Mysteriously, for a President at and under fire from all sides of the political spectrum, George W. Bush seems quite relaxed. Quite puzzling. of the Washington Post notes how Bush is looking to political historians to put things in context for him:
Not generally known for intellectual curiosity, Bush is seeking outthose who are, engaging in a philosophical exploration of the currentsof history that have swept up his administration. For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely expressingdoubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off course.
These sessions, usually held in the Oval Officeor the elegant living areas of the executive mansion, are never listedon the president's public schedule and remain largely unknown even tomany on his staff. To some of those invited to talk, Bush seems alone,isolated by events beyond his control, with trusted advisers takingtheir leave and erstwhile friends turning on him.
Bush is not even finished with his presidency and he is already looking back on it as if 20 years have passed. Newsflash: there is still a war in Iraq; Katrina victims are still being largely ignores; and the American public still has no faith in politicians. Get working!
Through scientific evidence, a research team recently found that the on the Kennedy assassination, which settled on a single-bullet theory, was flawed. The research team included a former FBI scientist. They conducted their at Texas A&M:
They found that the scientific and statisticalassumptions Guinn used -- and the government accepted at the time -- toconclude that the fragments came from just two bullets fired fromOswald's gun were wrong.
"Thisfinding means that the bullet fragments from the assassination thatmatch could have come from three or more separate bullets," theresearchers said.
"Ifthe assassination fragments are derived from three or more separatebullets, then a second assassin is likely, as the additional bulletwould not be attributable to the main suspect, Mr. Oswald."
Keep in mind that during the investigation the researchers used the ' new rules on how to properly analyze bullets. That had never been done before.
For anyone that lived during that time or saw the movie "JFK," this is definitely an article to read.
We are in the middle of a disastrous war that seems without end. We watched corruption run amok in a number of Executive Branch institutions. We saw first-hand the lack of competence in responding to a major natural disaster. We witnessed our reputation around the globe diminish drastically. Our national debt is sky-rocketing; our schools lack funding; and the opportunity gap between investors and most families is widening. Still, more so than any other time since I began following politics as a young adult, I am head-over-heels optimistic about our country's future.
I see more and more people -- Republicans, Democrats and independents -- relearning that political debate is supposed to be discussion about policy, not the cultural issues that divide us. As the New York Times' Maureen Dowd , "We may say a final, welcome goodbye to the wedge issues that havedivided Americans by race, ethnicity and religious conviction."
Translation: people are waking up to reality. For six years, we flirted with Machiavellian-style wedge politics. No more. People think it is getting old. Only 28% of the country, according to the latest , supports this President and his brand of politics -- that is significant.
Conservative constituents in Republican districts all throughout the country are telling their GOP representatives that we need to accept defeat and get out of Iraq, as the moderate House Republicans told Bush last week. Trends like these underscore our country's new embrace of reality.
People are thinking more critically on their own -- due in large part to the wealth of information on the internet.
So while leadership has suffered for the last six years, we can look forward to the next campaign season because it will be much different than the one in 2004. Yes, there will be a fair share of political attacks on both sides. But the most effective attacks will focus on policy and competence, not on who forgot to go hunting last weekend. No more picking your president based on which candidate you would be most likely to see at your neighborhood barbecue. It's about effectiveness and authenticity, not photo-ops and rhetorical muscle.
At the moment, as a country, we are one giant political oxymoron. Although challenges and disturbing circumstances look us in the eye, as a public we are thinking more clearly by putting reality over ideology -- that is a sign of progress. It truly is the best of times and the worst of times.
Yesterday was not the that George W. Bush met the Queen of England:
The firstwas 16 years ago, when his father George H.W. Bush waspresident. In her memoir, former first lady Barbara Bushrecounts that during lunch, she jokingly told Queen Elizabethshe had put their ``Texas son as far away from her as possibleat the table and had told him that he was not allowed to say aword to her.''
