7 dec 2008

Already Rewriting Bush' Legacy Yet !

Bush About the War in Iraq (the BAWI-game)



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Is Obama "Natural Born"?


Yesterday, we mentioned how insane lawsuits about Barack Obama's natural live birth were creeping like cracked-out, pissed-off kudzu through our court system. One of them is headed to the Supreme Court today. We used words like "clown car," and "macadamia nuts" to discuss the matter, because we wanted to conjure up the appropriate metaphor to describe the ongoing craziness. But hey! We wouldn't want any of our readers to think that Serious Newsmen weren't taking this matter Deadly Seriously. So here's David Shuster and Peter Williams, talking about the matter, breathlessly. Here's my favorite part:
WILLIAMS: The question is what is a natural-born citizen? That's never been legally defined.

Yes! That's because the founders didn't envision the totally batshit citizens we have now! It goes on:
WILLIAMS: The Supreme Court seemed to say a couple of decades ago if you were native born that meant you were a natural born citizen. It's never been conclusively determined. So it's a close question, I guess. You could say it's ambiguous. Most scholars agree that the Supreme Court is not going to weigh in and overturn the votes of 44 million Americans unless it was absolutely crystal clear.

Obama and Iran

Gingrich Says Israel Should Set A Deadline For Attack On Iran»

Last night on Fox News, co-host Alan Colmes asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich about a Jerusalem Post article yesterday reporting that Israel is preparing options to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. At first Gingrich gave a measured response, saying “I don’t think we’re prepared to sanction an attack on Iran.” Yet just moments later, Gingrich said the Israelis should set a deadline for an attack on Iran:
GINGRICH: I think that the Israeli government probably would be best served if they created a deadline of sometime next fall and basically told the new American president that they’re willing to do anything they can to help him achieve a non-nuclear Iran prior, say, to September or October, but that there is a point at which they will not run the risk.
Naturally, Sean Hannity concurred. “I agree with that wholeheartedly, Mr. Speaker.”

It seems that Gingrich has suddenly changed his tune on “deadlines” involving war and peace. In fact, he was one of many conservatives who were strictly opposed to any timeline to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq:
– “I am not for any precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, and I think Senator Kerry was advocating a policy of absolute defeat when he suggested he would set a date, which I think he said could be as early as May.” [4/13/06, Fox News]
– MR. RUSSERT: Senator Dodd, should the United States set a firm deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq? SEN. DODD: I, I believe we should, Tim. […] GINGRICH: I disagree deeply with, with Senator Dodd. [5/20/07, NBC]

So it appears that Gingrich is against deadlines for peace and for deadlines for war.

Bush Claims His Library Institute At SMU Will Not ‘Herald’ His Presidency»

Yes, a short message, but he is always long enough, isn't it?
During an interview on Thursday with NBC News’s John Yang, President Bush talked about his life after the presidency, namely, putting together his presidential library at Southern Methodist University. A “think tank” will accompany Bush’s library there, and during the interview, Bush claimed the institute won’t attempt to burnish his legacy:
BUSH: The klieg lights will be off as far as I’m concerned and the new president will have his chance to serve in this great job. And I’ll be occupied with some interesting things to do. We’re going to build a freedom institute at Southern Methodist, a policy center that’s going to not be a place where we herald George Bush or [the] Republican Party.

But the institute Bush is referring to will be completely independent from the academic governance of the university. It will reportedly “sponsor research and programs designed to promote the vision of the president” and “celebrate” Bush’s presidency. One university professor said that “[a]cademics everywhere should be concerned about this” and that it “goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry.”
In fact, Bush’s chief political operative Karl Rove — who is orchestrating the “Bush Legacy project” — will serve as a “critical resource” for the institute. Moreover, the library “will rely chiefly” on a design firm, rather than historians, to showcase Bush’s policies.
A number of SMU professors have expressed outrage that the library will trade academic scholarship for partisan praise of Bush. And after the United Methodist Church referred a petition to reject the library to its local jurisdiction that owns the university property, Methodist ministers launched a PR campaign highlighting the institute’s partisan nature. While the petition ultimately failed, a church committee offered a resolution urging the Bush library to protect the academic “integrity” of SMU.
Indeed, Bush has already begun promoting his tenure in the White House and he seems happy enough to rewrite history to do it.

