Freetalk about USA culture: 24 new messages in 19 topics

The culture of the United States of America.

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Friday, April 14, 2006

24 new messages in 19 topics - digest ==>Read...

soc.culture.usa
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa
soc.culture.usa@googlegroups.com

Today's topics:

* Wal Mart to stop gun sales in a third of it's US stores - 2 messages, 2
authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/3cb577d6ca5d903e
* DEAD-END DEBATES - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6af889c7df24e826
* HOW MANY JEWS WILL VOLUNTEER FOR THIS ONE? - 2 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/ef916c8be23cbcde
* HERE IS YOUR CHANCE KIKE, TO PROVE YOURSELF! - 2 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/b6199f1c06fa8f48
* THE FIRST TERRORIST PEOPLE - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/904401dc574f729b
* Seymour Hersh and The New York Times - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/79c10add2fc00b9a
* Al-Jafaari talks to Channel 4 News (UK) - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/9c29fdacd78aa79c
* TNB: Bill Cosby asks parents to watch their kids, Negroes say "Why?" - 1
messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/34026f7a590e9162
* Top Ten Jesus Movies - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/adf037a627d78e08
* Paul Krugman: We Better Believe It Re: Pitt: How Crazy Are They? - 1
messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/d0adc544b88554b1
* BUSH'S GENOCIDE WILL EXCEED THAT OF HITLER - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/40956d13df86d870
* Kook pushes conspiracy theory (was: Physicist says Thermite heat substance
felled WTC) - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/abf837d229b6d170
* There Are Criminals, and Then There Are Criminals - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/50ef8615cbe980ba
* April 14, 1935: Fearful dust storm inspires songwriter - 1 messages, 1
author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/9257aa48a1b1b1b4
* KIKE ABRAMOFF, THE SHITWAD! - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/30ff46aed373bca7
* AMERICA IS TRAPPED! - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6dbf260fc6bf2840
* SHIELDING ZIONAZI CRIMES - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/2b434dde80c72ee0
* Secondary factors why Eyeran wants nukes - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a6b2f655b2a3f198
* Why Rumsfeld Should Not Resign: Rats Leave a Sinking Ship - 1 messages, 1
author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/abe07d8427c1b9b0

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Wal Mart to stop gun sales in a third of it's US stores
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/3cb577d6ca5d903e
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 6:11 pm
From: "Felix D." <#1Chekist@OGPU.org>

"Kyle Rodgers" <sdes@aol.com> wrote in message
news:gvT%f.10889$4L1.465@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com...
>
> <aklon3@attbi.com> wrote in message
> news:1145040377.430468.124290@z34g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> >
> > Kyle Rodgers wrote:
> >> What's a rightard to do when he can't buy a rifle with his Doritos and
> >> Preparation H?
> >
> > We sit around and wonder how a guy like you can breathe with your head
> > wedged so firmly up your ass.
>
> You ever wonder that about Bush?

No. I had a pussy around my head when I was born. What's your excuse?

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 2:14 am
From: "Morton Davis"

"EGB" <egb@egb.egb> wrote in message
news:6eg042dsuu99gijg2iu7u5ogkuv7388bt0@4ax.com...
> On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 17:02:28 GMT, laura bush - VEHICULAR HOMICIDE
> <xeton2001@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060414/ap_on_bi_ge/wal_mart_guns_2
> >
> >Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has decided to stop selling guns in about a third
> >of its U.S. stores in what it calls a marketing decision based on lack
> >of demand in some places, a company spokeswoman said Friday.
>
> I'm sure all the Republican lawyers in Texas are happy to have an
> excuse to duck out of a bird hunt with the VP.
>
>
BULLSHIT
>
>
> --
> The War in Iraq is Lost. God is not an American.

We don't give a flying fuck.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: DEAD-END DEBATES
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6af889c7df24e826
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 6:12 pm
From: "Evron"

serwad wrote:
> IF YOU GET RID OF ALL THE ARABS, THERE WOULD BE NO PROBLEMS
> IN MIDDLE EAST!
>

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:07 pm
From: "serwad"

"Evron" <mossad@ziontimes.com> wrote in message
news:1145063568.454118.270890@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
>
> serwad wrote:
>> IF YOU GET RID OF ALL THE ARABS, THERE WOULD BE NO PROBLEMS
>> IN MIDDLE EAST!

THAT WILL BE THE DAY, "CHOSEN" ARSEHOLE

==============================================================================
TOPIC: HOW MANY JEWS WILL VOLUNTEER FOR THIS ONE?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/ef916c8be23cbcde
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:13 pm
From: "serwad"

An Iraqi-Canadian friend forwarded to me the announcement below he received
from an American recruiting company. Please read its details below and make
sure you click on the link in the bottom that reads, "See how some Aegis
mercenaries are earning their money "

The announcement below and especially the link in the bottom should give you
some idea of the atrocities committed by the Americans in IRAQ. This is only
one tiny aspect of the reality of this war. You will be shocked or
entertained depending on your set of principles when reading it and watching
the video clip.

When I gave a talk about the war on IRAQ in June 2003 and later in January
2004 in Cambridge, MA. and mentioned how the American soldiers are shooting
randomly at civilians with no reason whatsoever, many looked at me surprised
and few argued that I was exaggerating or not telling the truth.

The link in the bottom of the announcement below is one of tens of such
links on the Internet. What is unique about this specific link is that it
was sent proudly by the recruiting company as a proof of their ill conducts
in IRAQ.

**************

My name is K K and I am a Recruiting Specialist for Aegis Mission Essential
Personnel. I came across your resume on www.collegegrad.com. We currently
have an Arabic linguist position available overseas that your qualifications
indicate you may be suited for. I have listed the details of the position
below and attached a salary chart for you to review. As outlined in the
compensation breakdown, total compensation after completing a one year
contract with our company is $136,900 US dollars.

Please do not hesitate to forward this information to any other individuals
you feel would be interested in our linguist position. If you have any
questions or are interested in pursuing this job opportunity, please feel
free to give me a call at 614-xxx-2345 or reply by email to xx@aegismep.com.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Requirements:

-- Must be a Canadian citizen fluent in the Iraqi dialect-- Must be
proficient in
reading, writing, listening and speaking in Arabic and English-- Must be
willing to travel overseas, in this case, Iraq

Duties:

-- Provide operational contract linguist support to U.S. Army operations in
Iraq

-- Provide general linguistic support for military operations and interpret
during interviews, meetings, and conferences

-- Interpret and translate written and spoken communications

-- Transcribe and analyze communications

-- Perform document exploitation

-- Scan, research, and analyze foreign language documents for key
information

-- Translate foreign language documents

-- Identify and extract information components meeting military information
requirements

-- Provide input to reports

Vacation/Leave: --2 weeks vacation/leave after 6 months of service (24 days
after 1 year of service)

Benefits Package (Aetna Global Benefits):
-- Complete Health Care Package
-- Preferred employee status for future position with Aegis MEP (based on
availability)
Employee Compensation Effective 01 January 06

CAT I Arabic Linguist Bi-Weekly Salary (Hardship Duty 5) Green Card Holder
or Canadian Consultant

Base $2,484.62

Hardship $372.69

Hazard $621.16

Total $3,478.47

CAT I Arabic Linguist Yearly Salary (HS 5)

Base $ 64,600.00

Hardship $16,150.00

Hazard $16,150.00

30-Day Completion Bonus $10,000.00

180-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00

360-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00

Total $136,900.00

Health Insurance Deductions (Bi-Weekly)

*This compensation table is for reference only. Rates are subject to change.

Sincerely

K K,

Recruiting Specialist Aegis Mission Essential Personnel, LLC

(Keep in mind that Iraqis make jews eat their own balls, uncooked!)

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:39 pm
From: "serwad"

