Hyperpower Hype and Where It Took Us
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=73663
Of special note, read Kevin Phillips' article about the Republican Party having become America's first religious party in U.S. history: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/01/AR2006040100004.html .
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US and UK forces and their New Zealand Muttons establish 'enduring bases' in Iraq
Despite talk of withdrawal 'when the job is done', there are signs that coalition troops will be there for the long term
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 02 April 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article355178.ece
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Government in secret talks about strike against Iran
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 02/04/2006)
The Government is to hold secret talks with defence chiefs tomorrow to discuss possible military strikes against Iran.
A high-level meeting will take place in the Ministry of Defence at which senior defence chiefs and government officials will consider the consequences of an attack on Iran.
It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is "inevitable" if Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Q33LSY3YK4EWDQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2006/04/02/wiran02.xml&sSheet=/portal/2006/04/02/ixportaltop.html
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Fool Me Twice
By Joseph Cirincione Page 1 of 1
Posted March 27, 2006
FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="
I used to think that the Bush administration wasn't seriously considering a military strike on Iran, because it would only accelerate Iran's nuclear program. But what we're seeing and hearing on Iran today seems awfully familiar. That may be because some U.S. officials have already decided they want to hit Iran hard.
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The Friday Line: Dems Hold Edge in Top 20 House Races
Democrats are growing increasingly confident of their chances of making major gains in the House in this year's elections -- and perhaps even seizing control of the chamber. Republicans privately acknowledge that they are likely to lose seats but believe they will remain the majority party at the start of the 110th Congress.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2006/03/the_friday_house_line_double_y_1.html#more
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Gary Hart: The trick is on us. Permanent U.S. Military bases in Iraq: a Neo-Con Folly.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/the-trick-is-on-us_b_18261.html
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The US media, not known for following the internal political developments of other countries too closely unless it has a direct impact upon the US, has provided an inordinate amount of ill-tempered commentary on the wave of protests and strikes in France against the introduction of a law that enables employers to fire young workers without cause.
The reaction of the media has been universally hostile, varying from denunciations by the right-wing press of "mob rule" to the more low-key perplexity expressed by the liberal media, which suggests that French are suffering from some type of collective dementia because they believe they have the right to such things as job security.
In one way or another all of the commentaries suggest the protests are illegitimate. They declare that France's labor laws and social protections are outmoded and must be "reformed" if corporations are to thrive and create jobs. They suggest that "everyone" agrees with this, everyone, that is, except the millions of workers and young people marching on the streets of France. Echoing the infamous comments of British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the time of the invasion of Iraq, the US media suggests that the strength of a democracy is measured by the ability of political leaders to defy the will of the people and do "what's right."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/apr2006/pres-a01.shtml
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Published on Friday, March 31, 2006 by the Times/UK
Antarctic Air is Warming Faster Than Rest of World
New finding could have implications for sea level rises
by Mark Henderson
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0331-05.htm
Watergate figure John Dean appearing before Senate during hearing on Bush censure
By LAURIE KELLMAN Associated Press Writer
(AP) - WASHINGTON-John Dean, counsel to President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate scandal, is headlining a Senate hearing Friday on whether to censure President George W. Bush for authorizing a domestic wiretapping program as part of the war on terrorism.
http://news.findlaw.com/ap/p/56/03-31-2006/682d0018e873787c.html
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Church fires photog for giving Scalia photo to Boston Herald http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=132932 Boston Herald Peter Smith, who had freelanced for the Archdiocese of Boston's newspaper for a decade, says he doesn't regret releasing a picture of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia making a controversial hand gesture. "I did the right thing. I did the ethical thing," says Smith, an assistant photojournalism professor at Boston University.
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PREWAR INTELLIGENCE
Insulating Bush
By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Karl Rove
, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration.
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm
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Mosul slips out of control as the bombers move in
By Patrick Cockburn in Mosul
Published: 31 March 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article354786.ece
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Gauging the autonomy of Haitian president-elect Rene Preval.
Preval in Washington seeking aid and help in retraining Haiti's unprofessional police force.
Obtaining the immediate release of political prisoners jailed under the rump regime of Gerard Latortue, will be the first test of Preval's independence and responsiveness to the Haitian people.
