Len Hart

George W. Bush's war of naked aggression against Iraq --a war crime --has not only bankrupted the US, it has brought the entire world the brink of economic ruin. It is also an ignominious defeat and may one day be compared to Valens' loss to barbarians at Adrianople. One wonders: what sound is made by collapsing empires? Do they go boom or 'suck'?

As the most dominant empire since Roman times, America has helped to bring great wealth and prosperity to the world..

--Pat Robertson

Amid Robertson's 'celebration' of American empire, his death threats against Hugo Chavez or Americans daring to oppose his idiocy, Robertson forgot the rest of the story: Rome fell.

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Andrew Hughes

One could not help but notice the constant emphasis, during and since the Obama campaign, on Climate Change and Green energy programs. The world has a real need to develop more oil independent energy sources and halt the wholesale rape of Mother Earth. However, hearing these pleas from Washington to London from the highest offices in the land only demand more thorough investigation. When one remembers that these same high offices have been responsible for the Iraq War, The Afghanistan War and the destruction of the economy, taking anything at face value is a precarious enterprise.

As in all schemes brought to life by Government office, the first question that begs to be asked is Qui Bono? When a Carbon Tax or a Carbon Cap and Share program is announced the one thing that can be assumed is that it will be designed to make money for those who usually make the money all along. To believe that Washington or London have developed a more altruistic nature and suddenly want to save the world, is to deny decades of Political and economic history. The road to discovering the real truth behind the plan is to follow the money, the players and the science.

On the Change.gov website there was a news release about the Bi-partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles, California. Among the attendees were Governors Rod Blagojevich (IL) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (CA). (The Terminator and The Auctioneer were playing their part in the birthing of the new "impending disaster" just as much as Condi Rice, Bush and Rumsfeld played their part in creating the "Mushroom Cloud" scenario with Iraq). Mr. Obama had prepared a speech to address the conference via video. From the speech:

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Chris Floyd

1. Justice is for Suckers
Dick Cheney's recent admission on national television that he approved the waterboarding of a Terror War captive is, of course, the most prominent salvo in an on-going campaign to secure presidential pardons for the war criminals of the Bush Regime before the War Criminal-in-Chief leaves office next month. As many others have noted, Cheney's declaration that he -- and by implication, everyone else at the top level of government -- approved a torture technique that is a flagrant violation of United States law is aimed at making it impossible for George W. Bush not to issue pardons for his minions who set up and maintained the literally murderous gulag constructed, with his own full knowledge and approval, during his term in office.

So here's a prediction: at some point shortly before he waddles off the national stage, Bush will issue a weasle-worded blanket pardon for all those involved in his torture and murder program. This will be presented as a measure to protect those "on the front lines of the War on Terror" -- the interrogators of the military and the various security agencies -- from "politically motivated prosecutions." But its true aim will be to absolve those responsible for this Hitlerian-Stalinist war crime: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, Feith, Yoo, and many others, including, of course, the jabbering putz in the Oval Office himself.

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eileen fleming

The Times They Are a'Changin'- FREE Vanunu Mordechai! Now! Began on Face book on November 15, 2008 by an Italian with a vision for a Global V Day with his message to VMJC: Vanunu Mordechai John Crossman:

"For the little I can, [I will] try to move the conscience of the largest number of people possible, to try and break the chain of hatred that choke you and all the people of the area. Keep struggling. One day soon you will come to Rome to wipe away the ghosts of the past…" [1]

Excerpted from the Groups Description introduction by VANUNU MORDECHAI JC:

"…a man of peace, a symbol. KIDNAPPED IN ROME SEP' 30 th.1986…AFTER 18 YEARS IN ISRAEL PRISON… still a prisoner of fear and revenge. VANUNU…is waiting in East Jerusalem to leave;…be really free-to live…group objective is to help VANUNU… to enjoy in full his human right and to promote confrontation and a new mental approach toward the Palestine tragedy. Open your minds, stop hate.

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Kirsten Anderberg

I was riding the bus today, lost in thought, when the bus pulled up to a stop and I looked out the window I was leaning against to see several women, with their baggage and small children, sitting on the pavement in a parking lot, looking weary and forlorn. I was immediately overcome with a familiarity; it reminded me horribly of my mom and me, when I was a child. I immediately realized this was a pick up spot for homeless shelters. As my bus rolled on, I saw the next block was lined with women, young and old, carrying their bags, hovering around, looking agitated, anxious, hot, worn out, and desperate, waiting outside the YWCA in downtown Seattle, to see if they will have shelter tonight (as local shelters cannot accommodate all of the women who need shelter nightly). By the time we had rolled past that block, I was in tears. I looked around me on the bus. It seemed no one even noticed what was outside our windows for the full length of the previous block.

