Politics:. A strife of interests
masquerading as a contest of principles.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Crocodile Attacks Chainsaw
An Associated Press article (below) published in The Santa Cruz Sentinel on April 28, 2006 reports that a crocodile in Australia attacked a chainsaw wielding tree-cutter and destroyed the chainsaw.
The article also reports that other crocodiles have attacked small boats because, supposedly, the crocs don’t like the noise.
I sympathize with the crocs.
I have a fantasy about herds of crocodiles invading Congress and having at the corps of idiots who are attempting to run America (into the ground).
This would seem to be a remarkably effective and eco-friendly way of effecting change in our current political system. It is also a reminder that the human mind seeks relief in humor even at our most trying times.
Besides, I don’t like the noise. ___________________________________________________________________
Crocodile Attacks Chainsaw in Australia
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- A 14 1/2-foot crocodile mauled a chainsaw a worker was using Friday to clear up debris left by a tropical storm that lashed northern Australia. While the croc and worker were both uninjured, the saw's woodcutting days are over.
Freddy Buckland was cutting up a tree that fell against a crocodile enclosure at the Corroboree Park Tavern, 50 miles east of the northern port city of Darwin when the crocodile, called Brutus, apparently took exception to the chainsaw's noise and attacked.
"As he was trimming up the tree on the outside the croc jumped out of the water and sped along the tree about 18, 20 feet and actually grabbed the chainsaw out of his hands," said Peter Shappert, the tavern's owner.
"It must have been the noise ... I don't think he was actually trying to grab Freddy, but I'm not sure. He had a fair go at him ... I think he just grabbed the first thing he could and it happened to be the chainsaw," Shappert added.
Neither Buckland nor Brutus were injured.
The saltwater crocodile, which Shappert said he now is considering renaming Two-stroke in honor of the saw's fuel, appeared to like the snack.
"He chewed on the chainsaw for about an hour-and-a-half, then we finally got it out," Shappert said, adding that the saw was destroyed when it finally was retrieved from Brutus' giant jaws. Saltwater crocodiles have been known to attack small power boats, apparently because they do not like the noise of outboard motors.
Here’s what I don’t understand: the American press reports the doings of the Bush cabal and editorialists, commentators, and other people we listen to use the word “breathtaking” to describe their reactions, and consequently what they think our reactions should be to the treasonous actions of this man we have unfortunately seen installed as our President.
This is not “truth”, although the article spells out the horrors of this madman serving us as a president even though the majority of us are hoping for, at the least, impeachment of George Bush. “Truth” will not be fully served until our major news commentators, in all media, are willing to state exactly the truth: these actions are not “breathtaking”—they are criminal, dangerous, tragic, fascist, unconscionable, and “far beyond what is considered reasonable”.[1]
It would appear that the time to mince words in this fashion is long past. The time to call a spade a spade is upon us and the success or failure of America is at stake. Either you love your country or you don’t. For God’s sake: love your country enough to forego soft-pedaling the Bush Cabal. They are our enemies. And they are traitors. And they are likely to lead us straight into the path of a nuclear bomb.
Certainly, they are more than willing to destroy the lives of the poorest souls in America. __________________________________________________________________________________
Attack Iran, Ignore the Constitution http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060508/attack_iran by JEREMY BRECHER & BRENDAN SMITH [posted online on April 21, 2006] During the 2004 election, George W. Bush famously proclaimed that he didn't have to ask anyone's permission to defend America. Does that mean he can attack Iran without having to ask Congress? A new Congressional resolution being drafted by Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon, can be a vehicle to remind Bush that he can't. Bush is calling news reports of plans to attack Iran "wild speculation" and declaring that the United States is on a "diplomatic" track. But asked this week if his options included planning for a nuclear strike, he repeated that "all options are on the table." The President is acting as if the decisions that may get us into another war are his to make and his alone. So the Iran crisis poses not only questions of military feasibility and political wisdom but of Constitutional usurpation. Bush's top officials openly assert that he can do anything he wants--including attacking another country--on his authority as Commander in Chief. Last October, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee whether the President would circumvent Congressional authorization if the White House chose military action against Iran or Syria. She answered, "I will not say anything that constrains his authority as Commander in Chief." When pressed by Senator Paul Sarbanes about whether the Administration can exercise a military option without an authorization from Congress, Rice replied, "The President never takes any option off the table, and he shouldn't." The founders of the American Republic were deeply concerned that the President's power to make war might become the vehicle for tyranny. So they crafted a Constitution that included checks and balances on presidential power, among them an independent Congress and judiciary, an executive power subject to laws written by Congress and interpreted by the courts, and an executive power to repel attacks but not to declare or finance war. But the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, as laid out in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States and reiterated in 2006, claims for the President the power to attack other countries--like Iran--simply because he asserts they pose a threat. It thereby removes the decision of war and peace from Congress and gives it the President. It is, as Senator Robert Byrd put it, "unconstitutional on its face." Congressional Response DeFazio is now preparing a resolution underscoring the fact that the President cannot initiate military action against Iran without Congressional authorization. He is seeking support from other House members. "The imperial powers claimed by this Administration are breathtaking in their scope. Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues were willing to cede our constitutional authorities to the President prior to the war in Iraq. We've seen how that turned out," DeFazio told The Nation. "Congress can't make the same mistake with respect to Iran. Yet the constant drumbeat we're hearing out of the Administration, in the press, from think tanks, etc., on Iran eerily echoes what we heard about Iraq. "It likely won't be long until we hear from the President that he can take pre-emptive military action against Iran without Congressional authorization, which is what he originally argued about Iraq. Or that Congress has already approved action against Iran via some prior vote, which he also argued about Iraq," DeFazio said. "That is why it is so important to put the Administration, my colleagues and the American people on notice now that such arguments about unilateral presidential war powers have no merit. Our nation's founders were clear on this issue. There is no ambiguity." There is considerable evidence that military action against Iran has already started. Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner (ret.) told CNN that "the decision has been made and military operations are under way." He said the Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency recently told him that the Iranians have captured dissident units "and they've confessed to working with the Americans." Journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker that "American combat troops are now operating in Iran."
He quotes a government consultant who told him that the units were not only identifying targets but "studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds." Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has written to Bush, noting, "The presence of US troops in Iran constitutes a hostile act against that country" and urged him to report immediately to Congress on all activities involving American forces in Iran. Bipartisan Concern Concern about presidential usurpation of the war power is not just a partisan matter. Former Vice President Al Gore this year joined with former Republican Congressman Bob Barr to express "our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger." As Gore explained, "In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power." One of the stunning revelations of recent news stories is that top military brass are strongly opposed to the move toward military strikes. The Washington Post quotes a former CIA Middle East specialist that "the Pentagon is arguing forcefully against it." According to Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker, the Joint Chiefs of Staff "had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran." The Bush Administration is putting military officials in a position where they will have to decide whether their highest loyalty is to the President or to the country and the Constitution. Lieut. Gen. Gregory Newbold (ret.), who recently called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has criticized the US military brass for its quiescence while the Bush Administration pursued "a fundamentally flawed plan" for "an invented war." Now he is calling on serving military officers to speak out. The "generals' revolt" has not publicly targeted the plans to attack Iran. But its central critique concerns Rumsfeld's disregard for the military's evaluation of the costs of the Iraq War and the scale of commitment it would require. If a similar disregard of the costs of an attack on Iran aren't already the subtext of their action, it certainly is a logical concomitant. The American people are by now deeply skeptical of Bush's reliability in matters of war and peace. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, 54 percent of respondents said they did not trust President Bush to "make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran," compared with 42 percent who did. Forty percent said the war in Iraq had made them less supportive of military action against Iran. But Americans are being systematically deprived of any alternative view of the Iranian threat, the consequences of American policy choices or the real intentions of the Bush Administration. Smoking Gun, Mushroom Cloud Congress and the military allowed the Bush Administration to bamboozle the country with false information and scare talk prior to the Iraq War--and they share responsibility for the resulting catastrophe. Now we're hearing again about a smoking gun that will be a mushroom cloud. It's up to Congress and the military to make it clear that the President does not assume monarchical power over questions of war and peace. Congress and the American people--who should make the decision about war and peace--haven't even heard the forceful arguments of military officials against military strikes. Calling those Pentagon officials to testify--and protecting them against Administration reprisals--would be a good place to start. Colonel Gardiner, who specializes in war games and conducted one for Harper's magazine that simulated a US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, concluded, "It's a path that leads to disaster in many directions." Unless preceded by a UN endorsement or an imminent Iranian attack, it's also aggression, a war crime under international law and the UN Charter. If Bush or his subordinates have already ordered military operations in Iran, it should be considered a criminal act. The DeFazio resolution could provide a rallying point for a coalition to act pre-emptively to put checks and balances on the Bush Administration's usurpation of constitutional powers. Indeed, the growing evidence that the United States is already conducting military operations in Iran demonstrates the urgency of placing limits on executive power. Anyone who wants to avoid national catastrophe should get busy defending it. Otherwise, George Bush's legacy may be: "He bombed Iran, and the collateral damage wiped out the Constitution." washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, February 8, 2005; Page A22 THERE ARE TWO ways to treat a president's budget proposal. The realistic, even cynical, method is to unmask the various bits of budget gimmickry involved, to assume that some aspects are dead on arrival, and to view the document as the administration's opening gambit in a long political chess match. The other is to take it seriously, as the administration's idealized vision of what government should be. Either way, the fiscal 2006 budget proposed yesterday by President Bush is breathtaking -- in the first approach as farce, in the second as tragedy.
