Saturday, December 19, 2009

One Million Strong Against the GOP

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The GOP has been infiltrated by a kooky kult of korporatists! It is not the party of Eisenhower-like fiscal conservatives or of Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt anymore. It has become the party of the MIC and the big lobbyists on K-street. It has become the official party of the big corporations, the ruling one percent of the population which alone has benfefited from GOP fiscal policy.

Ronald Reagan doubled the national debt and tripled the deficit. While revenues declined as a result, Reagan compounded the problem by ramming through Congresss a TAX CUT from which ONLY the upper quintile benefited. It was a recipe for historic deficits, in fact, national bankruptcy. Concurrently, a trend, in which the rich get richer and everyone else poorer, did not abate until Clinton's second term. Under Bush the Shrub, the trend resumed with a vengence.

Today --as a result --just one percent of the nation owns more than about 95 percent of the rest of us combined. The inevitable result of transferring this wealth to the wealthy is that the net gain to the wealthy is, in fact, exported out of the economy and into offshore bank accounts.

That being the case --why were we surprised that the inevitable collapse occurred under Bush and carried over into the Obama regime. In effect, monies were removed from the economy --a contraction. Economists call this recession.

I have enough material on Reagan's irresponsible profligacy to fill several volumes, more data than I have time to 'twitterize'. Sometimes, you just have to read the long, dull story.

Bottom line: the GOP is just not credible when it claims to be fiscally conservative. The GOP is just not credible when it tries to trick you into believing that there is no difference between the GOP and Obama. The GOP has no legs when it claims to be fiscally conservative. Listening to goppers cry about Democratic 'deficits' is like hearing a million or more crocodiles singing the Hebrew Slave Chorus.

Because the big corporations dominate K-street, Americans inevitably get a ONE SIDED view, the GOP spin. The actual facts available from the Labor Dept, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis and EVEN the conservative Brookings Institution paint a different picture.

It's hard to set the record straight on a TWITTERIZED net. Even so some key facts utterly disprove the GOP/Reagan myth. To wit:

Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents

Johnson 3.8%
Carter 3.1
Clinton 2.4
Kennedy 2.3
Nixon 2.3
Reagan 2.1
Bush 0.6

--Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Current Employment Statistics Survey

The Reagan ERA was a period in which corporate PACs literally compelled Congress to pass pro-business legislation. According to supply-side theory, these actions should have nudged the economy in the right direction, not plunge it into the worst recession in 40 years. But that is PRECISELY WHAT HAPPENED.

The resulting 'depression' of some two years was the longest, deepest since Hoover's GREAT DEPRESSION triggered by the crash of '29, an event not seen again until Shrub's second term.

Given the economic 'crimes' committed by Reagan, Sr, and Shrub, the lame ass charges against Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pale.

How the GOP --which ran up the highest debts and deficits in US history --can lay that rap on Democrats which had control of Congress just eight of almost 20 years is just plain ludicrous.

ANY Dem Prez beats ANY GOP Prez since LBJ. Now --I would say that JOB GROWTH --essential for a healthy economy --is reason enough to fire the GOP until it repents and gets down on its knees to beg forgiveness of the American People, until it pleads, on its knees, for political salvation. Say Hallelujah!!!

Addendum:
This article would not have been possible had not Steve Kangas braved the wrath of a crooked GOP! Given that background, I have a message for Richard Mellon Scaife: FUCK YOU!

The Who: Won't Get Fooled Again!

Additional Resource: One Million Strong Against the Republican Party
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Thursday, December 17, 2009

What Must Obama do about the Lie of the Century?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Obama should get off his butt and insist upon war crimes trials of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condo Rice. That Iraq had WMD was a bald faced lie to justify the seizure of Middle East oil fields! Ergo --every Iraqi death following is one count in a WAR CRIMES INDICTMENT on the scale of those charged to Adolph Hitler and high mucky mucks in the murderous Third Reich.
TITLE 18 >(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

-- PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441, War crimes
I say let the trials begin with George W. Bush who believed himself above the law and that the US Constitution was just a 'goddamned piece of paper'!
The government official who wrote the first draft of the "dodgy dossier" that helped propel Britain into war in Iraq today admits, "We were wrong."

John Williams, a former Foreign Office aide, said last night that publication of his document would expose how members of Tony Blair's team were locked in a mindset that made military action inevitable.

