The Guerrilla Campaign

by Mary Pitt 2/26/07 After November's election, the people were feeling optimistic, having elected a Democratic majority in the House and more than an even balance in the Senate. Speaker Pelosi announced her "first 100 hours" strategy and we were ready to watch the reform take place. However, the euphoria was short-lived as the House passed first one "non-binding resolution" only to have it squelched by the Republican bloc in the Senate. The Democrats, unlike the Dixie Chicks, are still convinced that they need to make nice. Perhaps they were in the minority for too long and it was simply easier to fall back into the same old habits of huddling helplessness. In addition, the next election campaign is on everybody's minds and key figures are playing to the power structure rather than to the electorate. Now they trying to put together a plan to force the President to withdraw our troops from Iraq by one method if not another. However, the President dares them ...

A Political War against the American People and its Institutions by Rodrigue Tremblay Feb 26, 2007 http://www.thenewamericanempire.com/tremblay=1059.htm Second sorrow: "A loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Chalmers Johnson (Sorrows of Empire) "Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny." Barry Goldwater, former Republican senator from Arizona "Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our (U.S.) Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to...

More of the shameful war crimes being committed by the US to shore up its occupation of Iraq. As the British are leaving, the bush is adding more US troops to the maelstorm of his making. The longer this obscenity continues, the more enemies the US creates. Juan Cole of Informed Comment says it better than I can. At least, more objectively than I can. And on the subject of Iran, testimony in the libby trial points to cheney having a prominent role in the “outing” of Valerie Plame. This should be considered treason, since it removed her from her role in counter-proliferation activities specializing on Iran. Now with the bush talking up war with that country because of its nuclear activities, how else can one consider cheney’s act? If what the bush says is true, a BIG stretch to be sure, then cheney certainly aided the “enemy”. And as we know, the punishment for treason “in a time of war”, as the bush like to keep reminding us we’re in, is death. But I’ll settle for both the bush and ch...

by Stephen Lendman 2/22/07 Hugo Chavez Frias was reelected by an overwhelming nearly two to one margin over his only serious rival on December 3, 2006 giving him a mandate to proceed with his agenda to build a socialist society in the 21st century on a Bolivarian model designed to meet the needs of the current era in Venezuela and Latin America overall. Chavez first announced his intentions on January 30, 2005 at the Fifth World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his people affirmed they want him to proceed with it in his new term to run until December, 2012. Chavez wants to build a humanistic democratic society based on solidarity and respect for political, economic, social and cultural human and civil rights, but not the top-down bureaucratic kind that doomed the Soviet Union and Eastern European states. He said he wants to build a "new socialism of the 21st century....based in solidarity, fraternity, love, justice, liberty and equality" as opposed to the neoliberal ...

by Mary Pitt 2/22/07 As a life-long feminist, it would be the fulfillment of all my dreams to have a woman as President of the United States in my lifetime. However, I find that the position is too important to waste my precious vote in such an endeavor if it were not the right person for the job. I am not convinced that Hillary Rodham Clinton is that person and, for the good of my beloved country, I cannot vote for her, and I will be happy to tell you why. In 1992, I had become disillusioned with what the Republican Party had become under the leadership of Ronald Reagan and, though not ready to become a Democrat, I was ready to shop around. I watched carefully the presidential debates in order to evaluate the candidates and I settled upon Ross Perot, who seemed to have a better grasp of the welfare of the rank-and-file citizens. Sure, I was impressed by Mr Clinton but thought him rather callow as well as a wee bit shallow. Hillary, however, was impressive to my recently-Republican ins...

by Stephen Lendman 2/20/07 Hugo Chavez Frias gained an Ecuadoran ally last November when voters rejected Washington's choice and the country's richest man and elected Raphael Correa its President by an impressive margin. Correa is a populist economist and self-styled "humanist, leftist Christian" promising big changes for another Latin American country long ruled by and for the elite and against the interests of ordinary people Ecuador abounds in whose voices finally spoke and prevailed. Correa took office January 15 in a country of 13 million, over 70% of whom live in poverty. They voted for a man promising social democratic change and the same kinds of benefits Venezuelans now have under Hugo Chavez they too now have a chance to get. Correa is the country's 8th president in the last decade including three previous ones driven from office by mass street protest opposition against their misrule and public neglect. Correa campaigned on a promise of change includ...

by Stephen Lendman The world community calls them "Blue Helmets" or "peacekeepers," and the UN defines their mission as "a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace" by implementing and monitoring post-conflict peace processes former combatants have agreed to under provisions of the UN Charter. The Charter empowers the Security Council to take collective action to maintain international peace and security that includes authorizing peacekeeping operations provided a host country agrees to have them under Rules of Engagement developed and approved by all parties. At that point, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations enlists member nations to provide force contingents to be deployed once the Security Council gives final approval. Once in place, Blue Helmets are supposed to help in various ways including monitoring the withdrawal of combatants, building confidence, enforcing power-sharing agreements, providing elec...

Bush calls on Congress to fund U.S. troops to Iraq Bush said while he understood that lawmakers had differences of opinion about his plan, the disagreement should not stop them from approving funds for the troops. "I find it interesting that there is a declaration about a plan that they have not given a chance to work," Bush said. Well, george, there are some people who think up plans to play "Russian Roulette" from time to time. Are you saying I should be giving those plans a chance to see if they'll work? You know, if that's what you mean, come 'on over. I'll set the game board up.

