agitprop version 2.0

No Chief Left Accountable

The Presidential Commission on WMD Intelligence finally produced its report today (five months after the election) which put the blame on intelligence agencies, not the hawks in the Bush administration who sold the misinformation to the public before the Iraq War.

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Not only was the government "dead wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, officials still know "disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," a special commission warned Thursday . . . "The commission did not address how the administration used the information to take the country to war," said Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J. Commissioners said their charge was to learn exactly how and why things went wrong with Iraq. The report did say that no political pressure caused analysts in the weeks leading to the war to "skew or alter any of their analytical judgments." (full article)

No political pressure caused analysts to alter their judgment! There's the complicit media once again failing to question the government. So much for accountability. What about Dick Cheney's daily pestering of intelligence officials from his special office in the CIA during 2002? It's all in Woodward's book.  The report states that Intelligence officials relied on an Iraqi informant known as "Curveball", who supplied false information. I wonder why they didn't consult Deep Throat first. This report will get tossed down the memory hole and business will carry on as usual. Considering the 2003 USA Today poll which stated that 70% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, I can guarantee you that Osama is still laughing.

Terri Schiavo, R.I.P.

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman who spent 15 years connected to a feeding tube in an epic legal and medical battle that went all the way to the White House and Congress, died Thursday, 13 days after the tube was removed. She was 41. (full story here)

It's unfortunate that this entire situation played out like it did--a full-blown media circus ripe with crazed conservative pundits, opportunistic Christian leaders, and "culture of life" protesters. Not only has the privacy of the family been invaded, but the medical facts have been largely misconstrued. For instance, the Centre for Neuro Skills defines a persistent vegetative state as:

. . . A condition in which individuals have lost cognitive neurological function and awareness of the environment but retain noncognitive function and a perserved sleep-wake cycle. It is sometimes described as when a person is technically alive, but his/her brain is dead. However, that description is not completely accurate. In persistent vegetative state the individual loses the higher cerebral powers of the brain, but the functions of the brainstem, such as respiration (breathing) and circulation, remain relatively intact. Spontaneous movements may occur and the eyes may open in response to external stimuli, but the patient does not speak or obey commands. Patients in a vegetative state may appear somewhat normal. They may occasionally grimace, cry, or laugh.

This woman's cerebral cortex had turned to spinal fluid--basically her brain had liquefied. Basically, Schiavo had been dead for 15 years. Now that does not warrant the pulling of her feeding tube, however, Michael Schiavo is her guardian and he had the right to make that decision. I'm not going to speak for anyone else, but if I was in her situation, I would want my wife to order doctors to remove my feeding tube.

The protests have revealed a network of neo-fascist Christians intent on destroying the U.S. constitution and replacing it with religious law. If the "culture of life" includes these shady characters then I want no part of it. My vision of a culture of life includes fighting for equality, justice, freedom, self-determination and ending war, poverty and disease which continue to plague humankind. Liz at Blondesense has a wonderful discussion of what the culture of life should be here.

On the Road Again...

Talking Points Memo has some recent news from Bush's latest stop on the Bamboozlepalooza Social Security Tour here:

At the Reichert townhall meeting in Bellevue last night, I'm told that one of the biggest laugh lines (at least in the crowd's opinion) came when Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols insisted that there would be no transition costs under President Bush's phase-out plan.

Bush is going to magically pull the money needed to fund this plan straight out of his ass. He stumbles through his explanations of the details--no wonder people are confused. Not to mention that only Republicans and pro-Bush people may attend these carefully staged events. It's almost as if they are reading from a pre-determined script in these town hall meetings.  Holden at First-Draft has some of the transcript between Bush and the "panelists" here.

The majority of Americans are opposed to Bush's privatization plan because most Americans have common sense. Why dismantle a trusted proven system and opt for risky investment in the stock market? Privatization simply does not work. Markets that are too free become corrupted by greedy capitalist thugs if not properly monitored. The Democrats need to be bold and come out with their own plan to save Social Security. This will ensure Bush's crushing defeat and put an end to his silly traveling dog & pony show.

Roll up, Roll up for the Mystery Tour, Step Right This Way...

