Monthly Archives: May 2007

Democratic Party corruption sinks the heart of Cindy Sheehan

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Cindy Sheehan has been grieving a long time, and this Memorial Day after the capitulation of the Democratic Party legislators in Congress was particularly rough. But it is more than that. The pain is made even worse by how inactive so many rank and file Democratic Party voters are in opposing this war.

At street vigils we see this, too. So many liberal minded folk wave and honk their horns in support of our vigil, but then it seems that they never get out of their cars to be the protesters, and not just the driver by-ers. After a while, this becomes disheartening.

We hope that Cindy gets her spirits back up and rejoins the activist antiwar movement after some family time off. She deserves the best, and she has given America her best. Here is her last commentary about how despairing she now feels. Many feel the same alongside her.

We are sad to see it be so, but when push comes to shove, the Democratic Party is not to be relied on. Cindy Sheehan tried to push the Democratic Party into action, but the corporate controllers resisted. She is not the first, and will not be the last to fail in such a project.

Good Riddance Attention Whore
by Cindy Sheehan

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

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The OAS under Bush

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‘Orgies on the negotiating table’ by Colombian death squad leaders is in the news in Latin America.

A pretty picture of what the Organization of American States (OAS) located in Washington DC has actually deteriorated to, since they sponsored and secured the area where these criminals partied. And think that the US and its allies have a tough-on-crime attitude? How about a monthly $200 pension for death squad members who lay down their knives and stop dismembering peasants and other poor folk with?

Isn’t that nice? All part of the so-called War on Drugs, otherwise know as the daddy of the so-called ‘War Against Terrorism’.

See also, Colombia’s Civil War and the US

Falwell lives!

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It appears that Jerry Falwell died and went to neither Hell nor Heaven. He went to Poland, where he is now once again outing Tinky Winky from the closet. More intolerance of this sort can also be found in Moscow, too. Thank God we live in Colorado Springs, where people and dogs of all types tolerate and respect each other!

My dog sez Moo to Y’all. And she says that we all need each other, so don’t make life hard for others. It’s pretty damn simple., isn’t it?

US Armada poised to strike Iran

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I found video images of our Persian Gulf Armada taunting the Iranians and restricting their movement. What would our flag waver, ass-kicker types do if some other country sent a navy to aim their guns at our shores? Indeed what did the English do when the Spanish mounted their celebrated Armada? I think the Iranians are showing incredible restraint.

Memorial Day 3,500 x 100

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This Memorial Day the number of US soldier casualties in Iraq nears 3,500.

At 1,000 we held a vigil in Acacia Park. We did the same at the 1,500 and 2,000 marks. The numbered-cross memorial we mounted at Camp Casey COS commemorated near 2,000 deaths. The “Eyes Wide Open” boot collection came to town as the number exceeded 2,500. Colorado Springs was its last stop because the figures began to require too many boots to unpack at each stop. We met again in the park for the 3,000th, but I’m not going to eulogize any more boots until the number reaches 50,000.

That’s well into Vietnam War casualty territory and that’s where we’re going. The war got its funding, the military has revealed its plans to double the troop levels, the President is warning us to expect US casualties to surge, and sure enough we’re seeing the body count rise. Eight, fifteen a day. Not counting mercenaries. And still no one’s tallying the Iraqi dead.

I’m okay not to count the mercenaries. But what of our volunteer army, signing ever-increasing re-enlistment bonuses? I don’t want to count them either. Our soldiers keep shipping themselves off to Iraq to serve well-enough-documented evil illegal deeds. What’s to commemorate, really? They’re not jumping off cliffs, they’re driving armored vehicles into Iraqi children on the way.

Our soldier’s souls are already lost to us. That’s 150,000 active in Iraq. 300,000 counting the mercenaries. Plus who ever’s being held back with PTSD. Cry about that.

On this date in 1973, the military had counted 44 deaths for El Paso County. It was not enough even then.

Sun sets on Judeo-Christian legacy

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All roads lead to Rome. The sun never sets on the British Empire. What’s it going to be for the US empire? I’m guessing something from PT Barnum.

The sun has yet to set on a bigger bunch of uneducated self-obsessed blunderers. What’s the age most people acquire empathy? You know, when we learn the world doesn’t revolve simply to serve us? America, pre-adolescents gone wild. Id-less egos unbridled.

