Will your Senator support war with Iran?

 

The Jerusalem Post broke the news this morning: George Bush intends to attack Iran in his final months in office.  "The official claimed that a senior member of the president's entourage, which concluded a trip to Israel last week, said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for."1 Congress has the power to stop him. There is a resolution already in the Senate called S. Res. 356. It's a straightforward and simple resolution that says, "A resolution affirming that any offensive military action taken against Iran must be explicitly approved by Congress before such action may be initiated." Tell your Senator to support and fight for S. Res 356: http://www.TrueMajority.org/dontbombiran Today's story is just the latest to discuss the increasingly belligerent rhetoric of the Bush administration towards Iran. Just last week, President Bush compared anyone who seeks to negotiate with Iran to those who appeased the Nazis prior to World War II. We only have a few months until our long national nightmare of the Bush Administration comes to an end.  But, it is abundantly clear that they intend on going out with a bang. It's time for the Congress to embrace its role as a co-equal branch of government and stop them before it is too late.         Send a message to your Senator right now:         http://www.TrueMajority.org/dontbombiran Thanks for taking action to stop another war, -Ilya Ilya Sheyman Online Organizer

TrueMajority.org is a grassroots group of citizens who believe in America's true values of openness, fairness and compassion. We believe participating in an effective government is the best way to be mutually responsible for our community. TrueMajority is a project of USAction, a 501(c)(4) organization under the IRS tax code. TrueMajority.org / USAction, 1825 K St. NW, Suite 210, Washington, DC 20006 (802) 735-9110

Aliens

935 Lies by Harry Shearer

935 Lies

Strange Talk Express

Frustration for Bush as pledge to Saudis fails to win oil concession

by Ian Black

George Bush with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in Riyadh. Photograph: Kamal Mustafa/EPA

The US agreed yesterday to help Saudi Arabia protect its oil industry from terrorist attack, while offering to back conservative Arab countries resisting Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East.

The White House announced new agreements with the kingdom as President George Bush flew to Riyadh for private talks with King Abdullah at his ranch outside the capital. But the king was not persuaded to boost Saudi oil production to ease the effect of the $127-a-barrel price on the US economy.

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Jeffrey Toobin: In McCain’s Court

A vote for John McCain is a vote to continue the Bush Cheney nightmare, pure and simple.

-RikkiTikki

Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, May 26, 2008

Successful politicians know how to attract attention, and how to avoid it, so it's worth noting that John McCain chose to give his speech about the future of the judiciary on May 6th, a day when the political world was preoccupied with the Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. It is significant, too, that Senator McCain spoke mainly in generalities, rather than about such specific issues as abortion, affirmative action, and the death penalty. But even if he hoped to sneak the speech past a distracted public, and have its coded references deciphered only by the activists who were its primary target, its message should not be lost on anyone. McCain plans to continue, and perhaps even accelerate, George W. Bush's conservative counter-revolution at the Supreme Court.

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Quietly, wind farms spread footprint in U.S

By Carey Gillam

ROCK PORT, Missouri (Reuters) - At 265 feet tall, four gleaming white wind turbines tower over the tiny farm town of Rock Port, Missouri, like a landing of alien intruders.

But despite their imposing presence and the stark contrast with the rolling pastures and corn fields, the turbines have received a warm welcome here.

As Eric Chamberlain, who manages the wind farm for Wind Capital Group, eats lunch in a local restaurant, local people greet him with a "Hey Windy!" and many say they are happy to be using clean electricity.

"It doesn't pollute the environment, it provides tax revenue, creates jobs. I don't see a downside," said Chamberlain, who is something of a celebrity in this town of 1,400 people.

While growth in ethanol use as an alternative fuel has had a big impact on rural America, wind power has also been growing steadily for the past three years, with wind farms like this one springing up all over the windy expanse of the Great Plains and beyond.

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National Portrait Gallery - Herblock's Presidents

"The political cartoon is not a news story and not an oil portrait. It's essentially a means for poking fun, for puncturing pomposity."
                                                    —Herbert Block, 1977

The political cartoons of Herbert Block (1909–2001) appeared in American newspapers for more than seven decades under the pen name Herblock. This exhibition contains Block's original drawings of presidential cartoons from Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton.

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Washington Times mocks 'Bush the bee killer'

by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

When NBC's Richard Engel interviewed President George W. Bush in Egypt during his largely unproductive Mid-East tour, Bush for the most part confined his remarks to repeating well-established positions on Iran and the Middle East.

However, Bush did respond with one interesting new metaphor when Engel suggested, "Many people say that [the war on terror] has not made the world safer, that it has created more radicals, that there are more people in this part of the world who want to attack the United States."

"This is the beehive theory," Bush replied. "You should have just let the beehive sit there and hope the bees don't come out of the hive."

