‘”She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour,” Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.

. . . .

“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour,” Olmert said.

“I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone’. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now’. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

“I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour.”‘ (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

See Also:
Inquiries show Olmert version of UN Gaza vote spat closer to truth than Rice’s (from Haaretz.com)

- Dennis Kucinich on House Floor: US Weapons Used To Kill Children Paid For By US Taxpayers

- UN Expert: Compelling Evidence of Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
“UN human rights expert and retired Princeton law professor Richard Falk said today that there is compelling evidence that Israel violated the laws of war by “conducting a large-scale military operation against an essentially defenseless population.” . . .
“This is the first time I know of where a civilian population has been essentially locked into the war zone, not allowed to leave it despite the dense population and the obvious risks that were entailed,” Falk pointed out, “the civilians in Gaza were denied the option of becoming a refugee.”
Professor Falk made international news when, less than two weeks before Israel began the war on the Gaza Strip, he was detained by Israeli officials for over 20 hours at a Tel Aviv airport while trying to enter the country as the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. He was eventually expelled from the country, provoking an angry response from the United Nations and human rights groups.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Aharon Leshno-Yaar made no attempt to answer the charges, choosing rather to attack Professor Falk’s history of criticism for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, insisting “Professor Falk’s bias against Israel is well known.” (Read more from antiwar.com)

- War casts pall on Israeli business overseas, tourism (from Haaretz.com)

- Farmers claim UK, Jordan boycotting Israeli fruit (from ynetnews.com)

- Gaza assault spurs calls for boycott (from radionetherlands.nl)

- Turkish group calls for boycott of Israel, backers over Gaza
“Turkish Consumers Association calls on Turkish citizens to boycott Israeli, US and British products.” (Read more from dunyabulteni.net)

- World Protests Gaza Slaughter, Boycott Israel Movement Grows (from tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” -George Orwell

“The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.” -Alexander Hamilton

“Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms.” -Aristotle

“The biggest hypocrites on gun control are those who live in upscale developments with armed security guards — and who want to keep other people from having guns to defend themselves. But what about lower-income people living in high-crime, inner city neighborhoods? Should such people be kept unarmed and helpless, so that limousine liberals can ‘make a statement’ by adding to the thousands of gun laws already on the books?” -Thomas Sowell

“One of the best tests for determining whether a financial columnist or a professional economist is a Keynesian is to examine his views on personal spending. If he favors an increase of personal spending as a means to stimulate the economy, he is a Keynesian. He may not call himself a Keynesian, but he is a Keynesian.

John Maynard Keynes believed that an economy could become a self-reinforcing economic depression because the general public saved too much money. He believed that the key to economic growth is not productivity, but rather spending. . . .

Keynes was quite clear on one point: it does not matter what the government invests in. It does not matter if the government spends every dime on building pyramids. Or the government can bury paper money in jars, and hide these jars around the community. This way, individuals will have an incentive to go out and dig up jars of money, and therefore this will stimulate the economy. You might think I am exaggerating here, but this is specifically what Keynes taught in his supposedly magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).” (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

It’s ridiculous to accuse Bill Moyers, a class-act journalist who’d been involved in the civil rights movement, of racism. This isn’t about him being racist. This is about intimidation. A message to him an other journalists: There will be no criticism of Israel in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Mr. Moyers,

In less than a thousand words, you managed to fit into your January 9 commentary: (1) moral equivalency between Hamas, a radical Islamic terrorist group whose anti-Semitic charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and perhaps America’s greatest ally in the world; (2) historical revisionism, asserting that Canaanites were Arabs; (3) anti-Semitism, declaring that Jews are “genetically coded” for violence; (4) ignorance of the terrorist threat against Israel, claiming that checkpoints, the security fence, and the Gaza operation are tactics of humiliation rather than counter-terrorism; and (5) promotion of an individual, the Norwegian doctor in Gaza, who has publicly expressed support for the September 11 attacks.

I have seen and read serious critiques of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and I have disagreed with many of them. Your commentary, however, is different, consisting mostly of intellectually and morally faulty claims that do a great disservice to the PBS audience. It invites not disagreement, but rebuke.

On one point you are correct – “America has officially chosen sides.” And rightly so. Fortunately for our nation, very few of our citizens engage in the same moral equivalency, racism, historical revisionism, and indifference to terrorism as you. If the reverse held, it would not be a country that any decent person would want to live in.

Sincerely,

Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League

Dear Mr. Foxman:

You made several errors in your letter to me of January 13 and I am writing to correct them.