"Evron" <mossad@ziontimes.com> wrote in message
news:1145064719.919226.241520@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
> serwad wrote:
>> An Iraqi-Canadian friend forwarded to me the announcement below he
>> received
>> from an American recruiting company. Please read its details below and
>> make
>> sure you click on the link in the bottom that reads, "See how some Aegis
>> mercenaries are earning their money "
>>
>> The announcement below and especially the link in the bottom should give
>> you
>> some idea of the atrocities committed by the Americans in IRAQ. This is
>> only
>> one tiny aspect of the reality of this war. You will be shocked or
>> entertained depending on your set of principles when reading it and
>> watching
>> the video clip.
>>
>> When I gave a talk about the war on IRAQ in June 2003 and later in
>> January
>> 2004 in Cambridge, MA. and mentioned how the American soldiers are
>> shooting
>> randomly at civilians with no reason whatsoever, many looked at me
>> surprised
>> and few argued that I was exaggerating or not telling the truth.
>>
>> The link in the bottom of the announcement below is one of tens of such
>> links on the Internet. What is unique about this specific link is that it
>> was sent proudly by the recruiting company as a proof of their ill
>> conducts
>> in IRAQ.
>>
>>
>>
>> **************
>>
>>
>>
>> My name is K K and I am a Recruiting Specialist for Aegis Mission
>> Essential
>> Personnel. I came across your resume on www.collegegrad.com. We currently
>> have an Arabic linguist position available overseas that your
>> qualifications
>> indicate you may be suited for. I have listed the details of the position
>> below and attached a salary chart for you to review. As outlined in the
>> compensation breakdown, total compensation after completing a one year
>> contract with our company is $136,900 US dollars.
>>
>>
>> Please do not hesitate to forward this information to any other
>> individuals
>> you feel would be interested in our linguist position. If you have any
>> questions or are interested in pursuing this job opportunity, please feel
>> free to give me a call at 614-xxx-2345 or reply by email to
>> xx@aegismep.com.
>>
>>
>> I look forward to hearing from you!
>>
>>
>> Requirements:
>>
>> -- Must be a Canadian citizen fluent in the Iraqi dialect-- Must be
>> proficient in
>> reading, writing, listening and speaking in Arabic and English-- Must be
>> willing to travel overseas, in this case, Iraq
>>
>> Duties:
>>
>> -- Provide operational contract linguist support to U.S. Army operations
>> in
>> Iraq
>>
>> -- Provide general linguistic support for military operations and
>> interpret
>> during interviews, meetings, and conferences
>>
>> -- Interpret and translate written and spoken communications
>>
>> -- Transcribe and analyze communications
>>
>> -- Perform document exploitation
>>
>> -- Scan, research, and analyze foreign language documents for key
>> information
>>
>> -- Translate foreign language documents
>>
>> -- Identify and extract information components meeting military
>> information
>> requirements
>>
>> -- Provide input to reports
>>
>> Vacation/Leave: --2 weeks vacation/leave after 6 months of service (24
>> days
>> after 1 year of service)
>>
>>
>> Benefits Package (Aetna Global Benefits):
>> -- Complete Health Care Package
>> -- Preferred employee status for future position with Aegis MEP (based on
>> availability)
>> Employee Compensation Effective 01 January 06
>>
>>
>> CAT I Arabic Linguist Bi-Weekly Salary (Hardship Duty 5) Green Card
>> Holder
>> or Canadian Consultant
>>
>> Base $2,484.62
>>
>> Hardship $372.69
>>
>> Hazard $621.16
>>
>> Total $3,478.47
>>
>>
>> CAT I Arabic Linguist Yearly Salary (HS 5)
>>
>> Base $ 64,600.00
>>
>> Hardship $16,150.00
>>
>> Hazard $16,150.00
>>
>> 30-Day Completion Bonus $10,000.00
>>
>> 180-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00
>>
>> 360-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00
>>
>> Total $136,900.00
>>
>>
>> Health Insurance Deductions (Bi-Weekly)
>>
>>
>> *This compensation table is for reference only. Rates are subject to
>> change.
>>
>> Sincerely
>>
>> K K,
>>
>> Recruiting Specialist Aegis Mission Essential Personnel, LLC
>>
>
> You need a vacation and this may be your only chance, go for it seward.
>

==============================================================================
TOPIC: HERE IS YOUR CHANCE KIKE, TO PROVE YOURSELF!
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/b6199f1c06fa8f48
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:15 pm
From: "serwad"

HEY, KIKE THERE IS ALWAYS ROOM FOR ONE MORE!
An Iraqi-Canadian friend forwarded to me the announcement below he received
from an American recruiting company. Please read its details below and make
sure you click on the link in the bottom that reads, "See how some Aegis
mercenaries are earning their money "

**************

I look forward to hearing from you!

Requirements:

Duties:

-- Provide operational contract linguist support to U.S. Army operations in
Iraq

-- Provide general linguistic support for military operations and interpret
during interviews, meetings, and conferences

-- Interpret and translate written and spoken communications

-- Transcribe and analyze communications

-- Perform document exploitation

-- Scan, research, and analyze foreign language documents for key
information

-- Translate foreign language documents

-- Identify and extract information components meeting military information
requirements

-- Provide input to reports

Vacation/Leave: --2 weeks vacation/leave after 6 months of service (24 days
after 1 year of service)

CAT I Arabic Linguist Bi-Weekly Salary (Hardship Duty 5) Green Card Holder
or Canadian Consultant

Base $2,484.62

Hardship $372.69

Hazard $621.16

Total $3,478.47

CAT I Arabic Linguist Yearly Salary (HS 5)

Base $ 64,600.00

Hardship $16,150.00

Hazard $16,150.00

30-Day Completion Bonus $10,000.00

180-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00

360-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00

Total $136,900.00

Health Insurance Deductions (Bi-Weekly)

*This compensation table is for reference only. Rates are subject to change.

Sincerely

K K,

Recruiting Specialist Aegis Mission Essential Personnel, LLC

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:41 pm
From: "serwad"

Bush's death toll will vastly exceed Hitler's

by Herb Ruhs, MD, April 14, 2006

[Re Comparing Bush and Hitler, and the monsters behind the curtain]

I admired your piece, but perhaps not for the reasons you intended. Each of
your points is well made, but the issue is larger, and to my mind, much more
sinister than even you suggest.

In terms of the death toll attributable to this current batch of depraved
demonic warlords, there really is no reasonable comparison with the Nazis.
The eventual death toll will be so vastly greater for Bush/Blair (this
includes Bush 1 and Clinton to a minor degree, but chiefly Bush and his
crew) that there will be no basis for comparison. These people, if you can
reasonably call them actual people and not some form of reptile, are not
content to merely murder their contemporaries like all previous mass
murderers. They have their sights set on all future generations as well.

This conclusion is entirely due to the current military doctrine that sees
uranium weapons as a necessity in the modern battle field. The key fact to
focus on, when considering the long-term effects of these weapons, is the
creation of uranium dust. When these weapons are fired they burn, releasing
large quantities of very fine particles of uranium that act like a gas. This
gas diffuses into the atmosphere and is spread world-wide.

If this seems incredible to you, consider the reported increases in
monitored radiation over Europe that have coincided with use of these
weapons. The amount already used has created fallout roughly equivalent to
the explosion of more than 40,000 atmospheric nuclear weapons by some
estimates. This is an immediate, very real, threat to every person on earth.

Please do not make the mistake of considering what I am saying as mere
exaggeration or hyperbole. It is not. Much information (as well as
disinformation) is available on the net about this subject for the
interested researcher.

When the use of these weapons was first considered, it was the immediate
"poison gas" aspect that was attractive to the demonic thinkers of the time.
Now, technology has advanced so that it is possible to fashion uranium into
projectiles with an amazing penetrating capacity. Any armed force using
these weapons, as well as armor made from it, will prevail against any foe
not so equipped. It is roughly the equivalent, historically, to the
introduction of firearms into warfare for use against enemies armed only
with swords and arrows.

Because of the immense half-life of uranium, each submicron particle lofted
into the air is a lethal bullet that can circulate for all eternity (or at
least until our sun burns itself out!) waiting to kill and maim. (These
small particles allow short-range radiation, which normally would not be
able to get into a person's systems, to have direct access to the body when
inhaled.) This is not to mention the death attributable to genetic damage
passed on to the young, and the countless fetuses killed in the womb. I
can't think of anything conceivably more death-dealing, short of all-out
nuclear war, which also seems to be on the agenda of these fiends.

If you have inhaled some of these particles, dear reader, you may all ready
be a victim of mass murder and not yet know it.

So the death score of Bush's demonic deviance, solely as a result of the use
of uranium weapons (which are straight-up illegal, indiscriminate both over
time and space, weapons of mass destruction) will eventually vastly exceed
the score attributable to Hitler. In fact, it will, over time, exceed the
toll attributable to all previous demonic warlords combined.

Conceivably, this will be true even if we were to immediately stop their
use. It will certainly become true if they continue to be used.

Bush and his gang aren't just your ordinary war criminals, they are species
traitors, a whole different category of criminal than Hitler.

Hitler was intent on having the German people dominate the globe through
overwhelming violence. This was bad, but in no way comparable to the evil
perpetrated by these traitors to their own species.

Your writing carries a lot of weight with me. Instant weight, just because
it's always well worth reading, and accumulated weight, because I know
you're just never full of shit.

I had thought of so-called "depleted" uranium as an inhuman weapon, a war
crime, a long-acting form of genocide, seeking to kill the nations'
so-called enemies not just in the here and now but into future generations.

But I had considered uranium munitions to be mostly a fixed geographical
problem, poison left behind. I was unaware that any significant effects
would reside in the atmosphere and be spread world-wide.

Criminy. The human prognosis just gets worse and worse...

H&HH

==============================================================================
TOPIC: THE FIRST TERRORIST PEOPLE
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/904401dc574f729b
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:16 pm
From: "serwad"

**************

I look forward to hearing from you!

Requirements:

Duties:

-- Provide operational contract linguist support to U.S. Army operations in
Iraq

-- Provide general linguistic support for military operations and interpret
during interviews, meetings, and conferences

-- Interpret and translate written and spoken communications

-- Transcribe and analyze communications

-- Perform document exploitation

-- Scan, research, and analyze foreign language documents for key
information

-- Translate foreign language documents

-- Identify and extract information components meeting military information
requirements

-- Provide input to reports

Vacation/Leave: --2 weeks vacation/leave after 6 months of service (24 days
after 1 year of service)

CAT I Arabic Linguist Bi-Weekly Salary (Hardship Duty 5) Green Card Holder
or Canadian Consultant

Base $2,484.62

Hardship $372.69

Hazard $621.16

Total $3,478.47

CAT I Arabic Linguist Yearly Salary (HS 5)

Base $ 64,600.00

Hardship $16,150.00

Hazard $16,150.00

30-Day Completion Bonus $10,000.00

180-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00

360-Day Completion Bonus $15,000.00

Total $136,900.00

Health Insurance Deductions (Bi-Weekly)

*This compensation table is for reference only. Rates are subject to change.

