March 28, 2007

World on Fire,...The Final Beginning of the End

 
Iran would be attacked at the beginning of April
(Russian military experts)

By RIA Novosti

Translated from French by Babelfish


RIA Novosti. The Russian military experts estimate that the planning of the American military attack against Iran passed the point of nonreturn on February 20, when the director of the IAEA, Mohammed El Baradei, recognized, in his report/ratio, the incapacity of the Agency "to confirm the peaceful character of the nuclear program of Iran".

According to the Russian weekly magazine Argoumenty nedeli, a military action will proceed during the first week of April, before Easter catholic and orthodoxe (this year they are celebrated the 8), when the "Western opinion" is on leave. It may be also that Iran is struck Friday 6, public holiday in the Moslem countries. According to the American diagram, it will be a striking of only one day which will last 12 hours, 4 hours of morning to 16 hours of afternoon. The code name of the operation is to date "English Cock" (Bite). A score of Iranian installations should be touched. With their number, centrifugal machines of uranium enrichment, centers of studies and laboratories. But the first block of the nuclear thermal power station of Bouchehr will not be touched. On the other hand, the Americans will neutralize the DCA, will run several Iranian buildings of war in the Gulf and will destroy the key positions of command of the armed forces.

As many measurements which should remove in Teheran any capacity to counteract. Iran projected to run several tankers in the strait of Ormuz with an aim of cutting the provisioning of the international markets of oil and of striking with the Israel missile.

The analysts affirm that strike them American will be launched from the island of Diego-Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, from where will take off of the bombers with long operating range B-52 with on their board cruise missiles; by the embarked aviation of the American aircraft carriers deployed in the Gulf and forming part of the 6th American Fleet in the Mediterranean; cruise missiles will be also drawn since the submarines concentrated in the Pacific and with broad from Arabia.
 
Result, the Iranian nuclear program will be rejected several years in back. In private talks, American Generals suppose that the times of deployment of American anti-missile defense in Europe can be postponed. Another event envisaged, the oil barrel could fly away to 75-80 dollars and this for one prolonged period.

Meanwhile, the new resolution on Iran and whose project was adopted by the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany should be voted with CS as of this week. The text envisages sanctions against 10 Iranian public companies and to three companies concerned with the Body of the guards of the Islamic revolution, unit of elite to the orders of the spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic, the ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Sanctions are also envisaged against 15 physical people: eight leaders placed high of companies of State and seven key characters with the Body of the guards of the Islamic revolution.

Original article in French - http://fr.rian.ru/world/20070319/62260006.html
 
 
 
The Pentagon will attack Iranian military targets
(Russian expert)

By RIA Novosti

Translated from French by Babelfish

RIA Novosti. The Pentagon projects to conduct soon a massive attack against the Iranian military infrastructure, estimates the General Leonid Ivachov, vice-president of the Academy of geopolitical sciences.

"I do not have any doubt as for the reality of this operation or, more precisely, of this aggression against Iran", the General Russian in a maintenance with RIA Novosti Wednesday declared.

According to him, testify to it in particular the conference at the beginning of March in Washington to the Committee americano-Israeli (AIPAC), which decided to support the Bush administration, as well as the fact that a few days after the US Congress revoked his own amendment prohibiting to the president to attack Iran without its downstream.

"We drew from it the conclusion which this operation would have well place. In other words, the Israeli community of the United States and the Israeli direction - represented with this conference by the Foreign Minister of the Hebrew State - formulated the directive to attack Iran ", noted the expert.

But the United States does not project a terrestrial operation. "According to any obviousness, there will be no terrestrial invasion. It will be strike air massive and of wear, with an aim of destroying the military potential of resistance, the centers of administrative direction, the economic installations key and, if possible, a part of the Iranian direction ", the expert underlined.

The Ivachov General did not draw aside the possibility of strike by means of tactical nuclear weapons against the Iranian nuclear sites. _ "It himself be that one call appel upon some load nuclear of low power", have it suppose.

The action of the Pentagon will be able to paralyse the life in the country, to sow panic there and, generally, to found a climate of chaos and uncertainty ", the expert affirmed.

"That could revive the fights to be able it inside Iran. A mission of peace will have to follow to put at the capacity to Teheran a government pro-American ", estimated the Ivachov General.

The purpose of all that will be to regild the blazon of the republican administration which will be able to thus declare that the Iranian nuclear potential was destroyed, it added.

Among the possible consequences of the military operation, the General quoted the dislocation of the country like Iraq. According to him, "this design gave results in Balkans, now it will be applied - if this one is not it already - with regard to the Large Middle East".

Questioned on the question of knowing if Russia were in measurement, by the diplomatic way, to influence the evolutions around Iran, the expert affirmed that "Moscow must exert an impact, requiring an urgent convocation of the Security Council of UNO to study the question of the aggression not sanctioned in preparation against Iran and of the non-observance of the principles of the Charter of UNO".

"And there Russia could cooperate with China, France and the nonpermanent members of the Council. Such preventive measures could contain the aggression ", affirms the Ivachov General.

Original article in French -  http://fr.rian.ru/world/20070321/62387717.html

 

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Nancy Bush and G.W. Pelosi with their dog Dick,...are very, very SICK,...

Why War With Iran? 

Iran

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

Posted by ChoiceAmericaNetwork at 04:55:05 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

March 27, 2007

Why War With Iran?

The Coming War With Iran
Is it inevitable?

By Justin Raimondo 

The timing of the recent incident in which 15 British sailors were arrested by Iran at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arabwaterway for purportedly entering Iranian waters couldn't have been more provocative if it had been planned that way. And perhaps it was. The question is, however, who did the planning?

It happened on the eve of a vote in the UN Security Council to impose stricter sanctions on Iran and in the wake of escalating rhetoric from U.S. government officials blaming Iran for anti-occupation activity in Iraq. On top of that, recent events include the kidnapping of Iranian consular officials in Irbil, Kurdistan, by U.S. forces, reports of covert U.S. support for terrorist attacks inside Iran, the "disappearance" of a major Iranian military figure in the elite Revolutionary Guards unit, and suspicions that the Mossad may have had a hand in killing a renowned Iranian nuclear scientist. Add it all up, and there seems little doubt as to who carried out what seems like a brazen provocation.

Go here for the semiofficial British version of the confrontation: according to this account, we are supposed to believe that the Iranians entered Iraqi waters to "ambush" the Brits, who were engaged in what is described as a "routine" patrol of the disputed waterway in search of suspected smugglers. Car smugglers were offloading their merchandise onto a barge when they were approached by the Brit patrol and fled into Iranian waters – but not before "irking" the British crew:

"The suspected smugglers complied with the British orders and the crew returned to its rigid hull inflatable boats (rhibs) to continue its patrol, only to turn around and see the traders laughing in its direction."

