NPR: this is balance?

So, whatever happened to 'innocent until proven guilty'? Saddam Hussein never had a chance. This makes me sick.

Wanna know what else makes me sick? The manipulation of public opinion about President Hussein by the American press and politicians, who universally refer to him by his first name. Call him Saddam, and you can convince yourself that you're talking about an impetuous child. Call him President Hussein, however, and you have to face the fact that your country illegally invaded a soveriegn nation and illegally deposed its elected leader, so that you could pay $3/gallon for gas allowing Exxon to reap the biggest profits by any company in history -two quarters in a row (and where did those profits come from? Your checkbook). Try publishing a letter to the editor -any editor- in which you call our own loser president, "George." You'll never see your letter printed as written.

I'm not here to defend the guy. I just wish someone in power paid a little more attention to our constitution.

The constitution. "Oh yeah, that."

NPR makes me sick, too. I pay close attention, I do. Maybe you didn't notice, but during the 2004 election, all the NPR talking heads were saying "Oh my gosh! The Republicans are doing so well in the polls! Look at them go!" Who knows how well Republicans were actually doing in the polls: that's not the issue. The point is that NPR focussed on Republican candidates to the detriment of Democratic candidates by leading with Republican-related, Republican-supporting stories, interviews, and campaign ads. I let it go then, even though it made me ill. I presumed that they were highlighting Republican candidates because Republicans were in charge. Fine. Whatever. Hardly seemed like good journalism, but eh, whatever.

Now skip ahead a couple of years. Yeah, it's 2006, election season. By all indications, Democrats seem to be taking the lead in the polls. So you might expect NPR to hold to the same publishing standards, and highlight Democratic candidates and issues, simply because this time the Democrats are leading the polls.

But, no. Not NPR. Check it out for yourself: NPR consistently gives Republican candidates and talking points precendence over Democrats. In the 2006 election cycle, NPR continues to consistently present Republican voices before Democratic voices; they consistently provide Republican candidates with more air time than Democrats in interviews, background stories and ad comparisons, even going so far as to play complete (and vicious) ads from Republicans while 'comparing' them to edited versions of the ads that the given Democratic candidate had to slap together to combat the Republican ad in the first place, in stories about campaign strategies. The other day, I heard a 'comparison' between two Senators, Dick Durbin (D) and Bill Frist (R). Frist isn't even running for office; he's stumping for other candidates. In an odd turn, Durbin was on first, but wasn't really allowed to get a message out because the interviewer kept pressing him with questions about what Democrats would do about the war in Iraq (an issue which is unequivocally the President's problem, not the Senate's). Then Frist came on. The interviewer asked him how he felt about the Democratic agenda, and then proceeded to give him two solid minutes of uninterrupted air time in which Frist essentially gave a stump speech. This is balance?

Missing from NPR this season is any news of dissent among the people: their reporters seem completely unable to locate anyone who is anti-war or anti-George. If you're an NPR listener and a Democrat: there's a reason you feel so alone- It's NPR: Nationalist Party Radio.

filthy lucre

Drug firms 'inventing diseases' My suspicions confirmed. How deep might this tendency run, in the medical-pharmaceutical industry? (f-ing industry!?) Use your imagination. Or, if you're really ready to shake your foundations, check out this or this.

"Property." "Equity." "Money." It all makes sense, in its own little sphere. It only falls apart when you try to find a rational source for it all, an original owner, but of course, there's no such thing. It's a con.
However, it's difficult -at best- to come up with another way of keeping everyone busy and fed and compensated for the time they spent doing things we'd rather not have been doing. And face it, we all like being busy and fed and fairly compensated, to some degree.

On a slightly different note...

This is precisely why private armies -what they're euphemistically calling security forces today-- should be stomped out like vermin. More generally, it's yet another excellent argument against outsourcing the military. What a dumb f*cking idea.

