http://bit.ly/apOc5f

• You can’t Fool All the People All the Time •

But the rest of us have every right to call the event what it is: an exercise in self-aggrandizement on a Napoleonic scale. I half expect Beck to appear before the crowd in a bicorn hat, with one hand tucked into the front of his jacket.

That Beck is staging his all-about-me event at the very spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech — and on the 47th anniversary of that historic address — is obviously intended to be a provocation. There’s no need to feel provoked, however; the appropriate response is to ignore him. No puffed-up huckster could ever diminish the importance of the 1963 March on Washington or the impact of King’s unforgettable words.

• Today’s a Day to Help Each Other •

The most offensive thing about the rally is Beck’s in-your-face boast that the event will “reclaim the civil rights movement.” But this is just a bunch of nonsense — too incoherent to really offend. Beck makes the false assertion that the struggle for civil rights was about winning “equal justice,” not “social justice” — in other words, that there was no economic component to the movement. He claims that today’s liberals, through such initiatives as health care reform, are somehow “perverting” King’s dream.

But Beck’s version of history is flat-out wrong. The full name of the event at which King spoke 47 years ago was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Among its organizers was labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a vice president of the AFL-CIO, who gave a speech describing the injustice of “a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty.”

• Demanding Justice in 1968 •

• Demanding Justice in 2010 •
• Now that’s a legacy •

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., then an official of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the youngest speaker at the march. “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here — for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages,” he told the crowd. Referring to proposed civil rights legislation, Lewis said, “We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in the home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year.”

And from the beginning, King’s activism and leadership were aimed at securing not just equal justice but equal opportunity as well. When he was assassinated in 1968, King was in the midst of a Poor People’s Campaign aimed at bettering the economic condition of all underprivileged Americans, regardless of race.

But why am I wasting my breath? Glenn Beck isn’t interested in history, and he certainly isn’t interested in the truth. He just likes to set off little rhetorical firebombs that grab attention — and boost the ratings for his television and radio shows.

• The Lunatic Beck Moloch Still Lurks in Our Lives •

Since Beck has called President Obama a “racist” and accused him of having a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” it’s safe to assume that some people will attend Saturday’s rally because of a sense of racial grievance and an urge for some kind of payback. But many will attend for other reasons, and they’re the ones I feel sorry for. As the growth of the tea party movement clearly demonstrates, there are millions of Americans who feel alienated from their government, distressed about the economy and frightened of the future. Their concerns deserve to be heard. Instead, their anxieties are exploited by hucksters who see fear and anger as marketing tools.

Saturday night, when the event is done, the Lincoln Memorial will still be the place where King gave one of the most memorable speeches of the 20th century. People who came to the rally in search of answers will still be looking. And Glenn Beck will still be a legend in his own mind.

Originally posted 2010-08-23
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Our Central Florida VFP Chapter asks you to please spread the word about Lt. Col. Bowman’s 2010 speaking tour, perhaps even sponsoring or hosting him when he comes to your area. We also ask that you please do whatever you can to support his efforts as it does cost Bob a great deal to do these speaking tours. Tax deductible donations can be made by going to this link: Contribute to the Patriots.

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• BREAK THE CHAIN! •

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

• The Flimflam Confidence Swindlers •
• We Americans must put a Stop to It •

• PATHETIC •

• How bout a PEACE Room? •

In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

• Yang Yin • Nasty Peter King and Angel Anthony Weiner •

• MEDICAL CARE FOR THE RESCUERS? • How dare you?! •
• Just When You Think Rightwingers Can’t Be More Shamefully Anti-American •

• Be Careful Where You Get Your News • Many Times It’s Not News At All •

• Turn it off • TURN IT OFF! •

— To read the rest click HERE! —
• Gotta do it! •

• PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR THREE •

• Lincoln Country Road or Armageddon •

• Targeting Iran •

This military adventure has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board since the mid-1990s. First Iraq, then Iran according to a declassified 1995 US Central Command document.

• UNIFIED COMMAND •


• UNIFIED EMPIRE COMMAND •
• We miss the good old days before they changed the name of the United States to NORTHCOM •

Since 2005, the US and its allies, including America’s NATO partners and Israel, have been involved in the extensive deployment and stockpiling of advanced weapons systems. The air defense systems of the US, NATO member countries and Israel are fully integrated.