Laughing at Her Majesty's sailors, who were guarding the civilized world from the pernicious plots of car smugglers, was surely an act of war. After all, isn't a car a "weapon of mass destruction" in present-day Iraq? The Brits weren't going to let the Iranians off the hook quite so easily, and the next day they returned to the same waters to find the same smugglers plying their trade. The British patrol made a beeline for the smugglers, but this time the smugglers didn't run – and the poor naïve Brits walked right into the trap. No sooner had they boarded the vessel than they were surrounded on all sides by Iranian gunboats. Last anybody heard of their fate, they were in Tehran and the Iranians were talking about putting them on trial for espionage.

The Iraqi commander in charge of guarding Iraq's territorial waters, Brig. Gen. Hakim Jassim, has a different story to tell, as reported here:

"The Iraqi military commander of the country's territorial waters cast doubt on claims the Britons were in Iraqi waters. 'We were informed by Iraqi fishermen after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control. We don't know why they were there.'"

Ah, but I suppose it depends on which fisherman you ask. At any rate, no fisherman in the area will be interviewed by anyone in the Western news media any time soon, because, as the UK Independentnotes, all reporters have been "ordered away" by coalition forces. The Brits are hedging their bets: even while Tony Blair denies Iranian charges of "blatant aggression" and openly threatens Tehran,

"Lord Triesman, a Foreign Office undersecretary who had held talks with Iran's ambassador on Saturday, told Sky News there was good evidence the men were in Iraqi waters, but that the issue of whether the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters was only a technical one. 'I've been very clear throughout that the British forces do not ever intentionally enter into Iranian waters,' he said. 'There's no reason for them to do so, we don't intend to do so, and I think people should accept there's good faith in those assertions.'"

Although the Iranians claim the captured recording devices provide solid evidence that the Brits knew they were in Iranian waters, Iranian officials have so far declined to release the precise coordinates where the interception took place. One awaits further evidence, as opposed to the straight reporting of the British government's explanation as if it were fact. In any event, you'll note that various descriptions of the Shatt al-Arab waterway are often preceded by the word "disputed" – due to the fact that nobody really knows what defines the exact boundary between Iran and Iraq along this crucial oil route. Which is precisely why this area is such a perfect staging ground for the War Party's next adventure in "regime change."

Both Ron Paul and Antiwar.com columnist Philip Giraldi have warned about the likelihood of a Gulf of Tonkin-style incident in the Persian Gulf, and their predictions have, sadly, proved all too accurate. That it involves the British, not the Americans, is a double victory for the on-to-Tehran crowd: the war-weary Brits, who recently announced the withdrawal of their troops from southern Iraq, will presumably be dragged along in the wake of the coming U.S. military assault as their sailors are paraded before the cameras in Tehran. Once again, "coalition" forces are about to take down a Middle Eastern government, and they are already on the move.

The War Party's propaganda campaign has gone into high gear as a result of this incident, evoking memories of yet another "hostage crisis" and characterizing the incident as an Iranian provocation designed to set up a prisoner exchange, in which the Iranians would hand over their captive Brits for Iranians recently detained in Iraq – the latter supposedly numbering in the "hundreds."

As part of the general propaganda offensive, U.S. News is reporting yet another incident, this time involving the Americans and Iraqi troops, who were allegedly surrounded by Iranian Revolutionary Guards well inside Iraq. This supposedly occurred in September of last year – yet we're only learning about it now.

On the ground in the Middle East, the forces that will engage in a mighty clash of civilizations are gathering – while, on the home front, the Israel Lobby is preparing the ground by softening up any possible opposition. This means zeroing in on the Democratic Party, lining up the major presidential candidates in support of a strike against Tehran, and smearing any and all war opponents as anti-Semitic enablers of the nuclear-armed, Holocaust-denying Iranian regime.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recently-passed "antiwar" legislation – funding the conflict while giving the president plenty of room to evade a conditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by sometime in 2008 – is being hailed as a great achievement by the Huffington Post's David Sirota and other party-lining apologists for the DNC, but what these people somehow fail to mention is the stripping out of a provision that would have forced Bush to go to Congress before launching an attack on Iran.

No one should be surprised by this open invitation to the president to commence the bombing at his convenience. After all, Democrats have been more belligerent than the Bush administration when it comes to Iran. Hillary Clinton has accused the Bushies of mollycoddling Tehran, and Democratic Party national chairman Howard Dean opined to Chris Matthews that the tragedy of our wrongheaded intervention in Iraq was that it diverted attention away from the "real threat" – Iran. Asked by Matthews if we ought to go to war with Iran, Dean – like the big-time Democratic presidential wannabes – refused to take it off the table.

The Democrats, to their dismay, may soon find that it is being put on the table by George W. Bush – and how they react will determine whether they go down in history as opponents of this war-crazed administration, or its craven enablers. I'd be willing to bet the farm on the latter, and, in this context, rumors of a U.S. attack on Iran scheduled for April seem more credible by the hour.

I would note, in passing, and purely as a speculative matter that oil prices are already spiking in response to rumors of war in the Gulf, and perhaps this is the key to understanding the Democrats' capitulation. After all, the political atmosphere would certainly change – to the Democrats' advantage – if the price of oil were to truly skyrocket, say, to $200 a barrel. This would virtually ensure a Democratic victory in '08. That another side effect would be to trigger a worldwide economic collapse is just a minor matter, and perhaps as good an opportunity as any to institute some real New Deal-style "reforms" of the American economic system. Statist liberals have been complaining ever since 9/11 that George W. Bush has never really asked us to make "sacrifices" in pursuit of victory in the "war on terrorism," bemoaning the lack of a tax hike and disdaining the president's call for the nation to "go shopping" in response to the biggest terrorist attack in our history. Having caused a major economic as well as geopolitical catastrophe as a result of making war on Iran, our pro-sacrifice liberals – especially those in Congress who initially signed on to the attack on Iraq – may believe an attack on Iran is a small price to pay for power.

We keep hearing that the U.S. will never attack Iran because we don't have the troops or the military reserves. Lawrence O'Donnell, for one, keeps saying this on The McLaughlin Group, but I don't believe it for a minute. The Lobby is pushing hard on this one, and, politically, the War Party has lined up the leadership of both the Democrats and the Republicans, as Pelosi's capitulation on the Iran proviso makes all too clear. As long as domestic political support for an attack spans both parties and includes the key element of "liberal" Democrats like Pelosi and Chairman Dean, all systems are "go" for war with Iran.

God may forgive them: I will not.

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

 

Posted by ChoiceAmericaNetwork at 23:27:22 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

FUBAR

 
MoveOn moves in with Pelosi

The netroots group's support proved crucial to passage of the Democrats' Iraq spending plan. But antiwar activists say MoveOn has been co-opted by its access to power.