Mike huckebee is a Jackass


At a book signing this week, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee once again spoke truth to power and rejected two lies spread by the gay liberal media: 1) that the gay movement is a civil rights movement and 2) that violence against "homosexuals" is a big deal. Huckabee then shed light on the issue that nobody else will touch with a 10-foot pole: the gay violence perpetrated against Christians. It turns out that far from being the victims of hate crimes, the gays are the real haters and the true criminals.

Hucakabee explained, "there is a difference between the civil rights movement of African-Americans who were essentially hosed down in the streets by Bull Connor in Birmingham and beaten with their skulls crashed in on the bridges of Selma for being black, not for their behavior, not for anything other than their race."

Duh! Good point. Are gays really that persecuted? Show me a gay who had his skull cracked. Name one! 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was robbed, pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote area, and left to die, which he did. He had brain damage and a fractured skull, but it wasn't cracked. Besides, Shepard was in Wyoming, and nowhere near Selma, so it's so not comparable. And Shepard, like the other homosexuals he represents, aren't attacked for their race, they are attacked for their behavior. So, if they don't want to get attacked, they can just choose to be straight.
But it gets worse. Not only are the attacks against gay people not that big a deal, but it turns out the gays are the ones attacking Christians, the real victims. We all know that the persecution of Christians in the United States is at an all time high, rivaled only by the pre-Constantine Roman Empire. As if Christians aren't already disenfranchised in this country, they also are violently assaulted by homosexual christophobes. Again, Huckabee is dead on: "And so do the Christians [get violently attacked]. It was in Michigan that people barged into a church and were rather violent.... Well, it was certainly disruptive." The disruptions suffered by Christians really puts things like the fatal shooting of 15-year-old Lawrence King by his 14-year-old classmate into perspective, doesn't it? The Christian persecution is not an isolated incident, but endemic. Huckabee points yet another example:

In California, when some peaceful protesters, including a 79-year-old lady by the name of Phyllis, was out holding a cross, it was violently taken from her and stomped." When people stomp on a Christian's cross, they are basically nailing them to a cross, like Jesus. My heart goes out to Phyllis Burgess and all the people like Phyllis who have rallied against gay rights, screamed and elbowed their way through crowds, pushed over disabled people, and had their styrofoam crosses taken and stomped. Though they are no longer with us, they will certainly be missed. And their legacy lives on every time someone uses religion to attack gay people.

The other victims of hate crimes, who are ignored the media, are straight men. We must remember that even Matthew Shepard's killers were victims. In fact, the defendants tried to claim a "gay panic" defense, since they had acted under "temporary insanity," caused by Shepard hitting on them. It turns out, according to the killers' girlfriends, Shepard did not, in fact, come on to them. But I will have to write another piece to explore this particular hate crime: heterophobic attacks on homosexuals.

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Cell phones the latest rage in Bush Alaska


ALEX DEMARBAN alex@alaskanewspapers.com
December 05, 2008 at 8:34AM AKST

The cellular age has finally reached village Alaska in a big way.

As a result, villagers are signing up to get cell phones in droves, praising benefits they say will range from quicker backcountry rescues to staying in touch with large families sprawling the state.
GCI, which bills itself as Alaska’s largest telecommunications company, launched the village cellular service in dozens of communities in recent weeks.
For now, the company is blanketing two regions in Western Alaska – the Seward Peninsula and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. But officials promise to have cell phones chirping in all the state’s villages by the end of 2010.
The cell phone became mainstream technology in most of America more than a decade ago, but in rural Alaska the service has generally been restricted to hub cities such as Bethel. It also existed in a few village clusters where pioneering companies sometimes provided limited or costly plans.
The response to GCI’s new village service has been “pretty crazy,” said Sara Huff, the wireless operations manager in Anchorage.
The company turned on cellular service in 13 communities in the Nome region near Norton Sound in mid-October. There, officials expected to have 225 new customers by the end of the year.
They had 800 by early December.
The cell phones are also a big hit in 36 villages near the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, said Toni Crosby, head of GCI’s office in Bethel.
The technology arrived in that region in early November. The company expected about 300 new customers within two months, Crosby said. Instead, 1,000 people signed up in half the time.
GCI officials traveling to those villages to explain various plans have been mobbed with inquiries, especially how to get a phone, she said. The questions start when the officials land at the village airstrip and don’t let up until the GCI workers leave the village several hours later.
“People are loving it,” she said.