First, the farcical aspects: To meet its claimed target of cutting the deficit in half by 2009, the new budget omits the cost of the war in Iraq; the cost of the president's proposed private accounts for Social Security; and the cost of correcting the alternative minimum tax, which is hitting growing numbers of middle-class taxpayers rather than the rich it is intended for.
To make its already unaffordable tax cuts permanent, the administration wants to change the budget-scoring rules so that the cuts show up on the score card as cost-free. In fact, making them permanent would cost $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years. To obscure the real-world consequences of its unrealistic spending caps for discretionary programs, the administration has neatly avoided the inconvenience of specifying where, in future years, the necessary cuts would be made. It eliminated the traditional tables from the budget documents showing what spending would be in those programs beyond next year.
As to the tragic: Budget austerity is wise, but cuts as draconian as the administration proposes are not necessary and would fall too heavily on those who can tolerate it least. Under the administration's discretionary spending caps, spending for defense and homeland security would be permitted to grow, as it must; for example, military spending (and this doesn't include the costs of war in Iraq) would rise from $400 billion this fiscal year to $419 billion in 2006 to $492 billion in 2010. By contrast, other discretionary spending would be trimmed, from $391 billon this year to $389 billion next year and frozen at that level through 2010. Given expected inflation, this would mean a cut, in real terms, of 14 percent by 2010 in such areas as housing, environmental protection, education and transportation.
If implemented, this would bring a dramatic restructuring of federal spending. In 2002, spending for programs other than defense and homeland security accounted for about half of discretionary spending; by 2010, that would fall to just 42 percent. Interest payments on the national debt would amount to just $75 billion less. The administration also wants to make cuts in entitlement spending -- some of them laudable, albeit politically unlikely, cuts in agricultural subsidies, others more worrisome, particularly the $45 billion over 10 years that is to be cut from Medicaid, the shared federal-state health care program for the poor and disabled. Food stamp benefits would be eliminated for 200,000 to 300,000 people, and a freeze in child-care funding would cut the number of low-income children receiving help by 300,000 in 2009.
The administration and its allies depict these cuts as the unhappy but inevitable consequence of tough budgetary times. "This is not a time when we can have guns and butter in excess. We're going to have a fair amount of butter," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.). "But it's just not going to be at the level that it might have been in the past if we weren't at war." This maddeningly blinkered mindset ignores the impact of the Bush tax cuts, which were at once unaffordable and tilted to the wealthiest Americans. Next year alone, the cost of the administration's already enacted tax cuts will be $192 billion, not including added interest.
"It's a budget that sets priorities," Mr. Bush told reporters yesterday. That it does. The problem is that some of those priorities are flat wrong.
For the past eight years, I lived in a century-old house in Spokane, Washington, along with five other renters who happily shared the best views and, most likely, the cheapest rent, in town. The landlord was a peach: if you called with a problem, it was fixed immediately. The grounds were kept up, the fire alarm system was checked regularly and the building was maintained reasonably well. Then the landlord decided to sell the property. Some rich investors came along and bought the property for more than the asking price. Suddenly, we renters faced the prospect of finding new digs at, more than likely, twice the rent. The new investors sent out notices that we had twenty days to vacate the property because they were going to start construction on the old house immediately and turn it into four condominiums selling for close to a million dollars per condo, complete with an elevator, a spa, top-of-the-line accoutrements, and the magnificent view we had enjoyed.
At the time, I was surviving on a shoe-string provided by welfare while waiting for my Social Security Disability to be approved. Friends and family had been helping me (to the detriment of their own well-being) to maintain my rent and some of my bills. Needless to say, the money for a move did not exist but there was no choice in the matter. I figured I'd be homeless and lose everything I had managed to gain over the past decade in a go-for-broke yard sale. I figured I'd be pushing a shopping cart down the street with what few possessions remained to me. I figured life as I knew it was finished.
Fate intervened in the form of an old friend who was having trouble in her relationships with neighbors and we managed to scrape up enough money to get another apartment in which we, more or less, share expenses and for which she works extra hours to make up the monies that I am not currently able to supply as regards the household expenses.
In some respects, the move was all to the good. Things have worked out and we are happy with the arrangement for the time being.
