soc.culture.usa
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa
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Today's topics:

* The Day the Mufti Came to Town - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6765cc0b154c7691
* AMERICA IS TRAPPED! - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6dbf260fc6bf2840
* AHMADINEJAD.... - 2 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/168923a383917185
* Secondary factors why Eyeran wants nukes - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a6b2f655b2a3f198
* JEWS are doomed - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/9ae085fede66a411
* KIKE ABRAMOFF, THE SHITWAD! - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/30ff46aed373bca7
* Bush Defector to Demolish 9/11 Big Lie in Madison - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/d460c3faf7472955
* Easter Peace Message - 2 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/20f698be9daac53d
* The Rise of Fascism in America - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/89f6b9025a73fd20
* Muslim Outreach Key for Promoting Understanding, Integration - 2 messages, 1
author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c3a21f4438d4d9e
* White American gentiles must love dying for Israel - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4d3416693290a09b
* Weekly Standard: A Mexican Hugo Chavez? - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/e5bf04585723a58b
* Latin America: The Return of Populism - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/781fe588b56e647
* Venez Detains ex-Cop in Journalist Slaying - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/bd9905e98921fc2f
* US Continues Works on World's Biggest Embassy in Baghdad - 1 messages, 1
author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/e73d7a0c67205c14
* Marines Suffer 2 Dead, 22 Wounded in Iraq - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/919ae30da2472f8b
* Baquba mosque bombings kill 4 - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/294b7df81b40749d
* Palestinians to get Russian aid - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/3d701135de276b7d
* BUSH'S GENOCIDE WILL EXCEED THAT OF HITLER - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/40956d13df86d870

==============================================================================
TOPIC: The Day the Mufti Came to Town
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/6765cc0b154c7691
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:51 pm
From: "Jim E"

"serwad" <serwad@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:cpX%f.635$iB2.67@bignews4.bellsouth.net...
>
> "Jim E" <YD652126@sea.edu> wrote in message
> news:4a8ahkFs89u0U1@individual.net...
>>
>> "serwad" <serwad@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
>> news:EAy%f.828$4O2.454@bignews7.bellsouth.net...
>>>
>>> "DoD" <thecats@ss.mil> wrote in message
>>> news:zmw%f.197$5J6.109@newsread1.mlpsca01.us.to.verio.net...
>>>> "Death to America" can be heard loud and clear throughout the streets
>>>> of
>>>> Tehran. It can also be frequently heard out of the mouth of one Ikrima
>>>> Sa'
>>>> id Sabri, the Grand Mufti of the Al-Aqsa Mosque located in Jerusalem.
>>>> Recently, Sabri had the opportunity to visit the land that he hates so
>>>> much.
>>>> But why would he want to, and why would we let him?
>>>
>>> WHO IS "WE" YOU CROATIAN USTASHA!
>>>
>>
>> From the serb swamp dweller who ran from his homeland like the communist
>> coward he is.
> YOU ARE REALLY FUNNY JEWBOY! CAN YOU IMAGINE ANYONE ELSE WHO RAN MORE
> TIMES THAN JEWS DID?
>

Just you.
Had to run away from your home swamp.
You are the ultimate coward.

Jim E

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

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:54 pm
From: "é-koQ™"

itu mah sudah biasa , seorang pemburu kena perangkapnya kendiri ,
atawa tembak teman kendiri.

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 2:59 am
From: dimethyltryptamine

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

Yes, and Bush should have known the trouble it would cause to overthrow
a despotic sunni dictator and allow Iraq's shi't majority to align with
hostile shi't Iran. Bush SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, whether he can be held
responsible for the cocaine-induced stupor that impaired his judgement
is another matter.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: AHMADINEJAD....
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/168923a383917185
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:55 pm
From: "Jim E"

"serwad" <serwad@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:9ZL%f.907$t61.684@bignews6.bellsouth.net...
> DUBYA STOLE BOTH ELECTIONS EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT, INCLUDING HIS OWN PET
> JEWS!
>

No, if you bothered to check the facts, you would find that The USSC stopped
an attempt by the dims to recount Florida on a cherry pick of counties.
The court said count them all or go home.
Much after the fact every major big news agency in the country did recounts
of the Florida vote.
Every one of these independent recounts found GW to be the winner.
Not bad considering all these news agencies were rooting for Algore.

Why are all islamizoids dumber than dirt?

Jim E

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 7:58 pm
From: "Jim E"

Flushed

==============================================================================
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 7:57 pm
From: fredfighter@spamcop.net

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.

The degree of enrichment required for a weapon is far greater
than that needed for reactor fuel.

'Fairly quickly' will be a long time for the former when compared
with the latter.

--
FF

==============================================================================
TOPIC: JEWS are doomed
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/9ae085fede66a411
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:59 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: KIKE ABRAMOFF, THE SHITWAD!
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/30ff46aed373bca7
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:06 pm
From: "Jim E"

"serwad" <serwad@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:BUY%f.662$iB2.323@bignews4.bellsouth.net...
> Meet Mr. Republican: Jack Abramoff

The man who will write world policy for years to come.

Suck it up you muzzy loser.

Jim E

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:16 pm
From: gigo448@netscape.net

I read yer post, and then started to google around.
This is the most promising source of info I could find..

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1108892

Alot of the sites seem to be explaining in various
ways the content of what your post says. The above
sight said as much and much more as well. Thought
I'd share it with you and yer audience.

L8r..

bd4u

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Bush Defector to Demolish 9/11 Big Lie in Madison
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/d460c3faf7472955
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 11:07 pm
From: "K James"

"Well Done" <WellDone@WellHoned.com> wrote in message news:5vvv3252h0rgegjgj9d4l83800faq8ufjo@4ax.com...
> "K James" <kjames28@lycos.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> >7. It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed
> >by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature
> >of steel close to melting.
> <snip>
> Saving a lot of bandwith by not repeating your inanity.

The inanity is causing a lot of problems to you, see a professional.

> The steel didn't have to anywhere NEAR melting to give way.
>
> Reports of the sound of the floors pancaking were in the news on Sept.
> 11, 2001. Pretending now that those were actually demo charges is
> worse than silly - it's downright amusing.

Ever heard of thermite ?
http://www.physics911.net/thermite.htm

Prof. Jones paper on the use of thermite
http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html

> Keep it comin', sport.
> --
> ): "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think" :(
> (: Off the monitor, through the modem, nothing but net :)

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Easter Peace Message
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/20f698be9daac53d
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:11 pm
From: "Noah's Dove"

Easter Peace Message / Messianic Prophecies
Peace is something we all desire and it's something the world
desperately needs. Jesus, the Lamb of God when he comes will bring
real world peace...however the Bible says an emerging antichrist system

will bring a false peace. The following is some scripture, notes and
thoughts on God's Peace. I hope this message will give you peace
from the Christ the Prince of Peace. If you are blessed by the
following message of peace it will be nice to hear from you,

"Swords into Plowshares" - a Message and Prayer for Peace

"And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the
LORD's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and
shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the
mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will
teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion
shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and

they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn war any more." - the Prophet Isaiah Ch2

Our world is threatened with terrorism, racial violence, and war. What

has happened in Israel, and else where in the world is perhaps a
barometer for the times we live in. Is there a solution for lasting
Peace? With man perhaps it is impossible. God's Peace is available for
individuals and like salt and light can spread with God's help in our
society and beyond. When the Prince of Peace comes the prophets say
there will be permanent peace...however before that Day comes can we be

Peacemakers in a world being torn apart by hatred? Yes, we can ...God
who created the human race and has acted into human history has not
left us in the dark as to the nature of Peace.

Sometimes humans get use to imperfection

In a perfect world with perfect people there would be no
war, thief, terrorism, racism, human inflicted misery etc. All would
obey God's commandments to love our neighbors and obey the Golden rule.

Our nations would have no need for weapons of war. We would need no
police, armies, priest, gurus or locks on our door . There would be no
poverty, cruelty, or murder. Mankind would experience unity and peace.
All would worship and serve the one true God as there would be no
idolatry, false prophets or antichrists. This doesn't sound like our
world presently does it?

All this should tell us there is something terribly wrong with the
human
race. St. Paul in the book of Romans Ch1 wrote:

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of

God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and
also to the Greek.
17 For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to
faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness

and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God
hath shewed it unto them.
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his
eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God,
neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their

foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made
like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and
creeping things.
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of
their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served
the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their

women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman,
burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that
which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their

error which was meet.
28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God
gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not
convenient;
29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness,
covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit,
malignity; whisperers,
30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of

evil things, disobedient to parents,
31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection,
implacable, unmerciful:
32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things
are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them
that do them.

If you read the rest of Romans to the end of book of Revelations you
will begin to see God's solution for all this.

For a brief summary of the solution:

The following quotes, comments, and relevant scriptures will hopefully
shed some understanding and light on that that humanly difficult thing
to achieve...which is Peace.

War is easily spread by the flames of hate, racism, demonization and
desire for revenge. When people or nations are not just in their
treatment of others ..the seeds of war are planted.

Racism as defined by the dictionary is "an irrational belief or
advocacy of the superiority of a given group, people or nation." Racism

is not just a matter of differences in the colour of one's skin and
culture..it goes much deeper into issues...such as cultural pride ,
nationalism, non-scientific or untruthful definintions of race,
prejudice, etc.

