Time to shut-down the UN
Everyone knows Bush’s grand-plan for the Middle East, so why are the IAEA and Security Council pretending that the administration is genuinely interested in Iran’s fictitious nuclear weapons program?
Haven’t they seen this charade before?
It’s impossible that the main players don’t understand Bush’s real intentions or know that the nuclear issue is simply a pretext for war. Bush has telegraphed his belligerence at every opportunity even going so far as to announce to the Iranian people that his hostility is not directed at them, but at their government.
Bush’s appeal to the Iranian people is absurd. He’s asking them to abandon any sense of national loyalty so that he can violently replace the regime with an American client.
It’s crazy.
That’s right; the Washington warlords are planning to use nuclear weapons in an offensive attack.
This is madness.
When the bombing begins in Iran, the UN can finally board-up its doors and send the diplomats home; there’ll be no more reason to maintain the pretense. An attack on Iranian facilities will signal a period of global realignment where states either submit to the Washington axis or join the growing resistance. We are quickly moving towards Bush’s dream of a world that is divided into “us against them”.

TIME FOR BUSH FAMILY INTERVENTION
By Bill Gallagher
This troubled soul must be stopped. President George W. Bush is more frightening every day. Defusing his madness is imperative to save the world from unthinkable suffering, well beyond the misery he has already wrought. The president is bonkers.
Anyone with an I.Q. exceeding an amoeba's now knows the reasons for war with Iraq were concocted and Bush didn't give a hoot what the intelligence indicated.
Bush needs a court of enablers willing to affirm his lies and coddle his intellectual dishonesty. Bush is most comfortable surrounded by his nanny circle -- his mother, his wife, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and Harriet Miers. They tell him just what he wants to hear, how wonderful he is, and nurse his boo-boos. The nannies serve their man while betraying our nation.
It's unlikely, perhaps impossible, but what Bush really needs is a bitch-slap intervention from some manly men. No one is telling him what he doesn't want to hear -- Iraq is a disaster and he needs to radically change his approach to prevent further damage and more chaos and violence in the broader Middle East. His musings about military action against Iran are simply insane.

When GI Joe Says No
If 1960s activism was fueled by disillusioned outrage, then today's activism is fettered by a type of world-weary cynicism. Braga says most of the guys in his unit assume the war is based on lies and that it's all about oil, but they won't get involved in peace activism because "They say, 'You can't change anything.' But if you read history you see that usually people already have changed things," he says. "Movements have made lots of things happen."

"Stuff Happens"
"I could eat a baby through the bars of a crib."

Report says Rumsfeld allowed Guantanamo abuse
Salon cited Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, an Army investigator, as saying in a sworn statement to the inspector general that "The secretary of defense is personally involved in the interrogation of one person."
Schmidt is quoted as saying under oath that he concluded Rumsfeld did not specifically order the interrogation methods used on Kahtani, but that his approval of broad policies permitted abuses to take place.

Voter Distress Could Alter Upcoming Races
More and more, Americans are frustrated with politics as usual in Washington, where incompetence, arrogance, corruption and mindless partisanship seem the norm rather than the exception — a pox on both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Analysts say the public may be getting angry enough to give the U.S. political system a jolt, one way or another.

If You Don't Mind, Why Don't You Mind?
The trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion per year, and the United States is having to borrow more than $2 billion per day to pay for our profligacy. And it is China – our greatest strategic adversary – that loans us much of those sums. Never could anyone have imagined that the most powerful and arguably democratic nation the world has ever known would give its most threatening competitor and the world's largest remaining communist nation such direct control over its economic destiny. Where is your sense of indignation?

Time Running Out for Rebuilding of Iraq
In their makeshift offices in a former Baghdad palace, a small army of American builders and engineers, oilmen and budgeteers is working overtime on last-minute projects to help reconstruct Iraq.
Their time is running short, their money running out.
After three years in which the U.S. government allocated more than $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction, a bill now making its way through Congress adds only $1.6 billion this year, just $100 million of it for construction — not for building schools or power stations, but for prisons.

US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran
The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
"That's the name they're using," the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.
A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war."
But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.
"There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.
The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.
"If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle," the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.

Iran: The Next Neocon Target
I worry that before we can finish the war we're in and extricate ourselves, the patriotic fervor for expanding into Iran will drown out the cries of, "enough already!"
The agitation and congressional resolutions painting Iran as an enemy about to attack us have already begun. It's too bad we can't learn from our mistakes.

DHS's 'Operation Predator' snares two of its own
It's called "Operation Predator," a high-priority Department of Homeland Security program that does battle against those who prey sexually on children.
Now, with the arrest Tuesday night of a department deputy secretary, at least two of the agency's own top personnel stand charged with just such offenses.
Brian Doyle, deputy press secretary to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, faces 23 counts of using a computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor. He was caught in a police Internet sting in which a detective pretended to be a 14-year-old girl.
The other Homeland Security official charged with a sexual offense involving a girl is veteran administrator Frank Figueroa, 49, the ICE special agent in charge of the agency's operations in central and northern Florida. Figueroa, who also ran the agency's El Paso, Texas, office, has pleaded not guilty to charges he exposed and fondled himself to a teenage girl last year at a mall in Tampa.
Former Top DHS Child Porn Official A Sex Criminal?
Now we discover -- that law enforcement agent, Frank Figueroa, used to run Operation Predator.
The victim, a 16-year-old girl, said Figueroa pulled up a leg of his shorts, exposed himself and masturbated for about 10 minutes, according to the Tampa Tribune.
Figueroa was in court this morning; he pleaded no contest to charges of exposure of sexual organs and disorderly conduct. He had formerly said he was not guilty. His trial is expected to begin tomorrow.

Good News! The Rich Get Richer
Lack of applause for falling wages is media mystery
As the New York Times put it (12/6/05), the economy “has improved in the past two years, though polls show that most people think it has gotten worse.” USA Today (12/5/05) had it that “despite positive economic numbers, polls show that many Americans believe the economy remains weak.” And the Los Angeles Times (12/6/05) referred matter-of-factly to economic “good news,” noting Bush’s concern that “voters give him little credit for the improving economy.”
Again and again, the majority of Americans’ understanding of their own economic situation was presented as somehow disconnected from reality, ascribed to “pessimism,” ignorance or irrationality.
(Meanwhile back at the ranch...)
The New York Times’ Paul Krugman was likewise direct. “Americans don’t feel good about the economy because it hasn’t been good for them,” he wrote (12/5/05). While “GDP growth has been reasonably good, and corporate profits have soared” in recent years, Krugman explained, “most families actually lost economic ground,” with real median household income falling for the fifth year in a row.