The queen asked the ``Texas son,'' George W. Bush, why thatwas and whether he was ``the black sheep in the family?'' Bushsaid he guessed that was the case and asked the queen who wasthe black sheep in her family. She laughed and didn't answer.The conversation then shifted to Bush's cowboy boots, accordingto Barbara Bush's account.
Even more than six years later, I am still amazed we elected this guy.
In my younger years I considered myself a Republican, I wasn't sure why, butit probably had something to do with my traditional points of view, even though my ways ofthinking were liberal. I suppose the bottom line was Ihad no clue. As I grew older I learned how to understand my views and combine andmold them into what turned out to be mainstream liberal. I'm not easilyconvinced or swayed about everything left, I need to see it, hear it andunderstand it before I hop on any band wagons. That's why when I saw the title , I was taken back a bit and thought another (nutty) conspiracytheory. Then I read it.
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there arecertain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutionalfreedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to betaking them all
I knew Bush did some evil things, andshould be impeached (and flogged), but how are they going to equate Bush toHitler?
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the couptook a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list.In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down:the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residentialareas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press,tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
NowI had to keep reading, I had to see how this British paper was going to tie U.S.policy to that of a military coup in Thailand.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy -After we were hiton September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weekslater, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that hadlittle chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. Wewere told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "globalwar" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe outcivilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the USaccepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincolndeclared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands ofJapanese-American citizens were interned.
2. Create a gulag - Once you have got everyone scared, the next stepis to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wantedthe American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal"outer space") - where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste - Thugs in America? Groups of angry youngRepublican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workerscounting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you canimagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the nextelection day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election;history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a pollingstation "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system - In 2005 and 2006, whenJames Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret stateprogramme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and followinternational financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans thatthey, too, could be under state scrutiny.
5. Harass citizens' groups - The fifth thing you do is related to stepfour - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a churchin Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, founditself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches thatgot Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, havebeen left alone.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release - In 2004, America'sTransportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list ofpassengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried tofly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peaceactivists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member ofVenezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; andthousands of ordinary US citizens.
7. Target key individuals - Bush supporters in state legislatures inseveral states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fireacademics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants,the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spokeup for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publiclyintimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening tocall for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
8. Control the press - You won't have a shutdown of news in modernAmerica - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and SidneyBlumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well.What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false informationthat is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth fromuntruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying.When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands foraccountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason - Cast dissent as "treason" andcriticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as itelaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expandthe definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, thepublisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush calledthe Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", whileRepublicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, andrightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason"drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that onepenalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution
.10. Suspend the rule of law - The John Warner Defense AuthorizationAct of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This meansthat in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers todeclare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that hehas declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and itscitizens.
Special Thanks to granny for pointing us to this information.
My thought's quickly changed. These steps are much more detailedin the article and can be .
2 other far left conspiracy theories that after seeing the information I was (conservatively) 65% convinced were true. Alex Jones's '' (w/ VIDEO), and Robert Greenwald's Iraq For Sale: ''.
famously predicted that technology and information would lead us to what he called a revolution of technology that would inevitably unite us and give us the ability to communicate to anyone in the world at anytime with just about any means.
I am a senior in and in three weeks I'll graduate with degrees in Advertising and Public Relations. One of my morning classes deals with : how to handle tough situations, having a plan in place, communicating facts and answering questions appropriately, etc. My morning class today, Persuasive Communication taught by Dr. Robin Meyers (author of the famous speech, and author of ,) took a detour from the syllabus - about Marshall McLuhan - to just talk. It's difficult to gauge how you're feeling as readers, but as a student I find myself not needing to see political banter or politics for a few hours, at least a few minutes, and rather find myself just wanting to talk.
As a student in , I felt the building shake as I sat in my fourth grade classroom at 9:02AM on April 19, 1995, the morning of the . I drove through the torrential rains and heard my mother scream as the phone disconnected the night she was buried underneath her own house by the - May 3, 1999. I sat in my 11th grade Government class and watched as the second plane crashed into the . Yesterday, I sat in an empty room, the living room where I'll soon occupy in my new home, and listened to the cries of a university, a city, a state, a country, about the horrors of what transpired at .