Racism is widespread in our world and has led to lynchings, mob
violence, genocide and war and has resulted in the death of untold
millions on this planet. Racism and hate if unchecked have the
potential to destroy all life on this planet. Is this what people want
...If we come to our senses I think not!

What are the roots of racism and hate... The following quotes by
various prophets and sages will shed some light on the roots of racism
and hate and offer some alternative solutions:

A person who is treated poorly by a person of another race or color can

respond with hate or heed the words "You have heard that it has been
said, You should love your neighbour, and hate your enemy, But I say
unto you, Love your enemies....bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and
persecute you.."

The latter is difficult but can defuse a potentially reactionary
situation.

The person who said these words also said:

"So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; this is
the meaning of the Law and the Prophets." *

A person who loves will honestly recognize one's own faults and will
hold
his breath rather than condem others.

"He who has no sin cast the first stone" -this was said by Jesus of
Nazereth to an angry
judgemental crowd who was ready to cast stones at a women caught in the

act of adultery.

No racial group or individual can claim it, or he or she is without
sin...unfortunately we are
often too quick in condeming others while failing to see one's own
shortcomings.

Jesus had the following wise words to say about blindly condeming
others:

"Condem not, that you be not condemed.
For with what judgment you condem, you shall be condem: and with what
measure you out, it shall be measured to you again. And why do you
notice the speck that is in your brother's eye, but not see the beam
that is in your own eye? Or why do you say to thy brother, Let me pull
out the speck out of your eye; and, behold, a beam is in your own eye?
You hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of your own eye; and then
you will see clearly to cast out the speck out of thy brother's eye.".*

St. Paul writes:

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone
else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are
condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same
things. {Rom 2:1 NIV}
Love is willing to forgive and with time and God's help forget.
It is difficult to love our enemies without God's help. He is the Vine
..we can bear the fruit of love, forgiveness and peace if we abide in
in God .... "a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself"*

"But if you are led of the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the
works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery,
fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred,

variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings,
murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell
you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do
such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there
is no law." Paul to the Galatians.

"I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh
after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he
shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire:" -John the
Baptist

How do we receive the Spirit of PEACE and LOVE?

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall
find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh

receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it
shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a
father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a
fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a

scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to ...

read more »

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2
From: Noah's Dove - view profile
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 1:22 am
Not yet rated

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http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/528.htm

Dreams and visions have, through recorded history, often guided
mankind. God has frequently made use of dreams in communicating his
will to men. The following special dreams are recorded in the Tawrat's
Book of Genesis written by the Prophet Musa (Moses, pbuh):
• Yaqub (Jacob, pbuh) (28:12 & 31:10)
• Laban (31:24)
• Yusuf (Joseph, pbuh) (37:9-11)
• Abimelech (20:3-7)
• Egypt's Pharaoh (41:1-8). (Pharaoh is also mentioned in
the
Qur'an in Surah 10, Ayat 90-92)
• Egypt's Pharaoh's chief butler and baker (40:5)

And in other books of what is known as the Old Testament, also
sometimes referred to as the Tawrat:
• Gideon (Book of Judges, 7),
• King Sulaiman (Solomon) (Book of 1 Kings, 3:5)
• The Midianite People (Book fo Judges, 7:13)
• King Nebuchadnezzar (Book of Daniel, 2:1; 4:10, 18)

And in the Injil (New Testament), we find:
• Joseph, husband of Maryam (Mary), the mother of Jesus
"...an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, 'Joseph,
son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child

who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.' 'She will bear a
Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people
from their sins.' Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by

the Lord through the prophet: 'BEHOLD, THE VIRGIN SHALL BE WITH CHILD
AND SHALL BEAR A SON, AND THEY SHALL CALL HIS NAME IMMANUEL,' which
translated means, 'GOD WITH US.' (Book of Matthew, 1:20. See also 2:12,

13, 19)
• The wise men from the east who were led to the
birthplace of Isa
al Masih (Jesus) (Book of Matthew. 2:12)
• Pilate's wife (Book of Matthew 27:19)
• Paul In a night vision a "man of Macedonia" stood
before Paul and
said, "Come over into Macedonia and help us" (Acts 16:9; see also 18:9;

27:23)

God is Great! Just as He did in the past, God is showing His mercy and
guidance to Muslims throughout the world today! Read the following
story portions from Muslims worldwide who have reported such dreams and

now follow Isa al Masih as their Savior:

"...two angels dressed in white robes stood on top of the mountain.
Jesus was standing between the angels. He left the angels and came to
where I stood watching. As he approached me, I knelt down and he laid
his hands on my head..." [read more]

"...['D.'] dreamt he was sitting with his arms tied to a chair. Then he

saw a man he recognized as Jesus coming. Jesus touched the ropes and
they fell from his arms..." [read more]

"...In the dream, Jesus told me to come to Him and read the Bible and
He would show me the way, truth and the life..." [read more]

"...I was standing in a cross shape with a low wall around it. In my
right hand, I had a big stack of white unwritten papers. I was standing

at the cross beam, and I was looking to a small group of people who
were standing at the top. They all wore long white clothing, but one of

them was different. He was standing at the right side, and with his
left hand he was leading the people through a door in the wall. Beyond
the door was light, and I could not see what was in there. One moment I

was standing in the dream, and the next moment I was seeing the cross
from above..." [read more]

"...I saw some Christians standing in line to get into Heaven. I tried
to get into this line also, but a very tall being blocked my path and I

started to cry because the side I was on was really horrible but the
side they were on was a beautiful place, so beautiful, so blue..."
[read more]

"...I went back to bed after a short prayer and saw a second dream.
This time it was Jesus as I saw him in the Jesus film years ago and I
had trashed his video. He was hanging on the cross, the nails were in
his hands and feet, yet he was smiling at me and talking to me. Though
he was dying he seemed so beautiful. The cross was huge and I seemed
like a little boy. My neck was falling back trying to see the whole
face of Jesus and suddenly a huge big circle of light came from above
the cross and down upon me..." [read more]

"...I was swimming. It was very dark, without any stars in the sky.
After swimming for a while, I stopped and looked up at the sky.
Suddenly, I saw a star shining. I closed my eyes and made a wish. I
said, 'Morning Star, teach me the secret of life'...I kept having this
dream for years almost every other month and this pattern continued
until a few months after my conversion, when I read Rev. 22:16, which
says, 'I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the
churches. I am the Root and the offspring of David, and the bright
Morning Star'..." [read more]

Other Stories:

Filipino Muslims. Stories from the Zamboanga and Basilan regions of
the Southern Philippines are starting to come in. Yakan and Tausug
Muslims are reporting having dreams of Isa during and after Ramadan.
[read more]

A Vision. The story of one Malay's trip to Mecca for the hajj and the
strange incidents that occurred there. [read more]

The Battle. The story of one Turkish man's spiritual journey while
studying in the Caucasus. [read more]

>From Mosque to Church. Yilmaz, a Turkish man, decides to follow after

Isa Mesih. [read more]
Out of Kundalini. (non-Muslim) The story of one Indonesian man's
journey to Christ. [read more]

Power to Heal. (non-Muslim) The story of one Malaysian man's miraculous

healing. [read more]

A magazine published in California reports the following (based on
questionnaires completed by over 600 Muslims who placed their faith in
Jesus) [1]:
"Though dreams may play an insignificant role in the conversion
decisions of most Westerners, over one-fourth of those surveyed state
quite emphatically that dreams and visions were key in drawing them to
Christ and sustaining them through difficult times. Rick Love,
International Director of Frontiers, has recognized the pattern as
well. He writes that, 'Just as God used a vision to convert Paul, in
like manner He reveals Himself to Muslims through dreams and visions.
Just as God prepared Cornelius to hear the Gospel through a vision, so
God is preparing a multitude of Muslims to respond to His good news.'
[2]

One believer from Guinea recounts the dream of a figure whom he
later believed to be Christ. The figure was in a white robe, calling
the man to come to Him. In a related dream, he recalls that the same
figure's arms were extended, beckoning him. Dreams of this type have
become recognized as a pattern of work among Muslims. Though there are
variations, Christ appearing in a white robe is a recurring image among

those who have had dreams and visions. Similarly, a Muslim Malay woman
was drawn by a vision she had of her Christian parents who had died.
She saw them rejoicing with others in heaven. Jesus, appearing in a
white robe, said, "If you want to come to me, just come." Feeling that
she had tried her entire life to reach God without success, she now saw

God initiating the effort to reach her through Jesus.

A convert from the Middle East who had been afflicted with severe
headaches was lying on his bed after having prayed for his sick son. A
man with a beautiful, peaceful face appeared. Dressed in white, the
figure walked to the head of the man's bed and touched him three times
on the head. The next morning his headaches were gone. His son, too,
was fully healed. Understandably, he now recounts with confidence, "I
believe in prayer in the name of the Christ."

The great majority of dreams seem to fall into one of two broad
categories. The first could be considered the preparatory dream. Like
Christ appearing in a white robe, the vision confirms thoughts or
conversations one has been having about Christ or the Christian faith.
The second could be called the empowering dream. Here the dream or
vision commonly gives the believer strength in the face of persecution.

Short of persecution, it may embolden believers, strengthening the
nature of their witness.

