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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (434057)	7/26/2003 3:37:08 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769668

ROTFLOL...... Dean responded to the passing of these martyrs to American jingoism by angrily announcing that the ends don't justify the means. This is a war we're talking about. Why don't the ends justify the means? (Note to the Democrats: Just because you defended Bill Clinton doesn't mean you have to defend every government official who is reliably reported to be a rapist.) #reply-19149783

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (434057)	7/26/2003 3:41:10 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769668

Proof or pornography? Release of grisly Hussein photos assailed Posted on Friday, July 25 @ 10:25:13 EDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Doug Saunders, Toronto Globe and Mail Are they proof, or are they pornography? The images of Saddam Hussein's infamous sons, their faces bloodied and mutilated by the torrent of U.S. bullets and rockets that ended their lives on Tuesday, were released by the White House yesterday and transmitted around the world, over and over again, by eager news media. While U.S. President George W. Bush and other Washington officials defended the release of the photos yesterday as a necessary proof of success and resolve, others saw it as distasteful gloating, and some pointed out that it was exactly the sort of lurid display that the White House had condemned in the recent past. When Arabic television networks broadcast photos of dead U.S. soldiers during the Iraq war this year, they were strongly criticized by the White House for overstepping the bounds of decency and violating human rights. Despite the controversy, media outlets around the world did not hesitate to make use of the photos, which showed the head and shoulders of Uday and Qusay Hussein, their faces bloody, bruised, bloated and twisted. Uday appears to have suffered a wound through the mouth, which some U.S. officials said may have been self-inflicted. CNN showed the images for hours, drawing criticism from some journalists, as did the Arabic satellite stations Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. For many Arabs, the photos of the brothers' heads carry a strong historical resonance. In the year 680, the Muslim leader Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Mohammed, was slaughtered along with his followers by rivals in the city of Karbala, in current Iraq. His severed head was taken to Damascus and displayed in public, leading to a backlash in which Hussein became a martyr and the Shia branch of Islam was born. "In those days, before news photos," the Islamic historian Frederick M. Denny writes, "displaying the enemies' heads was a common way of publicizing something like the death of a movement." U.S. officials yesterday seemed eager to renew this tradition. "I honestly believe that these two are particularly bad characters," U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. "And that it's important for the Iraqi people to see them, to know they're gone, to know they're dead, and to know they're not coming back." Mr. Bush announced: "Now the Iraqi people have seen clearly the intent of the American people to ensure that they are free." And Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, took full advantage of the symbolic value of the photos in a briefing yesterday. "It will certainly help convince people of two things: that these two people are dead, but the more important point is that . . . the Baathists are finished. Saddam and his henchmen are finished. They're not coming back." Some Arab observers criticized this as hypocritical. "When Iraq broadcast photos of dead American soldiers, the U.S. considered that against human rights," Jordanian political analyst Sahar al-Qassem told the Associated Press. "So, why are they violating that now by showing such inhumane pictures?" Some Iraqis, however, said that the display of the photos was not aggressive enough. "Death is not enough. They should have been hung up on poles in a square in Baghdad so all Iraqis could see them. Then they should have died as people ate them alive," Baghdad businessman Khalil Ali told Reuters. And it did not appear that the photos had weakened the resolve of Iraqi guerrillas loyal to deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. Yesterday, three U.S. soldiers, part of the division that had killed the sons, were slain in an ambush. Three members of Mr. Hussein's Fedayeen militia later appeared on Al-Jazeera to take responsibility for the attack. "We want to say to the occupation forces: They said last night that killing Uday and Qusay will diminish [resistance] attacks, but we want to say to them that their death will increase attacks against them," one of three masked men read from a statement. TV news outlets in the United States splashed the images across their screens with a complete lack of reserve. During the Iraq war, many explicit images were kept off the screen, but yesterday the photos were shown almost non-stop. This drew some criticism from within the U.S. media. "I don't know that the networks need to play along to this degree," Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz said. "Obviously you would show those disturbing photos of two dead people for at least a few seconds — it's a legitimate part of the story — but already I am seeing this used as wallpaper, up for minutes at a time . . . I wonder if there's not a little exploitation going on, on the media's part as well." CNN executives announced in a statement yesterday that they had displayed the photos "because of the important role these photos play in telling this story . . . In order to fully tell this story and better understand and gauge Iraqi reaction, we believe it is appropriate to show these photos." Reprinted from The Toronto Globe And Mail: globeandmail.ca