Preval will have to deconstruct the deplorable legacy of the Latortue regime and seek justice for the interim leader's illegal actions.
The question of Aristide's return should be on Preval's agenda, and not Washington's.
For Haiti to be independent, Washington must give up its working assumption that its embassy in Haiti is the U.S. southern White House.
Preval already is feeling the pressure from all sides as he begins planning his own course
http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2006/06.22_Preval_Good_Launch.html
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Democrats unveil midterm election platform: a blueprint for endless war http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/dems-m31.shtml
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JEAN BAUDRILLARD
THE PYRES OF AUTUMN
Fifteen hundred cars had to burn in a single night and then, on a descending scale, nine hundred, five hundred, two hundred, for the daily 'norm' to be reached again, and people to realize that ninety cars on average are torched every night in this gentle France of ours. A sort of eternal flame, like that under the Arc de Triomphe, burning in honour of the Unknown Immigrant. Known now, after a lacerating process of revision?but still in trompe l'oeil.
The French exception is no more, the 'French model' collapsing before our eyes. But the French can reassure themselves that it is not just theirs but the whole Western model which is disintegrating; and not just under external assault?acts of terrorism, Africans storming the barbed wire at Melilla?but also from within. The first conclusion to be drawn from the autumn riots annuls all pious official homilies. A society which is itself disintegrating has no chance of integrating its immigrants, who are at once the products and savage analysts of its decay. The harsh reality is that the rest of us, too, are faced with a crisis of identity and disinheritance; the fissures of the banlieues are merely symptoms of the dissociation of a society at odds with itself. As H鬩 B骩L'Imposture culturelle (1997).]', FGCOLOR, '#E3E3E3', BGCOLOR, '#000000')" title="" onfiltered=nd(); href="#_edn1" name=_ednref1 [1] has remarked, the social question of immigration is only a starker illustration of the European's exile within his own society. Europe's citizens are no longer integrated into 'European'?or 'French'?values, and can only try to palm them off on others.
'Integration' is the official line. But integration into what? The sorry spectacle of 'successful' integration?into a banalized, technized, upholstered way of life, carefully shielded from self-questioning?is that of we French ourselves. To talk of 'integration' in the name of some indefinable notion of France is merely to signal its lack.
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27101.shtml
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election loomed, the White House was determined to keep the wraps on a potentially damaging memo about Iraq."
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm
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The GOP's Stake In Checking The President
by Senator Russ Feingold, TomPaine.com
Many Republicans now defending the president are losing sight of what ceding powers to the executive will mean for their own party down the road.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/30/the_gops_stake_in_checking_the_president.php
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Jay Bookman | The Dismay of Our Elders Sums Up
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0330-24.htm
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2,535 And Counting
by Tim Klimowicz
Tracking coalition military deaths in Iraq, one day at a time, across the map. Click to see the Flash-animated map.
http://tompaine.com/#passiton
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Iraq unrest displaces thousands
More than 30,000 Iraqis have been displaced as a result of sectarian violence between the country's two main communities over the past month.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4859758.stm
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Frida Berrigan on a For-Profit Nuclear World
Every now and then, amid all the grim stories in our world, you run across one that rings a special bell for you. Frida Berrigan's today is that for me. In fact, consider this week at Tomdispatch as a discordant hymn to the privatization disasters of the Bush administration. Michael Schwartz began it with his account of how the draconian economic privatization program Bush administration officials enacted on prostrate Iraq in 2003 led directly to the catastrophe of the moment in that country. We know as well that, under this administration, the Pentagon has been on its own privatization binge, turning what were once essential military activities over to Halliburton, its subsidiary KBR, and other private firms in a wholesale fashion
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=72765
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Patrick Cockburn: The End of Iraq
Iraq is splitting into three different parts. Everywhere there are fault lines opening up between Sunni, Shia and Kurd. In the days immediately following the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1300 bodies, mostly Sunni, were found in and around Baghdad. The Shia-controlled Interior Ministry, whose police commandos operate as death squads, asked the Health Ministry to release lower figures. A friend of mine, a normally pacific man living in a middle-class Sunni district in west Baghdad, rang me. 'I am not leaving my home,' he said. 'The police commandos arrested 15 people from here last night including the local baker. I am sitting here in my house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.'