Preparatory. One Sunni woman from the Arabian Peninsula had a figure
appear to her in a dream, telling her to visit a Christian woman she
knew. The figure, who she was later convinced was Christ, told her this

woman would teach her.

Prior to his conversion, a Persian man had a vision. In it, he was
falling in darkness over a cliff and was saved by a light holding onto
his back.

In a fascinating twist on God's use of dreams and sleep, one Algerian
recounted how she heard her sleeping Muslim grandmother say, "Jesus is
not dead. I want to tell you He is here."

A West African man recounts a succinct, yet powerful vision he had
prior to conversion. He saw a devout Muslim in hell and a poor
Christian who couldn't afford to give alms in heaven. A voice explained

to him that the difference was belief in Jesus.

Empowering. A North African believer found the needed strength to face
his imprisonment from a dream he had while imprisoned for his faith. In

it, he saw thousands of believers pouring through the streets of his
city, openly proclaiming their faith in his restricted country. While
in prison, he was tortured, suspended upside-down naked for hours,
beaten with electrified rods and repeatedly threatened with execution.
His vision of a day when people of his country would openly proclaim
their faith in the streets gave him great strength to persevere through

this most difficult time.

Encounter. Though not strictly a dream or a vision, a number of
Muslim-background believers have had a significant supernatural
encounter that was instrumental in drawing them to Jesus. One Egyptian
Muslim was reading the Injil (Gospel), when he came to Luke 3, where
the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in the form of a dove. God said,
"This is my son, in whom I am well pleased." As he read those words, a
stormy wind broke into his room. A voice spoke to him saying, "I am
Jesus Christ, whom you hate. I am the Lord whom you are looking for."
He recalls that he "wept and wept, accepting Jesus from that time."
...

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:21 pm
From: "Noah's Dove"

http://www.messianic-prophecy.net/
Messianic Prophecy: A Definition
The term "Messianic prophecy" refers to a compilation of over one
hundred predictions (conservative estimate) in the Old Testament
regarding the Messiah. They have undeniable accuracy even though these
prophecies were recorded by numerous writers into various books over
1000 years. We are assured that these prophecies were not conspired
after the fact due to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint. These items
are existed prior to Jesus' time on earth.

Messianic Prophecy: The Fulfillment
Jesus Christ fulfilled the Messianic Prophecy foretold by the Old
Testament authors. Study the prophecies yourself and consider the
probability of just one person fulfilling even a few of these specific
prophecies! Luke 24:44 says, "Then he said, 'When I was with you
before, I told you that everything written about me by Moses and the
prophets and in the Psalms must all come true.'"

Consider these Old Testament prophecies and the New Testament
fulfillment by Christ:
• Born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2, Matthew 2:1; Luke 2:4-7)
• Born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:21-23) as a descendant
of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3; 22:18; Matthew 1:1; Galatians 3:16), of the
tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10; Luke 3:23, 33; Hebrews 7:14), and of the
house of David (2 Samuel 7:12-16; Matthew 1:1)
• Herod killing the infants (Jeremiah 31:15; Matthew 2:16-18)
• Taken to Egypt (Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:14-15)
• Heralded by the messenger of the Lord (John the Baptist) (Isaiah
40:3-5; Malachi 3:1; Matthew 3:1-3)
• Anointed by the Holy Spirit (Isaiah 11:2; Matthew 3:16-17)
• Preached good news (Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:14-21)
• Performed miracles (Isaiah 35:5-6; Matthew 9:35)
• Cleansed the Temple (Malachi 3:1; Matthew 21:12-13)
• Ministered in Galilee (Isaiah 9:1; Matthew 4:12-16)
• Entered Jerusalem as a king on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9; Matthew
21:4-9)
• First presented Himself as King 173,880 days from the decree to
rebuild Jerusalem (Daniel 9:25; Matthew 21:4-11)
• Rejected by Jews (Psalm 118:22; 1 Peter 2:7)
• Died a humiliating death (Psalm 22; Isaiah 53) involving:
rejection (Isaiah 53:3; John 1:10-11; 7:5,48), betrayal by a friend
(Psalm 41:9; Luke 22:3-4; John 13:18), sold for 30 pieces of silver
(Zechariah 11:12; Matthew 26:14-15), silence before His accusers
(Isaiah 53:7; Matthew 27:12-14), being mocked (Psalm 22: 7-8; Matthew
27:31), beaten (Isaiah 52:14; Matthew 27:26), spit upon (Isaiah 50:6;
Matthew 27:30), piercing His hands and feet (Psalm 22:16; Matthew
27:31), being crucified with thieves (Isaiah 53:12; Matthew 27:38),
praying for His persecutors (Isaiah 53:12; Luke 23:34), piercing His
side (Zechariah 12:10; John 19:34), given gall and vinegar to drink
(Psalm 69:21, Matthew 27:34, Luke 23:36), no broken bones (Psalm 34:20;
John 19:32-36), buried in a rich man's tomb (Isaiah 53:9; Matthew
27:57-60), casting lots for His garments (Psalm 22:18; John 19:23-24).
• Rose from the dead! (Psalm 16:10; Mark 16:6; Acts 2:31)
• Ascended into Heaven (Psalm 68:18; Acts 1:9)
• Sat down at the right hand of God (Psalm 110:1; Hebrews 1:3)

Messianic Prophecy: Part 2. (Read Part 1 First!)

Messianic Prophecy - The Odds of Fulfillment
We can understand the power of Messianic Prophecy when we consider
statistical odds that one person fulfilled all of them. If we study
just seven of the specific prophecies, that were later fulfilled in the
Person of Jesus Christ, we are amazed by the impossibility!

To illustrate, here are some conservative "odds" next to seven
established prophecies.

Messianic
Prophecy                                    
Odds Without God

1.

Jesus would be a descendant of David.

104 (1 in 10,000)

2.

Jesus would be born in Bethlehem.

105 (1 in 100,000)

3.

Jesus would be a miracle worker.

105 (1 in 100,000)

4.

Jesus would present Himself as King riding on a donkey.

106 (1 in 1,000,000)

5.

Jesus would be betrayed by a friend for 30 pieces of silver.

106 (1 in 1,000,000)

6.

Jesus would be crucified.

106 (1 in 1,000,000)

7.

Jesus would first present Himself as King 173,880 days

from the decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild Jerusalem.     

106 (1 in 1,000,000)

Total Probability (without God)

1038 (1 in a 100 billion, billion, billion, billion)

Messianic Prophecy - The Importance!
This Messianic prophecy is unparalleled evidence that sets God's Word,
the Bible, apart from the other "holy books." Take time to study the
Old Testament prophecies and the parallel New Testament fulfillments.
What you discover is potentially life-changing!

==============================================================================
TOPIC: The Rise of Fascism in America
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/89f6b9025a73fd20
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Apr 15 2006 3:20 am
From: FRice@SkepticTank.ORG (Fredric L. Rice)

"al953" <al953@xyz.com> wrote:

> The Rise of Fascism in America

Christian fascism. Christian terrorism.

---
Republicanism: Rape, invasion, torture, kidnapping, genocide, treason.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Muslim Outreach Key for Promoting Understanding, Integration
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c3a21f4438d4d9e
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 11:26 pm
From: "K James"

I hope you learn something new from this.

Islam A Religion of Tolerance, Not Hatred
By: Faraz Waqar

The image of Islam in the modern world is one of intolerance and violence. It is considered a faith followed only by
fanatical bedoins and terrorists and is generally regarded as an outdated concept of life.

However, even a cursory study of Islam is enough to show that the current world view on this faith is far removed from
the truth.

The Holy Quraan, No compulsion in religion

Intolerance cannot be ascribed to a book which altogether excludes com-pulsion from the sphere of religion.

"There is no compulsion in religion." (2:256)

In fact the Holy Quraan is full of statements showing that belief in this or that religion is a person's own concern and
that he is given the choice of adopting one way or the other.

"The truth is from your Lord, so let him who wishes believe and let him who wishes disbelieve" (18: 29).

Thus the commonly held belief that Islam means forced conversion and strict enforcement of religious practices finds no
basis in the main source of Islamic teachings that is the Holy Quraan.

Acceptance of previous religions

As to the view that Islam is a totally different religion as compared to Christianity and Judaism, the religions of
currently the most civilized regions on Earth. The belief that it (Islam) advocates a social setup contrary to the
principles of peace, freedom and justice as are given by Judaism and Christianity, is again far from the truth.

The Holy Quraan is the only religious scripture that requires a belief not only in its own truth but also in the truth
of previous scriptures delivered to prophets of different nations.

"And those who believe in that which was revealed to thee and that which was revealed before thee." (2 4)

Thus the Holy Quraan accepts the truth of the sacred books of the world, and hence it is again and again spoken of as a
book verifying that which is before it. The basis of the relation in which the Holy Quraan stands to other scriptures is
that they are all members of one family, they all have a divine origin. Again it says, "Say: We believe in Allah and in
that which has been revealed to us and in that which was revealed to Abraham and Ishamil and Isaac and Jacob and the
tribes and in that which was given to Moses and Jesus and in that which was given to the prophets from their Lord and we
do not make any distinction between any of them and to Him do we submit." (2:1 76)

The level of universal tolerance of Islam is evident from the above Ayat which shows that Muslims believe in all that
the Lord has revealed to all of his prophets anywhere in the world.