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (434057)	7/26/2003 3:41:54 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769668

Bush administration censors 28 pages on Saudi Arabia's role from 9/11 report Posted on Friday, July 25 @ 10:24:30 EDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Agence France-Presse THE US Congress probe into the September 11 attacks may have prompted more questions than it answered when 28 pages on a possible role by Saudi Arabia were blacked out by the Bush administration. The revelation has sparked the indignation of the victims' families. For reasons of national security, the White House blacked out the entire section of the report entitled "Finding, discussion and narrative regarding certain sensitive national security matters." "In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people," Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan said in a statement. "Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages." AFP was able to confirm through various sources close to the investigation that the top-secret pages are for the most part about the Saudi policy of supporting fundamentalism in the absence of repressing al-Qaeda's terror network despite US alerts to Riyadh since 1996. The report confirms press revelations suggesting that Omar al-Bayoumi, an associate of two of the hijackers, could have been a Saudi government agent. The report details his ties with September 11 suicide attackers Khaled al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. In January 2000, al-Bayoumi entered the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and upon leaving, he headed directly to a restaurant where he met with the two future attackers, a meeting one FBI agent said "may not have been accidental." The two men had just arrived from Malaysia, where they had participated in a meeting with al-Qaeda officials under surveillance of Malaysian officials at the behest of the CIA. Al-Bayoumi then helped the men rent an apartment in San Diego, paying the first month's rent and the security deposit. The news weekly US News and World Report reported in November that the owner of the apartment was an FBI informant, a leader of the Muslim community in San Diego, Abdussatar Shaikh, 68. The FBI refused to allow the commission to question him, according to the report. The congressional report said: "(Since September 11) the FBI has learned that al-Bayoumi has connections to terrorist elements." "Despite the fact that he was a student, al-Bayoumi had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia. "For example, an FBI source identified al-Bayoumi as the person who delivered 400,000 dollars from Saudi Arabia for the Kurdish mosque in San Diego. "One of the FBI's best sources in San Diego informed the FBI that he thought that al-Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power." "The report shows the significant role played by Saudi government agents in the preparations (for the attacks) which benefited from the royal financial generosity," said Jean-Charles Brisard, attorney for the victim's families. "It would be inconceivable for the US government to refuse the victims' families the right to the whole and complete truth," he said. Many in Congress feel sure that in the end, the blacked-out part of the report will be made public. From Agence France-Presse: news.com.au

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (434057)	7/26/2003 3:42:40 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769668

