General Discussion

By Dave Lindorff

Last week, a US federal district judge, Henry Kennedy, ruled in favor of a case brought by the survivors of the crew of the USS Pueblo, a spy ship captured by the North Korean Navy in 1968, who were held prisoner by North Korea for 11 months, and who were reportedly tortured in captivity. The judge awarded the men $65 million in damages from the state of North Korea.

Now I’m happy for the plaintiffs. Torture is flatly banned under international law, and nobody should be tortured under any conditions (whatever Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may think). But let’s not ignore the irony of this ruling. In general, the federal courts have been incredibly reluctant about making such rulings against the US government for doing the same thing that North Korea did, or even worse.

by Linda Milazzo

I don't believe in god. I never have. I don't believe in religions. I study them, but I don't practice them. I try to understand them to be sensitive to the beliefs and traditions of others, and to attempt to appreciate the motivations behind religious thought and deed. But they are irrelevant to living my life.

Long ago as a freshman at CUNY's Queens College I was introduced to Taoism. Taoism began in ancient China as a religion, then morphed into a dogma free/deity free philosophy. Since my late teens I've tried hard to apply MY understanding of my Tao to my life. I have the freedom to choose my own path and not judge the paths of others. But since I have freedom of opinion, I fall prey to judge. I try not to. But I do.

Through the Tao, I'm both a peacemaker and a warrior since Taoism couples with the art of self-defense. I understand my right to protect myself when needed, and to protect the defenseless when they need me. Since I'm by nature protective, it suits my sensibilities to aid the weak, where I fancy myself absurdly as inordinately strong.

Bush's No Regrets Tour
By Ellen Goodman | Boston.com

I was doing fine until I saw the rocking chairs. My attacks of Bush-bashing were in remission. I told myself it was time to move on, to embrace the change you can believe in and, well, you get the idea.

So when the president - he's still the president? -popped up on television, I would repeat what Republicans told Democrats in 2000 after the Supreme Court ruling made George W. Bush president: Get Over It. Snap Out Of It. When he made a cameo appearance to socialize another piece of the economy, I silently counted the days of his tenure, backward.

By Dave Lindorff

The deafening silence from American government officials and from the US media regarding the criminal Israeli assault against civilians in Israel’s ghetto of Gaza, where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are trapped every bit as brutally as were the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, is beyond unconscionable.

` As Israeli shells and bombs and rockets rain down on university buildings, clearly marked ambulances, and homes, it has to be pointed out that much of the ammunition being used, as well as the planes that are delivering this death and mayhem, are provided by the United States and by American taxpayers—with no strings attached.

By Dave Lindorff

Vice President Dick Cheney has cultivated the image of a serious tough guy, with his grim, scowling vissage, his dismissive "So?" comments when things go badly, his unrepentant defense of torture, including waterboarding, and his brash statements confirming that he approved the interrogation measures that clearly violated US criminal statutes and the Geneva Conventions.

But it appears we willl in a few days get to discover whether Cheney really is a tough guy, or whether he is in truth just the same corpulent, self-centered hypocrite and gutless coward that he was back in the 1960s when, despite being a vocal backer of the Vietnam War, he ducked the draft not once but five times by arranging for student and marriage deferments, which he later defended by saying he had "other priorities" than serving his country.

by Linda Milazzo

For years since the United States invaded Iraq, I've witnessed countless photo and video images of innocent civilians - men, women, teens and children - being rudely and aggressively threatened by hired uniformed militants (mostly men), wielding guns. I've seen these images from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, Palestine, and more. Whether they be armed American military threatening Iraqis, armed Israeli soldiers threatening Palestinians, or armed Ethiopian troops threatening Somalis, the images have always disturbed me. There's an inherent injustice to such blatant imbalance of power. An injustice I suffered recently myself.

The oddity here is that unlike those less fortunate innocents in war zones who faced the guns of hired aggressors, I was not in a war zone when I faced mine. I wasn't even in a high crime zone. I was in a gentle middle class suburb, where my aggressor, an armed Brinks, Inc. security guard, was in full combat-mode performing his non war-zone duty. My aggressor more typified the machismo of a Blackwater guard than the demeanor of community-minded Brinks, when he flailed his loaded gun at me, as though he'd done it often before. My armed Brinks aggressor was not merely disrespectful. He was downright hostile and dangerous. He treated me as his enemy and freely showed me his force.