Respect for other religions

Even in the case of religious houses of worship the Holy Quraan specifically mentions that the Muslims are not to harm
any places of worship not only of the Jews and Christians, but even idol worshippers and they are to respect their
beliefs.

"And abuse not those whom they call upon besides Allah, lest exceeding the limits they abuse Allah through ignorance"
(6:108)

The Ayat clearly stops Muslims from even criticising the beliefs of others let alone harming their places of worship.

Fighting non-Muslims only to defend

Muslims have been allowed to fight against others by Allah, but not to compel the unbelievers to accept Islam as is
generally believed, but to establish religious freedom, to stop all persecution and to protect the houses of worship of
an religions.

"Permission to fight is given to those upon whom war is made because they are oppressed, and Allah is well able to
assist them; those who have been expelled from their homes without a just cause except that they say our Lord is Allah."
(22:S9.40)

The Holy Quraan therefore allows fighting only to save a persecuted community, and hence the condition was laid down
that fighting was to be stopped as soon as persecution ceased.

Good social relations with non-Muslims

"This day all good things are made lawful for you. And the food of those who have been given the Book is lawful for you
and your food is lawful for them. And so are the chaste from among the believing women and the chaste from among those
who have been given the Book before you". (5:5)

It is asserted by some that Islam forbids relations of friendship with the followers of other religions. How can a
religion which even permits marriage with people of other faiths forbid friendly relations with them? There can be
nothing closer and more friendly than marriage and if that is permitted between people of two different religions, there
is no reason to suppose that other friendly relations with non-Muslims are forbidden. Again in reference to non-Muslims
the Holy Quraan says, "Show them kindness and deal with them justly; for Allah loves the doers of justice"

"And if any one of the idolaters seek thy protection, protect him till he hears the words of Allah, then convey him to
his place of safety." (9:6)

Equal political and legal status for non-Muslims

"And all people are but a single nation." fl O:I 9)

The above quote from the Holy Quraan is but ample evidence that Islam considers the people of the world as one nation
and equal to each other in every respect.

"Surely Allah commands you to make over trusts to those worthy of them and that when you judge between people, you judge
with justice." (4:58)

The above Ayat shows that Allah wants equal justice for all and not just for Muslims alone.

This is in reference to the functioning of the justice system of an Islamic state. According to the Holy Quraan the
non-Muslims residing in a Muslim society may be judged by the laws given in their own books and scriptures, and they do
not have to abide by Islamic laws which apply to Muslims.

There are other Ayaah in the Holy Quraan which affirm this.

Thus according to the enlightened and liberal principles of Islam, non-Muslims are not only equal in every respect to
Muslims in an Islamic state but they do not even have to abide by laws which apply to Muslim citizens and may follow the
code given in their own scriptures without restrictions.

Action determines Hereafter

"Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Sabeans and the Christians- Whoever believes in Allah and the
Day of Judgment and does good-they shall have no fear nor shall they grieve."

The above Ayat clearly refutes the generally held belief by most illiterate and even some educated Muslims that only
they (the Muslims) shall go to heaven and the people of other faiths shall be punished for their beliefs.

The Holy Quraan clearly states that doing good to others is very important and will determine a person's reward in the
Hereafter. It is the person's actions in this world and the intention behind them which de-termine his or her reward in
the Hereafter.

"And every soul shall be fully paid what it has earned and they shall not be wronged." (3:24)

Thus every person is responsible for his or her own self and the deeds of each person in this world will determine their
reward in the Hereafter and not the faith they professed to belong too. None are dealt with unjustly by Allah, be they
Muslims or non-Muslims.

The tolerance of the Holy Prophet (Sallallaho alai/e wa'alehi wasallam)

preached like his glorious predecessors, the message of universal truth, and announced a common platform for spiritual
amity and religious unity. The offer of cooperation was extended to 'all lovers of truth' and worshippers of Allah.
Unity of Allah is the foundation stone of true religion. The Holy Prophet (SAW) preached Unity dauntlessly against
severe opposi-tion and hostility and along with the 'Unity of Allah. he stressed upon the 'Unity of the human race . He
called mankind 'the family of Allah'.

There are several incidents which testify to the prophets tolerant attitude towards non-Muslims.

Tolerance during preaching of Islam

When the Holy Prophet (SAW) began preaching Islam, he met the strongest opposition from all the tribes and clans of
Makkah. He and his followers were made to suffer all kinds of cruelties and discrimination. Once he was requested to
arouse Allah's anger on the polytheists. but he refused politely and said, I am not an ill wisher; I have been sent only
for mercy.'

Tolerant treatment for prisoners

There is a very genera} misconception that the Holy Prophet (SAW) preached intolerance and spread Islam with the Holy
Quraan in one hand and the sword in the other. The truth is that the Holy Prophet (SAW) never fought against others
except under the conditions mentioned by the Holy Quraan. After the battle of Badr was won by the Muslims, a number of
the polytheists were taken prisoners. Among them were some of the Holy Prophet's (SAW) most ardent opponents. The
prevailing customs were unanimously in favour either of their execution or of reducing them into slavery

But the Holy Prophet (SAW) I treated them in a different manner. He exhorted his followers to entertain the prisoners
hospitably. The treatment to the prisoners was so generous and kind that one of them later said, "Blessing be on the men
of Madinah, they made us ride while they themselves walked afoot; they gave us wheaten bread when there was little of
it, contenting themselves with dates."

When Makkah was conquered, the courtyard was filled with the infidels. Those were the people who had inflicted all sorts
of insults and injuries on the Holy Prophet (SAW) and his companions, and had even conspired to kill him. Now they were
all trembling in fear and expected death. But the Holy Prophet (SAW) addressed them, "O people of Qureysh! you are aware
of what treatment I am going to give you"

They said, "We know you are a generous person, son of a generous member of our family, so we expect a kindly treatment
from you".

The Holy Prophet (SAW) in answer recited the following verse of the Holy Quraan: "Have no fear this day! May Allah
forgive you and He is the most merciful of those who show mercy" (12.92)

With this verse he freed and forgave the people of Makkah in what was an unprecedented act of tolerance and generosity
to be found anywhere in recorded history.

The Muslims today

Today the Muslim nations of the world are in the grip of intolerance and violence. governments religious groups and even
common people support narrow minded views against not only non-Muslim and foreign culture. but also against different
sects that have grown up within Islam.

Learning about other religions and visiting their places of worship is considered highly inappropriate. The clergy
constantly inform the faithful that they are the only one's who shall enter paradise, while all the non-Muslims will
burn in hell without making an attempt to study what Islam preaches about this issue.

Re-Learning Islam

True many Muslims today still retain the qualities of tolerance and generosity towards all people of different faiths,
culture and races. But these are mostly a part of the small educated minorities that exist among the vast illiterate
populations of most Muslim nations of the twentieth century.

To face the challenges of the next century which is definitely going to be a truly global century, Muslims all over the
world not only have to learn to live together, but they also have to learn to live with others in the most amiable and
tolerant ways possible. There is no place for isolationism and narrow mindedness in the global village of the 21st
century

To survive in this bold new world the Muslims need to relearn the mes-sage of Islam and to review their own history,
both of which contain the answers for a successful future

http://www.binoria.org/albineng/june98/islam.html

"TheSecularist" <abc123@geocities.com> wrote in message news:e1nnh1$et1$03$1@news.t-online.com...
>
> We all laughed when "K James" <kjames28@lycos.com> the Mohammedan
> group-spammer hiding behind a Western name wrote in message
> news:X7adnV5nVfL_gaLZnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@sysmatrix.net...
> > Muslim Outreach Key for Promoting Understanding, Integration
>
> If there's a negative perception about Islam, it's because Islam and Muslims
> have created it and perpetuate it themselves. Islam demands respect and
> privileges but gives neither back in return.
>
> Respect has to be earned. And it is not earned by bombings, riots, fatwas,
> beheadings, executions, hate-preaching, anti-Semitism, arrogance, religious
> and cultural intolerance, infidel taxes and any of the other things Islamic
> states and some Muslims are guilty of on a daily basis.
>
> The West is already more than generous enough to Islam, allowing countless
> numbers of mosques to be built, cultural centers and liason groups to be
> formed. Not to mention allowing in millions of Muslim immigrants.
>
> It is Islam and not the West that must change for there to be peaceful
> co-existence!

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 11:33 pm
From: "K James"

"Bill Ireland" <billireland532@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:443f12dc$0$14523$6d36acad@titian.nntpserver.com...
>
> "K James" <kjames28@lycos.com> wrote in message
> news:X7adnV5nVfL_gaLZnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@sysmatrix.net...
> > Muslim Outreach Key for Promoting Understanding, Integration
> >
> > American government, society encourage dialogue among citizens
> >
> > "The [American] Muslim community realizes today they are part of the fabric of
> society, and they have a responsibility
> > and opportunity to bridge the gap between the two cultures," said Khalil
> Jassemm in an April 11 webchat.
> >
> > Jassemm serves as chief executive officer of the nonprofit, nongovernmental
> organization Life for Relief and Development
> > (LIFE), which has provided more than $100 million in humanitarian assistance
> to ten countries around the world.
> >
> > Jassemm said the attacks of September 11, 2001, served as a "wakeup call" for
> American Muslims. The subsequent war in
> > Iraq and War on Terror "forced them to become more proactive, and do more out
> reach in the community, educate, and
> > explain to the general public what Islam is really about," he said.
>
>
> From my experience, I agree.
>
> That's precisely what they're doing, and with good reason.
>
> There are too many fuck heads out there who would like this to be as it was in
> my country back in WW1 when we took people from their homes and throw them into
> camps because they were of German, Austrian, Hungarian or Ukrainian heritage.
> Or later in WW2, when Japanese, Germans or even those of Italian heritage were
> treated like shit.

