by Dave Lindorff

Forget her "Pledge," She Took an Oath: Why Pelosi is Wrong on Impeachment

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by Phil Rockstroh

Headline
(Reuters): "United States numb to Iraq troop deaths: experts"

"O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too ignorant to know they exist -- or too benumbed to resonate with their content.

Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of the citizenry of The Corporatists States of America have experienced a comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords experience when topping-off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel purchased with money plundered from their employee's retirement accounts ... Sans conscience above -- sans conscience below.

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by Arthur James

I remember the horror of death. On a darkening evening, three soldiers encountered me on a jungle trail. Our meeting startled us. The soldiers braced to shoot me. Shaking, I wedged myself and my M-16 rifle against a tree. I shot two of them. The third person dropped to the Earth on that dusk eve, crawled into dense bushes, and thankfully fled away. "Oh God." I groaned deeply. "What have I done? Why am I here?"

War unites humanity to feel madness, horror, and insanity. There must exist an enclave of peace, meditation, solace, and a quiet place to step back from this insanity. To be able to find and touch the Self's reserve of tranquility of Being is a difficult spiritual struggle. The Word one searches for to be descriptive and speak, fails. Words are all we have to work with. Words lack the power and often we people feel diminished with hardly the capacity to communicate. I represent myself guilty of this fact.

Before I digressed into the second paragraph, I began to mention that portraits were found on the limp, lifeless, lacerated forms. In long moments immediately after their death, I began wondering about those rummaged pictures my fellow squad members found. I wondered about their mothers, fathers, children, and their extended families of friends. Being stricken with a truth I had always known: These Vietnamese were people, distinguished and unique individuals. They were fellow humans, not my enemy.

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by Mike Whitney

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim”.

Gustave Le Bon - "The Crowd"

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by Manuel Valenzuela

The creators of American reality, those propagators of charades and mirages who dwell inside the hallways of the Ministry of Truth – otherwise known as the Corporate Media – continue their dance of deception and whitewash, festering in their offices of propaganda, directing the narratives and the epics hundreds of millions of Americans consider truth. Much like the disappearance of warmth giving way to the crispness of cold arrives with each annual changing of leaves, so the remarketing of American reality is altered by the changing faces of circumstance.

Today, this change is the complete disaster that is the occupation of Iraq, an endeavor whose initial fruition could not have taken shape without the blitzkrieg marketed incessantly into every home and mind in America by the Department of Propaganda, the Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists.

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by Mel Seesholtz, Ph.D.

“Let’s vote on it.” To most people that sounds like the ideal way to solve any issue. But it can also be one of the most dangerous.

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Loving v. Virginia was a landmark civil rights decision. But a 1968 Gallup poll documented that 72 percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage. Had America voted on the issue in 1968, civil rights would undoubtedly have been defeated.

On November 7, 2006 Americans in several states will vote on ballot initiatives concocted and promoted by the leaders of the evangelical Christian Right and their Republican sycophants. Increasingly, their incestuous relationship is being exposed at the same time their so-called “values voters” are fading into history. The Christian Right is slowly but surely dying, and for good reasons. But apparently they want to kill an independent judiciary before they go.

Examples were provided in an October 17, 2006 article titled “Judicial Activism Prompts Citizen Efforts to Restrain Judges”
by Pete Winn, associate editor of Citizenlink.com, a propaganda organ for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family theo-political empire:

South Dakota’s Amendment E is the most ambitious measure – it would allow residents to sue judges over their decisions. Grand juries would be convened, and judges would face removal from the bench if they were found guilty of an infraction.

Montana voters, meanwhile, must decide if they want … the right to have recall elections if they should become “dissatisfied” with a judge.

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by Mickey Z.