By Farhad Manjoo

When Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, looks at the Iraq spending bill that Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders managed to pass in the House today, what he sees is a way to end the war. The bill, which won passage on a nearly strict party-line vote, commits $124 billion to fund operations in Iraq, but it calls for removal of American combat troops by the summer of 2008. The plan is not perfect, Pariser concedes. It does not require complete withdrawal. Still,  MoveOn signed on to Pelosi's supplemental funding bill, citing a poll of its members showing overwhelming support of the idea.

MoveOn's longtime allies in the antiwar movement, however, look at the bill -- and MoveOn's support for it -- and see something very different. Groups who call for immediate withdrawal argue that MoveOn's position is a betrayal of their cause, and that Pelosi's bill merely continues the war while allowing Democrats to say they've done something to oppose it. Cindy Sheehan, the "peace mom" who favors immediate withdrawal, describes MoveOn as supporting "the slow-bleed strategy of the Democratic leadership." Gail Murphy, of the group CodePink, says, "MoveOn has taken a compromised position -- in fact I think they were involved behind the scenes in creating a compromised position." Other peace activists call MoveOn's e-mail poll of its membership a sham. If MoveOn's millions of members knew the full details of the bill, they would surely oppose it.

MoveOn, which began with an e-mail petition opposing President Clinton's impeachment in 1998, has grown into one of the biggest and best-known netroots groups on the left. When Republicans controlled the White House and the Congress, it raised millions of dollars in soft money for insurgent liberal candidates and produced memorable commercials blasting President Bush. Now, however, with the Democrats running the House and Senate, MoveOn's stance on the Pelosi bill has led critics to suggest complicity with the new congressional power structure. MoveOn has settled for something less than ideal. It's the classic problem the outsider faces after getting inside: Now that it's got an in with the speaker of the House, has MoveOn lost its soul?

It's true that Pariser, a 26-year-old who has worked for MoveOn since 2001, looks at the Iraq supplemental bill with a shrewdly pragmatic eye. Of all the Iraq plans discussed in Congress this week -- including one by liberal members calling for a quicker, complete withdrawal -- Pariser saw Pelosi's bill as the left's best chance. He saw it as the only one that could plausibly pass. And Pariser argues that its passage will help end the war. "Let's play this out," he says. "Congress passes a supplemental with a timeline attached and Bush is forced to veto it. That forces the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people." The bill is thus a starting point for future efforts. It builds legislative support, Pariser says, for an eventual congressional mandate to withdraw.

MoveOn has long been part of Win Without War, a large collection of progressive antiwar groups; now it is virtually alone among the coalition's membership in its support for the Pelosi plan. Sheehan says that some in the antiwar movement were so upset at MoveOn's position this week that they spent a couple of days drawing up full-page newspaper ads accusing the group of betraying its members. (In the end they decided to hold their fire, at least for now.)

But whatever the mainstream impression of MoveOn may be, it has never been a lockstep member of the idealistic, activist left. It may have seemed that way during the years of one-party GOP rule, when MoveOn and other progressive groups fought a common enemy. But the real story here goes back to an earlier age; MoveOn has always had a more pragmatic agenda than its lefty brothers. The group was founded to solve a political impasse in a practical way: When Berkeley software developers Joan Blades and Wes Boyd drafted their online petition calling for Congress not to impeach Bill Clinton, they were suggesting that it censure him instead, so that the nation could "move on" to other business. Not exactly a very lefty position.

MoveOn is now one of the largest activist groups in the country, but its popularity is more a consequence of its organizational savvy than any pie-in-the-sky plans. Peace groups believe in the grand possibilities of the firm, principled stand. But MoveOn has never had much truck with idealists. For Pariser, the bottom line on Iraq is the vote count. "If we could tell all of the Democrats plus the number of Republicans we'd need to survive a veto to end the war, we would," he says. "But getting that level of support for ending the war -- it sucks, it's terrible that so many politicians in Washington are out of step with where people are, but it's the case. And so we've got to make it hurt for them to support a continued war."

What precipitated the recent scuffle between MoveOn and its former allies was an e-mail that Pariser sent to MoveOn's members on Sunday, March 18, asking them to help guide the group's position on the war debate in Congress. As Salon's Michael Scherer has noted, the e-mail read like a push poll; Pariser described Pelosi's plan and Bush's opposition to it, and made only cursory mention of progressives' concerns. He did not describe plans floated by members of the House's Out of Iraq Caucus that would have funded a quick withdrawal from Iraq. "Should we support or oppose the Democrats' plan?" Pariser asked in the e-mail. Slightly more than a hundred thousand MoveOn members voted in the poll. The vast majority -- 84.6 percent -- sided with "the Democrats."
 
"It reads like a Soviet ballot," says John Stauber, the founder of the Center for Media & Democracy, whose harsh indictment of MoveOn's survey has been a hot item on lefty blogs this week. If Pariser had more thoroughly educated members about all of the positions in the debate, many would have voted against the Pelosi plan, Stauber says. More important, MoveOn could have helped the chances of an amendment by Reps. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters and Lynn Woolsey, leaders of the Out of Iraq Caucus, that called for withdrawal of all troops by the end of 2007. "They could have put out an alert to 3.2 million people across the country and said, 'If you do anything tomorrow, get up and call your representatives and tell them to support the Lee Amendment,'" insists CodePink's Gail Murphy. "They've got millions of dollars. If they put their money toward stopping this war, we'd have a lot more leadership in the Democratic Congress toward stopping this war." But MoveOn didn't stump for the Lee plan, and it died in committee.

Pariser defends his e-mail. He says that the group already knew that its members would have supported Barbara Lee's plan, but whatever MoveOn did, it would never have passed. What MoveOn didn't know was what its members thought about the Pelosi plan. "The choice that we needed to make as an organization was, Do we support this thing or not?" Pariser says. "And so I think the e-mail was a very fair presentation of the choice that was actually in front of the organization."

Pariser also says that his critics have confused MoveOn's policies with its political strategy -- they've confused what MoveOn wants with MoveOn's efforts to get there. What the group wants, he says, is what everyone in the peace camp wants: withdrawal as fast as possible. But there is no clear political path to immediate withdrawal. "Unfortunately we're living in a world where in order for anything to happen on Iraq that forces the president's hand, were going to need two thirds of Congress." MoveOn's strategy arises out of this parliamentary consideration; its goal is now legislative, to build toward two-thirds support in Congress.

Pariser has previously drawn a sharp distinction between MoveOn and the Democratic Party. In 2005, he told Salon's Tim Grieve that "the job of a party is to get elected and the job of a movement is to promote ideas and an ideology," and that "we're definitely on the movement side of the equation. We don't want to be the party." People in the peace camp, though, say that MoveOn has lately found a special place in the Democratic leadership structure. It's the safe antiwar group. Members of Congress can meet with MoveOn because they're sure it won't call for something too far out. Other organizations have been shut out. Gail Murphy, of CodePink, is on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, which represents 1,400 peace groups. "We've asked for meetings with Pelosi," she says. "We were never approached to sit down and have a conversation."