Every village
As for GCI’s plans in the rest of the state, the company intends to add 59 villages next year, including around the hub communities of Kotzebue, Barrow and Dillingham. They also plan next year to expand cell service in the Copper Valley region and to villages in the Aleutian and Pribilof islands that don’t yet have it, said Dan Boyette, vice president of rural consumer service.
To provide the service, GCI first built up its telecommunications infrastructure across the state, including through aquistions of some rural companies, he said.
Assisting with the effort is a longtime federal subsidy provided by the Universal Service Fund, a fee collected from long-distance calls that subsidizes telecommunications service in rural and poor communities.
“Federal supports helps, but it was just time for us to do this,” Boyette said. “The wireless business is the way the world is going.”
Villages have wanted cell phone coverage like the rest of America has had for years, he said.

“It’s finally time for rural Alaska to be included in that,” he said.

ACS, a rival of GCI that calls itself Alaska's leading provider of wireless and broadband services, provides wireless in Southeast and in areas generally associated with the state’s road system, including in Anchorage and Fairbanks, according to its Web site. It also provides wireless in the hub communities of Nome, Barrow and Kotzebue, as well as at a few spots associated with the oil industry out of Prudhoe Bay.
An ACS official, asked whether the company planned to expand cell service in villages, said this:
“Our basic message is we already cover over 80 percent of the Alaska population with our wireless coverage, including along Alaska’s major communication corridors, so we’re really happy about that,” said Paula Dobbyn, director of corporate communications.
She said a large part of the company’s focus in the last year has been installing an undersea fiber optics cable from Anchorage to the Lower 48. The cable will boost bandwidth in Alaska and allow people to digitally move large amounts of protected information. For example, an oil company in Alaska might use it to send seismic exploration data to Houston, Tex.

Fish camp is calling
As for GCI’s efforts in the Bethel region, most new customers have bought the plan that provides unlimited long-distance calls in Alaska, free calls to other GCI cell phones around the country and unlimited texting, all for $54.99 a month, said Crosby.
It’s the same price offered to Anchorage residents. Rural parents want it to give the phone to their children, who have left the village to attend college or boarding schools, she said.

“The parents say the kids have no excuse not to call,” Crosby said.

The cell phones could help people with subsistence activities.
One GCI employee recently called the Bethel office from fish camp, Crosby said. And a different GCI employee returning from a moose hunt called someone in Bethel on his cell phone as he approached town — he needed a truck to haul the moose meat into town, she said.
GCI’s cell phone signals, usually sent from 60-foot towers in each village, are not meant to work between villages, Boyette said.
But coverage overlaps in villages that are close together or in some places where trees and mountains don’t obstruct the line-of-sight radio signal. That “residual coverage” also exists in a few areas where cell phone towers exceed 60 feet, Boyette said.
One place with overlapping signals is between the communities of Napaskiak, Napakiak, Oscarville and Bethel, Boyette said.
In that area, like many parts of rural Alaska, local rescue teams are often called upon to save lives, said Ben Beaver, of Napakiak. The cell phone could allow stranded travelers on the tundra the chance to get quick assistance with a phone call.

“If the snowmachine breaks down or people are lost, they could call help,” he said.

The public safety officer in the village of 375, Beaver spoke by one of the new cell phones, bought by the local governing body to help him with his job.
The cell phone will be especially useful for village public safety officers, he said. They’ll be reachable wherever they go, whether in the Lower 48 or when they respond to emergencies in neighboring villages.
Mark Olick, the maintenance man at the Tuntutuliak school, said he’s one of about 30 people in the village of 400 who have bought the new cell phone.
Speaking on that new phone to an Anchorage reporter — the connection was garbled early in the conversation but remained clear for several minutes — Olick called the technology “a good thing” for rural Alaska.
The signal in his village is strong, he said. He recently traveled seven miles outside the village and the phone still worked.
Olick got one for himself and his wife. He bought the unlimited-in-Alaska plan so he could call family in Bethel and Anchorage without worrying about exceeding minutes.
But he’s guarding the new phone number so he doesn’t get calls at odd hours. People already keep his land-line phone ringing, asking whether he can open the school gymnasium so kids can play.

“They keep calling nonstop,” he said.

