The Rag Blog

Blackwater Security, Bush’s Private Waffen SS: The Iraqi Genocide
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Why has not the Turkish parliament given tit for tat and passed a resolution condemning the Iraqi Genocide?

As a result of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, more than one million Iraqis have died, and several millions are displaced persons. The Iraqi death toll and the millions of uprooted Iraqis match the Armenian deaths and deportations. If one is a genocide, so is the other.

It is true that most of the Iraqi deaths have resulted from Iraqis killing one another. But it was Bush’s destruction of the secular Iraqi state that unleashed the sectarian strife.

Moreover, American troops in Iraq have killed more civilians than insurgents. The US military in Iraq has fallen for every bit of disinformation fed to it by Al Qaeda personnel posing as “informants” and by Sunnis setting up Shi’ites and Shi’ites setting up Sunnis. As a result, American bombs and missiles have blown up weddings, funerals, kids playing soccer, and people shopping in bazaars and sleeping in their homes.

Not to be outdone, Bush’s private Waffen SS known as Blackwater Security has taken to gunning Iraqi civilians down in the streets. How do Blackwater and Custer Battles killers escape the “unlawful combatant” designation?

One can only marvel at the insouciance of the US Congress to the current Iraqi Genocide while condemning Turkey for one that happened 90 years ago.

People seldom see the beam in their own eye, only the mote in the eyes of others. Every member of the Bush Regime is busily at work denouncing Iran for causing instability in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the US has invaded two countries, throwing them into total chaos, while beating the drums for war with Iran and conspiring with Israel to invade Lebanon and to attack Syria.

The indisputable facts are that the US and Israel have attacked four Middle East countries and are determined to attack a fifth. Yet, it is peaceful Iran, at war with no one, that Bush and Israel blame for causing instability in the Middle East.

Not content with its many wars in the Middle East, the Bush Regime is sponsoring wars in Africa and is setting up an African Command. The US government has been bombing and attacking other countries ever since the cold war ended. Instead of peace, the gang in Washington DC chose war.

Other than the Israel Lobby, the greatest supporters of Bush’s wars are Christian evangelicals, specifically the “rapture evangelicals” and the “Christian Zionists.”

I remember when Christianity was about saving one’s soul. Today it is about bringing on Armageddon. While the various evangelical Christians preach war in the Middle East, they condemn Islam for being a “warlike religion.”

Americans are so full of themselves that they are blind to their extraordinary hypocrisy.

The US government has broken every agreement with Russia by withdrawing from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, pushing NATO to Russia’s borders, conniving to place missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, and buying governments in former Soviet republics and installing US military bases therein.

When Russian President Putin finally has enough and protests, the US Secretary of State blames Putin for being difficult and restarting the cold war.

Few Americans realize it, but they take the cake.

International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else. The rest of the world knows that the wars are about US and Israeli hegemony and that the US and Israel are prepared to engage in whatever acts of terror are necessary to achieve hegemony.

That is the bare fact.

When the US dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US empire will come to an abrupt end. Sooner or later the rest of the world will realize this and, in an act of self-protection, dethrone the dollar.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.

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Tomgram: David Morse, Energy Wars and Lost Boys in Sudan

If Somalia, occupied by U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops and in the midst of a chaotic, growing insurgency that has hardly been noted here, could well be our new Afghanistan, then what might Sudan be? Perhaps the starting point for the next disastrous oil war on this planet? Right now, in the American mind, Sudan is essentially Darfur, where a genocidal ethnic-cum-energy war run out of Islamist Khartoum is already underway — a subject which independent journalist David Morse took up at this site in 2005 and 2006.

Now, thanks to the support of the Nation Institute (which also supports Tomdispatch.com) and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Morse takes us along on a two-part journey he made with three young refugees, three “Lost Boys,” returning to the homes they fled years ago in the midst of a bitter civil war in southern Sudan. Though this region is largely ignored in the U.S. at the moment, that is unlikely to last for reasons Morse describes in his dramatic first-person account of traveling through the southern part of a Sudan poised at the edge of the abyss. Tom

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With the Lost Boys in Southern Sudan: “Starting from Zero” (Part 1)
By David Morse

To the extent that the media spotlight is ever directed at Africa, it has focused on Darfur, in western Sudan, where several hundred thousand people have died in ethnic violence since 2003. Just next door, beyond the glare of the spotlight, however, is South Sudan, where an estimated 2.2 million people were killed in two decades of bitter internecine fighting. There, a fragile, three-year-old peace agreement is rapidly coming apart. A new conflagration in South Sudan would engulf Darfur, dwarf the carnage that has taken place so far in the region, and launch sub-Saharan Africa into the age of energy wars.

Both the danger — and its ethnic character — were brought home to me very personally in a single moment on a recent trip to South Sudan as I tried to tell myself that the two-year-old Dinka boy pointing a pistol at my chest meant no harm. But the pearl-handled automatic looked real enough. “Khawaja,” he said. (Dinka for “white person.”)

I was relieved when the man who was perhaps the toddler’s father, a big-bellied lieutenant colonel in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, grinned and held the bullet clip aloft to show he’d removed it from the gun. He was visibly a little drunk.

“He’s very intelligent boy,” he said proudly, “You see, he points the gun at you because he thinks you are Arab.”

We were sitting on makeshift stools in a dark, narrow, crowded bar in Kuajok, a state capital in South Sudan — the only bar in town. Kuajok is under construction. Three years ago it was just a village. Since it was designated the capital of the newly formed state of Warrap, one of the ten states that make up South Sudan, its population has mushroomed. The few masonry buildings that survived two decades of civil war in Kuajok are undersized and shabby. Everything else has been cobbled together from poles and mats of woven rushes. The bar, where I was trying to find something to eat, is attached to a guest lodge — a compound containing half a dozen thatched huts with padlocks and no latrines, just shallow holes dug in the ground. A sign, lettered on a cotton sheet announcing the Warrap State Safari Guest House, is ripped right down the middle and readable only when the breeze is blowing just so.

Kuajok is a boomtown. All that’s missing is the money.

