David Kendall

This is supposedly what everybody shouts at a "surprise birthday party" when the guest of honor enters a room filled with his best friends and family who have gathered to celebrate the fact of his/her existence:

"Surprise!!" -- and then everybody sings "Happy Birthday" or "Auld Lang Sine" or some crap.

Has anybody ever actually attended one of these parties, or do they only happen in the movies or on television? If you've ever had one -- were you "surprised"? Or did you somehow find out about it in advance -- like they always do on TV?

In this digitized, computerized, sensationalized, homogenized, and hegemonized age of "Homeland Security", is there really any such thing as a "surprise"?

No.

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Muhammad al-Arabi

Muhammad al-Arabi argues that the clue to the motive for the attack on Mumbai lies in India's increasingly close relations with Israel and its identification with Anglo-American policies in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

At long last, the Mumbai horror show that we have been witnessing on our television screens for the past two days is over. So far, the death toll is 195 people, most of them innocent civilians.

We are still no wiser about the identity or motives of the gunmen responsible for this outrage. Predictably, the Indian government has seized the opportunity to blame Pakistan without having a shred of evidence to back its claim.

This is macabre opportunism at its worst by a government that is more concerned with enriching the super rich than with feeding its people, some of whom resort to eating rats in order to survive.

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S.A.S.

Part 1: Democracy

In 1945, observing the new socialist Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill observed, ‘Mr. Attlee is a very modest man – and he has much to be modest about!’

Jack Kennedy, on hearing that Reagan was to be put up as Governor of California, said, ‘No, no! John Wayne for Governor, Ronald Reagan for Best Friend!’

At the famous Round Table of American intellectuals at the Algonquin Hotel, when they received the news of the death of President Calvin Coolidge, Dorothy Parker drawled cynically, ‘How could they tell?’

Since mid-20th century, that is following World War II, among a tiny enlightened minority – for mass education produces only fools – Democracy, even among its political elite, had become a joke. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, with capitalism in the full flush of its final expansionist phase, motored by 24-hour electronic trading in paper and electronic signal money, Democracy is no joke.

It must be remembered that the adulation and elevation of Democracy is a relatively new affair. Its promotion from being ‘a good thing’ to being a necessary thing has evolved alongside the evolutionary emergence of the capitalist financial system from being a hegemony of private properties and projects into a totalitarian network that, from the leveraged buyout of a great corporation to a mere magazine subscription or football ticket, has engulfed the social nexus on a world scale.

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PCAS

Gaza Strip, 30, Nov, 2008-PCAS- As the siege of Gaza strip gets more tougher further attempts grow to end the siege. Many boats are to be sailing to end the Israeli blockade on Gaza, such as Qatari, Turkish and Kuwaiti boats. The Libyan ship carrying 3,000 tons of medical aid is expected shortly in the Gaza port. After several days at sea, the vessel should arrive by tomorrow.

Chairman of Popular Committee against the Siege PCAS, Jamal El Koudary, spoke with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi via telephone from the besieged Strip. He offered thanks for the sincere effort to provide material support to one and a half million people. The Libyan Minister of Health, Dr. Mohammad Rashid, says that the mission is a humanitarian one aimed at delivering aid, but that his hospitals are open to Palestinian patients at any time.

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N. Kapner

Former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak (L) shaking
hands with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New
Dehli.

The Anti Defamation Leauge expressed outrage at the Mumbai ‘terrorist’ attacks that “targeted innocent victims because they were Jews.” Abraham Foxman, ADL Director, issued the following statement:

“This brutal attack once again shows that terrorists single out Jews. The attack is a reminder that the world must stand up against all terrorism, because in the end no one is safe until terrorism is combated in all its manifestations.”

Well of course Jews like Foxman use the Mumbai incident as an opportunity to promote the ‘war on terror.’ Once again, Muslims are made the ‘enemies’ of all mankind, rather than the Zionist Jews, who are engaged in ethnic cleansing of Arab Muslims & Christians in Palestine and responsible for world wide chaos since the inception of their rogue state of Israel. Also - the ‘terrorist’ attacks in Mumbai will be used by Zionist Jews as justification for a US invasion of Pakistan, yet another ‘enemy’ of Israel.