I've been wanting to say this for years. Laugh at me now, go ahead, but I'm telling you that the same people who orchestrated the wave of assassinations in the 60s, and imposed a blackout on research on psychotropics (LSD, mescaline, etc), also gave birth to the disparagement of the idea of conspiracy. Richard M. Dolan says this about the word:

The very label serves as an automatic dismissal, as though no one ever acts in secret. Let us bring some perspective and common sense to this issue.

The United States comprises large organizations - corporations, bureaucracies, "interest groups," and the like - which are conspiratorial by nature. That is, they are hierarchical, their important decisions are made in secret by a few key decision-makers, and they are not above lying about their activities. Such is the nature of organizational behavior. "Conspiracy," in this key sense, is a way of life around the globe.

Anyone who has lived in a repressive society knows that official manipulation of the truth occurs daily. But societies have their many and their few. In all times and all places, it is the few who rule, and the few who exert dominant influence over what we may call official culture. -All elites take care to manipulate public information to maintain existing structures of power. It's an old game.

America is nominally a republic and free society, but in reality an empire and oligarchy, vaguely aware of its own oppression, within and without. I have used the term "national security state" to describe its structures of power. It is a convenient way to express the military and intelligence communities, as well as the worlds that feed upon them, such as defense contractors and other underground, nebulous entities. Its fundamental traits are secrecy, wealth, independence, power, and duplicity.

By way of credentials, he studied at Alfred University and Oxford University before completing his graduate work in history at the University of Rochester, where he was a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. Dolan studied U.S. Cold War strategy, Soviet history and culture, and international diplomacy. Not bad.

I'm not pretending to understand their motives, or their ways. All I'm saying is that critical observation suggests that a dynasty has been constructed on the backs of people who have been made to suffer. Remember what Donald Rumsfeld the apparently-invincible did between his stints in high-level diplomacy (for the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I administrations)? He drew a fat paycheck from the pharmaceutical industry.

Do not underestimate the opposition.

You can never have too many poor people

The Missouri state legislature says you can never have too many poor people. They say this because a surplus of po' folk keeps wages down and reduces demands on Management for better benefits, by keeping the workers fighting amongst themselves for the few available jobs. This legislation is religiosity, not religion or morality. Actually, it's worse than that, it's brazen pandering: these legislators have been bought by industry, to ensure a supply of cheap labor.

And all the while, another wing of the Republican party is encouraging immigration -ostensibly because Americans won't clean up after ourselves (Mexicans are hired to do work we Americans believe is below us), but really for the same reasons as Missouri had for their legislation: a surplus of labor leads to lower wages, which inevitably leads to higher profits and thus higher dividends for the privileged few (so long as the con-game lasts). Something tells me the right hand doesn't know what the -erm- other right hand is doing.

The con. Ah yes, we've come to that. Not a conspiracy, no: a con-game. A confidence game, in which the Player (so called because he is playing us like a cheap drum) wins the confidence of the Rube, then talks Rube into doing something not-in-Rube's-own-best-interest. Player, in our case, is the established class of Industrial Capitalists.

They won our present-day and continuing confidence simply by being on top when we got on the scene. They were simply already King of the Hill, because their parents had been Players before them, and their parents before them, etc. Yes, the occasional Horatio Alger has salmon-squiggled his way up the socio-economic ladder, but he's the exception. The rule is Nepotism- that Money Speaks for Money: we all, always, help and promote those closest to us.

Over the course of centuries, they convinced us rubes that we need them: to lead us, to direct our industry, and most importantly, to determine our worth as workers. "Ownership" itself is the con: the notion that Money has any inherent value, that by itself it is worth something, that it can multiply of its own accord as if by magic (the magic of interest), that it can confer ownership of a time-space event, that it can represent any time-space event and thereby confer control.

No life-form is ever stronger than its respiro-circulatory system. By the same token, no country is ever stronger than its economy. Money is the life-blood of nations; it must circulate to all extremes, or those extremes will atrophy. Just as you would not fare very well if your brain tried to hoard your blood supply, doling it out on the basis of the "value" of work performed, so your country -and your species-- will falter as the Industrial Capitalist class hoards ever more of the money supply. Making more simply won't do, any more than making more blood: you'll just increase the pressure.

