Left News and Views

A friend forwarded this youtube video:

I love the original song, and I usually like a good parody, but the subject matter for this one is a little hard to take. Which led me to a few other videos like these:

Congressman Brad Sherman of California’s 27th congressional district told the House in a speech on Thursday evening that several fellow Congressional Representatives have stated they were threatened with the prospect of ‘Martial Law’ should they vote in opposition to the $700 billion bailout.

Congressman Sherman’s revelation comes after multiple claims that this threat was being ramped up to aid the now $850 billion bail out through the House this past Friday.

Earlier this week, Congressman Michael C. Burgess from the 26th District of Texas, went public on Monday stating live on Infowars nationwide radio broadcast, that House speaker Nancy Pelosi had declared House Rule 136A, effectively putting the House under “Martial Law” rules, a dictatorial measure only activated during times of national emergency.

Here’s a video of  Burgess on the House floor:

Analysts and Congressmen alike have equated these threats to “fearmongering” and described them as a form of “economic terrorism” carried out by powerful banking interests in order to secure the record $850 billion payout to the banks by the American people.

According to numerous Congressional testimonies, the stark panic atmosphere which has gripped both Congress and the US media was intentionally created in order to ’fast-track’ a financial bailout bill. Several members of Congress were told before Monday’s vote that martial law might be instigated in America if the legislation failed.

Dennis Kucinich on the Democrats’ Bailout Betrayal
Posted on Oct 5, 2008 - TruthDig.com
By Chris Hedges

The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.

We are on our own. And don’t expect any help from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who lobbied hard for the bill and voted for it. Ignore their rhetoric. Look coldly at the ballots they cast against us. We, as citizens, have only a handful of representatives left in Washington, most of whom were left sputtering in rage and frustration on the House floor. The sad irony is that some of them were Republican.

This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from Cleveland. It is a direct attack on the American people’s ability to be able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without representation, to markets that are openly rigged.

“We buried the New Deal,” he said of the vote. “Instead of Democrats going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the economy and start money circulating among the population through saving homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block this. This is an outrage. This was democracy’s Black Friday.”

Truncated, for the complete article, see: www.truthdig.com/reportitem20081006_dennis_kucinich_on_the_democrats_bailout_betrayal/

From Radio Havana Cuba:

Washington, October 3 (RHC)– Throughout the United States, homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments — or Tent Cities — in recent years. According to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless, nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they’ve experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007.

The coalition says the problem has worsened since the report’s release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening. Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said that it is clear that poverty and homelessness have increased, adding that “the economy is in chaos, we’re in an unofficial recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the
middle class, about their future.”

According to media sources, the phenomenon of encampments has caught assistance groups somewhat by surprise, largely because of how quickly they have sprung up.

Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project — an umbrella group for homeless advocacy organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, California, as well as Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington — said that the relatively small city of Santa Barbara in California has designated a parking lot for people who sleep in their cars or trucks.

Boden also said that the city of Fresno, California is trying to manage several proliferating tent cities, including an encampment where people have made shelters out of scrap wood. In Portland and Seattle, homeless advocacy groups have
paired with nonprofits or faith-based groups to manage tent cities as outdoor shelters.

Other cities where tent encampments have either appeared or expanded include Chattanooga, Tennessee, San Diego, California and Columbus, Ohio.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported a 12 percent drop in homelessness nationally in two years, from about 754,000 in January 2005 to 666,000 in January 2007.

But the 2007 numbers omitted people who previously had been considered homeless — such as those staying with relatives or friends or living in campgrounds or motel rooms for more than a week.

In Seattle, which is experiencing a building boom and an influx of affluent professionals in neighborhoods the working class once owned, homeless encampments have been springing up in remote places to avoid police sweeps. Homeless people and their advocates have recently organized three tent camps at City Hall in Seattle in acts of civil disobedience. The camps are to call attention to the homeless and protest the sweeps.

According to media sources, the phenomenon of encampments has caught assistance groups somewhat by surprise, largely because of how quickly they have sprung up.

A letter to the editor the Cumberland Times-News published eight years ago from Jan D. Tuckley.

The economy of the corporate capitalists is like a bicyclist who has ridden over a cliff.

Unaware that they are in free-fall, they pedal madly and are thrilled with their speed.

