As he leaves Iraq this week, the outgoing US commander, General David Petraeus, is sounding far less optimistic than the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, about the American situation in Iraq. General Petraeus says that it remains ‘fragile’, recent security gains are ‘not irreversible’ and ‘this is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade… it’s not a war with a simple slogan.’ Compare this with Sarah Palin’s belief that ‘victory in Iraq is wholly in sight’ and her criticism of Barack Obama for not using the word ‘victory’. The Republican contenders have made these claims of success for the ‘surge’ – the American reinforcements sent last year – although they are demonstrably contradicted by the fact that the US has to keep more troops, some 138,000, in Iraq today than beforehand. Another barometer of the true state of security in Iraq is the inability of the 4.7 million refugees, one in six of the population, who fled for their lives inside and outside Iraq, to return to their homes. Ongoing violence is down, but Iraq is still the most dangerous country in the world. On […]
PARIS — Pope Benedict XVI’s first visit to France is providing President Nicolas Sarkozy another opportunity to fulfill a campaign promise – to rock the boat. Unlike any French president in decades, Mr. Sarkozy sees a more open role for religion in French society. And he seized upon the conservative German pope’s four-day trip to directly challenge French secularism, one of the most prized traditions of La République and a strict legal and cultural sanction against bringing matters of church and faith into the public realm. Secularism, or laïcité, is central to the modern French identity. It’s a result of hundreds of years of efforts to remove the influence of the Roman Catholic church from French institutions and reduce its moral authority. French media don’t discuss religion. At offices or work, most French believers don’t tell colleagues they are going to mass or church. It is seen as a private matter. Yet here on Friday Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, broke protocol and met the pope at the airport. They hosted the pontiff at the Élysée Palace, attended a papal talk at a newly restored Cistercian monastery in downtown Paris in front of 700 intellectuals and […]
There’s really only one way to prevent another stolen race, and that’s to focus national attention on the revelations of whistle-blower Stephen Spoonamore, who’s lately been revealing all we need to know about the Bush regime’s conspiracy to rig the vote from 2000 to the present. Spoonamore knows all the principals in this conspiracy, has been dealing with them for some time, and has a trove of emails, etc., to back up what he says. There have been several other whistle-blowers on this front, but none is as compelling as he is–not just because he knows about the whole plot overall, but also because he is (a) a Republican, (b) an erstwhile member of the McCain campaign (he quit some months ago, when he discovered what they have planned) and (c) a prominent and well-respected expert on computer fraud. Detection of such fraud is, in fact, his specialty. Spoonamore has named the man who was Karl Rove’s IT guru from 2000 until sometime last year: Mike Connell, a pro-life zealot who told Spoonamore that he had helped the Bush regime subvert elections ‘to save the babies.’ (The actual nuts and bolts of the election fraud machinery are largely […]
Despite denials by the Palin campaign, new evidence proves that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin had a direct hand in imposing fees to pay for post-sexual assault medical exams conducted by the city to gather evidence. Palin’s role is now confirmed by Wasilla City budget documents available online. Under Sarah Palin’s administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or their health insurers the $500 to $1200 fees. Although Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella wrote USA Today earlier this week that the GOP vice presidential nominee ‘does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test…To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice,’ Palin, as mayor, fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin’s knowledge, slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city’s victims of sexual assault. The city budget documents demonstrate Palin read and signed off on the new budget. A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice. News of the controversial policy has leaked […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