The ZioNazis (AKA Neocons) are the driving force behind world war III.

> "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history".
> - George Bernard Shaw
>

The Fraud of 9/11
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20060410222017325

>
>
>
> *** Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com ***

==============================================================================
TOPIC: White American gentiles must love dying for Israel
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/4d3416693290a09b
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:32 pm
From: mad2dog@thedogpound.net

what in the hell are you doing linking your posts to a nascar
racing group? just go away unless you want to talk nascar
racing...

maddog
---
make it idiot proof and someone
will create a better idiot...

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Weekly Standard: A Mexican Hugo Chavez?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/e5bf04585723a58b
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:36 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

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

Weekly Standard: A Mexican Hugo Chavez?

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

[The right-wing Weekly Standard flaps its wings at thoughts of a
Lopez Obrador victory in Mexico]

The Weekly Standard - April 17, 2006 edition
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Will a Hugo Chavez-Style Leftist Become President South of the Border?

By Angelo Jaramillo
Mexico City

ON JULY 2, the people of Mexico will elect a president, along with some 2,000 other public officials. Ideally, this exercise will strengthen the democratic process in a country where popular self-government has had a checkered past.

Democracy in Mexico goes back to the constitution of 1857, in which Benito
Juarez and others sowed the seeds of self-rule. Unfortunately, the
revolution of 1910 brought back to the fore a rival tradition, patrimonial
and statist. Many decades would pass before, in the final decade of the
twentieth century, the "perfect dictatorship," as the writer Mario Vargas
Llosa called the Mexican political system, turned out to be weak. When
Vicente Fox--a former Coca-Cola executive running under the banner of the
center-right party, PAN--was elected president in 2000, there were grounds
for optimism. Many commentators announced the dawning of an era of economic
prosperity, political liberty, and social peace.

But once again, the path to democracy has proved uneven. After leading
Mexico for more than five years, Fox, it is clear, is not the statesman his
country needs. He missed a great opportunity. For one thing, he failed to
grasp the meaning of September 11 and how it had changed Americans'
thinking. Partly out of parochialism, he failed to see that new forms of
international crime had outstripped existing provisions for civilized
punishment. His delayed response after the attacks showed a lack of
solidarity with the American people--not to mention the many Mexicans
incinerated in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

More to the point, Fox made no serious effort to eliminate the remnants of
Mexico's ancien regime. Admittedly, the members of the Mexican Congress bear
some blame; they were more interested in petty self-interest than in the
well-being of the nation. Nevertheless, President Fox failed as leader, and
Mexico is in a state of governmental deadlock.

Indeed, there is a wide consensus that Mexico's democracy is at a
crossroads. The next president must confront powerful drug cartels and
organized crime, promote the rule of law, spur the creation of wealth and
jobs, and manage globalization. The coming election is shaping up as a
three-way contest.

The corrupt and oligarchic Revolutionary Institutional party (PRI) which
ruled Mexico for 71 years, has chosen a candidate of the old guard. Robert
Madrazo long flourished as an apparatchik and political leader within the
PRI, and now offers empty rhetoric and an outdated program. Even some of his
supporters have little confidence in him. The recent involvement of the PRI
governor of the state of Puebla in an alleged plot to jail a journalist will
likely further damage Madrazo. Ideologically a chameleon party, the PRI has
no clear stance on the issues. Madrazo's best hope is to be seen as the
least of three evils, an unlikely outcome in light of his party's history.
At this point Madrazo is trailing the other two candidates slightly, and it
would take a miracle to put him into the lead.

The real contenders are Felipe Calderon, of the center-right PAN, and Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City and the candidate of
Mexico's third party, the left-wing Democratic Revolutionary party (PRD).

Calderon's chief handicap is that, at 43, he is relatively unknown in
Mexican politics. He supports free trade, globalization, foreign investment,
and sound monetary and fiscal policies, and makes a point of affirming his
commitment to the rule of law and the protection of human rights. A Harvard
graduate, he seems to understand the importance of Mexico's partnership with
the United States. Having defeated Fox's heir apparent, former Secretary of
Government Santiago Creel, in the primaries, Calderon is not seen as a Fox
protege.

Lopez Obrador could hardly be more different. He came of age politically in
the PRI in the state of Tabasco, where several prominent men of letters were
his mentors. When his reformist wing of the party was sidelined by the
technocrats led by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, he switched allegiances and
helped to found the PRD. Immediately, he became a charismatic leader and
helped his party rise. As mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005, Lopez
Obrador carried out major public works, notably highway improvements, and
laid the groundwork for his presidential bid. However, his tenure as mayor
was marred by acts of corruption by close aides and by a lack of
accountability. Currently he is ahead in most of the polls.

The trouble with Lopez Obrador is his populist outlook, his parochialism,
and his anachronistic ideas, such as complete state control of the
electricity and oil sectors and suspicion of globalization. He is also known
for his indifference to what happens overseas--he speaks no foreign language
and has seldom traveled abroad. Having embraced a facile reaction against
pro-market policies, he is seen in some quarters as the hope of the
underprivileged. But his populist tilt is combined with a casual attitude
toward the rule of law (he has said that his sense of fairness dictates
disrespect for "unjust laws"). Moreover, he has not spelled out what he
calls his "alternative project for the nation." Would he eliminate NAFTA?
Does he seek some alternative to the liberal-democratic order? And what does
he think about Fidel Castro's Cuba and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela?

These questions are timely. The Mexican elections are taking place in the
context of the victories of left-wing parties all over Latin America. The
left is in power in Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay,
and Bolivia. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say two lefts are in power,
for the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez is a far cry from the Chile of Michelle
Bachelet. Of these two lefts, the former is authoritarian, antiliberal, and
in the end antidemocratic, while the latter is committed in principle to a
liberal-democratic order. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in Brazil, seems to be
taking the liberal-democratic path.

Chavez and Castro--sensing that for the first time in years a left-wing
victory may be within reach in Mexico--are lending rhetorical support to
Lopez Obrador. Sure enough, Lopez Obrador displays no commitment to an
independent judiciary, the separation of powers, or accountability in
government. Nor is the truth his forte: He has been lying to the Mexican
people about his religious affiliation, claiming to be Catholic when he is
actually Presbyterian.

As for relations with Washington, a President Lopez Obrador would probably
try to slight the United States by aligning himself with his Latin American
counterparts. There is also some danger that he would contest the results of
a close election, which this promises to be. Lopez Obrador has resorted to
this tactic in the past, and some of his aides have hinted that they do not
trust the electoral authority, which they allege is controlled by the PRI
and the PAN. If Lopez Obrador decides to challenge the outcome in July, he
will be defying the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), a widely respected
autonomous body created under President Salinas to organize elections.

In a nutshell: Lopez Obrador looks like an old-fashioned authoritarian
leftist who will lean towards demagoguery =E0 la Chavez.

The United States should take notice of the potential damage to its
interests if the Mexican elections produce an unfavorable outcome.
Demagoguery from Mexico City would hardly aid a rational resolution of the
immigration problem, for instance. Not only does Washington stand to lose a
strategic ally, but Mexico's fragile democracy could also be put at risk and
the security of the region jeopardized. It is in the interest of the United
States, as well as Mexico, that Mexico continue to develop into a
full-fledged democracy.

Happily, there is at least one small step the Bush administration could take
to facilitate a smooth election: It could publicly express confidence in the
IFE. The stakes in this election--given Mexico's geopolitical importance,
its partnership with the United States, and Chavez and Castro's new regional
ambitions--are too high to ignore.

[Angel Jaramillo is a Mexican journalist and political scientist based in
New York City.]

*
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TOPIC: Latin America: The Return of Populism
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/781fe588b56e647
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:36 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

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Latin America: The Return of Populism

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

The Economist - April 15, 2006 edition
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_GRDNQQR&CFID=2771667&CFTOKEN=99456435

The Return of Populism

A much-touted move to the left masks something more complex: the rebirth of
an influential Latin American political tradition

LATIN AMERICA, it is widely asserted, is moving to the left. The recent
election victories of Evo Morales in Bolivia, of Chile's Michelle Bachelet,
and of Ollanta Humala in the first round of Peru's presidential ballot (see
next story) are seen as forming part of a seamless web of leftism which also
envelops Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva,
Argentina's Nestor Kirchner and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the
front-runner in Mexico's presidential election. But this glib formula lumps
together some strange bedfellows and fails to capture what is really
changing in Latin America.

Some of the region's new or newish presidents are of the moderate,
social-democratic left. They include Lula, Ms Bachelet in Chile, =D3scar
Arias in Costa Rica and Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay. Broadly speaking, they
stand for prudent macroeconomic policies and the retention of the
liberalising reforms of the 1990s, but combined with better social policies.