One of the few visible public works in progress is the main road through town, now being rebuilt. Dump trucks rumble back and forth carrying the red, gritty, compactable soil used here for building the all-weather roads so desperately needed throughout southern Sudan, where the rainy season brings ground transport to a near standstill. A school for girls also nears completion, privately funded through UNICEF; but there is no hospital at all, just a pathetically under-equipped clinic. In separate interviews, the state ministers of education and health used the same phrase: “We are starting from zero.” Warrap — the most populous of South Sudan’s states, as well as the newest — has a hard time just meeting its modest payroll.

The same is true, I discovered, throughout South Sudan. Everywhere, a shortage of cash, everywhere a backlog of unmet human needs. The rainy season means sorghum can be planted; it brings subsistence farmers to their knees, slashing the earth with straight-bladed hoes. But because of poor sanitation and lack of clean water, the rain also brings cholera, guinea-worm, and dysentery. It means children will die.

Six hundred miles to the north, Khartoum’s Arab elite are awash in oil money. From near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s, Sudan has tripled its gross national product in the past seven years. Consumers buy giant flat-screen plasma TVs, expensive new cars. The capital city, Khartoum, has new roads, an elevated expressway, weapons factories constructed by the Chinese, and Malaysian-built refineries that pipe oil to tanker terminals on the Red Sea. Sudan’s proven oil reserves are estimated at a fairly hefty 5-6.5 million barrels, giving it the fifth largest reserves in Africa.

But South Sudan, where most of that oil actually comes from, remains one of the poorest regions on the planet. Historically marginalized by Khartoum — first under the Ottoman Turks, then under the British, and now under Arab Islamists who control the central government — the South, black African and religiously diverse, has zero manufacturing capacity. Everything from building supplies to salt has to be trucked in from neighboring Uganda or Kenya.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (commonly referred to as the CPA), signed in January of 2005, was supposed to address these inequities. Brokered by the U.S. and Kenya in painstaking, seemingly endless negotiations, the CPA was an acknowledgment by the warring parties — the National Islamic Front, representing the government in Khartoum, and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM), representing the rebels in the South — that neither side could win the bloody civil war that had staggered on for 21 years. The agreement was not truly comprehensive: It did not include the three western Sudanese states known as Darfur, which were just then erupting into violence; nor did it address the needs of other marginalized regions and constituencies suffering under Khartoum’s yoke. Nevertheless, the agreement was hailed as a triumph by the Bush administration and by an international community eager to see the conflict resolved.

Whatever its limitations, the CPA did, at least, address the only partly ideological root causes of the conflict in the South. Khartoum had, indeed, wanted to impose fundamentalist Islamic law on all of Sudan; but, from the beginning, the conflict was largely over wealth-sharing. Increasingly this civil war also became a “resource war.”

Under the CPA, South Sudan was to have the status of a semi-autonomous state, with control over its internal affairs. Revenues from the southern oilfields were to be divided 50-50 between Khartoum and the newly formed Government of South Sudan. The CPA also provided for a plebiscite, scheduled for 2011, in which the South could vote to secede. This future vote was meant to placate southerners who feared Khartoum would not keep its word.

So now, three years into the CPA, southerners are asking with increasing agitation: Where is the promised oil money?

The sight of that toddler pointing a pistol at me was unsettling, but not nearly as disturbing as the explanation the Colonel offered: because he thinks you are an Arab. A gregarious bully who seemed to be part of the security detail assigned to the group I was with, the colonel, perhaps reading my expression, retrieved his pistol and tucked it into the fanny pack under his belly. But if the pistol was out of sight, the words hung there, a reminder of the larger danger that lay just beyond the bar’s jury-rigged walls. Subsequent events have confirmed my assessment — that this sprawling, dysfunctional country is again slipping into the racial polarization of “Arab” versus “Black” that has prevented it from becoming a coherent nation. Sudan is again poised at a precipice.

The enmity between slave-taking Arabs and black Africans goes back centuries, long predating Sudan’s existence as a nation. “The Sudan,” as many people still call it, is in fact a comparatively recent amalgamation: North and South were thrown together for the convenience of a hastily departing British colonial government in 1956. The British left the Arabs “in charge,” much as the Belgians did with the Hutu in Rwanda. Even so, the ethnic tensions might now be transcended, were it not for the way Khartoum manipulates them to its own immediate advantage, here as in Darfur. Now, the whole country — including the three western states that comprise Darfur, where two million displaced people already live at the edge of disaster, dependent on outside aid — appears ready to plunge into a bloody ethnic war.

Read the rest here.

Thanks to Joni Mitchell for the title line.

Wisdom amid a world tired of the US megaphone
By David Ignatius, Daily Star staff

10/15/07 “Daily Star” — — “We talk about democracy and human rights. Iraqis talk about justice and honor.” That comment from Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, made at a seminar last month on counterinsurgency, is the beginning of wisdom for an America that is trying to repair the damage of recent years. It applies not simply to Iraq but the range of problems in a world tired of listening to an American megaphone.

Dignity is the issue that vexes billions of people around the world, not democracy. Indeed, when people hear President George W. Bush preaching about democratic values, it often comes across as a veiled assertion of America power. The implicit message is that other countries should be more like us – replacing their institutions, values and traditions with ours. We mean well, but people feel disrespected. The bromides and exhortations are a further assault on their dignity.

That’s the difficulty when the US House of Representatives pressures Turkey to admit that it committed genocide against the Armenians 92 years ago. It’s not that this demand is wrong. I’m an Armenian-American, and some of my own relatives perished in that genocidal slaughter. I agree with the congressional resolution, but I know that this is a problem that Turks must resolve. They are imprisoned in a past they have not yet been able to accept. Our hectoring makes it easier for them to retreat deeper into denial.

The most articulate champion of what the administration likes to call the “democracy agenda” has been Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. When she talks about the universality of American values, she carries the special resonance of an African-American girl from Birmingham, Alabama, who witnessed the struggle for democracy in a segregated America. But she also conveys an American arrogance, a message that when it comes to good governance, it’s “our way or the highway.”

That’s why it’s encouraging to hear that Rice is taking policy advice from Kilcullen, a brilliant Australian military officer who helped reshape US strategy in Iraq toward the bottom-up precepts of counterinsurgency. Sources tell me Kilcullen will soon be joining the State Department as a part-time consultant. For a taste of his thinking, check out his September 26 presentation to a Marine Corps seminar (available at www.wargaming.quantico.usmc.mil.)