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Amr Ismail

American bankers, British business moguls, New York Jewish Rabbi, Dual Israeli American nationals, western multinationals CEO’s, and a host of international business executives. They all converged on Mumbai in the hopes of cutting business deals, sizing investment opportunities, and taking advantage of the second largest economy in the world in terms of growth and outlook. Terror hit the financial district and its most lucrative locations. But Foreigners were not the only ones targeted in hotels and the cafe by the attackers; One hundred and counting local Indians were gunned down in the main train station just as they were heading for the platforms in the second busiest station in India.

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Len Hart

As recently as 2005, Milton Friedman was still singing the praises of an utterly failed economic policies that had been put to the test by Herrs R. Reagan and Bush Sr and found tragically lacking. Friedman is enamored with policies that bankrupted the nation, made terrorism worse, created the longest, deepest recession since the crash of 1929, exported jobs abroad and resulted in absolutely destruction of the American labor movement and, as a result, the loss of employee rights. Because Ronald Reagan put into effect the lame-brained ideas of Milton Friedman, we live poised on the precipice of economic collapse at the end of the very worst Presidency in American history.

When I met Milton Friedman in Houston, Ronald Reagan had not yet plunged the nation into a two year long depression. At the time, it was the worst depression since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression of the 1930s, the one that your parents, grand-parents or great great parents have told you about.

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Sheila Samples

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The recent blowout election that gave us President Barack Obama resulted in a flood of emotion that engulfed both parties. The one thing they had in common was that neither party could believe it. Political comedian Mort Sahl once said, "Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen." If we have learned nothing else about Republicans, it's that, with few exceptions, they are vindictive, immoral, blood-thirsty, and just plain power-mad. Republicans are so much better at destroying things than Democrats are. They say and do whatever it takes to win. And if that doesn't work -- they seize it anyway.

So we were braced for another disappointment -- not because we didn't share Obama's vision of change and his hope for a better life for all Americans, but because voting machines were frantically flip-flopping votes from Obama to John McCain, minority voters were purged, telephones jangling with robocalls smeared Obama as an alien terrorist -- and John King over at CNN kept ramming solid red "magic" maps in our faces as proof that McCain could not lose. So, what happened?

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Paul J. Balles

While Americans concentrate on the cost of rescuing the US financial system, and Europeans worry about how the worldwide financial crisis will affect them, Israel blithely, with US government and European community approval, deprives Gaza's entire civilian population of food, medicine and clean drinking water.

When pushed to explain their behaviour, they claim self-defence. Defence against whom? More than 50 per cent of the population in Gaza is comprised of children under the age of 15. Few people outside of Gaza even notice this slow genocide.

Israel always manages to commit its worst deeds when no one else is looking. If they happen to be caught, they blame it on the Palestinians – on a few resistance fighters lobbing rockets into Israel in retaliation for a broken cease-fire. To the Israeli, the actions of a few violent Palestinians are justifiable cause for genocide of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza. Joe Mowrey writes:

As conditions in the Gaza Strip approach a catastrophic level of deprivation, the world media, and in particular the US media, remain largely silent. The United Nations, whose truckloads of food and medical supplies continue to be denied entry into Gaza by Israel, appears to be one of the few international voices of dissent concerning the collective punishment of 1.5 million human beings.

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Sarah Meyer

"There we go, Uncle Dick -I pardon you, and I pardon me."

EMAIL THIS. "I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a President that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them. I surrounded myself with good people. I carefully considered the advice of smart, capable people and made tough decisions. I'd like to be a President (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace; that focused on individuals rather than process." George Bush (The self-described "compassionate conservative": 12.11.08 interview)

Michael Isikoff wrote an article in Newsweek entitled ‘Obama To Take On Torture’: The “new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration.”

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