Obama Pledges Massive Public Works Program


"We won't just throw money at the problem," Obama said in his weekly radio address and Internet video. "We'll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve _ by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world."
Obama's remarks come after the Labor Department announced Friday that employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years.
Obama said his plan would put millions of people to work by "making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s."
He also wants to install energy-saving light bulbs and replace old heating systems in federal buildings to cut costs and create jobs.
School buildings would get an upgrade, too. "Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools," Obama said.
As a part of the plan, Obama said he wants to expand Internet access in communities. Hospitals also should be connected to each other online.
"Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online," he said.
Obama said he would announce other details of the economic recovery plan in the coming weeks. He said he'd work with Congress to pass the initiative when lawmakers reconvene in January.

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Barack Obama and Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski


Wow, an alarming message! Someone wrote:
Obama has been groomed by Zbigniew Brzezinksi.
Zbig is a major player in the CFR.*
Obama is, in other words, not what he pretends to be. He talks about change, but he is doing the same thing as several of his predecessors has done, with the exception of his foreign policies: They are even more aggressive than the ones of Bush43.


* He means the Council of Foreign Relations, established in New York on July 29, 1921. Nothing strange or wrong with that. A remarkable quote from the Wikipedia article:
On 24 November 1953, a study group heard a report from political scientist William Henderson regarding the ongoing conflict between France and Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh forces, a struggle that would later become known as the First Indochina War. Henderson argued that Ho's cause was primarily nationalist in nature and that Marxism had "little to do with the current revolution." Further, the report said, the United States could work with Ho to guide his movement away from Communism. State Department officials, however, expressed skepticism about direct American intervention in Vietnam and the idea was tabled. Over the next twenty years, the United States would find itself allied with anti-Communist South Vietnam and against Ho and his supporters in Vietnam War.
By now we call that the “Vietnamese Liberation War”.

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But the initial message, ai, that’s not good? What to say?

First we will see what Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski means in real life.

He had mixed relations with the Reagan administration. On the one hand, he supported it as seemingly the only alternative to the Democrats' pacifism, but he also criticized it as seeing foreign policy in overly black-and-white terms.
He remained involved in Polish affairs, critical of the imposition of Martial Law in Poland in 1981, and more so of Western European acquiescence to the imposition in the name of stability. Brzezinski briefed Vice President George Bush before his 1987 trip to Poland that aided in the revival of the Solidarity movement.
In 1985, under the Reagan administration, Brzezinski served as a member of the President's Chemical Warfare Commission. From 1987 to 1988, he worked on the NSC-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. From 1987 to 1989 he also served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
In 1988, Brzezinski was co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force and endorsed Bush for president, breaking with the Democratic party (coincidentally hurting the career of his former student Madeleine Albright, who was Dukakis's foreign policy advisor). Brzezinski published The Grand Failure the same year, predicting the failure of Gorbachev's reforms and the collapse of the Soviet Union in a few more decades. He said there were five possibilities for the Soviet Union: successful pluralization, protracted crisis, renewed stagnation, coup (KGB, Military), or the explicit collapse of the Communist regime. He called collapse "at this stage a much more remote possibility" than protracted crisis. He also predicted that the chance of some form of communism existing in the Soviet Union in 2017 was a little more than 50% and that when the end did come it would be "most likely turbulent". In the event, the Soviet system collapsed totally in 1991 following Moscow's crackdown on Lithuania's attempt to declare independence, the Nagorno-Karabakh War of the late 1980s, and scattered bloodshed in other republics. This was a less violent outcome than Brzezinski and other observers anticipated.
In 1989 the Communists failed to mobilize support in Poland, and Solidarity swept the general elections. Later the same year, Brzezinski toured Russia and visited a memorial to the Katyn Massacre. This served as an opportunity for him to ask the Soviet government to acknowledge the truth about the event, for which he received a standing ovation in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Ten days later, the Berlin Wall fell, and Soviet-supported governments in Eastern Europe began to totter.
Strobe Talbott, one of Brzezinski's long-time critics, conducted an interview with him for TIME magazine entitled "Vindication of a Hardliner."
In 1990 Brzezinski warned against post–Cold War euphoria. He publicly opposed the Gulf War, arguing that the U.S. would squander the international goodwill it had accumulated by defeating the Soviet Union and that it could trigger wide resentment throughout the Arab world. He expanded upon these views in his 1992 work Out of Control.
However, in 1993 Brzezinski was prominently critical of the Clinton administration's hesitation to intervene against Serbia in the Yugoslavian civil war. He also began to speak out against Russia's First Chechen War, forming the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya. Wary of a move toward the reinvigoration of Russian power, Brzezinski negatively viewed the succession of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin to Boris Yeltsin. In this vein, he became one of the foremost advocates of NATO expansion.

