Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Stop gap post for the dial-uppers!



Please continue!

31 comments:

Gerald said...

Partners in Health

Bishop Gumbleton alerted me to the Partners in Health website.

I cannot get too excited in the Libby trial because EVIL ALWAYS WINS in Nazi America.

David B. Benson said...

Joe Conason "It Can Happen Here"

capt said...

It Can’t Happen Here? It Has Happened Here



"Our fellow citizens have been led hoodwinked from their principles by a most extraordinary combination of circumstances. But the band is removed, and they now see for themselves."

~ Thomas Jefferson


Today’s citizens, lately aware of the crimes of those who rule them from the White House, have removed the band (the blindfold) from their eyes. The huge majority of average Americans are dead set against "the surge" in Iraq, seeing it for what it is: the senseless slaughter of American sons and daughters on a mission which has nothing to do with US security.

The question is, what are the people going to do about it?


More HERE

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

capt said...

It could happen here



In an excerpt from his new book, Salon's columnist explains why, for the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon, Americans have reason to doubt the future of their democracy



Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of "it" is.

To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel "It Can't Happen Here," "it" plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America's most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe's fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as "it."

If "it" denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then "it" hasn't happened here and isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

More HERE

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Whoop's - I meant to have this one in there too! Joe Conason is another person I hold in high regard for his writing talent.


capt

Gerald said...

What is amazing from comments or an article I read is that Nazism moved from Nazi Germany after their defeat to Nazi America. Names of Nazi Germans may have changed but the same Nazi thinking prevails in Nazi America by such names as Bush, the Bush family, Cheney, the Cheney family, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Rice, Colin Powell, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Scalia, the new guy on the Supreme Court that I forget, Perle, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Tony Snow, Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, and million of Nazi Americans who bought into Nazism. IT CAN HAPPEN HERE AND IT HAS HAPPENED HERE!!!!! We are a total Nazi empire,aka as the devil incarnate nation. We are an empire of devil worshippers.

Gerald said...

NAZI AMERICA IS AN EVIL EMPIRE!!!!!

The foundation of the Nazi American empire rests on hatred, murders, torture, war crimes, corruption, decadence, greed, lies, and a mob mentality.

Nazi America resides in hell!!!!!

Gerald said...

America's Moral Decline

Gerald said...

America the Pitiful

Gerald said...

Bush Is Certifiable

Gerald said...

War Criminal Nation

Gerald said...

Our American Future

Gerald said...

The Shame of Being an American

Gerald said...

Bush's Cruel and Degrading Presidency

Gerald said...

Is Bush Clinically Insane

Gerald said...

Ruining America

Gerald said...

Bush's Breakdown

Gerald said...

One Flew Over the WH

Gerald said...

Bush's Inner War

Gerald said...

Bush Has Been at War Forever

Gerald said...

Bush's Psychotic Legacy

Gerald said...

Bush and Congress Should Be On the Couch

Gerald said...

The Prosecution rests in stating my case in the fact that George Hitler is a psycho.

capt said...

Gerald,

Check out "Operation Paperclip" also known as "Project Paperclip".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip



capt

capt said...

===
The principal power in Washington is no longer the government or the people it represents. It is the Money Power. Under the deceptive cloak of campaign contributions, access and influence, votes and amendments are bought and sold. Money established priorities of action, holds down federal revenues, revises federal legislation, shifts income from the middle class to the very rich. Money restrains the enforcement of laws written to protect the country from abuses of wealth--laws that mandate environmental protection, antitrust laws, laws to protect the consumer against fraud, laws that safeguard the securities markets, and many more: Richard N. Goodwin - Speechwriter for John F. Kennedy

=
Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else: Bill Moyers - PBS Commentator

=
Money becomes evil not when it is used to buy goods but when it is used to buy power... economic inequalities become evil when they are translated into political inequalities: Samuel Huntington - Political Scientist

===

NEW - NEW - NEW

ICHBLOG.EU without the bells and whistles. Click here for text only version of the site (great for dialup users)!

http://www.ichblog.eu/text/

===

Read this newsletter online http://tinyurl.com/dy6yy

Thanks ICH Newsletter!

capt said...

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow



Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the "body shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war.


