"At the end of the day, the only thing you have … is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor and when you don't have that anymore, well, there you go…It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me…You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me…the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the vice president go on 'Meet the Press' on the fifth year [anniversary] of 9/11 and say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam dunk' as if he needed me to say 'slam dunk' to go to war with Iraq...And you listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot [who] told us and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous … Let's everybody just get up and tell the truth. Tell the American people what really happened." -George Tenet, CBS News: Tenet: "Slam Dunk" Comment Misused - April 26, 2007

It’s not surprising that Tenet is angry at being used as a scapegoat for the failed Iraq war. Bush blamed Tenet directly for the misinformation on Saddam's nuclear capability in his State of the Union Speech.  Later, the Republicans tried to blame the whole war on "flawed intelligence estimates" made under George Tenet's management of the CIA.  

The Bush Administration's misstatements of known facts to justify the Iraq War has been interpreted by many of us as a criminal conspiracy that justified an impeachment investigation. But thanks to the Democrat Party leadership, that did not happen.  

Tenet’s outraged comments are just more evidence that such an investigation is justified.

Bill Moyers' latest indepth investigation, Buying the War, documents the failure of the media conglomerates to investigate and verify the facts behind the justifications for the Iraq War.  

Of all the media corporations, only Knight-Ridder's reporters and editors investigated the claims that Saddam was in collusion with Bin Ladin, or willing and able to pass WMD technology to terrorist organizations. Not a single editor or reporter that failed to investigate the war claims has lost their jobs, or even suffered a demotion or reassignment. All of the pundits that supported the falsified claims made about Saddam's WMD capability, and his association with Al Qaeda are still being touted by the news shows as "experts" in foreign policy issues.

The media conglomerate's almost complete and total lack of interest in investigating the forged documents and faulty intelligence makes it easy to believe that the ownership and management of America's media were in agreement with the War Party aims, if not complicit in the conspiracy to incite the world to war.  

LIE 1: Saddam had WMD capability.

LIE 2: There was ongoing cooperative communication between Bin Ladin and Saddam.

"Yeltsin's legacy to Russia – poverty, privation, and a renewed adversarial stance by the West – is the "gift" that just keeps on giving." The Legacy of Boris Yeltsin, Justin Raimondo.  

Free market ideologues and oligarch-financed “think tanks” infest the Nation’s Capital where I live. And nothing sets them off these days, but the indignity of Russia ‘backsliding” into Democratic Capitalism from the Gangster Capitalism that was Boris Yeltsin’s legacy. It's not surprising that the same pimp for the neo-con conspiracy that incited the nation to war in Iraq is leading an attack to rollback Russia's fledging steps toward economic democracy.

Justin Raimondo is a self-proclaimed “libertarian”, although more in the tradition of Lysander Spooner then Ayn Rand, at least in my opinion. So it’s not surprising that he has been one of the few online journalists to cover the other side of the disinformation campaign against the Presidency of Vladimir Putin.

Justin‘s obituary for Boris Yelsin is the last word on the sad story of how he and his cliché of crony capitalists stole the economic security of Russian people with the help of the American government.

Bush2 and his neo-con cabal keeps telling us what a disaster it would be if the US withdrew from Iraq.  These so-called" risks" are easily refuted with the cold water of common sense from Barry R. Posen, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the "risks" of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq....

Al Qaeda will take over the country. This risk is now non existent. Al Qaeda's support is strongest among Sunnis, whom the Shia outnumber by three to one. The Shia control the military, the police, and numerous militias. The United States has ramped up its operations in Baghdad in part to stop the Shia from cleansing the Sunnis from Baghdad. There will be no caliphate in Baghdad, whether Americans stay or leave.

Iraq will become a new Afghanistan, to Al Qaeda's benefit. The most extreme among the Sunni insurgents may indeed be committed to international jihad, and they may continue to work clandestinely out of Iraq, as they do today. But these jihadis will not be comfortable. Iraqi Shi'ites despise them, and even many Sunnis oppose them. US intelligence will indeed have to keep an eye on them, and special operations forces may occasionally need to sneak back into Iraq to strike at them. These are capabilities the United States has spent billions building up since Sept. 11.

