Thank you WP, Brad and all who post here, whose intentions are the exposure of lies leading this country and the world towards a dark future. You make the point rarely spoken that it is not just our beloved country at grave risk. We tend to see our problems as unique and separate from the rest of the world community. The same greedy SOBs that manipulate our media and governing system, sit on director boards with others of different origins who do the same in their respective countries. I know and accept that the main thrust of this blog are the E Voting issues. This site has made a difference, a big one. Please continue to make room for the discussion of other related topics. You guys do it better than any others. Thanks again.

NYT is the central mouthpiece for the government propaganda - witness judy miller's role in the lies about WMD and the outing of a CIA asset.

The government "leaks" disinformation to the NYT that then publishes the lies. The rest of the MSM then "catapult the propaganda" by repeating what the NYT said it, becuause - well, its the "newspaper of record."

The charges that NYT is liberal are more lies designed to downplay the importance of newsworthy items that even the lying liars can't ignore completely.

Even more attempts to scare us!
This teaser up now at Raw Story: "Alberto Gonzales: terrorists are in our neighborhoods.. Soon...."

Never one to eschew foolishness, I'm still looking for the "imminent threat" - have been since 2001. Where is it? Can someone point it out to me? We are at "war" with "Islamo-Fascism" and they can't do better than this? We are not at war just because someone says we are.

What a tragedy this is. We need to address real threats right now - peak oil, global warming, mass extinction. Instead, we are wallowing in primitive and stupid tribal conflicts and being "led" by those whose object is personal power or class power, not the power to successfully address real problems. Every stupid act, every lie, every failure of rational thought takes us further away from the moral, intellectual, and human center where we have to be. And it is all so foolish. The sun is shining, the horizons beckon but we don't even see them, we are so intent on digging our own grave.

What tragic decadence when contrasted with the promise of democracy.

Has anybody considered the logistics of blowing up an airliner over a city with a lens cleaning solution bomb? I've been in airplanes before. You wouldn't be able to AIM; you wouldn't be that sure your effort would even cripple the plane enough to stop it from landing safely; the best you could hope for would be plane parts falling in unpleasant places, or messing with a runway and part of a terminal. Nothing remotely approximating a massive threat to air travelers or the populations below them. And now their big solution is for us to put our solutions in our checked luggage? What? It's okay to blow up the cargo hold?

Even as I don't buy the story about the box cutter hijackers hijacking the planes on 9/11, I know for certain that anyone trying to hijack a plane now will immediately be taken out by a mob of passengers, even at the cost of their lives. There are prudent measures to help assure the safety of airline travel that needn't hold up the passengers. If someone's spiked toothpaste blows a hole in a plane or two or ten, or even blows the whole plane or two or ten, HOW is that worse than the the traction for fascism garnered by all these "security" measures and terror alert codes and alarmist/sensationalist megaphoning we have to call media coverage?

The thing that insured our security before was our unwillingness to limit freedom, even for security. Our country was founded on the principle that if the cops don't have a warrant when they enter OJ's property, he gets a walk. THE REASON FOR THAT WAS SO NOBODY HAD TO FEAR THE GOVERNMENT. We agreed that it was ALWAYS more important to maintain our democracy and freedom from fear of our government than any other consideration. That kind determination is what brought real democracy to plenty of other countries. They SAW what it wrought, and wanted it. We have ALWAYS been willingly and wittingly vulnerable to attack because it was the guarantee of freedom.

Where is it now, folks? Where is it now? This will never stop until we have reaffirmed our commitment to our founding principles. Never.

Hi, Arry. Funny you should mention "Islamo-Fascism". I've been sitting on this phrase (and its partner, "Islamic Fascism") and wondering whether to write a full post about it or just stick a comment somewhere. Looks like "stick a comment somewhere" has won, but it's gonna be a long comment...

In my opinion, the term has been kicked around so much that it has become part of the "prevailing myth", even though it makes no sense.

Even the victims of this racial-cultural slur don't seem to understand it. Consider this excerpt from a recent BBC report (my emphasis):

"The use of the term casts a shadow upon Islam and bolsters the argument that there is a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West," Mr Younis, the national director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (Mpac), told the BBC.

He said it was wrong to link the actions of violent Muslims to their religion.

"There is nothing Islamic about their fascism. The Prophet [Muhammad] and the Koran clearly articulate that this type of activity is outside of bounds for Muslims."

The point Mr. Younis seems to be missing is this:

There is nothing Fascist about it either!!

