USA Today Diplomatic Correspondent Barbara Slavin released a new book this week: Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation.

[Cross-posted from OOIBC]

Let’s hear a big round of applause for Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT).  President Dodd?

Speaker Pelosi? It is time to stop funding and put an end to George Bush’s occupation  of Iraq and get all the troops there home. Now. You have exhausted all your excuses, and all of them have just been shown up to be nothing more than the hot air they are. If you will not end it before November 2008, after Chris Dodd’s clear example yesterday of real, honest legislative leadership, you deserve to be unseated and sent home in disgrace.

Dodd issued a press release yesterday stating

…that he would block the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) “from being considered by the full Senate and from receiving a vote on the Senate floor.” The statement came as the Senate Intelligence Committee met to consider the legislation — and weeks before it is likely to reach the floor.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators and the Bush administration reached a compromise on the politically charged bill, which governs the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, including a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies. Civil libertarians oppose the compromise as going too far to protect telecoms that were revealed to have participated in a warrantless wiretapping program, and because the legislation wouldn’t establish warrants for each individual wiretap.

Dodd said he would place a “hold” on the FISA bill, a device available to any senator to stop legislation from moving forward. “By granting immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president’s terrorist surveillance program, even though such participation may have been illegal, the FISA reform bill sets a dangerous precedent by giving the President sweeping authorization to neglect the right to privacy that Americans are entitled to under the Constitution,” Dodd explained in a statement outlining his concerns.

The rhetoric got hotter with every paragraph. “It is unconscionable that such a basic right has been violated, and that the president is the perpetrator,” Dodd said. “I will do everything in my power to stop Congress from shielding this President’s agenda of secrecy, deception, and blatant unlawfulness.”

Chris Dodd deserves to be elected President next year.

He has just blown out of the water all of the claims by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Leadership that they are unable to defund and end the occupation of Iraq with the claims that they ‘don’t have the votes’, and set a clear, effective example of the “power of the purse” that Pelosi now has no excuse not to follow.

David Swanson explains in greater detail…

[Cross-posted from Edgeing]

“Zeitgeist is originally a German expression that means ‘the mind of the age’, literally translated as ‘time (Zeit) mind (Geist)’. It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era.” —wikipedia

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Address to the American Newspaper Publishers, 27 April 1961

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.
…
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.
…
Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution — not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants” — but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate, and sometimes even anger public opinion.

Zeitgeist 2007: 1 hr 56 min. Or watch the film in three parts below.

What do Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve have in common?

This is the full Zeitgeist production.

“They must find it difficult…
Those who have taken authority as the truth,
rather than truth as the authority.”
—Gerald Massey, Egyptologist (1828-1907)

If you ever doubted it…

…this should resolve the question once and for all: We are on our own.
…
Asked about her “greatest mistake,” Pelosi said Why don’t you tell me? ‘Cause I think we’re doing just great.” Remember when Georgie stumbled over a similar question and couldn’t recall any mistakes? It seems Our Only President is not the only one so afflicted.

The hand-off…

It has been pointed out to me many times that the Iraq Occupation and the FISA amendment are only two issues of many, on most of which the Democrats are incrementally better than Republicans, and this has been used as an argument against the conclusion that there is no difference between them.

They are incrementally better. Is that a reason to give them a pass for being complicit in the mass death caused by the Iraq Occupation and in the bankrupting of America? Or a reason to give them a pass for hacking away at freedom and privacy?

Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Leadership are confidant that they will win the presidency and the Congress next year simply on the strength of peoples fear of Republicans.

Recognition of the realities of the situation that has been created in Iraq is all well and good and important, but… and it’s a big but.

This from Jay Ackroyd’s post at TPMCafe really bothers me:

If you saw Taylor Marsh at YKos, you heard a clear delineation of this DC consensus. This isn’t a matter of reflexive use of force as the only solution by crazy neocons. This is a recognition that Iraq is a failed state without a sovereign government and without the capacity to defend itself. The US Congress passes resolutions declaring what laws Iraq must pass, while the Pentagon makes all military decisions. Iraq’s government plays no role other than certifying US policy. And, these days, we’re hearing talk of changing the government. That talk is taking place in Washington. And there can be no freely elected, sovereign government in Iraq, because, in the Washington consensus, those bases are more important than a reprentative government–and no represesentative government would permit military bases defending Israel and threatening Iran.

This leaves the Democratic candidates in a very difficult position. They are part of this Washington consensus.

Iraq is a mess. That’s undeniable reality. It’s not going to be fixed easily. I think that’s also undeniable reality.

Just because it reminded me of something…

Here’s some good Sunday morning staring out the window while sipping hot coffee and scratching Magic (the cat) music:

I’ll bet it reminds you of something too.

Updated: Originally posted at Talkleft & Edgeing February 2007
…………………………………………

Since the story of a cheap safe cancer cure first broke on Jan 23 in NewScientistdotCom, virtually NO US mainstream media has picked up on and reported the story.

Google news searchs on “dichloroacetate” now produce only 9 hits this morning (compared to 59 hits in February). Contrast that to 15,433 news search hits this morning on “al-qaeda”, for a bit of perspective. Cancer is a killer disease affecting millions of people every year, so the ignoring of this story cannot be due to any “lack of interest”.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells.

Incinerated body of an Iraqi soldier on the “Highway of Death,” a name the press has given to the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq. U.S. planes immobilized the convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then bombing and strafing the resulting traffic jam for hours. More than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of highway. The clear rapid incineration of the human being [pictured above] suggests the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incendiary bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols. This massive attack occurred after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660. Such a massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who “are out of combat.” —War Crimes

The 1990/91 Gulf War, The Death Of Reason, the ensuing long years of the sanctions war against the people of Iraq, the 2003 invasion of the country, and the ongoing occupation of Iraq since, are all aspects of and symptoms created by something much larger and much more insidious: War On Terror: The Rise Of The Politics of Fear.

I have to admit that as stupid as I sometimes portray Bush, I really have problems with the idea that he is incompetent.

I doubt that anyone incompetent has a chance of becoming president, unless they are so unbelievably stupid that they really can be just a hand puppet.

I think it would show publicly more than it does, and I doubt he’d be able to carry off his deceptive ‘just a dumb good ole boy’ act if he was that stupid.

Bush is a clown definitely, but I think stupid clown is a gross over-simplification.

Thinking Causes Cancer – Kensington Report

Don’t think about it. It is what it is. Just watch and listen.

–hat tip to Scary @ The Daily Scare

Inspired by buhdydharma’s The Big Picture Vol. 2

Originally posted at TalkLeft, Dec 10, 2006:
The End Of The Beginning?

In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.