As we think about a “dignity agenda,” there are some other useful readings. A starting point is Zbigniew Brzezinski’s new book, “Second Chance,” which argues that America’s best hope is to align itself with what he calls a “global political awakening.” The former national security adviser explains: “In today’s restless world, America needs to identify with the quest for universal human dignity, a dignity that embodies both freedom and democracy but also implies respect for cultural diversity.”

After I mentioned Brzezinski’s ideas about dignity in a previous column, a reader sent me a 1961 essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, which made essentially the same point. A deeply skeptical man who resisted the “isms” of partisan thought, Berlin was trying to understand the surge of nationalism despite two world wars. “Nationalism springs, as often as not, from a wounded or outraged sense of human dignity, the desire for recognition,” he wrote.

“The craving for recognition has grown to be more powerful than any other force abroad today,” Berlin continued. “It is no longer economic insecurity or political impotence that oppresses the imaginations of many young people in the West today, but a sense of the ambivalence of their social status – doubts about where they belong, and where they wish or deserve to belong.”

A final item on my dignity reading list is “Violent Politics,” a new book by the iconoclastic historian William R. Polk. He examines 10 insurgencies through history – from the American Revolution to the Irish struggle for independence to the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation – to make a stunningly simple point, which we managed to forget in Iraq: People don’t like to be told what to do by outsiders. “The very presence of foreigners, indeed, stimulates the sense first of apartness and ultimately of group cohesion.” Foreign intervention offends people’s dignity, Polk reminds us. That’s why insurgencies are so hard to defeat.

People will fight to protect their honor even – and perhaps, especially – when they have nothing else left. That has been a painful lesson for the Israelis, who hoped for the past 30 years they could squeeze the Palestinians into a rational peace deal. It’s excruciating now for Armenian-Americans like me, when we see Turkey refusing to make a rational accounting of its history. But if foreign governments try to make people do the right thing, it won’t work. They have to do it for themselves.

Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published regularly by THE DAILY STAR.

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A lesson in humility for the smug West
By William Dalrymple. Introduction by Axis of Logic
Oct 15, 2007, 08:11

Axis of Logic: Below, William Dalrymple’s treatment of the history of tolerance and humanistic ideals helps us put the West’s claim on universal values in perspective. Ordinary people throughout the world are awakening to the abuse of terms like “democracy”, “liberty” and “human rights” in Washington, London, Paris and other bases of neoliberalism. Due to the arrogance and overstepping of the elite and to the democratization of information via the Internet, ordinary people are gaining awareness and power in unity.

Opposition to the West’s economic exploitation of natural resources, pollution of the earth and rampant militarism is swelling up “from below” where real and lasting power is born, thrives and grows. Despite the claims of the corporate media, the people are also responding with measures of success against the technical warfare inflicted on them in recent years in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia and Mexico. The new revolutionary and constitutional governments in Latin America, from Caracas to La Paz and Quito can be traced back to the people from whence they come. Reduced to a simple statement – the people can be trusted to govern themselves through participatory democracy. Great strides have been achieved to debunk the corporate media’s claims on the “higher values” of the West and Dalrymple’s analysis below gives those claims their proper place in history. – Les Blough, Editor

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Many of the western values we think of as superior came from the East and our blind arrogance hurts our standing in the world

About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.

Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together.

Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.

All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portugal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori.

It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he “was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: “Decades of intense cultural relativism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.

The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over the motion: “We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values”. (The motion was eventually carried, I regret to say.)

Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ethical source of these values.

Yet where do these ideas actually come from? Both Judaism and Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch, Constantinople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe.

Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value – universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.

And where was the first law code drawn up? In Athens or London? Actually, no – it was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient Iraq. Who was the first ruler to emphasise the importance of the equality of his subjects? The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, set down in stone basic freedoms for all his people, and did not exclude women and slaves, as Aristotle had done.

In the real world, East and West do not have separate and compartmentalised sets of values. Does a Midwestern Baptist have the same values as an urbane Richard Dawkins-read-ing atheist? Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same ethical tradition as Osama Bin Laden?

In the East as in the West there is a huge variety of ethical systems, but surprisingly similar ideals, and ideas of good and evil. To cherry-pick your favourite universal humanistic ideals, and call them western, then to imply that their opposites are somehow eastern values is simply bigoted and silly, as well as unhistorical.

The great historian of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, knew better. As he wrote at the end of his three-volume history: “Our civilisation has grown . . . out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.” He is right. The best in both eastern and western civilisation come not from asserting your own superiority, but instead from having the humility to learn from what is good in others, as well as to recognise your own past mistakes. Ramming your ideas down the throats of others is rarely a productive tactic.

There are lessons here from our own past. European history is full of monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, some of which – such as those of Salazar, Tito and Franco – survived into the 1970s and 1980s. The relatively recent triumph of democracy across Europe has less to do with some biologically inherent western love of freedom, than with an ability to learn humbly from the mistakes of the past – notably the millions of deaths that took place due to western ideologies such as Marxism, fas-cism and Nazism.

These movements were not freak departures from form, so much as terrible expressions of the darker side of western civilisation, including our long traditions of antisemitism at home.

Alongside this we also have history of exporting genocide abroad in the worst excesses of western colonialism – which, like the Holocaust, comes from treating the nonwestern other as untermenschen, as savage and somehow subhuman.

For though we like to ignore it, and like to think of ourselves as paragons of peace and freedom, the West has a strong militaristic tradition of attacking and invading the countries of those we think of as savages, and of wiping out the less-developed peoples of four continents as part of our civilising mission. The list of western genocides that preceded and set the scene for the Holocaust is a terrible one.

The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by British hunting parties who were given licences to exterminate this “inferior race” whom the colonial authorities said should be “hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed”. Many were caught in traps, before being tortured or burnt alive.

The same fate saw us exterminate the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as tribe after tribe of Native Americans. The European slave trade forcibly abducted 15m Africans and killed as many more.

It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all – the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West.

For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for allthat is remarkable and beautiful in ourart, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-de-feating in western history.

The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right.

Tragically, this western tradition of failing to respect other cultures and treating the other as untermenschen has not completely died. We might now recognise that genocide is wrong, yet 30 years after the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia and My Lai, the cadaver of western colonialism has yet again emerged shuddering from its shallow grave. One only has to think of the massacres of Iraqi civilians in in Falluja or the disgusting treatment meted out to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to see how the cultural assertiveness of the neocons has brought these traditions of treating Arabs as subhuman back from the dead.