The current civil war (or wars) will escalate. Fighting may indeed intensify after a US disengagement. To come to an understanding of how wealth and power in Iraq will be shared, the political forces there must measure their relative capacity and will. The United States now stands in the way of such a measurement, and the US presence delegitimizes any outcome. The promise of a certain US withdrawal date may clear the heads of some Iraqi politicians ; a negotiated settlement could start to look better to them than an escalation of fighting.

Genocide. The humanitarian consequences of this intensified fighting could be grave. But genocide happens against unarmed populations; all groups in Iraq are heavily armed. Still, the violent ejection of minorities from particular areas is likely. Instead of convincing minorities to stay in neighborhoods where they are vulnerable to murder by local majorities, the United States can help people resettle in parts of Iraq that are safer.

If the civil war intensifies, regional powers will rush in. This too is already under way, but escalation into a giant civil war is not in anyone's interest. Syria, Iran, and Turkey have Kurdish minorities which may become restive during such a war. The Saudis would likely prefer that their Sunni Arab friends make a deal, rather than wage a fight that they might lose. Even Iran, whose Shia co-religionists stand to win such a war, faces risks. The Arab Shia are not one big happy family; they kill each other in Iraq today. Most Iraqi Shia think of themselves as Arabs; heavy-handed Iranian intervention may energize their nationalist opposition.

The worst case. The civil war escalates; outsiders back their friends; their friends begin to lose, so the war escalates to become a regional conflagration. Could happen, but one should not exaggerate the military capabilities of any of the local players. They are all heavily armed, but conventional warfare is not the strong suit of any of the regional actors, with perhaps the exception of Turkey. The Saudi forces, though equipped with modern weapons, are almost surely helpless without help from western contractors. Iran's air forces are obsolete and highly vulnerable to American air attack. Moreover, Saudi Arabia and Iran are one-crop countries; each depends on oil facilities that are vulnerable to attack by the other. A kind of Mutual Assured Destruction should deter both from risking general war.

Compare the "risk" of US withdrawal from Iraq with the COST of maintaining the occupation:

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is spending more than $5.8 billion a month on the war in Iraq, according to the military's top generals.  That is nearly a 50 percent increase above the $4 billion-a-month benchmark the Pentagon has used to estimate the cost of the war so far.  Iraq War Topping $5.8 Billion a Month / UPI Nov 19, 04

Obviously, the cost is not worth the risk. 

From Steve Sailor latest at The upcoming national campus crusade against weirdoes  

“…all this pop culture attention to the subject did not ignite a wave of school shootings.

This suggests that the 1990s wave was influenced by a copycat mentality, probably spread by the overwhelming television coverage of school shootings. ABC, CBS, and NBC alone aired 296 stories on Columbine.

Even two weeks after that mass murder, one could still turn on the TV at almost any hour of the day and find anywhere from two to ten channels blaring about "Terror in the Rockies." It costs little these days to send a remote truck to broadcast from the scene of the crime. Thus, every channel feels obligated to have their own reporter standing in front of the school building mouthing clichés.

The diversification of media channels due to cable TV and the Internet was supposed to lead to a greater variety of subjects being covered on the Information Superhighway. Instead, we seem to have entered the age of "one story at a time" journalism, where everything else going on in the world is dropped in favor of all the news channels simultaneously broadcasting live coverage of some poor high school kid's funeral.

Not surprisingly, Columbine in turn inspired a rash of planned shootings and bomb plots. Fortunately, many were headed off by newly paranoid police and school administrators.

The mention of the names of the Columbine killers in his "manifesto" means that it is likely that Cho Seung-Hui's murderous rampage was a “copycat” of the Columbine High School Murders. It's not hard to imagine that he hoped to achieve in death a sense of personal worth that he didn't have in his life.  Driving all this was his expectation that the media would publicize his paranoid sense of "victimhood" by widespread distribution of his crazy “manifesto”. Obviously, in this Cho Seug-Hui was entirely rational...the media conglomerates behaved exactly as he expected.