"Once you have been homeless, you can never go back," I scribbled on a piece of scrap paper in my backpack. It occurred to me that perhaps many of the people on the bus around me did not understand what was going on out there on the street around the YWCA. It occurred to me that many, if not most, of those on the bus around me, had never been homeless and thus would not recognize that snippet of street reality that just was in our windows, for the painful scene of suffering it was. The way that scene got my attention was something outside the window triggered a very strong feeling in me, a bad feeling, a feeling of discomfort and anxiety, yet a familiar feeling, and I looked out. What I saw was me as a child, and my mom, fretting in worry, as we waited to figure out where we would sleep that night. I remember that feeling so much that I am still shaken hours later after feeling it again.

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Mary Shaw

One of the many big political stories of the past few days is Barack Obama's newest pastor problem.

Obama has chosen Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation.

This is the same Rick Warren, of the ironically named Saddleback megachurch, who actively pushed for passage of Proposition 8, and has compared homosexuality to incest, polygamy, and child abuse.

Warren's respect for women equals his respect for gays. For instance, he recently compared reproductive choice to the Holocaust.

This guy is the king of zealous exaggeration and deceptive spin. But people follow him and absorb his every word. That makes him dangerous. And that danger led to disaster on November 4th, when his Prop 8 efforts succeeded in stripping gay couples in California of their right to marry.

This is the kind of religious political interference that we voted against when we elected Barack Obama as our next president. But now Warren will play a starring role at the inauguration of the president who promised change we can believe in. -So, naturally, Obama has come under fire in the past few days for this selection. And rightly so, in my opinion.

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Gilad Atzmon Interviews Sid Shniad (IJV Canada)

Recently I have been corresponding with Sid Shniad (1), a founding member of Canadian Independent Jewish Voice (Canadian IJV) (2). Those who are familiar with my writing are well aware of the fact that I am highly critical of any form of Jewish political activism, for I consider it to be a racially orientated discourse.

Yet, as much as I am interested in elaboration on the issue, a true dialogue with Jewish political activists is pretty much impossible. Jewish political ethnic campaigners and political activists have much to lose. They are fully aware of the categorical contradiction between the aim for universal values and tribal activism. They have much incoherence and inconsistency to hide.

Sid, however, was different, though we do not agree on many things, we have managed to keep an open and fruitful dialogue. He was very helpful and addressed each issue in a very positive manner.

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Jonathan Raban

Gore Vidal with beloved cat Baby Brown.

In the grand sweep of Vidal's aquiline view, American history has been a succession of tragic follies, and his essays, in their still-uncollected totality, amount to a massive prose Dunciad of literary and political knaves, hacks, and blockheads.

In his essay about the top ten best-sellers on the New York Times fiction list of January 7, 1973, Gore Vidal gave a characteristically withering notice ("Tolstoi hangs over the work like a mushroom cloud") to Solzhenitsyn's August 1914. He finished with the remark, "I fear that the best one can say of Solzhenitsyn is goré vidal (a Russian phrase meaning 'he has seen grief')." I'd always taken this as a joke-rather a below-par joke by Vidal's standards-until I checked it out with my Russian housecleaner.

"Gore Vidal!" she said. "Yes, but it is worse than grief. It is terrible. A woman, she have five sons, her only children, they all are killed at once in the war-goré vidal! It has many, many meanings. 'I was beaten so much nothing hurts me any more'-goré vidal. Sometimes it is sarcastic: we say 'goré vidal!' like Americans say 'Fuck you!' It is very common. I use it all the time." Later she sent me a list of synonyms for goré translated from her Russian dictionary. They included misfortune, disaster, mischief, distress, calamity, accident, adversity, ills, misery, affliction, bad luck, grief, sorrow, anguish, woe, poverty, melancholy, depression, and yearning.

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Remi Kanazi

I can't lie. I've watched Iraqi journalist Montather Al-Zaidi whip those two shoes past George Bush's head more times than I can count. I loved it; I even got into the corny jokes about the Red Sox drafting Al-Zaidi in the spring (cementing my belief that Iraqis have the second strongest arms in the Middle East—behind Palestinians of course). I also read endless blog coverage and joined the Facebook group, "Release Montather Al-Zaidi and Give Him New Shoes."

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Andrew Glikson

It is a good question whether the Australian government, having effectively abandoned any meaningful attempt at the arrest of accelerating climate change, would have changed its White Paper in view of rising melt rates of Arctic Sea ice, which acts as the Earth's thermostat, and which has already decreased from 8 to 4 million km2 and is projected to vanish within the next 5 years or so news.bbc

Mean temperatures over the Arctic Sea, increased by about 3C and locally by 5C over the last 4 years, compared to the earlier long-term mean, heralds a new climate pattern in the northern hemisphere, including advanced melt of Greenland ice sheet over the next few decades, raising sea levels by several metres.

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