Post 9/11
After 9/11 Brzezinski was criticized for his role in the formation of the Afghan mujaheddin network, some of which would later form the Taliban and would shelter Al Qaeda camps. He asserted that blame rightfully ought to be laid at the feet of the Soviet Union's invasion which radicalized the relatively stable Muslim society. However, Brzezinski is also accused of having "knowingly increased the probability that they (the Russians) would invade" by supporting Afghan rebels before the invasion and drawing the Russians into an "Afghan trap".
Brzezinski also became a leading critic of the Bush administration's "war on terror." Some painted him as a neoconservative because of his links to Paul Wolfowitz and his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski wrote The Choice in 2004 which expanded upon The Grand Chessboard but criticized the Bush administration's foreign policy. He has defended the paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. He has been outspoken in his criticism of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent conduct of the war.
Brzezinski currently lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He is married to the sculptor Emilie Anna Benes, a grandniece of Czechoslovakia's former president Edvard Beneš, and has three children. Ian served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO and is now a Principal at Booz Allen Hamilton. Mark is a partner in McGuire Woods LLP, Washington, D.C. His daughter Mika is a reporter who is currently the co-host and news reader on Morning Joe on MSNBC.

Support for U.S Presidential candidate Barack Obama
In September 2007, Brzezinski endorsed Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama, saying, "What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we live in a very different world where we have to relate to a variety of cultures and peoples."

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The relation with Paul Wolfowitz isn’t something what makes me happy about Brzezinski but we can’t call him a neocon because Wolfowitz belongs to the bloodthirsty neocon cohort. And also we can’t call Barack Obama a neocon because Brzezinski who supported him is related to the neocon Wolfowitz. We can be sure that Wolfowitz does not support Obama and stronger: Brzezinski did not support Wolfowitz either, nor the politics of Bush43.


If a wise President has doubts about certain people with power he keeps them under control by his own dominant influence in his own surrounding. Keep them busy by standing supreme and make them compliant by friendly decisive corrections to conclude discussions about the policies. The Brzezinski-figure in March 2009 81 years old, is almost dead and not as important and connected as the Clintons. Ideas about a total helpless, trainee President Obama, without any shadow of a personal vision or influence, who takes immediately the matching colour of his changing backgrounds over, even from opponents and is therefore already preparing to destroy Europe by a full-scale nuclear war, or any other idiocy, because some ugly one in his rear-sight thinks that this is a good idea… no, that idea about Obama is not very believable.
I know intensely proved high talented people and how consistent they can be to reach their goals in life, with patience and some slight dirty tricks or forcing tactics reaching what is planned. That’s life. You have to compete to be the best with the highest ambitions and there is nothing wrong with that.
That’s how a President has to behave.
I have to remind the message writer the factual circumstances that the President elect is not the current President, but he is elected to become President on the 20th of January and he has not done anything. So, you are addicted to accuse the POTUS of all evil, a nice habit so far concerning the war-criminal Bush43, but it has to stop now. You have to kick that habit with Barack Obama, even if he has not had any chance to do something evil as effective POTUS.
We may expect that he will change something, but of course he will be inaugurated like any president before him. That’s exactly the same procedure. He will live with his family in the White House too, just like former presidents. Yes, that's all the same.
It happens to be that I share a lot of Obama’s rare habit to behave exceptional normal. I fully understand that.
Such a kind of people want to realize substantial gains, each prioritized in a well-known comprehensive program, with a large variety of tactics and tools, both hidden tools and public tools. So he writes the marching orders and the rules of conduct. His servants (like Hilary Clinton) are due to obedience. He can command the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense as well as any other member of his staff and Cabinet, but he can not command a Senator or Representative in the House. And this one is an extremely strong leader, full aware of his personal power, reaching higher than any president in my lifetime.
It is an honour for his Cabinet members and advisors to sit at his feet and they know that.
The harsh character of such a strong leader will not show up in public and they will adore that.
It is his job to be decisive.

They (the new President elect and Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski) are even more aggressive than the ones of Bush43 ??? That’s total nonsense.

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