Wasteland of the Free

WHY BOTHER?

FASCISM

WAR

RACISM

MYTHS

LETTERS

HYPOCRISY

COVERUPS

ENVIRONMENT

SPORTS

PSYCHOPATHIC SADISTS IN GOVERNMENT

CONSEQUENCES OF ATOMIC WAR

RAYS OF HOPE

Web Log for pessimistic things worthy of mention as they arise

• July 2005: Karl Rove is the Traitor in the White House who outed Valerie Plame

  In June 2004 Bush said "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of". Will Bush Junior now break his own word and keep the lying deceptive Rove in the White House where he can do even more damage to America behind the scenes? After lying for 18 months by claiming he had nothing to do with revealing the identity of Valerie Plame to reporters, Rove deserves prison time, 20 or 30 years at least. The mastermind of propaganda in the White House, the Goebbels of the Bush Administration, should not be given the benefit of the doubt for his lame excuses; Rove's weasely attempt to claim that "he never actually said her name" won't wash; if someone were to refer to the "lying husband of Laura Bush", we would all know precisely who was being identified without the actual name being necessary.

  Here's what Bush Senior had to say in 1999 about the exact type of treason Rove has done: "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources," the former CIA director told a group of Agency employees in 1999. "They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."

• Is George Bush the AntiChrist? see the proof

• from an article in Asia Times Online by Ehsan Ahrari titled "The clash of fundamentalists " on 9/11/04:

  A fundamentalist belief system has little use for a contrary point of view. Perhaps the strong feeling of righteousness - or even righteous indignation - overpowers the inherent human curiosity and the need for inquiry. Eric Hoffer labels these fundamentalists "true believers", in his seminal work of the same title. His description of this personality type states, "It is the true believer's ability to shut his eyes to facts which in his own mind deserve never to be seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and consistency."

• from A Family in Baghdad

  Dear faiza
  .........
  .........

  I read your blog and everything the other American women told you about us losing our rights is true. After the planes went into the trade centers Americans were afraid and angry. The Bush administration took advantage of the fear and anger to pass some laws that I think are unconstitutional. The right to go into your home without a warrent, to take your belongings, to arrest you and hold you indefinetly without charging you with a crime.

  We were told that the Government had to "get" the terrorists and these laws would help them to do that. Most Americans believed that at the time.

  And yes, we do have a lot of very poor people here. We have a lot of social welfare programs, but they don't give the poor people enough to live a decent life. There are jobs, but the jobs for unskilled help don't pay enough to live on. Many families struggle to maintain their families. In rural areas people are very frugal and grow their own food. That helps.

  The cost of living is very high. I don't know what things cost in Iraq, but here it costs almost $4.00 for a gallon of milk, a small apartment cost about $700 a month to rent. To feed a family of four would cost about $125.00 a week, and that would be just for basic food, not the prepackaged fancy kind.

  Our schools are not the best any more. Some of the schools are dangerous. Angry city youth have formed gangs and they fight each other, often killing innocent bystanders. All of this has happened in the last 20 years.

  America is in a moral and social decline. Many American families took their children out of the public school system and schooled them at home. We call it home schooling. In fact, I home schooled my children for five years. They went to a public high school, but they went with their morals intact.

  Drugs and alcohol are a big problem, many kids start using them in high school and before. Drugs are illegal, but it doesn't seem to matter, kids are still able to get them if they want them.

  In America we still have the freedom to work towards change. There is an opportunity to challenge laws that you don't agree with. One of the things that I worked on for 4 years was a summer program designed for kids at risk of failing in school. It is just one example of a way of trying to help. There are people all over America working for change. I just pray that it isn't too late.

  Love,
  Joan

• Effects of depleted uranium everyone should know who's guilty of using Weapons of Mass Destruction

• 2/16/04: I’m going to miss America by Canadian Aaron Braaten:

  In the latest issue of Cigar Aficionado, General Tommy Franks let the burqa slip up far enough to reveal that if there’s one more terrorist attack on United States of America, it will be no more. Everything our southern sisters and brothers hold dear: up in smoke. Electoral voting: gone. Would-be military dictatorship by executive orders: in. Quasi-free press: out. De facto Carlyle/Black propaganda machine: in. Given a high probability that a pre-emptive strike in the Middle East would instigate a response on American soil, thereby leading to a dissolving of the Constitution, I’m going to miss that good old country I’ve read so many great things about.