"Haven't you just smashed the bees' hive and let them spread?" Engel asked.

"To suggest that bees would stay in their hive is naive," Bush replied. "They didn't stay in the hive when they came and killed 3000 of our citizens."

In an item headed, "Bush the bee killer," the conservative Washington Times called this an "odd exchange" and suggested that "apparently Bin Laden is the queen bee," implying that Bush's bee-killing has been ineffective.

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annals of flying penises

Flying Penis Invades Russian Political Scene

Here is "grand chessmaster" Garry Kasparov, who moonlights as the leader of the Other Russia movement, "a loose coalition of activists opposing Vladamir Putin and the current Russian government." He gave a speech Saturday in Moscow when a FLYING HELICOPTER PENIS interrupted him, frightening the world, until some (gay?) dude swatted it down. Don't believe us? Watch. [Sharenator, Waxy]

 

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Banks Keep $35 Billion Markdown Off Income Statements

By Yalman Onaran

May 19 (Bloomberg) -- Banks and securities firms, reeling from record losses resulting from the collapse of the mortgage securities market, are failing to acknowledge in their income statements at least $35 billion of additional writedowns included in their balance sheets, regulatory filings show.

Citigroup Inc. subtracted $2 billion from equity for the declining value of home-loan bonds in its quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 2 without mentioning the deduction in the earnings statement or conference call with investors that followed. ING Groep NV placed 3.6 billion euros ($5.6 billion) of negative valuations in its capital account, while disclosing only an 80 million-euro depletion to income.

The balance-sheet adjustments are in addition to $344 billion of writedowns and credit losses already reported on the income statements of more than 100 banks. These companies have raised $263 billion from sovereign wealth funds, their own governments and public investors to shore up capital. The balance-sheet writedowns also reduce equity, which needs to be replenished. Adding the $35 billion leaves the banks with a $116 billion mountain of losses to climb.

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Kristol: Wrong Again

 by Mustang Bobby

William Kristol began his illustrious tenure at the New York Times last winter by getting his facts wrong in his very first column when he cited the wrong source for a quote. Since then he has managed to demonstrate his flair for the error in both perception and fact, and today is another case in point.

In trying to make the case that John McCain is the exception to the rule that the current crop of GOP candidates running in special elections in previously safe Republican strongholds stink on ice (0-3), he cites a number of factors that bode well for Mr. McCain, including the ruling last Thursday by the California State Supreme Court overturning the ban on same-sex marriage.

On Thursday, the California Supreme Court did precisely what much of the American public doesn't want judges doing: it made social policy from the bench. With a 4-to-3 majority, the judges chose not to defer to a ballot initiative approved by 61 percent of California voters eight years ago, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court redefined marriage in that state, helping to highlight the issues of same-sex marriage and judicial activism for the 2004 presidential campaign. Now the California court has conveniently stepped up to the plate.

Obama's campaign issued a statement that its candidate "respects the decision of the California Supreme Court." The McCain campaign, by contrast, said it recognized "the right of the people of California to recognize marriage as a unique institution ... John McCain doesn't believe judges should be making these decisions." Since the next president will almost certainly have one Supreme Court appointment, and could have two or three, this difference on judicial philosophy could well matter to voters — and in a way that should help McCain.

Furthermore, the action of the California court will remind voters of the Defense of Marriage Act, which says a state is not required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and which was passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. McCain voted for and supports it. Obama opposes it.

If Mr. Kristol had bothered to read the history of the case or the ruling itself rather than launch his typical right-wing volley of "activist judges" missiles, he would have known that the court ruling was not making social policy from the bench at all, but doing exactly what the court was created to do in the first place: interpret the laws and the constitution of the state. The California Assembly had twice tried to pass laws legalizing same-sex marriage, only to have them vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wanted the State Supreme Court to first decide whether or not such laws would pass constitutional muster. The court so ruled on Thursday, citing only the state constitution and pointedly avoiding the social policy aspect of the case.

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SEC charges eight ex-AOL Time Warner execs

By Karey Wutkowski

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged eight former executives of AOL Time Warner, now known as Time Warner Inc, in a fraudulent scheme that overstated company advertising revenue by more than $1 billion.

Four of the defendants settled with the SEC and the other four are facing fraud-related charges in federal court in New York.

The former executives participated in a scheme from mid-2000 to mid-2002 to artificially inflate the company's reported online advertising revenue, the SEC said in a statement. Online advertising revenue was a key measure analysts and investors used to evaluate the company.

The scheme involved fraudulent transactions in which AOL Time Warner effectively funded its own advertising revenue by giving purchasers the money to buy online advertising that they did not want or need, the SEC said.