Sincerely

K K,

Recruiting Specialist Aegis Mission Essential Personnel, LLC

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Seymour Hersh and The New York Times
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/79c10add2fc00b9a
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:24 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Seymour Hersh and The New York Times

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

[McReynolds notes that the way The New York Times has handled the Hersh
story on US threats to Iran is "very odd." This is a long letter with much
in it. We won't comment except to raise one very petty, mundane and quite
possible explanation for the dreadful non-coverage of Hersh's Iran story.
Perhaps it's just because there's bad blood between Seymour Hersh and the
Gray Lady, for which he reported in the 1970s. Hersh was always way out
ahead of the Times, and when they parted it wasn't entirely happilyl. The
Gray Lady has a long memory. And, yes, the politics at the Paper of Record
really are that petty. -NY Transfer]

sent by David McReynolds - Apr 14, 2006

April 13, 2006

Bill Keller, Executive Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York City 10036

The New York Times has long been (and remains) essential reading for me
though, as Ive told various audiences, it is a bit like Pravda was in the
old days - you have to learn how to read it. All the news is generally there
- - but often buried. As the story of Seymour Hersh and his article in the New
Yorker was buried on page 23 in your Sunday (April 9th) edition.

That George Bush had on his desk plans for possible use of tactical nuclear
weapons in Iran, that plans for a military strike were far advanced, and
that key officials were threatening to resign if the nuclear option, at
least, was not "taken off the table" was clearly front page news, not for
page 23. (There was, as if to confirm my point that the Times was taking a
"pause" until it decided how to deal with this, nothing at all on this in
the April 10th edition, though, as if your editorial board had finally had a
crucial meeting, there was a moderately good editorial on Tuesday, the
11th).

Seymour Hersh is a first class reporter - his credibility far exceeds that
of Bush, the White House press secretary, or the British Foreign Office. In
this case the various denials of Hershs piece, issued by all of the above,
only served as a kind of confirmation. I dont mean Hersh cant make a
mistake - it is the rare reporter who doesnt. I do mean that, given the
source, this was a front page story and thats not where you put it.

I understand - anyone who follows the media understands - the kind of
childish, unprofessional tendency of the Times not to cover a story if the
Washington Post has broken it first, and the Washington Post had made this a
major story. You cant argue that you didnt know about it simply because
the New Yorker didnt hit the stands until Monday. It was already on the
internet two days earlier.

In the good old days before the internet, if something wasnt in the Times
then no one could be sure it had really happened. (I remember the Sunday
Times when the long newspaper strike ended - it was a physical problem to
get the issue home, so heavy was it, and so determined were you to cover in
some short summary EVERYTHING that had happened during the long months of
the blackout - as if, unless they made it into the New York Times - they
hadnt really happened). I can imagine the terrible frustration of the late
lamented New York Herald Tribune in its final days, when it sought to boost
circulation with larger than usual headlines. The frustration being that,
when the Times runs a page one story with a three column headline IT IS
NEWS, automatically, because of what the Times is. But the Trib couldnt
pull it off - its headlines didnt make things important just because they
were three or even four columns wide.

In this case, the Hersh story was already a major issue on cable news, PBS,
BBC, and CNN. So the story the Times buried on page 23 and didnt report at
all on the next day, was already "the story" being followed by all of us in
the "chattering classes", and one of the questions we were asking was why
the Times wasnt covering it.

I dont believe in conspiracy theories. I know journalism is in some ways an
accidental profession, that with the best will in the world good reporters
are never really sure if they have missed a story, or if the story they are
covering is really important. I know that sometimes you carry news because
it fits an editorial position youve taken - long long before you came on
staff (very possibly before you were born) we had a fairly bedraggled "ban
nuclear tests" march that came into the city (I think it was about Easter of
that year - it was surely back in the late 1950's) and I looked at the paper
and saw you had put us on page one, which we certainly didnt merit, but
which matched your editorial position in favor of a nuclear test ban.

I know - again, everyone who follows journalism knows - that the Times is
important precisely because it is the "establishment paper" (along with the
Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal). As I said, it is like reading
Pravda in the old days. You just have to know how to read the paper. It was
pretty clear to some of us that a military strike on Cuba was about to
happen before the Bay of Pigs - the pieces were all there in the Times if
only you put them together.

I remember a page one story - it still sticks in my mind - during the very
early days of the Vietnam War when you were still routinely referring to the
Vietnamese resistance as "terrorists". The story was about how a "terrorist
attack" alarmed US military advisors because the "terrorists" had captured
military equipment, including several mortars. Mortars are primitive
military devices, hardly rocket science, and if the capture of a few mortars
alarmed the US military advisers it meant that the "terrorists" werent
actually getting any vast supply of military equipment along the Ho Chi Minh
trail (and they werent). That is, the "Vietcong" were waging war with guns
they captured from us, not being shipped in from China.

Not to wander - only to note that the Times does carry the news. Lets go
back to the Seymour Hersh piece and the implications. First, I dont know
whether the leaks that Hersh had pieced together were a complex operation
to psych out the Iranians, or whether they were a way to make it possible
for a "routine" military strike on Iran more acceptable to the public, or
whether Bush and the cabal around him really are considering tactical
nuclear strikes. My hunch is the latter is the case.

But of one thing I am damn sure - if Seymour Hersh got those leaks, so did
one or more reporters at the Times. Youve been badly shaken by a number of
internal problems, including having let Judith Miller con you (and in the
process help to make possible the case for the Iraq war). Youve had other
problems. I have no idea what internal struggles the Times may be having,
but you are a human institution, and all institutions have internal
struggles.

What I do know is that you had the news and were sitting on it. If the New
Yorker (and the Washington Post) hadnt broken the story, it would have
remained a matter for the internet. (Which, like the Times itself, requires
great skill to read, to separate the nuts from the nuggets of real
information). We are glad you finally broke the news of the NSA spying, but
you had, by your admission, sat on it for months. (I had assumed years ago
that NSA had replaced the CIA as the primary intelligence agency - that the
CIA was taking the heat for things NSA was doing - glad to see my hunch was
right).

We are clearly in a constitutional crisis, and have been for some time. The
President has carried out a foreign policy of which the establishment itself
does not approve. Forget about Katrina, the corruption scandals, etc., the
fact is that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice have been pretty much on their
own for a long time. The Democrats dont seem to know how to tackle them,
but the comic strips in our Sunday papers have made Bush the butt of
astounding satire, and the late night shows have skewered Bush and Cheney in
a way only Clinton got - at the height of his Monica Lewinsky scandal.

We dont have a real opposition party in this country. The Democrats are too
timid to suggest impeachment (and of course, if you impeach Bush what do you
do about Cheney?). So we have the irony that it was a key "military" figure
in Congress, John Murtha, no pinko, no pacifist, who finally blew the
whistle on the Iraq war and noted for the first time that the emperor was
naked. Your paper has not reported properly on the positions of John Kerry
or Al Gore. These men - particularly Kerry - are titular leaders of what
should have be an opposition party. The statements these men made should
have been front page news - not because I thought the statements were good
(they werent that good, and I hadnt voted for either man) but because the
statements were news. Instead you put them (at least Kerrys) on the op ed
page.

Now, adding to the crisis, and something which the Times has yet to report
on in depth (though you may be working on a story on this) is the remarkable
revolt of the generals. Ive never, in 76 years, seen anything like this. It
worries me deeply that the generals are doing what a civilian political
opposition should be doing. We dont want the military in politics.
Historically theyve been pretty good at staying out of politics. That I may
agree with demands for Rumsfelds head (and Id go farther - I think he
should be indicted in the torture scandals) is not important - that demand
needs to come from the civilian political leadership, not the military.

We have nearly three years to run with a President in the White House who
lost the election in 2000, but got there because Gore didnt have the sense
to demand a total recount of ALL the Florida votes. there seem to be no
checks and balances on him. Under his rule, with the aid of Gonzalez at
Justice, we have seen a deep erosion of constitutional limits on executive
power, clear violations of the Bill of Rights, and of the Geneva
Conventions. We have seen our nation become a party to torture ordered from
the highest levels.

And in the midst of all of this, while we appreciate the news we get (and
are grateful for alternative and reliable news sources - including the New
Yorker), and for several of your Op Ed columnists, what I do not see is the
kind of marvelous courage provided by several papers, including both the
Washington Post and the Times, when the Pentagon papers were published.

I do understand that the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is disturbing.
We might ask why people do not realize that it was Israel which started the
nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Or remember that at one time (1948) the US was considering a nuclear attack
on the Soviet Union to prevent it from getting the bomb, as the Soviets were
alleged to have considered strikes on China to prevent it from getting the
bomb.

We have good reason to be unhappy with the current regime in Iran. But a
military attack on Iran - let alone the absolute madness of a tactical
nuclear strike - is not only morally wrong but folly from a geo-political
point of view. It is my assumption Iran does want to get a nuclear weapon -
and US pressure might better be directed to Israel, to demand it take into
account Arab offers for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East.

(I do not, parenthetically, understand by what logic Israel is considered a
"US ally" and Cuba a "US enemy" - to whom in this country is Israel an ally
or Cuba an enemy?). I certainly understand Israels reason for concern with
Iran - if I lived in Israel I would be concerned as well, just as all of the
Arab states are concerned with Israels nuclear weapons. But any attack on
Iran will not resolve these tensions. Negotiations are not only the best
hope - they are the only hope.

The failure of the Times to give serious coverage to Seymour Hershs article
doesnt damage Hersh, it damages the Times. It is a step toward making the
Times into what the Herald Tribune was in its final days - a useful
newspaper, but not an essential one.

Sincerely,

David McReynolds
New York, NY

*
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: Al-Jafaari talks to Channel 4 News (UK)
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/9c29fdacd78aa79c
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:24 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Al-Jafaari talks to Channel 4 News (UK)

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

Snowmail - Channel 4 News (UK)- Apr 14, 2006
http://www.channel4.com/news/snowmail/index.html

Al-Jafaari talks to Channel 4 News

Iraqi looks to be about the strongest story around today, and this is
because we got a call this morning saying that our bid to interview the
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari had come up.