In a recent National Football League game, Tampa Bay Buccaneer quarterback
Chris Simms suffered a ruptured spleen. Simms was rushed to the hospital, his spleen was removed, and he is now on the road to recovery. This much talked about injury inspired Robert N. Jenkins of the St. Petersburg Times to declare that Simms, in reality, "didn't need his spleen." In an article called "Humans have body parts to spare," Jenkins went on to pronounce that we also do not need our appendix, gall bladder, tonsils, esophagus, stomach,  and adrenal glands because those organs, according to conventional wisdom, are "vestigial."

I'm not here to debate what - if any - human organs are superfluous. What interests me more is the fact that most folks would read Jenkins' article and accept the premises therein without question... and this includes the most cynical lefties you'll ever meet. I know people skeptical enough to think the Foley sex scandal was leaked by Republicans to distract the public from the fiasco in Iraq. But tell those same people that some scientist has declared their spleen obsolete and they're not likely to rush off to post a rebuttal on their blog.

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by Dave Lindorff

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that, barring some incredible act of criminal cynicism such as the bombardment of Iran by the president, the Democrats are going to take over the House of Representatives.

That being the case, I propose that it's time all those patriots and lovers of liberty, all those who oppose the administration's mad imperial military policies, all those who recognize the so-called War on Terror for what it is--a War on America, all those whose stomachs turned at the sight of the fatal drowning of New Orleans, all those who are outraged at a president who claims the right to violate laws at will, to ignore acts of Congress and to snub rulings of the Supreme Court, all those who are sick of seeing their government function like a whorehouse for corporate Johns, all those who are angry at having a government that tortures and kidnaps people, including children, in our name, all those who know that there are dark secrets about 9-11 being buried by traitors in the White House, all those who despair at seeing the Bill of Rights ripped out of the Constitution article by article, begin a mass campaign to make impeachment of President Bush item one on the agenda of the next Congress.

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By Tom Chartier  
 

Are you worried about fraud at the polls? Ah… you must live where electronic voting machines are being used. Are they the ones made by Diebold? If so, that is all the more reason to be uneasy.  

If you are a staunch Republican Bush supporter fear not! I have no doubt your party line Republican vote will be correctly counted as you wish. Of course, if you are a Democrat or, God forbid, a Libertarian, or even a member of the Bull Moose Party, you might have cause for concern. 

Electronic voting machines are, in the words of my hard-core Midwestern Republican, Information Technologies expert buddy, a “formula for disaster.” Indeed they are. They can be easily hacked as some researchers at Princeton University recently proved.

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by Chris Floyd

Israel admits it used phosphorus weapons (Guardian)

Israel Adds Far-Right Party to Coalition (NY Times)

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By Mike Whitney

Iraq is the great tragedy of our generation. Every day men and women are brazenly killed in their own homes or cities by foreign troops who occupy the country without justification.

In Baghdad, “liberation” has become a permanent state of martial law where one can never be certain if his door will suddenly be kicked in and he will either be shot or dragged off to some remote prison for torture.

Entire cities are now under siege; surrounded by concertina-wire and massive walls of dirt. The townspeople are forced to exit and enter through American-run checkpoints and forced to verify their identity to their foreign jailors.

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By Mike Whitney

Most people won’t pay any attention to this week’s energy summit in Lahti, Finland, but they should. It is particularly instructive for anyone who is interested in the latest developments in the global resource war.

The purpose of the meeting was to work out the nettlesome issues of energy policy, but the hidden agenda was to pressure Russian President Putin into signing away the control of his country’s critical assets to the big-players in the world energy cartel. The proposed “Energy Charter Treaty” is designed to tie up Russia’s resources through legal obligations which serve the overall interests of the energy giants. The treaty is no different than the EU Constitution which was voted down last year when the “informed” European public realized that it was just another boondoggle set up by big business to override national sovereignty, environmental safety, and civil liberties. The Energy Charter Treaty and the EU Constitution focus on the very same objectives, that is, establishing the legal framework for placing the world and its dwindling resources in the hands of a small cadre of obscenely-wealthy western plutocrats.

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