Yet the briefest look at the foreign policy of the Bush administration surely gives a textbook example of the futility of trying to impose your values and ideas – even one so noble as democracy – on another people down the barrel of a gun, rather than through example and dialogue.

In Iraq itself, we have succeeded in destroying a formerly prosperous and secular country, and creating the largest refugee problem in the modern Middle East: 4m Iraqis have now been forced abroad.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US attempt to push democracy in the region has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against its old client proxies – by and large corrupt, decadent monarchies and decaying nationalist parties. But rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed they would, Muslims have everywhere lined up behind those parties that have most clearly been seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention in the region, namely the religious parties of political Islam.

Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders “to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions.” It will be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.

We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility.

William Dalrymple’s new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history.

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Pelosi says she’ll press on with Armenian ‘genocide’ resolution

WASHINGTON (CNN) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that she intends to move ahead with a vote on a resolution that labels the deaths of more than a million Armenians during World War I as genocide.

The resolution has strained U.S. relations with Turkey and drawn criticism from the Bush administration.

“This resolution is one that is consistent with what our government has always said about … what happened at that time,” Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week.”

When asked about criticism that it could harm relations with Turkey — a key ally in the war in Iraq and a fellow member of NATO — Pelosi said, “There’s never been a good time,” adding that it is important to pass the resolution now “because many of the survivors are very old.”

“When I came to Congress 20 years ago, it wasn’t the right time because of the Soviet Union. Then that fell, and then it wasn’t the right time because of the Gulf War One. And then it wasn’t the right time because of overflights of Iraq. And now it’s not the right time because of Gulf War Two.

“And, again, the survivors of the Armenian genocide are not going to be with us.”

But White House Spokesman Tony Fratto said bringing the resolution to a vote “may do grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations and to U.S. interests in Europe and the Middle East.”

Turkey’s top general warned Sunday that ties with the United States will be irreversibly damaged if Congress passes the resolution, The Associated Press reported.

Turkey has recalled its ambassador from Washington for consultations and warned of cuts in logistical support to the United States over the issue. The recall is only for a limited period of time, said a U.S. State Department official who talked to the ambassador.

“If this resolution [that] passed in the committee passes the House as well, our military ties with the U.S. will never be the same again,” Gen. Yasar Buyukanit told the daily Milliyet newspaper, according to AP

The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 27-21 Wednesday to approve the nonbinding measure, which declares the deportation of nearly 2 million Armenians from the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923 was “systematic” and “deliberate,” amounting to “genocide.” The deportations led to the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people.

But Sunday, Pelosi stood by her previous assertion that the measure would be taken to a full vote if it passed the committee.

Newly installed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, tried to calm tensions by phoning his Turkish counterpart shortly after Wednesday’s vote.

Mullen told Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, Turkey’s chief of staff, that the Pentagon is working hard to inform Congress of what the military implications might be if the Turks were to respond by cutting off U.S. access to the air base at Incirlik in Turkey.

Seventy percent of U.S. air cargo bound for Iraq passes over or through Turkey.

The Armenian government and Armenians around the world, including many Armenian-Americans, have been pressing for international support for their contention that Armenians were the victims of genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

The Ottoman Empire disintegrated in 1923, replaced by the modern republic of Turkey, where the Armenian issue remains sensitive. Turks reject the genocide label, insisting there was no organized campaign against the Armenians and that many Turks also died in the chaos and violence of the period.

Though predominantly Muslim, Turkey, which borders both Europe and Iraq, is secular and pro-Western. In addition to its membership in NATO, Ankara is also seeking to become a member of the European Union.

Speaking later on ABC’s “This Week,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell denounced the House committee’s vote — despite agreeing with the assertion that the killings amounted to genocide.

“I think it’s a really bad idea for the Congress to be condemning what happened 100 years ago,” the Kentucky Republican said Sunday. “We all know it happened. There’s a genocide museum, actually, in Armenia to commemorate what happened.

“But I don’t think the Congress passing this resolution is a good idea at any point. But particularly not a good idea when Turkey is cooperating with us in many ways, which ensures greater safety for our soldiers.”

Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham echoed those comments on CNN’s Late Edition.

“I’m not worried about World War I. … I’m worried about what I think is World War III, a war against extremists, and Iraq is the central battle front and Turkey has been a very good ally,” Graham said Sunday.

“We’ve had problems with Turkey, but the problem that Turkey has with the northern part of Iraq, if you think it is bad now, let the country fail.”
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Turkey has engaged in ongoing cross-border skirmishes with rebels from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which launches raids from northern Iraq. The recent killings of Turkish soldiers brought the conflict to a boiling point, and Turkey’s parliament may consider a motion to approve cross-border incursions into northern Iraq as early as this week. Video Watch how the rebels are straining U.S.-Turkish relations »

The United States and the EU have designated the PKK a terrorist organization. The U.S. State Department has urged Iraq to crack down on the PKK, though some Turkish officials have said Washington has failed to take decisive action.

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Castro Makes Rare Live Appearance
AP, Posted: 2007-10-15 09:15:36

HAVANA (Oct. 14) – Fidel Castro made his first live appearance on Cuban airwaves since falling ill 14 months ago, sounding lucid and in good humor as he exchanged praise and jokes Sunday with the Venezuelan president.

Castro’s telephone call to a television and radio program came minutes after visiting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez aired a new videotape of their weekend meeting in which he sang revolutionary hymns to Castro and called him “father of all revolutionaries.”

“I am very touched when you sing about Che,” Castro told Chavez during his hour-long call to Chavez’s “Alo, Presidente!” program – referring to revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara, to whom the program was dedicated.

“There is electricity in the air,” Chavez said, obviously pleased with Castro’s call.

Read it here.

But, but, Iraq already threw them out a month ago, immediately following the incident in Nusur Square. And of course, they should’ve been thrown out of Iraq a few years ago. Whatever ….

Report says Iraq wants Blackwater out within 6 months
By Times Wires, Published October 15, 2007

BAGHDAD – The Iraqi government has demanded that Blackwater USA, the private security firm that guards top U.S. diplomats in Iraq, be expelled from the country within six months and pay $8-million in compensation to the family of every civilian its employees are accused of killing last month, Iraqi officials said.