In 1971, 90% of international financial transactions were related to the real economy (trade or long-term investment) and 10% were speculative. By 1990 these percentages were reversed, and by 1995 about 95% of the vastly greater sums were based upon nothing more than pure speculation.

Money now moves around the world at a speed that defies and baffles government regulators. Policies to “liberalize” investment, combined with advancements in information technology now allow about $1.5 trillion a day to travel across borders as foreign- exchange transactions. Only one to two percent of these transactions are related to trade or foreign direct investment. The remainder is for speculation or short-term investments that are subject to rapid flight when investors’ perceptions change.

After Mexico suffered a rapid exodus of capital in late 1994, the International Monetary Fund and other global agencies claimed that they had set in place new safeguards to prevent a repeat.

Yet, over these same years, the IMF and the U.S. Treasury Department were pressuring nations to remove remaining restrictions on inflows and outflows of finance and investment.

The rapid flight of short-term capital from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea in late 1997, and from Russia and Brazil in 1998, revealed that dozens of other countries are Mexico-style crises waiting to happen as nervous investors
move their money elsewhere at the touch of a computer key.

The focus at this point is on using money to make money by expanding bank lending, creating real-estate bubbles, and speculating on fluctuations in prices of currencies and other financial instruments. The financial excesses we are now witnessing on a global scale are much like those that preceded the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

The mechanisms employed by finance capitalism to make money from money, without the intervening necessity of engaging in productive activity, allow those with money to increase their claims against society’s stock of real wealth without contributing to its production.

Meanwhile, by 1999, the wealth of the world’s 475 billionaires was greater than the combined income of the poorest half of humanity.

In the U.S., Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ net worth is equal to that of the poorest 120 million Americans combined. The average CEO of a U.S. based multinational corporation now pays himself some 425 times the amount of his company’s entry-level employees.

These same capitalists also own the major media, which are constantly bragging about about how great the economy is doing. Actually, in terms of real purchasing power, the income of the average American worker is 13 percent les than it was in 1972.

The average American household now holds some $6000 in credit-card debt alone. Millions of Americans are fighting to keep up while finding themselves in an ever-downward financial spiral.

There are really two separate economies in place. There is that of the corporate elite and that of the rest of humanity. The top one percent of the American population now have more wealth than the entire bottom 95% combined, and this gap is continuing to grow.

The corporate elite, their “Public Relations” spin-doctors and purchased politicians would have us believe that “A rising tide lifts all boats.” In fact, it lifts only the yachts. A tidal wave is on the way.

Jan D. Tuckley
Ridgeley, WV
July 14, 2000

Eight years ago, and Jan nailed it perfectly. The housing bubble bursting and the economy racing towards a second Great Depression are indeed what corporate greed has brought us. People like Jan have been trying to warn us all for years and thanks to mass media and their corporate masters the general public never heard them. Thanks.

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

— Thomas Jefferson
1812

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

— Benjamin Disraeli
Prime Minister of England
1844

Eat the Rich

From talk on the net …

People think that a banking or stock market collapse must be bad for everybody, but it’s not. If you know a stock collapse is coming (because you are going to cause it) then you sell at the highest price, crash the market, and buy back at a few cents on the dollar. In this way, those who cause the crash can end up with vastly more stock, and thus financial power, than they had before the “crisis” and they pay comparatively little to secure it.

The Rothschilds have famously, and infamously, used this technique endless times and they are doing so again today. In the US most recently with their partner JP Morgan in 1929, and again with Rockefeller and JP Morgan Chase in the, decidedly infamous, 911 market crash.

The thing to remember about banks, as with the business and financial world in general, is that there may be many names above the doors, but there are far fewer ultimate owners and controllers. If you go high enough, at least most of them are named “Rothschild. ”

So when public and media commentators talk about a terrible time for the banking industry they miss the point.

Of course, it is bad for those who lose their savings, homes, jobs … lives … But that, to those without access to empathy like the Rothschild Monarchy, is unworthy of thought, let alone dialog or feeling.

After all, they cope with the deaths of thousands in their industrial empires each day.

Basically their business is to ’steer’ the rudder of global corporate warfare and calamity daily. Every day the banker monarches must say yay or nay to uncounted ‘prospectus sellers’ who propose the ‘collapses of towers’ to offset a public opposition to a ‘mineral-acquisition’ war in Africa, or a ‘native-land-acquisition’ war in Latin America, or an ‘oil- acquisition’ war in the Middle East. The body-count statistics shift with the attendant media-spin and public awareness or motivation.

