New York Times: Obama failed to act on BP Oil Spill!!

The Obama administration failed to act upon or fully inform the public of its own worst-case estimates of the amount of oil gushing from the blown-out BP well, showing response efforts and keeping the American people in the dark for weeks about the size of the disaster, according to preliminary reports from the presidential commission investigating the accident. The government repeatedly underestimated how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and how much was left after the well was capped in July, leading to a loss of faith in the government's ability to handle the spill and a continuing breach between the federal authorities and state and local officials, the commission staff members found in a series of four reports issued Wednesday. "By initially underestimating the amount of oil flow and then, at the end of summer, appearing to under-estimate the amount of oil remaining in the gulf," one of the reports stated,"the federal govern- ment created the expression that it was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem."

Yvonne Ridley: Monte Python's Dead Parrot!

After news filtered through that the Middle East peace talks had stalled and failed, we begin to realize that that Obama's "peace initiative" is even deader than John Cleese's "Norwegian Blue parrot. Of course, Obama is in complete denial - remember that "denial" is NOT just a river in Egypt! A gaggle of assorted journalists and travel writers from various assorted journalists and writers from various media outlets seem to agree! Israel is just over 60 years old, and in that time has never known a day of peace for itself and its neighbors, living in a state of advanced paranoia, always on a war footing, always threatening those who speak of peace. Their paranoid attack on those who dare to bring hope and help to those Palestinians who are continually being tortured by the "Jewish" state, is merely one small example of Israeli paranoia. The sinking of the USS Liberty, while I was the intelligence operations officer for the 4th US Armored Division in Goeppingen, Germany was merely another glaring example. As our commanding general told me during his reading of my cable about that tragic moment: "With friends like these, we have no need of enemies!" How much longer is our great country going to tolerate this rabid little nation? The moral of this event is simple: Nothing lasts forever! Empires and emperors come and go. Borders disappear and expand, and so will arrogant, vicious little Israel. Good Riddance!

Our generals admit: There is no way we can defeat the Taliban!

The truth is: Our generals can't quite tell us what our "mission" in Afghanistan is: First, there is no way we can defeat the Taliban, since they enjoy too much popular support in the rural areas, which is the majority of that country. Even though we've been there for nine years, the Taliban are still controlling that country. After nine years, the Taliban, not our army control the environment in our combat areas, and so far, we have only completely run the Taliban out of 3% of Afghanistan. During World War II, it took us only eleven months after D-day to entirely defeat the Nazis across all of Europe. In addition, our troops and their commanders are still trying to learn the language, the culture, and the customs of Afghanistan. After they have killed numerous civilians, through recklessness or for sport, our troops are simply not trusted by most of the citizens of Afghanistan.
In addition, the Afghan government we installed is corrupt beyond belief, no wonder their citizens don't trust them. "President" Karzai is on anti-depressants, and our advisors (my job in Vietnam) tell us he is erratic and "loopy" much of the time. (Don't forget that he once ran a coffee shop in New York, hardly a good background for running a country, especially one embroiled in a serious war.)
Before I became an advisory team leader in Vietnam, I had at least a reasonably solid military background!

Is Obama Insane? Are we really going to war against a Nuclear Power?

Unless "our" CIA is now involved in destroying our United States, that often rogue world power, which is apparently responsive to no-one, our country is about to be destroyed by Pakistan, which we have apparently helped to become a first-rate nuclear power. Right now, while you and your congress is asleep at the switch, the CIA is ready to beg, borrow, or steal any armed drone, which we normally use to destroy any civilian targets in Pakistan or Afghanistan - truly our tax dollars at work! Is our "government" really as stupid as they look: As John Wayne would have put it: "A reckon so, Pilgrim!" As the CIA's drone war escalates, so have airborne border crossings of a different sort. US helicopters are pursuing "fleeing" Taliban fighters as part of what the military terms armed "self-defense", once known as "hot pursuit" into Pakistani "sanctuaries" from which the Taliban is said to be conducting its own successful surge in Afghanistan. Afghan War commander General David Petraeus is now advocating "a more aggressive posture with Pakistan", and has been particularly supportive of the CIA drone effort. In other words, the blind are leading the blind, and no-one understands what's going on in our battlefield. Even our war in Vietnam wasn't as screwed up as that!

The Dirty History of the Nuremberg Laws!

First of all: Let's look at the history behind the "so-called" Nuremberg Laws. By the way, if I really wanted to be technical, and I do. the city bombed to smitherens by the "glorious" Allies of that war were unfit to pass any criminal sentences after their destruction of the beautiful city of Dresden, which I saw burning from a hill 10km south of that city. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws, whose passage 75 years ago in Nazi Germany transformed Jews from citizens to inferior subjects, in the same manner that the Jewish state has dealt with the Palestinians, whose land the Jews are now continuing to occupy. Neither my mother, grandmother, or father, had any part in Nazi atrocities, yet they were punished by the "allies" as well. As we all know, Hitler is now dead, but a few of the Allies, who ordered their air forces to hunt us while our train barely allowed us to escape from Breslau. (Now Wroclaw, Poland) When we returned to Breslau, my Grandmother was, like most Germans, ordered to dig the graves of those German civilians who died there. She, and all of the other Germans who were forced to dig these graves were given no food, and only a very small amount of water by the Catholic Nuns, and most of them died in mass graves by our glorious "Allies".

Chris Hedges: We need to revolt against the "formal structures of power"

Chris Hedges speaks with more legitimacy and authority than any other journalist, having ducked quite a few bullets and landmines as I did, while I served as Advisory Team Leader in Trung Lap, in the heart of the so-called "Iron Triangle": The forces assaulting the remnants of American democracy will not be cowed or discredited with rallies, such as the one in Washington on Saturday. We will blunt these rising anti-democratic forces only when we organize outside conventional systems of power. It means dismantling the permanent war economy and the corporate state. It means an end to foreclosures and bank repossessions. It means a functional health care system for all Americans. It means taking care of our poor and unemployed, and it means a system of government that is freed from corporate interests.
Please click on my headline to read the rest of Chris Hedges' wisdom.

Do unto others, etc, - If you build a trap for others, beware of falling into it yourself!

Those who have chosen to become our country's enemy didn't start out that way. In fact, many once held the United States and our Constitution, the moral value systems of our Christian faith, in awe. It is with great sorrow that they find us "wanting in the balance" as our preachers like to phrase our serious shortcomings in the way we treat other nations and faiths: 39-year old US born Moslem Anwar al-Awlaki has now become a poster-child for our bad manners: He has now contacted the Nigerian Umar Farooq Abdulmutallab, who had tried to blow up an international flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on December 25, 2009. He is also suspected to have a connection with Malik Hassan, who also shares his extremism, and who shot several US soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas a few weeks ago. Anwar al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico in a family originating in Yemen. Though he studied engineering at the University of Colorado, it seems that he was not interested in a scientific or industrial career path. Somewhere in the middle of the 1990's, the young man became a follower of radical Islam, sharing his ideas in mosques of San Diego and Fort Collins.