Torture By Any Other Name......Would Still Be As Painful

That darn crazy librul media. You know, the one that bends over backwards not to offend the easily offended by not being too controversial?
Well, it seems for years, it called waterboarding torture. Well, it still considers waterboarding torture, just not when the US does it.
Sure, it's a double standard, but in order to placate those who maybe torturing, or have family members in the torture business, they can't infer that there's anything wrong with it. It's like, for fear of offending drug dealers, they started calling them entrepreneurs.
It's obvious by now that criminals are in charge, enabled by the corporate media, embedded in the social political elite, afraid to offend the leadership, because somewhere down the road, there may be a cushy government position for them.
Our corporate media has long abandoned the responsibilities of a free press. Maybe that's why newspaper circulation declines, and maybe why the country has devolved into a corporate idiocracy.

Rising Heroin Use Among Teenagers:It's A Good Thing!

In pre-invasion Afghanistan, the Taliban had successfully eradicated the opium poppy cultivation trade. Now, since the US led invasion of that country, Afghanistan provides 93% of the world's heroin production, or about $4 billion dollars in street value. So, not only are we losing the war on terrorism there, we are also losing the war on drugs. Is there anything the Bush administration can't botch?
Some people have accused US puppet Hamid Karzai of being soft on opium farming, even going so far as to protect the narcotics traffickers and opium producers because they are political allies.
So, with all the protections we have in the US from terrorist attacks, how does the heroin make it's way into the US?

"It's very difficult to say which smugglers are in the government," Hassenzoi said. "I don't know names. But I believe there are people in the government, and that is why we can't stop the smuggling. These people in the government are driving cars without license plates and with dark windows. Nobody knows who they are. Nobody can stop them."

The fall out from all this is that heroin use is rising among teenagers across the US. In order to prevent the Taliban from getting more recruits, we should look the other way while teenagers like Amy Bousfeld die? That is a sick foreign policy and a hypocritical drug policy.
The Taliban never attacked us on 9/11. After we invaded that country in 2001, following the attacks, we allowed al Qeada to slip into Pakistan while we installed former oil executive Karzai as a puppet president so that UNOCAL could build a pipeline through that country from the oil fields of Russia to port in Pakistan. During the jihad following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI used opium cultivation to fund the muhajadeen, but the Taliban had eradicated nearly all opium cultivation from Afghanistan.
Now the US government, not being satisfied with sending young men and women to their deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, have decided that the possibility of your child OD'ing isn't as important as achieving it's goals in the Middle East. Are we safer now that instead of our children becoming methheads, they're becoming junkies instead?

Random Rantings

Last week, on Face The Nation, independent (yeah, right) Senator Joe Lieberman advocated the bombing of Iran. While not in line with the way many people feel about excelerating the MidEast conflict (most of them want it ended, hence the Democraps control of Congress in 2006), it is in line with the neocons and the Israeli government, who have been looking for an excuse to drop nuclear weapons on Iran for as long as two years ago. As Charley Reese put it:

Iran has no intercontinental missiles, and the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons is Israel. Please note that the United States flatly refuses to endorse the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East. Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has refused to sign it. Iran admits international inspectors. Israel flatly refuses to allow international inspectors. The only country in today's Middle East with weapons of mass destruction and a history of invading and occupying other people's countries is Israel.

As for Iran's alleged threat to "wipe Israel off the map," that is propaganda based on a mistranslation. Nobody in Iran has ever threatened to attack Israel militarily. The accurate quotes from Iranians have been simply that Israel as a Zionist state will eventually collapse, just as the Soviet Union as a communist state did. Iranian officials have even explicitly said they have no desire or intention of attacking Israel.

The Bush Doctrine Applied To Other Countries
Now suppose Iran, who has been threatened by not only the US, but Israel as well, decided to pre emptively strike first? Wouldn't that be okay? By the Bush regime's specious reasoning, the attacks on 9/11 were perfectly justified because the US had threatened the Taleban first with a carpet of bombs, after they rejected our carpet of gold to build a pipeline through their country.
Send Your Kids To Die, Leave Mine Alone
Mitt Romney has stated he wants to increase the size of the military. But like Joe Lieberman, Rudy Ghouliani, or any other war pimps running for the presidency (which includes everyone, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, and Mike Gravel), none of them have any family members in the military.
That's why there's the big push to pass the immigration "reform" bill, not only will it lower wages by flooding the labor pool, but:

a provision in the stalled immigration bill that would have allowed some undocumented aliens to join the military

What right-thinking white person wouldn't endorse a war where we send all them brown-skinned people from over here to fight all them brown-skinned people over there? When this bill passes, it won't matter that the Army missed it's recruitment goals, because there'll be plenty of people to send off to kill and die for big oil and the military-industrial complex. Especially when the war engulfes the whole MidEast because some idiots decided we needed to bomb Iran.