The demands were contained in a report prepared by Iraqi investigators probing the shooting in downtown Baghdad, in which they said 17 Iraqis were killed after Blackwater guards opened fire without provocation. The findings were described by Iraqi officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Sept. 16 incident sparked widespread outrage across Iraq and prompted heightened scrutiny here and in the United States of shootings by foreign security firms that have left scores of Iraqis dead.

Anne Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Blackwater, said she had not seen the report and hoped no decisions would be made until an investigation by the FBI has been completed. The company has said its guards opened fire after they came under attack.

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The Realpolitik of Article VI: Religious Test Required for Public Office
By Robert Weitzel, Oct 14, 2007, 13:24

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On October 10, the province of Ontario, in Canada, had a general election. During the campaign, one of the parties had stated an intent, if it formed the government, to extend public funding to ‘faith-based’ schools. Historically, Ontario has provided some funding to Roman Catholic schools (100% since the 1970s); although they are still considered to be ‘separate’ schools, they do adhere entirely to the public curriculum. How they fit religious instruction into that paradigm is entirely up to them.

There are approximately 53,000 students who do not attend the public school system (or the Roman Catholic version), opting for a variety of religious-based schools. This is in a province with more than 2 million pre-college students.

That single campaign promise became the entire focus of the election. Nothing else was discussed by anyone, except the Green Party and the socialist party – but both are too insignificant to gain much attention so their messages went unheard. The faith-based funding issue became highly divisive, and it is not hard to see the nervousness of the Roman Catholics who heard, repeatedly, that public funding belongs only in public schools.

The party which made the campaign promise was thoroughly trounced on election day, despite polls prior to the election which suggested they were in good shape. It seems that in Ontario, the concept of the separation of church and state is still alive and might actually be on the increase.

In that light, we offer the following article from one of our frequent contributors. He sent it to us with these introductory remarks:

Article VI of the Constitution forbids religious tests for public office. The reality on the ground is that all politicians campaigning for office in the Sunday school miasma of contemporary American politics must learn God-speak and use it often and convincingly. Unfortunately, if religious platitudes continue to pass for serious political discourse, we will render unelectable eminently qualified women and men who choose to keep their faith a private matter or to wear their “faithlessness” on their sleeve. This essay considers both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates and their 2008 faith-based campaigning.

— Axis of Logic editors

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“He won my vote when he talked about religion.” -Candice Collins-

In an October 4 New York Times article, Marc Santora wrote, “The intensified assault by religious leaders poses a central question about Mr. Giuliani’s viability as a Republican presidential candidate and presents him with one of his first big tests on the stump.”

The same day, the New York Times published an editorial by James Dobson of Focus on the Family entitled, “The Values Test,” in which Dobson put both the Republican and Democratic parties on notice that their test—written and proctored by religious conservatives—is fast approaching, “If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate.”

Earlier this year at an “Ask Mitt Anything” forum in Pella, Iowa, Mrs. Van Stennis, a teacher at a local Christian school, asked Mitt Romney where the Bible would be in his decision making as president. “Would it be above the Book of Mormon, or would it be beneath it?” Mr. Romney, affecting his best Jack Kennedy religious tolerance stance, answered, “This is a nation where people come from different faiths, different doctrines, different churches.”

Then tactically, if not disingenuously, he added, “But, unlike the people we’re fighting over in the Middle East, we don’t have a religious test to say who should be able to run our country. It’s over there where people say, ‘You don’t go to my church, you can’t run our country.’ ”

Had he been less concerned with passing Mrs. Van Stennis’ religion test, he might have added more honestly, “ But as you know, it’s over here where people say, ‘You don’t go to church, you can’t run our country.’”

Contrary to Article VI of the Constitution, which states in part that “ . . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,” the realpolitik of American political campaigning is that all candidates for public office must pass a religious test. This is not a “de facto” religious test. It is the real McCoy. But it has become the de facto law of our “Christian nation.”

In a 1981 speech to the U.S. Senate, Barry Goldwater, the archconservative, five-term Republican Senator from Arizona and author of “The Conscience of a Conservative,” alarmed by the encroaching influence of the Christian Right on the Republican Party platform specifically, and on American politics in general, warned his fellow Senators, “The religious factions . . . are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent . . . Just who do they think they are? 
 I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.”

Over a quarter of a century later, John McCain, four-term Republican senator from Arizona—Goldwater’s immediate successor—and author of “Faith of My Fathers,” confirmed Goldwater’s prescience and fears in an interview with Dan Gilgoff of BeliefNet. When asked if a presidential candidate’s personal faith has become too big an issue, McCain replied, “I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, ‘Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition . . .’”

Considering McCain was being “quizzed” by a religious web site, one would expect him to mince words to his faith-based, political advantage. But for a U.S. Senator, whose secular “bible” is the Constitution, to then tell Gilgoff and the country, that “ . . .the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” is either inexcusable ignorance or plain pandering. Regardless, he just led the Republican Party and the Republic down to the banks of the river Jordan.

But as Republican candidates squeeze into the revival tent this campaign cycle, they find themselves sitting next to a newly-converted Democratic candidate whose hands are raised in exaltation, albeit, a bit self-consciously.

On a June 4 special religion edition of CNN’s “The Situation Room” featuring Democratic candidates John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, moderator Soledad O’Brien asked Edwards if he thinks the United States is a Christian nation.

Edwards’ stumbling attempt to pass his religion test was a veritable glossolalia of fundamentalist God-speak and political correctness, “No, I think this is a nation — I mean I’m a Christian; there are lots of Christians in United States of America. I mean, I have a deep and abiding love for my Lord, Jesus Christ . . .”

Unlike John McCain who unabashedly rewrote the Constitution for the Christian Right, Edwards’ seemed uncomfortable in his role of Christian apologist, though his hedging answer did contain the virus currently debilitating American politics—the mistaken notion that since there is a preponderance of Christians living in the United States, we are a Christian nation.

To appreciate how wrong-headed this notion is, imagine a white politician seriously claiming that since a preponderance of their state’s population is Caucasian, it is a white state. Of course, they will quickly add that people of all colors are welcome . . . sort of. Albinos, on the other hand . . .?

