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Thursday, October 9, 2003 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper.
Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
- - Gore Vidal
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - OCTOBER 9th
1977 -- Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Amnesty International. In October 1998, Amnesty International announces a one-year campaign to focus on Human Rights abuses in the United States. About 1/3 of its membership & source of its funding is there. The US government has long been a self-righteous critic of human rights abuses in other countries which belittles its critics, much as it did foreign critics of racist policies & practices in the 1950s & 60s.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/
2 TV TIPS TONIGHT
1) Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate from Phoenix, AZ
Thursday, 5 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. Pacific Time on CNN.
Today is Congressman Dennis Kucinich's 57th today.
2) Frontline on PBS - "truth, war and consequences"
FRONTLINE traces the roots of the Iraqi war back to the days immediately following September 11, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the creation of a special intelligence operation to quietly begin looking for evidence that would justify the war. The intelligence reports soon became a part of a continuing struggle between civilians in the Pentagon on one side and the CIA, State Department, and uniformed military on the other-a struggle that would lead to inadequate planning for the aftermath of the war, continuing violence, and mounting political problems for the president.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/
Today's NY Times Review of "truth, war and consequences" at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/09/arts/television/09STAN.html?th
RHINO HERE:
I went to sleep last night feeling like I'd been sucker punched in the solar plexus. I woke up still a bit nauseous, but trying for some positive get up & go. The best news is that the California voters rejected Proposition 54 (58%-42%), a contentious ballot initiative that would have banned the government from tracking race in everything from preschools to police work. Clips of Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamonte showed him celebrating that outcome, saying, "No more wedge politics!" He once again stood firm with California's tribal governments, condemning what he called the "shameful attacks on the tribes" during the election. he will remain Lt. Governor under... UG! can I say it? Governor Schwarzenegger. I don't envy his position, but I believe he has the intestinal fortitude to maintain his integrity.
Calif. Voters Reject Race Initiative
The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20031008_169.html
The other good news is that the voters were willing to make an abrupt change. Unfortunately it wasn't the direction Rhino was hoping for, but that willingness I believe can also translate to tossing the shrub gang out if the voters think they're taking it out of their wallets - and of course they are. 52% of the California voters from union households voted to kick Grey Davis out of the Governor's chair, as did 47% of Hispanics. 53% of women wanted Davis gone. A majority of independents, 55%, voted to remove Davis, as did 89% of Republicans and one-quarter of all Democrats, exit polls showed. More than a quarter of all voters who identified themselves as liberals voted to remove him." And as the old adage goes, "It's the economy, meathead" or something like that.
Left-of-center voters unhappy with recall but pass it anyway
By Alex Johnson, MSNBC
http://msnbc.com/news/977396.asp
So it's done. And life must go on. While I've been focused on Total Recall, I've been painfully aware of so many other issues that I'll be trying to get to in the coming weeks. Competing for the top of the list is the BILLIONS of taxpayers dollars that the gang is saying we need to spend to rebuild Iraq, conveniently forgetting the pre-invasion promises by Powell, Wolfowitz , Cheney et al, that Iraqi oil revenues would take care of all that. the following piece reveals that they knew that wasn't true, not only pre-invasion, but pre-9/11.
Report Offered Bleak Outlook About Iraq Oil
By JEFF GERTH, NY Times, 10/5/03
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 - The Bush administration's optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq's oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq's oil industry, according to public records and government officials. The task force, which was based at the Pentagon as part of the planning for the war, produced a book-length report that described the Iraqi oil industry as so badly damaged by a decade of trade embargoes that its production capacity had fallen by more than 25 percent, panel members have said.
Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq's oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war. Now, as the Bush administration requests $20.3 billion from Congress for reconstruction next year, the chief reasons cited for the high price tag are sabotage of oil equipment - and the poor state of oil infrastructure already documented by the task force.
"The problem is this," L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, asserted at a Senate hearing two weeks ago: "The oil infrastructure was severely run down over the last 20 years, and partly because of sanctions over the last decade."...
READ THE REST AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/international/middleeast/05OIL.html?hp
Today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE tells a bunch of unadulterated truth about why American youth are dying Iraq daily and why the US taxpayers are being made responsible for an ever plunging deficit. It's written by Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com), the bestselling author of over a dozen books, including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," and the host of a nationally syndicated daily talk show, "The Thom Hartmann Program," that runs opposite Rush Limbaugh. http://www.thomhartmann.com
7:58:43 AM 
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Blood, Oil, and Tears - and the 2004 Bush Campaign Strategy
by Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams.org, September 4, 2003
The two words we never hear in the corporate media's discussion of Iraq are "oil" and "nationalism." Yet these are the keys to understanding why we got into Iraq, why we only want "limited" involvement from the U.N., why we won't succeed in stopping attacks against us in Iraq, and why George W. Bush's crony capitalism and aircraft-carrier-landing phony-warrior drama have so terribly harmed our nation and set up a disaster for our children's generation.
If we stay, we'll continue to control ten percent of the world's oil (and perhaps as much as twenty percent - Iraq still has vast unexplored areas that Cheney was dividing up in his pre-9/11 Energy Task Force meetings with Halliburton and Enron). Maintaining control of Iraq's oil will keep OPEC off balance, and will keep faith with Rupert Murdoch's advice to George W. Bush before the war that cheap oil resulting from seizing Iraq's oil fields would help the American economy more than any tax cuts.
(Actually, we should stop calling our invasion of Iraq a "war" - we'd already crippled the nation with 12 years of attacks and sanctions, and then sent the UN in to verify that they were helpless. It's like beating somebody senseless on the street, breaking both their legs with a baseball bat, blindfolding them, and then challenging them to fight. This was an invasion, not a war.)
Thus, keeping control of Iraq's oil will help us keep our SUVs and keep faith with Poppy Bush's famous dictum that "the American lifestyle is not negotiable." And transferring the money from Iraq's oil to large corporations that heavily support Republican candidates has obvious benefits to those currently in control of the White House, Senate, House, and Supreme Court...
READ THE REST AT: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0904-11.htm
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6:42:42 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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