The Banker Monarchies, and their associated network of subordinate families, own the system – the game - and however that system may re-adjust and re-structure itself from time to time the game is still theirs. For example, Merrill Lynch may have failed, but it has been absorbed by the Bank of America, a Rothschild bank if you follow the trail of hidden ownership, and so the game just goes on under different, and fewer, names.

Lehman Brothers may have collapsed, but the vultures, like Barclays in Britain, are circling the corpse to seize the most profitable assets and the game goes on. If you own the game, are part of the security state, you always win because you make the laws under which it is played. The laws which do not apply to the security state members themselves.

The paradigm shift today, due to Global Consciousness, is this bringing of the dialog to the public. To honor life and mind, and take the whole world population under the protection of the voluntary ’security’ state, to finally share the knowledge, the truth of all cultures … for all to share in the decision making. And each to be the locus of the decision making for our own cultural, regional, local, family and personal lives.

The end of global, financial, serfdom, slavery.

People are sacred divine beings, not victim guinea pigs to be modified with the poisons of the oil-chemo war machine, sliced and diced as the ’seven-billion-spare’ body parts for the pharmo-medical monster mouth — you and I are the source and soul of song, of consciousness, of the ‘media medium’, all the arts and humanities, of all herstory.

This experience, of the ‘now’, today, is known as refinement, enlightenment.

Knowing, honoring, the WHOLE rainbow of world culture.

Our GLOBAL ENLIGHTENMENT is Love, aka Respect ….

From SocialistWorker.org:

October 1, 2008

Quickly organized protests around the U.S. drew opponents of the bailout for Wall Street (Joe Newman)

AS THE smoke cleared after Monday’s stunning House of Representatives vote against a $700 billion financial bailout for Wall Street, the politicians immediately got down to the business of blaming each other–and scheming about the next attempt to push through this rescue of the super-rich.

But for working people trying to figure out what the hell has happened to the U.S. financial system–and why the leaders of the U.S. government, apparently regardless of political party, are prepared to spend more than $2,000 for every man, woman and child in this country to save Wall Street–the reaction was different.

For one thing, there was sweet satisfaction to be taken in the fact that the bankers and stockbrokers didn’t get their way for once–especially since they’re out to steal $700 billion in taxpayers’ money to cover their bad investments, under a program devised by former Wall Street CEO and now Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

With the business world ratcheting up political pressure and Paulson predicting certain doom if no action was taken, the Bush administration and the leadership of both parties in both the House and Senate were all sure that the bailout bill would go through. Yet the legislation was derailed because members of Congress are feeling the heat from a growing popular outrage over the staggering scale of a giveaway to the very same people who led the economy to the edge of the abyss.

It was an all-too-rare turn of events for the U.S. political system–the opinions of ordinary Americans actually mattered in what happened.

At the same time, though, there’s a sense of foreboding. If the government can’t agree on a bailout, will Wall Street really crash and burn–and cause an economic catastrophe on Main Street, too?

Read the rest of this entry »

How many zeros in a billion?
This is too true to be funny.

The next time you hear a politician use the word "billion" in a
casual manner, think about whether you want the "politicians"
spending YOUR tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising
agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective
in one of it's releases.

1. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

2. About a billion minutes ago, the Roman Empire was in full swing. (One billion minutes is about 1,900 years.)

3. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

4. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

5. About a billion months ago, dinosaurs walked the earth.
(One billion months is about 82 million years.)

6. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the
rate our government is spending it.

7. If we wanted to pay down a billion dollars of the US debt, paying
one dollar a second, it would take 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour,
46 minutes, and 40 seconds. To pay off a trillion dollars of debt,
at a dollar a second, would take about 32,000 years.

8. A tightly-packed stack of new $1,000 bills totaling $1 billion
would be 63 miles high. In comparison, jet planes fly at 30,000 -
40,000 feet (5.7 - 7.7 miles high).

9. A billion inches is 15,783 miles, more than halfway around the
earth (circumference). 

10. The earth is about 8,000 miles wide (diameter), and the sun is
about 800,000 miles wide, not quite a million.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain...
let ' s take a look at New Orleans ...
It ' s amazing what you can learn with some simple division.

Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D)is presently asking Congress for
250 BILLION DOLLARS to rebuild New Orleans .  Interesting number...
what does it mean?