Pariser is skeptical of the idea that MoveOn has much power with Democratic leaders. "I wouldn't be over-grandiose about our influence with Nancy Pelosi," he says. "We're still a group of outsiders trying to create change in Washington, D.C." He concedes that some members of Congress considered MoveOn's support important, and as a result, he says, the group held out to provide it in order to get a better bill. And they saw results. "This wasn't due only to us," he says, "but in those two weeks the timetable was added to the bill."

MoveOn's imprimatur has certainly given many Democrats cover to vote for the Pelosi bill. And this is really the main criticism people in the peace camp level at MoveOn. "The leadership wants to say, 'Hey look, everyone voted for an antiwar bill," Stauber says. "So I think the peace movement is being hijacked and rerouted to serve a Democratic leadership and the 2008 political agenda." But Stauber believes the effort won't work; most of MoveOn's members, he notes, didn't even vote in Pariser's poll. "They've grown so blas&eacaute; about MoveOn's appeals that they don't even bother to open their e-mail," he says. And when MoveOn can't reach people by e-mail, what can it do?

Pariser disagrees; he thinks MoveOn members really got the substance of the debate at hand, and that they do agree with the group's stance. "Our members aren't stupid," he says, "and they responded in a serious and thoughtful way to the political question of whether this incremental step to isolate the president and the people who oppose a timeline is worth supporting."

Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group, Inc
 
 
 
Howard Zinn Replies to MoveOn’s support for the supplemental

By Howard Zinn


"I'm disappointed in MoveOn. We are not politicians, we are citizens. Let the politicians advocate half-way measures if they choose, but only after they have felt the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is winnable in a shameful timorous Congress. Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed things up, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite -- provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence -- they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home. If Congress thinks it must compromise, let it. But we should not encourage that. We should speak our minds fully, boldly and say what is right, whatever they decide to do..

"I would add this: To me it is tantamount to the abolitionists accepting a two-year timeline for ending slavery, while giving more money to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

"There is an understandable predisposition for reasonable people to compromise, but there are compromises which are real, and others which are surrenders. See the new movie THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY. The Irish rebels were offered a compromise, which gave them the Irish Free State, something palpable, a ledge to stand on from which to fight for more, which they have done. There is nothing palpable in this "compromise," only a promise whose fulfillment is in the hands of George Bush, and meanwhile funds the ongoing slaughter in Iraq."

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

Posted by ChoiceAmericaNetwork at 04:30:47 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

March 23, 2007

Nancy Bush and G.W. Pelosi with their dog Dick,...are very, very SICK,...

 
 
The AIPAC Girl

By Pat Buchanan


If George W. Bush launches a pre-emptive war on Iran, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will bear full moral responsibility for that war.

For it was Pelosi who quietly agreed to strip out of the $100 billion funding bill for Iraq a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before launching any new war on Iran.

Pelosi's capitulation came in the Appropriations Committee.

What went down, and why?

"Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy," wrote The Associated Press' David Espo and Matthew Lead.

"Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said in an interview there is a widespread fear in Israel about Iran, which ... has expressed unremitting hostility to the Jewish state.

"'It would take away perhaps the most important tool the U.S. has when it comes to Iran,' she said of the now-abandoned provision.

"'I don't think it was a very wise idea to take things off the table if you're trying to get people to modify their behavior and normalize in a civilized way,' said Gary Ackerman of New York."

According to John Nichols of The Nation, Pelosi's decision to strip the provision barring Bush from attacking Iran without Congress' approval "sends the worst possible signal to the White House."

"The speaker has erred dangerously and dramatically," writes Nichols. Her "disastrous misstep could haunt her and the Congress for years to come."

Nichols does not exaggerate.

If Bush now launches war on Iran, he can credibly say Congress and the Democrats gave him a green light. For Pelosi, by removing a provision saying Bush does not have the authority, de facto concedes he does have the authority.

Bush and Cheney need now not worry about Congress.

They have been flashed the go sign for war on Iran.

Pelosi & Co. thus aborted a bipartisan effort to ensure that if we do go to war again, we do it the constitutional way, and we do it together.

Nothing in the provision would have prevented Bush, as commander in chief, from responding to an Iranian attack or engaging in hot pursuit of an enemy found in Iraq. Nor would the provision have prevented Bush from threatening Iran. It would simply have required him to come to Congress — before launching all-out war.

Now Pelosi has, in effect, ceded Bush carte blanche to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. It's all up to him and Cheney.

For this the nation elected a Democratic Congress?

Why did Pelosi capitulate? Answer: She was "under pressure from some conservative members of her caucus, and from lobbyists associated with neoconservative groups that want war with Iran and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)," writes Nichols.

The Washington Times agrees as to who bully-ragged Nancy into scuttling any requirement that Bush come to the Hill before unleashing the B-2s on Arak, Natanz and Bushehr:

"Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received a smattering of boos when she bad-mouthed the war effort during a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the Democratic leadership, responding to concerns from pro-Israel lawmakers, was forced to strip from a military appropriations measure a provision meant to weaken President Bush's ability to respond to threats from Iran."

This episode, wherein liberal Democrats scuttled a bipartisan effort to require Bush to abide by the Constitution before taking us into a third war in the Middle East, speaks volumes about who has the whip hand on Capitol Hill, when it comes to the Middle East.

Pelosi gets booed by the Israeli lobby, then runs back to the Hill and gives Bush a blank check for war on Iran, because that is what the lobby demands. A real candidate for Profiles in Courage.

As for the presidential candidates, it is hard to find a single one willing to stand up and say: If Bush plans to take us into another war in the Mideast, he must first come to Congress for authorization. And if he goes to war without authorization, that will be impeachable.

All retreat into the "all-options-are-on-the-table" mantra, which is another way of saying, "It's Bush's call."

The corruption of both parties is astonishing. Republicans used to be the party of the Constitution: "No more undeclared wars! No more presidential wars!"

Democrats used to be the party of the people. The people don't want this war. They don't want another. The Jewish community voted 88 percent for Democrats in November, and 77 percent oppose Iraq.

So says Gallup. Yet, just because the Israeli lobby jerked her chain, the leader of the Peoples' House has decided she and her party will leave the next war up to Bush.

Sam Rayburn must be turning over in his grave.



To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

 
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC
 
 
 
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Posted by ChoiceAmericaNetwork at 05:32:25 | Permanent Link | Comments (3) |

March 21, 2007

Gonzales Should Resign or Be Removed from Office,....

 
Attorney General Gonzales Should Resign or Be Removed
from Office  
 
 PFAW petitions demand Gonzales’ departure as first step to restoring rule of law in administration marked by abuse of power, violations of Constitution


WASHINGTON, D.C.—People For the American Way, which two years ago helped lead opposition to the confirmation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, has  called for his resignation or removal as the first step toward holding the White House and Department of Justice accountable to the rule of law, and urged Congress to expand its oversight of the administration.