This is a coordinated endeavor of the Pentagon, NATO, Israel’s Defense Force (IDF), with the active military involvement of several non-NATO partner countries including the frontline Arab states (members of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative), Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, among others. (NATO consists of 28 NATO member states. Another 21 countries are members of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council — EAPC, The Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative include ten Arab countries plus Israel.)

The roles of Egypt, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia (within the extended military alliance) is of particular relevance. Egypt controls the transit of war ships and oil tankers through the Suez Canal. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States occupy the South Western coastlines of the Persian Gulf, the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman. In early June, “Egypt reportedly allowed one Israeli and eleven U.S. ships to pass through the Suez Canal in ....an apparent signal to Iran. ... On June 12, regional press outlets reported that the Saudis had granted Israel the right to fly over its airspace...” (Muriel Mirak Weissbach, Israel’s Insane War on Iran Must Be Prevented, Global Research, July 31, 2010)

In post 9/11 military doctrine, this massive deployment of military hardware has been defined as part of the so-called “Global War on Terrorism,” targeting “non-State” terrorist organizations including al Qaeda and so-called “State sponsors of terrorism,” including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan.

• Will Good Triumph Over Evil? •

The US and its allies are “beating the drums of war” at the height of a Worldwide economic depression, not to mention the most serious environmental catastrophe in World history. In a bitter twist, one of the major players (BP) on the Middle East Central Asia geopolitical chessboard, formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, is the instigator of the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

• So long, Mom, I’m off to drop the bomb, so don’t wait up for me . . . •

The war on Iran is presented to public opinion as an issue among others. It is not viewed as a threat to “Mother Earth” as in the case of global warming. It is not front-page news. The fact that an attack on Iran could lead to escalation and potentially unleash a “global war” is not a matter of concern.

The Cult of Killing and Destruction

The global killing machine is also sustained by an embedded cult of killing and destruction which pervades Hollywood movies, not to mention the prime time war and crime TV series on network television. This cult of killing is endorsed by the CIA and the Pentagon which also support (finance) Hollywood productions as an instrument of war propaganda:

Ex-CIA agent Bob Baer told us, “There’s a symbiosis between the CIA and Hollywood” and revealed that former CIA director George Tenet is currently “out in Hollywood, talking to studios.” (Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham, Lights, Camera… Covert Action: The Deep Politics of Hollywood, Global Research, January 31, 2009).

The killing machine is deployed at a global level, within the framework of the unified combat command structure. It is routinely upheld by the institutions of government, the corporate media and the mandarins and intellectuals of the New World Order in Washington’s think tanks and strategic studies research institutes, as an unquestioned instrument of peace and global prosperity.

A culture of killing and violence has become embedded in human consciousness.

War is broadly accepted as part of a societal process: The Homeland needs to be “defended” and protected.

• If we’re strong and alert, we don’t let ourselves get sucked in to warring •

A “humanitarian war” is upheld by the so-called international community. It is not condemned as a criminal act. Its main architects are rewarded for their contributions to world peace.

With regard to Iran, what is unfolding is the outright legitimization of war in the name of an illusive notion of global security.

A “Pre-emptive” Aerial attack directed against Iran would lead to Escalation

At present there are three separate Middle East Central Asia war theaters: Iraq, Af-Pak, and Palestine.

Were Iran to be the object of a “pre-emptive” aerial attack by allied forces, the entire region, from the Eastern Mediterranean to China’s Western frontier with Afghanistan and Pakistan, would flare up, leading us potentially into a World War III scenario.

The war would also extend into Lebanon and Syria.

It is highly unlikely that the bombings, if they were to be implemented, would be circumscribed to Iran’s nuclear facilities as claimed by US-NATO official statements. What is more probable is an all out air attack on both military and civilian infrastructure, transport systems, factories, public buildings.

• Ain’t it purty? •
• Isn’t this better? •

Of significance is the recent discovery in Iran of the second largest known reserves of natural gas at Soumar and Halgan estimated at 12.4 trillion cubic feet.

Targeting Iran consists not only in reclaiming Anglo-American control over Iran's oil and gas economy, including pipeline routes, it also challenges the presence and influence of China and Russia in the region.

