Being Poor's the Real Crime as Cops Nab Trash Thieves
These poor people think they can waltz up and down our alleys, eat food out of our trash containers and then make off with our most valuable garbage, aluminum cans that have a street value of 75 cents a pound.
People who dress up in nice suits and work in tall buildings don't work anywhere near as hard as someone who spends all day hauling enormous bags filled with cans up and down alleys.
Let's see. At 75 cents a pound, you only have to collect a hundred pounds to earn a whopping $75. You could live on that for days.
Kin Hubbard, one of those homespun humorists in my home state of Indiana, used to say that being poor is no crime, but it might as well be.
Increasingly, we criminalize the act of being poor.
We haven't quite reached the point of Mexico City, where entire families live in an enormous dump outside the city waiting for the garbage that sustains them to be delivered.
So our poor people have to go out and get their own garbage. You could call that entrepreneurship and the American way. Or you could call it a crime.

Osama, Saddam and the Ports
From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman
The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what’s the difference?
...after years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn’t attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can’t suddenly turn around and say, “But these are good Arabs.”

Your e-mails: Raw deal over U.S. ports?
(CNN) -- A proposed business deal that would turn control of six U.S. ports over to an United Arab Emirates-based company has raised security concerns among some lawmakers. CNN's Jack Cafferty asked viewers of the "Situation Room" what they thought. Here is a selection of their responses, sent in by e-mail:

Ask the families of our war dead if they think we should hand over security of our ports to a foreign government. The very idea of it is obscene. And Mr. Chertoff, our brave troops aren't making those sacrifices to protect "robust trade." You shouldn't be in charge of a neighborhood watch if you believe half of what you say.
James, Fayetteville, North Carolina

You got it wrong, Jack. The #1 priority of the Bush regime since 9/11 has been to promote the illusion of safety. The hypocrisy is so transparent even Bush's puppets are finally seeing the treasonous sellout of our country for the crime it is.
Toni, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

The impending sale of the ports to the Arabs is proof positive that the administration is pouring water on our shoes and telling us it's raining. It's also evidence that a deal has been cut somewhere. I just don't believe they are that stupid. Then again, I could be wrong.
John, Jacksonville, Florida

It's hypocritical and appalling to talk about national security and then sell off control of vital US ports to any foreign country, especially a Muslim one.
Justin

I used to think President Bush should be impeached. I think now, he needs to be committed! There is no end in sight to the insanity of this administration.
Evelyn, North Carolina

Isn't this port situation like McDonalds hiring Burger King to run their business?
Charles, Fort Wayne, Indiana

You have got to be kidding me. Our government has not learned a thing from 9/11. Shame on all of you that are making this happen!
Mark, Baytown, Texas

If they want to have foreign companies do security in our ports, they need to have the standards as our TSA -- U.S. Citizenship.
Linda, Port St. John, Florida

Outsourcing has gotten out of hand. This latest situation is insane! Why don't we just give them the keys to the White House?
George Townsend, Bradford, Vermont

THE NEW AMERICAN POLICE STATE
"When I saw that the neoconservative response to 9/11 was to turn a stateless war against terrorism into military attacks on Muslim states, I realized that the Bush administration was committing a strategic blunder with open-ended disastrous consequences for the United States that, in the end, would destroy Bush, the Republican Party and the conservative movement."
I agree with that, but I didn't write it. No liberal did.
The author is Paul Craig Roberts, one of the creators and champions of "supply-side economics," the great conservative cause of the early 1980s. As a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and then assistant secretary of the treasury under President Reagan, Roberts was a true believer and an effective advocate. His political stance is pretty well summed up in the title of his newest book: "The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice."
"Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are not our protectors," he adds. "Americans need to understand that many interests are using the 'war on terror' to achieve their agendas. The Federalist Society is using the war on terror to achieve its agenda of concentrating power in the executive and packing the Supreme Court to this effect. The neoconservatives are using the war to achieve their agenda of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Police agencies are using the war to make themselves less accountable. Republicans are using the war to achieve one-party rule ..."
"Debate is dead," Roberts concludes. "One certainty prevails. Bush is committing America to a path of violence and coercion, and he is getting away with it."

U.S. Church Alliance Denounces Iraq War
A coalition of American churches sharply denounced the U.S.-led war in Iraq on Saturday, accusing Washington of "raining down terror" and apologizing to other nations for "the violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown."
"We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," said the statement from representatives of the 34 U.S. members of World Council of Churches. "We mourn all who have died or been injured in this war. We acknowledge with shame abuses carried out in our name."
"Our country responded (to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks) by seeking to reclaim a privileged and secure place in the world, raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors … entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of national interests," said the statement. "Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."
The Rev. Sharon Watkins, president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), worried that some may interpret the statement as undermining U.S. troops in Iraq.
"We honor their courage and sense of duty, but … we, as people of faith, have to say to our brothers and sisters, `We are so profoundly sorry,'" Watkins said.