Mr Chavez, Mr Kirchner, Mr Lopez Obrador and, in Peru, both Mr Humala and
his likely rival in a run-off ballot, Alan Garcia, belong in a second
category. Albeit in different ways and to different degrees, all correspond
to the Latin American tradition of populism. So, in some respects, does Mr
Morales in Bolivia. He is often portrayed as an indigenous leader. Yet as a
young man he left his Andean-Indian village for the coca-growing region of
the Chapare. His politics are those of a mestizo (mixed-race) trade-union
leader.

"Populism" is a slippery, elusive concept. But it is central to
understanding what is happening in the region. One of its many difficulties
is that it is often used as a term of abuse. In many parts of the world,
"populist" is loosely used to describe a politician who seeks popularity
through means disparaged as appealing to the baser instincts of voters.

But populism does have a more precise set of meanings--though these vary
from place to place. In 19th-century Russia, populists were middle-class
intellectuals who embraced peasant communalism as an antidote to Western
liberalism. In France, politicians from Pierre Poujade in the 1950s to
Jean-Marie Le Pen have championed the "little man", especially farmers and
small shopkeepers, against big corporations, unions and foreigners.

In the United States, too, populism had rural roots, in the prairies of the
Midwest. In the 1890s, the People's Party campaigned against what it saw as
the grip of urban cartels over the economy. This cause reached its zenith in
the 1896 presidential election, when the populists backed the campaign of
William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic crusader against the gold standard.

Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana in 1928-32, was another populist. He
campaigned against Standard Oil and other big companies, ramped up taxes and
state social spending, and was accused of dictatorial tendencies for
building a ruthless political machine.

But it is in Latin America where populism has had the greatest and most
enduring influence. As in Russia and the United States, it began as an
attempt to ameliorate the social dislocations caused by capitalism. In Latin
America it became an urban movement. Its heyday was from the 1920s to the
1960s, as industrialisation and the growth of cities got under way in the
region. It was the means by which the urban masses--the middle and working
classes--were brought into the political system.

In Europe, that job was done by social-democratic parties. In Latin America,
where trade unions were weaker, it was accomplished by the classic populist
leaders. They included Getulio Vargas, who ruled Brazil in various guises in
1930-45 and 1950-54; Juan Peron in Argentina (pictured above) and his second
wife, Eva Duarte; and Victor Paz Estenssoro, the leader of Bolivia's
national revolution of 1952. They differed from socialists or conservatives
in forging multi-class alliances.

Typically, their leadership was charismatic. They were great orators or, if
you prefer, demagogues ("Give me a balcony and I will become president,"
said Jose Maria Velasco, Ecuador's most prominent populist, who was five
times elected president and four times overthrown by the army). Like Huey
Long, Vargas and Peron used the new instrument of radio to reach the masses.
Mr Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution" relies heavily on his skills as a
communicator, exercised every Sunday in his four-hour television programme.

Some of the populists, such as Victor Ra=FAl Haya de la Torre, the founder
of Peru's APRA party, and William Jennings Bryan, relied on religious
imagery or techniques. ("You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold,"
Bryan preached.) A recent biography of Mr Chavez remarks on his similarity
to a televangelist.

The populist leaders sought a direct bond with their mass following. They
led personal movements rather than well-organised parties. Argentina's
dominant political organisation bears Peron's name. Take Mr Chavez out of
the "Bolivarian revolution" and there would be nothing left. Contrast that
with Ms Bachelet, who presides over a stable four-party coalition, or Lula,
whose Workers' Party has up to 800,000 dues-paying members.

The populists saw elections as the route to power, and pushed successfully
to expand the franchise. But they also relied on mass mobilisation--on
getting their followers out into the streets. They were often less than
democratic in their exercise of power: they blurred the distinction between
leader, party, government and state. Peron, for example, packed the
judiciary, put his own people in charge of trade unions, and rigged his
re-election in 1950. Mr Chavez used a constituent assembly to gain control
of all the institutions of state. Both Mr Morales and Mr Humala have
promised similar assemblies.

Not coincidentally, many of the populists have been military officers. That
goes for Vargas, Peron and Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico's president from 1934 to
1940, who nationalised foreign oil companies and handed land to peasants. Mr
Chavez and Mr Humala are retired lieutenant-colonels. Part of their appeal
is that of the military caudillo, or strongman, who promises to deliver
justice for the "people" by firm measures against the "exploiters". Some
scholars distinguish between military populists and civilians such as Haya
de la Torre and Paz Estenssoro, whom they see as "national revolutionaries"
closer to social democracy.

But there are many common threads. One is nationalism. The populists
championed national culture against foreign influences. They harked back to
forgotten figures from their country's past. In many respects, they were
nation-builders.

While their preaching was often anti-capitalist, they made deals with some
capitalists. They rallied their followers against two rhetorical enemies:
the "oligarchy" of rural landlords and foreign "imperialists". They
supported industry and a bigger role for the state in the economy, and they
granted social benefits to workers. They often paid for this by printing
money.

Though populists were not alone in favouring inflationary finance, they were
particularly identified with it. Some commentary on populism has emphasised
this aspect. In their book "The Macroeconomics of Populism", Rudiger
Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards characterise "economic populism" as
involving a dash for growth and income redistribution while ignoring
inflation, deficit finance and other risks.

Such policies were pursued not just by populists of the past, but by Mr
Garcia, Peru's president in 1985-90. In a milder form, they are being
followed by Mr Kirchner, Argentina's Peronist president. Mr Chavez has been
rescued from deficit financing only by Venezuela's oil windfall.

Populist economics was adopted, too, by Salvador Allende, Chile's Socialist
president of 1970-73, and Nicaragua's Sandinistas. That has led many
observers to use "populist" and "leftist" interchangeably--a mistake that
led foreign investors to lose money when they panicked unduly when Lula won
Brazil's election in 2002.

In fact, there is nothing inherently left-wing about populism. Some populist
leaders were closer to fascism: Peron lived as an exile in Franco's Spain
for 18 years. Many favoured corporatism--the organisation of society by
functional groups, rather than the individual rights and pluralism of
liberal democracy.

Other writers have seen populism as a technique of political leadership more
than an ideology. They have applied the term to such free-market
conservatives as Peru's Alberto Fujimori and Argentina's Carlos Menem who,
in different ways, sidestepped interest-groups and made direct appeals to
the masses. It is not clear whether Mr Humala, if elected in a run-off,
would fall into this category--or try to mimic Mr Chavez.

Populism is full of contradictions. It is above all anti-elitist, but
creates new elites. It claims to favour ordinary people against oligarchs.
But as Messrs Dornbusch and Edwards pointed out, "at the end of every
populist experiment real wages are lower than they were at the beginning."
Populism brought mass politics to Latin America, but its relationship to
democracy is ambivalent. Populists crusade against corruption, but often
engender more.

In the 1960s, populism seemed to fade away in Latin America, squeezed by
Marxism, Christian democracy and military dictatorship. Its current revival
shows that it is deeply rooted in the region's political culture. But it
also involves some new elements. The new crop of populist leaders rely
partly on the politics of ethnic identity: Mr Chavez and Mr Humala are both
mestizos. Their coalitions are based on the poor, both urban and rural, and
those labouring in the informal economy. They champion those discomfited by
globalisation rather than industrialisation.

One big reason for populism's persistence is the extreme inequality in the
region. That reduces the appeal of incremental reform and increases that of
messianic leaders who promise a new world. Yet populism has done little to
reduce income inequality.

A second driver of populism has been Latin America's wealth of natural
resources. Many Latin Americans believe that their countries are rich,
whereas in truth they are not. Populists blame poverty on corruption, on a
grasping oligarchy or, nowadays, on multinational oil or mining companies.
That often plays well at the ballot box. But it is a misdiagnosis. Countries
develop through a mixture of the right policies and the right institutions.
Whatever their past achievements, the populists are leading Latin America
down a blind alley.

*
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: Venez Detains ex-Cop in Journalist Slaying
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/bd9905e98921fc2f
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:36 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

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Venez Detains ex-Cop in Journalist Slaying

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

Associated Press - April 14, 2006
http://www.highbeam.com/browse/News-International+News-AP+Worldstream

Venezuela Detains Ex-Police Officer in News Photographer's Slaying

By Natalie Obiko Pearson

Venezuelan authorities have detained a former police officer they say is the
prime suspect in the killing of a newspaper photographer gunned down on his
way to cover an anti-crime demonstration.

Meanwhile in two kidnapping-and-killing cases, officials said they have
detained a Caracas police officer and were on the lookout for a second
officer and a military colonel.

The developments underscore concerns heard during recent demonstrations that
paralyzed the Venezuelan capital, when angry protesters accused police and
other authorities of long committing serious crimes with impunity and the
government of failing to confront the problem.

Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez announced Thursday the capture of
33-year-old Boris Lenis Blanco an ex-policeman dismissed last October from a
Caracas force for "lack of integrity" who is suspected of shooting and
killing photographer Jorge Aguirre.

Aguirre, a photojournalist for the Caracas daily El Mundo, was shot last
week by an assailant on a motorcycle wearing dark, police uniform-like
clothing. Aguirre was attacked while on his way to cover an anti-crime
protest at a local university.

Authorities have not identified a motive or found the murder weapon. But
they believe Blanco is responsible after finding shells during the raid that
match shells found at the crime scene, as well as bulletproof vests,
firearms, ammunition and police gear, Rodriguez said.

