, countries move from open to closed and repressive societies by devolving past certain markers, and Wolf makes a powerful case for the way in which the United States is following a similar pattern without any significant deviation. In each instance she compares and contrasts how America's adherence to the pattern compares or contrasts with the pattern in pre-World War II Germany. The 10 steps are:
1. Invoking an external and internal threat
2. Establishing secret prisons
3. Developing a paramilitary force
4. Surveiling ordinary citizens
5. Infiltrating citizens' groups
6. Arbitrarily detaining and releasing citizens
7. Targeting key individuals
8. Restricting the press
9. Casting criticism as "espionage" and dissent as "treason"
10. Subverting the rule of law
As noted in the quote from Justice Douglas above, the fascist shift is a protracted process; it never happens overnight, and in U.S. History Uncensored, I offer an historical narrative describing exactly how we have arrived where we are-at "the end of America". Some aspects of the process were generated before the U.S. Civil War, but our recent history is nothing less than the story of the acceleration of the fascist agenda and the death of the Republic.
Frequently, books come into our lives with momentous timing. Several weeks ago a friend of mine was traveling through a small town in upstate New York looking for the location of a meeting he was scheduled to attend. Realizing that he was lost, he spotted a police officer in a marked car and waived to the officer to pull over. The officer pulled over, and my friend innocently got out of his car to walk back to the officer's car. Suddenly, the officer's voice came blasting across a loud speaker, "Get back in the car! Stop where you are! Get back in the car!" My friend returned to his vehicle and waited for the officer to approach his driver's side window. The officer, with a hand on his holstered firearm, angrily asked my friend what he wanted. When my friend asked him for directions, he replied with hostility that he didn't know the location of the place for which my friend was searching and once again repeated, "Never get out of your car when you're dealing with a police
officer." So much for asking directions from a police officer these days.
On another occasion, two friends of mine returning from Canada were detained at the U.S./Canadian border, and while one of them had a U.S. passport, the other had forgotten to bring his. He produced a variety of identification but was taken aside, questioned, shouted at, and harassed in an extremely hostile manner as if he were an enemy of the state. Fortunately, after over-the-top intimidation from a couple of surly customs officers, he was allowed to enter the U.S.
About three weeks ago I was returning from a routine visit to the dentist in Mexico and had a U.S. passport with me, even though none will be required for returning from Mexico until January, 2008. I was told by a very aggressive female customs agent to pull over to the center where vehicles are detained. I was ordered in a very hostile manner to give her my driver's license and the keys to my vehicle and stay in my vehicle. When I asked what the problem was, I was told to be quiet and again, to stay in my vehicle. Having taught in Mexico for three years, returning to the U.S. every day and rarely having to show any identification whatsoever, I found this procedure to be astonishingly rigid and unnecessary. I have made many trips to Mexico in recent months and have never had any problem when the automatic photos that are taken of every license plate crossing the border appeared on U.S. Customs computer screens.
After what seemed like an eternity the female officer returned and told me that it appeared that I had had an expired vehicle registration four years ago which I had not taken care of and that I needed to do so at once. She gave me the name of the court where the offense was allegedly registered. The very next day I contacted the court and discovered that indeed I had been stopped four years ago for an expired registration for which I was given a warning. Every year since, I have purchased my annual registration well before the deadline, but the offense was never brought to my attention, and I even acquired a new driver's license last year through the motor vehicles division and was not informed of the offense. Not wanting any further hassle regarding the "heinous crime" of having an expired registration four years ago, I agreed to pay the small fine imposed by the court.
Some readers may assume that I was harassed because of who I am and my open delivery of alternative news and opinions on this website daily. I, on the other hand, do not believe that this was "all about me." Whether or not it was, it is blatantly obvious to me that the behavior of law enforcement in the United States has shifted dramatically in recent months. Whether or not I was targeted, which I sincerely doubt, this kind of treatment is becoming standard in law enforcement procedure throughout the United States.