But let’s not flatter ourselves, we most certainly are bridled. We are the US-Israeli empire. Israel being not merely another state, nor a territory or protectorate, but a fully bloomed brain transplant. Between us, who calls the shots?

And while we’re talking empire, should we quibble about the relevance of nationalities? Over the course of the last century the world became America’s de-facto empire. American capitalism overcame international sovereignties the same way it conquered The West, rushing in to squat with commerce. Today national boundaries serve simply to thwart the uniting of their people’s common interests. Fiefdoms divide the working population into manageable groups. But Capitalists own the world, and entities like China and Russia are rogue upstarts to be kept in line, presiding over markets still considered negligible.

Every past empire extended to the reaches of its known worlds. There were always lands known to lie beyond, but they were not part of the world that mattered. Islam, as always, lords over populations almost too poor to matter, until they fight back, hence the renewed effort to keep them underfoot.

But there is more to life than money.

As to the hierarchy of the American Empire, we are Israel’s veto on the Security Council. We are the enforcers to “Israel’s right to exist” in place of the Palestinians. We are the siblings who run the family business while the oldest brother studies the Talmud. We keep the money flowing to the temple, er, Promised Land, though we ourselves are not invited. Israel, beacon of democracy in the Middle East, is a democracy in the Roman sense, only for its citizens. It is not for non-Jews.

There’s a Jewish Anti Defamation League to keep anyone from complaining about that.

An axiom for America? Let us know our place. A self-Chosen People employ a narcissist brute to do the heavy lifting. American Empire handles the task like a pit bull, dumb and disposable. Raised with a short attention span and brutal temperament, Americans rule the junkyard. I think I’m most upset at Israel’s arrogance that their bastard Goy offspring could never bite them in the ass.

US bloodies up Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp

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Nahr el-Bared, one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp continues to be battered by the US-allied Lebanese government of ‘Prime Minister’ Saniori. The attack on this refugee camp was made in Washington DC, and Bush is sending in tons of military equipment in to the US controlled Lebanese government at this very moment. All to use on the Palestinian refugees in this camp.

Tens of thousands have already fled the bombardment, and Bush fully intends to terrorize these refugees yet more in the days to come. Yet the cowardly American corporate press is hiding away the details of American initiation of this attack and details of Bush’s political game plan to spread the US War Against Iraq into more and more neighboring countries. Rather than this just being an effort to clean out some extremists connected with al qaeda, this attack is nothing more than a direct US intervention into the internal political affairs of the Lebanese nation.

Once again, the US is helping Israel do its dirty work for it. In turn, Israel will be expected to continue to help the US do its dirty work of stealing out total control over the Middle East’s oil resources for itself. Meanwhile, how many amongst the circles of US soldiers, their families, and their friends know the full reasons of why American soldier’s lives are being (or were) put to risk on this Memorial Weekend? Their sacrifices are/were made in a war of the US rich against the World’s poor. And wounding and killing new thousands of destitute in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps is about par for the course.

Me Claudius

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Bush gave the nation forty wacks…
Our emperor’s got no clothes? Oh no no no! This emperor’s fully outfitted. He’s wearing the skin of Clarisse for starters, if maybe I’m mixing up my film villains. Our creepy gladiator despot is the Silence of the Lambs cross-dresser, Hannibal, Freddy, Jason, I Know What You Did Last Summer and “Here’s Johnny” rolled into one embarrassing Will Farrell portrayal of the Deliverance banjo dude.
 
And we’ve just given him 120 billion to keep his axe.

The lesson of Vietnam

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As Congress voted today to approve funds for prolonging the bloodbath in Iraq, a vote which included a butt-load of Democrat shits, absolute idiots for shits, fork-tongued, pandering, corrupt asshole shits brought aboard last election selling the hope that they would represent the people and put an end to Bush’s fiddling recital while burning the US constitution over the fires of Holocausts unleashed on millions of Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Somalis, Colombians, et al, the pretender-alternative party caving to the Necons for absolutely no reason, it occurs to me the lesson learned with Vietnam.