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News from Israel

People stand around a large plate of hummus in Jerusalem May 5, 2008. In an attempt to break the Guinness Book of world records for the largest plate of hummus, the plate of hummus measuring about 4 metres (13 feet) in diameter was displayed on Monday at a fruit and vegetable market in Jerusalem.

Photo by Ronen Zvulun

WWJMD?

by mcjoan

Mon May 19, 2008 at 12:25:16 PM PDT

There are barely words for this:

Georgia Republican Party chairwoman Sue Everhart said Saturday that the party's presumed presidential nominee has a lot in common with Jesus Christ.

"John McCain is kind of like Jesus Christ on the cross," Everhart said as she began the second day of the state GOP convention. "He never denounced God, either."

Yes folks, John McCain was shot down and held captive for your sins. Deification. All the rage in Republican circles.

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The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement

 

By Robert Parry

 

The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush's own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.

If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naïve saying "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided," then what should be said about Bush's grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany.

That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the "Trading with the Enemy Act."

So, perhaps instead of holding up Sen. Borah to ridicule, Bush might have acknowledged in his May 15 speech that his forebears also were blind to the dangers of Hitler.

Bush might have noted that his family's wealth, which fueled his own political rise, was partly derived from Nazi collaboration and possibly from slave labor provided by Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

A more honest speech before the Knesset – on the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding – might have contained an apology to the Jewish people from a leading son of the Bush family for letting its greed contribute to Nazi power and to the horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, there was just the jab at Sen. Borah, who died in 1940.

President Bush apparently saw no reason to remind the world of a dark chapter from the family history. After all, those ugly facts mostly disappeared from public consciousness soon after World War II.

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Stranded in Suburbia

By PAUL KRUGMAN

I have seen the future, and it works.

O.K., I know that these days you're supposed to see the future in China or India, not in the heart of "old Europe."

But we're living in a world in which oil prices keep setting records, in which the idea that global oil production will soon peak is rapidly moving from fringe belief to mainstream assumption. And Europeans who have achieved a high standard of living in spite of very high energy prices — gas in Germany costs more than $8 a gallon — have a lot to teach us about how to deal with that world.

If Europe's example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don't drive them too much.

Notice that I said that cars should be fuel-efficient — not that people should do without cars altogether. In Germany, as in the United States, the vast majority of families own cars (although German households are less likely than their U.S. counterparts to be multiple-car owners).

But the average German car uses about a quarter less gas per mile than the average American car.

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Webb: Bush would be first to veto veterans' benefits

by Nick Langewis and David Edwards

Some politicians have no qualms about using other people's military service for their own benefit, but appear to be reluctant to extend a benefit with historical precedent to those who have served, said Senator Jim Webb during an interview with NBC's Tim Russert this morning.

"The Republican Party...continually seeks to politicize military service for its own ends even as it uses their sacrifices as a political shield against criticism for its failed policies," Webb wrote in his book, A Time to Fight. "And in that sense, it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

The Senator opined that Republicans have benefited from a climate of anti-war and perhaps anti-military sentiment stemming from the Vietnam era, resulting in well-meaning but misguided activism among Democratic-leaning people, and Republicans have won the image of being more positive towards the military and military service by default.

Webb's pending GI bill would offer tuition and living stipends to veterans similar to the benefits enjoyed by those returning from Japan and Germany in the 1940s.

"I introduced this GI bill my first day in office," Webb said. "The idea was to give the people who'd been serving since 9/11 the same educational benefits--the same right to a first class future--as those who served in World War II."

"No president in history has vetoed as benefits bill for those who've served," he continued. "[President Bush is] fine with sending these people over and over again where they're spending more time in Iraq than they are at home.

"He's fine with the notion of 'stop-loss,' where we can...make people stay in even after enlistments are done. And then we say, 'Give them the same benefit that the people in World War II have,' and they say it's too expensive. So I think the Republican Party is...on the block here to clearly demonstrate that they value military service, or suffer the consequences of losing the support of people who've served."

A full transcript is available here.

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but not for long

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Paid Death Notices

OBERFIELD--Bernard, 90, on May 16th, 2008. Ruth's beloved husband of 67 years the romance of the century. Father of William (Lynn), Richard (Sharon), the late Gilbert (Naomi Danis), and Sara Hohn (Michael). Grandfather of Joshua (Annie), Zachary (Felicia Lin), Jillian, Gabriel, Nora, Sophie, Ezra, Talya and Caley. Bernie was a true renaissance man, never far from a stack of books or a thesaurus. Pharmacist who served customers from Harlem to Suffolk County. Japanese brush painter, sculptor, lover of learning and good fruit. Survived by the Bush administration, but not for long. The family wishes to extend its gratitude to Dr. David Wolf for his extraordinary care, and to the Palliative care team of New York Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Funeral May 18th, at 1pm, Schwartz Bros. 114-03, Queens Blvd., Forest Hills.