And now fast-forward to Monday, September 17, 2007 (U.S. Constituion Day), at the University of Florida and the tasering of a student questioning John Kerry regarding the 2004 elections and Kerry's membership in Skull and Bones-an incident which has been viewed by millions on the internet and on mainstream TV news broadcasts. Writing of this debacle, Wolf's article "A Shocking Moment For Society" appeared on various internet sites this morning, and in it she states:
There is a chapter in my new book, The End of America, entitled "Recast Criticism as 'Espionage' and Dissent as 'Treason,'" that conveys why this moment is the horrific harbinger it is. I argue that strategists using historical models to close down an open society start by using force on 'undesirables,' 'aliens,' 'enemies of the state,' and those considered by mainstream civil society to be untouchable; in other times they were, of course, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals. Then, once society has been acculturated to that use of force, the 'blurring of the line' begins and the parameters of criminalized speech are extended - the definition of 'terrorist' expanded - and the use of force begins to be deployed in HIGHLY VISIBLE, STRATEGIC and VISUALLY SHOCKING WAYS against people that others see and identify with as ordinary citizens. The first 'torture cellars' used by the SA, in Germany between 1931 and 1933 - even before the National Socialists gained control of
the state, during the years when Germany was still a parliamentary democracy - were informal and widely publicized in the mainstream media. Few German citizens objected because those abused there were seen as 'other' - even though the abuse was technically illegal. But then, after this escalation of the use of force was accepted by the population, students, journalists, opposition leaders, and clergy were similarly abused during their own arrests. Within six months dissent was stilled in Germany.
Comment: For a vivid and shocking first hand account of Germany's rapid descent into totalitarianism as described above, see Sebastian Haffner's 'Defying Hitler'.

What is the lesson for us from this and from other closing societies, some of them democracies? You can have a working Congress or Parliament; newspapers; human rights groups; even elections; but when ordinary people start to be hurt by the state for speaking out, dissent closes quickly and the shock chills opposition very, very fast. Once that happens, democracy has been so weakened that major tactical and strategic incursions - greater violations of democratic process - are far more likely. If there is dissent about the vote in Florida in this next presidential election - and the police are tasering voters' rights groups - we will still have an election.
What we will not have is liberty.
We have to understand what time it is. When the state starts to hurt people for asking questions, we can no longer operate on the leisurely time of a strong democracy - the 'Oh gosh how awful!' kind of time. It is time to take to the streets. It is time to confront those committing crimes against the Constitution. The window has now dropped several precipitous inches and once it is closed there is no opening it without great and sorrowful upheaval.
As I read Wolf's latest article, I realized that despite my enormous admiration for her and The End Of America, there are a number of areas where I must disagree with her.
First, the only thing shocking to me about the University of Florida incident is that so many Americans are shocked that it happened. Last night I posted a communication to her mailing list regarding the incident from former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney who says:
No police officer should be in the business of denying Constitutional rights to anyone; I am particularly chagrined when it appears that a black police officer participated in this attack on an innocent student.
What is happening to us???? How much more will the people accept?? I was outraged as early as 2000 when Florida was stolen and the Democrats said nothing!!!! Now, innocent students get tasered just for asking questions.
What kind of US Senator do we have who can't or won't answer a question about his own election that affects all of us???
Wolf has given us a compendium of civil and Constitutional rights stolen from us during the past eight years of the Bush administration. If one understands this odyssey of oppression, then yesterday's tasering of a questioning student makes perfect sense. I appreciate why Wolf used the word "shocking" in her most recent article, but I'd be willing to bet that she isn't shocked at all - not after the extraordinary documentation she has given us in The End Of America. What I do believe she wishes to clarify is the intentionally traumatizing methodology of law enforcement to maintain social control.
Secondly, I must take issue with Wolf regarding her statement that "...we on the left must snap out of our 'it's-all-the-WTO-the-two-parties-are-the-same' torpor...We have to reengage in an old-fashioned commitment to democratic action and believe once again in an old-fashioned notion of the Republic. We need to help lead a democracy movement in America like the ones that have toppled repressive regimes overseas."
