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Rover Lost in Paradise

Try this on.

President “W” has the insight and intelligence of the average small town letter-to-the-editor writer: simple understandings of complex problems; simple explanations of causes; simple remedies; unassailable notions of who is to blame, and unbounded faith in the righteousness of his own simplistic position.

If the Freedom of Information act would allow access to “W’s” school records, I would expect his IQ to be “low average” ; I’ve read an estimate of 91. Having taught school for thirty-one years, I concur with the estimate.

That is not to say that the brilliant vampires surrounding our president are not bright bulbs; they know exactly what they are doing! It is a marriage made in hell ( with Carl Rove playing Lucifer).

Bush is the perfect shill for the nastiness of the neo-cons. The dark forces of the Empire (Darth Cheney, Grand Marshall Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, et. al.) can hide their sneers behind the scenes while Skeletor Rumsfeld works his petulant humor on the venal press corps. Knowing all the while that the idiot-boy-presidential front man will make everything OK.

Nuking Iraq

Lifeboatnews.com

An International Tribunal Must Be Established for East Timor: A Statement from U.S. Religious Leaders and Organizations

As religious leaders and organizations from the United States of America, we join the global call for the timely establishment of an international tribunal for East Timor.

We remember the tragedies endured by the people of East Timor and have heard their cries for justice. We agree that an international tribunal is necessary to hold accountable those most responsible for the war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed throughout the 24 years of brutal Indonesian military occupation.

The initial years of Indonesia's illegal occupation saw the deaths of more than one-third of East Timor's pre-1975 population. The occupation ended in 1999 amid a wave of terror and violence unleashed upon civilians countrywide. The Indonesian military committed countless atrocities in East Timor, including torture, rape, forced sterilization, disappearance and murder. Justice for such egregious crimes cannot be denied without serious repercussions. Indeed, peace in East Timor and the rule-of-law in Indonesia have already been seriously compromised.

During the occupation, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo was among the

Stomp: At the Palace Theatre

STOMP is a hell of a kick.  It's the Oltatunji of the Ashcans.  The Kodo Drumming of the Alleyways.  It is offbeat, imaginative, relentlessly unique in its working-class creativity, and, at its best, downright inspirational.

Gotta admit---it starts slow.  You have to adjust to a set cobbled together from trashcans and hubcaps, discard signs and scrap metal.  There's no orchestra and no lyrics.  Marcel Marceau would get mugged in this neighborhood.

Festivities open with a guy pushing a broom.  Soon there's a chorus line of broomsters, somehow making it all musical.  And from there it goes...

Other "instruments" range from paperbags and daily newspapers to bottleopeners and kitchen utensils, from actual basketballs to apparently random trash.

Slowly, the cast establishes their characters.  The sad sack.  The macho muscle man.  The Earth Mother.  The firefly.

They're all young and profoundly athletic.  They play a very good game of fast-break  run-and-shoot.  Not much defense.  The pace quickens.  The stunts grow more demanding.  The music gets better.  The jumps and turns get more impressive.  

The question remains: Why?

NEW YORK CITY -- Much as I hate to interrupt what is apparently a deeply felt triumphalism on the American right, now that it's over, does anyone see any reason for our having invaded Iraq?

I realize that's what we all kept trying to figure out before the invasion, but don't you think it should at least be visible in hindsight? Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire.

These are early days, certainly, to attempt a full historical evaluation. Could be a case of the forest and the trees. Perhaps we're well along the road to having everything work out magnificently, and I'm just missing it. Still, I can't see anything that's going right.