“Each scandal sheds new light on the Bush administration’s abuse of power, violation of Americans’ civil liberties, and contempt for the Constitution,” said People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas. “Our nation’s top law enforcement official is in the middle of it, showing greater fidelity to the political interests of President Bush than to the public interest and the rule of law.”

Petition congressional leaders to demand that Gonzales resign or be removed from office!

Early last week, Congress heard testimony from eight U.S. attorneys who had been fired by the Bush administration, several of whom testified that their dismissals appeared politically motivated. Since then, news reports have linked that political pressure to the White House and President Bush himself. In addition, the Department of Justice’s inspector general recently issued a report finding that the F.B.I., which is part of the Justice Department, had violated the law and abused its authority under the Patriot Act to obtain personal information about American citizens.

Neas said these are just the most recent in a series of developments that demonstrate Alberto Gonzales has failed to live up to his oath of office and act as the people’s lawyer, not the President’s.

“The Attorney General has demonstrated time and again that Americans can’t trust him—or this administration—to follow the law, or to uphold the Constitution,” said Neas. “There has to be some accountability here. It is in the nation’s best interest for the Attorney General to resign, and if he fails to do so, President Bush should remove him from office.”

People For the American Way was one of the most vocal opponents of Gonzales’ confirmation as Attorney General in early 2005, based in large part on his advocacy for overreaching presidential powers and his role as one of the chief architects of the administration’s policies on the torture of detainees, one of the most serious abuses of power by this administration. (See PFAW’s 2005 report opposing Gonzales’ confirmation here.) At the time, PFAW questioned Gonzales’ judgment and warned that the Constitution and rule of law could suffer if he were confirmed.

“PFAW’s review reveals a lawyer who too often allows his legal judgment to be driven by his close relationship with the President rather than adherence to the law or the Constitution.” Neas said at the time. “The risk that such lack of independence poses…is simply too great to warrant his confirmation.”

Such fears have now come to pass. Gonzales has repeatedly used his position to further the Bush administration’s agenda even when it conflicts with the rule of law and the interests of the American people. In addition to the problems noted above, Gonzales:

  • Defended the Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying program, which operated in secrecy for years in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was declared unconstitutional by a federal district court
  • Continues to back the Bush administration’s authority to hold U.S. detainees without judicial review
  • Showed disdain for congressional oversight that could protect Americans’ civil liberties
  • Oversaw the Justice Department’s failure to fully enforce laws that protect every eligible American citizen’s right to vote
  • Undermined checks and balances by asserting that the courts have no right to judge the executive branch’s national security policies
  • Falsely suggested in testimony before Congress that the Constitution does not provide the right of habeas corpus

Neas announced that PFAW has begun circulating a petition demanding Gonzales’ departure.

PFAW is not alone in its call for Gonzales to leave office. On Sunday morning, the New York Times editorialized that he should resign or be removed. Also on Sunday, the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, Charles Schumer of New York, called on Gonzales to resign.

Criticism of Gonzales’ Justice Department has become increasingly bipartisan, with Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.), Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.), and others expressing disapproval.

One reason that criticism of Gonzales is growing is that the new Congress has shown a markedly stronger commitment to exercising its oversight responsibility than have previous ones. For example, most of the U.S. attorney firings occurred on December 7, but it was not until last week’s congressional hearings that they gained widespread attention.

“The House and Senate should be commended for their return to oversight. Congressional oversight is an important part of the system of checks and balances, and until this Congress was sworn in, it had been sorely lacking. Congressional oversight is good for our democracy—it helps shine a spotlight on transgressions, ensure that problems are remedied, and bring accountability to government,” Neas said. “It is also important to be clear that this doesn’t stop here. Bush administration efforts to undermine civil liberties and the rule of law must be investigated, and those who have violated the law must be held accountable, whether Attorney General Gonzales steps down or not.”

PFAW’s efforts to bring about Gonzales’ departure are part of a larger campaign to restore constitutional liberties that have been undermined by the Bush administration. PFAW is working to end the administration’s illegal domestic spying program, restore habeas corpus protections, and bring about increased congressional oversight of the Bush administration’s activities in the area of constitutional liberties.


Contact: Josh Glasstetter or Mary Moreno
People For the American Way
email: media@pfaw.org
phone: 202-467-4999
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Posted by ChoiceAmericaNetwork at 15:57:27 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

March 20, 2007

U.S. Real Estate Crash,...

 
Top investor sees U.S. property crash
 
By Elif Kaban

(Reuters) - Commodities investment guru Jim Rogers stepped into the U.S. subprime fray on Wednesday, predicting a real estate crash that would trigger defaults and spread contagion to emerging markets.

"You can't believe how bad it's going to get before it gets any better," the prominent U.S. fund manager told Reuters by telephone from New York.

"It's going to be a disaster for many people who don't have a clue about what happens when a real estate bubble pops.

"It is going to be a huge mess," said Rogers, who has put his $15 million belle epoque mansion on Manhattan's Upper West Side on the market and is planning to move to Asia.

Worries about losses in the U.S. mortgage market have sent stock prices falling in Asia and Europe, with shares in financial services companies falling the most.

Some investors fear the problems of lenders who make subprime loans to people with weak credit histories are spreading to mainstream financial firms and will worsen the U.S. housing slowdown.

"Real estate prices will go down 40-50 percent in bubble areas. There will be massive defaults. This time it'll be worse because we haven't had this kind of speculative buying in U.S. history," Rogers said.

"When markets turn from bubble to reality, a lot of people get burned."

The fund manager, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with billionaire investor George Soros in the 1970s and has focused on commodities since 1998, said the crisis would spread to emerging markets which he said now faced a prolonged bear run.

"When you have a financial crisis, it reverberates in other financial markets, especially in those with speculative excess," he said.

"Right now, there is huge speculative excess in emerging markets around the world. There will be a lot of money coming out of emerging markets.

"I've sold out of emerging markets except for China," said Rogers, long a prominent China bull.

Even in China, the world's fastest expanding economy, Rogers said stocks were overvalued and could go down 30-40 percent.

But he added: "China is one of the few countries in the world where I'm willing to sit out a 30-40 percent decline."

The last stock market bubble to burst was the dot-com craze which sparked a crash from March 2000 to October 2002.

When the last bubble burst in Japan, said Rogers, stock prices went down 85 percent despite the country's high savings rate and huge balance of payment surplus.

"This is the end of the liquidity party," said Rogers. "Some emerging markets will go down 80 percent, some will go down 50 percent. Some will most probably collapse."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Posted by ChoiceAmericaNetwork at 09:30:04 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Falling from Paradise,...

 
Velkomin to the United States of Foreclosure

By Mike Whitney


The stock market is about to crash. The only question is whether it will quickly drop down the elevator shaft or follow the jerky flight-path of a man pushed down a stairwell. Either way, the outcome will be the same; stocks will nose-dive, the dollar will plummet, and the bruised US economy will be splattered on the canvas like George Foreman in Rumble in the Jungle.

