by Tom Chartier  

Well, now that we have established a Democratic Dictatorship there seems to be some confusion. This is America! Constitutional Monarchy?  It can’t happen here! We learned that in the third grade.  

It has happened here! With the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, America has its very first bona fide dictator! The Silver Spoon Kid from Texas has made good. Yee ha! Ride ‘em cowboy! Oops, excuse me, that phrase best fits Rep. Mark Foley. 

Sadly, not all seem to be hot for Hitler-nouveau. I’m certainly displeased and plan to write a strongly worded letter to my Congressman. Fact is, I’m mad as Hell. I like to think that the U.S. is still a Democratic Republic! Well folks, the times they are a changin’ and not in a good way. Don’t people read or follow the news, beyond FOX infotainment? Never mind answering that question. It’s rhetorical. 

Maybe what we have here is a failure to communicate. We need a refresher course on how to Spot A Dictator! It’s a lot like the old Monty Python skit Spot The Loony but the prizes you win (and lose) are a whole lot more serious. 

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by Paul Lehto
 

Habeas corpus -- it's your most fundamental legal right, your right to go to a court and get an order requiring the government to prove that it is holding you in prison with proper legal authority to do so. Without that right, one necessarily lives in a dictatorship. President Bush today on October 17, 2006 signed a bill repealing that law, meaning that the administration need not comply or show compliance with law any more with regard to who goes to prison or Gitmo.

While it supposedly applies just to terrorism cases, that doesn't prevent it from ending the rule of law in the United States for our newly all-powerful Executive. This is true not just because terrorism is construed so broadly in the prohibition of "material support" for terrorism (which by the way has already been held to include a lawyer's press release on behalf of a terrorist client) but because the administration NEED NOT PROVE IT'S REALLY TERRORISM because they don't need to answer to any court in the land at any time.

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by Manuel Valenzuela

To twenty five million Iraqis hell on Earth has been introduced to their land by the demons roaming the halls of American power that care not an ounce for the misery and wickedness now roaming like a vulture over Iraq’s skies. 

For human evil has been imported into the Cradle of Civilization, an export birthed, nurtured and molded by Old Glory itself, under the watchful eyes of Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington, crafted by debasement and corruption, becoming the most successful product launch America has sent abroad in many, many years.

For the war culture has perfected the art of sadistic mass murder, a new edition introduced like a software program, resurrected every few decades to enrich war profiteers and greed mongers while making comfortable the lives of those residing inside the belly of the beast.  Like a virus the American angel of death has spread far and wide, free of antidotes or miracle cures, given the freedom that is denied Iraqis, like a haze enveloping almost every city and town, village and farm, infecting madness and hatred and vengeance and anger into the minds of millions, injecting civil war upon Iraq and genocide upon the Iraqi people. 

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by Chris Cook 

Though there are a myriad of reasons Canadians should have a quick end to the public service career of Mr. Harper - his personality, arrogant disregard of both Canadian tradition and sensibilities, and his cosy relationship with the Republican regime to the south leap immediately to mind - three recent “initiatives” are enough to sink the bastardized, remnant Conservative Party, and in so doing turn back too the latest and greatest threat to her sovereign survival Canada has faced yet in two centuries of resistance to American expansionist designs.
 

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by Mickey Z.

Thanks to the nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran, there's no shortage of rhetoric along these lines: "We can't let rogue nations have nukes. They might use them." Absent from the discussion are two elementary questions. First: What is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons (and have civilians been targeted)?

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. government ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

A Tokyo radio broadcast describe how "the impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all livin things, human and animal, were seared to death by the tremendous heat an pressure engendered by the blast." Tokyo radio went on to call Hiroshima  city with corpses "too numerous to be counted...literally seared to death. It was impossible to "distinguish between men and women."

The Associated Press carried the first eyewitness account: a Japanese soldier who describe the victims as "bloated and scorched-such an awesome sight-their legs an bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister." After visitin the devastated city, Australian war correspondent, Wilfred Burchet described Hiroshima as a "death-stricken alien planet" with patient presenting purple skin hemorrhages, hair loss, drastically reduced white blood cell counts, fever, nausea, gangrene, and other symptoms of radiation disease he called an "atomic plague."

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By Ingmar Lee & Krista Roessingh

We are appealing for your immediate help to protect South India's last significant herds of Wild Elephants! Please take a few moments to familiarize yourselves with the predicament of these magnificent animals!

Recent estimates of the number of Asian elephants (Elephus maximus) remaining in the wild range from 35,000 at the low end to 50,000 at the upper end. Asian elephants once ranged throughout most of Asia, but their habitat has been reduced to isolated fragments, often with boundaries that restrict traditional migrations and gene flow.
This expanding human settlement/wildland interface has lead to increased pressure on populations due to human-elephant conflicts ranging from poaching to crop-raiding and roadkills. The distribution of Asian elephant populations in India is well known but population estimates, ranging from 26,000 to 31,000 are up to 14 years out of date and many are based on less than rigorous data collection. Also, effective population sizes are lower due to selective poaching of males for ivory.

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by George Soros

The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued; a plot that could have claimed more victims than 9/11 has just been foiled by the vigilance of British intelligence.

Unfortunately, the "war on terror" metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. But the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense.

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Steve is a New Englander, an educated man. He's been released from jail just a few hours before the rendezvous with the camera, late at ... all » night, in a crowded bar in Denver. It's a cold night. The judge will not let him see his son without a shrink being present. Steve is very upset and outspoken. He talks about what he calls the Shitstem, the justice system in America; he divides American society amongst those who have and those who have not, and was on the consequences to come should we decide to do nothing about it. Steve's an average American, an educated man angered at a society that he finds profoundly unjust.

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by Richard Kastelein

A paranoid passenger seated next to former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins got nervous on a flight to Brisbane when he saw the rocker reading “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia”, a book about Islamic fundamentalists. The passenger contacted the authorities after the plane landed and Henry faced the rubber glove snapping... thanks to the Australian government. For a book.

“Days later I received an e-mail from a woman who I guess figured out who I was and found me,” Rollins stated. “I had been named a ‘person of interest.’ Basically, they get calls like this every five minutes, and I’m probably on the ‘who cares’ list, in that they’ll probably let me into the country again. But the fact that this guy could be that ignorant and call me in on this for a book . . . I was angry. Because of the fact that the guy wouldn’t confront me. I like confrontation. If I’ve offended you, let me know. Don’t call it in and not leave your name. I just think it’s pretty weak.”

Source

Henry Rollins
Freedom is under attack

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By Mel Seesholtz, Ph.D.

Spirituality is intrapersonal. It’s a liberating and uplifting awareness. It nurtures personal growth. It inspires more conscious perceptions. But when personal spirituality is organized into a religion, an institution is produced and, as all institutions, it then produces a hierarchy who concoct dogma that has nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with maintaining social and political control.

The Roman Catholic Church lied about and covered-up decades of child abuse by priests. When finally exposed, they responded by banning “gay priests.” But as Kathryn Conroy, assistant dean of Columbia University’s School of Social Work, pointed out in a New York Times piece following the Vatican’s ban on “gay priests”:

What is forgotten in all of the hysteria about priest sexual abuse is that pedophilia is about a sexual attraction to children (most often, regardless of their sex) and about access. …

Reliable studies show that pedophiles (those adults who sexually abuse children) are overwhelmingly heterosexual. In fact, homosexuals are statistically underrepresented as those who sexually abuse children. …

Further, women have far lower rates of sexually abusing children than men do. So if the church were really serious about protecting children from sexual abuse by priests, gays would not be excluded from the priesthood and ordination would be extended to women.

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