He is a man who claimed to be a uniting force in the country but is now seen
as being very much part of the problem and part of the reason why four
months have now gone by without a government being set up in Baghdad. The
interview was an intriguing exclusive. The PM's not for turning. He won't
resign.

He has a democratic mandate. He has no evidence that Iran is meddling in the
insurgency and that is that. All of which adds up to meaning that a
government of unity is, still, a very long way off by the look of it.

Elsewhere in Iraq its been another day of spiralling sectarian violence with
another two mosques attacked today in Baqubah and down in Basra (for much of
the occupation relatively peaceful) 11 building workers have been kidnapped
and shot dead in the worst mass killing down there in many weeks.

*
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NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: TNB: Bill Cosby asks parents to watch their kids, Negroes say "Why?"
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/34026f7a590e9162
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:27 pm
From: Voice Of Reason <>

On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 10:34:31 +0000 (UTC), Affirmative Action
<pointing@true.info> wrote:

>Cosby: watch your children
>Comedian tells crowd that parents need to be supervising
>BY FEOSHIA HENDERSON | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER
>
>"Put a body on 'em."
>
>Comedian and social commentator Bill Cosby gave that advice to a largely
>African-American audience during an afternoon parenting session at Xavier
>University.
>
>Cosby, 68, said that means parents must stay involved in every aspect of
>their child's life - from friends to homework - to prevent family
>breakdown and out-of-control behavior.
>
>
> Parents also should have a network of people who can help keep an eye on
>potentially wayward kids.
>
>"These children need bodies on all of them," Cosby said. "If you're not
>doing that, then you should be ashamed of yourself."
>
>Cosby spoke to a group of about 1,200 during the first of two free
>sessions at the university's Cintas Center.
>
>He moderated discussions on parenting, education and social responsibility
>as part of a nationwide tour, "Call Out with Cosby."
>
>He was part of a 14-person panel of educators, doctors, children's workers
>and other professionals.
>
>The tour was Cosby's first visit to Cincinnati in five years.
>
>Cosby said many parents know their children are doing wrong, but aren't
>doing anything to stop it.
>
>"What's worse is how sedated you seem to be about making corrections," he
>said.
>
>Cosby long has been an entertainment icon in American culture, but in
>recent years he's become a sort of social crusader.
>
>Two years ago he drew ire - and some kudos - from African-Americans when
>he criticized black parents for their children's behavior and lack of
>education.
>
>None of that anger was evident from the audience during Thursday's
>session, which was part comedy routine, part instructional, part church
>service and part upbraiding.
>
>The afternoon also included a question-and-answer portion.
>
>One 18-year-old got a shock when Cosby privately talked to him for nearly
>45 minutes at the request of a local minister.
>
>"He asked me, Where do I see my life in the future?" Rodney Lee, of
>Westwood, said afterward. Lee said Cosby told him he would help Lee get
>into college.
>
>Beyond the Veil Christian Fellowship minister Sonny James, of Norwood,
>asked Cosby to speak to Lee near the beginning of the question segment.
>
>Cosby called Lee down to the stage and then walked off with him for the
>remainder of the session. The other panelists handled the questions.
>
>James said he'd recently taken Lee into his home, but Lee had lost focus
>and direction in his life.
>
>"I know if anyone can speak motivation to him, it's Bill Cosby," he said.
>
>Jill Thompson of West Chester, who was with her nephews David, 16 and
>Phillip, 13 - she declined to give their last names - said people need to
>put Cosby's words into action.
>
>"Put the bodies on 'em. I loved that statement. I think that is something
>that is very concise, and people need to hear that. They need to not just
>hear it, but do it," she said.
>
>But not everyone went away pleased. Kristi Williams, of South
>Cummingsville, was with her sons Kyante, 12 and Khaliek, 10. She said
>people didn't get enough specific instruction on how to take care of
>problems.
>
>"We've heard (this) before. People in the city need help here," she said.

Well Ms Williams, YOU could have helped your own boyz a bit more by
giving them names that would be more mainstream (and helpful) than
Kyante and Khaliek. If you were a corporate recruiter, rifling thru
100's of resumes, would you look more closely at one from someone
named Walter Williams, or that of Khaliek Williams? Which one are you
more likely to invite for an interview?

Anyway Ms Williams (and those who are as lost as she is), Bill Cosby
IS giving you a formula that will help them, even with those silly-ass
names. "Put the bodies on `em". What part of that is too hard to
grasp for you? So quit sniveling, and get busy.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Top Ten Jesus Movies
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/adf037a627d78e08
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:27 pm
From: "Jay G." <"Jay "@tmbg.org>

On 14 Apr 2006 16:45:48 -0700, RichA wrote:

> "Godspell" over "The Life of Brian?"

"Life of Brian" wasn't about Jesus. It's right there in the title.

-Jay

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:50 pm
From: Derek Janssen

Jay G. wrote:
> On 14 Apr 2006 16:45:48 -0700, RichA wrote:
>
>
>>"Godspell" over "The Life of Brian?"
>
>
> "Life of Brian" wasn't about Jesus. It's right there in the title.

...Okay, well, "Godspell" over ANYTHING? 0_o??

Derek Janssen (I'm a Holy Pepper!)
ejanss@comcast.net

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Paul Krugman: We Better Believe It Re: Pitt: How Crazy Are They?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/d0adc544b88554b1
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 1:33 am
From: acoustic@panix.com (lo yeeOn)

The Princetonian economist Paul Krugman is on the mark about what Bush
and his cabal are capable of doing to America as well as to the world.

It is implausible that the Bush cabal is not complicit in 9/11. It
defies logic to believe otherwise, given all the facts. The only
reason why the cabal is still able to escape the public's scrutiny is
because, from the very beginning, the cabal has understood and fully
exploited people's psychology: our president wouldn't do that . . .,
end of story, no need for more questions!

Such a sinister exploitation on the faith of the American people has
now given the Bush cabal and its neocon master-puppeteers the perfect
rallying cry to do everything they want to the world and the American
people.

``We've got to have the Patriot Act against the American people
because of 9/11.''

``We've got to attack Iraq, even without provocation because of
9/11.''

``We've got to build an embassy in Baghdad 10 times bigger than any
other US embassy in the world because of 9/11.''

``We've got to keep the enduring bases in the ME because of 9/11.''

``We've got to continue our war on terror for decades due to 9/11.''

``We've got to fight a ``long war'' because of 9/11.''

``We've got to reactivate our tactical nuclear weapons R&D because of
9/11.''

``We've got to spend so many trillions on wars because of 9/11.''

``We've got to have the pre-emptive strike option available because of
9/11.''

``Our president can make any decision about state intelligence,
including cherry-picking any hearsay report and de-classifying any
intelligence-related information if he sees fit.''

. . .

Now the president can do anything in the name of security, just
invoking 9/11.

And there are many quiet supporters in Congress and in the media
because the neocons have a great deal of control over the politicians
in Washginton, D.C.

It would not surprise me if one day we find evidence that it is Bush's
blackmailability (besides his daddy's enormous influence) which was
the major reason why he had the establishment's support to win the
presidency.

The case of Bill Clinton has already told us a lot about why he was
picked over his democratic competitions who had more integrity and
were less blackmailable. Bill Clinton was tall and quite articulate.
But Bill Clinton was no more articulate than his competition such as
Jerry Brown. Neither did Bill Clinton have more accomplishments in
governing than Brown or other competitions. Bill Clinton could've
been easily demolished by the media using his past scandals from his
Arkansas years, had they chosen to.

Instead, ABC News chose to use an innuendo about a marijuana party
allegedly took place in Brown's LA residence to drive Brown off the
national political stage, even though he wasn't even at the alleged
party. At the time, Brown was the only threat to Clinton's
nomination. Brown was also someone who would be hard to blackmail
because of his monastic lifestyle.

On the other hand, having a Bill Clinton for president was just a
perfect tool for the establishment to push its political agenda
through. Bill Clinton's weakness for women was so well-known it would
be hard to believe that the media din't know something about it from
the beginning. Their knowledge of him and his scandalous past should
make him a very convenient tool for the establishment who wanted to
drop bombs regularly into Iraq and starved the Iraqi children.

The Clinton-Brown incident convinced me that the media had a lot of
Citizen-Kane power to shape the politics and power in Washington.

(Remember the Orson-Welles film named Citizen-Kane. Today, the media
would like us to remember it as a piece of great art by a great artist
named Orson Welles. They want us to think of the story as a piece of
fiction. But the real significance is not so much that it is a great
film, but rather that the film carries a great message.)

And it may very well be that George Bush simply became the more total
tool for the establishment after the success of its experiment with
Bill Clinton as the subject.

And what it says is that until America finally comes to grip with the
growing corruption in Washington, D.C., we'll continue to subject
ourselves to the mercy of the uncontrollably mad policies of our
government, a government which has been totally hijacked by forces
which are completely out of reach of the democratic process.

For one thing, the Bush administration has been stifling the voice of
the scientists who've been working on the global atmospheric system on
the subject of global warming.

Now keep in mind that the only laboratories these scientists can work
are government facilities since they are the only places which have
the massive data available. In other words, the government scientists
are the only scientists who are in the know, concerning global warming.

Yet these scientists've been prevented from speaking out on the danger
the planet is now facing.

One might ask why the government wouldn't want people to know about
the danger which is facing us?

I can think of at least one reason why it wouldn't.

If these experts in the government have been allowed to speak freely,
then your local weathermen or weatherwomen would start talking about
ii as news and what not.