Sailor also is right about the the state of our dysfunctional media:

“The diversification of media channels due to cable TV and the Internet was supposed to lead to a greater variety of subjects being covered on the Information Superhighway. Instead, we seem to have entered the age of "one story at a time" journalism, where everything else going on in the world is dropped in favor of all the news channels simultaneously broadcasting live coverage of some poor high school kid's funeral”

All that technological advancement has done little to improve the product the consumer gets. Media tycoons don’t behave much differently from William Randolph Hearst who was infamous for his Yellow Journalism. 100 years later, modern journalism is still all about lowering standards and stressing entertainment over ideas, all with the purpose of maximizing profits.

Police probing the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech University have criticised the decision of US network NBC to show footage of the killer...police said on Thursday that the videos - showing an angry Cho ranting and pointing guns at the camera - added little to their investigation.." - BBC NEWS: Police Regret Release of Killer's Video Thursday, 19 April 2007

Could anything be worse then our so-called "news" organizations falling all over themselves to reward Cho Seung-Hui for his murderous rampage by distributing his "manifesto" to everyone in the United States? Yes! It's the "entertainment" conglomerates who finance and distribute the kind of smut that inspired this deluded sicko's murderous rampage!  The poses in Cho Seung-Hui's manifesto were right out of the Time-Warner's The Matrix, and the Korean movie, Oldboy, distributed by TLA Releasing.  

Next the public will have to endure months and months of endless moralizing by Corporate Media's chattering classes about America's "moral failing", or the mistakes made by Virginia Tech's administration. But I doubt there will be nary a mention of the media conglomerates that are unloading the kind of stuff that inspired Cho Seung-Hui's rampage on an unprotected public!  

The rise of political liberalism and neo-Marxist influence in American culture has resulted in the embrace of psychological dysfunction in art and entertainment. The human consequenses of the dysfunctional products produced by Corporate media matters little to the cultural elite. If anything, the liberal chattering classes embrace the "product" of Corporate media as it reinforces their own sense of moral superiority to the "conventional" values of traditional family, religion and community. 

Of course, as with most aspects of modern liberalism, it's all about advocating anything, no matter how absurd, as long as it doesn't affect you personally. It's easy for liberals to embrace dysfunction in media because the well-to-do are soundly insulated from it's consequenses in their Santa Monica mansions and San Francisco Condominiums. But it matters to the rest of us who have to live next door to people like Cho Seung-Hui who are pschologically susceptible to the kind of garbage that makes Hollywood tycoons wealthy.

American trying to raise children in times of increasing economic pressure to maintain a middle class lifestyle deserve the protection of government from the kind of garbage that Hollywood is producing without the distracting argumentation of "free speech" or accusations of "censorship". Gratuitous sex and violence are no more fit for human consumption then toxic chemicals in our foodstuffs.

BTW, a big "Hurrah" for Steve Sailor, the under-rated critic of the American Conservative Magazine, who jumped the corporate media and was the first to recognize the connections.

HEADLINE: Europe's Problems Color U.S. Plans to Curb Carbon Gases

By Steven Mufson, Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 9, 2007 - Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/08/AR2007040800758.html

Five Senate proposals all use the same basic approach (to limiting carbon gas emission), known as "cap and trade," that Europe has used for the past two years. But what the snappy name "cap and trade" means is that the market will put a price on something that's always been free: the right of a factory to emit carbon gases. That could affect the cost of everything from windowpanes to airline tickets to electricity.

Europe has already hit a few bumps with its program. There's the Dutch silicon carbide maker that calls itself the greenest such plant in the world, but now can't afford to run full-time; the French cement workers who fear they're going to lose jobs to Morocco, which doesn't have to meet the European guidelines; and the German homeowners who pay 25 percent more for electricity than they did before -- even as their utility companies earn record profits

A carbon tax or carbon emissions trading system will not make much difference to a trust fund baby or Hollywood pretty-boy who claim that an impending global warming catastrophe justifies drastic economic penalities to reduce carbon emissions. But an increase in a utility bill as a result of such ideas will fall hardest on working families trying to maintain a middle class lifestyle while  the fixed costs of maintaining a household consume a larger share of income then any time since the 1970's!