Published in the New York Times on 5/18/2008.

 

Liberty: A New Comic Strip

by Aram Sinnreich

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Why I had to lie to my dying mother

American writer Susan Sontag was terrified of death. She beat cancer in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, but third time around she wasn't so lucky. In a tender account of her final illness, her son David Rieff recalls how he colluded with his mother's fantasy that she wasn't dying - and what this ultimately cost him after she had gone



America, 1967: David Rieff and mother Susan Sontag. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
 
When my mother Susan Sontag was diagnosed in 2004 with myelodysplastic syndrome, a precursor to a rapidly progressive leukaemia, she had already survived stage IV breast cancer in 1975 that had spread into the lymph system, despite her doctors having held out little hope of her doing so, and a uterine sarcoma in 1998. 'There are some survivors, even in the worst cancers,' she would often say during the nearly two years she received what even for the time was an extremely harsh regime of chemotherapy for the breast cancer. 'Why shouldn't I be one of them?'

After that first cancer, mutilated but alive (the operation she underwent not only removed one of her breasts but the muscles of the chest wall and part of an armpit), she wrote her defiant book Illness as Metaphor. Part literary study, part polemic, it was a fervent plea to treat illness as illness, the luck of the genetic draw, and not the result of sexual inhibition, the repression of feeling, and the rest - that torrid brew of low-rent Wilhelm Reich and that mix of masochism and hubris that says that somehow people who got ill had brought it on themselves.

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And now, a little something for the ladies

by Trish Bendix

If you haven't experienced the magic that is Flight of the Conchords, I suggest you utilize a search engine pronto. This New Zealand-based duo (Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement) are hilarious and catchy with their comedy/music styling, which has garnered them their own television series on HBO as well as two albums on Sub Pop Records.

While their self-titled show is about them trying to become famous, in reality they are finally becoming a hit in the States. They recently released a video for their '70s-inspired single, "Ladies of the World," which is a song dedicated to every single one of us out there, whether we are "ugly, skanky or small."

I like their advocation of soldiers putting down their weapons and instead picking up a woman, and "brunettes not fighter jets." While you probably won't want to take them up on their offer of making love to you ("it's the least we can do"), you'll appreciate that some dudes want to "show you some gratitude."

Check out their song on Myspace. After the realizations we had on the blog yesterday about women being left out of the Time magazine list of influential people and this summer's movie line-up, let's start Friday off with a tribute to us.

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Keeping Jazz Makers Alive

Evicted or with no medical insurance, musicians playing their last chorus are saved by the Jazz Foundation

by Nat Hentoff

Years ago, without a steady gig or paycheck and a first child on the way, I was anxiously freelancing and began to empathize with the common lot of many musicians who existed from gig to gig with no medical insurance. I asked a former sideman who had played with several renowned jazz leaders, but was then scuffling: "How do you make a living?"

He shrugged: "I wait for the phone to ring."

I became aware that there were jazz players—some internationally known and most in jazz discographies—who had been evicted for nonpayment of rent at times, and others—too sick to work and without medical care—winding up in emergency rooms. A one-time piano phenomenon whom I'd interviewed, Phineas Newborn, ended up in a pauper's grave.

But at last, in 1989, a group of musicians—among them trumpeter Jimmy Owens and bassist Jamil Nasser, along with the late Herb Storfer, former jazz archivist at the Schomburg Library—started the Jazz Foundation of America in New York.

They began to bring new life and even gigs to forlorn survivors. As one example, the Jazz Foundation now says: "Not one musician in eight years has ever gone homeless who came to us before being evicted."

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Poem by Barack Obama written in 1981

    Under water grottos, caverns
    Filled with apes
    That eat figs
    Stepping on the figs
    That the apes
    Eat, they crunch
    The apes howl, bare
    Their fangs, dance,
    Tumble in the
    Rushing water
    Musty, wet pelts
    Glistening in the blue.

 

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Clinton/Obama Ad

Bee-Mail

Noah Veil has sent you a Bee-mail! Click here for your urgent message! Noah Veil has joined the cause to help save the honey bees whose lives are in danger worldwide. Will you join, too? helpthehoneybees.com Here are a few bee facts to get you started: 1. Honey bees are responsible for pollinating one-third of all the foods we eat, including many of our favorite fruits, nuts and vegetables. 2. Alarmingly, more than 25 percent of the Western honey bee population has disappeared over the last several winters, threatening our food supply and our way of life. 3. Many of the honey bee deaths are being attributed to a mysterious threat called Colony Collapse Disorder, which causes bees to suddenly leave their hive and die. Unfortunately, not much is known about this new threat. 4. Researchers are working to find a solution to Colony Collapse Disorder, but there are ways that we can all help the honey bees today. Learn more about bees and what you can do to help at helpthehoneybees.com.