Subject: Living Will
A man and his wife were sitting in the living room and he said to her,
"Just so you know, I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug."
His wife got up, unplugged the TV and threw out all of his beer.
People living in the Arctic have filed a legal petition against the US government, saying its climate change policies violate human rights.
The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) claims the US is failing to control emissions of greenhouse gases, damaging livelihoods in the Arctic.
Its petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights demands that the US limits its emissions.
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OK, so they gave themselves some cover by passing some tax relief for US boots on the ground in Iraq. How nice, well it's a 94.5 Billion dollar tax bill, so there must be a nice chunk of change for those troops stuck in that misbegotten hell-hole on the Tigris River, right? Right? Achtung, not so fast, Chuck-O...
Insurgents Using Chem Weapons - On Themselves?
This has to be the most bizarre twist in the WMD saga yet. Insurgents in Iraq could very well have chemical weapons. And they may be using them - on themselves.
The story starts over a year ago with a Marine blogger in Iraq. On June 2nd 2004 "The Green Side" - we'll get back to the signficance of this source later - describes suicidal attacks by insurgents in Fallujah: "We could not understand why they kept coming but they did." The reason, it turned out, was drugs: "...these 'holy warriors' are taking drugs to get high before attacks. It true, as we pushed into the town in April many Marines came across drug paraphernalia (mostly heroin). Recently, we have gotten evidence of them using another drug BZ that makes them high and very aggressive."
BZ is not your typical substance of abuse. It's a hallucinogenic chemical weapon. This weird concept originated in the 1950's when "better living through chemistry" was a slogan to live by and warfare without blood was the goal.
Thomas -- who besides having his fling with a Pharma lobbyist received $112,619 in campaign funds from the pharmaceutical industry in the 2004 cycle -- couldn't brook passage of a bill forbidding the state to pay for ED drugs.
In other words, Thomas couldn't vote without Viagra. If there is a better metaphor for the Republican troubles, I haven't heard it.
In a meeting last week, the conservative RSC showed the finale of The Bridge on the River Kwai to celebrate the defeat of the $230 million Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere" pork project rammed into a highway bill over the summer. When the bridge over the Kwai exploded at the movie's end, the crowd of GOP congressmen cheered. Republicans, celebrating the death of a Republican bridge.
Could any Republican, much less 100 of them, have pulled a stunt like that in public a year ago?
No way. The party's over, George.
Thompson, who committed suicide last February, invented the "gonzo" style in the 1970s by combining on-the-scene reporting, off-the-wall comedy and inventive invective. In the '80s, O'Rourke kept up the gonzo tradition from a conservative perspective. Both were gutsy guys: Thompson rode with the Hells Angels and O'Rourke traveled to various Third World war zones. Taibbi shows his guts by spending time with a group that's far more vicious and dangerous than bikers or guerrillas -- the United States Congress.
Of course, name-calling is easy and anybody can do it, even an Oxycontin-addled Rush Limbaugh. But Taibbi also exhibits a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the inner workings of Congress. Wonks will recognize the aptness of his description, in a story last August, of the House Rules Committee, the place where amendments go to die, as "perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination -- a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish."
When I heard that our government has secretly paid Iraqi reporters and newspapers to report good news about the war, it only made me wonder how bad the real news must be.
That's the trouble with pay-for-good-press schemes; the truth has a nagging little way of coming out, causing more damage than the chicanery gained.
As a former Army public information specialist, I'm hardly naive about the strategic uses of propaganda. But your propaganda is severely neutralized if people don't even believe you when you're telling the truth.
Trust in democracy requires a trust not only in the public's right to know the truth, but also an abiding faith in their baloney detectors. Truth inevitably comes out, in true democracies, and once you lose your credibility, it's hard to get it back. Just ask Armstrong Williams.
How fitting it would be if Sugar Land, a town which caught the attention of Steven Spielberg because of a big-hearted loser who broke out of prison, returned to the national spotlight 32 years later because of a hard-hearted bully who may be sent to prison.
A 44-year-old U.S. citizen who claimed to have a bomb was killed by air marshals Wednesday at Miami International Airport, several sources told CNN.
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Take a moment today to remember that, 16 years ago, on December 6, 1989, a man walked into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and killed fourteen women in cold blood.
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Remember that while our objective is equality, we have not yet reached that goal, but we must continue toward it. Remember that even in North America, women are not yet completely equal to men, though some may think otherwise...
Imagine if Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria gave a press conference. What would it sound like?
Beria, as you may remember, was head of Stalin's secret police during one of the most infamous periods in Soviet history, the Great Purge of 1938. As head of the NKVD, or Soviet secret police, he was responsible for carrying out a massive political repression that was nominally focused on a series of "enemies of the people," such as the intelligentsia, professionals and rich peasants. In reality, however, the bloody purge - and others Beria oversaw for Stalin in later years - were simply a means for Stalin to ruthlessly consolidate his power by vanquishing his political enemies through show trials, forced labor camps, torture and, when all else failed, murder.