On Wednesday, ministers will hit a deadline for publishing the 2002 document, after years of resistance.

The Williams draft was written in September 2002, only days after Mr Blair, then Prime Minister, announced that the Government would publish a dossier of intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein threatened the world with his weapons.

The draft was not disclosed at the Hutton inquiry into the death in 2003 of the former Iraq arms inspector David Kelly. The scientist had suggested the dossier was exaggerated to justify the UK joining the 2003 invasion.

--'Dodgy dossier' was 'wrong', its author says, The Independant
According to the Times of London, Ministers had been warned in July 2002 that it "had no choice but to find a way" of making the American-led invasion of Iraq legal. In other words, the government in Britain KNEW that what Bush was doing in and to Iraq was a prosecutable war crime but, instead of doing the right thing, Britain sought to 'make it legal'. The very phrase --'to make it legal' --speaks to guilt and pre-meditation of both the US government of George W. Bush and the British government of Tony Blair in whom so many hopes had been invested, later dashed by the corrupting influences of the worst and most criminal White House in US history.


Damn Liars and War Criminals!

If the nation had wanted another eight years of war, a total of some twenty years of quagmire, war crimes and other atrocities. it might have put two idiots in the White House --John McCain and the even stupider Sarah Palin.

Rather, the nation wanted change and expressed that hope by electing an articulate man of substance. Committing the nation to an quaqmire well underway is NOT what the nation voted for. Another eight years of Bush's war crime is NOT the path the US should be on if it wishes to restore its blackened image throughout the world.


Nope! No WMD under the podium!
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Friday, December 11, 2009

Official Lies about 911 Exposed

Guest Columnist, Dr. David Ray Griffin
Although John Farmer's "The Ground Truth" has attracted a lot of favorable attention, it is a deeply flawed book, containing misleading claims and providing an extremely one-sided account of 9/11.

Much of the attention received by the book has been prompted by misleading claims made by Farmer and his publisher. The book's dust-jacket calls it the "definitive account" of 9/11, but it actually deals almost entirely with only one question about that day: why the airliners were not intercepted.

Also, the book's subtitle calls it "the untold story" of 9/11 and its dust-jacket says that it "breathtakingly revises" our understanding of that day. In reality, however, it simply provides new support for the story told about the planes in "The 9/11 Commission Report," which appeared in 2004, and in two publications that appeared in 2006: Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton's book "Without Precedent," and Michael Bronner's essay in "Vanity Fair."

Most provocatively, Farmer presents his book as a rejection of the "official" account of 9/11, which was given by "the government," by which he means primarily the FAA and the Pentagon. But this rhetoric is misleading for three reasons.

First, Farmer's book is a defense of the 9/11 Commission's report, which he calls "accurate, and true" (2), and the Commission was itself a governmental body: its chairman, Thomas Kean, was appointed by Bush; the other members were appointed by Congress; and the executive director, Philip Zelikow, was essentially a member of the Bush White House.

Second, the "official account of 9/11," as generally understood, is the Bush-Cheney administration's conspiracy theory, according to which the 9/11 attacks resulted from a conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and some members of al-Qaeda, and Farmer supports this theory.

Third, in rejecting the "official version," Farmer is referring only to the first version of the official account. It was replaced in 2004 by the 9/11 Commission's version, which since then has been the official version of the official account. In spite of his rhetoric, therefore, Farmer is defending the official account of 9/11 produced by the government in 2004, so the book is far less radical than it has been promoted as being.

Even more serious than the book's misleading rhetoric is its one-sidedness. Rather than containing an impartial examination of various types of relevant evidence, this book by Farmer - a former prosecuting attorney - reads like a lawyer's brief: Besides citing a large number of facts that appear to support the Bush-Cheney conspiracy theory and trying to undermine some of the contrary evidence (which supports the alternative theory, according to which 9/11 was an inside job), it seeks to suppress, by simply ignoring, the enormous bulk of this contrary evidence.

This one-sided approach is acceptable within an adversarial law court, given the presence of an opposing lawyer, but it does not result in a book that is acceptable by scholarly standards.