The lesson that Americans learned after being responsible for the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians is that we got away with it. Shamed, chastized but ultimately let off, we forgave ourselves, forgot the deeds, Lieutenant Calley retired a midwestern jeweler, revelations of the Tiger Patrol’s atrocities obfuscated by miscreant swiftboaters, and Joe Public who went along, waved the flags, those who beat the drum, smiling, ridiculing voices who sought to get us out. What happened to those people. Nothing. They’re back. They’re doing the same thing, again, getting away with murder.

Raul Castro’s daughter blasts homophobia

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I thought that this news item was of note, so here it is in full. Walter Lippmann’s website is worth visiting, too. See below… Tony

Raul Castro’s daughter blasts homophobia

Havana, May 21 (EFE).- The daughter of acting Cuban President Raul
Castro spoke out in favor of tolerance and against gay-bashing on the
occasion of the International Day against Homophobia.

“The communications media have a big responsibility in the education
of the public, in developing a culture of respect for people due to
their sexual identity and sexual orientation,” said Mariela Castro,
the head of the National Sex Education Center, in remarks broadcast
Sunday by state television.

Castro attended an unusual film-debate held in the “23 y 12” hall in
Havana, where organizers showed the U.S. film “Boys Don’t Cry,” which
tells a story based on real events of the difficulties,
discrimination and violence to which a young transsexual woman was
subjected.

“Starting with the advances we have had on these matters in our
country, it’s that we (are) trying to better visualize the goal of
this international – and in this case national – day,” said the
sexologist.

Castro said that “homophobia and transphobia still exist in the world
in a very strong, very cruel, very distriminatory way against
homosexual, transsexual and transgender people in a general sense
and, above all, as a result of ignorance.”

The government of Fidel Castro, who provisionally handed over power
to younger brother Raul last July after undergoing major surgery, has
in the past displayed marked intolerance for homosexuals, imprisoning
gays and quarantining AIDS sufferers.

The National Sex Education Center, a teaching, research and
assistance institution created in 1989, has proposed in the Cuban
legislature a bill to legally recognize the sex changes undergone by
transsexuals, at the same time it has been pushing for some time an
awareness campaign in the state-controlled media.

The International Day against Homophobia was begun on May 17, 2005, a
decade after the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from
its list of mental illnesses.

Thirteen years after its first showing in movie theaters on the
island, on May 5, Cubans watched the first broadcast on local
television of the 1993 film “Fresa y chocolate” (Strawberry and
Chocolate), an allegory against intolerance and discrimination
against homosexuals. Recently, Cuban TV also showed “La mujer de mi
hermano” (My Brother’s Wife), which also deals with the theme of
homosexuality. EFE

=============================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
writer – photographer – activist

Front Page


=============================

US threatens Iran with war

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Nine US warships are now in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Iran just 2 weeks after Dick Cheney threatened that country with an attack. What does it take to waken the international public to the reality that the US government plans to extend its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq into new attacks on neighboring countries?

Meanwhile, the US’s allies in Lebanon have been bombarding a refugee camp in their own country of 40,000 people with the Bush Adminstration cheering this on. It looks like we might just be days away from a major escalation of the US-made war on the varying people’s of the Middle East into new countries, like Iran and Syria.

The Democratic Party has refused to act against the plans of the Bush Administration to spread their war throughout the Middle East and it is now up to the world population to act decisively in opposition to this US governmental terrorism. It is absolutely the wrong thing to do to await until after the bombing of Iran begins to show opposition. Unfortunately, that appears to be just exactly what the Peace Movement in the US is doing right now.

Act to end the Endless War now. It just takes a couple of people to do a corner peace vigil and show opposition to continuing the carnage. US Troops Out of the Middle East Now!

Protest is patriotic so what are you waiting on? And contrary to popular cynicism protest does work when done with sufficient numbers. Add yourself to those willing to protest this evil war. It’s not really all that hard to do a peace vigil, even on your own, so don’t sit around acting utterly paralyzed.

Thank you, Larry Small

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I was able to attend the city council meeting where I made the effort to correct some of the more recent baloney that The Gazette had published regarding the city’s pro-peace community. I stated that local peace activists were neither harshly unconciliatory towards the city government and its police, nor were we into a love fest with the new police chief, Richard Myers.