Aguirre managed to take a picture of his killer fleeing on a motorcycle.
Rodriguez said investigators traced the vehicle back to a metropolitan
police officer, who led them to Blanco.

Prosecutors intend to charge both men in the killing, Rodriguez said.

Aguirre's slaying came amid angry demonstrations in Caracas demanding a
crackdown on crime that were prompted by a spate of high-profile murders,
including the kidnappings and killings of three Canadian-Venezuelan brothers
and an Italian-born businessman, Filippo Sindoni.

Marcos Chavez, chief of the judicial police, said Thursday that a Caracas
police officer, Javier Rafael Pineda Chirinos, was arrested in connection
with the slayings of the three Faddoul brothers John, 17; Kevin, 13; and
Jason, 12.

A group of assailants apparently kidnapped the three brothers and their
driver at a bogus police checkpoint in late February. Witnesses saw men
dressed in police uniforms stop the car and later dismantle the roadside
checkpoint after the victims disappeared.

The victims' bodies were discovered last week shot in the neck and head.

Chavez said investigators are looking for another suspect, also a
metropolitan police officer.

Authorities still have not revealed a motive for the crime, though at least
10 suspects are in custody including those responsible for holding the
victims' hostage and others for killing them. It was not clear to what
extent Pineda Chirinos is believed to have been involved.

Meanwhile, authorities are searching for a former National Guard colonel who
is the lead suspect in the Sindoni case, said Chavez.

The retired officer, Juan Carlos Saavedra, is suspected of shooting and
killing the 74-year-old tycoon, originally from Sicily, who owned a pasta
company and a regional TV station in Venezuela.

Sindoni was kidnapped March 28 by men dressed as police who stopped his car.
His body was found the next day with a bullet wound in the head.

Authorities have already arrested a police officer, a former police officer
and four others, including a Portuguese man and a Colombian, in connection
with Sindoni's killing.

Violent robberies, kidnappings and murders are frequent in Venezuela. There
were 9,402 homicides reported in 2005, down slightly from 2004, according to
government statistics.

*
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: US Continues Works on World's Biggest Embassy in Baghdad
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/e73d7a0c67205c14
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:36 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

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US Continues Works on World's Biggest Embassy in Baghdad

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

AP - Apr 14, 2006
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_NEW_EMBASSY?SITE=MABED&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

U.S. building massive embassy in Baghdad

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris
River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican
City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force,
self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of
Iraq's turbulent future.

The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in
Rome.

"We can't talk about it. Security reasons," Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at
the current embassy, said when asked for information about the project.

A British tabloid even told readers the location was being kept secret -
news that would surprise Baghdadis who for months have watched the forest of
construction cranes at work across the winding Tigris, at the very center of
their city and within easy mortar range of anti-U.S. forces in the capital,
though fewer explode there these days.

The embassy complex - 21 buildings on 104 acres, according to a U.S. Senate
Foreign Relations Committee report - is taking shape on riverside parkland
in the fortified "Green Zone," just east of al-Samoud, a former palace of
Saddam Hussein's, and across the road from the building where the
ex-dictator is now on trial.

The Republican Palace, where U.S. Embassy functions are temporarily housed
in cubicles among the chandelier-hung rooms, is less than a mile away in the
4-square-mile zone, an enclave of American and Iraqi government offices and
lodgings ringed by miles of concrete barriers.

The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy, almost half listed as
security, are far more numerous than at any other U.S. mission worldwide.
They rarely venture out into the "Red Zone," that is, violence-torn Iraq.

This huge American contingent at the center of power has drawn criticism.
"The presence of a massive U.S. embassy - by far the largest in the world -
co-located in the Green Zone with the Iraqi government is seen by Iraqis as
an indication of who actually exercises power in their country," the
International Crisis Group, a European-based research group, said in one of
its periodic reports on Iraq.

State Department spokesman Justin Higgins defended the size of the embassy,
old and new, saying it's indicative of the work facing the United States
here.

"It's somewhat self-evident that there's going to be a fairly sizable
commitment to Iraq by the U.S. government in all forms for several years,"
he said in Washington.

Higgins noted that large numbers of non-diplomats work at the mission -
hundreds of military personnel and dozens of FBI agents, for example, along
with representatives of the Agriculture, Commerce and other U.S. federal
departments.

They sleep in hundreds of trailers or "containerized" quarters scattered
around the Green Zone. But next year embassy staff will move into six
apartment buildings in the new complex, which has been under construction
since mid-2005 with a target completion date of June 2007.

Iraq's interim government transferred the land to U.S. ownership in October
2004, under an agreement whose terms were not disclosed.

"Embassy Baghdad" will dwarf new U.S. embassies elsewhere, projects that
typically cover 10 acres. The embassy's 104 acres is six times larger than
the United Nations compound in New York, and two-thirds the acreage of
Washington's National Mall.

Original cost estimates ranged over $1 billion, but Congress appropriated
only $592 million in the emergency Iraq budget adopted last year. Most has
gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the rest
awarded to six contractors working on the project's "classified" portion -
the actual embassy offices.

Higgins declined to identify those builders, citing security reasons, but
said five were American companies.

The designs aren't publicly available, but the Senate report makes clear it
will be a self-sufficient and "hardened" domain, to function in the midst of
Baghdad power outages, water shortages and continuing turmoil.

It will have its own water wells, electricity plant and
wastewaster-treatment facility, "systems to allow 100 percent independence
from city utilities," says the report, the most authoritative open source on
the embassy plans.

Besides two major diplomatic office buildings, homes for the ambassador and
his deputy, and the apartment buildings for staff, the compound will offer a
swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in
a recreation building.

Security, overseen by U.S. Marines, will be extraordinary: setbacks and
perimeter no-go areas that will be especially deep, structures reinforced to
2.5-times the standard, and five high-security entrances, plus an emergency
entrance-exit, the Senate report says.

Higgins said the work, under way on all parts of the project, is more than
one-third complete.

[Associated Press news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to
this report.]

© 2006 The Associated Press.

*
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==============================================================================
TOPIC: Marines Suffer 2 Dead, 22 Wounded in Iraq
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/919ae30da2472f8b
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:36 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

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Marines Suffer 2 Dead, 22 Wounded in Iraq

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

AP - Apr 14, 2006
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=ILEDW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Marines Suffer 2 Dead, 22 Wounded in Iraq

By VANESSA ARRINGTON
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Two U.S. Marines were killed and 22 wounded - two of
them critically - in fighting in western Iraq, the U.S. military said
Saturday. It was the biggest number of American casualties reported from a
single engagement in weeks.

A U.S. statement said the casualties were suffered Thursday as a result of
"enemy action" in Anbar province but gave no specific location or details of
the fighting.

One Marine was killed "at the scene of the attack," the statement said.
Another Marine died at a medical facility in Taqqadum, it added.

Eight of the wounded were flown to the main U.S. hospital in Balad. Two were
listed in critical condition and six were reported as stable, the statement
said. The others were taken to a U.S. clinic at Camp Fallujah, where four
were hospitalized for observation.

"Our hearts go out to the families of the dead and wounded Marines," said
Marine spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Salas. "Our wounded Marines are receiving
the best care available, and we look forward to their speedy recovery."

U.S. casualties have begun to rise this month following a sharp drop in
March, which saw the lowest number of American dead in Iraq since February
2004. Last month, 31 U.S. service members died in Iraq, but fatalities in
April have already passed 40.

Meanwhile, dozens of Iraqi police remained missing and nine were dead after
insurgents ambushed their convoy Thursday evening as they left a U.S. base
where they had picked up new vehicles, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.

Brig. Gen. Abbas Maadal complained that the Americans refused to allow the
police to spend the night at the base, just north of the capital. But U.S.
spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said no such request had been made and that
the Iraqis had not asked for American troops to guard the convoy.

The attack, the deadliest against police here in months, began about 7:30
p.m. Thursday as a convoy of 109 police was traveling through a sparsely
populated area near the Taji base heading back to Najaf, 100 miles to the
south, Maadal said.

Police heard cries of "Allahu akbar," or God is great, and "long live jihad"
broadcast by loudspeaker from a nearby mosque, Maadal said. Suddenly
insurgents, including some women, opened fire and triggered a roadside bomb.

Maadal said 37 policemen returned to Najaf late Friday and about 20 more
were en route. About 40 remained unaccounted for. At least nine policemen
were killed and three of the 12 vehicles were heavily damaged, Johnson said.
One insurgent was wounded and five were arrested, he added.

Although no U.S. troops were with the Iraqi convoy when it came under
attack, Johnson said American forces responded with helicopter gunships and
ground troops.

"Once the attack occurred we did respond," he said. "We helped engage and
brought this situation under control."

A U.S. patrol had passed along the same route shortly before the Iraqis and
called for help when they heard the firing, Johnson said.

It was unclear why the insurgents allowed the Americans to pass by without
attacking them. In recent months, insurgents have shifted their attacks to
Iraqi forces, which have less firepower than the Americans.

The overwhelming majority of police in Najaf are Shiites, and the area where
the attack occurred is populated mostly by Sunnis.

Sectarian violence has worsened in Iraq since the Feb. 22 bombing of a
Shiite shrine in Samarra. At least 11 people were killed Friday, including
four who died in a pair of roadside bombings outside two Sunni mosques in
Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said.

