Mr. Mark Foley! I think you just handed the Democrats and liberals the election this fall. Thank you, Sir Slimey! This podcast covers the Mark Foley scandal, (former Representative from Florida, resigned); Bush’s plan for the Middle East, (including why Lebanon vs. Israel happened); Bush’s ‘State of Denial’ as proven in a couple of his speeches; a conservative guest rant from ‘Ozone’ of the podcast “Democrats are Lost” (an ultra-conservative who defends Israel); and an excerpt from the actual book “State of Denial” by Bob Woodward.
That brings up Condi Rice’s famous brush-off of George Tenet’s attempt to warn her of the imminent danger of 9/11 coming up, back on July 10, 2001. This is written about in detail in Woodward’s book and yes, the State Department does say that Tenet had a special meeting about al Qaeda with Condi Rice in July of 2001. She can deny it all she wants - we won’t believe her because too many people dispute her claims and she’s a proven liar.

Will the Democrats take both houses back? Ten Senate seats are either tied or Democrats are ahead. -This is a big surprise and it all happened before Foley’s boy-page-IM scandal!

I will be at the World Can’t Wait protest Thursday, October 5. The U.S. is headed for fascism, fast and furious, and the Democrats aren’t helping, but there are millions of us to march in the streets on Thursday. JOIN US. Here is the article I mentioned in the podcast that was in Rolling Stone Magazine: Will the Next Election be Hacked? by RFK Jr.

Promos played: Avalon Farmcast, a new member of the Progressive Podcast Network, and Last of the Super Heroes which you can find at the PPN.

Music played: ‘SoULS Of ChAoS’ by Michael Burns; Koba, ‘Rise Up Move’; and ‘Support the Truth’ by Jim’s Big Ego.

submitted by Shelly of Citizen Against Lies

I’m totally disillusioned with the MSM, or mainstream media, these days. Are they worthless or did they cover the protests and I missed it? Look at this crowd! I now in fact call the media the COM, or the corporate-owned media. I don’t mean online media, which is often pretty good.

So I knew there would be protests on August 12th in Washington, but I assumed, due to lack of hearing about it later, that the protesting was a disastrous failure. Nothing of the kind! In fact, according to certain websites which actually pay attention to this type of thing, the protests were large and enthusiastic. You can read about them here at one of my favorite protest websites.

My latest podcast ends with an interview with Ahmad S., an Afghan journalism student in Pakistan who talks about our foreign policy and his ideas on what we can do about it. You’ll be impressed with his insightful thoughts on it. He produces and writes his own blog called MyScribbles, here. During the interview he expresses his desire for Americans to rise up and protest and demand that our government change our policies. It sounded so easy when he described what we should do! Part of the problem is that when people do protest, the media doesn’t even cover it. If it’s completely ignored, there is no reason to protest. They know this, and that’s why they control so much of the media. Look up who owns American media, and it all starts to make sense. Whoever controls the flow of information to the people, controls the people.

Submitted by Shelly of Citizen Against Lies.

I don’t know what to believe.. Yet.

When I heard about the recent terror threats thwarted by the British government it was on the car radio as I got back from a few days away in the sticks. The circus was in full swing with the tabloid news bigging things up almost to the level of an American TV news station. Comparisons with nine eleven were batted about as easy as delivering a weather report and still nothing was really known.

I thought I would reserve judgement for a few days and see what surfaced. Instead of watching the endless news reports say the same nothings, I looked around at how the British public were reacting.

Down my local shop people weren’t talking about it any more than the weather. The most concerned person I came into contact with was a member of the family that was due to fly to Spain and wanted the airports to get back to normal as they had been desperately looking forward to this break abroad.

Have we really gotten so use to all of this? Perhaps it only affects our subconscious now? The fear.. The feeling of a threat always lurking in the shadows..

I am hoping it’s that we just have retained a little perspective. There is some serious suffering going on in the middle east at the moment and maybe even the British public can see through the frantically scrawled sensationalism fed to us by our gutter press.

Yesterday I found myself momentarily thanking the powers that be for reading every electronic information transmission in the ‘civilised’ world. Thanking them for intercepting this threat and therefore keeping us safe.

But only for a moment.

Then I realised how convenient this all is. That we are to be reminded of another victory for the powers-that-be over the evil that lurks in our everyday lives. Just when our ‘war on terror’ was flagging and the common man joined together in condemnation of the atrocities occurring in the middle east.

A few small crumb like facts are slowly coming to light and things are once again beginning to look a little sinister.

Could this plot descovery be another well timed public release..?

Take a proper-gander at the news and decide for yourselves.