A.
Well... if you are one of the 484,674 residents of  New Orleans
(every man, woman, and child)you each get $516,528.

B.
Or... if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your
home gets   $1,329,787.

C.
Or... if you are a family of four...your family gets  $2,066,012.

Washington, D. C
< HELLO! >
Are all your calculators broken??

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL License Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax < BR>Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Luxury Tax
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Service charge taxes
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax (Truckers)
Sales Taxes
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Tax
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago...
and our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

We had absolutely no national debt...
We had the largest middle class in the world...
and Mom stayed home to raise the kids .

What happened?
Can you spell politicians?

The Denver Police could not have meant to reinforce the image of police officers as bully boys for the government with this shirt could they?

I can see the tongue-in-cheek humor, but really, was this the wisest thing to do in today’s political climate? Probably not. It seems to have caused a fair bit of uproar on the net.

From The Colorado Independent:

By Ernest Luning 9/25/08 5:08 PM

Protest groups are demanding Denver police halt the sale and discipline anyone responsible for the creation of a “commemorative” DNC T-shirt distributed to officers featuring a baseball-bat wielding cop and the slogan “WE GET UP EARLY to BEAT the Crowds 2008 DNC.”

The black T-shirt — which also displays a 68 with a slash through it, a reference to demonstrators’ intentions to bring the spirit of the 1968 Democratic National Convention to Denver — has been available for sale since the week after the convention at the office of the Denver Police Protective Association, a union representing most of Denver’s 1,400 police officers, according to DPPA employees.

What does this say about our police officers?

They have a dark sense of humor?

Brian Maass,CBS4 NEWS, over at Rocky Mountain News says this about it:

A tongue-in-cheek T-shirt poking fun at Democratic National Convention protesters is selling fast and creating some minor controversy along the way.

The shirts were created and distributed by the Denver Police Protective Association, the union that represents most of Denver’s 1,400 police officers.

…

The Denver police detective who produced the shirts, Nick Rogers, says he has received no complaints until now. He said the shirts are being sold for $10 each at the Police Protective Association offices.

He said every Denver police officer was given one.

There’s more to the story though, as I found out over from Michael Roberts at The Latest Word:

This graphic can’t help but recall flyers that juxtaposed a riot-gear-clad policeman and the slogan “WE BEAT YOU THEN! WE’LL BEAT YOU AGAIN,” which appeared prior to the DNC. Those, too, referenced Re-create 68, and the group’s reps suspected the Denver Police of being behind them — at least until Westword reported that an artist who later revealed himself to be Pete Bergman had created them as a combination art project and media prank.

Predictably, the Re-create 68 forces don’t find this coincidence to be amusing.

…

Here’s the flyer:

I can see how someone might see that as offensive.

However, I can see how the police might be offended by the whole re-create 68 movement. Considering the violence of the 1968 convention.

I don’t believe provoking unneccessary violence is ever a good idea.

by Kevin Phillips
The American Prospect
5/5/08

As of spring 2008, we’re probably just a third of the way through the unfolding debacle in the housing, credit, and financial markets. In political and regulatory terms, the ultimate problems and remedies have only begun to define themselves.

We’re not just looking at an ordinary recession. Since the 1970s, the United States has redefined itself from a manufacturing nation to a financial economy built on debt, leverage, and a considerable ratio of speculation. Both political parties have been complicit in this, and the downturn now beginning will be unusual and potentially tragic.

The case being made in some reform-minded and progressive circles — that we are on the cusp of a grand political, ideological, and pro-regulatory opening such as that of 1933 — has some logic but also merits a considerable amount of economic and historical caution. The plausible analogies deserve a quick run-through. To begin with, there is the prospect that, over the next few years, the largest credit bubble since the Roaring Twenties is going to unwind with at least some of the angst and pain of the Depression years.

In 2007, total credit-market debt in the U.S. reached almost 340 percent of gross domestic product, far above the previous high-water mark of 287 percent a few years after 1929. Second, it is also becoming likely that the 2006?2010 decline in U.S. home prices will be the largest in three-quarters of a century.

Read the rest of this entry »

From my inbox last week:

http://www.gp.org/index.php

Please Take the time to see what the Green Party has going on. I was going to withhold my vote this year… something I have never done- but I see that voting Green Party will tell the rest of the nation that we don’t have to put up with these atrocities any longer! So, please- take the time to see what they are doing. After all, how many hours have the Democraps and Repuglicans taken up of your time?????