First, to call someone a racist for lamenting the slaughter of civilians by the Israeli military offensive in Gaza is a slur unworthy of the tragedy unfolding there. Your resort to such a tactic is reprehensible.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that the International Red Cross “was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.”

When American troops committed a similar atrocity in Vietnam, it was called My Lai and Lt. Calley went to prison for it. As the publisher of a large newspaper at the time, I instructed our editorial staff to cover the atrocity fully because Americans should know what our military was doing in our name and with our funding. To say “my country right or wrong” is like saying “my mother drunk or sober.” Patriots owe their country more than that, whether their government and their taxes are supporting atrocities in Vietnam, Iraq, or, in this case, Gaza. . . .

(Read more at PBS.org)

Tell it like it is Ron!!!!

Michael Journal is a journal of Catholic patriots for monetary reform through the education of the population and not through political parties.

This is heartening. Monetary abuses by the Fed are certainly a moral issue, even though a minority of us understand them as such. It’s nice to see them recognized as such.

Alex Jones is a little radical for some people’s tastes. His show is focused on fighting what he perceives as coming fascism. These days, I admire anyone with a dissenting voice. If he is right, his rage is complete warranted. Peter Schiff is a widely-respected investment guru who predicted the current financial crisis, and has been strenuously warning about it since 2006.

(from CNN.com)

I found this article on reddit.com under the headline “Woman Vomits Shit on National Television.”

In high school, I remember learning about government’s heroic anti-trust break up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Yay, government! That was long, long ago. I’ve since come to regard government not as the thin gray line between the public interest and corporate greed, but as the instrument of corporate greed. Here, I think, lies the difference between liberals and conservatives.

In debates with my liberal friends, their underlying assumption often seems to regard government as a benevolent force, which would cure our ills if only we surrendered more wealth, more liberty, and more power to it.

Here are several stories which, I hope, shatter the myth of government benevolence:

- Regulator Let IndyMac Bank Falsify Report. A senior federal banking regulator approved a plan by IndyMac Bank to exaggerate its financial health in a May federal filing, allowing the California company to avoid regulatory restrictions only two months before it collapsed, a federal inquiry has found. (Read more from washingtonpost.com)

- Press reports document criminality of US financial elite. Recent press reports make clear that the Madoff affair is not an aberration. It is indicative of pervasive fraud and criminality in the highest echelons of the financial establishment, aided and abetted by government regulatory agencies. (Read more from inteldaily.com)

- Antitrust’s Greatest Hits. The government’s victory against Standard Oil had a long-term effect on the oil industry that is seldom discussed by those who see parallels with the Microsoft case. Only six years after losing the antitrust case, Standard Oil dramatically changed its attitude toward Washington, moving from hostility or avoidance to a very warm embrace. Company chief A.C. Bedford served as chairman of the War Services Committee, an agency created to mobilize the nation’s supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel for military use during World War I. After the war, federal control never retreated, transforming what economist Dominick Armentano has called “a virtual textbook example of a free and competitive market” into “what had previously been unobtainable: a governmentally sanctioned cartel in oil.” The legacies of this transformation include higher prices for consumers and the “energy crisis” of the 1970s. Deregulation in the 1980s finally restored some measure of competition to the industry.

The Standard Oil case teaches some important lessons about competition, innovation, and antitrust law. We see the difficulty antitrust has dealing with highly innovative companies. We witness the vagueness of antitrust law, which allows prosecution on the basis of alleged intent rather than specific actions. And we see how the Standard Oil case ultimately failed to benefit consumers or investors. Instead, it laid the groundwork for collusion between industry and government, bringing about many of the very ills the “progressive” proponents of antitrust said they were fighting. (Read more from Reason.com)

- Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley. From the beginning of this decade, the process of new company creation has been under assault by legislators and regulators. They treat it as if it is a natural phenomenon that can be manipulated and exploited, rather than the fragile creation of several generations of hard work, risk-taking and inventiveness. In the name of “fairness,” preventing future Enrons, and increased oversight, Congress, the SEC and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) have piled burdens onto the economy that put entrepreneurship at risk.

The new laws and regulations have neither prevented frauds nor instituted fairness. But they have managed to kill the creation of new public companies in the U.S., cripple the venture capital business, and damage entrepreneurship. According to the National Venture Capital Association, in all of 2008 there have been just six companies that have gone public. Compare that with 269 IPOs in 1999, 272 in 1996, and 365 in 1986.