They would start picking up jargons in physics like the conservations
of energy and momentum.

And the next thing to talk about becomes what is energy, what is
momentum, and what is the meaning of conservation of those quantities.

When TV programs start talking about these concepts, people may start
thinking to themselves, ``but wait a minute, couldn't all these
endless wars in the Middle East have something to do with the more
than double the number of tornadoes we've had in the Midwest and the
Hurricanes at the coasts in the last few years? . . .'' One question
will lead to the next!

Think about it, what does conservation of energy and conservation of
momentum mean if relation to our weather, which is part of the global
weather system and which is ultimately connected to the very gigantic,
very shocking things that happen over the Afghan or Iraqi skies?

So, it is completely plausible that our warmongering leaders really do
not want the people to have any reason to think about this stuff or to
know anything about science in a way which would help stall their war
efforts.

lo yeeOn
========

Economist's View

April 10, 2006

Paul Krugman: Yes He Would

Paul Krugman warns against taking the president's march to war with
Iran too lightly:

Yes He Would, by Paul Krugman, More War? Commentary, New York
Times: "But he wouldn't do that." That sentiment is what made it
possible for President Bush to stampede America into the Iraq war
and to fend off hard questions about the reasons for that war until
after the 2004 election. Many people just didn't want to believe
that an American president would deliberately mislead the nation on
matters of war and peace.

Now people with contacts in the administration and the military
warn that Mr. Bush may be planning another war. The most alarming
of the warnings come from Seymour Hersh... Writing in The New
Yorker, Mr. Hersh suggests that administration officials believe
that a bombing campaign could lead to desirable regime change in
Iran -- and that they refuse to rule out the use of tactical
nuclear weapons. ...

As it happens, rumors of a new war coincide with the emergence of
evidence that appears to confirm our worst suspicions about the war
we're already in.

First, it's clearer than ever that Mr. Bush, who still claims that
war with Iraq was a last resort, was actually spoiling for a fight.
The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of a British
government memo reporting on a prewar discussion... In that
conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Blair that he was determined to
invade Iraq even if U.N. inspectors came up empty-handed.

Second, it's becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Bush knew that
the case he was presenting for war -- a case that depended
crucially on visions of mushroom clouds -- rested on suspect
evidence. For example, ... Mr. Bush cited Iraq's purchase of
aluminum tubes as clear evidence that Saddam was trying to acquire
a nuclear arsenal. Yet Murray Waas reports ... that Mr. Bush had
been warned that many intelligence analysts disagreed with that
assessment.

Was the difference between Mr. Bush's public portrayal of the Iraqi
threat and the actual intelligence he saw large enough to validate
claims that he deliberately misled the nation into war? Karl Rove
apparently thought so. According to Mr. Waas, Mr. Rove "cautioned
... that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely
damaged" if the contents of an October 2002 "President's Summary"
containing dissents about the significance of the aluminum tubes
became public.

Now there are rumors of plans to attack Iran. Most strategic
analysts think that a bombing campaign would be a disastrous
mistake. But ... Mr. Bush ignored similar warnings, including those
of his own father, about the risks involved in invading Iraq...

Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose
presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may
believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished
moment.

And it's not just Mr. Bush's legacy that's at risk. Current polls
suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of
Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch
investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid
off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts
openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head
off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could
change the domestic political dynamics.

Does this sound far-fetched? It shouldn't. Given the combination of
recklessness and dishonesty Mr. Bush displayed in launching the
Iraq war, why should we assume that he wouldn't do it again?

This War on Terrorism is Bogus

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure
its global domination

Michael Meacher
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1036688,00.html

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons
why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has
focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British
motives too.

The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit,
retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first
step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam
Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of
mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However
this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal
murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax
Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald
Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb
Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief
of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was
written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project
for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the
Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while
the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in
the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to
Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced
industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to
a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the
UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American
global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding
American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says
"even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a
threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime
change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American
forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to
dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent
"enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US
may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific
genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of
terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria
and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the
creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a
blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an
agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better
explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11
than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several
ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to
pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries
provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior
Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA
and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big
operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided
included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was
arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit
Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national
intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could
crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon,
the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia.
Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in
Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing
visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them
to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in
collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this
operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is
also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure
US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan
flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th
hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he
showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large
airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had
radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer,
which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3
2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month
before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin
Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on
terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September
11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than
8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at
10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from
the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until
after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There
were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before
9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched
fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP,
August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft
has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent
up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or
being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations
have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on
whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus,
has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services
prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for
either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has
ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October
2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin
Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US
official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too
narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if
by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of
the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that
"the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The
whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19
2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001
the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in
its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had
been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly
enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence,
all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is
compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set
against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war
on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider
US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted
at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful
about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to
have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened
on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so
determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10
separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to
9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13
2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC
plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for
military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before
9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute
of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner
of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence
to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle
East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the
report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the
US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6
2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported
(September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign
secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in
Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan
would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US
government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central
Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from
the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,
through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted
with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US
representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of
gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service,
November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US
failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext
for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well
planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US
national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this
approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance
warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached
the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US
public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of
September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into
"tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence
of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl
Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for
a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise
have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the
US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy
supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the
world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining
global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is
decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for
both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically
57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of
its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be
facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed
that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of
that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq
has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July
2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was
the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi
Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline
would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of
Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and
Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue
Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in
which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was
dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining
world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British
participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of
BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies
in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a
British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August
2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other
European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to
potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10
2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global
war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to
hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies
required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and
junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for
British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more
objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this
whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a
radical change of course.

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

==============================================================================
TOPIC: BUSH'S GENOCIDE WILL EXCEED THAT OF HITLER
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/40956d13df86d870
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 9:37 pm
From: "serwad"

Bush's death toll will vastly exceed Hitler's

by Herb Ruhs, MD, April 14, 2006

[Re Comparing Bush and Hitler, and the monsters behind the curtain]

I admired your piece, but perhaps not for the reasons you intended. Each of
your points is well made, but the issue is larger, and to my mind, much more
sinister than even you suggest.

If you have inhaled some of these particles, dear reader, you may all ready
be a victim of mass murder and not yet know it.

Conceivably, this will be true even if we were to immediately stop their
use. It will certainly become true if they continue to be used.

Bush and his gang aren't just your ordinary war criminals, they are species
traitors, a whole different category of criminal than Hitler.

Hitler was intent on having the German people dominate the globe through
overwhelming violence. This was bad, but in no way comparable to the evil
perpetrated by these traitors to their own species.

Your writing carries a lot of weight with me. Instant weight, just because
it's always well worth reading, and accumulated weight, because I know
you're just never full of shit.

Criminy. The human prognosis just gets worse and worse...

H&HH

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Kook pushes conspiracy theory (was: Physicist says Thermite heat
substance felled WTC)
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/abf837d229b6d170
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 6:44 pm
From: "Stan de SD"

"Leftists = traitors" <rander3127@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1145058265.204440.323500@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

> The same prof. probably lunches with Ward Churchill.

That would explain the sign "OUT TO LUNCH" on both of their doors, wouldn't
it?

==============================================================================
TOPIC: There Are Criminals, and Then There Are Criminals
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/50ef8615cbe980ba
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:09 pm
From: "Stan de SD"

"Sanders Kaufman" <who@where.com> wrote in message
news:5px%f.10655$4L1.746@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com...
> "Stan de SD" <standesd_DIGA_NO_A_SPAM@covad.net> wrote in message
> news:1cdc1$443e9477$45035f0d$21353@msgid.meganewsservers.com...
> > "cor" <cor@exchangenet.net> wrote in message
>
> >> Yea, right gatt, Cindy Sheehan cared shit about her son.
> >
> > Cindy Sheehan apparenty didn't give a shit about protesting anything
when
> > she met Bush the first time. The attention whore only started caring
when
> > she realized she could be in the daily spotlight by a left-leaning
press.
>
> It's interesting how you equate "free" with "left-leaning".
> Unfortunately for you - we the people are very tolerant of freedom.

As usual, Sanders, you couldn't deal with the issue at hand.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: April 14, 1935: Fearful dust storm inspires songwriter
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/9257aa48a1b1b1b4
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:30 pm
From: "fgoodwin"

April 14, 1935: Fearful dust storm inspires songwriter

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/daybyday/04-14-001.html

On this day in 1935 a great dust storm covered the Texas Panhandle town
of Pampa, inspiring Woody Guthrie to write the song "So Long, It's Been
Good To Know You."

Guthrie had moved to Pampa in 1929. Performing with bands at nightclubs
and radio stations in the Panhandle, he found his calling as lyricist
and musician and began developing skills that later gained him a
reputation as a writer, cartoonist, and down-home philosopher. He
married a Pampa girl, Mary Jennings, in 1933 and experienced the pain
of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, sources of his many songs
that appealed to his fellow sufferers.