Also, I will say, once again, what I have said since the Supreme Court committed treason and appointed a president of the United States. The ultimate goal of the Bush Juggernaut is a fascist government and the total collapse of the U.S. Dollar. How far away are we now? Besides, I still won’t believe the bastards have left the White House until the helicopter has flown away from the White House, Bush, Cheney, wives and dogs in tow.

So, what the hell? “And it’s one, two, three- what are we fighting for?” {Country Joe McDonald and the Fish} It has taken a lot to break the bank for this Once Great Nation…. But endless extreme war {in which Bush Co. has profited to the extreme on the hardware of war- an international war crime, might I add), corporate give-aways, tax-dodging for the very wealthy, funding of heinous piracy on Wall Street, and other atrocities as yet unrevealed certainly have changed the tides of financial realities. The aristocrats learned from the French Revolution… don’t let the peasants know who is really in charge.

What will we do? Well, as I was reminded this morning, there is a Chinese blessing/curse for this moment in History… “May you live in interesting times.” Right on! Let’s live it then. And while you are at it, please consider turning off the black magic box in your life… your television! You are being mesmerized by the Beast itself! Stop. Look. Listen… this is, after all, our world and our lives, too. Let us live by our own convictions and means.

Good luck to us all… and may we be able to see the interesting times for what they are!

From Earthmother Carla

I know a lot of people are saying that taxpayers who took out home loans that they couldn’t afford don’t deserve to be bailed out. But, it is not like we took out a quarter of a million dollar loan to buy a sports car, damn it. Yes, I am indeed taking this stuff personally.

We had five people ( me, my husband, our two kids, and my mother) living in a two bedroom trailer(18×80). None of us had any space or privacy, ever. The baby had to sleep with me and my husband, and Mom shared a room with our 7 year old son. We had to do something.

So, we took a loan from Wells Fargo, because they told us it was the only way we could get a bigger home (3 bedrooms versus the 2 that we were living in). You know what we got - a home worth $63,000 that, by the time we pay off the mortgage, will have cost us $250,000. But we’re the greedy, selfish bastards who don’t deserve a bailout, or apparently, a home to call our own.

The people on “Main Street” are the ones who built a country we could all be proud of, while the fat cats on Wall Street have once again managed to throw us all in the sewer. Thanks. I hope we someday get to return the favor.

We seriously need to reinvoke the Glass-Steagall Act.

I am not the only one to think our financial system is full of craziness either, check out this post over on Will Blog for Food.

Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act

By WILLIAM KAUFMAN

If you’re looking for a major cause of the current banking meltdown, you need seek no farther than the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

The Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking in order to protect depositors from the hazards of risky investment and speculation. It worked fine for fifty years until the banking industry began lobbying for its repeal during the 1980s, the go-go years of Reaganesque market fundamentalism, an outlook embraced wholeheartedly by mainstream Democrats under the rubric “neoliberalism.”

The main cheerleader for the repeal was Phil Gramm, the fulsome reactionary who, until he recently shoved his foot even farther into his mouth than usual, was McCain’s chief economic advisor.

But wait . . . as usual, the Democrats were eager to pile on to this reversal of New Deal regulatory progressivism — fully 38 of 45 Senate Democrats voted for the repeal (which passed 90-8), including some famous names commonly associated with “progressive” politics by the easily gulled: Dodd, Kennedy, Kerry, Reid, and Schumer. And, of course, there was the inevitable shout of “yea” from the ever-servile corporate factotum Joseph Biden, Barack Obama’s idea of a tribune of “change”–if by change one means erasing any lingering obstacle to corporate domination of the polity. Read the rest of this entry »

by Edward F. Mazur

Sophisticated and elaborate plots are often plagued with one or more serious flaws or oversights, which if followed up doggedly, would expose them as malicious frauds. More often than not, such flaws are discounted or massaged by the architects and their abettors and although the explanations may not be generally accepted by astute observers they do contribute to the convoluted and tortuous pattern of evidence that keep researchers running in circles and chasing rainbows.

To solve the entire 9/11 puzzle—to connect all the dots—would certainly be desirable. But to dilute one’s efforts by taking in all the broad aspects of the entire series of events at the outset would be unproductive.

