Observations on current events

Le Monda (FR): The Exuberance of American Military Spending

LA Times: Scalia Took Trip Set Up by Lawyer in Two Cases

William Rivers Pitt: 'The Passion' of the Americans

Ray McGovern: No Skunks Allowed

BBC: UN bugging scandal widens

The Guardian (UK): Casualties of terror

NY Times Editorial: Mr. Greenspan's Warning: "If the Bush administration is planning to trumpet Alan Greenspan's endorsement for making the president's tax cuts permanent, it has to accept both sides of his argument."

NY Times: Another Recall Involving Ford, Firestone Tires and S.U.V.'s

Seattle Times: Perle quits to avoid distractions He's finally seen that he is a liability, and rightly so. He pushed hard for preemptive war in Iraq. He wants the US out of the UN, wants the US to take down North Korea and Iran, as well as being a public in his expression of contempt for the CIA and State Department.

The Guardian (UK) : Clare Short on the BBC Radio 4's 'Today' Former Blair government MP, Clare Short, asserts that British agents had spied on Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

NY Times Editorial on yesterday's Supreme Court decision: Separating Church and State

The Guardian (UK): Heavenly body gives Bush a close call

Daniel Ellsberg: Where are Iraq's Pentagon papers?

The Seattle Post Intelligencer: Administration favors nuclear free-for-all

The Atlantic Monthly: Blind Into Baghdad "The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge."

Knight-Ridder:US Still Paying Millions to Group that Provided False Iraqi Intelligence

Howard Zinn: The Ultimate Betrayal

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Iraq war is the Suez of our time

This is a rarity - Noam Chomsky published, rather than derided, in the NY Times: A Wall as a Weapon

AP: U.S. Pressing for High-Tech Spy Tools

Washington Post: A Secret Hunt Unravels in Afghanistan

IPS: IRAQ - Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War

The Observer: British spy op wrecked peace move

Guerrilla News Network: The Empire Strikes - America gets imperial in Iraq

The Village Voice: George Bush, Make-Believe President

Mel Goodman: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy

Guerrilla News Network Spin of the Week: Memo Sheds Light on Pre-War Media Duping

AP: Union of Concerned Scientists says Bush Ignores, Manipulates Research

Newsweek: Extraordinary Measures "A recalcitrant Bush administration forces the 9/11 Commission to poke into Bob Woodward's notebook"

Guerrilla News Network: Dirty Water, Bad Blood "South of Baghdad, the water is making people sick. Locals blame Bechtel."

The AP reports on the impact of 'new media' in Iran: Iran's Blogging Boom Defies Media Control While the conservative Council of Guardians will likely be successful in determining the outcome of today's election (by disqualifying candidates from standing, even those who are current MP's), the above phenomenon is a reason for hope. A significant majority of Iran's population is under the age of 30. As stated by a Boston Globe editorial: "By overwhelming majorities they have now voted several times for regime change. They want a truly free press, freedom of speech and association, women's rights, and jobs for a rapidly expanding work force -- jobs that will come only in an economy that has been liberated from the mobster-like hold of corrupt clerics running unregulated conglomerates called religious foundations."

Wired News: Pentagon Preps for War in Space ...and we were told the goal of a man on Mars was about science. What a thin cover for the real agenda. If you doubted that the Project For the New American Century's agenda was being implemented point for point, read it again (see page 66 of the PDF, or search it's text for the word 'space').

Thankfully, the NY Times does see fit to print a news analysis piece about this start political reality: U.S. Presidential Politics and Self-Rule for Iraqis

Dar Al Hayat (Beirut) on double standards: Had President Bush named Israel in his speech about nuclear nonproliferation, there would be no excuse for not supporting American efforts.

Guerrilla News Network: Banking on Empire "Iraqi ministries will now be able to borrow billions of dollars to buy much-needed equipment from overseas suppliers, but only by mortgaging the national oil revenues through a bank managed by New York-based multinational JP Morgan Chase."

NY Times: Skilling, Former Enron Chief, Surrenders to Authorities Let's hope Skilling is made to eat his perjurious words before a Congressional committee two years ago during a long jail term. A hefty fine also would hit his greedy ego nicely.

The Guardian (UK): Take one part Kerry, one part Fonda... and try to whip up a political row.

NY Times Editorial: Distorting the Intelligence

San Francisco Chronicle: Solar energy's cloudy past / Advocates say 50-year-old industry is finally in a position to heat up

Le Monde (FR): Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday

International Herald Tribune: State-Aided Broadcasting Faces Scrutiny Across Europe It seems the government of Tony Blair will try to alter the media which criticized him. The world press needs more, not fewer, outlets that are editorially independent from their sources of funding, if the interest of the public is to be truly served. In the US, this seems to be the furthest thing from the minds of commercial broadcasters, despite their obligations under their FCC charter. The US corporate media are the lapdog of the current administration and its patrons, yet most still Americans confuse the 'news' messages on a selling medium with unbiased information. Is it any wonder that NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC gloss over the misdeeds of their corporate parent GE, or that ABC gives wide latitude to Disney? Would one ever expect the commercial networks cover a negative story about the auto or pharma industries, which are some of their biggest sources of ad revenue?