Life in the Orange Curtain

Atrios posted a discussion about The O.C. last night. No, not the stupid Fox teen drama, but the county, which happens to be my place of residence. It turns out that the median home price in O.C. is $555,000. Atrios writes:

The O.C. - home to B1 Bob Dornan, the Nixon Library, John Wayne Airport, Kevin Drum, and Fox Teen Dramas - isn't quite what people think it is. I began my blogging career during my mercifully brief tenure there. I lived in Laguna Beach for most of that time, an odd oasis in an odd place. But, despite its history and reputation, the O.C. is not the uniformly rich white county one might think. Large chunks of it are home to immigrant and minority communities (primarily Vietnamese and Hispanic). Quite clearly large chunks of the population are not in the "$550,000 house-buying crowd."

O.C. - Not what you think!
Laguna Beach - property rich/income poor!
Housing bubble? shhhh!!
Prop. 13 - wack!

He's right. Orange County, CA, birthplace and home of conservatives like Richard Nixon, Lou Sheldon, and the John Birch Society, has a real estate market who's bubble is about to burst.  Prices for single family homes have risen 100% in most areas within the past seven years. Orange County is not the fiction you see on Fox's The O.C. Yes, there are people in Newport Beach who have homes like that and own three Jaguars and three Hummers each, but the real O.C. is much more normal.

Radical anarchist Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine grew up in my city of Irvine. We've got the liberal-tarian weekly paper The OC Weekly as well as Indie 103 FM. The old right-wing base is not as strong as it used to be, but Republicans still outnumber Democrats in this county 3 to 2. The OC Weekly ranks the Christian televangelist Trinity Broadcasting Network's headquarters and the Richard Nixon Library as the scariest places in O.C.

Pagan Cacophony Drowns Out the Lord's Day

Terminating Democracy

Arnold's new slogan is "Mo Money, Mo Money, Mo Money!" because he can raise all the cash he wants for his special election this year. Full article here.

SACRAMENTO - A Superior Court judge cleared the way for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to raise unlimited cash to promote his agenda to voters, ruling Friday that the state's political watchdog improperly limited donations for ballot measures. The ruling overturned a Fair Political Practices Commission regulation that would have restricted Schwarzenegger's efforts to raise $50 million for a package of constitutional amendments he wants to put before voters in the fall . . . Schwarzenegger and Citizens to Save California are circulating petitions to qualify ballot measures that would increase the time it takes for teachers to earn tenure, privatize public pensions and change the way congressional and legislative districts are drawn. The governor raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the campaign and his re-election at events earlier this month in Washington D.C., New York, Cincinnati, Sacramento and Los Angeles.

I knew that Rove and his Republican gangsters were behind this all along. It just reeks of conspiracy. It started back in 2001 and 2002 when Kenny Boy at Enron decided to toy with California's power grid. The rolling blackouts were blamed on then Governor Gray Davis. Then, Enron collapsed in 2002 and took half of California's economy with it. Davis was blamed for bankrupting California (oooh and he wanted to give illegal aliens driver's permits too!).

In comes Arnold Schwarzenegger (freshly bankrolled by union-buster Walmart, real estate developers and energy companies) as the moderate Republican here to "save California from special interests". Meanwhile, he has taken more special interest money than any governor in history. But he claims that special interests include only labor unions and native American tribes, not large corporations and other business interests that have been his biggest boosters.

Schwarzenegger has been unable to enact his Bushian ownership society agenda through the Democratic-controlled state legislature. So he is raising over $50 million dollars to bankroll a special election and have Californians vote on the measures. All he has to do is confuse the voters with a few enigmatic propositions and he gets his way and bypasses the legislature. This whole thing is a draconian power grab à la Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin--the main goal for Schwarzenegger to reduce the legislature's ability to control the state budget and then break the back of the teachers' unions. Schwarzenegger is setting his sights on the White House. All he has to do is embark on a hard right agenda and prove himself as a true Bushie to be accepted by the national Republican party. Here is his program to terminate democracy in Cal-ee-four-nee-ah:

• Privatize the Teachers' Pension System = Similar to Bush privatization plans for Social Security. This will break the backs of teachers' unions. He also wants to promote merit pay for teachers instead of standard salary. The end goal is to completely privatizate education. Sound too extreme? I wouldn't put it past him.
• Executive control of the budget = Bypass the legislature and let the governor make quarterly budget adjustments.
• Redistricting = Tom DeLay has mastered this one. Well Arnold wants to redistrict California in the middle of the decade. Typically you do this right after the Census, not five years after!