One civilian died when a suicide bomber targeted a British patrol south of
Basra, wounding four Britons, police and British authorities said. Two
brothers were also gunned down in front of their elderly mother, who was
wounded when assailants stormed into their home in a mostly Shiite area of
Baghdad, police said.

In the northern city of Mosul, at least seven people were wounded in another
suicide car bomb attack on a police station, police said. Police saw the
vehicle coming and fired at the driver, preventing him from entering the
compound, an official said.

The others died in bombings and a shooting in Baghdad and Mosul, police
said.

Delays in forming a new national unity government four months after
parliament elections has sharpened sectarian divisions.

Sunni and Kurdish opposition to the Shiite choice of Prime Minister Ibrahim
al-Jaafari for another term has blocked progress toward a new government.

Leaders of the Shiite alliance, the dominant bloc in the legislature, said
they would attend Monday's parliament session, called to break the political
logjam. Shiite politicians had earlier suggested they would boycott the
session unless the dispute over al-Jaafari as well as other political posts
that require parliamentary approval were resolved first.

But Shiite leaders said Friday they would attend even if no agreement had
been reached on al-Jaafari or the other posts.

"We will meet Saturday and Sunday to discuss the matters of the prime
minister nomination and the distribution of key posts," said Sabah al-Saedi,
a Shiite politician. "We are going to attend Monday, regardless of what
happens at the internal meetings."

Ridha Jawad Taqi, a leading figure of the biggest Shiite party, also said
the alliance plans to attend Monday's meeting.

In an interview Friday with a British television station, al-Jaafari
repeated that he would not step down.

"I was the legitimate and democratic choice," he told Britain's Channel 4
News. "I wouldn't have accepted the responsibility if I thought it was
against the will of the people. I don't see how I could repay my people's
faith in me by letting them down."

Although the parliament session may produce no deals at all, it is seen as a
sign that the parties are committed to forming a unity government.
Boycotting it would make the Shiites appear obstructionists.

Voters chose the 275-member assembly on Dec. 15, but the legislature met
briefly only once last month. The lack of progress has frustrated Iraqis,
especially as steady violence - much of it sectarian - continues to claim
hundreds of lives and threatens to push the country into a large-scale civil
war.

© 2006 The Associated Press.

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==============================================================================
TOPIC: Baquba mosque bombings kill 4
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/294b7df81b40749d
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:37 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

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Baquba mosque bombings kill 4

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

CNN - Apr 14, 2006
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/04/14/iraq.main/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Baquba mosque bombings kill 4

Toll in Iraq mortar attack now 2 Marines dead, 22 wounded

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Two homemade bombs exploded Friday at two Sunni
mosques in Baquba, 37 miles (60 kilometers) north of Baghdad, killing four
people and wounding six others, police said.

The attacks occurred around 2 p.m. after Friday prayers, as worshippers were
leaving, police said.

On Thursday night, bombers attacked the Imam al Sharif Al Radhey shrine, a
Shiite mosque in the city, detonating explosives placed around the dome,
police said.

Shiite pilgrims frequently visit the shrine. It's unclear if there were any
casualties.

A day earlier, a car bomb killed at least 26 people in a marketplace near a
mosque in Huwaider, a Shiite town about 5 miles (8 kilometers) north of
Baquba.

One week ago, a massive suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in Baghdad killed
81 people and wounded 160.

Hostilities between Shiites and Sunnis have escalated since the February 22
bombing of Al-Askariya Mosque, a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra.

As the attacks continue, Iraqis are fleeing their homes.

In the past two weeks alone, the number of Iraqis leaving for safer parts of
the country has more than doubled to 65,000, the Iraqi Ministry of
Displacement and Migration said Thursday.

A ministry spokesman said there were 30,000 internal refugees estimated on
March 30. The ministry put the number of families on the move at 10,991.

Most of the refugees are women and children, said an Iraq Red Crescent
Society official.

"We are very concerned about communicable diseases in the camps that have
formed, like cholera and typhoid," the official said. "This exponential
increase of refugees is quite disturbing."

The refugee situation and bloodshed come amid a deadlock by Iraqi leaders
over the formation of a national unity government, a step the United States
considers necessary before its troops can begin to pull out. Marines in
critical condition

A mortar attack by insurgents this week on a group of Marines building an
observation post northeast of Falluja has left two Marines dead and 22
others wounded, according to a statement issued by the U.S. military.

The military earlier had reported 15 Marines had been wounded in the attack.

Members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were building an observation
post for the Iraq army Thursday about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northeast of
Falluja -- in the sprawling, Sunni-dominated Anbar province west of Baghdad
- -- when they were attacked by insurgents, the military said.

The dead Marines weren't identified, pending notification of their families.
One was assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters Group,
the other to Regimental Combat Team 5, the statement said.

Two Marines were in critical condition after being evacuated to a medical
facility in Balad, where six others were listed in stable condition, the
statement said.

Six Marines were treated at a medical facility at Camp Falluja and returned
to duty; four others were being held there for observation. Four other
Marines received minor wounds, the statement said.

All of the wounded were assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5.

"Our hearts go out to the families of the dead and wounded Marines," said
Lt. Col. Bryan Salas, a Marine spokesman. "Our wounded Marines are receiving
the best care available, and we look forward to their speedy recovery." Bush
backs Rumsfeld

Amid calls by several retired generals for Donald Rumsfeld to step down as
defense secretary, U.S. President Bush on Friday issued a statement
reiterating his "full support and deepest appreciation" of Rumsfeld.

The president said he had spoken earlier in the day with Rumsfeld, who has
held the post since Bush took office in 2001.

"I reiterated my strong support for his leadership during this historic and
challenging time for our nation," he said in a written statement.

Six retired generals, including three who commanded troops in Iraq under
Rumsfeld's leadership, have publicly stated their criticism of Rumsfeld's
leadership and called for his resignation. (Full story) Other developments

# At least six Iraqi policemen are dead and dozens missing after insurgents
ambushed their convoy north of Baghdad on Thursday night, police said,
according to The Associated Press.

# Eleven employees of a construction company in the southern city of Basra
were kidnapped Thursday, then killed, a police official said Friday. Near
the city, a roadside bomb killed two Iraqis and wounded four British
soldiers, a British military spokesman said.

CNN's Sadik Auday contributed to this report.

Copyright 2006 CNN.

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TOPIC: Palestinians to get Russian aid
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/3d701135de276b7d
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 10:37 pm
From: NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org

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Palestinians to get Russian aid

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

BBC News - Apr 15, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4911310.stm

Palestinians to get Russian aid

Russia has said it will grant the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority urgent
financial aid, in opposition to the policy of the EU and the US.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the pledge to authority President
Mahmoud Abbas in a telephone call, Moscow said.

The US and EU cut off aid after Hamas took power on 30 March because the
militant group refused to renounce violence or recognise Israel.

Iran on Friday urged the Muslim world to help fund the authority.

A Russian foreign ministry statement said: "Mahmoud Abbas stated his high
appreciation of Russia's intent, confirmed by Sergei Lavrov, to grant the
Palestinian Authority an urgent financial aid in the nearest future."

Mr Lavrov said on Tuesday withholding aid to the Palestinians was a mistake.

"Hamas should... recognise Israel and sit down at the negotiating table. But
for that it's necessary to work with them," Mr Lavrov said.

The US Treasury this week further tightened the screws on Palestinian cash
by banning American nationals from doing business with the Hamas-led
authority.

However, the US is making exceptions for government entities under the
direct control of Mr Abbas, whose Fatah movement is a rival of Hamas.

Palestinian PM Ismail Haniya, of Hamas, vowed on Friday that the cuts in
funds would not weaken the people's resolve.

'Oil and olives'

In Tehran, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, opened a
three-day forum on Palestinian solidarity by calling on the Muslim world to
help the Palestinian people and their Hamas-led government.

Ayatollah Khamenei said all Muslims had a duty to help and should not remain
indifferent to tyranny.

Both he and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched strong attacks on the
West.

Ayatollah Khamenei said its liberal democracy was like a poison.

He said global imperialism led by the US president openly threatened the
Muslim world by talking about launching a crusade against it

President Ahmadinejad widened the attack to include Israel, which he said
was "a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm".

The president provoked an international outcry last October when he cast
doubts on the Holocaust and said Israel should be "wiped off the map".

On Friday he said there were no doubts about the holocaust suffered by the
Palestinian people in the past 60 years and that the Palestinians should not
pay the price for what the West said were crimes against Jews.

"Believe that Palestine will be freed soon," he said.

Mr Haniya said on Friday the suspension of Western aid to the Palestinians
would never defeat the Hamas-led administration.

He said the West would not succeed in isolating the government because it
had the full support of Palestinians.

"We will eat cooking oil and olives," he said.

Mr Haniya was addressing Friday prayers in Gaza before the start of a series
of rallies aimed at demonstrating support for the Hamas-led administration.

The militant group's political leader in exile, Khaled Meshaal, is attending
the Tehran conference to gain funding pledges.

Iran has said it will fund the Hamas-led government but so far no figures
have been publicly pledged and no concrete deals have yet been announced at
the conference.

© BBC MMVI

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TOPIC: BUSH'S GENOCIDE WILL EXCEED THAT OF HITLER
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/40956d13df86d870
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Fri, Apr 14 2006 8:39 pm
From: "Al Nakba"

Take an enema, your head's full of shi'ite, ya kalb!

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