So what would it sound like if in, say, 1938, Beria gave a press conference to detail how the Great Purge was going? Well, it would probably sound a lot like the press conference President Bush gave in the Oval Office of the White House, today, December 6th, 2005.
So you could imagine that, in a windowless room somewhere in the Kremlin in 1938 or so, with a half dozen terrified journalists hand-picked to ask Beria how the "Global War on Internal Terrorists" (GWOIT) was going, the bespectacled, balding interior minister, resplendent in his starched Red Army uniform, would likely say everything was coming along nicely, thank you. And, if one of those reporters was bold enough to ask about reports there were secret prisons buried somewhere in the basement of police headquarters, the answer would probably be something along the lines of "We don't discuss covert operations designed to protect the people." And, if the very brave reporter were to ask why people were being tortured in those prison cells, the answer might have been "We've got to take each threat seriously; we've got to stay on the offense."
Just like George Bush. Just like in 2005. Just like in the United States of America.
Having already destroyed the credibility of his first Secretary of State, George W. Bush has now eviscerated whatever trust the world might have placed in his second Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.
Now, Rice has suffered a similar fate, appearing before European leaders and making assertions that were known to be lies as they passed her lips.
In a larger sense, however, Rice's torture denial - like Powell's earlier deceptive case for war - represents a longstanding approach to information by the neoconservatives who dominate Bush's foreign policy.
For decades, the neocons have followed the approach that when lacking the facts, simply lie. Then, count on your allies in the media to browbeat the doubters by impugning their patriotism. Also, recognize that America's weakened checks and balances will seldom hold you accountable. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Neocon Amorality."]
Many Americans marvel at this chutzpah. But the answer to the mystery of this stunning arrogance is simple: Bush, Cheney and their surrogates judge that they can say whatever they want because this strategy has worked so often before.
They know the powerful right-wing media apparatus - from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to Fox News to AM talk radio to the multitude of conservative writers and commentators - will embrace virtually whatever comes out of the White House. Plus most mainstream journalists are so afraid of getting pegged with the "liberal" label that the worst that will happen is that the press will present competing versions of reality.
Most Democrats - terrified of some future 30-second attack ad - will search for some politically safe middle ground. For those few who still muster the courage to challenge the administration directly, they can expect a good tongue lashing from Cheney for their "reprehensible" behavior or Fox News diatribes for their lack of patriotism.
The danger from this national media predicament is that the Bush administration's "perception management" may work domestically in the near term to keep the American people in line, but the propaganda has declining value elsewhere in the world, especially in the Middle East where U.S. credibility is scraping the bottom.
At some point, international credibility - or the lack of it - may emerge as a national security problem. In all likelihood, there will come a time when a truly dangerous threat to the United States will arise and will require a multilateral response.
If that happens, the American people might wish for a Secretary of State who is not viewed around the world as a liar.
Let me count the lies - the building blocks of Bush's 'democracy'
From the start of the Bush presidency in 2001, senior White House officials have been telling reporters, usually anonymously, that because journalists are reality based, they cannot understand or relate to the Bush administration, since it is pursuing a "bold," God-guided doctrine that intends to create its own reality. Iraq was clearly one of those bold ventures, and because the planning behind it was both flawed and unrealistic, the nation is now suffering psychologically and materially.
There is no compromise - or reality - in the "bold" Bush government. Only secrecy and prevarications.
In a transcript of an intercom exchange recorded in March 2002, a voice positively identified as the vice president's identifies himself as "the Lord thy God" and promotes the invasion of Iraq, as well as the use of torture in prisoner interrogations.
"There's a lot of religious zeal in the West Wing," said a former White House staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's possible that the vice president has taken advantage of that to fast-track certain administration objectives."
"I was very surprised by the president's slow response in New Orleans," political commentator Bill Kristol said. "The president told me that he was praying every day in his office, but had received no reply. I had no idea what he meant, but of course, it all makes sense now."
At the time of Katrina, Cheney was on a fly-fishing trip, from which he returned on Sept. 1.
"It's hard to tell the leader of the free world that he has been the butt of an elaborate and long-term ruse," a former staffer said. "Maybe it would be easier to take if it came from Cheney's God voice."
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What bothers me is that of late his lies are so obvious that even the boobs can see through them. I allude, of course, to his recent attempts to placate his base with an alleged "crackdown" on illegal immigration.
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And consider the Bush administration's push to grant driver's licenses to illegal aliens. If he's going to send home all those who are violating our immigration laws, why will the violators need driver's licenses?
I suspect that even the dimmest of the dim bulbs out there in the red states can see through this spin. But if my e-mail is any indication, many of them are still buying the spin on the Iraq war. Bush made a speech about that last week as well, this time in Annapolis. He somehow refrained from dressing up in that Navy flight suit again, but the speech was full of the usual lies and evasions that have followed since the unraveling of the mission his spin doctors once portrayed as accomplished.
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