Shapes of things to come

Here is something I ran across on the Rigorous Intuition discussion board (I think?). It's dense, sometimes difficult to read, and -well-- possibly bogus, but if it's not, whoaa. Frankly, I think I smell disinformation, broadcast to confuse those investigators who are on the right track, but I'm not entirely sure. It's very interesting, and I'd like to believe it, but the one thing about 911 I absolutely can not believe -that those two planes alone brought the twin towers (and WTC7, which nothing even hit) down like a controlled demolition- stands in the way. This story, however chilling or hokey it might be, only accounts for flying planes into the towers, and every investigator worth his salt knows that the towers were specifically designed to withstand even greater impacts, and that the findings reported on that Nova program have been dismissed.

Oh, and why do we never hear about Pakistan's involvement in the plot? Because they lobbied to keep their name out of the final report. We can't say for sure that this lobbying was the same reason that kept Pakistan out of those few media-sponsored investigative reports of the event, but it's certainly not much of a stretch to think so. This seems to be further evidence that the U.S. media is nothing more than a propaganda organ for the Bush administration: connected at the lip. Listen to AirAmerica Radio on line instead.

Freak windstorms in Hawaii and Kansas (75 mph winds ripped old trees apart in a two-block wide path through Lawrence- but it wasn't a tornado, oh no) on the same day. Coincidence, or shape of things to come?

Demand a paper ballot! Democracy For America is circulating a petition about this. Sign it here!

Right-Wing Pundit Hall of Shame:
(many thanks to the quasi-anonymous Richard)

"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)


"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it."
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)


"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention."
(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)


"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/27/03)


"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)


"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)


"We're all neo-cons now."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)


"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."
(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)


"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation [stunt]--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)


Mission Accomplished?

"The war winds down, politics heats up.... Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific."
(PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)


"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)


"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)


Neutralizing the Opposition

"Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)


"What's he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose their--Isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?"
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean--4/9/03)


"If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a president fresh from a war victory?"
(CNN's Judy Woodruff, 5/5/03)


"It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context..... And the silence, I think, is that it's clear that nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him. The Democrats can't oppose--cannot oppose him politically."
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum-- Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)


Nagging the "Naysayers"

"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)


"I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)


"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.... I just wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war....

"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, 'The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.' Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail, again.

"Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)


"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
(Fox News Channel's Dick Morris, 4/9/03)


"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right."
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)


"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."
(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)


"Shouldn't the [Canadian] prime minister and all of us who thought the war was hasty and dangerous and wrongheaded admit that we were wrong? I mean, with the pictures of those Iraqis dancing in the streets, hauling down statues of Saddam Hussein and gushing their thanks to the Americans, isn't it clear that President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair were right all along? If we believe it's a good thing that Hussein's regime has been dismantled, aren't we hypocritical not to acknowledge Bush's superior judgment?... Why can't those of us who thought the war was a bad idea (or, at any rate, a premature one) let it go now and just join in celebrating the victory wrought by our magnificent military forces?"
(Washington Post's William Raspberry, 4/14/03)


"Some journalists, in my judgment, just can't stand success, especially a few liberal columnists and newspapers and a few Arab reporters."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, 4/14/03)


"Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn't figured out we won the war."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)


Cakewalk?

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate-- cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)


"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?"
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)


"It won't take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there's no question that it will."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)


"There's no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and Britain unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold like that."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)


"He [Saddam Hussein] actually thought that he could stop us and win the debate worldwide. But he didn't--he didn't bargain on a two- or three week war. I actually thought it would be less than two weeks."
(NBC reporter Fred Francis, Chris Matthews Show, 4/13/03)


Weapons of Mass Destruction

NPR's Mara Liasson: Where there was a debate about whether or not Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction and whether we can find it...