Professor Juan Cole has written about this at length and is at his clearest here:

Bush, Islamic Fascism and the Christians of Jounieh

A few key excerpts:

Relatively few Shiite Muslims of Lebanon are fascists of any sort. There are all kinds of Shiites.
...

There can be Muslim fascists, just as there can be Christian fascists (and were, in Spain, Italy and Germany, and parts of Central and South America; the Spanish fascists and the Argentinian ones, e.g., were adopted by the United States government as close allies.)

But there cannot be "Islamic" fascists, because the Islamic religion enshrines values that are incompatible with fascism.

Fascism is not even a very good description of the ideology of most Muslim fundamentalists. Most fascism in the Middle East has been secular in character, as with Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Fascism involves extreme nationalism and most often racism. Muslim fundamentalist movements reject the nation-state as their primary loyalty and reject race as a basis for political action or social discrimination. Fascists exalt the state above individual rights or the rule of law. Muslim fundamentalists exalt Islamic law above the utilitarian interests of the state. Fascism exalts youth and a master race above the old and the "inferior" races. Muslim fundamentalists would never speak this way. Fascism glorifies "war as an end in itself and victory as the determinant of truth and worthiness." Muslim fundamentalists view holy war as a ritual with precise conditions and laws governing its conduct. It is not considered an end in itself.

The lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism cannot account for their increasing willingness to participate in elections and serve in parliamentary government.

Juan Cole knows what he's talking about; he never succumbs to the temptation to talk in vague generalities. If you read his work you can learn an awful lot in a very short time, but you have to prepare yourself for a huge shock: virtually nothing that you think you know about the Middle East is true; especially if you got your "information" from American "news" sources.

So reading Professor Cole can be tough going, especially at first. But you'll notice I didn't say it wasn't worth the effort.

IMVHO, Juan Cole's Informed Comment is one of the very best blogs on the net, and it deserves a lot more attention than it gets --- especially from people who really want to know what's going on in the world. Hint, hint.

Bottom line: Bush calls Islamic people Fascists because he doesn't want anyone to realize that it is actually his administration that is Fascist. It's part of a trend so pervasive it's tough not to call it deliberate. He also says "they have no respect for human life", even though it is his administration that started America's love-affair with torture, and has been starting wars --- and encouraging others to start wars --- for no good reason.

I could belabor this point --- I could drive it into the ground if I wanted to --- but I don't think that's necessary. We have a lot of smart readers around here.

99: I agree completely with your comment #5; further, I think it's quite clear that one event knocked all reason out of us, and stifled --- no! quashed! --- the national debate about everything that's real, and everything that's really important.

I wrote about this before I even started blogging. If you haven't already read my post about it, you might want to do so now ... or you might not --- that's ok, too! ... but for those who are interested, here's a "golden oldie" from please don't read my blog:

Fear and Loathing after 9/11: Trouble

I think the latest "liquid bomb" terrorism threat is just such a hoax with purely political motivatons. The irony I see is that airline passengers are having their bottles of water, tubes of lipstick, toothpaste, and all sorts of other carry-on toiletry items confiscated in the supposed belief that some of them may contain a liquid or substance which is volatile if it comes in contact with certain other substances and perhaps set off by a spark from someplace.

All of these confiscated items are dumped together at the airport security check point, thus helping to meet the physical conditions a would-be terrorist is seeking to create. If this is real and not a hoax, then to act consistently and logically, every suspect item should be handled separately and a safe distance should be maintained at all times until the items are either tested or destroyed in a secure environment.

I have read that airport security people are now perplexed what to do with all the contraban they have seized. Some have talked about donating it to the homeless!

Hey, thanks, WP. Yes, it helps to read what you wrote so long ago. Good for you to have managed to keep it in order to post it so much later, and now to be able to link to it. If I could recover the stuff I was writing about THIRTEEN years ago, I could show you how wary I was for the safety and integrity of our founding principles even then, how worried I had been since Reagan took office, actually since Washington seemed to turn on Carter so unaccountably. They of course gave accounts, but they were flimsy excuses. We know now that all through the 1990s, PNAC anyway, wanted a fascistic aggressor kleptocracy, but I had been feeling the tumblers falling into place for quite a while before that. It felt to me as if the rank and file federal employees were having their paychecks and pensions used to insure their loyalties to something un-American even back then. A look at some of the work of the last two SCOTUS appointees from the 1980s gives some idea of what that was. My point: We have to do a THOROUGH cleaning to get our country back --- top down AND bottom up.