In the economic climate of "globalization" where a multi-national corporation can avoid paying decent wages  by shipping their work to a contract manufacturer in a third world country, the carbon tax will be an additional reason to shut down another union job. But the loss of a good union job in the United States won't solve the global warming problem if the job is shipped to Communist China where carbon emissions are not taxed or regulated.

The case for global warming catastrophe is far from clear. So far, Europe's experience with it's carbon trading system has done little but provide proof for the law of unintended consequenses. Until the children of wealth and privilege are willing to bear their fair share of the cost of fixing the problems, advocates for working folks need to be very careful in supporting an environmental agenda that will put more burdens on middle class families that are already at risk because of outsourcing and globalization. 

"We're not going to vote to cut funding, period," Levin said. "But what we should do, and we're going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement."  - Senator Carl Levin, (D) Michigan - Levin: Senate Will Keep Paying for War - by AP via Washington Post Sunday, April 8, 2007

Levin's announcement is a Democrat message to Bush that they will not fight his veto of a war funding bill that contains timetables for withdrawals from Iraq. To mark the 4th Anniversary of the ill-fated US invasion of Iraq the Democrats remind us of their complicity in authorizing the original use of force resolution that gave President Bush the authority to attack Iraq.

It is clear that the Democrat Party is only interested in passing the blame for the Iraq War--not ending it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can confidently talk about voting with Russ Feingold to cut funding for the war, knowing full well that most of his party will vote to send President Bush the full war funding "with no strings" attached that he demands. By posturing for peace, Democrats think they can pacify their voting constituency, which is against the war, while not offending their pro-war funding constituency, which is primarily the AIPAC.

Of course, talking out of both sides of their mouths is nothing new for the Democrats, who voted to give Bush a blank check to attack and then occupy Iraq and begin the first phase of the Israeli-inspired grand plans to "democratize" the Mideast by force of arms.

Syria tells Pelosi it ready for peace talks Reuters April 4th 2007

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on a visit to Syria opposed by the White House, said on Wednesday President Bashar al-Assad was ready to hold peace talks with Israel.."(Our) meeting with the president enabled us to communicate a message from prime minister Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks as well,"...."Comments (Olmert) made to the speaker of the House did not represent any change in a policy Israel has expressed to all international figures dealing with the (Syrian) issue," a clarifying statement from Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's office said."

Not since John Kerry strayed from his handler's prepared speech to announce that people who were too stupid to get into college end up in Iraq, you have we seen such a disasterous performance from a senior Democrat Party leader. Democrats are hardly in a position to make fun of George W. Bush's verbal gaffes when their own leaders are capable of such arrogant blunders.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives has every right to make a fact-finding trip to the Mideast like any other Congressman. But Pelosi flubbed it by arrogantly getting involved in "message carrying" in the first place, and then failing to convey Olmert's message correctly. She so misinterpreted the message from Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, that his office was forced to issue a press release clarifying Israel's position. Any future reference to her knowledge of the Mideast situation is now going to be the subject of jokes about her lack of listening comprehension.

Her performance not only undercuts her credibility, but that of the Democrat Party. It's another example of why people make jokes about the Democrat Party as the political party of folks whose idea of American Foreign Policy is lighting a candle, holding hands and singing "Kumbaya". 

Pelosi is ill-suited to be Congress-person, much less the Speaker of the House. Her political career is one of family and money connections, and carrying baggage for the Big Money Boys. It's only in a city whose politics are so corrupt and bizarre as San Francisco, could such a politician as obtuse as Nancy Pelosi could emerge.

The fact that she's a LEADER of the Democrat Party makes working class voters who are desperate for an alternative to the Republican Party of Dixiecrat social policies and Wall Street economic agenda cringe in fear at what the Democrats might do to if given the Presidency again.