US government establishes outright military dictatorship in Pakistan

All this prattle coming from the White House and its allies in the Democratic-Republican Party about DEMOCRACY, but that’s not what Bush has arranged for the world’s largest Muslim country, Pakistan.

Pakistanis get military dictatorship and make no mistake about that since the coup is absolutely DC approved, despite the unconvincing words from Condi Rice about being ‘disappointed’ with this latest development right as Musharraf declares martial law.

The US has given $10 billion dollars to Musharraf in the last 6 years to carry out US foreign policy in the region, and this thug is thoroughly paid for by the US taxpayers. That’s what the entire world sees even if Americans continue to play deaf, dumb, and blind to what’s going on in their name.

Sure the US government would have preferred, like before when occupying Iraq, that its policy for Pakistan would be greeted with flowers and praise. That not being the case, though, the US still is absolutely going to push on with its destructive foreign policy objectives, no matter what the consequences are to people in other countries. War criminals really don’t care about that. They just want to get their own unilateral way and will kill and pillage to do so.

For an interesting comment by the commondreams artist in residence, Natasha Mayers, see ‘Thank You, Pakistani Lawyers, For Showing Us How’

US army blocks efforts to build Canadian protest against Bush

The Council of Canadians has been blocked by the US army from building a public protest against a major summit to be held in Montebello, Quebec in August.
 
Bush and the Mexican ‘President’, Felipe Calderon, are two of the bigwigs that will be attending . This effort to seclude protest away from public view may foreshadow the types of violations of the right to protest and the right to free speech that will probably be put into effect during the Democratic and Republican Party conventions coming up next year? In the abstract we have the right to public protest which is a basic exercise of our supposed right to free speech, but in the concrete this is often violated in some form or another.

Democratic Party corruption sinks the heart of Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan has been grieving a long time, and this Memorial Day after the capitulation of the Democratic Party legislators in Congress was particularly rough. But it is more than that. The pain is made even worse by how inactive so many rank and file Democratic Party voters are in opposing this war.

At street vigils we see this, too. So many liberal minded folk wave and honk their horns in support of our vigil, but then it seems that they never get out of their cars to be the protesters, and not just the driver by-ers. After a while, this becomes disheartening.

We hope that Cindy gets her spirits back up and rejoins the activist antiwar movement after some family time off. She deserves the best, and she has given America her best. Here is her last commentary about how despairing she now feels. Many feel the same alongside her.

We are sad to see it be so, but when push comes to shove, the Democratic Party is not to be relied on. Cindy Sheehan tried to push the Democratic Party into action, but the corporate controllers resisted. She is not the first, and will not be the last to fail in such a project.

Good Riddance Attention Whore
by Cindy Sheehan

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

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Numb skulls awarding peace prizes

Two weeks ago I wrote about a CIA funded Otpor spokesperson in town talking to local pacifists of Gandhi and nonviolence and how supposedly that had overthrown Milosevic in Yugoslavia instead of the US and NATO bombs rained down on his country. Then last week I wrote about a NM Department of Tourism run ‘peace’ festival in Albuquerque funded to the tune of $450,000. Sappy ‘peace’ rhetoric run by the Chamber of Commerce basically. This week I guess the focus has to be on the Australian ‘Sidney Peace Prize‘.

This one just blows me away, too! The prize was awarded to none other than Hans Blix, which is the most absurd award of a peace prize since Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1973! We truly live in an Orwellian world these days when initiators of wars are so often given prizes by people spouting pacifist ideology.

Hans Blix was the guy who set up all the lies about Saddam Hussein and Iraq having WOMD that Bush and his Democratic and Republican Party enablers used to launch the invasion and occupation of Iraq. No way he deserves a peace prize, and actually he might better be executed as a war criminal instead. Without his personal act as wrench-er up of the propaganda, hysteria, and panic, the world public would never have gone along much as they did with initially supporting the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

This is just one more example of how pacifist beliefs and desires by much of the public can often be distorted into its opposite by simplistic twists of illogic. Then we get numb skulls awarding peace prizes to war criminals like Hans Blix and Henry Kissinger.