In a follow up question on the same broadcast, the Reverend Sharon Watkins of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ asked Edwards the evangelical equivalent of “Did you beat your wife again last night?” “When you pray, how do you know if the voice that you are hearing is the voice of God or your own voice in disguise?”

What was Edwards suppose to say? “Yes, I hear voices that tell me what to do” or “No, I don’t take the advice of the creator of the entire universe.” What he did say was worthy of a politician, and a telling example of the “point of singularity” to which the Christian Right has shrunk political discourse in America, “ . . . some would argue we sometimes have trouble telling the difference . . .”

John F. Kennedy—the first Catholic to be elected president— didn’t have any trouble telling the difference between what “God” wants and what his conscience dictates. In fact, Kennedy passed his one and only religious examination in his 1960 presidential campaign in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Alliance in a manner that would “excommunicate” his Democratic torchbearers in today’s Christianized political climate.

He told the assembled ministers that religion would have no place in his administration. He assured them that he “believed in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” He further pledged that “whatever issue may come before me as President . . . I will make my decision in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”

Kennedy understood the realpolitik of Article VI as it applied to his presidential campaign, “I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty . . . neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test–even by indirection . . .” At the time it was Kennedy’s religion, not his lack of one, that was his first big test on the stump.

Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, is not exactly sure which way to step as she nudges her way into the evangelical tent. Responding to Soledad O’Brien’s observation that she doesn’t talk a lot about her faith, Clinton said, “ . . . a lot of the talk about and advertising about faith doesn’t come naturally to me . . . I come from a tradition that is perhaps a little too suspicious of people who wear their faith on their sleeves . . .”

What Senator Clinton failed to mention to O’Brien and millions of viewers is that she doesn’t need to wear her faith on her sleeve since it is written down in the 352 pages of Paul Kengor’s recent book, “God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life.” She also neglected to mention that Paul Kengor has written two other books with similar titles: “God and Ronald Reagan” and “God and George W. Bush.” Could it be she doesn’t want to bask in the reflected light of these two ultra right-wing conservative luminaries? More likely, she doesn’t want to be tarred by the same brush?

Another aspect of Hillary’s faith that is not worn on her stylish sleeve—or even admitted to in public—but which may be of interest to potential left-of-center supporters, is her ongoing active participation in a secretive Capital Hill group known as the Fellowship. According to a September 2007 Mother Jones article, the Fellowship is a conservative Bible study and prayer circle that includes such committed right-wingers as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

Hillary Clinton, like all Americans, has the constitutional right to pursue religion as her heart dictates. However, if she plays the religion card for political gain, she had better be willing to show her entire hand.

To illustrate the deleterious effect religious tests have on the secular democracy envisioned and codified by the Founding Fathers, consider that three of the first four presidents of the United States, all of whom where instrumental in drafting either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, would be unelectable today if certain of their thoughts on religion were worn on their sleeves.

Imagine the scurrilous hay right-wing pundits would make of the following “blasphemous” snippets:

John Adams: “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”

James Madison: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”

Now imagine denying men of Adams, Jefferson and Madison’s intelligence and political acumen a leadership role in the government.

Currently, Representative Pete Stark (D-Fremont) is the only member of Congress who wears his atheism on his sleeve. Since the best estimate is that one in ten Americans is an atheist, statistically there should be at least 53 atheists in Congress. Someone is not being honest with the American electorate . . . little wonder?

But there are small, encouraging, signs that the electorate is growing tired of the Sunday school miasma pervading our “Christian nation’s” political process. A recent poll conducted by the University of Connecticut’s, Center for Survey Research and Analysis, found that 68 percent of those who responded “don’t like it when politicians rely on their religion in forming their policy,” while 44 percent said religion plays too large a role in American politics.

On October 6 Barack Obama asked the 12,000 congregants of the Redemption World Outreach Center to “pray that I can be an instrument of God” as he campaigns for the presidency.

Until candidates begin asking the faithful among the electorate to pray that they be an instrument of the Constitution first and foremost, religious tests for public office will continue, religious platitudes will continue to pass for serious political discourse and to influence both domestic and foreign policy, we will continue to render unelectable eminently qualified women and men who choose to keep their faith a private matter or to wear their “faithlessness” on their sleeves, and the public square of our nation will continue to be the exclusive meeting place of the faithful.

Biography: Robert Weitzel is a freelance writer whose essays appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He has been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Skeptic Magazine, Freethought Today and on popular liberal websites. He can be contacted at: rweitz@tds.net.

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Joseph Stiglitz, in Caracas, Praises Venezuela’s Economic Policies
October 11th 2007, by Kiraz Janicke – Venezuelanalysis.com

Caracas, October 11, 2007 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Nobel Prize winning economist and former vice-president of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, praised Venezuela’s economic growth and “positive policies in health and education” during a visit to Caracas on Wednesday.

“Venezuela’s economic growth has been very impressive in the last few years,” Stiglitz said during his speech at a forum on Strategies for Emerging Markets sponsored by the Bank of Venezuela.

Venezuela, the fourth largest exporter of crude oil to the United States, has experienced the highest economic growth rate in Latin America in recent years, with fifteen successive quarters of expansion and looks set to close the year with 8-9% growth. Despite the high rate of growth, high public spending and increased consumer demand have contributed to inflationary pressures, pushing inflation up to 15.3%, also the highest in Latin America. However, Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001, argued that relatively high inflation isn’t necessarily harmful to the economy.

He added that while Venezuela’s economic growth has largely been driven by high oil prices, unlike other oil producing countries, Venezuela has taken advantage of the boom in world oil prices to implement policies that benefit its citizens and promote economic development.

“Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appears to have had success in bringing health and education to the people in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas, to those who previously saw few benefits of the countries oil wealth,” he said.

In his latest book “Making Globalization Work,” Stiglitz argues that left governments such as in Venezuela, “have frequently been castigated and called ‘populist’ because they promote the distribution of benefits of education and health to the poor.”

“It is not only important to have sustainable growth,” Stiglitz continued during his speech, “but to ensure the best distribution of economic growth, for the benefit of all citizens.”

Although Stiglitz praised Venezuela’s “positive policies” in areas of health and education and policies to promote economic diversification, he assured that Venezuela still faces the challenge of overcoming structural problems associated with an economy overwhelmingly geared towards oil production.