When the great storm of April 14, 1935, occurred, some Pampans thought
that the end of the world was upon them and that there was just time
for final goodbyes. Tired of dust and poverty, Guthrie left for Los
Angeles in 1937.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: KIKE ABRAMOFF, THE SHITWAD!
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/30ff46aed373bca7
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:33 pm
From: "serwad"

Meet Mr. Republican: Jack Abramoff
The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington
So this is it, finally. By the time this magazine hits the newsstands, Jack
Abramoff -- right-wing megalobbyist and great feckless shitwad of our new
American century -- will be but a tick of the geological clock away from The
End. There will be no rack, no stoning, no scorpion-filled sand pit, no
bucket of fire ants. Just a sanitary plea agreement and a single blow of the
gavel, and "Casino Jack" Abramoff will disappear for a few years of
weightlifting and Talmudic study.
En route to his day of reckoning, Abramoff really did travel each and every
right-wing highway, from Jo-burg in the old days to the Bush White House.
But he's being sentenced for only the last few miles of that trip. It's
almost an insult to a criminal of Abramoff's caliber that the charge he'll
go to jail for is a low-rent wire-fraud scheme committed in a pickpocket
capital like Miami Beach. In that one, Jack and his cronies claimed to have
$23 million in assets when he didn't have a dime, and he persuaded financial
backers to purchase a $147.5 million cruise-ship casino empire. A nice score
for a Gotti child, maybe, but a bit gauche for the wizard of the Republican
fast lane.

The other charges are a little more respectable. He took tens of millions
from Indian tribes that sought relief from Washington on gaming-industry
questions, illegally pocketed millions in lobbying fees and evaded taxes on
his ill-gotten gains. He also used their money to provide, in exchange for
favors, a "stream of things of value" to elected officials, including golf
junkets to Scotland, free meals and other swag.

It's that last bit that made Abramoff a national celebrity, the poster boy
for the way the Bush administration does business and the most feared name
around in a Washington political society that is still waiting with bated
lizard breath for the other shoe to drop. To most Americans, Jack Abramoff
is the bloodsucking bogeyman with a wad of bills in his teeth who came
through the window in the middle of the night and stole their voice in
government. But he was much more than that. Abramoff was as much of a symbol
of his generation's Republican Party as Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater was
of his.

He was an amazingly ubiquitous figure, a sort of Zelig of the political
right -- you could find him somewhere, in the foreground or the background,
in almost every Republican political scandal of the past twenty-five years.
He carried water for the racist government of Pretoria during the apartheid
days and whispered in the ear of those Republican congressmen who infamously
voted against anti-apartheid resolutions. He organized rallies in support of
the Grenada invasion, showed up in Ollie North's offices during Iran-Contra,
palled around with Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi and the Afghan mujahedin.

All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt
organizations to fund campaign activities and using charities to fund
foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with
everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover
Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He
is even lurking in the background of the 2004 Ohio voting-irregularities
scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat
requirements for a paper trail in elections.

He is a living museum of corruption, and in a way it is altogether too bad
that he is about to disappear from public scrutiny. In a hilariously tardy
attempt to attend to his moral self-image, lately he has been repackaging
himself as a fallen prophet, a humbled super-Jew who was guilty only of
going too far to serve God. He was the "softest touch in town," he has said,
a sucker for causes who "incorrectly didn't follow the mitzvah of giving
away at most twenty percent." Then he shows up a few weeks before sentencing
with his cock wedged in the mouth of an adoring Vanity Fair reporter,
claiming with a straight face that his problems came from trying to "save
the world."

There is no evidence yet that anyone is going to call him on any of this
bullshit, and we can see where all of this is going. He'll go away now for
his Martha Stewart fitness tour, and a few years from now he'll slide
straight into his own prime-time family show for cable's inevitable Orthodox
Channel and a $14 million deal from HarperCollins for his 290-page
illustrated manual of marriage and intimacy for devout Jewish couples.

No other outcome is really possible, given the logic of the American
celebrity world. What is unknown, as yet, is whether America will learn any
lessons from the here-and-now of the Jack Abramoff story. For that to
happen, we would all have to take a good, hard look at the remarkable life
story he is now temporarily leaving us to consider.

Abramoff is a man defined by his connections. As an individual -- as a lone
dot on a schematic diagram, an intersection of crossed strands in a web --
Jack Abramoff is a nobody, just another pompous Washington greedhead
distinguished only by the world's silliest Boris Badenov fedora ("That was
between me and God," Abramoff now says of the infamous hat). But let him
loose in society, and magic happens. Jack Abramoff's instinctive political
talent was for first locating and then inveigling himself into the
disreputable backroom deal of the hour. He was a walking cut corner, a thumb
on the scale of American history.

* * * *

The story about Jack Abramoff and the elementary school election, the one
first reported by The Los Angeles Times, is true. It only seems like
apocryphal bullshit. Born in Atlantic City to Frank Abramoff, an affluent
Diner's Club executive who would go on to represent golfer Arnold Palmer,
Jack moved with his family to Beverly Hills as a boy and grew up attending
one of the more prestigious elementary schools in the country, the Hawthorne
School. And it was here, at this same fancy-pants school that would one day
be home to a chubby girl named Monica Lewinsky, that Jack got his start in
politics by being disqualified from a race for student-body president for
cheating.

"Jack was a very, very, very smart boy with a straight-A average," recalls
Milton Rowen, the then-principal of the school. "We had certain rules about
the amount of money that could be spent, and there was no electioneering
outside of the school . . . He had his mother come up with hot dogs in her
car and give them out to the kids.

"He was a very nice boy," the eighty-seven-year-old now says, laughing. "But
he hot-dogged it."

Still, even with that setback, Abramoff was already off and running on a
course that would lead him straight to the political underworld. Like
Watergate vets Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Gordon Strachan and Ron
Ziegler before him, Abramoff throughout his youth would be drawn to student
politics, running (and losing) again for student-body president at Beverly
Hills High before becoming head of the Massachusetts College Republicans
while at Brandeis University in the Boston suburb of Waltham.

Abramoff was part of the first wave of young people who came back to the
Republican Party en masse during the so-called Reagan Revolution. The year
1980 was a time of resurgence for a party that just four years before had
been in a post-Watergate death spiral; the Moral Majority had just been
founded, and new-right prophets like Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich and
Richard Viguerie were attracting a fresh generation of young people to the
brash, piss-in-your-face, fuck-the-poor ideas emanating from places like the
Heritage Foundation and Bill Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom. Among
their other converts at this time were Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, a
pair of ambitious students from Harvard and Emory University, respectively.

After Reagan's 1980 landslide win, those two, along with Abramoff, would
work together at the College Republicans National Committee, and when
Abramoff succeeded Norquist as CRNC chief he would win a national reputation
as a hard-liner with his Lenin-esque pronouncement that it wasn't the job of
young Republicans to "seek peaceful co-existence with the left." The
take-no-prisoners stance of the twentysomething student leader: "Our job is
to remove them from power permanently."

All accounts point to Abramoff as the prototypically humorless Animal House
campus villain. A thick-necked champion weight lifter (he still holds the
Beverly Hills High bench-press record) with a square jaw and exquisite
hygiene, the man-child Abramoff also had the kind of sadistic jock
temperament that impresses coaches and corporate recruiters alike. "The
football coach was always afraid that Jack was going to kill somebody if he
hit him head-on," Rowen says. By the time he went away to Brandeis, he'd
already undergone a conversion to Orthodox Judaism, having found religion at
the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles (after seeing Fiddler on the Roof as a
youngster, Abramoff says), and so he arrived in 1970s Massachusetts the
rarest of East Coast campus creatures: a moralizing weight lifter with short
hair and a passion for Republican politics.

The Abramoff story, in fact, confirms in the most dramatic way every vicious
popular stereotype about campus conservatives. Kids who get involved with
lefty politics on campus almost always graduate straight into some degrading
state of semi-employment -- the defining characteristic of lefty student
movements is how few doors they open for you. Another defining
characteristic of the student left is its persistent, unquenchable and
irrational suspicion that the campus Republicans hold their meetings in the
offices of someplace like the Rand Corporation, where they have their
buttocks branded with Sumerian symbols in secret ceremonies that upon
graduation will gain all of them entrance to the upper ranks of corporate
and governmental privilege.

That was Jack Abramoff. Like those famed USC student "ratfuckers" who went
on to hold the ultimate panty raid in the Watergate Hotel, Abramoff and his
close friends Norquist and Ralph Reed (the one-time head of the Georgia
College Republicans used to sleep on Abramoff's couch) never really
abandoned the laughable training-wheel secrecy and capture-the-flag
gamesmanship of student politics. His buttocks freshly branded, Abramoff in
1983 traveled to Johannesburg on behalf of the CRNC and immediately parlayed
his student experience into a real job as a sort of frontman for South
African intelligence services. He was the young progressive's paranoid
nightmare come shockingly true: absurd campus Republican proto-geek
effortlessly transformed at graduation into flesh-and-blood neo-Nazi spook.

It is not easy to find anyone who actually encountered Abramoff during his
South Africa experiences, although one source who was involved with South
African right-wing student politics recalled "Casino Jack" as a "blue-eyed
boy" who rubbed people the wrong way with his arrogant demeanor. On his
first trip to Johannesburg in 1983, Abramoff met with leaders from the
archconservative, pro-apartheid National Students Federation, which itself
is alleged to have been created by South Africa's notorious Bureau of
Security Services. Together with NSF member Russel Crystal -- today a
prominent South African politician in the Democratic Alliance, an
anti-African National Congress party -- Abramoff subsequently, in 1986,
chaired the head of a conservative think tank called the International
Freedom Foundation.

The creation of the IFF officially marked the beginning of the silly phase
of Abramoff's career. According to testimony before Democratic South
Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, the IFF was not a
conservative think tank but actually a front for the South African army.
Testimony in sealed TRC hearings reportedly reveal that the IFF was known by
the nickname "Pacman" in the South African army and that its activities were
part of a larger plan called "Operation Babushka," designed to use
propaganda to discredit the ANC and Nelson Mandela at home and abroad. Among
other things, Abramoff managed during this time to funnel funds and support
from the IFF to a variety of stalwart congressmen and senators, including
Rep. Dan Burton and Sen. Jesse Helms, all of whom consistently opposed
congressional resolutions against apartheid. These members of Congress would
deny knowing that the IFF's money came from the South African government,
because that, of course, would have been illegal; Abramoff himself denied it
too, although he has been largely quiet on the subject since the TRC
testimony in 1995.