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/cock01_.html
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The US Propaganda Machine: Oh, What a Lovely War
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0330-04.htm
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of Slums
by Mike Davis
Photographs by Sebastiao Salgado
The international economic policies that decimated rural infrastructures worldwide over the last two decades have driven hundreds of millions of the poor to already teeming cities, creating a stark contrast with burgeoning new urban wealth.
READ NOW
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/06-2om/Davis.html
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Sulzberger refuses to rule out cutbacks at Boston Globe http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/view.bg?articleid=132665 Boston Herald During a visit to the Globe, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. reportedly told department heads that no decisions have been made yet on whether there will be staff reductions at the Times-owned paper. Jay Fitzgerald reports Sulzberger said Globe execs will make the final call on whether to implement another round of job cuts. > Herald's Purcell recently met with NYT Co.'s Robinson (last item) (BG) http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/29/buy_local/
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Khardori: Send press critics Kurtz, Shafer and Carr to Iraq http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ankush-khardori/send-in-the-media-critics_b _17998.html
Huffington Post New York mag media writer Kurt Andersen should also go, says Ankush Khardori. "The result: on-the-ground-reporting on the on-the-ground reporting. What is it like to work in Iraq? What are the dangers? How do journalists get around and with what kind of security? What is their relationship like with their Iraqi staffers? How easy is it to get information from the Iraqi government and the US military? ...The upshot: How is the news produced and is it being done well?"
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The Immigration Bomb Explodes
http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2006/06.21_Immigration_Cancun_Fox.html
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Two Fronts In Iraq
by Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com
The Bush administration's handling of the war is turning allies into enemies.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/29/two_fronts_in_iraq.php
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When computers do the news, hoaxes slip in
Lack of human involvement is why hoaxsters love Google News.
By Randy Dotinga | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
When a New Jersey teenager decided to create a fictional story about being hired by one of the Internet's largest companies, he knew just where to spread the news - with the unwitting help of the company itself.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0329/p01s01-ussc.html
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Gallup: In Shift, More Americans Now Call Themselves Democrats
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/
article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002273782
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Sulzberger refuses to rule out cutbacks at Boston Globe http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/view.bg?articleid=132665 Boston Herald During a visit to the Globe, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. reportedly told department heads that no decisions have been made yet on whether there will be staff reductions at the Times-owned paper. Jay Fitzgerald reports Sulzberger said Globe execs will make the final call on whether to implement another round of job cuts. > Herald's Purcell recently met with NYT Co.'s Robinson (last item) (BG) http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/29/buy_local/
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Khardori: Send press critics Kurtz, Shafer and Carr to Iraq http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ankush-khardori/send-in-the-media-critics_b _17998.html
Huffington Post New York mag media writer Kurt Andersen should also go, says Ankush Khardori. "The result: on-the-ground-reporting on the on-the-ground reporting. What is it like to work in Iraq? What are the dangers? How do journalists get around and with what kind of security? What is their relationship like with their Iraqi staffers? How easy is it to get information from the Iraqi government and the US military? ...The upshot: How is the news produced and is it being done well?"
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The Immigration Bomb Explodes
http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2006/06.21_Immigration_Cancun_Fox.html
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Two Fronts In Iraq
by Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com
The Bush administration's handling of the war is turning allies into enemies.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/29/two_fronts_in_iraq.php
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When computers do the news, hoaxes slip in
Lack of human involvement is why hoaxsters love Google News.
By Randy Dotinga | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
When a New Jersey teenager decided to create a fictional story about being hired by one of the Internet's largest companies, he knew just where to spread the news - with the unwitting help of the company itself.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0329/p01s01-ussc.html
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Republican National Committee memo warns that Republicans members of Congress better not run from Bush in the fall elections. Sounds like someone is a bit worried.
Time Magazine first reported on the memo this weekend, but the full text is below.
http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/03/post_6.html
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Economic Nationalism and the Steel Industry: Mittal's Bid for Arcelor
Drafted By: Michael Piskur
http://www.pinr.com
On January 27, 2006, Mittal Steel, the world's largest steel producer, put forth a hostile bid to purchase the second-largest steel firm, Arcelor SA, for US$22.4 billion. If the deal succeeds, the resulting enterprise would account for approximately $70 billion in sales and 10 percent of world steel production, nearly quadruple that of the closest competitor, Japan's Nippon Steel Corp., and would employ 320,000 workers on four continents.