Troubles in the sub-prime market have just begun to materialize and already 38 main sub prime lenders have gone kaput. Foreclosures have reached a 37 year high, and an estimated 2 million homeowners will be put out on the street in the next few years.

And that’s just for starters.

The contagion has spread beyond the sub prime sector to other ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) where late payments and defaults are cropping up faster than their sub-prime counterparts. According to Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius, “Prime ARM delinquencies are above their worst levels of the 2001 recession…. By contrast, sub-prime fixed-rate delinquencies are well below their recession levels.” (Barrons)

Sub prime loans and other “Prime ARMs” (alta-A loans) make up roughly 35% of current mortgages. That means that millions of homeowners are struggling to meet their “upwardly-adjusted” payments. If Congress does not come up with a bailout strategy, then we will face a “downturn worse than that resulting from the NASDAQ collapse”. (Barrons)

Sub prime loans are loans that are made to people with poor credit. The lender requires a higher rate of interest to cover his risk. For the last 5 years, the sub prime market has skyrocketed due to the loosening of lending practices. The traditional criterion for determining whether a loan applicant is credit-worthy has been abandoned. Now, it is not uncommon to have mortgage lenders provide 100% financing to shaky borrowers who are unable to provide documentation of their real earnings (“no doc” loans) and cannot even scrimp together 4 or $5 thousand for a down payment.(“piggyback” loans)

Why on earth would the banks and mortgage lenders take such a risk?

In a word; greed.

The mortgage industry is driven by fees. Lenders (and agents) are able to fatten their bottom line through loan origination fees and then they tack on additional fees for shipping the loans off to Wall Street where they are bundled into Mortgage Backed Security (MBS). Collateralized debt has become a Wall Street favorite and these otherwise shaky loans have become staples in the hedge funds industry. In fact, last year Wall Street purchased nearly 60% of all mortgages--ignoring the risks associated with sub prime “debt instruments”. Also, through the magic of derivatives, many of these Mortgage Backed Securities have been leveraged to the extreme; sometimes at a ratio of 35 to 1.

In other words, a home loan of $300,000--that may have been secured by a young man with bad credit who makes $12.50 per hour picking up mill-ends and bits of insulation on a construction job site--has been leveraged into a $10,500,000 securities investment. This may explain why Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is trying to sooth jittery investors with words of encouragement while he dispatches the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) to shore up the trembling stock market behind the scenes. Every effort is being made to keep this monstrous equity bubble from pirouetting to earth.

Currently, derivatives and mortgage-backed bonds total more than all US Treasuries, Notes and US Bonds combined!?! The stock market is one gigantic pyramid of debt and it’s ready to blow.

Kitco.com’s Doug Casey puts it like this:

“The rocket-shot rise of hedge funds and the advances in financial modeling techniques have spawned something of a competition among the so-called best and brightest to find ever-more-complex ways of skimming pennies from very large piles of money. The collective result is that our financial system has been wired up to $370 trillion dollars of privately negotiated investment contracts. They’re usually written to shift risk from one bank, pension fund, insurance company or brokerage firm to another. And many are linked together in long chains, with each contract providing collateral for the next.

It’s all very clever, but layering the enormous size– $370 trillion dollars, far more than the net worth of all the financial institutions in the world – on top of all that complexity is downright scary. In simpler times, a home loan going bad would affect only the particular lender. Enough defaults would put the lender out of business. And that would be the end of it. But today a wave of defaults can send a shock through the portfolios of financial institutions around the globe, including hedge funds, banks and pension funds far removed from the troubled borrowers.

Imagine an electrical circuit with thousands of connections. No one designed it. No one tested it. No one has a diagram for it. It just grew. Now, because of its size and power and pervasiveness, everything depends upon it. So what happens when one of those thousands of connections burns out? No one really knows.” (Kitco.com commentaries)

That’s right; no one really knows what will happen, but there is growing concern about what MIGHT happen. And, what might happen is disaster!

(Derivatives numbers are staggering. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that the notional amount of derivatives traded on regulated exchanges topped a quadrillion dollars last year) Ann Berg “War Drags the Dollar Down” antiwar.com

Casey gives an apt summary of our present predicament. There is currently $370 trillion in derivatives, hedge funds and over-leveraged marginal investments. There is no coherent relationship between this mass of cyber-wealth and actual deposits or investments. It is merely a fractional banking scam on steroids; computer-generated capital with no basis in reality. As the sub prime market comes under greater strain; hedge funds will teeter, derivatives will tremble, liquidity will dry up and the whole debt-plagued system will crash in a heap. The frantic efforts of the PPT with their flimsy bits of scaffolding will amount to nothing. Wall Street is quick-stepping towards the gallows and there’s little hope of a reprieve.

As we watch the sub-prime market unwind; we should keep in mind that this massive expansion of credit took place on Alan Greenspan’s watch and with his implicit approval. The former Fed-chief was a big fan of sub-prime mortgages and he wasn’t hesitant to extol their merits. In April 2005, Greenspan said:

“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as sub-prime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants… With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers… Where once more marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in sub-prime mortgage lending… fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers.” (Thanks Jim Willie Goldenjackass.com)

“Innovation”? Is that what Maestro Greenspan calls this fiendish, economy-busting Ponzi-swindle?

Greenspan is like a jungle-monkey swinging from one massive equity bubble to the next. The housing bubble turned out to be his “piece de resistance”, a bottomless black hole sucking up the nations’ wealth into its dark vortex. His “low interest” doctrine may have kept the moribund economy on life support after the dot.com bust, but it has ruined the country’s prospects for the future. We’ll be digging out of this mess for decades.

Greenspan nodded approvingly as trillions of dollars were funneled into shaky sub primes, but he chose to cheerlead rather than slow-down the process. He scorned the idea of government regulation preferring his own type of Darwinian “natural selection” or, rather, survival of the shrewdest. Now the pundits and the talking heads are trying to shift the blame to struggling low-income wage-slaves who thought they could live the American dream by buying a home on credit. They were seduced by the promise of cheap money and then led by the nose to the slaughter. The whole charade was orchestrated by Greenspan and his buddies in the banking cabal. They alone are responsible.

Here’s another tidbit which sheds light on Greenspan’s culpability in the sub prime fiasco:

"The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency took little action in public to police the $2.8-trillion boom in the U.S. mortgage market -- whose bust now risks worsening the housing recession. The Fed, which is responsible for the stability of the banking system, didn't publicly rebuke any firm for failing to follow up warnings on home-lending practices between 2004 and 2006. The OCC, which supervises 1,793 national banks, took only three public mortgage-related consumer-protection enforcement actions over the same period.