In a hilarious convergence of ordinary workaday incompetence and pointlessly
secretive cloak-and-dagger horseshit, Operation Babushka's grand opus would
ultimately turn out to be the production of the 1989 Dolph Lundgren vehicle
Red Scorpion, in which American moviegoers were invited to care about an
anti-communist revolutionary targeted for execution by a sweat-drenched
jungle version of Lundgren's overacting Ivan Drago persona. The film, which
Abramoff wrote and produced, was instantly derided by critics around the
world as one of the stupidest movies ever made.

Veteran character actor Carmen Argenziano, who played the heavy, Col. Zayas,
in Red Scorpion, recalls the "Cimino-esque" film shoot in Namibia as one of
the most surreal experiences of his career. "It was pretty weird," he says.
"What was going on was fishy, and then in the middle of production the word
spread that there was some kind of weird South African/CIA connection. And
that bummed everyone out."

Argenziano, whom history will likely absolve for being, with Lundgren, one
half of the film's only memorable scene, which also perhaps represents the
apex of Jack Abramoff's literary career (Argenziano: "Are you out of your
mind?" Lundgren: "No. Just out of bullets"), laughs almost nonstop as he
recalls his Namibia experiences.

"We were all staying in this hotel called the Kalahari Sands in Windhoek,
the capital," he says. "There was this huge new escalator in the hotel. I
guess it was the only one in the country, because little African kids kept
coming in to stare at it. But the South Africans we had on the shoot
[Abramoff was reportedly provided free labor by the South African army] kept
shooing them away, literally pushing kids off the escalator, shouting these
racist words at them. Wasn't exactly good for morale."

The Eighties show Abramoff involved in a series of almost comic backroom
escapades, the most famous being the organization of a sort of trade
convention for anti-communist rebel leaders in Jamba, Angola. There are not
many facts on the record about this incident, but what is known smacks of an
articulate young Darth Vader putting out scones and lemonade at a
sand-planet meeting of the leading bounty-hunter scum in the universe. Under
the auspices of the Citizens for America, a group founded by Rite Aid
drugstore magnate and one-time New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis
Lehrman at the request of Ronald Reagan, Abramoff helped organize a meeting
of anti-communist rebels that included Angolan UNITA fighters, Afghan
mujahedin, Laotian guerrillas and Nicaraguan Contras.

Some reports speculate that the meeting was convened so that one of the
Americans -- perhaps Abramoff or Lehrman -- could pass along a message of
support from the White House. But it's more likely that this will be just
another Abramoff episode to remain shrouded in mystery. Twenty-one years
later, Lehrman won't say what it was all about, noting that "I do not recall
if there was a White House message discussion" and adding only that "there
were very many anti-communist individuals present in Jamba."

Abramoff's CFA experience was extensive enough, however, to make him a
character in the Iran-Contra scandal. His ostensible role was to raise
support for the Contras through the CFA. "Abramoff was a bit player in
Iran-Contra," says Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who served as a special
counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Iran-Contra
investigation. "That's where he learned that the money wasn't in the
ideological skulduggery world. It was in the go-buy-the-government world."
But, Blum adds, Abramoff's experiences with various conservative foundations
and nonprofits during this period proved valuable later on. "This is when he
made all his connections," he says. "It was through them that he learned
that it was much more lucrative to work in the commercial end of politics."

Abramoff, Norquist and Reed were all in their mid-to-late twenties, and all
were experiencing paradigmatic life changes. While Abramoff was joining such
groups as the Council for National Policy, the CFA and the United States of
America Foundation, Norquist was founding Americans for Tax Reform, the
organization he would later ride to prominence as a fat, hygienically
deficient tax-policy oracle. Reed, meanwhile, was recovering from the trauma
of an April 1983 incident in which he was reportedly caught plagiarizing for
his student newspaper a Commentary article denouncing Mohandas Gandhi. A few
months after that setback, however, Reed found Jesus in a phone booth
outside the Bullfeathers pub in Washington -- and by 1985 he, too, had found
his calling, terrorizing abortion clinics with the Students for America, a
sort of pale precursor to the Christian Coalition.

There is a common thread running through almost all of Abramoff's activities
during this tadpole period of his in the Eighties. Suggested in his every
action is an utter contempt for legal governmental processes; he behaves as
if ordinary regulations are for suckers and the uncommitted. If the
government won't step up to the plate and sign off on support for the
Contras, you go through channels and do it yourself. If you really want to
win an election, you find ways around finance laws and spending limits. And
if you want to oppose a national anti-apartheid movement on the country's
campuses, don't waste time building from the ground up; go straight to
Pretoria and bring home a few million dollars in a bag.

One of the ugliest developments in American culture since Abramoff's obscure
Cold Warrior days in the Eighties has been the raging but highly temporary
success of various "smart guys" who upon closer examination aren't all that
smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte ("The smartest son of a
bitch I ever met in my life," said one Olympian client), Enron's "smartest
guys in the room" Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, "ingenious
dealmaker" Jack Abramoff. Somewhere along the line, in the years since the
Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking,
self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate
prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some
kind of earth-shattering revelation -- as though they had fucking invented
fraud and cheating. But to a man, they all turned out to be dumb,
incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them -- not even
good at being criminals.

* * * *

All of Abramoff's late-career capers -- the inner-city youth charity that
actually bought sniper scopes for Israeli settlers, the academic think tank
that turned out to be a lifeguard in a shack on Rehoboth Beach, the "check's
in the mail" fleecing of his own tailor out of a bill for suits -- they all
exude the same infuriating "Check out the brains on us!" vibe.

Take the infamous Naftasib scheme of 1997-98. The short version of this
story is that Abramoff and Tom DeLay met with a bunch of shady Russian oil
executives in 1997; the Russians then sent $1 million to a British law firm
called James and Sarch; James and Sarch then sent a million to the pompously
named nonprofit "U.S. Family Network," which in turn sent money to numerous
destinations. It went to a lobbyist agency called the Alexander Strategy
Group that was run by DeLay's ex-chief of staff, Edwin Buckham; the agency
would subsequently hire DeLay's wife at a salary of $3,200 a month. It went
toward the purchase of a luxury D.C. town house that DeLay would use to
raise money. And it went toward the purchase of a luxury box at FedExField,
which Abramoff used to watch the Redskins. If you follow the loop all the
way around, the quid pro quo probably involved DeLay's 1998 decision to
support an IMF loan to Russia, whose economy collapsed that year and would
rely on an IMF bailout to survive. A Maryland pastor named Christopher
Geeslin, who briefly served as the U.S. Family Network's president, would
later say that Buckham told him that the $1 million from the Russians was
intended to influence DeLay's decision regarding funding for the IMF. DeLay
ended up voting to replenish IMF funds in September of that year, right at
the time of the bailout.

Is this smart? Sure, if you're fucking ten years old. If your idea of smart
is turning an IMF loan into Redskins tickets, then, yeah, this is smart. But
another way to look at it is that these assholes got themselves Redskins
tickets by giving $18 billion to one of the most corrupt governments on
Earth. I'd call that buying at a premium.

That's the most striking characteristic of Abramoff and his crew of
ex-student leaders; nearly thirty years out of college, no longer young at
all, the whole bunch of them are still Dean Wormer's sneaky little shits,
high-fiving one another for executing the brilliant theft and pre-dawn
public hanging of the rival college's stuffed-bear mascot. That whole
adolescent vibe permeates the confiscated Abramoff e-mails, the best example
of which being this exchange between Jack and his "evil elf" aide Michael
Scanlon regarding their lobbying fees for the Coushatta Indian tribe:

Scanlon: Coushatta is an absolute cake walk. Your cut on the project as
proposed is at least 800k.

Abramoff: How can I say this strongly enough: YOU IZ DA MAN

Again, these assholes affirm every stereotype about campus conservatives.
They don't spend enough time being kids when they're supposed to, so they do
it when they're balding, middle-aged men with handles and back hair -- using
Washington and Congress as their own personal sandbox.

They figured out how to beat everything. Everything about the Abramoff story
suggests that at some point, he and his buddies Norquist, Reed and DeLay
took a long, hard look at the American system, war-gamed it and came up with
a master plan to strike hard at its weakest points. In the end, almost all
of the Abramoff scams revolved around the vulnerability of the national
legislature to outside manipulation. Once Abramoff and his cabal figured out
how to beat Congress, everything else fell into place.

Case in point: Abramoff's remarkable success in defeating H.R. 521, a 2001
House bill that would place the Guam Superior Court under the control of a
federally controlled Supreme Court. Led by Judge Alberto Lamorena, Guam
Superior Court justices hired the lobbyist to defeat the bill, which would
have unseated them as the chief judicial authorities of the island. It says
something for Abramoff's ability to bring out the worst in people that he
managed to get a group of sitting judges to pay him $324,000 in public funds
in $9,000 installments so as to avoid detection.

Despite the $324,000 fee, Abramoff could not prevent the House Resources
committee from unanimously recommending H.R. 521 for passage. Would the
superlobbyist finally fail? No, of course not. Given what we know about
Abramoff's tactics, we'd be naive not to conclude that he could lean on
DeLay and then-Whip Roy Blunt to stall the bill in the congressional
machinery. On May 27th, 2002, just five days after the Resources committee
made its recommendation, an Abramoff-linked PAC wrote two checks for
$5,000 -- one to Blunt, one to DeLay. H.R. 521 never reached the floor.