Further, I offered our thanks and appreciation for the concern offered to us by some on the city council, and thanked Larry Small, vice mayor of the city, in particular, for the remarks he had made 2 weeks previous. He had stated that he apologized if any of us paraders for PEACE had been harmed emotionally or physically, by actions taken at the St. Patrick’s Day parade by law enforcement.

On behalf of the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission, I was able to tell the city council that we were appreciative of these remarks by the vice mayor, and that it was indeed noticed by us all and that we were grateful for what had been said. Still, that 7 of us faced criminal charges, and that we were now totally aware of the role that John O’Donnell has constantly been used as pro-military organizer for city sponsored events. While we are appreciative of the role taken at conciliation by the city council and police, we still were unable to allow the city government to continue to hide behind the pretense that John O’Donnell was a mere private citizen and that we should somehow be considered as illegitimate gate crashers at a private event.

We ask that police be restrained in their use of unecessary force in the future.

Blackwater USA out of Sudan!

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Last night, some misguided peace activists in Colorado Springs got together at ‘Poor Richards’ to call for more US-UN-EU intervention into Sudan. They want to stop the bloodshed in Darfur but seem oblivious to the actual realities of US global interventionism. Their get together comes just days after Joseph Biden, a Democratic Party presidential candidate, called for US troops to be sent into Sudan.

So what in effect we have, are Colorado Springs pacifists calling for US military intervention into an African country! It is companies like Blackwater USA who will actually carry out this intervention, along with other outfits from the USA like the Louis Berger Group.

US Out of Africa, not further into it! Blackwater USA Out of Sudan!

Congress sold us out… surprise

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Now the question is how much heat can we apply quickly?

Not advocating the use of Molotov Cocktails or anything, but that is a predictable result of continued Bush-league dictatorship.

We struggled uphill, against an Attorney General, Supreme Court, and an Army of dead voters in order to send people to Congress who were going to Stand Up to the Commander Guy in Chimp. It’s things like this which make me an Anarchist rather than a progressive.

There are those on the Hill with consciences, but no consensus.

What I’m hoping most for, right at this minute, is that it’s a subtle trap, that it’s designed to make the stupid mother fucker get on DumFox Noise and start gloating about how he is the new dictator, all shall bow before him and the rule of law no longer applies…

Which would then hasten the coming revolt and the mutiny that is growing in the ranks of the military.

Or his stupid ass being dragged out of the White House in handcuffs.

Mexico slides into political chaos

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There is little news in the US press about it, but Mexico is beginning to sink into chaos. After stealing the Mexican federal presidential election in mid 2006 with US support, Felipe Calderon (FeCal), now acting president, began a struggle to obtain some public legitimacy by initiating a war with Mexico’s drug lords. He is now losing that war.

Of even more potential interest to the Mexican public as well as to the international public, is a split forming in the Mexican political establishment, exemplified by a new book by long time PRI leader, Roberto Madrazo entitled ‘La Traicion’ (The Betrayal). Madrazo book claims that Mexico was betrayed, as well as himself, by a secret pact made between previous Mexican presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. He dates that secret pact as having begun in 1994.

The essence of that pact was to seemingly end the over a half century dictatorship of one party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI, and to begin a planned-on ‘alternancia’, where political power would alternate between the PRI and PAN kind of like it does in the US between the Democratic and Republican parties. Except the pact was actually broken when Felipe Calderon followed Vicente Fox into presidential office, since both are from the same political party. Madrazo knows about this secret plot well, since he was a full participant to it when it was initiated. But he thought that it would guarantee him the presidency in 2006. Instead, he came in third, hence the ‘betrayal’.

But what political forces actually launched this secret plot? Roberto Madrazo dates this well and it is easy to follow the money. He dates the plot as beginning in 1994 and it was in precisely the time that the Clinton Administration and Mexican PRI government were negotiating an economic ‘bailout’ to stop the Mexican economic crash of that time. In 1995, the cash began to flow to the tune of over $55 billion dollars from the US into Mexico. What was purchased by the US government?

The US was sick of having ties to a corrupt Mexican dictatorship that had no world legitimacy. The European Union was formed as an economic bloc, but the US only had Mexico and Canada to work with, and Mexico had a most unsavory reputation. What was purchased by the bailout was an agreement to open up the Mexican system to another pro-big business political party, the Partido Acion Nacional or PAN. That way, the US would not be seen as dealing with a dictatorship.