Consumer advocates and former government officials say the regulators, by acting behind the scenes rather than openly advertising the shortcomings of some firms, failed to discipline an industry that loaned too much money to borrowers who couldn't repay it. Now, more lenders are being forced to shut and foreclosures are rising, threatening to scuttle any chance of an early recovery in housing. (Chuck Butler; “The Daily Pfennig”)

The Federal Reserve knows where every dime winds up in the economy. They even provide a detailed account of the relevant data. Ignorance is not an excuse. The Fed looked on while trillions of dollars flowed to “unqualified” applicants who had no chance of repaying their loans. The lax standards and easy money kept Wall Street and the mortgage industry happy, but the “predatory lending” hurt millions of hard working Americans who are now in danger of losing their homes.

The End of the Liquidity Party?

All of the major investment firms are heavily invested in the $6.5 trillion mortgage securities market. The sudden decline in the sub prime market is shutting down the funding sources for low income people while increasing home inventories. It is also boosting unemployment, putting pressure on the banks, and thrusting the country towards recession.

As the housing market continues to languish, home equity loans (which amounted to $600 billion in 2006) will shrivel reducing consumer spending and GDP accordingly. That means that the Federal Reserve will be forced to lower interest rates and remove the last crumbling cinder block propping up the greenback.

When Bernanke lowers interest rates, foreign investment in US Treasuries and dollar-based securities will drop off, the dollar will fall and we will undergo a painful cycle of hyperinflation. These are the inescapable consequences of Greenspan’s policies.

Equity bubbles are an expression of class interest. They are a way of shifting wealth from working class people--whose hourly wages or fixed-incomes can’t keep pace with a hyperinflationary monetary policy—to the wealthy and powerful, who benefit from overheated markets and rampant speculation. The investor class and their plutocratic peers are the only ones who profit from interest rate manipulation and increases in the money supply. For everyone else, inflation is just a hidden tax. Greenspan used the money supply and interest rates as weapon against working class people. It became his preferred method of “social engineering”; creating greater division between rich and poor while ensuring the upward redistribution of wealth consistent with his plans for a new world order. (NWO)

Greenspan is the plutocrat’s champion; America’s all-time serial bubble maker.

The rest of the world is eying America’s housing slump with growing apprehension. The downturn in the sub prime market is just the first crack in the façade. Other disruptions are bound to follow. Another jolt from the Yen “carry trade” or a sudden blip in the Chinese stock market could send Wall Street sprawling and put the economy on a fiscal-respirator. A substantial dip in securities could trigger a liquidity crisis which would traumatize our credit-dependent society. If consumer spending slows down, the economy will grind to a halt and living standards will sharply decline. The sub primes are just the first domino.

These are some of the things that Fed chief Bernanke will have to consider before resetting interest rates: Does he keep rates where they are and turn away foreign investment or lower rates and try to salvage the faltering housing market? Either choice will result in a certain amount of pain.

A cloud of uncertainty has descended on the over-leveraged United States of Foreclosure. The storm is just ahead. The stewards of the system--Paulson, Bush, Bernanke--could care less about the public welfare. All their energy is devoted to building a lifeboat for themselves and their fat-cat buddies. Once, they’ve robbed the last farthing from the public till they’ll be gone, and we’ll still be marching along the path to national calamity.

High-flying US fund manager Jim Rogers summed up the impending crisis like this:

“You can’t believe how bad it’s going to get. It’s going to be a disaster for many people who don’t have a clue about what happens when a real estate bubble pops. Real estate prices will go down 40-50% in bubble areas. There will be massive defaults. And it’ll be worse this time because we haven’t had this kind of speculative buying in U.S. history.”

Then he added ominously, “When markets turn from bubble to reality, a lot of people get burned.”

 

 COPYRIGHT 2007 MIKE WHITNEY

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

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March 17, 2007

It's time for Americans to wake up and take back their country before it's too late,...



North American Union Would Erase U.S. Borders, Replace U.S. Constitution, Destroy Standard of Living for Americans
 

By Dean Ayers
 Animals C.L.U.B.-Freedom
 
Congress, Citizen-Activists Offer Best Hope to Defeat European Union-Style Government for North America


Supporters of U.S. borders and sovereignty urge more Americans to join Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), Virgil Goode (R-Va.), Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.) in fighting a little-known plan to create a North American Union. The scheme would combine the U.S. with Mexico and Canada into a single political and economic system modeled after the European Union. The merger would erase U.S. borders and sovereignty and allow for the free movement of people, products, and capital between the regions by 2010. It would allow unelected bureaucrats and corporate internationalists to "harmonize" U.S. laws with corrupt Mexico and socialist Canada, according to Daniel Sheehy, author of "Fighting Immigration Anarchy: American Patriots Battle to Save the Nation."

In September 2006, the four congressmen introduced a resolution opposing the merger and the construction of the NAFTA Superhighway system that would connect the three countries. The massive corridors would result in the loss of countless acres of private land and more terrorists, criminals and drugs entering the U.S., Sheehy said.

"I urge Americans to learn about this radical agenda to erase our country and tell their state and federal representatives to join these brave congressmen in putting a stop to this madness," Sheehy said. "We are in grave danger of losing our Constitution, national independence, standard of living, and common English language and culture."

Sheehy is also a national speaker and activist for border and immigration law enforcement. Fighting Immigration Anarchy includes an explosive and well- researched 20-page chapter titled "Bush and Other Elites Merging U.S., Mexico, and Canada."

In March 2005, President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin approved the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America. The SPP is a framework for the integration of the three countries. Working groups were assigned to implement the details of the agreement. Congress did not approve the SPP and most Americans have never heard of it.

Other Americans also are expressing outrage as they learn about this hidden agenda. In recent weeks, state Senators Karen Johnson of Arizona and Nancy Schaefer of Georgia publicly denounced the SPP as nothing but a plan to end U.S. sovereignty. Johnson is calling for congressional hearings. Citizen-activist groups such as STOPSPP.org in San Diego and the Minutemen have held protests to awake the public to this scheme.  

"This is a systematic plan designed to serve the economic interests of multinational corporations and globalists and replace our constitutional system," Sheehy explained. "Since 9/11 our government leaders have told us we are in a 'war on terror.' Yet, they have refused to secure our borders and enforce U.S. immigration laws. We've had more illegal immigration since 2001 than in any other five-year period in our nation's history. Our leaders are pushing hard for massive 'guest-worker' programs and amnesty. Seven hundred miles of fencing along the Mexican border authorized by Congress last September may never be built.

"None of this makes any sense until you realize that open borders and this massive immigration invasion are part of a larger plan to discard American sovereignty in favor of a North American Union. There will be no more illegal immigration since there will be free movement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Our government's immigration and trade policies are being used to destroy America's middle class by lowering wages at the behest of multinational corporations. It's time for Americans to wake up and take back their country before it's too late."

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

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Bush secret papers will no longer be,...

 
House overturns Bush order on papers secrecy

By Peter Szekely

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Brushing aside a veto threat, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to overturn a 2001 order by President George W. Bush that lets former presidents keep their papers secret indefinitely.