Brit Hume: No, there wasn't. Nobody seriously argued that he didn't have them beforehand. Nobody.
(Fox News Channel, April 6, 2003)


"Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it."
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)


"Saddam could decide to take Baghdad with him. One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of 'the green mushroom' over Baghdad--the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time."
(Newsweek, 3/17/03)

--all lif

21st Century Geography

Ah, Nigeria. It's like this: Pretend you own your house. You love it, love living there, love the view, etc. Then someone you don't know or recognize comes along and says, "Hey, we're gonna use that dirt that your house is sitting on. Just the dirt, don't worry; you're not using it." He wrinkles his nose and shakes his head a little. "Just the dirt." Maybe you complain, but they don't care: they wave a little cash and some big menacing weapons in your face and assure you that your life can go on as before, and blah blah bling.

But then you start to see that, while they are in fact just taking the dirt, their doing so is ruining your home. "Oh, yeah," they say. "Wow. Sorry about that. Looks like your house sorta... fell down! We didn't do it, of course- never touched your house." And of course, they didn't: they just undermined it until it collapsed. You have no recourse to these people; your interests are not represented among their decision-makers, your voice can't be heard above the roar of Progress, and your weapons are no match for theirs. Your property has become part of someone else's colony, and you have no say in the matter.

Nigeria -most of Africa, really- has been brutally raped by the pink West for hundreds of years, but most especially since oil was discovered off the Atlantic coast. Their homes have been destroyed to make way for roads -which they didn't need- and pipelines -for which they have no use, and from which they reap no benefit. Their environment has been destroyed by "accidents" in which millions of barrels of oil and its by-products have been spilled; oil rigs have destroyed fisheries, the soil itself has been ruined by exposure to too much petroleum waste. They'd petition their government for grievances, but that government only has ears for money, and the money comes from the oil companies, i.e., indirectly from us. They'd petition the oil companies, but corporations only deal with other organizations, not individuals, and the Nigerians on the ground are too poor to afford the tools to organize broadly (like phones, mail service, or computers). Where else can they turn?

Where else, but to the local leaders and power-structure they've known all along. And to the tactics they've practiced for centuries, tactics practiced by every hopelessly-outnumbered and out-gunned fighting force ever: guerrilla- and gang warfare. You can call this "anarchy" if you want, but what it really is, is governance by organizations that we just don't recognize as governments. Organized crime is only "crime" because the organizers aren't in control of the judiciary. So, you might as well wipe your ass with that political map of Africa: it's about to be outdated.

Oh, and by the way, that's the future of the Arctic, too. Five countries currently share that region: Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the U.S. Every one of these countries has border disputes with the others over the region, an enormous part of which is yet unclaimed. Polar ice is in retreat, so the Northwest Passage will soon be a viable year-round opportunity for travel and transport. Like Africa, the region's indigenous people are governed by foreigners with no cultural or physical ties to the land, which means they get economically and politically marginalized (let's just say they're not all "Eskimos"). And like Nigeria, there are sizeable oil deposits off shore.

Shift back into neutral for a sec here, folks, you'll need it.

Have you heard about the family in Ohio who kept their foster children in cages? This is one supremely messed-up situation. I'll let the story do the talking, but something there caught my eye:

Sharen Gravelle said she met her husband in 1986 at a dinner for a child sex abuse support group. She said she was attending because a relative had been molested. Michael Gravelle was there because he was accused of inappropriate touching, a charge he denies. The couple married two months later.

As if the story isn't strange enough, this little tidbit is almost more than I can wrap my head around. First, support groups. Support groups are great if they're your thing- a great way to find similar experiences among your peers, so you don't feel so excluded/freaked out. Sharen, the future foster-mother, was attending because she presumably, apparently, felt victimized by her relative's molestation. Michael's presence at this function, as an accused molester himself, is so completely inappropriate as to be beyond belief, like holding an AA meeting at a bar. Someone in this picture is a predator, and it seems exceedingly likely that both are lying.

There is FAR more here than meets the eye, and what lies beneath is very, very disturbing.

I only wish this was an isolated case....

Drip...drip...drip...