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/august2006/130806liquidbomb.htm

President Bush’s approval rating has “dropped to 33, matching his low in May,” according to an AP-Ipsos poll. Most of the people who voted for Bush in 2004 (57%) disapprove of the job he is doing. Obviously, we need to all walk around with shirts that say, “Pay Attention!” What are the other 43% thinking? Bush, Cheney and Lieberman all wasted no time in blaming Democrats for terrorism and using yesterday’s foiled plot to justify all war that ever occurred anywhere. But in fact, this terror plot is clearly an offshoot of Bush’s disastrous foreign policy, according to no less than the former 9/11 commissioner Tim Roemer.

According to Think Progress, Dick Cheney has already used the terror plot for political reasons. As have Tony Snow, Bush, and even Joe Lieberman, fresh off his huge and humiliating Connecticut primary loss. Cheney said the Democrats were encouraging “the Al Qaeda types.” . . . and the vice president added, “there’s a significant body of opinion that wants to go back — I guess the way I would describe it is sort of the pre-9/11 mind-set, in terms of how we deal with the world we live in.” (Why do the media continue to quote this? He says it at least once a month. Boooooring!) From the Center for American Progress:

President Bush seized on the foiled London airline bomb plot yesterday “to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.” [He also said, “The London conspiracy is “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” the president said on a day trip to Wisconsin.
“It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America,” he said. He’s right - his administration is a HUGE threat to the United States.] His remarks came “one day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign” to tar opponents of the Iraq war as “weak on terrorism.” Publicly, Bush aides “fought the notion that they had exploited their knowledge of the coming British raid” for political advantage. Privately, they expressed a different sentiment. “Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big,” one unnamed White House official said, expressing hope that the foiled plot “would yield political gains.” Another Iraq war supporter, Sen. Joe Lieberman, said yesterday as he kicked off his “Lonely Joe” campaign, that setting a timeline for U.S. troop redeployment (backed by 57% of Americans) “will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again.” Previously, Lieberman has called using national security issues for political purposes “just unacceptable and in my opinion un-American.”

I guess that means Lieberman just called himself and most of the Bush administration un-American.

Submitted by Shelly of Citizen Against Lies

Before the war, Bush was unaware that there was a difference between Shiites and Sunnis. Now granted, I was no expert either, but I’m not the frackin’ President of the United States, either. How dumb is/was is this guy? According to Former Ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, he was clueless. In his new book (The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End) Galbraith claims that the Bush regime knew very little about Iraqi, Iraq society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

“Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam–to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”

This also explains why Bush can’t coherently explain what an “insurgent” is, and in fact he has called them “ordinary Iraqis”. RawStory writes that a year after the “Axis of Evil” speech, Bush met with experts who said it became very clear to them that Bush was clueless about the different religious groups within Iraq and the potential problems with attempting to force them to merge and all be like one another under Bush’s utopian veil of “democracy, freedom and liberty”. Those words to Bush seem to represent a 1950’s version of American society where everything is shiny and old-fashioned, and capitalism thrives and people spend all their time thinking about money and how to make more of it. That would have provide the U.S. with decades of controlling cheap oil. That the Bush regime is still going ahead in pursuing this utopian plan, despite all that has transpired in the last 3 years and not taking into account how much of Iraq despises us, is madness. Instead, Bush will be adding more American soldiers (aka “targets”) to the fray in hopes of calming down the super-violent Bahgdad. As Gen. John P. Abizaid testified before the Senate last week, we needed to at least control Baghdad, and we’ve lost that. As a result, Iraq is now embroiled in a horrible civil war, all because our ignorant “leader” had no concept of what he was getting into. Time Magazine says that Baghdad is already in a civil war which it calls “Life In Hell”. My question is: what is our punishment for doing this to a country? Not just one country but at least two. Look at these satellite photos of Beirut, courtesy of Juan Cole’s website.

Submitted by Shelly of Citizen Against Lies.

This is a picture of a destroyed vehicle in Southern Lebanon. It’s not the whole picture. On the bottom of the picture, cut off, is a very small child lying dead, killed by Israeli bombs. Click here for more graphic depictions of what Israel is doing to the innocent civilians of southern Lebanon. More pictures of “precision bombing” by Israel here. The Guardian wrote about it too, as children dying in a convoy attack, but it wasn’t just children. Unfortunately Isreal, according to Juan Cole, has vowed to cause “pain to the Lebanese”. I think it has achieved this objective, and then some. If you refuse to negotiate a peace, then you are likely to have to go on fighting a war, says Juan Cole on his blog on Thursday. I think we have all noticed by now how some governments, including the current Bush regime, seem to ridicule peace and treat it like a sickness they need to wipe out. Then there is this allegation: “Lebanon charged that the US blocked a UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire.” Face it: Israel and the Bush administration want war; mainly because it’s profitable by itself, or its outcome it. Maybe someone can explain why we give Israel over $3 billion per year, much of it earmarked for weapons. American taxpayers are funding their war against Lebanon, a fellow Democratic country. So we can somehow, some day, blame this all on Iran, and then really start the next world war.