In terms of economic development Stiglitz argued it was not good for the Central Bank to have “excessive” autonomy. Chavez’s proposed constitutional reforms, if approved in December, will remove the autonomy of the country’s Central Bank.

However, Stiglitz claimed, developing nations must strike a balance between public and private control of the market.

“The key to success is to find the correct equilibrium between the private sector and the government, which is different for each nation,” he said.

Stiglitz also welcomed Venezuela’s initiative to create the Bank of the South; due to be founded in Caracas on November 3, saying it would benefit the countries of South America and boost development.

“One of the advantages of having a Bank of the South is that it would reflect the perspectives of those in the South,” said Stiglitz, whereas, he argued, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund often impose conditions that “hinder the development effectiveness.”

Stiglitz also criticized the “Washington Consensus” of implementing neo-liberal policies in Latin America, in particular the US free trade agreements with Colombia and other countries, saying they failed to bring benefits to the peoples of those countries.

The Washington Consensus “is undermining the Andean cooperation, and it is part of the American strategy of divide and conquer, a strategy trying to get as much of the benefits for American companies,” and little for developing countries, he said.

Stiglitz also met with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Miraflores, where they exchanged points of view on the global economic situation, economic indicators and the behavior of world markets.

*Stiglitz quotes translated from Spanish

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Sudan: Breaking the Abyei Deadlock
Africa Briefing N°47, 12 October 2007

OVERVIEW

The dispute over the Abyei region is the most volatile aspect of Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and risks unravelling that increasingly shaky deal. The CPA granted the disputed territory, which has a significant percentage of Sudan’s oil reserves, a special administrative status under the presidency and a 2011 referendum to decide whether to join what might then be an independent South. However, in violation of the CPA, the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) is refusing the “final and binding” ruling of the Abyei Boundary Commission (ABC) report, leaving an administrative and political vacuum. Negotiations between the NCP and the former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/SPLM) are stalled, and both sides are building up their military forces around Abyei. The SPLM’s 11 October decision to suspend its participation in the Government of National Unity in protest of the NCP’s non-implementation of the CPA, marks the most dangerous political escalation since the peace deal was signed. The international community needs to re-engage across the board on CPA implementation but nowhere more urgently than Abyei, where the risks of return to war are rising.

On its face, resolution of the Abyei issue appears relatively straightforward. The sequencing of implementation was clearly set out in the CPA’s Abyei Protocol, beginning with border demarcation. However, the situation continues to fester, mainly due to NCP intransigence. Bringing peace to the region will require addressing both the national political dimension between the NCP and the SPLM and the local dimension between the Ngok Dinka and the neighbouring Misseriya communities. The following five steps offer a way forward:

* The CPA’s international guarantors, led by the U.S., which authored the Abyei Protocol, must send a strong, coordinated message to the NCP that it is legally bound by the ABC report and expected to implement it in good faith. Those who signed the CPA, and who all need to become more active again, include Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, the U.S., the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and its International Partners Forum, the Arab League, the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU).
* Crisis Group has argued in past reports for targeted, multilateral sanctions to influence the regime to implement its commitments under the CPA and in Darfur. Given the fragility of Abyei, pressure is urgently needed to obtain acceptance of the ABC report.
* Tension in and around Abyei must be de-escalated. The parties view the key measures – demarcation of boundaries and appointment of the local administration – as determining the likely outcome of the referendum and have dug in accordingly. The international community can help change this dynamic by facilitating independent dialogue between the Misseriya and Ngok Dinka in order to strengthen the guarantees for continued Misseriya grazing rights in Abyei beyond the referendum and by increasing development projects in Dinka and Misseriya areas. These efforts should be led by the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), with the full backing of the CPA’s international guarantors.
* Oil’s role in the impasse must be acknowledged and dealt with in good faith and the wealth-sharing provisions of the Abyei Protocol carried out. While Abyei’s oil is being depleted and revenue estimates beyond 2007 begin to drop significantly, existing fields contain the majority of oil in the North, and revenues from them are critical to the survival of the NCP. Crisis Group calculates that revenue from Abyei’s oilfields was roughly $599 million for 2005 and $670 million for 2006. We estimate it at $529 million for 2007. More generally, oil is tied directly to the CPA’s viability. The parties need to open a new, transparent dialogue on oil issues, including a plan to establish a revenue-sharing agreement between North and South beyond 2011, for the contingency that Abyei votes to join an independent South. The National Petroleum Commission, the joint NCP-SPLM oversight body created by the CPA, must be allowed to play its role and have direct access to all oil production-related data.
* The newly appointed head of UNMIS, Ashraf Qazi, should prioritise working with the parties to establish a demilitarised zone in Abyei in order to separate the militaries and reduce the risk of renewed conflict. Thousands of Misseriya troops have recently opted to join the SPLA, a move resented by the NCP, which led to a recent dangerous confrontation between army (SAF) and SPLA forces. While the focus should initially be on Abyei, a demilitarised zone could eventually be extended along the entire North-South border.

Abyei’s fate is tied directly to that of the CPA. While Abyei itself is a bone of contention, it is also tied into broader CPA challenges such as transparency and revenue sharing in the oil sector and the demarcation of the North-South border. If peace takes hold in Abyei and implementation moves forward, it can be a model for other North-South border issues and unlock the implementation of additional contentious issues. If the dispute is not resolved soon, however, it will increasingly retard progress on broader CPA implementation and encourage the country’s descent back into war.

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Limbaugh Had Himself Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, Now Is in a Snit of Jealosy over Gore’s Win
Posted by Jon Ponder | Oct. 14, 2007, 9:34 am

While it may have been common knowledge in the Dittohead universe that Rush Limbaugh was nominated for the Nobel Prize this year, the story went largely unreported out here in the real world.

Even though Limbaugh had no chance of winning, now that Al Gore has won the prize, Limbaugh is in a snit of jealousy:

LIMBAUGH: My lawyers at the Landmark Legal Foundation are looking into the possibility of filing an objection with the Nobel committee over the unethical tampering for this award that Al Gore is engaging in. This is clearly above and beyond the pale. I mean, this might happen in high school class president elections and so forth, but this is shameless.

Rush’s nomination sounds on the surface like a stunt dreamed up by Sascha Baron Cohen. A deeper dig reinforces this perception.