'Watching BushCo crumble' Posted on Friday, July 25 @ 10:23:15 EDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ratings slipping, economy tanking, lies spiraling, credibility shot. Try not to cheer By Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle This is what happens when it's all a house of cards. This is what happens when you build your entire presidency on an intricate network of aww-shucks glibness and bad hair and cronyism and corporate fellatio and warmongering and sham enemies and economy-gutting policies and endless blank-eyed smirks that tell the world, every single day, whelp, sure 'nuff, the U.S. is full of it. Shrub's ratings have dropped below 50 percent for the first (and probably not the last) time since they surged hugely right after 9/11 and he was hoisted in front of a wary America and puffed out his chest and pretended like he could find Afghanistan on a map and promised he would bomb every damn country on the planet that didn't have a McDonald's or an Exxon or a secret U.S. chemical-weapons deal. Shrub's numbers are down. The nation is catching on. The armor of money and power is cracking. The smirk is waning. Dick's defibrillator is running on fumes. And Karl Rove, Shrub's master strategist, is scrambling, rushing down hallways, sweating hard, mapping out lib-killer tactics and frantically redirecting blame (CIA! FBI! The NSA!) as nine Demo candidates have a field day knocking all of Shrub's shortcomings out of the ideological park. Maybe it's the regular slew of lies. You know the ones: "proof" of uranium purchases, "proof" of Iraqi nuke facilities, "proof" of WMDs, poison gas, plus two quick and "painless" wars, a robust economy, women's rights, gay rights, America proud and strong and respected the world over, a nice shiny oil-sucking SUV for every flag-waving misguided Fox News-drugged American. Ha. Funny how the BS can wear you down. Funny how it can make you feel like someone's been piling huge rocks on our collective chest for the past three years and stomping on them with ugly polished right-wing loafers until we can hardly breathe. And all you have to do is ask any schoolteacher or grandparent or health-care worker or conscious sensual attuned soulful organism anywhere, and the answer is unavoidable: The nation is gasping for air. Cities are desperate, basic services are being slashed, schools are broke, the environment's molested, the GOP has promised a ridiculous array of cuts and dedicated billions they can't possibly deliver in light of inane tax cuts and the biggest deficit in U.S. history. Hey, how's your portfolio doing? Maybe the slip, the change in national timbre, is due to all the recently uncovered and aforementioned misfirings of the GOP machine, that frighteningly rich and seemingly omnipotent team of multibillionaire CEO Bushites who bought the presidency in the first place and who have steered the conservative agenda so brilliantly, so ruthlessly to this point. Until recently, they've managed to stay viciously on message, trashed every liberal cause, demonized every social program, overhyped every fear, desiccated the poor and the elderly and gays and women and called it all Christian largesse, compassionate conservatism, which of course we all now know means, whoops sorry about all the unemployment and the raped environment and the dead Iraqi children. Or maybe it's all those U.S. soldiers, more dying every single day, outright brutal guerrilla warfare with no end in sight, tens of thousands of American soldiers stuck in miserable and war-torn Iraq for years to come, proving that BushCo's policy of perpetual unilateral war in the name of a sovereignty we no longer have is just plain dangerous, if not downright immoral. Iran? North Korea? Liberia? Saudi Arabia? Wanna make your own list? Maybe it's that feeling that we've reached saturation, that the nation can't really absorb any more misinformation and misdirection and snide switcheroos, Osama to Saddam, nukes to uranium, WMD to WMD intent, serious threat to "liberation," brutish recession to "temporary downturn." Maybe we've just had enough. Enough of the macho all-American gun-totin' faux-cowboy ethos that says, if we just beat [insert nation/minority/progressive viewpoint here] up enough, they'll get the message and get in line and start complying with U.S. demands and we can expand our empire and crush all comers and their wimpy objections, too. It is not yet time for delicious plates of schadenfreude. It is not yet time to relish Junior's slide into abject failure and scathing ratings and one-term histrionics -- you know, just like those suffered by his dear old dad. We are still too fragile, the feelings too raw, the wounds too recent from the current administration's mugging of the country. But we are healing fast. We are coming back to life. We are opening our blackened eyes, realizing we have been massively and systematically and enthusiastically and intentionally duped by some very rich, very impotent white males three years running and it's damn near time for a domestic regime change and let's just float a Dean/Kerry (Kerry/Dean?) presidential ticket out there to the cosmic Void, see how it plays, shall we? Because after all, that whimpering house of cards, it can't survive much longer. Reprinted from The San Francisco Chronicle: sfgate.com

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (434057)	7/26/2003 3:43:32 PM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 769668