• 2/12/04: Time magazine asks, "Does George Bush Have a Credibility Gap?"
  Duh, Time. Does a bear shit in the woods?        

• 2/10/04: I work with computers and databases on a routine basis, so I know that electronic voting machines make voting fraud extremely easy. SOMEBODY has to be able to access the databases which capture the votes, if for no other reason than to maintain the system. It should be obvious that a corrupt partisan bitch like Katherine Harris would have no qualms about 'adjusting' electronic votes if it were in her power to do so, AND FLORIDA PLANS TO GO TO ELECTRONIC VOTING IN THE 2004 ELECTION. The Chief Executive of Diebold, Inc., which makes the electronic voting machines, states outright that he's in Bush's camp, and it's known that his electronic voting systems can be easily hacked. Want to know exactly how? Their databases are even .mdb files that can be easily read by Microsoft Access! Want more information? Check out this Google search

• 2/5/04: Bush's Military Records which show him to have been AWOL from his assigned post for over 30 days, which makes him a deserter. He also refused a direct order to get a flying physical. The man deserved a courtmartial, dishonorable discharge, and a prison sentence, but because he is the tender delicate son of a powerful politician, he got treated with kid gloves. Check out AWOLBush.com and the top ten lies bush has told about his military service! The man is a blatant criminal, plain and simple. Guess what? There's no statute of limitations on desertion, he belongs in jail TODAY.

• 1/11/04: United States militarism - an amazingly long list.

• 12/9/03: The Record of the Bush Administration Slowly Unfolds

• 11/27/03 I find myself wondering each day as I pick up my morning newspaper, "I wonder what stupid thing George Bush Junior did yesterday?"

• 11/2/03: An excellent biography of George Bush Junior is presented at WikiPedia the free online Encyclopedia. It includes the following:

  Bush enrolled in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War and served as an F-102 pilot for a period until he was grounded after failing to appear for a mandatory physical exam and drug test. Controversy exists over whether he broke the law by going Absent Without Leave (AWOL). Bush insists that he did serve as a pilot during his entire tour of duty. However, no documents confirming this have been made available.

  He had serious problems with alcohol for years after college, including a drunk driving arrest in Maine in 1976. Allegations of past cocaine use have been widely circulated. Bush himself has refused to comment on any past history of drug use.

  ... and this about his business practices:

  Bush began his career in the oil industry in 1975 when he formed the oil and gas exploration company Arbusto Energy and continued working in the energy industry until 1986. His forays into the industry were disastrous, losing millions of dollars.

  In 1978 Bush ran for the House of Representatives and was defeated by the Democratic State Senator Kent Hance.

  After working on his father's successful 1988 presidential campaign, he assembled a group of partners from his father's close friends and purchased the Texas Rangers baseball franchise in 1989.

  Bush was involved in controversial stock trades while serving on the board of directors of Harken Energy Corp. in 1990. Bush has claimed that he sold Harken stock on the assumption of a positive corporate outlook. However, on April 20 of that year, company President Mikel D. Faulkner told the directors that the company was facing grave financial problems, including a serious cash crisis that was exacerbated by pressure from lenders, as well as a slumping oil market. After receiving this dire news, in June Bush sold 212,140 shares of Harken stock. Shortly thereafter, on August 20, Harken reported a $23.2 million quarterly loss. Bush waited 36 weeks to file an SEC form about his sale. An SEC investigation, conducted while Bush's father was President of the United States, declared "the investigation has been terminated as to the conduct of Mr. Bush, and that, at this time, no enforcement action is contemplated with respect to him." but the investigation's termination "must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result." As President, Bush has refused to authorize the SEC to release its full report on the investigation. When reporters asked Bush about his Harken activities, he told them that they "need to look back on the director's minutes", although this would in fact be impossible because Harken has declined to release its board records ever since questions were first raised concerning Bush's activities there.