The PRI establishment wanted some guarantees as to their future though, and Roberto Madrazo wanted the 2006 presidency to come back to himself. Well it simply didn’t, as change began to spin out of control of the PRI bigwigs in charge up to that time of all that was Mexico.

So where will the political chaos brake at? A lot will depend on what happens in the war of Mafias now engulfing Mexico. Presidente FeCal (Felipe Calderon) thought he had the best armed and best situated mafia. Perhaps not? Like Colombia, Mexico might now best be considered an evolving Narco-Death Squad state. Lots of dealing and wheeling gone bad. And FeCal as well as Roberto Madrazo may well fall to the wayside.

Numb skulls awarding peace prizes

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Two weeks ago I wrote about a CIA funded Otpor spokesperson in town talking to local pacifists of Gandhi and nonviolence and how supposedly that had overthrown Milosevic in Yugoslavia instead of the US and NATO bombs rained down on his country. Then last week I wrote about a NM Department of Tourism run ‘peace’ festival in Albuquerque funded to the tune of $450,000. Sappy ‘peace’ rhetoric run by the Chamber of Commerce basically. This week I guess the focus has to be on the Australian ‘Sidney Peace Prize‘.

This one just blows me away, too! The prize was awarded to none other than Hans Blix, which is the most absurd award of a peace prize since Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1973! We truly live in an Orwellian world these days when initiators of wars are so often given prizes by people spouting pacifist ideology.

Hans Blix was the guy who set up all the lies about Saddam Hussein and Iraq having WOMD that Bush and his Democratic and Republican Party enablers used to launch the invasion and occupation of Iraq. No way he deserves a peace prize, and actually he might better be executed as a war criminal instead. Without his personal act as wrench-er up of the propaganda, hysteria, and panic, the world public would never have gone along much as they did with initially supporting the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

This is just one more example of how pacifist beliefs and desires by much of the public can often be distorted into its opposite by simplistic twists of illogic. Then we get numb skulls awarding peace prizes to war criminals like Hans Blix and Henry Kissinger.

PS- I am still trying to get over how the local ACLU cut off audience questioning of CS police chief Richard ‘Liars’ Myers last week. The ACLU organizers required that all questions be vetted and then read by one person alone to the audience. Because of this, the annual meeting of the ACLU turned into a hug and handshake fest with the cops. Shameful. If the city of Colorado Springs had tried to do this sort of stunt at the city council meeting we would all have gotten peeved off. But instead, the audience silently sat by while the police chief fed them a long sermon of crap. And then many of the crowd applauded just that! Sometimes some amongst the ‘peace’ crowd can make one wanna cry with their innocence and naivete.

’24’ and the high cost of idiocy

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Now I think we can begin to put a precise figure on the high cost of idiocy. Here is what it took the Australian government in OZ dollars to get Hicks back out of direct US hands. A mere 1/2 million dollars for one single one way flight!

I’m sure boondoggles like this one in the name of the so-called ‘War Against Terrorism’ are bound to continue to just really please the folk down under. Aw Hell! The tax payers don’t really need the money spent on reality anyway, do they? It’s just paper…. Who ever knew that torture would cost so much? Wonder if Fox’s hit show ’24’ ever mentions this sort of stuff on their ‘reality’ program?

Sicko government goes after Michael Moore

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Amidst reports that the US medical debacle rivals the US occupation of Iraq as being the biggest boondoggle in the history of the universe, the film Sicko is being displayed at the Cannes Film Festival. And amidst reports that the US medical system is the most expensive in the industrialized world and delivers the worst care, Bush chooses to go after Michael Moore for exposing this to the American public. Sicko!

Goodbye, Jerry, Paul, and Tony

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They were all here with us so long, and now they have gone away. In the next year yet more of them will go away, too, and the corporate media will be ablaze with shouts about the glory of it all. Yet nothing has changed, nor will real change come with the US elections. The banality of corruption and decay of the US Empire will continue, with resistance mainly confined to the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Latin America, and Somalia. We will go on shopping, though the price of gasoline will be a little higher. Short term local forecast?

More cloudy weather with gradually rising temperatures ahead. Local pressure confined mainly to a few individuals resisting as they can.