What Happened To My Country?
The difference between the United States, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy is steadily and inexorably diminishing and the people are letting it happen while they remain paralyzed with fear.

Eyes Wide Open
What shall we say when history asks how such crimes came to be committed in the name of America? Will we say that we stood silently by, shrugging our shoulders, filling our bellies, closing our eyes?

37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty
A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Bush ignored CIA advice on Iraq
In an article in the next edition of the bimonthly journal, Foreign Affairs, Paul Pillar, has become the highest-ranking CIA official from the prewar period to accuse the White House of manipulating the intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The allegations contradict the findings of two official inquiries into the intelligence debacle, which have largely blamed the CIA and absolved the administration. They also emerged on the day it was reported that Lewis Libby, a former aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney, had told a grand jury that he had been "ordered" by "his superiors" to leak classified WMD information to the press to bolster the case for going to war.
The White House made no direct response to Mr Pillar's claims. Mr Pillar said the White House had simply ignored intelligence that did not conform with its intention to invade. "It went to war without requesting - and evidently without being influenced by - any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq." The "broadly held" intelligence assessment, he said, was that the best way to deal with the weapons problem was through an aggressive inspections programme to supplement the sanctions already in place.
"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war - or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath."

The White Noise of Scandal:
The Rude Pundit
2/10/2006
What's it gonna take for the general public to be shocked anymore? 'Cause, really, and, c'mon, this week's news alone ought to be enough to make the head of even the most casual observer of the nascent Washington scandals explode into a shower of skull and viscera, raining down on the ignorant. The White House knew the levee hadn't held and that New Orleans was being drowned a day earlier than previously admitted? Scooter Libby was told by Dick Cheney and other "superiors" to break the law and leak classified information? Tom DeLay is put on the House subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department, while said department is investigating DeLay's buddy, Jack Abramoff?

Intel pros say Bush is lying about foiling 2002 terror attack
"The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world," says a longtime field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. "He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington."
Within hours of the President’s speech Thursday claiming his administration had prevented a major attack, sources who said they were current and retired intelligence pros from the CIA, NSA, FBI and military contacted Capitol Hill Blue with angry comments disputing the President’s remarks.
“He’s full of shit,” said one sharply-worded email.

Abramoff says he met Bush "almost a dozen" times
Jack Abramoff said in correspondence made public on Thursday that President Bush met him "almost a dozen" times, disputing White House claims Bush did not know the former lobbyist at the center of a corruption scandal.
Abramoff added that Bush also once invited him to his Texas ranch.
Bush has said he never had a discussion with Abramoff and does not remember having his picture taken with him.
Photos Of Bush And Abramoff

BYU’s Dr. Steven Jones Blows the Roof off a Utah Auditorium
Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth
On Wednesday, February 1, a quiet, “churchy-looking” gentleman in a white shirt and tie walked into a packed auditorium on the campus of Utah Valley State College and electrified the room like a rock star. The 150-seat auditorium was filled to capacity, with every seat occupied, and people sitting in the aisles from the stage floor to the back of the room. Video cameras on tripods lined the back row. Two documentary-film crews were in attendance, in addition to the school’s camera crew, and various independent journalists. Seven “spill-over” rooms, with seating for 40-50 each, were also filled to capacity. On this very conservative campus (in the most conservative county in the most conservative state in the union), where community leaders pulled out all the stops in 2004 to prevent Michael Moore from speaking as part of his anti-Bush, pro-Kerry “Slacker Uprising Tour,” Dr. Steven Jones, this pious professor from the Mormon Church-owned Brigham Young University, calmly, gently, gave a simple physics lesson on the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, the implications of which awed the audience with a sense of world-historical significance, and implied an indictment of the present administration so utterly devastating that it made Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a Bush apologia.
Dr. Jones argues that the physics behind the government’s explanation of the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11 do not make sense, and that a better (and perhaps only) explanation for their collapse was that they were demolished, exactly the way structural engineers bring down large buildings, by pre-positioned explosive devices set off in precise sequences. He argues that the 650 degree Celsius temperature of burning jet fuel would not have been hot enough to even bend the steel girders of the WTC Towers, let alone to melt or evaporate them, as recovered beams indicate. And even if it was hot enough to evaporate the steel, the towers should not have collapsed as they did, pancaking so perfectly into their own footprints. On the rare times when such structures have failed (always due to earthquakes), they have toppled over sideways. The towers would have had to have been perfectly sliced, at every point along a horizontal plane at exactly the same instant, for something even resembling a pancaking effect to occur. And even if they did somehow pancake perfectly into their own footprints due to a structural failure, they would not have done it in the time it took for them to collapse, falling at essentially the speed of an apple dropped from the top of one of the towers, with nothing between it and the ground but thin air. The steel and concrete in the floors that collapsed should have taken some measurable time to break, and thus slowed the collapse somewhat as it unfolded. And even if it did collapse, at super speed, phwack phwack phwack, floor by floor, as fast as an apple falling through the air, impelled by the weight of the decapitated structure above it, its solid steel frame severed like a head by a flaming guillotine, that does not explain the molten steel seen at the Ground Zero clean-up site many days after the event. What could have caused such heat? asked Professor Jones.
And on it went, point by point, for almost two hours. Nothing about the physics of “what we know” about 9/11 seemed to add up. And all that’s not to mention the mysterious collapse of the forgotten WTC-7, the third steel-frame building that imploded due to fire, not only that day, but in the history of architectural design--the building that was not hit by a plane, that was surrounded by other buildings equally impacted but structurally undamaged by the collapse of the towers, that, with no jet fuel or violent impact, but allegedly due to a small number of scattered “debris fires,” collapsed, pancaking perfectly into its own footprint, looking exactly like video images of buildings being demolished by pre-positioned explosive devices. Playing the one available video of WTC-7 collapsing at slow speed, Dr. Jones used his laser pointer to indicate the explosive “squibs” clearly seen shooting their way up the sides of the building as it collapsed from the top center down. He showed still images of similar micro-explosions on the sides of the Twin Towers, with steel beams clearly visible, ejected out of the sides of the buildings, ahead of the dust, blown out before the above portions collapsed.
It is a devastating presentation, and one could feel the disequilibrium of 150 minds reeling at once. The defining moment of contemporary American experience suddenly lost its definition. What is the meaning of 9/11? What really happened that day? If these things are true, the implications clearly point to some kind of “inside job” involving the government of the United States of America. (The Department of Defense, the FBI, and the CIA all had offices in the mysteriously collapsed WTC-7. Is it reasonable that outside terrorists could have infiltrated that building and filled it with explosives? ) If the WTC was brought down by pre-positioned explosive devices, somehow facilitated and covered up by the government, it would be the most audacious conspiracy in human history. When before have so many people been so spectacularly bamboozled, with so much death and destruction, and such massive implications for geo-politics? Never, that’s when.