We can only expect more political and electoral shenanigans in California this year.

Crucifying Kofi with American Wood & Nails

When the U.N. gets bad press, right-wingers tingle with joy and excitement. They'd love the see the worthless United Nations wither and die so that the United States can take its rightful place as leader and commander of world affairs. The Oil For Food Scandal has got U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in a lot of hot water, and right-wingers want to see him boil. I agree that there has been corruption and Kofi deserves to take the blame. However, is the corruption at the U.N. any worse than what the U.S. has done in Iraq? Here Corrente comments on the Wall Street Journal's bashing of Kofi for cozying up to tyrants:

Yes, he certainly looks bad when compared to our own leaders: Nixon in Cambodia and Chile, the Phillipines and Iran; Reagan in Nicaragua, South Africa, Panama and El Salvador; the support of the School of the Americas and the funneling of military aid to Iraq; Bush I in Indonesia; Bush II in Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Pakistan. And of course, the home-grown humanitarian abuse and murders of prisoners across the American gulag.

Two years after the Iraqi invasion, the mainstream media is slowly picking up stories about U.S. military prison abuse, corporate war profiteering and Paul Bremer's corrupt leadership of the Coalition Provisional Authority. These stories simply have less zing in the American press than anti-U.N. stories. Kofi Annan's son may have profited $400,000 from illegal dealings with Oil-for-Food providers yet Custer Battles, a U.S. contractor, overcharged coalition authorities $50 million for their rebuilding efforts in Iraq. Full story here by Michael Hirsh (Newsweek/MSNBC) :

The [Bush] administration's reluctance to prosecute has turned the Iraq occupation into a "free-fraud zone," says former CPA senior adviser Franklin Willis. After the fall of Baghdad, there was no Iraqi law because Saddam Hussein's regime was dead. But if no U.S. law applied either, then everything was permissible, says Willis. The former CPA official compares Iraq to the "Wild West," saying he delivered one $2 million payment to Custer Battles in bricks of cash. ("We called Mike Battles in and said, 'Bring a bag'," Willis told Congress in February.) Willis and other critics worry that with just $4.1 billion of the $18.7 billion spent so far, the U.S. legal stance will open the door to much more fraud in the future. "If urgent steps are not taken, Iraq ... will become the biggest corruption scandal in history," warned the anti-corruption group Transparency International in a recent report. Grassley adds that if the government decides the False Claims Act doesn't apply to Iraq, "any recovery for fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars ... would be prohibited."

Turns out that Iraq was just an excuse for Bush to play cowboy.

Nuke All Dissent

Will the Senate invoke the "nukular" option? Stay tuned.

Megaphone for Fraud

Left-wing apostate Christopher Hitchens ripped Joe Scarborough on his show last night calling him a "megaphone for fraud" about his coverage of the Terri Schiavo episode. Crooks & Liars has the video clip here in quicktime format. Although Hitchens is still a looney hawk when it comes to Iraq and U.S. foreign policy, he's partially redeemed himself in my book for criticizing the horrid media coverage of the Schiavo episode. If we give him some more time maybe he'll come around eventually.

Guantanamera!

Do the prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo sing the words of the the traditional Cuban folk song Guantanamera? Do andriods dream of electric sheep?

Regarding the first question, you may be asking yourself, isn't Castro's island of Cuba part of the Axis of Lesser Evil? So why the hell does the U.S. have a military base there? In 1898, the U.S. defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War. The U.S. took possession of the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Phillipines. The U.S. granted Cuba its "independence" in 1902 but retained the right to intervene in Cuba affairs under the Platt Amendment. This Amendment also granted to the U.S. the right to establish naval bases on the island and so the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay was established in 1903. Today its used to house and abuse the "enemy combatants" captured during the War on Terror. Fidel Castro has erected some nasty anti-American propaganda billboards which criticize the abuses in U.S. military prisons.

Here The Heretik has carefully examined the role of U.S. Torture Czar Alberto Gonzales in the abuses at Guantanamo:

The Heretik expresses extreme skepticism in Mister Gonzales.  He is a singular disgrace in this entire sorry litany of shame.  Anyone with any doubts should read what Mister Gonzales believes is permissible and then read the United States Constitution.  Read them in that order and don't eat before hand.  Because if you read the Fourth Amendment and then Gonzales, The Heretik makes no guarantee you will not be sick to your stomach.