March 16, 2003 Sunshine for Women This essay was written in response to an e-mail I received from a family member. In the essay which you forwarded entitled "Peace for Our Time" by Alistair Cooke, Cooke equates Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler and warns the world against appeasing a megalomaniac and a tyrant. Widely respected for his powerful writing (even to the point of being knighted in 1973) this eye-witness to World War II eloquently states the danger of appeasement. The world knows the dangers of appeasing tyrants: certainly the German, French, and Russian people know the dangers of appeasement – one, possibly two, generations of Germans, French, and Russians spent their lives rebuilding their war-scarred and shattered lands. I am surprised that Cooke seems to believe that he needs to inform the world of the dangers of appeasement. Does he believe that the German's have forgotten their own history or the French or the Russians? Maybe American's have forgotten the...

By Sheila Samples 2/12/07 Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."~~ Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas If the Bush administration and the US mainstream media are united on any one issue, it's an absolute refusal to rock the political boat as they sail mercilessly through the seas of corporate profit on the good ship Terrorbush. For the most part, each group is an incurious lot -- undead creatures who neither care, nor dare, to glance over the side of the ship at the bloated, swirling bodies in the blood-red water below. From the beginning, their mission has been to perform so fantastically against a backdrop of such violent, explosive madness on so many fronts that we watch hypnotically but do not ...

by Rodrigue Tremblay February 12, 2007 "The dangerous patriot: "The one who drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions. He is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory. Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism . . . which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power and which equates the national honor with military victory." James A. Donovan, Colonel, US Marine Corps "Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control." Lord Acton (1834-1902) "If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject... " William Graham Sumner On September 20, 2002, George W. Bush, in conformity with the path that Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Rice and Co. had traced for him, adopted a hegemonic foreign policy and issued the famous hubristic " Bush Doctri...

By John V. Walsh February 8, 2007 We hear over and over again that it "takes 60 votes to get something serious done in the Senate." That is a lot of malarkey. It takes only one senator to begin a filibuster against any bill. And then it takes only 41 votes to uphold that filibuster and prevent any proposed law from coming to the floor. Thus, the present authorization for defense funding in the coming fiscal year can be stopped cold if it contains funds for the war on Iraq. And this can be done by just one courageous Senator, backed by 40 colleagues. Let me propose the following scenario. Just one Senator, Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold or Robert Byrd, arises in the Senate and declares that he will filibuster the present defense authorization bill if it contains funds for the war on Iraq or Iran. That bill is then dead unless there are 60 votes (3/5 of the 100 Senators) to end the debate, i.e., to invoke cloture. That is it. Bush no longer has the funds to prosecute the war. He ...

by Ilan Pappe A Review by Stephen Lendman 2/8/07 Pappe is also one of Israel's "new historians" whose scholarship and writings are based on access to material now available from British Mandate period and Israeli archives that provide the most accurate and authentic documented history of Israel before and after it became a state and which now serve to debunk the myths about the years leading up to the Jewish State's founding and those following it to this day. Pappe has also authored, contributed to or edited nine books. His latest is the one this review covers in detail so readers will know about its powerful and shocking content, unknown to most in the West and in Israel, that hopefully will arouse them enough to get the book and learn in full detail what Pappe documented. He proves from official records how the Israeli state came into being with blood on its hands from lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian inhabitants who'd lived on it for hundreds of ye...

The Rude Pundit 2/5/2007 …Meanwhile, in the Senate, they're debating about debating about using a garden hose to stop the wildfires from engulfing the house.

by Rodrigue Tremblay February 5, 2007 http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1056 "The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place." Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) "The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses." Edward Abbey (1927-1989) "It's quite fun to fight 'em, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you. I like brawling." Lt. Gen. James Mattis, US commander of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (comment made at a conference in San Diego, California, on February 1, 2005) Under the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper, Canada 's foreign policy has become subservient to American foreign policy, at a ...

Depleted Uranium, Diabetes, Cancer And You by Dr. Alan Cantwell Global Research, January 18, 2007 Recently, I received an intriguing email claiming that the rapidly increasing worldwide epidemic of diabetes was caused by depleted uranium (DU). As a medical doctor I never heard of such an idea. Every physician knows that radiation can lead to cancer, but the DU and diabetes connection seemed ludicrous. Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to check it out on the Internet. The best tool for medical research on the Net is the PubMed website sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine. I typed in the keywords: depleted uranium and diabetes. No citations to scientific papers in the medical journals appeared on my computer screen, which further assured me there was no scientific connection. Even when I used key words - depleted uranium and human disease - only a mere 16 papers were cited on the subject from 1994 to 2005; and only half these papers addressed the medical proble...

By Lorenzo A. Canizares Thursday, 01 February 2007 Today (Feb 2) in the front page of the New York Times it is announced major cuts being proposed for Medicare & Medicaid, at the same time that EXXON & BP establish record profits! Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people about the danger of the military- industrial complex. According to journalist Robert Scheer the "complex" political control has already arrived. Scheer says "anyone doubting that need only look at the prodigious amount that this war is costing us and where the greater cost - ignoring the lives lost - lies. Who is profiting? Are we getting value for their work? Are those profiteers affecting our politics with their contributions to political campaigns and lobbying efforts." It was a surprise to many election observers to discover that voters named the economy second only to the war as the issue of most concern. And, it was even a bigger surprise to find out that 59% of these people voted ...

The February issue of theMagazine is on-line Israel's Kafkaesque 'Matrix of Control' by Stephen Lendman 2/1/07 Finding an equitable solution to the intractable, festering decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Gordian Knot that must be cut to achieve peace overall in the Middle East. Today, no solution is in sight nor are any serious efforts planned to find one despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary like what's now being heard from Washington with similar disingenuous echos inside Israel. Palestinians know otherwise from long experience. They've heard this siren song before. It's the same old tired refrain going nowhere and not intending to. The so-called "road map" goes nowhere, and the "peace process" guarantees only more conflict because Israel wants it that way to justify its harshness and refuses to discuss the most fundamental Palestinian concerns. Unless they're resolved there can never be peace. They include ...