PS- I am still trying to get over how the local ACLU cut off audience questioning of CS police chief Richard ‘Liars’ Myers last week. The ACLU organizers required that all questions be vetted and then read by one person alone to the audience. Because of this, the annual meeting of the ACLU turned into a hug and handshake fest with the cops. Shameful. If the city of Colorado Springs had tried to do this sort of stunt at the city council meeting we would all have gotten peeved off. But instead, the audience silently sat by while the police chief fed them a long sermon of crap. And then many of the crowd applauded just that! Sometimes some amongst the ‘peace’ crowd can make one wanna cry with their innocence and naivete.

The destruction of Iraq is not a US government policy aberration

Iraq is no mere aberration by the US government. The Democratic Party would have us think otherwise, but just as top Democratic Party officials set the stage for supporting Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, they have also gone along totally with Republican policy in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Somalia, too.

There the Democrats supported policies of destroying these other countries by illegally fighting wars under false pretenses, and using proxies to do most of the fighting for the Pentagon. Nothing is different from Iraq.

The fighting in Afghanistan threatens to continue to extend itself into Pakistan. The fighting in Lebanon threatens to extend itself into Syria and Iran (especially if Israel has its way). The fighting in Somali, threatens to extend itself into renewed fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Everywhere the Democrats follow along behind the leadership of the Republican Party, large areas of the world start to crumble into deepened anarchy, destruction, and despair.

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon is directing its most cowardly war. There, the Pentagon regularly is dropping bombs into civilian areas from thousands of feet up high. They just don’t seem to care about the ‘collateral’ damage done to innocent people, as long as Pentagon allied casualties are kept as low as possible. We cannot ‘support our troops’ in that country at all, as they have been turned by the Bush Administration into nothing more than a bunch of mass murderers.

In Somalia, the Pentagon send in troops from Ethiopia, and then has taken thousands of new prisoners to torture in hidden jails throughout Africa, all done Abu Ghraib-Guantanamo style. Close to half a million refugees have been sent scurrying out of Mogadishu alone, where most now face starvation and death by disease.

In Lebanon, much of the country still is in ruins, with cluster bombs everywhere in unknown locations for civilians to step on. Will the US give the Green Light again for Israel to start the fighting up once again? Will the US and Israel attack Iran and Syria, too? The failures of the Iraq War to do anything other than destroy are not aberrations of one Republican Administration, but is only one face of the entire fiasco of America’s bipartisan foreign policies. We need to stop all these wars now. Shame on us if we fail to act, and if we The American people don’t act, the carnage will be extended and extended and extended, all in our name. Protest is patriotic now, and sitting on our butts is not.

The US will attack Iran because the Democratic Party top leadership supports that, too

We are all in a waiting game, waiting for our government to attack Iran. There is one reason only why this attack will occur at this point in time, and that is simply that the top leadership of the Democratic Party also supports this new war as well as the Republican Party presidency led by Cheney. Because of the faith by so many in our population that the Democratic Party actually represents a true opposition to the Republican Party government, we The People have been immobilized. We lost important time and now it is much too late to successfully stop this madness from occurring.

That is the price we pay for so many having delusions that America is a true democracy despite the evidence in front of our very own eyes. Our rulers think that military force will conquer all but it will be the common people in America, along with our government’s foreign victims, that will pay the full price for our corporate rulers’ vicious arrogance. May the world forgive us for our complacence, immobility, and compliance. We failed to act.

The farce

America’s idiotic politics has been never more pathetically framed than in the grand pseudo debate over the nonbinding resolution on whether to ‘surge’ or not. All the Democratic Party posturing done here doesn’t add up to a bean of real opposition to the Bush Administration’s constant war plans. Instead, we the public, got merely a grand show, a grand farce of pretend ‘opposition’ that is not a real opposition by any yardstick of measurement.