Again, let's fast forward not to Monday, but today and the headline "Senate bars bill to restore detainee rights " - a decision which supports the Bush administration's denial of habeas corpus to Guantanamo prisoners who want to challenge their imprisonment in court. Need we reiterate one more time that since the 2006 elections, the Democrats have done virtually nothing to end the occupation of Iraq? Need we watch the video one more time of John Kerry standing mute and statue-like on the University of Florida auditorium stage-saying or doing nothing as a student was tasered for asking him why he handed the 2004 election to George W. Bush? Does anyone seriously believe that in a world where fellow students applaud as police remove and taser a questioning student and do nothing to speak up against such an outrage that we will see a viable, effective "democracy movement in America like the ones that have toppled repressive regimes overseas"?
As for Wolf's suggestion in today's article that we "take to the streets", the police state is preparing for that eventuality as well by letting us know that it has developed severely injuring electromagnetic crowd control technology that will dramatically limit how many and how often people can "take to the streets." Welcome to full-spectrum "1984".
I repeat: the police state is right here, right now!
Moreover, some pivotal factors that Wolf has not addressed are global energy depletion, climate change, and global economic meltdown which are exacerbating the fascist shift about which she so brilliantly writes and which will continue to embolden that shift as energy scarcity, climate chaos, and financial crises add fuel to the fires of terrorism that the ruling elite have so consciously and carefully incited and fanned throughout America. As American society continues to unravel, the fascist shift will escalate, and what is left of our civil liberties will further evaporate.
As for political parties, I prefer the definition offered by Mike Ruppert in "America: From Freedom To Fascism" in which he explains that the two major parties are like two crime families - the Genoveses and the Gambinos. They function like players in a crap game that feign opposition to each other, but when the chips are down, they will always unite to serve their common interests. (If the Iraq occupation is not a case in point, then I don't know what is.) When we vote in presidential elections for corporately-owned candidates or "the lesser evil", we are merely choosing between the two crime families, and even if one candidate were not a crime family member, our votes in the past two presidential elections, as Bev Harris has so astutely demonstrated, have been hacked. In the throes of the current, and I might add, rapidly-accelerating fascist shift, what evidence do we have for assuming that if there is an election in 2008, anything will be different? Tell me again,
what's the definition of insanity?
At this moment another Naomi comes to mind-Naomi Klein whose book Shock Doctrine I shall soon review. In that work Klein documents one of the key strategies of fascist empires: shocking their citizens into submission in a variety of ways from widespread societal terrorism to the administering of electroshock therapy to individuals. What we witnessed at the University of Florida yesterday, and what we are likely to see more frequently in America, are deliberate shock tactics applied by law enforcement to citizens for the purpose of achieving massive social control.
Comment: See Stephen Lendman's review of Shock Doctrine HERE.

Some of my students who are criminal justice majors tell me that the latest strategies now being taught to police officers are "shock doctrine" techniques which terrorize and intimidate civilians in order to control them. Law enforcement officers are no longer encouraged to "keep a cool head" but to "follow their own instincts" (which usually means their own internal, adrenaline-charged state of terror) and react with full force because it's easier to apologize (or encounter a lawsuit) than to ask permission or risk being killed. Terrified people should not be wearing a badge and carrying a gun, and when they are, a fully terrorized society is guaranteed.
In spite of my disagreements with Naomi Wolf's suggested solutions, I cannot recommend The End Of America enthusiastically enough. It is now a permanent part of my U.S. history curriculum and is an ideal tool not only for educators, but for parents who want to teach their children where all those civil liberties we used to have actually came from as well as how and why they are disappearing in the present moment.
Carolyn is an adjunct professor of history, a former psychotherapist, an author, and a student of mythology and ritual. Visit Carolyn's website.



On 9/23/07, rnovkov@netzero.net < rnovkov@netzero.net> wrote: This is illegal wiretapping, Bush is doing this without going to Congress first, we are not any safer than we are on 9/11, Bush just wants us to live in fear and the government should be held accountable for this.

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