What continues to haunt me are those twenty days between being summarily evicted so that the rich could occupy my home and my friend signing the lease on the new apartment. I was saved by something like Divine Intervention, or Karma, or maybe Jesus. Who knows? But, saved, I was. The fear, however, lingers. As an old woman with no "life-partner", no means of support due to physical limitations, and no base of support beyond what little friends and family can provide, I know that I was as close to homeless as it is possible to be without actually pushing that ol' shopping cart down the street. There's still enough arrogance left over from a somewhat privileged childhood for me to feel that "I just don't come from that sort of people". Homelessness, in my soul, is just not an option.
In reality, homeless is now an option which remains too close for any real sense of comfort in my life and my remaining days on this Earth. What really disturbs me is that I was forced into this horrifying situation just so the rich could get richer. The purchasers of the property were nice as they could be and did everything they could to make the situation easy. However, there was no doubt that come the end of the twenty day notice to vacate, our possessions would be put on the street and we would be left without shelter, without protection, without recourse no matter what our personal situations might be.
Nobody should have this fear. There oughta be a law.
An Op-Ed in The New York Times for April 20, 2006 suggests that the time is nigh for reinstituting the draft which would send all our boys and girls over to the desert (no exemptions) for cannon fodder in the quest for making the obscenely rich richer. One can't help but see this piece of writing as a test to see whether the American public will continue to sit on its haunches while yet another crazy thing happens to destroy the progress we as a nation have made over the past decades.
It's worrisome that today's kids don't have the memories of the older generation: street protests and draft card burnings, beatings, attack dogs, jails, prisons, all the events that resulted in overturning the draft in America. It's also worrisome that the Bush administration, under the guise of 'terrorism' has instituted conditions which can ultimately make protests horrific events in which protestors in America are jailed without recourse to legal representation, "renditioned" to countries where they are liable to be tortured (for no good reason other than the prurient and deviant desires of the torturers); where the mere act of protesting the draft could—and most probably would—result in our children being labeled as 'terrorists' simply for standing up for the inalienable rights of American citizens.
In other news, The Seattle Times article on the visit of President Hu of China states: "At least 90 percent of U.S. imports from China are goods that are no longer produced in the United States," Hu said. "Even if not from China, the United States will still have to import these products." That's 90 percent of the goods we buy are not made in America, folks. The Chinese are certainly disciplined enough to cut us off if they chose to do so. What then?
Secrecy and Revision
Why is our so-called government trying to censor and classify the last 50 years of documents? It would seem, based on reporting about the Bush administration's movements to reclassify our American history and therefore our American consciousness that these machinations have only taken place regarding the documents held by the National Archives, however, today's Washington Post reports that F.B.I. agents are also trying to get their hands on the last 50 years of the private notes of dear old Jack Anderson—a thorn in the side of secret-hiding politicians for decades.
What is out there in those writings that the Bush administration is so desirous of hiding from the American people? Could it— finally—be a link to the assassination of John F. Kennedy that some say started with a Texas cabal? Could it be that the lever to overturn the rocks and shine the light of knowledge on the current administration's ties to a conspiracy dating back to the 1960's is really out there, just waiting for discovery by a consequently enlightened American public? Or is it just the desire to destroy historical precedent for this nation built on freedom of knowledge and freedom of speech?
American history is a sacred trust based on truth and freedom to research our past. The only way to really change America is to change our history. It has been reported this week that students in our public schools are ignorant of historical American facts.
"No Child Left Behind", indeed…
The diabolical bent of the Bush zealots would seem to enjoy the cynicism of hiding and obfuscating American principles of democracy behind titles that say one thing and mean another and "no child left behind" simply means that no child of America will have any idea of what America has really meant to her citizens and the world—these Bushites are attempting to steal and rewrite our very character.
We are on our way to being a Nazi-esque group of citizens who condone torture and use weapons instead of rational thought to change society and it becomes easier as time passes and the machinations of the Bush people become more ardent and obvious that it is not easy to change a group dedicated to overthrowing our government. We as a people now find ourselves in the very same set of circumstances that led to the destruction of Germany by Nazis.
It becomes easier every day to understand how the rank and file German citizens "allowed" the holocaust to happen and we are on our way to the destruction of our country just as surely as the Nazi movement destroyed Germany.
This generation might see the imprisonment of the poor rather than "lesser races" and we are currently only a few steps from enforced labor. After all, the working poor do not deserve more than minimum wage, health insurance, driving privileges, the economic freedom to drive a car, a viable old age, or education. When you think about it, there is simply nothing else to be done with the 90% of us who are not members of Bush's "base"—the richest 10% of Americans.
Consider that the next presidential election is already decided and our votes are meaningless. Consider that one of these Bush people goes to the White House again.
Location: Spokane Valley, Washington, United States
"Another said--"Why ne'er a peevish Boy,
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;
Shall He that made the Vessel in pure Love
And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy!"
--Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam LXII