Six years have elapsed since the attacks took place at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and many of the pieces to the 9/11 puzzle still remain scattered and disconnected. A broad overview of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon points to American Airlines’ Boeing 757, Flight 77 as the weak link in the 9/11 incident. The official account of the Pentagon explosion contains inconsistencies and aberrations that can and should be explored and exploited.

French author and researcher Thierry Meyssan provided detailed data, photographs and drawings in his book bearing the English title, The Big Lie. It offered sound evidence to support the conclusion that what struck the Pentagon was not Flight 77 but probably a missile. Another French writer, Emmanuel Ratier, published Letter of Confidential Information—Faits & Documents, which won first prize from LeMonde for investigative reporting together with his dramatic presentation of a series of photographs entitled, No Plane Crashed Into The Pentagon.

David Ray Griffin, Professor of Philosophy and Religion is the author of five books on 9/11, His latest work, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, points out the many contradictory and false statements that have been allowed to remain without comment, clarification or retraction.

[Photos, cartoons and links added to original article]

See complete article at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MAZ20080911&articleId=10158

Warning! Graphic Photos!

Think before you click the following link. It contains pictures of war, in all its ugliness. If you’re under 18 Do Not follow the link, unless you’re considering enlisting, then by all means, click ahead. (Note the last photo)

From: http://mindprod.com/politics/iraqwarpix.html

Denial

Most Americans are in deep denial that their country would butcher children and civilians, routinely torture, or bomb homes. Yet nearly every American saw this live on CNN with his own eyes on 2003-03-20 when America did its Shock & Awe bombing of the residential sections of Baghdad on the opening day of the war. Granted, they did not see the blood spurting, but they saw apartments full of families being turned to rubble. Everyone knows perfectly well what happens when a bomb hits an apartment. Americans pretend the $2 trillion they borrowed for the war went for reconstruction. If that were so, every Iraqi would be living in a $400,000.00 USD mansion. That money clearly went for mayhem and destruction. Soldiers are trained and paid to kill, not build schools or hand out candy. America has behaved worse than Nazi Germany. Americans plug their ears and say “lah lah lah” as if that would erase their responsibility. How dare they claim to be a Christian nation!

Read the rest of this entry »

from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #551, 9/12/08

An Irish judge last Friday threw out drugged driving charges against a young driver, saying that a positive result for marijuana in his urine sample was not specific enough to allow him to conclude that the driver was indeed impaired. Judge Kevin Kilrane of the Ballyshannon District Court in Donegal also criticized the Road Safety Medical Bureau for failing to test for the level of drug intoxication in its drug tests.

Peter Gillen was pulled over shortly after 4:00am for driving erratically, and Garda Officer Sean Flynn described him as “very shocked, unsteady, and very agitated” upon being stopped. Gillen tested negative on a breath test for alcohol, but Flynn arrested him on suspicion of drugged driving, and a urine sample Gillen provided soon after came up positive for marijuana.

That wasn’t enough for Judge Kilrane to find Gillen guilty of drugged driving, which carries a harsh penalty of an automatic four-year loss of one’s drivers’ license. The mere presence of marijuana in Gillen’s system did not show he was impaired, the judge said.

“The defendant could have been stoned out of his mind or he might have had a trace element only,” Kilrane said. “At best, all you have is suspicion, and suspicion is not enough.” The evidence was “too thin” to convict he said, as he dismissed the charge.

Kilrane scolded the Road Safety Medical Bureau for only testing for the presence of marijuana and not quantifying the amount present. “It is not the fault of the gardaí,” he said. “It is the fault of the bureau that does not give a concentration of drugs.”

US states that have “zero tolerance” drugged driving laws operate on the same standard criticized by the Irish jurist. In such jurisdictions, the mere presence of marijuana or its metabolites is sufficient to garner a conviction, without the need to show actual impairment.

I have mixed feelings about this story. While I am definitely pro-marijuana, I am not pro-impaired driving, whatever the cause of the impairment.

Then there’s the fact that you can have a fairly high concentration of THC in your urine and not be impaired. Cannabis remains in your system for up to 90 days, depending on strength and frequency of use. I know from personal experience that you can test positive for marijuana even 45 days after quitting all usage.

What we really need is an accurate way for law enforcement officers to test for any chemical impairment (alcohol, pharmaceuticals, street drugs, or whatever) that will expose current impairment instead of past usage. The issue should be the driver’s ability to operate their vehicle safely, not what they choose to put into their own bodies.