The one-sidedness of Farmer's book is manifest in his endnotes, which include no reference to any writings aimed at exposing serious problems with the 9/11 Commission: Besides not referring to any of my own books, one of which is entitled "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," Farmer does not even mention "The Commission" by former New York Times writer Philip Shenon - who pointed out, among other things, that Zelikow had secretly written a detailed outline of the Commission's report before his research staff had even begun its work.

This bibliographic one-sidedness is important because it is reflected in substantive one-sidedness, one form of which is the ignoring of a great number of relevant facts. I will mention 15.

1. Claiming that the military did not have information about AA 77 in time to prevent it from striking the Pentagon, Farmer strongly attacks the claim (in the first version of the official account) that the FAA had notified the military about this flight at 9:24 AM. In doing so, he ignores a memo - even though it was discussed and read into the Commission's record in May 2003 - that was sent by the FAA's Laura Brown, explaining that 9:24 was only the time of the "formal notification" - that the FAA had set up phone bridges with the Pentagon and that "real-time information . . . about . . . Flight 77 . . . was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification" (Griffin, "The New Pearl Harbor Revisited" [NPHR] Chs. 1 & 2).

2. Simply assuming that Osama bin Laden authorized the 9/11 attacks, Farmer fails to mention that the FBI has admitted that "no hard evidence" supports this assumption (Griffin, "9/11 Contradictions" [9/11Contra] Ch. 18).

3. While mentioning that some of the alleged hijackers spent time in Las Vegas (62), Farmer fails to point out that, while there and in other places, they drank, went to strip clubs, and did other things that contradicted the Commission's portrayal of them as devout Muslims ready to die for their faith (9/11Contra Ch. 15).

4. Farmer calls Hani Hanjour, who allegedly flew AA 77 (a Boeing 757) through an extremely difficult trajectory to crash into the Pentagon, a "trained pilot" (45), failing to mention the much-documented fact that Hanjour could not even safely fly a single-engine plane (9/11Contra Ch. 19).

5. While claiming that "American 77 crashed into the Pentagon at a speed of 530 miles per hour" (186), Farmer does not point out that, according to the official seismic report, no station, including one only 63 km away, recorded the impact. He also fails to mention that many witnesses at the scene, both inside and outside, reported seeing no crashed airliner (NPHR Ch. 2).

6. Claiming that the alleged hijackers purchased tickets and boarded planes (62, 106), Farmer fails to mention that none of their names - indeed, no Arab names whatsoever - were on the passenger manifests of the flights released by the airlines or on the Pentagon autopsy report (NPHR Ch. 6).

7. Repeating the Commission's claim that Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari took an early morning flight from Portland (Maine) to Boston to catch American Flight 11 (103-05), Farmer does not point out that this story was a late invention, created after authorities learned that Adnan and Ameer Bukhari, originally said to have taken that flight, had not died on 9/11 (9/11Contra Ch. 16).

8. Writing as if the alleged phone calls from the airliners actually happened, Farmer does not point out that, after originally supporting the view that many of the reported calls were made on cell phones, the FBI in 2004 - after members of the 9/11 Truth Movement showed that cell phone calls from high-altitude airliners would have been impossible - quietly withdrew its support for such calls. The FBI thereby contradicted, among others, Deena Burnett, who was positive that she had been called by her husband, Tom Burnett (whom Farmer mentions), because she recognized his cell phone number on her Caller ID (9/11Contra Ch. 17).

9. Farmer repeats the claim, supported in 2004 by "The 9/11 Commission Report," that CNN commentator Barbara Olson had twice called from AA 77 to talk to her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson (163, 166). But Farmer fails to point out that in 2006, after members of the 9/11 Truth Movement had reported that American's 757s did not have onboard phones, the FBI - in its report for the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called 20th hijacker) - said that Barbara Olson's (one) attempted call did not go through and therefore lasted "0 seconds" (9/11Contra Ch. 8).

10. Farmer endorses the claim that the hijackers had box-cutters (161, 163), not mentioning the fact that this claim had been made only in the reported calls from Barbara Olson, which the FBI now says never happened (9/11Contra Ch 8).

11. While repeating the Commission's claim that al-Qaeda hijackers finally succeeded in breaking into UA 93's cockpit 30 seconds after they started trying (189), Farmer fails to ask why, in all that time, the pilots did not use the transponder to squawk the hijack code - a procedure that takes about 2 seconds (NPHR Ch. 6).