He knew. Watch the video; he knew.
President Joker instead goes on vacation, while Vice-President Penguin holes up in his secret bunker again. Where's Batman when you need him?

Money Makes Politics Dirty

Have I said this before? Money makes politics dirty. Say it with me: Money makes politics dirty.
We don't tolerate this kind of behavior on playgrounds. Why do we tolerate it in Congress and the White House?

As long as the White House -and the President- can be bought, we're in trouble. We need to get money out of politics, entirely. How would you start? I'd start by publicly funding elections, to the exclusion of private money. Put limits on ad-time, and require that all candidates get equal time (yeah, I said "all candidates," meaning even the kooks; maybe that would get the networks to think a little bit about the way they cover campaigns. Here's a hint to all in the mainstream media: NOT ALL CAMPAIGNING IS NEWS).

"Oh god, this shit is real..." Real, and really scary.

Good essay from Harper's:
Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush.

The new math

We should know how to what?

Nigeria is about to pop. Remember what I said about South America? (I've been prognosticating about a reversal in South American politics for some time now, and I see the elections of people like Brazil's Lula, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Bolivia's Evo Morales, and Chile's Michele Bachelet as significant moves in that regard. These are radical leftists, folks (with the possible exception of Bachelet, who only seems radical in comparison to her predecessors, those guys who kidnapped and killed her father, a General, back in the day), taking power back to the people. I've been following Hugo Chavez most closely (here here here here and here), but Evo Morales may be even cooler. He was a coca farmer, but is now the first indigenous Andean to take power there, and has halved his own salary and declared that no cabinet minister can take home more than he does, as well as preceding his swearing-in with an indigenous religious ceremony. That being said, Michele Bachelet is another very interesting case- the first woman president of Chile, a single mother in a country which only legalized divorce last year, the daughter of an assassinated General of Chile, and once a political prisoner, herself; she's made her cabinet up of at least 50% women, as promised. Keep watching- it could get even livelier: Peru has an election coming up, with self-exiled ex-Pres Fujimori vowing to return this year...wow).

Hey everybody, watch this: 6 = 21. Cool, huh?! It's the new math.

wasn't he that saxophone player guy...

Just ran across this, and think it deserves a wider audience:

Transcript from CNN's Lou Dobbs 2/13/06:

Tonight, the United States is about to allow a United
Arab Emirates company to take operational control of
many of this nation's major seaports. The Bush
administration has OK'd a deal that would allow a
company based on The Emirates it take charge of the
ports. Many of them, most of them, vital to this
nation's security. Bill Tucker reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Dubai
Ports World is set to take control of operations in
ports in the United States. Those ports? New Orleans,
Miami, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and New
Jersey. The deal involving a company from the Middle
East is raising security concerns.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER, (D) NEW YORK: How do we know
what checks they take on their employees? do they do
background checks? If a terrorist organization should
decide to infiltrate this new company, headquartered
in the United Arab Emirates, what would stop them.

TUCKER: The UAE was home to two of the 9/11 hijackers.
The Port Authority of New York/New Jersey says it will
review its lease agreements with P & O before
automatically granting the lease the of The Newark
Terminal to Dubai Ports World.

Defenders of the deal note that Dubai Ports World
operates ports all over the globe and that safe,
smooth, port operation are very much in its business's
interests. Security will remain in the control of
local and federal law enforcement authorities, but --
MICHAEL O'HANLON, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Ports are
essentially on the front line in the war on terror and
on homeland security. And so allowing a foreign firm
to operate a port is sort of like allowing a foreign
firm to operate a U.S. military air field in a
traditional conflict.

TUCKER: In other words, the United States should
proceed cautiously. The Committee on Foreign
investment in the United States, the same group which
gave the green light to the takeover of UNOCAL by the
Chinese National Overseas Oil Company has reviewed the
deal of P & O and Dubai Ports World and given it its
blessing.

When called for comment, a spokesman would only say --
no comment.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

Now coincidences happened but they're rare. So for
that reason, we thought it was worth noting that the
man nominated by President Bush to run the Maritime
Administration is the director of operations of Europe
and Latin American for Dubai Ports World, Lou. His
name is David Sanborn.

