We hold these truths to be self-evident

4 07 2008

by lestro

Today is July 4, Independence Day.

Every year, I make sure to take 15 minutes out of my barbeque/fireworks/beer time to make sure I read the Declaration of Independence.

It’s a good reminder of who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to believe in about this country.

Unlike the Constitution, which is a working document designed to create and maintain a government that would protect the rights of its people, the Declaration is a statement of Ideals.

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Posted by EJP in Bush, Politics

From the less poetic, often forgotten about, but just as important section of the Declaration of Independence:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
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• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
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• He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
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• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

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"We, the Salt of the Earth, Take Precedence"

by Paul Craig Roberts

Which country is the rogue nation? Iraq? Iran? Or the United States? Syndicated columnist Charley Reese asks this question in a recently published article.

Reese notes that it is the US that routinely commits "acts of aggression around the globe." The US government has no qualms about dropping bombs on civilians whether they be in Serbia, the Middle East, or Africa. It is all in a good cause – our cause.

This slaughtering of foreigners doesn’t seem to bother the American public. Americans take it for granted that Americans are superior and that American purposes, whatever they be, take precedence over the rights of other people to life and to a political existence independent of American hegemony.

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Link to larger image

by OPOL 

Sun Jun 22, 2008 

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Some of you who were around when I first started posting at DailyKos a little over two years ago may remember the 'OPOL flame wars' as kos himself put it. Many of my ideas provoked great animosity in the dkos community. I was called every name under the sun, was threatened with banishment, and was the object of great wailing and gnashing of teeth. I was bitterly and enthusiastically criticized for saying things like:

The 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen.
The war on terrorism is a bogus invention meant to justify war profiteering.
The rise of the neocons amounted to a fascist coup.
The democrats enabled the neocons and in some cases were complicit in their crimes.
Our political system is broken and corrupt to the bone.
Bush and Cheney should be impeached.
The Bush administration committed war crimes.
Our government is enslaved to the evil of the Military Industrial Complex.
The American dream is just another lie.
Our government has no intentions of ever leaving Iraq.
We are running out of time to save the humans.

After all that has transpired over the past two years, these ideas seem much less inflammatory today. A casual reading of DailyKos these days suggests that most kossacks now agree with many if not all of these statements. The hideous nature of our present reality can no longer be denied by thinking people. The horror we face has begun to sink in. 

Naomi Wolf - Blackwater Fascism 


The propaganda machine we are subjected to from cradle to grave in this country is a powerful force. We are taught that this is 'the greatest country in the world', though we are not told why. American exceptionalism is drilled into us incessantly until it becomes one of those core beliefs not subject to deep questioning. It is hard for us to face that we are NOT the good guys, NOT the land of the free and the home of the brave, not really even a democracy, just a pretend one. The real power in America is not the vote - it's the buck. 

America is Tyranny 

 

In my view the time for action is nearly past. If we don't act decisively and soon, all will be lost. More and better Democrats is not the answer, and the reason is because the system is so corrupt that it taints anyone who gets near it. What we so desperately need (IMHO) is radical reform of our government and political system. A good start would be mandated public financing, outlawing all but the most benign lobbying, and to make lying in the course of one's official duties as an elected or appointed official, a major crime with severe penalties.
If we fail to do those things at a minimum, we will all die in due course of planetary neglect. The only question that remains, it seems to me, is do we give up or fight back?

Everybody Knows

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by: OPOL Fri Jun 20, 2008

I came of age in the time of Nixon and Vietnam.  I learned then that our government was not to be trusted, that they lie to us whenever it's convenient and that there is nothing pure about their motives.  I also learned to suspect that elements of our government played an active role in the assassination of John Kennedy and possibly others.  I'm not saying they did, just that I've pondered that possibility for most of my life and not without reason.  I still have to wonder.  The possibility that our government is that fucking evil shouldn't seem like such a stretch to anybody these days.

I just heard it described on CNN how a man arrested in Baghdad by U.S. forces was sodomized as many as 15 times, and another man was made to lay face down in urine, was raped and then urinated upon - all of this at the hands of U.S. servicemen.  This new information comes from the report released today by Physicians for Human Rights, and as disgusting as it is, it is nowhere near the worst of what has been done in all of our names.  And the claim that it was just some out-of-control rogues at the bottom of the food chain is just another dirty lie.  The real culprits are hiding in plain sight, so far untouched by accountability or justice.   "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." MCClatchy Heh, he's starting to sound like some of us.

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Related
Another step towards tyrany? McCain believes in politicizing the military to support his views


June 14, 2008

McCain doesn't pick up on Michelle Obama joke

So a man finally got a question into McCain and he had a very different sort of question.

The questioner noted that he had been educated at Princeton and Harvard and made more than $300,000 a year.

"How can I be proud of my country?" he asked.

Get it — he was mocking Michelle Obama and her statement earlier this year that her husband had for the first time in her life made her proud of her country.

Well, McCain either missed the joke or decided to ignore it and answer the question literally. I think it was the former because the individual asking the question had a thick accent that sounded to be either Indian or Pakistani, perhaps suggesting to McCain a recent immigrant grappling with America's image abroad.

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Posted 12 June 2008

If you want to know what's wrong with the foreign policy establishment in the United States, look no further than Condoleezza Rice's article, "The New American Realism," published in the July/August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs." Not only has the Council on Foreign Relations spread its pages wide open for an infamous interventionist -- a lying and deceitful enabler of the Bush administration's illegal, immoral unprovoked invasion of Iraq - it also readmitted Ms. Rice without requiring anything resembling a mea culpa for the crimes against humanity that have lowered her, the Bush administration and the United States to the depths of moral disrepute around the world.