Speaking of that, the Republicans may decide to promote ‘the long war’, the GWOT (Global War on Terror), the whole violent, volatile mess in the Middle East, and everything else that the Neocons have started or encouraged, as World War Three. And WWIII will be a perpetual way of life from now until eternity — in order to win elections for the GOP from now until eternity. So says Newt Gingrich. (Remember him?) “Let’s face it, it’s WWIII, Gingrich says” yesterday on Meet the Press. Therefore, it must be so, because Big Giant Head Newt says so. That adds plausibility to what we are doing there, of course, which benefits Republicans. Here is what Newt is afraid of: as more Americans seem to accept gay marriage and abortion as things they can and will “tolerate”, those items could soon disappear as issues for elections. So instead, the GOP can use WWIII as an excuse to keep them in power and “fighting the enemy” for ever and ever. Eternal war. That must be why they are promoting it and possibly blocking ceasefires. Any other explanation would mean they are just murders. Newt said, “. . . Bush needs to deliver a speech to Congress and “connect all the dots” for Americans.” We’re way ahead of you, Newt. Consider connnecting dots a “Mission Accomplished”.

Posted by Shelly from Citizen Against Lies

I found this blog while I was researching for my next podcast. It gives you a look at the Iraq war from the beginning to present. Altho I thought it was missing some things like war profiteering; it is a good quick look back that makes you realize how much we were lied to. After looking at this website I was sad thinking about how we had no justification to be in this war. I started to think about how we are starting to stop looking for Osama bin Laden; which I do not understand at all. I am a realist. I believe we need hard power as well as soft power to fix issues that effect us. I am a firm believer that we needed to use our military power, or hard power find Osama bin Laden, and punish him for 9/11. But instead we out sourced this job to war lords who let him get away. Thin he spider webbed his organization, so if we caught him his terrorist cell would live on. Instead of stopping the problem at the source we take our resources and attack Iraq. This is where soft power was in place political power, and guess what it was working just fine until we decided to use hard power, and over throw their government now we are in a mess. Right wingers say we are fighting them over there so we do not have to fight them over here. When I ask them why Afghanistan was not a good enough place to fight them. You know what they say? They say there is nothing there. I understanding what they are saying. They think if there was nothing to rebuild so they could have their no bid contracts. It was not worth it so we left Afghanistan hanging; we could have built that country up, caught Osama bin Laden, and stayed the corse in Afghanistan. But it just would not have been as profitable. I want to be wrong, but I just do not see it. Look at the highlights on this page also they outline even more issues that are affecting us.
http://www.thinkprogress.org/iraq-timeline

Our military leaders have been systematically desensitizing combat soldiers to death and denying the humanity of “the enemy”, reported Democracy Now on Wednesday. While people are trying to understand how a young soldier with a “Personality Disorder” could end up raping and killing a 15-year old Iraqi girl and then murdering 4 members of her family, (one as young as 4 years old) it was revealed by a former soldier that the military attempts to remove all humanity from Iraqis in its training of soldiers so that they can be more easily killed, without soldiers feeling that bothersome remorse. Geoffrey Millard revealed to Democracy Now that this type of objectifying that can lead to murder goes on regularly. He said it has led to many murders at checkpoints in Iraq and some reports of families being killed were merely shrugged off by those in command. Obviously, this is what is leading to atrocities in this military exercise, as it has led to similar atrocities in previous wars. Millard said,

“. . . . in this checkpoint killing, an entire family was murdered — a mother, a father and two young children, a young boy, age of four, and a young girl, age of three, were all killed that day in a car. It was moving very quickly towards a traffic control point, at which time a private pressed the butterfly trigger of his 50-caliber machine gun and killed this whole family. And as this was briefed to the general, a full bird colonel turned around to the division staff and said — and I quote — “If this f**king haji learned to drive, this s**t wouldn’t happen.” And that really was a big turning point for me in realizing what war was truly about, and the fact that this term “haji” isn’t just a term that grunts use on the ground, it’s one that is projected down from the top, all the way up in ranks downward upon the average G.I.”

In fact, the term haji is still being used by soldiers now. There is probably no better example of how pervasive this word is, and how innocently viewed, than in this story of a Marine who wrote and sung a song about a murdered Iraqi girl, in the context of a love story. This soldier called the song, “Haji girl”. He was prevented at the last minute from professionally recording the song by officers who discovered his plans. The song was scheduled to be aired on a conservative radio show as soon as it was finished, which tells me that soldiers aren’t the only people being desensitized to killing — Republicans suffer from this too. Obviously, we’re destroying minds with this senseless occupation/war. It’s time to stop it before it’s too late for others.