Boy are they ever pouring it on thick now:

Prepared Text of Attorney General Gonzales at the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh

It's starting to feel like the 50's, when we practiced hiding under our desks at school from the A bombs. When you were the cool kid on the block if your folks had a bomb shelter. When us kids in the neighborhood thought a reclusive family were Russian spies with a robot. When Senator McCarthy ruled the roost and everyone was blacklisted. When I had nightmares of enemy soldiers coming down the street and marching families out of their homes and then shooting missiles into the homes. When we would take field trips at school to the local missile silos and the soldiers in their spiffy uniforms and shiny badges would tell us all was ok - they were protecting us. When we were taught to hate people we didn't even know anything about.

Duck and Cover

Oh were did my 60's go???

Be sure to read the reviews at "Duck and Cover" - very consistant with today!

Well, I take that back - it looks like most reviewers don't get it! I guess I should have read more first! LOL

The one which caught my eye was:
"The main point to get from this, it seems to me, is that one of of creating a sense of community is by dramatising (and exaggerating) external threats.

Don Delillo, in Underworld, remembers the dog-tags that some children were given so that in the case of nuclear holocaust, their little charred bodies would be identifiable.

At this point, surely, we must agree that the propagandists' objective is not to educate and save lives, but to drive the image into parents' heads of their child, killed by a Soviet bomb; a political objective by the govt, achieved through fear, even the mental torture of its own citizens."

Bluebear2, Peg and I are working on getting your 60's back.

Agent99 and Peg

Thanks - that would be so great!

Not that there wasn't turmoil, but at least people gave a damn and got together to work for change and much was accomplished. (Only to be torn down by the ush cabal.)

Mussolini said a better term than fascism would be 'corporatism', since fascism is the merger of corporations and the government. Using his 'expert' definition, it's obvious fascism has NOTHING to do with Muslim fundamentalism, and EVERYTHING to do with the K Street Project!

WP --- You'll see that "mirror" kind of talk all through the Busheviks statements. (I think Agent99 had a word for it in some post.)

The big one is, "They hate our freedoms." What they mean, of course, is, "We hate your freedoms." Yes, it's pervasive.

The "Islamo-Fascist" term has been making my blood boil as blatant and racist/cultural fear-mongering --- strictly an animal of propaganda - fascist propaganda.

Thanks for the Juan Cole article link. I used to read Juan Cole regularly, but, for some reason, I got distracted and haven't read him in awhile. Now, I remember why I always read his pieces.

Yes, Arry, my dear man who should be back in the redwoods, they speak antonymically.

Thanks, the beautiful Agent99.

Arry (AKA "The Sensitive Cad")

Bluebear2 #10

I feel better now. This paragraph from Gonzales's statement assures us he has turned over a new leaf and will now be following the constitution, protecting civil liberties instead of ignoring them and even work under the rule of law! Thank God, because the rest of it is pretty fucking scary!

Although every situation is different, and flexibility is critical, there is one thing that does fit every case: adherence to civil liberties and the rule of law. Those concerned with civil liberties should be reassured, and all Americans should find satisfaction in knowing that we are fighting terrorists according to our constitution.

Somebody should produce a film showing INCUMBENTS how to "Duck and Cover"!

I am non-violent and do not own a gun. I think Lou Dobbs probably does though.

The NYT is not the only MSM outlet that ignorantly or purposefully exudes propaganda.

And it is not the sole province of the left to realize that fact of American political life after the republican dictatorship evolved:

You can't tell any more the difference between what's propaganda and what's news.

(FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein). It is being done on a massive scale, and we see scare tactics on the menu.

The Federal Communications Commission has mailed letters to the owners of 77 television stations inquiring about their use of video news releases, a type of programming critics refer to as "fake news."

Video news releases are packaged news stories that usually employ actors to portray reporters who are paid by commercial or government groups.

The letters were sparked by allegations that television stations have been airing the videos as part of their news programs without telling viewers who paid for them.

(ibid.)

As much as I would like to agree with the "they have not been charged" point of your statement, the article does not say they have not been charged, it says that the British can hold them for up to 28 days without being charged. It does NOT say they have not been charged.

That's a good catch, Jason (#23) ... but I'm not sure whether you caught what you think you caught. You are quite right to say that "the article does not say that they have not been charged" ... TODAY!