DOBBS: And this coincidence and this program looks to
at coincidences intensely, particularly like this and
particularly with an administration that not for the
first time has interesting coincidences reverberating
throughout it. What do they say about this
coincidence?

TUCKER: They don't have any comment about it. We
weren't able to reach David Sanborn today.

DOBBS: Well, we hope that David would talk to us. We
would hope that anyone in the administration would
like it talk to us about this coincidence. And it
would be fascinating to understand why the same
government that thinks there's no problem, this
administration, with turning over ownership to foreign
corporation and companies of our air carriers sees no
problems with having the United Arab Emirates, a
company based there, take over our vital seaports.
It's remarkable. Excellent job of report, Bill Tucker.
Thank you, sir.

My questions: Who is this David Sanborn, and who is George doing favors for now?

what goes on

scary info about the royal family

So Dick, were ya drunk? Sure looks like you were closer to Harry than you said you were. And why did y'all prevent the local Sheriff from entering the property, after the shooting?

This is apparently not getting much coverage by the U.S. media. Surprise, surprise.

This November, demand a paper ballot!

Life imitates art.

Air America Radio. Just listen. Randi Rhodes is particularly awesome, but I like the Rachel Maddow show, too.

Drop Dead Gorgeous

So, Dick, what the hell? Why'd you shoot your friend? Cheney's been a hunter "for years," he says. In fact, we know he hunts several times a year, preferring 'canned hunts'- on private land, where the game is often tame enough to eat out of human hands -but that's beside the point. He should be familiar with guns and gun rules. Still, accidents happen, I suppose.

All questions about what exactly happened -and-how- and why aside, there is a relationship at play here which is ...very interesting.

See, Harry Whittington is an Austin-based lawyer, and a long-time big-wig Republican. Way back when George was still Governor of Texas, another old Bush family friend, Robert Waltrip got in trouble when hundreds of corpses were found in buildings and woods on the premises of his funeral home and crematorium (Service Corporation International, aka SCI). Yeah, remember Funeralgate?

Well, Eliza May was in charge of the Texas Funeral Services Commission (TFSC) when the bodies were discovered, and felt it was her job to investigate. When she got curious about why so many politicians were pressuring her to drop the investigation, she started to dig up campaign contribution reports, and was promptly fired and replaced with... Harry Whittington (who could not have been ignorant of the situation at SCI). She brought suit against the State of Texas and SCI for being forced out of her job, but the suit was quietly settled out of court -get this-- just weeks before two other SCI funeral homes in Florida were found doing the very same thing, and worse:

In one instance at Menorah Gardens, a Jewish cemetery, SCI desecrated graves and left corpses in the woods where they were devoured by wild hogs.

The general manager of Menorah Gardens, Peter Hartman, died by apparent suicide on December 27, 2001. From Wiki -I didn't want to disturb the original links.

So you'd think they'd be shut down by now, eh? No, silly! Remember- Robert Waltrip is a good, old friend of the Bushes. So what's SCI up to now? They got a no-bid contract to handle the remains of the dead from Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans. Maybe the 'gators will do a better job of cleaning up, than the hogs did?

I think I'm gonna be sick.

Hats off to Jeff at Rigorous Intuition for taking the lead on this side of this story.

Apparent suicide. Remember that one. "Apparent," like Gary Webb's "suicide," perhaps. One wonders how many guns were involved.

George, you got a lot of 'splainin to do...

The president is a FUCKING LIAR. Get it? We've been had.

Lying again!

I am the canary in your coal mine, people, and I am screaming: MOVE! ALL IS NOT WELL! SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG HERE.

The powers-that-be have us on the wrong path. Our very notions of civility are eroding; we are one natural disaster away from every man for himself.

the tide is turning

Stop everything. Read this now. To the end.
Thank you.
Now you know. Now you can say, "Yeah, I know that speech...." -coz you'll want to, later.