The Guam incident certainly shows how easily the whole Congress was
controlled by a small gang. The DeLay Republicans, along with Abramoff, were
apparently the first to recognize the opportunities for corruption presented
by the House leadership's dictatorial control over key committees, in
particular the Rules committee. Now, a single call to a lone Tom DeLay could
decide the fate of any piece of legislation, pushing it through to a vote or
gumming it up in the works as needed. The other 430-odd congressmen were
window dressing.

I asked Rep. Louise Slaughter if the Guam case, which showed that just two
men could quash a bill, proved that Congress was especially vulnerable to
manipulation by the likes of Abramoff.

"Absolutely," she said. "And the thing is, we have no idea how many
incidents like that there were. What else didn't get to the floor? We have
no idea. No way of knowing."

Even more ominously, Abramoff would eventually come under fire in Guam
following the mysterious removal of Guam Attorney General Frederick Black,
who had seen the fate of H.R. 521 and decided to investigate Abramoff's role
in it.

"The thing that really worries me about Guam is the prosecutor who was
plucked off the case," says Slaughter, a New York Democrat who has
spearheaded her party's lobby-reform drive. "It makes you wonder what really
went on there."

At the very least, Abramoff's relationship with White House procurements
officer David Safavian shows that he made at least some inroads into the
world of White House patronage. Abramoff took Safavian on one of his famous
Scotland golfing junkets and reportedly was receiving help from Safavian in
leasing government property. Safavian was working on the distribution of
millions in federal aid to Katrina-affected regions when he was arrested,
which raises all kinds of questions about what else might have been going
on.

"There were so many contracts, from Katrina to Iraq -- God knows what really
went on in there," says Slaughter.

Once Congress was conquered, Abramoff, Norquist, et al., apparently
discovered a means for turning it into a pure engine for profit. The game
they may have discovered worked like this: One lobbyist (Abramoff, say)
represents one group of interests -- for example, the Malaysian government.
Then, a lobbyist friend of Abramoff's (say, Norquist) represents an
antagonist to Abramoff's client, in this case, let's say dissident leader
Anwar Ibrahim. Ibrahim asks Norquist to press his case against the Malaysian
state in Washington; Norquist complies and uses his contacts to raise a
stink on the Hill. Abramoff's client, unnerved, turns to Abramoff to make
the problem go away. Abramoff dutifully goes to the same friends Norquist
applied to in the first place, and the problem does indeed go away. In the
end, everyone is happy and both lobbyists have performed and gotten paid.
Abramoff apparently pulled this kind of double-dealing scheme more than
once, as he and Ralph Reed appear to have run a similar con on the Coushatta
and Tigua Indian tribes, who were on opposite sides of a gaming dispute.

An idiot might call a scheme like this clever. But that's only true if you
don't consider what really happened here: Dozens of people conspiring to
reduce the U.S. Congress to the level of a Belarussian rubber stamp for the
sake of . . . what? A few million dollars in lobbying fees? And not even a
few million dollars apiece but a few million dollars split several ways.
Shit, even Paris Hilton can make a million dollars in this country without
blowing up 200 years of democracy. How smart can these guys be?

Everyone sold themselves on the cheap. They apparently got Rep. Bob Ney
(R-Ohio), and many others in the House, to lie back and open their legs all
the way for a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions. In the Third
World, corrupt politicians at least get something for selling out the
people -- boats, mansions, villas in the south of France. If you offered the
lowest, most drunken ex-mobster in the Russian Duma $5,000, $10,000, $15,000
in soft money for his vote, he would laugh in your face; he might even be
insulted enough to shoot you. But Jack Abramoff apparently got any number of
congressmen to play ball for the same kind of money.

They paid journalists to change their opinions; as it turns out, the right
to free speech is worth about $2,000 a column to America's journalists like
Doug Bandow of Copley News Service. And now it comes out that Diebold, the
notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff's firm,
Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring
paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote
Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked
every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial
electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.

They targeted Congress, the courts, the integrity of elections, and the free
press, and in every corner they found willing partners who could be had for
a few bucks and a package of golf tees. That doesn't mean Jack Abramoff was
so very smart. No, what that says is that America is no longer trying very
hard. And when Jack Abramoff hears his sentence, ours will certainly be made
plain soon after. Jack Abramoff was the Patient Zero of Washington
corruption. He's the girl at school that everyone got a piece of, including
two janitors in their forties. It strains all credulity to think that he's
been talking to the Department of Justice for months and yet prosecutors
still have to "encircle" a lone congressman, Bob Ney, as has been reported.
If Ney is the big target the government made a deal with Abramoff for, we'll
know we've been had again.

"If you're venal and cunning enough, like him, you can do it," says
Slaughter, when asked if the American system has become easy to beat. "But
he had a lot of help."

==============================================================================
TOPIC: AMERICA IS TRAPPED!
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6dbf260fc6bf2840
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:33 pm
From: "Bang Adil"

Does America realize that it is now TRAPPED between TWO SHIITES, IRAN
and IRAK (majority in Iraq)...?????

==============================================================================
TOPIC: SHIELDING ZIONAZI CRIMES
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/2b434dde80c72ee0
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:41 pm
From: "Jim E"

"serwad" <serwad@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:_vM%f.912$t61.870@bignews6.bellsouth.net...
> US blocks UN criticism of Israel's 'excessive use of force'
>
> UNITED NATIONS 14/04/2006 08:54
>
>
> The United States blocked as unfairly critical a Security Council
> statement that would have urged Israel to refrain from "excessive use of
> force" against the Palestinians.
>
> The text, under negotiations for the past three days by the 15-member
> council, came in response to intensive Israeli bombardments of the Gaza
> Strip over the past few days aimed at putting an end to rocket firing by
> Palestinian militant groups.
>
> Fifteen Palestinians were killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes over
> the weekend.
>
> The draft text would have called on Israel "to refrain from excessive use
> of force" and on the Palestinian Authority to "take a clear public stance
> against violence."
>
> "The draft text that was negotiated was not fair and balanced and
> consistent with our long-standing policy. We are not prepared to support a
> text that distorts the reality in the region," US Ambassador John Bolton
> told reporters after council consultations on the issue. "We did reject
> it."
>
> "A lot of changes were made but the balance of the text was still not
> adequate in our view. We think it was disproportionately critical of
> Israel and unfairly so and needlessly so," he added.
>
> Palestinian UN representative Ryad Mansour, who had pushed for council
> action, said the council's 14 other members had shown "a tremendous amount
> of understanding and flexibility."
>
> "But unfortunately one member (the United States) is shielding and
> protecting Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza and
> other parts of the occupied territory," he added
>
> Mansour said that at the initiative of the nonaligned movement, the Arab
> UN group, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and others, the
> Security Council would hold an open session on the Middle East Monday.
>
> "We will see representatives who will speak on behalf of maybe more than
> 150 countries to express their outrage at Israeli aggression and attacks
> and request upholding of international law," he added.
>
> Bolton said he did not think that Monday's meeting would be "productive."
>
> "I don't think the Security Council is an exercise in group therapy," he
> noted.
>

Hey alex, how much for the pink flamingos this week?

Jim E

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Secondary factors why Eyeran wants nukes
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a6b2f655b2a3f198
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:43 pm
From: Vince

Fred J. McCall wrote:
> Vince <firelaw@firelaw.us> wrote:
>
> :Fred J. McCall wrote: :> ianparker2@gmail.com wrote: :> :> :Yes but
> if you have 10,000 centrfuges and a reprocessing facility :>
> :everyone knows that one could be cobbled together fairly quickly if
> :> :required. Perhaps that is all that is needed for the desired
> political :> :pressure. :> :> If you have 10,000 centrifuges (and a
> bunch of uranium) you don't need :> a reprocessing facility. :> :>
> The centrifuges are used for enriching uranium. The reprocessing :>
> facility is for separating plutonium from a nuclear fuel burn. The
> :> former gives you material that can probably "cobbled together
> fairly :> quickly" into a (gun-type) bomb if required. The latter
> gives you :> plutonium, which is a much harder problem to turn into a
> working :> weapon (and "cobbling" just won't get it). :> :> Please
> learn something about the technologies behind what you are :> talking
> about. : :Reprocessing facilities also describes extracting uranium
> from spent :reactor fuel elements
>
> Which has nothing to do with making a bomb, which is what is being
> talked about. The uranium from fuel rods would need to be further
> enriched (and there isn't enough of it to do that, generally - you're
> better off just starting from tons of ore).
>

nonsense. spent Reactor fuel is already enriched (3-5%), so it is the
best possible feedstock for the Centrifuge.

"A PWR has fuel assemblies of 200-300 rods each, arranged vertically in
the core, and a large reactor would have about 150-250 fuel assemblies
with 80-100 tonnes of uranium.

80-100 tons of uranium enriched to 5% is a huge amount of U-235
even partially spent fuel rods can be about 3% u=235

Vince

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Why Rumsfeld Should Not Resign: Rats Leave a Sinking Ship
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/abe07d8427c1b9b0
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:42 pm
From: Fafnir

In article <1145057554.2289066235.1378377911@blythe.org>
NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Why Rumsfeld Should Not Resign: Rats Leave a Sinking Ship
>
> Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't
Fit
>
> The Guardian - Apr 14, 2006
> http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=493&row=0
>
> Why Rumsfeld Should Not Resign
>
Because he's worth at least thirty seats in Congress to the
Democrats.

SOMEBODY has to fill the vaccuum left by Delay...

==============================================================================

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