The measure, which drew bipartisan support and passed by a veto-busting 333-93 margin, was among White House-opposed bills the House passed that would widen access to government information and protect government whistleblowers.

"Today, Congress took an important step toward restoring openness and transparency in government," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said.

The presidential papers bill nullifies a November 2001 order, criticized by historians, in which Bush allowed the White House or a former president to block release of a former president's papers and put the onus on researchers to show a "specific need" for many types of records.

Among beneficiaries of the Bush order was Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, a former vice president and president.

The order gave former vice presidents the right to stop the release of their papers through an executive privilege that previously only presidents could use. And it extended to deceased presidents' designees rights to keep their papers secret indefinitely.

The House bill would give current and former presidents 40 business days to object to requests to view their papers, allow a sitting president to override a former president's claim of executive privilege and strip former vice presidents and the designees of deceased presidents of the power to use executive privilege to block access to their historical documents.

In its veto warning, the White House said the bill encroaches on the president's constitutional authority and the 40-day deadline would force presidents to use executive privilege to block information requests "out of an abundance of caution" and thereby invite litigation.

The real reason, the White House said, for delays of up to five years in releasing presidential papers to researchers is a lack of archivists at presidential libraries.

Many historians, however, support the House bill, saying the Bush order has slowed the declassification process.

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives at George Washington University, said the average time to release presidential documents has grown to 78 months from 18 months since the Bush order, which he said directly contributed to one year of the lag.

A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate.

Also passed by the House by a 331-94 margin, despite another veto threat, was a bill aimed at bolstering protections of government whistleblowers who report wrongdoing, especially those with private contractors and national security and scientific agencies.

A third bill, which passed 308-117, was aimed at speeding requests for government information made under the Freedom of Information Act. The White House stopped short of threatening to veto it but said it could not support the bill.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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March 15, 2007

Ron Paul for President 2008

 
Ron Paul enters 2008 White House Race


WASHINGTON - Ron Paul, America's nine-term Republican congressman from Texas formally announced on Monday he will seek the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

Ron Paul has strong appeal to Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians and the Green party - in short, practically all Americans.  Like no other candidate before, he is most definitely the only candidate with such broad appeal.

Paul, a longtime Libertarian who frequently strays far outside the Republican mainstream, said he was surprised by the level of encouragement he received after forming a presidential exploratory committee in January.

"I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of people who responded and the fund raising went very well," Paul said on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal." Look for Ron Paul as one candidate who can not be ignored.

"The amount of money raised so far isn't competitive with those so called ‘established’ candidates that will raise $100 million," he said. "With the Internet, the amount of money and enthusiasm, I think we can become very competitive." 

America has come to love Ron Paul.  America does not want another President who can be bought and all signs suggest that Ron Paul cannot be bought. 

Paul frequently crosses or ignores Republican leaders in Congress, where he has voted against defense spending bills, called for a speedy withdrawal of troops in Iraq and proposed a diminishing of the power of the Federal Reserve.  But America may finally have wised up to being "bought" at the polls.  A majority now seems to want to speak for themselves, and that could be why Ron Paul's appeal is so broad.

Ron Paul believes the federal government should be limited to the duties specified in the Constitution, Period.

"I'm confident the Republican Party has gone in the wrong direction," Paul said. "We used to be a party of small government. Now we are the party of big government….But most importantly, we need to be a united America."

In a crowded Republican presidential field headed by far too many 'wannabes', Paul, an obstetrician-gynecologist from the Houston area, might be considered a long shot by neo-conservatives and mainstream media, but Ron Paul has far greater knowledge of America's needs, both domestic and foreign, than any other candidate seeking the presidency.

He has questioned the highly controversial NAFTA Super Highway, the America union of Mexico, Canada and the United States, not to mention the Patriot Act.  He is the candidate that many feel is much needed to restore the American freedoms which have slowly been eroded over the last 7 years. He is a man of his word and well respected in his congressional district, in Washington and throughout America.   Americans appreciate his no nonsense approach and his ability to stand on his own when others won't stand at all.  He is what America needs now more than ever - a President for, of and by the People.

He ran for president in 1988, drawing more than 400,000 votes nationwide.  But now, it's a different time and a whole new playing field.  Ron Paul will, without question, surprise all politicos just as he has done in the past.  He is an individual.  He is not a flip flopper and he makes no false promises.  He is truly all American.

Paul said he would run for the presidency and for re-election to his seat in Congress at the same time, which is allowed under Texas state law.

Ron Paul is the true candidate of Choice for America.  Americans have come to admire and respect Congressman Ron Paul.

 

Get to know Congressman Ron Paul  

Political Power and the Rule of Law

By Ron Paul
by Ron Paul

With the elections over and the 110th Congress settling in, the media have been reporting ad nauseam about who has assumed new political power in Washington. We're subjected to breathless reports about emerging power brokers in Congress; how so-and-so is now the powerful chair of an important committee; how certain candidates are amassing power for the 2008 elections, and so on. Nobody questions this use of the word "power," or considers its connotations. It's simply assumed, in Washington and the mainstream media, that political power is proper and inevitable.

The problem is that politicians are not supposed to have power over us – we're supposed to be free. We seem to have forgotten that freedom means the absence of government coercion. So when politicians and the media celebrate political power, they really are celebrating the power of certain individuals to use coercive state force.

Remember that one's relationship with the state is never voluntary. Every government edict, policy, regulation, court decision, and law ultimately is backed up by force, in the form of police, guns, and jails. That is why political power must be fiercely constrained by the American people.

The desire for power over other human beings is not something to celebrate, but something to condemn! The 20th century's worst tyrants were political figures, men who fanatically sought power over others through the apparatus of the state. They wielded that power absolutely, without regard for the rule of law.

Our constitutional system, by contrast, was designed to restrain political power and place limits on the size and scope of government. It is this system, the rule of law, which we should celebrate – not political victories.

Political power is not like the power possessed by those who otherwise obtain fame and fortune. After all, even the wealthiest individual cannot force anyone to buy a particular good or service; even the most famous celebrities cannot force anyone to pay attention to them. It is only when elites become politically connected that they begin to impose their views on all of us.

In a free society, government is restrained – and therefore political power is less important. I believe the proper role for government in America is to provide national defense, a court system for civil disputes, a criminal justice system for acts of force and fraud, and little else. In other words, the state as referee rather than an active participant in our society.

Those who hold political power, however, would lose their status in a society with truly limited government. It simply would not matter much who occupied various political posts, since their ability to tax, spend, and regulate would be severely curtailed. This is why champions of political power promote an activist government that involves itself in every area of our lives from cradle to grave. They gain popular support by promising voters that government will take care of everyone, while the media shower them with praise for their bold vision.

Political power is inherently dangerous in a free society: it threatens the rule of law, and thus threatens our fundamental freedoms. Those who understand this should object whenever political power is glorified.

February 6, 2007

Get to know Congressman Ron Paul - visit his Archives below,...

Ron Paul Archives

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

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