Why publish the words of a liar and alleged war criminal? Who takes her seriously? Was her article accepted for publication because of her high position in the thoroughly discredited and morally bankrupt Bush administration? Or was publication a "no brainer," simply because the foreign policy elite at the Council on Foreign Relations actually shares Ms. Rice's smug interventionist conceit?

Whatever the excuse, it doesn't pass the smell test. Why? Because Rice's unimaginative, evasive and euphemism-riddled whitewash of Bush's disastrous "Time of Troubles" would barely merit a grade of "C" in any freshman course devoted to U.S. foreign policy.

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By Nat Hentoff

Newton Kansan

Posted Jun 05, 2008 @ 09:18 AM
Last update Jun 05, 2008 @ 09:33 AM

WASHINGTON —

On April 30, the Senate’s subcommittee on the Constitution held a vitally important hearing on “Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government,” chaired by Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis. At issue, ignored by the presidential contenders, is a profound change in the very core of our laws. Said witness Steven Aftergood, secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists:

Growing use of secret law “is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans. ... Secret law excludes the public from the deliberative process, promotes arbitrary and deviant government behavior, and shields official malefactors from accountability.”

At this very Senate hearing, John R. Elwood, the Office of Legal Counsel’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General, provided a startling example of the Bush administration’s justification for the imperious essence of secret law. As reported in the May 1 New York Times, Elwood “disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities.”

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Important article.

Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society

By Joachim Martillo

Saturday, 15 March 2008

Topics addressed:

* Taboo topic: references to the power of the "lobby", control of the media, control over influential political groups
* US: Influence of "neocons" on policy formation
* Ideology: foundation of neo-conservatism, neocon ideology
* US: politics/society: Israelization of the US and influence of pro-Israeli politicians or media on local society and politics
* Zionist tactics to suppress/silence/stifle criticism of Israel
* Taboo topic: the power of the Zionist lobbies
* Taboo topic: the Israeli lobby pushing for US wars against Iraq, Iran...
* Crypto-Zionist 'concern' for Africa; Darfur
* Israeli espionage
* Israeli recruitment of 'sayanyim' — supporters within foreign Jewish communities
* Israel: Espionage, criminal activities, drug trafficking, money laundering
* Zionism: Organizing efforts by Zionists in universities, unions, and political action groups to push the pro-Israel line
* Exploitation of the Holocaust; Political uses of the holocaust; Hollowcaust
* Anti-Semitism: political uses of anti-Semitism
* Zionist organizations stoking islamophobia; "islamofascism"
* US politics and society: Zionist groups funding travel for key civil society sectors to visit Israel; targetted indoctrination
* Zionist influence on mainstream US/Canadian civil rights groups
* Zionist Corporate chieftains
* Political junkets -- trips, by US public officials, to Israel, paid for by groups associated with pro-Israel lobbying groups

People/entities mentioned in this item:

* Susan J. Abulhawa
* Sheldon Adelson
* AIPAC
* Rashid I. al-Khalidi
* Paul Anderson
* Louis Dembitz Brandeis
* Vincent Brook
* CAMERA
* Noam Chomsky
* CanWest Global Communications
* Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
* Alan Dershowitz
* Nadia Abu El-Haj
* Rahm Emanuel
* Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (spelling error)
* Abraham H. Foxman
* Genocide Information Network
* Randa Ghazy (spelling error)
* Golan-Globus
* John Hagee
* Lawrence Harmon
* David A. Harris
* Abraham Joshua Heschel
* HonestReporting
* David Horowitz
* Israel Campus Coalition
* Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action
* Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
* Tony Karon
* Joe Kaufman
* John Brady Kiesling
* Naomi Klein
* Joel Kovel
* Paul Kriwaczek
* Elizabeth Laird
* Laurel Leff
* Joseph A. Massad
* Melani McAlister
* John McCain
* John J. Mearsheimer
* MEMRI
* Angela Merkel
* Ruth Messinger
* Rupert Murdoch
* Ron Paul
* Martin Peretz
* James Petras
* Daniel Pipes
* Jonathan Pollard
* Itamar Rabinovich
* Marc Rich
* Haim Saban
* Nicolas Sarkozy
* Reuven Shiloah
* Yuri Slezkine
* Robert Spencer
* Steven Spielberg
* StandWithUs
* Michael Stanislawski
* Lawrence Summers
* Ken Sweder
* The David Project
* Stephen M. Walt
* Washington Institute for Near East Policy
* Alison Weir
* Philip Weiss
* Gloria White-Hammond
* Elie Wiesel
* Orde Charles Wingate
* Ruth Roskies Wisse
* YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
* Bat-Ami Zucker
* Mortimer B. Zuckerman

Journals mentioned in this item:

* New Society
* Commentary
* Boston Globe


Full article: Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society

The Long Night

by Charley Reese

Have you ever wondered how human beings can be so cruel? And how cruelty crosses all the boundaries – national, racial and ethnic? I have. Rereading an autobiography published in 1941 by a communist agent reminded me of the dark side of human nature.

The book, Out of the Night, was written – under the pseudonym "Jan Valtin" – by a German who lived through the chaos of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. Broken by Gestapo torture, he ended up being pursued by both the Nazi and the communist manhunters and killers.

Murders by these two forms of socialism are measured in the millions during the 20th century. That alone should warn all people off any form of collectivism, because all of those millions, in the minds of their killers, were sacrificed "for the greater good." They – flesh-and-blood individual human beings – were all murdered in the name of an abstraction, a stupid theory of how society should be organized. I doubt if the head thugs on both sides actually believed the theories. What they really believed in was power over their fellow man.

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