It's Not Too Late: Demand Obama Investigate Bush War Crimes

This is particularly important, since the press has only asked Obama about this one time.

read more | digg story

In Dense Gaza, Civilians Suffer

A Palestinian boy, Ismael Hamdan, 8, was wounded in an Israeli airstrike, in which his two sisters died. He died Wednesday. Photo by Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Editor's note: This boy, this Ismael, can you imagine him running, laughing, playing football with his friends? I can't, he's dead, His death was caused by Israel, by Hamas, by Americans, by stockholders and profiteers and lunatics everywhere. Happy New Year, it looks a lot like the old year from here. Bob By Taghreed El Khodary The New York Times GAZA — A dentist stood at the bed of a doctor, his good friend Ehab Madhoun, 32, who had just died, his shrapnel-pitted body wrapped in a white shroud. The day before, Dr. Madhoun, a general practitioner, was in an ambulance responding to an Israeli strike at the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Another missile hit the ambulance. The driver, Muhammad Abu Hasira, died instantly. Dr. Madhoun lingered for a day, dying of his wounds on Wednesday in the intensive care unit of Shifa Hospital, where hundreds of people have been brought since Israel began its heaviest assault on Gaza in three decades. The dentist cried. “He was just doing his work,” said the dentist, who would not give his name. “He’s a doctor, and I can’t understand why Israel would hit an ambulance. They can tell from the cameras it’s an ambulance.” It has always been this way, over years of conflict here, that civilians are killed in the densely populated Gaza Strip when Israel stages military operations it says are essential for its security. But five days of Israeli airstrikes have surpassed past operations in scale and intensity; the long-distance bombardment of the Hamas-controlled territory has, however well aimed at those suspected of being militants, splintered families and shattered homes in one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Among the total dead — between 320 and 390, according to the United Nations — Palestinian medical officials say that 38 were children and 25 were women. The United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees said 25 percent of those killed had been civilians. Israel said it knew of 40 civilian deaths but that it was still checking. Read More at The New York Times

Worldwide Sawdust:: In Dense Gaza, Civilians Suffer

The Stepford VP, The Worst and the Dimmest

Sarah Palin, doggone it, what can I say, golly, wasn't she just precious, the way she read talking points and sound bites to the cameras. She was a model of right wing Church Lady womanhood, all lip gloss and sly winks to the camera, and jeepers she was so folksy, reminded me of the time Aunt Martha fell in the privy at the family reunion.

read more | digg story

The Bush administration's dumbest legal arguments of 2007

"The Bush administration continues to limit our basic freedoms, conceal its own worst behavior, and insist that it does all this in order to make us more free. In that spirit, it seemed an opportune moment to commemorate the administration's worst legal justifications and arguments of the year."

read more | digg story

Throw Out The Hyenas of the Ruling Class

Is there anyone out there who still harbors the delusion that George Bush or most of his administration possesses the slightest shred of human integrity or the tiniest morsel of respect for the truth, for law, for the people of this country or any other?

Sorry, the question was rhetorical and asked out of personal frustration with the evil festering stew of lies, theft, brutality and domestic and international piracy that this administration has created in the place of what was once the USA.

No, I'm not naive enough to believe that we were ever a perfect country, free of guilt from participation in many and various Machiavellian schemes and plots over the last two centuries, the influence of the power lusts of private wealth have always had far too much influence in our public affairs to allow us to avoid responsibility for the results of our contributions to the general level of human misery. We have committed serious crimes against people in places as varied as Vietnam and Chile, and as far apart in space and time as Nicaragua and Iran.

In the generally business driven efforts to support the interests of entities such as United Fruit, Chiquita Banana, Anaconda, various oil giants, mining companies, and financial institutions we have gone to bat for tin horn dictators in Iran, Cuba, Chile, Cambodia and in other places to numerous to name here. Even the Mafia found support in the efforts to prop up the fascist pig Batista against communist pig Castro.

Much of our record has not been pretty and, in general, has usually favored and supported wealth and property over humanity and justice.

Revelations last week of more administration lies in the widening "Waterboardgate" scandal came as no surprise to most people and, although many expressed shock and dismay in public, the expressions of astonishment seemed to be presented for dramatic effect rather than as spontaneous displays of true emotion. When it comes to the current administration I don't believe that there are many rose colored glasses left among the body politic, experience having taught us to assume the worst.

Even the families of the long suffering military who have borne the brunt of the aspirations to Empire of America's transparently criminal ruling class over the last seven years are now beginning to break ranks with the "commander" who has squandered the lives of their loved ones treated them with such contempt.