02/20/07 "Vanity Fair" - March 2007 --- One of the great staples of the modern Washington movie is the dark and ruthless corporation whose power extends into every cranny around the globe, whose technological expertise is without peer, whose secrets are unfathomable, whose riches defy calculation, and whose network of allies, in and out of government, is held together by webs of money, ambition, and fear. You've seen this movie a dozen times. Men in black coats step from limousines on wintry days and refer guardedly to unspeakable things. Surveillance cameras and eavesdropping devices are everywhere. Data scrolls across the movie screen in digital fonts. Computer keyboards clack softly. Seemingly honorable people at the summit of power—Cabinet secretaries, war heroes, presidents—turn out to be pathetic pawns of forces greater than anyone can imagine. And at the pinnacle of this dark and ruthless corporation is a relentless and well-tailored titan—omniscient, ironic, merciless—played by someone like Christopher Walken or Jon Voight.

To be sure, there isn't really such a corporation: the Omnivore Group, as it might be called. But if there were such a company—and, mind you, there isn't—it might look a lot like the largest government contractor you've never heard of: a company known simply by the nondescript initials SAIC (for Science Applications International Corporation), initials that are always spoken letter by letter rather than formed into a pronounceable acronym. SAIC maintains its headquarters in San Diego, but its center of gravity is in Washington, D.C. With a workforce of 44,000, it is the size of a full-fledged government agency—in fact, it is larger than the departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined. Its anonymous glass-and-steel Washington office—a gleaming corporate box like any other—lies in northern Virginia, not far from the headquarters of the C.I.A., whose byways it knows quite well. (More than half of SAIC's employees have security clearances.) SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent. If "contract backlog" is any measure—that is, contracts negotiated and pending—the future seems assured. The backlog stands at $13.6 billion. That's one and a half times more than the backlog at KBR Inc., a subsidiary of the far better known government contractor once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Halliburton Company.

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"—they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it involves the most sensitive matters of national security. The Founding Fathers may have argued eloquently for a government of laws, not of men, but what we've got instead is a government of body shops.


More HERE

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From ICH too: "Private federal contractors now "absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000."

Viewed a bit differently, "more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly ... to some contractor rather than to the IRS."

Disastrous "misplaced power" indeed. Ike was right.


*****

Had enough yet?

capt

Gerald said...

capt, good information! I guess the Nazi mentality lives on in Nazi America with the Nazi scientists. We truly are a Nazi state.

What a country???

It is truly frightening to realize how low we have gone as a country.

I see a nuclear war with Iran and George Hitler at some point will declare martial law and cancel the 2008 elections.

George Hitler has not accumulated all his power to relinquish it over some stupid election.

Gerald said...

I have often believed that no person is so evil to be relegated to hell for all eternity but as I see Nazi America unfold I can see the evil people all over Nazi America. We are truly an evil empire!!!!!

capt said...

Werner had 300 "rocket scientists" working for him - Operation Paperclip brought over 5,000 (and their families) - makes me wonder who are the other 4,700? Just some SS war criminals? No small wonder we are revisiting the same issues ad nauseum.



capt

Robert S said...

Gerald,

Would it be too much to ask you to usually (I, too, use the art of the tease, but, hopefully, moderately.) add author and date to your posts? I'd rather not duplicate the contemporary, but tracking them all is somewhat daunting...

Now then,

Blair to announce Iraq troop withdrawal RAW STORY
Published: Tuesday February 20, 2007


British Prime Minister Tony Blair will announce that thousands of British troops are to begin withdrawing from Iraq in weeks, media reported.

According to The Sun daily, Blair will say that the first contingent of 1,500 troops will leave the war-torn country and arrive back in Britain in a matter of weeks, and a further 1,500 will follow by Christmas.

Britain currently has about 7,100 soldiers stationed in Iraq.

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capt said...

new post up!

Robert S said...

Meanwhile, back in the 2 Circuit, the Constitution gets a battering, thanks in part to the Military Commissions Act:

Court: Detainees Can't Challenge Cases
By Hope Yen
The Associated Press
Tuesday 20 February 2007


Washington - A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that foreign-born prisoners seized as potential terrorists and held in Guantanamo Bay may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a key victory for President Bush's anti-terrorism plan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether the military is illegally holding the prisoners - a decision that will strip court access for hundreds of detainees with cases currently pending.

More.

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US sponsored War Crimes: The Atrocity Exhibition
A Review of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Exhibit
by Michael Carmichael
Global Research, February 19, 2007


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