What delusion, what illusion, that the Democratic Party in actuality even opposes any of the torture, war, and bankruptcy being engaged in by ‘our’ Empire. The Democratic Party leadership is more delusional about Bush’s war than even the Republican Party itself is! And folk that follow behind them are as much the problem as the rabble of Republican Party nitwits themselves.

Iraq is not even the main issue, a new war against Iran is not just the issue neither. Torture and destruction of the Constitution of the US is not the issue. Destruction of the environment is not the issue. The real issue is whether the US population has anything other than total lethargy and apathy within itself to offer up for self-protection? The issue is whether the US public can ever begin to mount any campaign to rein in the fascistic minded corporate power that is sinking the whole ship? Or will it just allow itself to be pacified by nonbinding do-nothing irresolutions and pathetic babbling by a phoney play pretend opposition? The real issue is whether the public is going to ever be able to dump both of the two corporate parties, or not? They both got to be thrown out and not just one, for things to ever begin to start to change.

Nonbinding resolutions what a crock! There is no real national opposition to the war machine other than what we can put together from near total scratch. We’re staring into the possibility of Bush using nuclear weapons soon and all the Democrats can come up with are nonbinding resolutions? It’s beyond nauseating and meanwhile the public just goes on driving around in circles nonstop in their oversized and imbecilic vehicles! That’s what the real issue as our population acts more like a deer in the glare of the headlights of an oncoming truck than anything else. One out shopping…. One out to lunch.

Democracy cannot be built nor sustained on such a foundation of immobilization. We need a third party. We need a movement. Any more of this business as normal by liberals hooked into the Democratic Party is a dead end.

Super bowl Janet Jackson and Republican morality.

This is something I published a couple of years ago. Every bit as relevant as today. And every bit today as then, some things are timeless.
This one contains a “dirty” word, so you might go ahead and set your browser Content Filter to profanity blocking. Better to censor yourself than try to censor me.

But now, once again, we are going to have the hyperbole and rampant commercialism pushed onto our senses, over and over and over and endlessly and I bet you thought I was going to say over again and again and again and repeatedly.

I don’t know the exact date of the Super Bowl. Just that it’s about a couple of weeks. I know the Chicago Bears are going to be one team, because of the hype I got as soon as I opened one of my email servers.

I am sure everybody is going to get lots and lots of Emails saying Bears or ? you choose… or New Poll: Who will it be Bears or ?

There will be jockeying to find out what the commercials are going to be for the half-time show, there will be much breathless wide-eyed awe and stories about what the commercials and so much (ok, I lied, there are more than one “dirty” word in this) all kinds of who-seriously-gives-a-fat-rat’s-ass-about-it bullshit, to lead us up to the Big Game.

A lot of the commercials are going to be for beer. And other drugs, especially alcoholic drugs.

You know the ones, they say at the end of it “(name of brewer/distiller) urges you to DRINK (notice they put this word last) responsibly”.

It is dope dealing at its finest. The crack house and the opium den and the weed corner are blown away (sick dope reference) by this magnum opus of Purveyance of Demon Rum.

And it is on a Sunday, a Pagan holy day, co-opted by Christianity, for worship of our respective God or gods. Pastors in Churches across the land are going to schedule their services, especially the evening services, around this latter-day Circus Maximus. And their morning services too, because the worshipers are going to have to rush to the store after services so they can score their dope and munchies for the BIGGGGG DEALLLLL…….

So I got the Super Bowl part embedded in our consciousness, right?

Now to the Republican Morality part, for a quick tease, then to Janet Jackson and the Infamous Titty Incident, then back to a slightly longer rant on Republican “Morality”.

The owners of the NFL teams, virtually all of them, are supporters of the Republican party. And the R’s pay it back in spades by supporting legislation that makes the PUBLIC TREASURY pay for the stadia, (yes, I spelled that last word right, I’m practicing my Latin, are you?) the security, the traffic control, and in-stadium dope I mean Beer Sales. That last because some stadia, like the ill-fated Cotton Bowl in Dallas, are in dry precincts. Which is the real reason the Cowboys don’t play in Dallas, for decades it has been in Irving, and next year it won’t be in Dallas County even.