Iraq is in chaos, and apparently the only way we'll be able to stop it will be to kill a lot of Iraqis. Just what Saddam used to do. The other day, we announced we were going to shoot looters, and when that produced nightmare scenarios of children dead for stealing bread, we had to cancel that plan. Now we're going to try gun control -- that should have the enthusiastic support of the NRA. Meanwhile, the chaos in Iraq seems to be

Media ownership

AUSTIN, Texas -- This is a gross scandal. The Center for Public Integrity has a stunning study out on the concentration of ownership in telecommunications. The even more stunning news is that the Federal Communications Commission, which theoretically represents you and me, is about to make all of it even worse. And behind this betrayal of the public trust is nothing but rotten, old-fashioned corruption. It's the old free-trip-to-Vegas ploy, on a grand scale.

The Public Integrity people examined the travel records of FCC employees and found that they have accepted 2,500 trips, costing nearly $2.8 million over the past eight years, paid for by the telecommunications and broadcast industries, which are, theoretically, "regulated" by the FCC. The industry-paid travel is on top of about $2 million a year in official travel paid for by taxpayers.

According to the center, FCC commissioners and agency staffers attended hundreds of conventions, conferences and other events all over the world, including Paris, Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. They were put up at luxury hotels such as the Bellagio in Las Vegas and ferried about by limo.

The Road Map hoax

Don't waste your time fretting over the fortunes of the "road map" to peace in the Middle East. It's all a fraud, following the contours of all the other frauds down the years, back to such museum pieces as the Rogers Plan, conceived in Nixon time.

The recipe is unvarying. The Palestinians are required to pledge that they will instantly abandon all vestiges of resistance to Israel's onslaughts on their persons, children, houses, land, crops, water, trees, livestock, roads, schools, universities, graveyards and public buildings.

In return Israel agrees that a few years down the road the government of Israel will begin to ponder the outlines of a dim possibility of formal ratification as a Palestinian statelet of whatever tiny sliver of territory they haven't already appropriated.

Amid choruses of approbation for its courage from Israel's vast lobby of politicians and opinion makers in the United States, Israel gouges a couple of extra billion out of Uncle Sam and gets on with the day-to-day business of making life hell for Palestinians. Anytime Israel wants to

Oppose media deregulation

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning to vote next week on a proposal to weaken rules that protect the public from media monopolies – even though it hasn't released the proposal publicly. From the details that have emerged, this proposal would weaken rules governing how many TV stations one company can own, and may even permit a company to own newspapers and television stations in the same local market. This would allow a few huge conglomerates to monopolize what we see, hear and read in the media.

Please take a moment to tell the FCC and your members of Congress that you oppose the FCC's proposal to deregulate media ownership rules. Then, forward the informationto your family and friends.

Take action now: pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=467&id4=OHFreep

Background:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already deregulated radio, where the massive Clear Channel now owns at least 1200 stations, including multiple stations in the same markets. Now the FCC has scheduled a vote for

More than Ninety Religious Leaders and Organizations Representing 15 Faiths Call Indonesian Court on East Timor 'Not Acceptable'

Call for International Tribunal, Regardless of Indonesian Court Verdicts

May 26, 2003 More than ninety leading religious leaders and organizations from across the U.S. released a statement today urging the U.S. government to support the establishment of an international tribunal for East Timor. The statement follows the last week's acquittal by an Indonesian court of former Indonesian military commander Brigadier General Tono Suratman for crimes against humanity committed in East Timor in 1999.

The religious figures called the Indonesian ad hoc Human Rights Court for East Timor a "sham" and said: "The U.S. and other governments must not pretend the Indonesian judicial process is in any way acceptable. We call on the U.S. Mission to the UN to actively work with its Security Council colleagues to pass a resolution establishing an international tribunal for East Timor. The world's powers must not again turn a blind eye to East Timor's suffering."

"The Indonesian court's recent acquittal of Brigadier General Suratman dramatically highlights the failure of the process to meet international

Thanks, Harvey.

Thanks for the terrific article by Mr. Wasserman. A real honest comparrison to the "MATRIX". We need writers like him if there is any hope of saving our damaged nation.

PEACE!!

GUY FALGOUT
TERRYTOWN,LOUISIANA.

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