Isn't Iran A Sovereign Nation?

Continuing on the Bush administration policy of hypocrisy, the weapons used in an attack in Iran came from the US. Wasn't it last week that the Bush administration laid claims that weapons seized in Iraq came from Teheran? They then backed off the statement and said they were coming from Iran, but not the government. (You remember, these weapons)Meanwhile, US patrol ships are on alert in the Gulf, as the rhetoric escalates like US carrier groups there.
Then over in Afghanistan, al Qaida releases a video of it's attacks on US forces there. The "terrorist" organization is hiding out in Pakistan, which brings to mind Bush's oft-repeated statement:

"[w]e have made it clear to all nations that if you harbor terrorists, you are just as guilty as the terrorists, you are an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account."

So shouldn't we threatening Pakistan? Well, according to Porter Goss:

when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play."

In other words, we can't go into Pakistan because it's a sovereign state, even though it's harboring terrorists. But Iraq and Iran are sovereign nations, too, yet we didn't hesitate to invade them when they didn't harbor terrorists, and Iran even offered to help us with the Taleban in Afghanistan.
The "war on terror" began as we sought those responsible for the terrible attacks of 9/11. 9/11 was also used as a pretext for our invasion of Iraq, even though later, Bush admitted that there was no link.Now Bush isn't even bothering to link Iran to 9/11, instead relying on the resolution passed in 2002 granting him power to invade Iraq, which he acquired under false pretenses, (i.e., by lying). So while the politicians waste time arguing on whether to pass non-binding resolutions on Iraq, instead of investigating and impeaching those who manipulated intelligence to get their oppurtunity to wage an illegal war against a sovereign nation, the Bush cabal is planning to start another war, the third of his presidency. I guess George didn't have to clean his plate before he got dessert when he was a child.

Better Off Dead?

If you're an enlisted person, fighting in the endless war on terror, if you happen to be engaged by the enemy, better hope they kill you, rather than just maim or disfigure you. Why?
Because if you're unable to finish your tour of duty, you will be expected to pay back your enlistment bonus. Never mind that your sacrificed part of your self so that military contractors will have enough Hummer juice to drive to their summer (or winter )homes, that's money that could be used to lure another sucker, er, I mean, soldier, off to protect the corpocracy in another part of the world.
Of course, when you come back with out an arm or leg, or suffering brain damage, you'll probably have to go through some sort of rehabilitation, do they charge you for that as well. then if you're lucky enough to find a job, well than you can start to pay back that bonus, while trying to retrofit your house with wheelchair ramps to make it easier for you to access, having given up part of your body so Big Oil can reap record profits. My suggestion? Collect money from all those people with the yellow ribbon magnets on their cars.

Didn't Any Of These People Read 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf'?

The Bush administration has a problem. Looking to start a war with Iran people still remember the lies they told about Iraq. Like the mangled maxim he muttered many years ago, "Fool me twice...can't get fooled again".
Already the dialogue has started to shift towards another end. Because they have been exposed, in part by Scooter Libby's trial, as manipulating intelligence on Iraq to give the appearance of a weapons program in Iraq that didn't exist, the whole "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons" crap has been been put on the back burner, and now has shifted to a "nuclear Iran",(mostly because Iran hasn't been found to be doing anything except building a nuclear power plant). Now, our failure in Iraq has been shifted from "terrorists and insurgents", to a Iranian backed insurgency. Yes, we are not fighting an occupation resistance, we are faced with an Iranian backed Sunni insurgency (which is strange, since most of Iran is Shi'ite).
So, for those of you who wish to see what Iran looks like before we nuke it back to the stone age, take a look here. Some people get what the troops surge in Iraq is all about, while others believe that it's all about winning. Or victory. Or not failing.
Thousands of people gathered yesterday to protest the war. Conspicuously absent were any Democratic presidential aspirants save Dennis Kucinich. John Edwards has stated:

"At the top of these threats is Iran. Iran threatens the security of Israel and the entire world. Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons."

Which if it doesn't explicitly state he supports a military option against Iran, it certainly is implicit. Hillary Clinton, busy campaigning in Iowa has said in the past:

"A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond. The regime's pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it poses. U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot and should not – must not – permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. In order to prevent that from occurring, we must have more support vigorously and publicly expressed by China and Russia, and we must move as quickly as feasible for sanctions in the United Nations. And we cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran – that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons."

She also said that when she voted for the war in Iraq "I acted on the best judgment I had at the time." What if her judgement on Iran is wrong, too?