  The sale of Harken stock helped pay off a loan for his purchase of a partial interest in the Texas Rangers. He served as managing general partner of the Rangers until he was elected Governor of Texas on November 8, 1994 over incumbent Ann Richards. When the team was sold in 1998, Bush had earned $15,000,000.

• "In an amazing departure from reality" MoveOn.org said in email to it's subscribers on 7/21/03, President Bush explained in a press conference on the 14th that "we gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power . . . " Inspectors were, of course, on the ground in Iraq for over three months, until they were pulled out because the U.S. was going to war. (White House, July 14).

  Was he confused, forgetful, or what? Here is a little bit fuller text from that speech:

  The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.

  You can read this astounding fabricated-reality speech at the White House web site!

• Q: Why is George W. Bush so sure that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction?

  A: His dad still has the receipts.

• 5/21/03

  Christie Whitman, Bush's Environmental Protection Agency director, has resigned in frustration over the Republican agenda making her job impossible to perform ethically. Read the Sierra Club's press release about it. They cite these "lowpoints of the Bush Administration's EPA environmental record": Recommended cutting EPA enforcement budget by 13 percent, gutting the government's ability to hold polluters accountable for breaking the law. Breaking the campaign promise to curb carbon dioxide, which causes global warming. Weakening the Clean Air Act to allow more power-plant pollution. Opposing efforts to make polluters pay for cleanup of their toxic waste sites. Initially opposing efforts to reduce the amount of arsenic in our drinking water before public outcry forced a reversal.

• 5/12/03 Could this war against Iraq have been entirely manufactured? It isn't widely discussed that Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior gave chemical weapons to Saddam to help him fight the Iranians back in the 1980's, and that Donald Rumsfeld among other Americans influential in the government visited Saddam in person, in Iraq. Is it possible that a deal was made to create the appearance of strife for political purposes? At hipakistan.com is an article by M.J. Akbar titled "Choosing enemies with more care" which suggests a growing suspicion that there's been secret collusion going on:

  In 1963 the CIA's Cairo bureau planned the coup that overthrew the pro-Soviet government of General Abdel Karim Kassem in Baghdad. The agency was helpful again when Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr organized the internal putsch in 1968; Saddam took over from his protege in 1979. Was there a last-minute deal between Saddam and the Americans in which four full Republican divisions disappeared instead of making a stand in Baghdad, thereby saving their own as well as American lives? No one knows, and perhaps no one will ever know for certain. But such whispers are the brushwood of new fires that seek to burn as fiercely against the despot as the invader.

• 4/28/03 The Attack on Iraq has phased from a relatively easy invasion in which American military might steamrollered the Iraqi resistance, into a mopping-up operation against remaining pockets of resistance and U.S. troops acting as police to stop looting and other crimes which have proliferated in the absence of government. They've had well over a month now to find the weapons of mass destruction that we were assured were just cause for a preemtive war, but so far nothing. Maybe they'll search a chemistry lab and have Fox TV display some jugs of chemicals as proof eventually, because all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot fail to find SOMETHING to justify the mad Bush's paranoia.

  Worse, there seems a good chance that Islamic conservatives will take over the reins of power as the Shi'ite majority has 'democracy' handed to it on a silver platter. How lovely to see America be the midwife of another American-hating Islamic regime in the Middle East, as if there weren't enough already. Iraqis, especially Iraqi women, may actually wind up under more oppression than they were under Saddam if the mullahs take over.

• 4/22/03 Have you been to your doctor lately? Mine has asked me to read and sign a multipage form detailing the privacy surrounding my medical records. It's presented in such a fashion as to make it appear that our privacy is increasing, but a close read says that private medical information may now be released to law enforcement if it might help them locate suspects and solve crimes. It used to be that the police needed a court order to look at your medical records, but no longer, so this is less privacy than before, not more. Can you spell p-o-l-i-c-e s-t-a-t-e ?

• 3/22/03 The war is on, Americans have allowed their corrupt President-select to proceed with an unprovoked attack on Iraq. The TV news is obsessed with live coverage, people sit either numbly in shock at the immorality of it all or else cheer it as if it was some kind of frigging football game. We are now the world's worst instigators of death and destruction, and in the process we are destroying American goodwill throughout the Arab world and the rest of the world too. Surely our national aggression will come back to haunt us a hundred times over...