Here's the closing paragraph, as posted at this moment:

Meanwhile, the police on Wednesday applied for extra time to detain and question suspects arrested in the alleged plot. The initial warrants to hold 23 of 24 suspects were set to expire Wednesday, but under British anti-terror laws, the authorities can detain suspects for up to 28 days without charge.

But YESTERDAY --- when I read the article, and when I posted this item --- the closing paragraph said:

On Tuesday, the British authorities said they had arrested an additional suspect in connection with the alleged plot, bringing the total number of people being held in the case to 24. None of the suspects have been formally charged.

If you want to see the text of the originally posted article, click here.

You will also notice that the headline has been changed. Yesterday it said:

Europe Seeks to Unify Airport Security Rules

But today it reads:

European Nations Plan New Anti-Terror Efforts

Also worth noting: The original article was credited to "Eric Pfanner, International Herald Tribune" and began this way:

LONDON — Home Secretary John Reid met Wednesday with counterparts from several European countries to coordinate airport security policies after a crackdown in Britain led to fears that terrorists could carry out their plans by boarding planes elsewhere.

Today the article is credited to "Heather Timmins and Eric Pfanner" and it starts like this:

LONDON — European security chiefs pledged increased cooperation against terrorism on Wednesday, saying they may begin blocking Web sites, fingerprinting or iris-scanning airline passengers and training Muslim preachers to fight radicalism.

There have been other changes to the text, as well.

Why? You tell me!!

As for the question of whether the suspects have been charged, the NYT was not the only "news" agency reporting that they hadn't been.

As reported yesterday by the CBC: British police extend detention of alleged bomb plotters (my emphasis)

British authorities received warrants from a judge Wednesday to extend the detention of 23 people arrested in the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic jets.

The suspects, arrested last week in the initial sweep by police, are being held without charges.

The CBC article, by the way, does not appear to have been changed since yesterday.

I have seen several other news articles in the last few days which say the suspects have not been charged; none claiming that they have been. What does this tell us?

If charges had been laid, it would be big news and we would be reading about it everywhere.

But meanwhile, many stories are ducking the question, even while reporting that authorities have been asked for more time to hold the suspects and that the request has been granted.

Of course, if charges had been laid, there would be no need to ask for an extension.

I think that the most terrifying thing about all this is that so many powerful, established countries are going along with the drive towards fascism. In Hitler's day, it was resisted tooth and claw. Today it is acquiesced to, even embraced, by much of the world. Even as South American countries are attempting to pull themselves out from under the crushing boots of international corporatism, that same corporate monolith is drawing almost unlimited power unto itself.

Resistance to this takeover must begin on the individual level, I'm convinced. The voices on this thread are the voices of sanity and humanity. To all of you, I say, "Thank you for being here and caring enough to make yourselves known!" And to Brad and WP, I add heartfelt thanks for providing this spot to gather in and be warmed by!!!

Peggy I agree with everything you said #25. Sending Thanks back at ya!

Hey, Peg, Laura, thanks, I needed that.

Been watching too many Frontline episodes and C-SPAN videos and wrestling with the urge to enlist as Bollyn's bodyguard.... Have had myself on a pretty serious bummer for a couple of days. So words like yours help.

WP! They changed the hmpflgt article? The New York Times? I've been telling everyone for years that the Albanians always refer to the United States as "the revisionists" and no one is ever confused by this usage... but THE NEW YORK TIMES CHANGED THE RECORD OF ITS OWN REPORTAGE? Oh! Crap! This is getting seriously, seriously bad. What contortions will eventually convince us that appeasement of these murdering thugs isn't going to cut it? Do we have to see the vote yanked away from us again, and again, and again, and even again to finally know appeasement doesn't work any better with our own fascists than it did with Germany's and Italy's?

Agent99

For you.

{Thanks so much, dear friend. xoxox --99}

99 #27 -

We share our bummers, it seems. I've been on a real paralyzer, and today I began pulling myself out of it, one bootstrap after the other. (You see, I attach them to sky hooks with sheer willpower!) Our time machine will solve a lot of problems...

Latest Vanity Fair is saying NYT is going under big time. I have wondered why people continue to buy it. Since it has turned into a rag. Well, as it turns out...people aren't.

Wow, this website is amazing. I've been getting really passionate about this scare-tactics stuff that the gov has been up to lately. I'm a webmaster myself (of a humble rock drum lessons site), but maybe I should make a web resource and link this site up!