'The giant sucking sound of lost jobs gets louder' Posted on Friday, July 25 @ 10:19:11 EDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. - The recession is over. So says the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of U.S. business cycles. It announced on July 17 that the recession that began March 2001 ended eight months later in November 2001. The 2001 recession was one of the briefest since World War II, but the bureau also found that it was followed by one of the weakest recoveries. In the months that followed the end of the 2001 recession, the supposedly recovering economy grew at half the rate of previous upturns. That might explain why there now are 9.3 million Americans that are jobless and why the U.S. unemployment rate is currently at 6.4 percent - the highest it has been in nearly a decade. In the 19 months since the end of the 2001 recession, more than 2 million jobs disappeared. This year, President Bush has promised that his $330 billion "jobs and growth" tax cut plan will create 1.4 million new jobs by the end of next year. The U.S. economy would have to generate an average of 300,000 new jobs a month from now until the end of 2004 to create 5.5 million new jobs - that's the promised 1.4 million from the tax cuts and the 4.1 million that White House economists earlier this year predicted would be gained with or without the tax cuts. Think it's going to happen? Probably not. When Bill Clinton was president, the U.S. economy gained an average of 239,000 jobs per month. Since Bush took office, jobs have disappeared at a rate of 69,000 a month. It looks like almost a dead certainty that there will not be 5.5 million new jobs by December 2004. If you want some proof, check out the June 9 issue of Fortune. It details a dirty little secret in the American economy - how white collar workers are seeing their jobs outsourced to foreign countries. The U.S. manufacturing sector has been nearly wiped out by overseas competition. Now, it's the service sector's turn. Tasks such as financial analysis, software design, tax preparation are now being done in India and the Philippines. The quality of the work is good. The price is even better. Where, say, an American accountant's starting pay ranges from $40,000 to $50,000, an accountant in Bangalore gets less than half that. Forester Research, a Massachusetts-based technology consultant, estimates that 3.3 million service jobs will move to countries such as Russia and China in addition to English-speaking countries such as India and the Philippines over the next 15 years. Information technology and financial services will be the two sectors that should see the most overseas outsourcing. "The debate of at major financial services companies today is no longer whether to relocate some business functions but rather which ones and where," Andrea Brierce, managing director of the consulting firm A.T. Kearney, told Fortune. "Any function that does not require face-to-face contact is now perceived as a candidate for offshore relocation." This is a frightening prospect for every person who thinks the U.S. economy can grow its way out of recession. Traditionally, white collar workers have gotten laid off when times are bad and get rehired when things pick up. Now, like their blue collar brethren, they're watching their jobs get shipped overseas and those jobs are likely not coming back. It's equally frightening for people who still believe that a college degree or senior executive experience is protection against long-term unemployment. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 18.1 percent of the long-term unemployed in 2002 had college degrees and 20 percent were from the executive, professional and managerial category. This compares to 14 percent in 2000 for both segments. The long-term trend of good, stable and well-paying jobs being replaced by not-so-good, unstable and lousy paying jobs is something that few folks are talking about. But it is a trend that all of the tax cuts in the world won't change. The code phrase for this trend is "labor market flexibility." When you hear economists and business people say it, they mean a labor environment where - if you are fortunate enough to have a job - you are willing to work longer hours for lower pay and if you aren't, then your job will go someplace else where someone will do it for even less money. In the rest of the world, they call this "The American Model." Countries that still insist on quaint ideas like socialized medicine, cradle-to-grave social welfare, unfettered access to higher education, protection of domestic industries and jobs that pay a living wage are doomed in a global economy where corporations want cheap labor, low taxes, no unions and no government regulations. This is how the world's economy now works. Productive workers in the U.S. are discarded as companies search for cheap and compliant overseas labor. The average two wage-earner family in the U.S. is working about 300 hours more a year than 20 years ago, with little or no growth in real wages. And most of the jobs that have been created in the past decade are low-wage service jobs that are insufficient for raising a family. The unrelenting demands of investors to show an ever-greater profit, the demand for cheap consumer goods and services that Americans feel is their birthright and a global economy that has become reliant on producing more stuff at less cost have all combined to siphon jobs out of the U.S. The only winners in this race to the bottom are the corporations profiting from this global exploitation of workers. When workers don't earn enough to buy the products they make and corporations hopscotch the globe searching for ever-cheaper labor, you have a recipe for an economic disaster. But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats want to talk about this. Any serious discussion of the economy has to address the hemorrhage of U.S. jobs to other nations and the steady erosion of the standard of living of U.S. workers that has resulted. If not even white collar jobs are safe from overseas outsourcing, what does this mean for the American economy? Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books).

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (434057)	7/26/2003 7:47:50 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769668

here's an interesting take on coulter from the letters section of antiwar.com: In a recent column, Justin Raimondo correctly praised Ann Coulter for defending Joe McCarthy in her recent book, Treason. I agree with both Justin and Ann that McCarthy was essentially correct: there were Communists in the American government, they were traitors, and they deserved to be identified as such. Ann Coulter deserves credit for saying so. But here's the rub: those Communists back in the '50s realized in the '80s that their international subterfuge was going nowhere. Communism was dying a justified death. So what happened to the American Communists? Antiwar.com and several other honest websites have repeatedly shown that those former Communists gravitated in the 1980s to neoconservatism. They could see that the international communist cause was lost. And they could see that Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative tide was winning. So they all had a sudden epiphany that right-wing conservatism was the solution! The dramatic shift of former Communists to neoconservatism has been explained but not fully examined. How extraordinary and convenient of them to see where the shift of power was, to leap on it, and to attempt to lead it. And, sadly, they have succeeded, of course. The pathetically obtuse Little George Bush is now their tool. Even mildly intelligent people can see this – regrettably they are in short supply among American patriots. But here's my point: Ann Coulter accuses left-wing commies of the '40s and '50s of treason. Okay, true, Annie. But, these same left-wing commies are now neoconservatives, whom Ann supports unconditionally. Ann Coulter is now aligned with the traitors she abhors! The neocons betrayed America into a war in Iraq that is killing American soldiers every day and bankrupting the American people. Inasmuch as Ann Coulter supports Neocons, she supports the traitors that McCarthy identified. ~ Bruce Hayman