The cities have to pay for the construction of the stadia out of bond money, and they are always told that it will boost the local economy.

Also here in Colorado, there was a guy running for Senator, you might recognize the name Pete COORS. And yes, he is heir to the beer fortune.

On to The Titty Incident.

Janet Jackson, during the half-time 3 years ago or was it 4, I lose count of things like football. Got her costume deliberately torn at the end of a song and exposed part of her (gasp! the HORROR!!) breast. Now, I didn’t get to see this. I don’t watch football. The homo-eroticism of 22 very large gentlemen throwing their bodies at each other doesn’t do it for me.

There was much scandal. Much public outcry. Much Breast Beating in the halls of Congress, (yeah, I know, that last joke was horrible but I had to get it off my chest) even the Commander in Chimp of the United States saying that he hadn’t watched the incident, but it was a lovely breast.

Ok so I might have taken a little liberty with that last statement, but I don’t keep abreast of the off the wall statements of Mr Bush, every time I try to watch one of his speeches my brain tries to escape by crawling out my left ear.

The Moral Outrage sweeping the country was amazing, especially in the R party.

Like Mr Coors.

 During the 04 super bowl, and I know I know, the Super Bowl calendar starts from S.B. I and S.B.II and so forth, with the not-very-subtle Roman numerals numbering system. Instead of A.D. or C.E., measured from the birth of Christ or the birth of Christianity, depending on your faith viewpoint. But I don’t worship the oblong ball. So it matters naught to me how the Hell many S.B. there were.

Mr Coors was OUTRAGED about this public impropriety. How dare they interrupt his half time show where he had a commercial or two over the years, with scantily clad women whose costumes showed a substantially higher percentage of overall Breast Acreage than Ms Jackson did, telling the poor saps watching that somehow they would have a shot at touching these breasts if they only buy his brand of Dope. For people who keep up with such things, these are the modern version of the Vestal Virgins performing their religious duty at the modern Circus Maximus, the Cheerleaders, who get paid a paltry amount for their Services on the field, but get much more opportunity working in commercials. Like for Mr Coors.

Since this was an Election Year, when all the Noble Laws about the Half Time show being lagged 4 seconds or so just to protect America from such an awful sight ever again….

And the Republican NFL team owners who pimp out these Vestal Virgins as part of their Circus, were also outraged, that Ms Jackson would Dare To Expose America to a sight of substantially less breast-age than their own cheerleaders and even most of the Female fans and even some of the (ewwweewwww) male fans show during every game. I mean, one team has its fans wear cheese on their heads, and paint their naked upper torsi green and yellow, and show over and over again one in particular a set of udders that would make a topless dancer envious (or nauseous) and who happens to be a guy (I think)

So this year we will be (or you will be, I plan to be out riding my bicycle, while the streets are practically deserted for four or five hours) watching a heavily subsidized, heavily censored, erotic commercial enterprise, knowing that the GOP Big Brother apparatus will be protecting us from such unseemly behaviour ever again occurring.

US aggression against Somalia shows that America’s rulers are truly sick

How much of this continual US military aggression is going to be tolerated by the American people? Both the Democrats and Republicans are criminally responsible for continually breaking international law. They seem to think that they have carte blanche to make war, assassinate, torture, and invade other people’s countries at will! And worse, they have our government continually pushing other countries to do the dirty work for them.

The American people are not for this. We do not have a democratic system in place that gives us recourse to stop these continuous atrocities our government is continually making in our name. God spare us the revenge that will eventually be extracted on us for sitting by passively while these atrocities continue. We may not have a real democracy in place where thesse criminals that call themselves politicians can be removed at the voting booths, but we do have the ability to get out into the streets, make noise, and stay there until we can cause a popular rebellion to change our corporate dictatorship to something more humane.

