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God bless the Senate Republicans

Into every tragically depressing world situation some light must shine if you wait long enough and the planets align just right.

That glimmer of light came yesterday from, of all places, the Death Star known by many as Washington, D.C., from deep within one of the most unfathomable quadrants of that bleakness – the chambers of the United States Senate.  Even more remarkably, it sprang from what some consider a true black hole – the Republican caucus.

But light it is, and in these times we need to celebrate every photon that comes our way. 

Yesterday, the Senate voted 53-45, seven votes short of the 60 needed to advance the bill, against a $50,000,000,000 “supplemental” funding measure passed earlier this week by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.  What the Republicans objected to was the limp, inconsequential troop withdrawal plan supported by House and Senate Democrats – something that Groucho Marx would have much more accurately termed, “a sham of a mockery of a sham.” 

People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters

One of the biggest lies ever told in American industrial history is that “no one died at Three Mile Island.”

In the frenzy to get public funding for still more nuclear reactors, some industry backers now say no one has ever been killed by the nuclear industry AT ALL.

These absurd statements reflect atomic energy's desperate need for federal loan guarantees, which have been slipped into the Energy Bill now before Congress. After fifty years of proven failure, no private sources will invest in this lethal, expensive technology.

Meanwhile billions are pouring into the booming business of green power, including wind, solar power and increased efficiency. These technologies are not only profitable and clean, they don't kill people.

And the reality is that people have, in fact, been killed by the fallout from atomic power, and not just at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

The road to 9/11

The road to 9/11: wealth, empire, and the future of America By Peter Dale Scott, University of California Press, 432 pages

I have always been fascinated with trying to see the more subliminal/hidden aspects of our world, so long as they are either based in hard-nosed verified fact; or understood as speculative vision (which may possess a metaphoric validity of its own). With The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, University of California Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott delivers the preceding.

Tightly non-speculative, meticulous and insightful, Dr. Scott shines the know-glow on a rather extensive and sordid history of U.S. governmental shadow activities; predominantly partial or total cover-ups. Fortunately, in this his magnum opus, he also holds out the promise of an American redemption, so long as the festering boil of turpitude is lanced and drained in the light.

The assassination of Hugo Chavez

Lago Agrio, Ecuador -- Before The Lord spoke unto Pat Robertson and told him to endorse Rudy Giuliani, family man, for President, the Reverend got a message that higher powers wanted him to arrange a hit on another President:

"Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him.  I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it."

Robertson has a tough time separating Church and Hate. But when the vicious vicar declared it was time to take out the President of Venezuela, he was simply channeling the wishes of the Supreme Authority, Dick Cheney.  

I'm asking you to see the story they don't want you to see in the USA:  from the original investigations filmed for BBC Television, "The Assassination of Hugo"- a special DVD documentary by myself and Rick Rowley.   NOT for general release - ONLY available as a gift to donors to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

Why must they kill Chavez?

With the help of guerrila cameraman Rick Rowley ("Fourth World War"), I flew to Caracas to get the answer - from Chavez himself.  I also talked to the guy who took Chavez hostage in 2002.  (I had to wear a wire for that one.)  

Baghdad in middle America

Honoring vets means nothing at all unless it means honoring the deeply gouged personal truths each experienced during deployment. But the dismissal of such truths is as much a part of war, and its aftermath, as the propaganda and geopolitical whoppers necessary to launch it.

The problem with these individual truths is that they seldom smack of glory. More often, they’re simply mundane and hellish, and slowly eat the vet’s soul. The clinical name for this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and it’s the phrase I heard most frequently and most distinctly this past weekend, during the grim, pained acknowledgement — I can hardly call it celebration — of Veterans Day.

Ray Parrish, a vets’ counselor and Vietnam vet, was adamantly pessimistic as he spoke to 100 or so people gathered on a bitter, gray Sunday morning at the river in downtown Chicago, about the psychic toll our current wars are exacting on the ones who are fighting them.

Another Clinton campaign fraud

It sounds silly, but for a long time it just didn't occur to me what the implications would be. Thus spake a college student who agreed to ask Senator Clinton a planted question. And thus, alas, must I speak as well.

Senator Clinton asked me to impersonate a citizen of the United States, and I was tempted to play along. The assignment she had marked "(citizen)" on the script on her clipboard, read:

"A citizen is a member of an electorate. A citizen's job consists of voting. A citizen may also spend the two years in between elections thinking about how he or she will vote (but not about who will count the votes). In between elections, citizens should not imagine they can influence their representatives. Public demonstrations, lobbying, media activism, media production, and civil disobedience are not proper citizen activities unless professionally organized to target exclusively Republicans. A citizen's loyalty is to his or her Party. For the sake of your Party you must accept such compromises as voting for a candidate who supports a massive military and empire that you oppose, or corporate

Mentes Peligrosas: confession of an American thought criminal

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”
–Winston Smith from George Orwell’s 1984

If you needed more evidence that most of our “esteemed” members of Congress are members of a criminal class of ruling elites, who regard the likes of us in the poor and working classes with the disdain most people reserve for cockroaches, look no further than H.R. 1955.

93% of the filth “representing” us in the House voted in favor of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. Once this vile piece of legislation sails through the Senate and the sociopath on Pennsylvania Ave gleefully slaps his endorsement on it, the mechanisms will be in place for our lords and masters to initiate programs that will make Cointelpro and the murder of Fred Hampton look like child’s play.

Disease-ridden invaders

http://mattbors.com

Bolton and me

http://mattbors.com

U.N. me: a Campus Progress cartoonist can’t resist John Bolton

(Click here to view the comic Matt drew for this article.)

Political cartoonists are in the strange position of benefiting when the country suffers. The more absurd the world becomes, the easier it is to draw comics. Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has presented my fellow cartoonists and me with an unforgettable cast of characters: the brooding madman Dick Cheney, the crazed evangelical John Ashcroft, and the sweating and stammering Scott McClellan. But there was a time when one Bush administration character shined brightly above the rest. That was U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

With his red-faced anger and chalk-white mustache, Bolton presented a position to the United Nations that can only be described as right-of-hawkish. He physically and ideologically resembled Yosemite Sam—a walking, talking (or rootin’, tootin’) caricature sent to make cartoonists’ lives a little easier. So it was a bittersweet moment when Bolton resigned in December 2006. The world was better off, but cartoonists certainly were not.

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