12. While claiming, like the Commission, that "Vice President Cheney learned that the Pentagon had been hit while he was in the tunnel under the White House leading to the shelter" (207), Farmer does not point out that Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta told the Commission that Cheney had been in the shelter (the Presidential Emergency Operations Center) at least since 9:20 AM, hence about 20 minutes before the reported time of the Pentagon attack - an observation that was supported by other witnesses, including counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke (9/11Contra Ch. 2).

13. While acknowledging that Richard Clarke's account of his White House videoconference contradicts the 9/11 Commission's claims about the whereabouts of not only Cheney but also Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Farmer simply asserts that Clarke's account "does not square in any significant respect with what occurred that morning" (184), failing to point out that the question of who told the truth could be cleared up simply by looking at the videotape.

14. Suggesting that the Twin Towers came down because each one was "fragile at its core" (28), Farmer implicitly denies the fact that each tower was supported by 47 massive core columns and ignores the question of why several scientific studies, including one by the US Geological Survey, showed that the dust at Ground Zero contained various elements that, unless explosives had been used to bring down the buildings, should not have been there (Griffin, "The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7," Ch. 4).

15. Although Farmer's entire case for the 9/11 Commission's version of the official account, which involves his accusing a remarkable number of people of lying, rests entirely on logs and audiotapes not examined by the Commission until several years after 9/11, he fails to consider reasons that have been provided for believing that these tapes and logs had been doctored (NPHR Chs 1-3, 10).

There would be much more to say in a complete review, but the above points suffice to suggest that Farmer's book is deeply flawed, providing an account that is far from the "ground truth" about 9/11.

--David Ray Griffin, PhD

If 911 had not been an inside job, it would have been investigated! The cover up that followed has only one purpose: the protection of the guilty! It is not only the absurd, alleged conspiracy of 19 Arab hijackers, a cover story for which there is absolutely no convincing or admissible evidence, it is the fact that the events that day were deliberately covered up and access to evidence denied investigators.
It was odd to me that I was dispatched to go to New York even before the second plane hit the South Tower, while the media was still reporting only that a “small plane” had collided with the North Tower — far too small of a catastrophe at that point to involve FEMA . FEMA was mobilized within minutes, whereas it took ten days for it to deploy to New Orleans to respond to Hurricane Katrina, even with abundant advance warning! It was odd to me that all cameras were so fiercely prohibited within the secured perimeter of Ground Zero, that the entire area was declared a crime scene and yet the “evidence” within that crime scene was so rapidly removed and destroyed. And then it was very odd to me when I learned that FEMA and several other federal agencies had already moved into position at their command center at Pier 92 on September 10th, one day before the attacks! ...

We are asked to believe that all four of the “indestructible” black boxes of the two jets that struck the twin towers were never found because they were completely vaporized, yet I have footage of the rubber wheels of the landing gear nearly undamaged, as well as the seats, parts of the fuselage and a jet turbine that were absolutely not vaporized. This being said, I do find it rather odd that such objects could have survived fairly intact the type of destruction that turned most of the Twin Towers into thin dust. And I definitely harbor some doubts about the authenticity of the “jet” turbine, far too small to have come from one of the Boeings!

--Kurt Sonnenfeld, 9/11 FEMA videographer at Ground Zero goes public
Among the many lies about 911, the most egregious are the 'official ones' put forward by the Bush administration and Bush personally. Make no mistake about it: the story of 19 Arab hijackers co-ordinated from a cave in Afghanistan by a man who was most certainly already dead of kidney failure, is the most absurd lie among them. If Bush had taken his 'case' to court, a 'burden of proof' would have been imposed. It would have been interesting to see the government prosecutor attempt to 'prove' a case against a man that that could not have been proven to have been alive let alone co-ordinate multiple hijackings with cell phones from inside a remote cave in Afghanistan!

The many lies about 911 are evidence of guilt. The guilty are most always most motivated to cover up their crimes and only an idiot would suppress evidence if it would exonerate him!

Bush ordered the destruction of evidence, in fact, the cover up of 911. He and his administration shut down every investigation. Bush hid the truth. At the very least, the Bush administration obstructed justice because it is fully culpable for the inside job we call 911. And the lot of them should be indicted and put on trial for the crimes of high treason and mass murder.


911: An Inside Job
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