Faced with crushing reporting costs if they go public, new companies are instead selling themselves to big, existing corporations. (Read more from wsj.com)

- Anti-trust, Anti-truth. In his masterpiece, Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure, Dominick Armentano carefully examined fifty-five of the most famous antitrust cases in U.S. history and concluded that in every single case, the accused firms were dropping prices, expanding production, innovating, and generally benefiting consumers. It was their less-efficient competitors who were “harmed,” as they should have been.

For example, the American Tobacco Company was found guilty of “monopolization” in 1911, even though the price of cigarettes (per thousand) had declined from $2.77 in 1895 to $2.20 in 1907, despite a 40 percent increase in raw material costs. (Read more from the Ludwig Von Mises Institute)

- Letter from an angry business owner. To All My Valued Employees, There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn’t pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country. (Read more from fivemilliondots.com)

The widely popular video sharing website YouTube has reached out to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its expertise in dealing with hate on the Internet. As a result of this partnership, the League is now a contributor to YouTube’s newly launched Abuse & Safety Center, where users are empowered to identify and confront hate, and to report abuses.

The YouTube Abuse & Safety Center features information and links to resources developed by ADL to help Internet users respond to and report offensive material and extremist content that violates YouTube?s Community Guidelines on hate speech. . . .

“We commend YouTube for their efforts to provide users with access to important information from those with expertise, such as ADL and others, on how to effectively respond to hate on the Internet and to report abuses,” Foxman said. (Read more from haaretz.com)

There is concern this well-meaning effort will result in further censorship of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

“I must admit that, like most progressives and antiwar activists in the coalition that played a crucial role in the victory of President-elect Barack Obama, I have been greatly disappointed with his national security team (NST). Gone are all the hopeful signs of real change in the American foreign policy that we saw – as it now appears self-deludedly – coming with the election of Obama. Instead, we must confront the cold – but by now very familiar – reality that the main players in U.S. foreign policy for several years to come will be people we have disagreed with very strongly, even despised, over the years.

There is not even one progressive or antiwar voice with principled positions in Obama’s NST to counter all the pro-war people he has picked, even though when introducing his NST, Obama declared that he believes in having “strong personalities and strong opinions” and that he will welcome ‘vigorous debate inside the White House.’

I don’t want to rehash all the praise that Obama has been receiving for the selection of his NST from the neoconservatives and the War Party, which is a glaring sign of how terrible his NST is. Many people, including the author, have already done that. It should suffice to say that the neocons and the War Party could not have been happier with Obama’s NST. The turncoat Joe Lieberman, whose sole purpose in life seems to be starting a war with Iran, called Obama’s selections ‘virtually perfect,’ and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard declared that the selections indicate “surprising continuity on foreign policy between President Bush’s second term and the incoming administration. . . . The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush. . . .”

. . . .

In the Democratic debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008, [Obama] said,

‘I have said I will do whatever is required to prevent the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons. I believe that includes direct talks with the Iranians where we are laying out very clearly for them, here are the issues that we find unacceptable. . . . Now, my belief is that they should also know that I will take no options off the table when it comes to preventing them from using nuclear weapons. . . .’

Those are weapons that Iran does not have, and there is no evidence that it is attempting to get them.

In an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America on April 22, 2008, Obama said, ‘We shouldn’t allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, period. I have consistently said that I will do everything in my power to prevent them from having it, and I have not ruled out military force as an option.’” (Read more from antiwar.com)

Question: Can we create cult of personality to gain support of all the policies begun under our reviled President Bush?
Answer: YES WE CAN!

With the help of CIA spotters, the Peruvian air force shot down 15 small civilian aircraft between 1995 and 2001, ostensibly as part of the US-abetted war on drugs, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee revealed Thursday. Many of the shoot-downs were made without warning within two to three minutes of the planes being detected.

Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who disclosed the program, was the first to confirm the number of planes shot down in the CIA led ‘Airbridge Denial Program,’ which sought to derail the narcotic trade but also claimed the life of an American missionary from Michigan and her daughter in 2001. . . .

Most of the 15 planes shot down with the help of the CIA crashed in the jungle, Hoekstra told AP, and ‘the wreckage has not been or could not be examined to ascertain whether narcotics were aboard the aircraft.’ . . .

A CIA inspector general’s report in November raised questions about planes being taken down ‘without being properly identified, without being given the required warnings to land, and without being given time to respond to such warnings as were given to land.’

It also said the CIA withheld information about multiple investigations that showed failures and violations of procedures from the National Security Council, Justice Department and Congress. The classified report was sent to Congress in October, AP said. . . .

The Peruvian “shoot down” program was shuttered after the death of Bowers and her child in 2001. ”

“[I will] smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” -John F. Kennedy