My life and the technology within it has allowed me to step out from a small suburban classroom, from a city-wide terrorist attack, from a statewide natural disaster, into what was the first of, unfortunately, many global tragedies. The global village has its ups and downs, and the down is that we must all experience the devastation of tragedy without ever feeling the ground shake or hearing the shots fired.
At the time of this publication, we have learned and and have begun to piece together the history of the individual: , , . We've watched a university stumble in crisis from , , and We've watched media outlets frantically interview second- and third- and fourth-hand witnesses and provoke emotional reactions. We've watched Fox News tell you how this will impact the stock market and the war on terror and the security and sanctity of our schools. Unfortunately, until now, we have yet to just talk.
McLuhan says, In this place, the home of inclusion and open-mindedness and intelligent dialogue, I hope the message can resonate from those values. I needed to engage the global village, to speak back to it instead of merely observing it. I hope you'll do the same.
If there's anything you'd like to share - comments, critiques,condolences, thoughts in general - please use the comments section todiscuss.
Although I'm not a religious man, I am a peaceful one, and out of respect for the Easter Holiday, I felt this would be an appropriatepost. This is a message of peace from Pope Benedict.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict led the world's Roman Catholics intothe second Easter of his pontificate on Saturday night, telling them not to fearevil or even death.
The 79-year-old Pope presided at an elaborate Easter Vigil in St Peter'sBasilica, the last event in a hectic week before Sunday's main Easter service inSt. Peter's Square.
"In the resurrection of Jesus, love has been shown to be stronger thandeath, stronger than evil," the Pope said.
He prayed that God would "descend into the darkness and abyss of ourmodern age, and take by the hand those who await (God). Bring them to thelight".
The Pontiff, who turns 80 this month, also baptized eight new members of theChurch, six adult converts and two children. They were from China, Cuba,Cameroon, Japan and Italy.
Here is a from then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in which he predicted that Iraq would be a quagmire if the U.S. removed Saddam and occupied the country:
“The notion that we ought to now go to Baghdad and somehow take controlof the country strikes me as an extremely serious one in terms of whatwe’d have to do once we got there. You’d probably have to put some newgovernment in place. It’s not clear what kind of government that wouldbe, how long you’d have to stay. For the U.S. to get involvedmilitarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who’s goingto govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire.â€
So how would you define this war, Mr. Cheney? An ? Oops! I apologize for putting words in his mouth. But he actually did say that.
What an amazing transformation it has been. Over the course of one decade, Dick Cheney went from a cautious realist to a knee-jerk ideologue. As Christopher Layne wrote in an op-ed in this morning's edition of , "If only George H.W. Bush's foreign policy realists were running the show.":
If the realists were still making US foreign policy instead of Cheneyand Bush Jr, they would be trying to negotiate with Iran instead ofcompounding the mistaken war in Iraq by engaging in recklesssabre-rattling that risks provoking an even wider war in the PersianGulf.
Like it or not, Cheney says that regarding Iran. With the Administration now in a lame duck position, we can only cross our fingers and pray that the next two years go by fast, and that the moderates in the White House (comparatively speaking) can outflank Cheney's influence.
During testimony today in the Scooter Libby trial, it was revealed that in 2003 CIA Director George Tenet wanted the White House to remove the part in Bush's State of the Union speech that claimed Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The CIA knew that the claim was false. But the White House was desperate to make the case for war, even if it meant tricking the American public into thinking that Saddam Hussein had nuclear capabilities.
Hardball's David Shuster explained that the White House rebutted the CIA's efforts to make sure correct intelligence was put into the speech -- just months before the start of the Iraq war (the video might be down from time to time. If you are unable to view it, come back in about 20 minutes and it should be available):
So for now on, no one can say that it was the intelligence community's fault that Bush got the wrong information about Iraq's WMD's. The White House cherry-picked intelligence to fit their pre-determined argument in favor of war in Iraq.
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