I suppose that what depresses me and, in truth, causes me the greatest fear is the fact that the oligarchic forces of fascistic wealth have effectively bought out the opposition which showed it's true face last month with the passage of the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act," one of the most frightening pieces of legislation since the "Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798."

This legislative abomination, added to the so called "Patriot Act," and last year's "Military Commissions Act" helped to spell the end of any pretense to adherence to constitutional principle and democratic rule in this country.

The forces which have so cynically manipulated public opinion to bring about the death of democracy have always been with us and have, at various times, risen and ebbed as evil tides, of "red scares," "commie menaces," of "outside agitators," and the currently in vogue "Islamofascism," a term popularized by some Goebbelian marketing wonk in the bowels of Dick Cheney's office and pressed forward by money driven waves of irrational fear, and the malignant energy of powerful and pathologically dishonest men.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, caused in large measure by the abdication of reason by rank and file Democrats, the racist and anti-democratic march to plutocracy, halted and long delayed since the thirties by the common blessings of FDR's "New Deal," was born again, hidden behind thinly disguised code words like "silent majority," "hard hats," or "family values."

The incubation of this poisonous philosophical monstrosity did not begin to reach it's full virulence until large measures of neo-conservative and rabid theocratic ingredients stirred into the mix at the millennium, at which point those who most despised the Constitution and the rule of law were then able, due to a perfect storm of world events, a combination of public dread and apathy, congressional and judicial meekness, and the complete corporate takeover of the fourth estate, to seize control of the very government they long held in such contempt and begin it's thorough looting, dismantlement and replacement with corporate rule.

Now we have a Department of Agriculture run by agribusiness, the Mine Safety and Health Administration run by corporate mining interests, a Department of Energy thoroughly in the control of multinational oil and gas and coal conglomerates, a health care system run by the insurance and drug industries and on and disgustingly on through every federal department and agency.

The takeover has been so complete and the parties involved so incredibly powerful that the Congress and the courts have, in large measure, knelt in fear and supplication before them as evidenced by the aforementioned "legislation" that would have been laughed out of the halls of congress four decades ago.

But as cowardly as the courts, the congress and the media have become, their cowardice is overshadowed by their addiction to the corporate feed bags of their campaign contributors and advertisers. The lure of hundreds of millions of dollars draws them to the putrid feast like hyenas to the sun ripened carcass of a wildebeest and in their lust to feed at the feet of the ruling class they have lost all sense of shame, all sense of the wretched aroma of their own corruption.

On the horizon looms an election, now entering it's second painful year, in which nearly two dozen of our most respected flimflams have pandered to the National Association of Manufacturers, the health lobby, the defense lobby, the insurance and energy lobbies along with anyone else who will pay them to turn a trick.

By the time the general election is held just under a year from now the various moneyed interests will have spent nearly a billion dollars to place their man or woman on the puppet throne of public policy and the big dance will go on, the music, the lyrics and the tempo unchanged no matter which "party" is elected to represent their masters in industry.

Looking for solutions? So am I. Finding any? I know of only one.

Write, call, speak out, raise bloody hell, make noise and lots of it. The people who rule will never willingly give up control, they will always strive for more, for absolute control, it is their nature as a class. They will never willingly remove the economic and political shackles they have devoted so much effort to place on the "lesser" classes, they will be satisfied with nothing but total slavery, the complete exploitation of the world's working people, it is the nature of their class. The people must seize power using many of the same methods employed in shedding the British yoke at the end of the eighteenth century.

In the short term, I will vote for any Democrat over any Republican, even if I have to hold my nose, and when we elect them we must hold their feet to the fire constantly, without letup, to insure a return to open and honest democratic government.

In the longer term we have to insist on the immediate passage of public campaign financing, we must place severe limits on the the ability of corporations to stand above the law and avoid responsibility for their crimes and get rid of the revolving door between elected office and the lobbying industry, and the corporate boardroom. We must enact extremely tough ethics rules for elected and appointed public officials and include within them mandatory jail time commensurate with the seriousness of the crime, in other words, treat violations of the public trust as the treasonous acts that they are.

Along the way we have to seriously revise or reverse much of the misguided and flat out dangerous legislation of this dark era of the neo conservative robber barons and build a new era of progressive populism in which the people truly rule, unencumbered by the tyranny of a cynical and self serving ruling class.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Links:
Lying Down with Hyenas

Conservatives Have No Clothes

The consequences for the country have been disastrous. Even when Democrats have prevailed, the radical trend of privatization was only slowed temporarily to the detriment of workers and consumers alike. From healthcare, to the gutting of FEMA and the misguided pursuit of empire have left Americans economically insecure and isolated in a dangerous..

read more | digg story