For starters, it appears that Limbaugh de facto nominated himself for the prize. The nomination went out under the letterhead of the Landmark foundation, a rightwing nonprofit for which Limbaugh is an unpaid advisor. (Landmark’s donors include relatives of Richard Melon Scaife, the Pittsburgh heir and newspaper publisher who funded the Arkansas Project, a smear campaign against the Clintons that served as the prototype for what we now know as Swiftboating.)

Landmark’s president, Mark Levin, is a snarling, unappealing ideologue who made his name in the 1990s as a Clinton-basher on cable news. Levin is a Rush acolyte and wannabe who even has his own talk show.

Landmark and Levin are essentially Limbaugh’s lapdogs. Even if the idea to nominate Rush didn’t come from Limbaugh himself, it had to have been done with his approval and guidance.

It is laughable to think that anyone as divisive and hateful as Rush Limbaugh would believe he had the remotest chance of winning a peace prize of any sort. And yet in his nomination of Limbaugh Levin cited Rush’s “nearly two decades of tireless efforts to promote liberty, equality and opportunity for all humankind, regardless of race, creed, economic stratum or national origin. These are the only real cornerstones of just and lasting peace throughout the world.”

Now that is funny.

But the main proof that the nomination was a publicity stunt is the fact that it had no official standing from the getgo:

Nominations for the Prize may be made by a broad array of qualified individuals, including former recipients, members of national assemblies and congresses, university professors (in certain disciplines), international judges, and special advisors to the Prize Committee. In some years as many as 199 nominations have been received. The Committee keeps the nominations secret and asks that nominators do the same. Over time many individuals have become known as “Nobel Peace Prize Nominees”, but this designation has no official standing.

Rush is so busy smearing 12 year olds and wounded veterans that it is doubtful he could have found the time to go to Norway to accept the award had he won. However, we’ll have to see if he and his lapdogs at Landmark will find the time to try to steal the limelight from Gore’s much-deserved win by launching a smear campaign against Gore and the Nobel committee.

Too bad for Rush there is no international prize for petty vindictiveness. He would be a shoo-in.

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This is another of those things we hear about and say, “Well, it’s not my problem. I didn’t make them homeless.” We (meaning The Rag) have frequently ranted about the failure of our humanity. As a society, we no longer have any meaningful empathy for the plight of those less fortunate. We give money to the United Way, and we call it good. Our government’s priorities seem to be war, war, and more war. We need to stop this cycle once and for all time.

San Francisco: Fed-Up With Homelessness? It’s About Time!
by Bobby Bogan‚ Oct. 11‚ 2007

So the people of this city have finally had enough of the homeless problem. Good, it’s about time, and let me say to all of you … “Welcome To the Club.” Because you can rest assured that every homeless advocate in this city is just as tired as you, and all of us are delighted that you finally came on board, even if you are about twenty years too late.

It was about that long ago when advocates for the homeless began asking for your cooperation in addressing this tragedy, but at that time all of you were turning your back on the problem because it wasn’t your community being affected by this crisis. All of you who now see the light and are so ready to begin pointing fingers, most likely at the ones victimized by this mess, must first point the finger at yourselves because you were forewarned at a time when it was a much simpler problem and solutions weren’t very far away. Now, unfortunately, it has developed into a nationwide tragedy, and as usual in this country, the ones who count the most (Joe Public) weren’t there when they were needed the most.

You were all kicked back enjoying the comforts of home and family while the less fortunate Americans were falling through the domestic cracks in this nation left and right. Your contention then at that time was to rely on the government to address the matter. It was their responsibility.

Remember when then President Ronald Reagan refused to acknowledge that there was a homeless problem in America? Ain’t that something.

The media, one of the biggest culprits in this mess, who are now fanning the flames of “can’t stand those homeless people,” had an opportunity to cooperate with us in addressing this mess. Yet they choose to play politics with the matter, wouldn’t print the truth, and kept the issue on the back burner so as to not upset whatever agenda was being fed to the public at that time by whoever was in charge.

Now here they are again with more of their hypocritical comments and attitudes concerning this mess, and once again helping to deceive the minds of this society as to the real nature of the problem, and as usual there are those of us living in denial as to our “social responsibility’ to the less-fortunate, which at one time was the ‘great American Way.’ Remember???

What we all must understand is that “homelessness” is America’s greatest failure, and it is a failure that we all must share as true Americans. It is a by-product of greed, selfishness and neglect that reaches far into the moral fiber of this nation. There are homeless families now, and none of you stood up to complain that children were being victimized by homelessness.

Quality of life issues? Defecating, urinating, and sleeping in your doorway? Homelessness is also dehumanizing, and hopelessness is its closest companion. How can we allow ‘hope’ to get lost in a nation as prosperous as America? Keeping hope alive is the ultimate mission of mankind, especially in America, the richest, most resourceful, and supposedly most compassionate nation on the planet.

Would you believe the number of veterans, those who have fought the wars of this nation to preserve our liberties and freedoms, who are homeless in this nation?

You’re fed up? How do you think they feel? How do you think the homeless mothers feel who have to get their kids ready for school in the back seat of her car, washing there faces in gas station restrooms and Mc Donalds? Don’t you think she is also sick and tired?

How do you think homeless seniors feel, who have worked all their lives, raised families, sent the kids to college, paid into the system and then find themselves living on the street or an S.R.O. because their Social Security check can’t pay the high-ass rent in this city because of the greedy landlords?

Don’t forget about adults with disabilities who sleep in ally-ways in their wheel chairs. You’re tired?

Okay, so now we are all tired at the same time…so where do we go from here tired San Franciscans? But hold on for a minute because the game cant began until all the players are on the field. Wait until the problem reaches the doorsteps of those on Russian Hill, Twin Peaks, The Sunset, etc., then we can start talking to one another about a solution. The bringing together of the class structure of this city will be done when everybody wakes up one day and finds poop on one of their corners and someone sleeping in their doorway.

One thing that Mayor Gavin Newsom has been saying to all of you all along is that San Francisco can solve its own homeless problem, and I sincerely believe that. But we have got to work together to get it done. So keep on getting tired, scream at the top of your voice, get frustrated, and throw tantrums.

When you get finished and come back down to earth, stop by and let’s see what we “ALL” can do to address this problem. Until then, “SHUT UP” cause we already told you that one day this day will come.

Bob Bogan is Executive Director of Seniors Organizing Seniors.

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