Here's how it happened:

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have long known: that the White House and in particular then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report, which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable justification for launching a war.

By Dave Lindorff

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional wisdom in our conventional media that Barack “No Drama” Obama will not seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for crimes committed over the past eight years—not even for authorizing and promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America’s wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and “terror.”

12 things to throw at Bush
A shoe? Not bad. But surely we can do better
By Mark Morford | SFGate.com

A shoe is an honest choice. Civilized. Convenient. Sends a simple "you're an artless jackass, and everyone knows it" kind of message. What's more, a hurled shoe is a timeless bit of wisecrackery, sort of like a pie in the face or standing up and hurling your drink at your two-faced lover in a restaurant. Classic.

But this is Dubya we're talking about. Worst. President. Ever. Surely he deserves better. Surely he deserves something a bit more ... thoughtful? Profound? Ironic? After all, while a shoe is nice, it's also terribly cliched. Boring, even.

By Dave Lindorff

When Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi heaved his two shoes at the head of President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, he did something that the White House press corps should have done years ago.

By Dave Lindorff

` We workers of America, white collar, pink collar, blue collar, and no collar at all, have just gotten a wonderful example of the power of having a union. It’s an example that should have every unorganized employee in America looking for a union organizer.

With the recession deepening, it’s clear that major layoffs are in store, and that employers are going to be putting the squeeze on employees, even if they don’t drop them. Individually, workers have little leverage in such a situation.

By Dave Lindorff

A brief conversation I had earlier this week with a car dealership executive while standing in a post office line demonstrated simply both why the bank deregulation and consolidation process of the past two decades has been a screw job for ordinary people, and why the Washington bailout has been both a taxpayer rip-off and a failure (if it was even intended to work!).

I was chatting with the guy standing behind me who works at one of the 14 dealerships in a Philadelphia-area regional family-owned chain of GM dealerships called Bergey’s. Noting that a number of big dealers like Knopf (a Chrysler Dealer) and McGarrity’s (Ford) had been closing, I asked this Bergey’s manager if the problem was that the banks had frozen lending, making it hard for people to buy new cars.

By Dave Lindorff

Before the odor of burned gunpowder has left the air of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the US is lecturing India not to go off half-cocked and attack Pakistan, simply because all of the attackers in the terrorist assaults in that city arrived by boat, apparently from neighboring Pakistan. US officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are calling on India to engage in a “transparent” and “thorough” investigation into the attacks to establish who was responsible.

How different this is from the American government’s response to the 9-11 attacks in the US!

Nixon bids nation goodbye in historic resignation
by Stacy Smith Segovia | The Leaf-Chronicle

President Richard Nixon's resignation in the face of impeachment after the Watergate scandal was not a surprise to Americans. Still, his announcement Aug. 8, 1974, that he was quitting our nation's highest post was a blow.

No American president had ever before resigned, nor has one since.

The day is singular in American history.

The Leaf-Chronicle chose to cover the story by leading with Ford at the top of the page, above the name of the newspaper itself. "Nation Has New President" Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle proclaimed on Aug. 9, 1974.

The article, by Gaylord Shaw of the Associated Press, begins:

Comments: State justice confirms he yelled "Tyrant!" at Mukasey before AG collapsed
By Ken Armstrong | Seattle Times

Richard Sanders, a justice on the Washington State Supreme Court, has never been one to shy from controversy or blunt language. And last week, as he sat at a Federalist Society dinner and listened to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Sanders reached his tipping point.

After listening to Mukasey defend the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies — its detainment practices at Guantánamo Bay, its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions' reach — Sanders stood and shouted "Tyrant! You are a tyrant!"

By Dave Lindorff

I am not a terrorist.

How can I prove this in these paranoid times? Easy. The New York Department of Motor Vehicles took my $30 payment over the phone to clear what they said was a record of my NY drivers license having once been withdrawn, and informed the National Driver Register in Washington that I’m a good guy deserving of a renewal of my Pennsylvania drivers license.

Let me explain.

By Dave Lindorff

I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago, and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping again.”

Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get Americans back into the malls.

In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.

By Dave Lindorff

It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it will fail in the end.

The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.

For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed, a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car market wither.