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29 March 2006
In light of the situation in Ukraine, PINR recommends:
"Ukrainian Presidential Elections: To East or West?"
http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=236
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First they came for the Communists," runs the opening of the famous poem about the Nazis' incremental persecution of minorities. So perhaps we should admire the efficiency of Reps. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and Peter King ( R-N.Y.) in sponsoring "immigration reform" legislation that revokes the rights of both undocumented immigrants and the rest of us, all at once.
In December, the House passed the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act by a vote of 239 to 182, thanks to the complicity of 36 Democrats. Reading as if it was penned in a vacuum?wholly removed from the 12 million undocumented immigrants toiling in the dark underbelly of our glistening, service-oriented New Economy?the 257-page bill is an affront to reality. Among other monstrosities, it would classify these workers as felons subject to imprisonment, permanently bar them from legal status, put numerous roadblocks in the way of legal immigrants and political refugees, and authorize construction of a giant fence along a third of the U.S.-Mexico border
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2566/
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Rival Shia Groups Unite Against US after Mosque Raid
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0328-01.htm
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Morality failure - Fred Halliday HYPERLINK "http://venus.opendemocracy.net/t/2821/88826/1604/0/" FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=barbed wire"
Alberto Gonzales's flippant attitude towards torture exposes the US administration's wider moral blindness
Alberto Gonzales, the attorney-general of the United States, is all that the modern state would wish to have as its representative: detached in the fulfilment of his bureaucratic obligations; obedient to, if not obsequious towards, his boss; wordy and word-twisting in matters of legal definition; stonewalling on matters of substance; and, above all, distinctly cold in matters of human concern.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization/attorney_general_3399.jsp
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Brazil's Lula Lashes Out At Rich Nations
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0328-08.htm
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The following is an executive summary of a report on Radio and TV Martí. For the complete document, please scroll down.
Washington Guns after Castro at Any Cost
In the face of a sweeping debt and budgetary crisis currently afflicting the U.S. economy, the passage of the FY 2006 budget witnessed a brutal bloodletting of vital domestic programs from education and child welfare to Medicaid. At the same time, Congress, at the White House's passionate urging, allocated an additional $10 million to purchase a specially equipped aircraft to transmit the broadcasts of the long-standing anti-Castro media project, Radio and TV Martí. This figure comes on top of the $27 million the media operations already receive annually. Since its founding, the Martí concept has been a "bridge to nowhere." Nevertheless, almost half a billion dollars have been thrown away in the project
http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2006/COHA%20Report/COHA_Report_06.03_Radio_TV_Marti.html
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Rumsfeld Singled Out as Crisis Deepens in Iraq
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0328-02.htm
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The Economics Of Occupation
by Michael Schwartz, TomPaine.com
The CPA's slash-and-burn assault on Iraq's economy is the overlooked fuel of today's insurgency.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/28/the_economics_of_occupation.php
IS THERE A CASE FOR IMPEACHMENT? Posted on Wednesday, March 22, 2006. Edited selections and MP3 audio from a forum moderated by Sam Seder and featuring Representative John Conyers Jr., John Dean, Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, Lewis Lapham, and Michael Ratner, held March 2, 2006 at Town Hall in New York City. http://harpers.org/IsThereACaseForImpeachment.html
Michael Schwartz on Why the Media Gets the War Wrong
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=72319
Time Magazine: Earth is At the Tipping Point. The climate is crashing and global warming is to blame. Another "Armageddon Here Thy Come" Disastrous Legacy of Bush Inc. Is He Talking to God or Satan? Cause It's Going to Get as Hot as Hell.
http://reference.aol.com/globalwarming/timemagazine?id=20060327120109990001
Tom DeLay's Handgun License Suspended. Now All He Can Shoot Off is His Big Mouth.
http://www.gunguys.com/?p=880
Iraq parties demand U.S. cede control
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-03-27T191932Z_01_L27605414_RTRUKOC_0_UK-IRAQ.xml
Iraq: US mosque massacre deepens occupation's crisis http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/fran-m28_prn.shtml