• The real contest is between love and hate, between greed and decency •

US-NATO military planners have envisaged various scenarios of military escalation. They are also acutely aware of the geopolitical implications, namely that the war could extend beyond the Middle East Central Asia region. The economic impacts on the oil markets, etc. have also been analyzed.

While Iran, Syria and Lebanon are the immediate targets, China, Russia, North Korea, not to mention Venezuela and Cuba are also the object of US threats.

At stake is the structure of military alliances. US-NATO-Israel military deployments including military exercises and drills conducted on Russia and China's immediate borders bear a direct relationship to the proposed war on Iran. These veiled threats, including their timing, constitute an obvious hint to the former powers of the Cold War era not to intervene in any way which could encroach upon a US-led attack on Iran.

Global Warfare

The medium term strategic objective is to target Iran and neutralize Iran’s allies, through gunboat diplomacy. The longer term military objective is to directly target China and Russia.

The deployment of coalition troops and advanced weapons systems by the US, NATO and its partners is occurring simultaneously in all major regions of the World.

The recent actions of the US military off the coast of North Korea including the conduct of war games are part of a global design.

But if we were titillated that Sunday, it wasn’t immediately clear that this internal government history of the war had mass appeal. Tricia Nixon’s wedding in the White House Rose Garden on Saturday received equal play with the Pentagon Papers on The Times’s front page. On “Face the Nation” the guest was the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, yet the subject of the papers didn’t even come up.

That false calm vanished overnight once Richard Nixon, erupting in characteristic rage and paranoia, directed his attorney general, John Mitchell, to enjoin The Times from publishing any sequels. The high-stakes legal drama riveted the nation for two weeks, culminating in a landmark 6-to-3 Supreme Court decision in favor of The Times and the First Amendment. Ellsberg and The Times were canonized. I sold my first magazine article, an Ellsberg profile, to Esquire, and, for better or worse, cast my lot with journalism. That my various phone conversations with Ellsberg prompted ham-fisted F.B.I. agents to visit me and my parents only added to the allure.

I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs. Last week the left and right reached a rare consensus. The war logs are no Pentagon Papers. They are historic documents describing events largely predating the current administration. They contain no news. They will not change the course of the war.

• Gonna beat all our drones and bombs into plowshares •

What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president. By June 1971, the Tet offensive and Walter Cronkite’s famous on-air editorial were more than three years in the past. The David Halberstam article that inspired “The Best and the Brightest” had already appeared in Harper’s. Lt. William Calley had been found guilty in the My Lai massacre exposed by Seymour Hersh in 1969. Just weeks before the Pentagon Papers surfaced, the Vietnam veteran John Kerry electrified the country by asking a Senate committee, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Most Americans had long been telling pollsters the war was a mistake. By the time the Pentagon Papers surfaced, a plurality also disapproved of how Vietnam was handled by Nixon, who had arrived in office promising to end the war.

• Shut Down the War Department • Open the Peace Department •

The public’s reaction to the Afghanistan war logs has largely been a shrug — and not just because they shared their Times front page with an article about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. President Obama is, to put it mildly, no Nixon, and his no-drama reaction to the leaks robbed their publication of the constitutional cliffhanger of their historical antecedent. Another factor in the logs’ shortfall as public spectacle is the fractionalization of the news media, to the point where even a stunt packaged as “news” can trump journalistic enterprise. (Witness how the bogus Shirley Sherrod video upstaged The Washington Post’s blockbuster investigation of the American intelligence bureaucracy two weeks ago.) The logs also suffer stylistically: they’re often impenetrable dispatches from the ground, in contrast to the Pentagon Papers’ anonymously and lucidly team-written epic of policy-making on high.

Yet the national yawn that largely greeted the war logs is most of all an indicator of the country’s verdict on the Afghan war itself, now that it’s nine years on and has reached its highest monthly casualty rate for American troops. Many Americans at home have lost faith and checked out. The war places way down the list of pressing issues in every poll. Nearly two-thirds of those asked recently by CBS News think it’s going badly; the latest Post-ABC News survey finds support of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan at a low (45 percent), with only 43 percent deeming the war worth fighting.

• Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964 •

• Another piece of metal memorializing murder victims •

• Ms. Shirley Sherrod •

The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn’t look like a Norman Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife’s testimony to her good deeds on CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture who fired Sherrod without questioning the video’s patently spurious provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn’t a failure of due diligence — there was no diligence.

Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the Sherrod smear — including some in the news business who reported on the video without vetting it — watched her entire speech. What’s important is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What matters is Sherrod’s own story.

She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th anniversary of her father’s funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17, leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth. Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed “Gator” for a reason. Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father’s murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.

• Mr. Charles Sherrod •

• SNCC •

• Atticus Finch, from To Kill A Mockingbird •
— To read the rest click HERE! —

• Bybee & Yoo • The Torture Brothers •

Bybee, who is now a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco, did sign off on a variety of other torture techniques, including the near-drowning experience of waterboarding. Prolonged diapering was included in a list of torture techniques that the OLC initially approved in 2002, but it was removed possibly because it might have resulted in a lengthy legal review.

Some of the techniques, including diapering, were permitted by CIA Director George Tenet and other senior agency officials despite the lack of clear OLC sign-off in 2002. Diapering and other abuses, such as water “dousing,” were cleared by the OLC later after Bybee left to become a federal judge.

In an investigative report published by Truthout on April 17, intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee captured after 9/11, was subjected to repeated sessions of “water dousing” prior to the issuance of the August 2002 torture memos. At the time interrogators used it on Zubaydah, water dousing was described by intelligence officials knowledgeable about Zubaydah’s torture as spraying him with extremely cold water from a hose while he was naked and shackled by chains attached to a ceiling in the cell he was kept in at a black-site prison.

• Right and Wrong can Sure be Obvious Sometimes •

Bybee’s statements to the committee appeared to be an attempt to shift the blame for some illegal torturing onto the CIA.

“If the CIA departed from anything that it told us here, if it had any other information that it didn’t share with us or if it came into any information that would differ from what they told us here, then the CIA did not have an opinion from OLC,” Bybee said, according to the transcript of his interview released by the Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Moreover, Bybee said his OLC memos prohibited the “substantial repetition” of harsh techniques, such as waterboarding. Justice Department documents and a report released by the CIA’s Inspector General state that two high-value detainees, Zubaydah and self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were waterboarded 83 times and 183 times in the course of a single month.

In 2005 one of Bybee’s successors, Steven Bradbury, permitted several of the torture tactics to be used in combination. The application of the torture techniques alone and in various patterns appears to have amounted to a form of human experimentation.

Last month, the international doctors’ organization, Physicians for Human Rights, released a report that said waterboarding was monitored in early 2002 by CIA medical personnel who collected data about how detainees responded to the torture technique. The data was then used in Bradbury’s 2005 torture memo advising CIA interrogators how to refine the practice.

• Is either of these men fit to be a judge, a lawyer, or an inmate in prison for life? •

That medical analysis then informed “subsequent [torture] practices,” the report said.

Criticizing Yoo

In the congressional interview, Bybee was also harshly critical of his former colleague John Yoo, the principal author of the torture memos as well as other opinions asserting that President George W. Bush could exercise unlimited powers as commander in chief during the “war on terror.”

It’s time to both speak and act truth to power, and bring about real systemic change that we everyday people “can believe in.”

• NO •

Wars are essentially a deliberately perpetuated lapse in human sanity. They are not inevitable. They do, however, represent the height of humankind’s manipulated insanity.

• It’s All in the Numbers •
• This is #1 •

Why are wars, as horrifying as they are, perpetuated? And who perpetuates and manipulates humanity into these constant bloody quagmires? And for what purpose or purposes?

• TEARS OF RAGE •
• #2 •
Anup Shah, World Military Spending, Global Issues, Updated: July 07, 2010

• Repulsive, Ugly, Offensive • It’s the Truth of War •
• And Perpetual War Shames Us •

• Is Obama going to Order an Attack on Iran or isn’t He? •

• #3 •

• THIS DOES NOT WIN HEARTS OR MINDS •

• Tears of Grief •

• Too Many People Have Died •

• Hurts So Bad •

• We can’t Count All the Places • We can’t Count All the Wars •
• We can’t See All the Faces •
— To read the rest click HERE! —