Paul Krugman on Health Care in the US: The Health of Nations

NY Times: Intelligence Panel's Finances Will Stay Private ...or 'Who's Afraid of a Little Sunshine?' Follow the money and you'll usually discover the agenda.

NY Times: Inquiry Focuses on Group DeLay Created

AP: Bremer Suggests U.S. May Block Islamic Law in Iraq Or, 'Conditional freedom & liberty for Iraq'

William Safire on media consolidation: The Five Sisters

NY Times: Intelligence: Dispute Prompts Scrutiny of Bush's Daily Reading

NY Times Editorial: How America Doesn't Vote

AP: Halliburton Accused of Wasting Tax Money

Le Nouvel Observateur (FR): The Man Who Knows Too Much

NY Times: Intelligence: Dispute Prompts Scrutiny of Bush's Daily Reading

AP: Kay Says Bush Slowing Intelligence Reform

AP: Blix Fears Iraq Weapons Reports Distortion

MSNBC: New twist in nuclear waste debate

CS Monitor: Solar power hits suburbia

NY Times: Move to Screen Bush File in 90's Is Reported

The Sydney Morning Herald: The politics of the family

Bob Herbert: Bush's Duty, and Privilege

Paul Krugman: The Real Man

USA Today: Iraq arms hunt in doubt in '02

NY Times: F.C.C. Begins Rewriting Rules on Delivery of the Internet

USA TODAY: Ex-officer: Bush file's details caused concern

This piece by Michael Massing (The New York Review of Books) : Now They Tell Us offers a critique of media coverage before the Iraq war.

Washington Post: Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq - "Now that extended efforts to find weapons of mass destruction have proved futile, some are asking why Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld used unequivocal rhetoric to describe the threat from Iraq when the intelligence on the subject was much more nuanced and subjective."

Center for American Progress: Claim vs. Fact: The President on 'Meet the Press'

Fortune: The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare

WCBS, NY: Are You On Uncle Sam's No Fly List?

Greg Palast: Khan Job: Bush Spiked Probe of Pakistan's Dr. Strangelove, BBC reported in 2001

The Observer (UK): Britain spied on UN allies over war vote

Newsweek: The White House: A New Fight Over Secret 9/11 Docs

Reuters: Bush offers [yet another] shifting rationale for war

Salon.com: Records Contradict Bush's AWOL Denials

Read the latest Bushspeak in the transcript of Feb. 8th NBC'S 'Meet The Press'. On the Iraq war, Bush says: "And I made the decision, obviously, to take our case to the international community in the hopes that we could do this achieve a disarmament of Saddam Hussein peacefully. In other words, we looked at the intelligence. And we remembered the fact that he had used weapons, which meant he had weapons."

Then read the pieces below, which factually contradict not only Bush's statement of when he made the decision to use unilateral US military force (The Lie Factory), but also the nonsensical notion that 'he had used weapons, which meant he had weapons' with the reality of Iraq's disarmament as argued by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

From Mother Jones: The Lie Factory

Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs

From Tom Paine: Ray McGovern - Still Smoke And Mirrors

AP: Feds Win Right to War Protesters' Records

Here are two interesting items I heard this morning on Democracy Now!:

"Cheney’s Staff Connected to CIA Leak Case
UPI is reporting that federal law enforcement officials have developed hard evidence that two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office were involved in the unlawful illegal outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame last year. Plame was the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who publicly questioned part of the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq. According to UPI the two employees in Cheney’s office are his chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby and John Hannah. Hannah is identified by one source as the major player in the leak. According to UPI the FBI is threatening to send Hannah to jail for his role.

Frist Staffer Quits Over Judiciary Probe
Meanwhile a top aide in the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has resigned after he became the target of an investigation into how Republican aides gained access to the computer files of Democratic Senators. For months Republican aides accessed internal Democratic memos concerning judicial nominees. Many of these files later were published in the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal. Frist’s aide, Manuel Miranda, has denied any wrongdoing."

More information concerning the UPI story about the VP's staffers appeared in the Asia Times: The day Cheney was rocked to the core

Paul Krugman: Get Me Rewrite!

This item from The Village Voice is worth noting. How strange! Sleeping With the GOP by Wayne Barrett 'Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Rev. Al Sharpton.'

USA TODAY: Mass. court: Same-sex couples entitled to marriage I can already see the stategy Karl Rove and the RNC will be using to paint the Democratic nominee as being in favor of 'liberal activist judges' who support the above ruling.

New York Post: A new documentary, "Super Size Me," details a 30-day McDonald's diet and subsequent health woes.

NY Times: Near-Sighted Bush Deficit Plan Ignores Problems Down the Road It's as if the White House is saying "Not whose problem? Not ours."

The Guardian: Back to the future "Bush's willingness to run up a mammoth deficit may hide - as it did for Reagan - a rightwing agenda to cut welfare."

Washington Post: Incomplete!

Paul Krugman: Another Bogus Budget

NY Times: Army Study of Iraq War Details a 'Morass' of Supply Shortages

NY Times: Test of Electronic Balloting System Finds Major Security Flaws

NY Times Editorial: The Fat of the Land