• 3/14/03 I think we are in our present situation as a nation largely because we have failed to learn some important lessons from the tragedies of September 11. We have failed to learn the root causes for the hatred we inspire in others, though sometimes they are very clear: abject poverty and oppression, tendencies toward callousness and contempt for other cultures, our economic exploitation and history of military aggression (we are still the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons on another, and we are armed to the teeth now). And we should have learned some lessons about religious fanaticism because we have Taliban too, here they just call themselves Christians instead of Muslims. They have in common the desire to control everyone's behavior through fear and threats of divine disapproval. This is bad enough here already, having to constantly fight to keep compulsory prayer out of schools and public life, but Islamic countries are generally much worse (ironically, Iraq is one of the least strict, not requiring burkas or any covering at all over women's hair and faces and permitting most religions to be practiced). We should be grateful to our founding fathers for attempting to completely separate church and state (even if they weren't completely successful at it), because we see how state-supported fanaticism is so harmful and dangerous. We ought to take this as an object lesson to reduce the influence of our own religious fanatics, starting with these two, on the social and political fabric of our country. We ought to repudiate much of what they stand for and do so publicly, in an affirmation of our strength of national character that respects all creeds and religions without allowing any one of them to define us as a nation. We are no longer the Crusaders that Muslims may see us as, but we might as well be. Certainly the religious right sees September 11 in the context of religious war. That is of course the mental sickness that caused September 11 in the first place, the Christian mirror image of the deluded Islamic suicide pilots.

  We should be examining those sicknesses in our own culture and curing them, both to stand against Muslim fanaticism and for the full emancipation of our government from religious influence. That would finally bring the church/state separation dream of the founding fathers to its complete fruition as well as unify and strengthen us in our respect for diversity and personal freedom. We should realize the value of a secular education that explains the superstitious tenets of various religions as basically fairy stories, while teaching the constructive values and moralities shared by all religions (the healthy aspects of religion) as core principles by which most people should live their personal and social lives. Education is key to understanding, and understanding helps us make better decisions. .

  Unfortunately our leadership isn't opting for expanding education but for war. Bush is going to make things ever so much worse.

• 2/21/03 Seymour Hersh, famous investigative reporter was interviewed by Jane Wallace on PBS about his recent articles for The New Yorker on the United States and its strange and sometimes hidden relationship with Pakistan. He says Pakistan is a real scary country, really the one we ought to be worried about. They've developed uranium-based nuclear weapons (it's estimated they probably have around 40 by now) and they traded the technology with North Korea in exchange for missles. He believes that Pakistan is probably secretly proliferating nuclear weapons among third-world Islamic nations, he even mentioned Lebanon! Hersh also tells an amazing story about the escape of top Al Qaeda generals from Afghanistan aboard Pakistani aircraft through a safe air corrider granted by (most likely) Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld probably didn't intend to do that but the safe air corridor was a quid pro quo to help keep Musharraf in power so the Islamics wouldn't take over and the administration would have a compliant tool in Musharaff for our foreign policy. It makes sense because the media's been mentioning for a long time that many of Pakistan's ISI (military) are sympathetic to the Taliban, and Hersh says the ostensible purpose of the evacuation flights was to evacuate high-ranking ISI people from Konduz, Afghanistan, where they had been advisors to the Taliban. So a lot of these people are not our friends at all and they smuggled out a lot of Al Qaeda, thousands even, amongst the ISI. According to Hersh:

  The initial plan was to take out the Pakistani military. What happened is that they took out al Qaeda with them. And we had no way of stopping it. We lost control. Once their planes began to go, the Pakistanis began-- thousands of al Qaeda got out. And so-- we weren't able to stop it and screen it. The intent wasn't to let al Qaeda out. It was to protect the Pakistani military.

  It's a fascinating story and there's much more to it than I've mentioned here. The full transcript is at http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_hersh.html. Apparently there is a lot our government isn't telling us...