Why Russia caved-in on Iran
It may be, in the words of the Godfather, that the Bush administration made Putin “a deal he couldn’t refuse”. For one thing, MosNews reports just yesterday that “Lukoil will replace the disgraced Halliburton” in providing fuel in Iraq.
Does the administration really need a war with Iran so desperately?
Yes.
The truth is, that even the control of oil is not nearly as critical to the US as maintaining it’s continued dominance in the exchange of oil in greenbacks. If Iran is allowed to open its oil bourse (exchange) in March and openly compete with the US’s monopoly on trading oil in petrodollars, the central banks across the globe will dump hundreds of billions of dollars overnight, and the American economy will disappear beneath the waves.
This is not fiction.
The Lukoil transaction should prove to skeptics that Washington is prepared to give up anything to prevent the opening of Iran’s oil exchange. The UN Security Council is just the last step before military operations begin.
The Bush administration is dead-set on attacking Iran and removing this existential threat to the American economy and the ongoing supremacy of the reserve currency.

An Open Letter to Bubba
I’ve seen you driving your gas guzzling SUV with the “Support Our Troops” ribbon on the back. I’ve seen you wearing your pro-war/pro-bush t-shirts as you walk right past me in my Iraq Veterans Against the War t-shirt as if I don’t exist. And I’ve seen you at anti-war rallies and meetings where I often speak, as you wave your American flag and call me a traitor. In this country we have freedom of speech. But you owe me and every other veteran of this war the respect of listening to our experience.
Your magnet says “support our troops,” but what have you done for us? Not a penny of the proceeds go to us, instead they go to sweatshops in China. You say that I am not supporting the troops when I say that they should come home.
I know that the Iraq war was not worth fighting. I know, because I fought there. You say I’m confused. But what do you know about Iraq? You’ve never been there.
Keep coming to the rallies. Maybe I’ll get through your thick skull eventually. But remember I waved my flag in Baghdad, so you can sit down, shut up, and listen to me.

The Failure of Citizenship
We are witnessing an all pervasive mediocrity in government that has come as a result of a spectacular failure of citizenship. We are a people that value ease and convenience over self education, sacrifice and truth. We do not demand evidence in support of our views. We believe what we are told; and we do what we are told by authority. We do not like to make trouble. Asking questions requires self examining critical thinking, a skill that is rapidly disappearing from our culture of fluff and ease. We want the kind of life where the decisions are made for us—a life that does not place demands upon us. We want to be entertained, not informed by burdensome truths that may assault our conscience and cause psychological injury. That is dangerous knowledge because it would dispel the myths about what America really is. It would force us to think differently about who we are as a people. We would see us as the rest of the world sees us.
If you are a republican of ordinary means and you think that George Bush is looking out for your social and economic interest, I feel sorry for you. You are a damned fool who is unwilling to confront the evidence, afraid to see what is really there. You are encouraging and cheering on the very ones who are raping you.