Get involved! Make sure your local antiwar groups protest this latest military aggression against yet another downtrodden third World country, and get out into the streets with signs, banners, and your physical and personal presence!

Ethiopia Out of Somalia! Get the US out of Somalia! Stop the US government murder and mayhem everywhere! And throw these top Democratic Party and Republican Party politicians into jail where they truly belong.

Peak Oil and America’s economic unsustainablity

Half or more of the Republican group of voters may disbelieve in major tenets of current scientific theory such as evolution, the warming of the global climate, or even that the earth is older than what the Bible states it as being, but there is one element of scientific reality that Republican leadership is certainly making its plans around, while Democrat leadership is completely lacking. That is the scientific reality that world oil and natural gas supplies have become depleted by overmining these natural resources in the recent past until the very present.

We may not like the road the Republican Party is taking us in trying to deal with this scientific reality of energy resource depletion, but it is still true that the last 6 years of the Bush presidency have greatly advanced the public in beginning its realization that reaching resource peaks will produce real crisis. Not only for Americans, but the entire world population. And also for the energy companies themselves, as public anger is certain to rise in a volatile manner, and is certain to eventually be directed at the energy companies themselves.

Right now, we have both major US capitalist political parties pretending that our new permanent war to secure energy supplies is not in fact just that, but rather is a war to protect the ‘homeland’ from a shadow-like, political rif-raf, which they call terrorism. And neither party has any strategy what-so-ever to conserve energy resources, nor to change our structure of economic activity into more rational alternatives. The big business profit making must go on for these two, even if the world doesn’t, it seems.

So what we are left with is that the Republican big wigs advocate continual warfare to corner world energy resources, while the Democrat Party advocates basically nothing to ward off the impending economic/ecological collapse! And all the liberal voters basically propose nothing more than voting for this do-nothing political party, the Democrats, even as they sometimes point out the need to take ecology into account somehow within a capitalist framework. But can that really even be done? The entire historical foundation of capitalism is the overuse of natural resources. It’s like asking a zebra to change its stripes and behave like a kangeroo.

All of America has been convinced by the business community that socailism cannot work, precisely at the moment when it is evident that capitalism cannot work without destroying the ecologic basis of all life on our planet. So we have a population totally unprepared and stupidly looking around, desperately for some impossible new technological fix to bail capitalism out of its impossible dilemma.

Here is an article in Money Week on Peak Oil that would not have been published even a couple of years ago. It even discusses the various transition periods we will traverse as we enter into increasing energy scarcity. Yes, the Republican Party types are out in front in acknowledging valid scientific theory on this issue. Why we must take Peak Oil seriously

Our city’s unlikely Republican roots

To quote the late Herbert Sommers, who wrote about his childhood in turn of the century Colorado Springs, about Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to the city on August 10, 1901. Roosevelt was then Vice President of the country and within less than a month would succeed William McKinley after his assassination.

Theodore Roosevelt’s visit was an enormous bally-hoo and preceded his famous hunt in which he spared what became his namesake teddy bear.

In the 1900 election the Republican party was not popular in Colorado Spings, but Sommers wrote about the aftermath of Rooselvelt’s momentous visit:

If you do not think that this event gave life and character to every boy in Colorado Springs, then you do not know boys. Every boy became a Republican and all became active readers of our daily paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Evening Telegraph was also a Republican paper at that time and it, too, had an increase in reader support.

Light summer fare

Congressman Westmoreland do-nothingHere are some wonderful video clips, if you haven’t seen them already:
 
1. Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland wants to post the Ten Commandments in the halls of congress, if only to be reminded of them himself. Here he is in an interview with Stephen Colbert.

2. If you haven’t seen it yet, Stephen Colbert’s address to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. While you’re at it, read Colbert’s follow-up commencement speech.

3. Jon Stewart spars with Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman, and empathizes with him because “you have to spray perfume on the turds.”

4. Ask-a-Ninja explains net neutrality.

5. A David Copperfield sendup and an amazing juggling finale.