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vietnam
Repaying a Big Debt to Lt. Kerry
A former Green Beret saved 35 years ago by the young senator-to-be is happy to help him now.
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The eyes still get watery 35 years later, and Jim Rassmann — former Green Beret, retired California cop — doesn't want anybody to see. He turns away or uses his beefy hands to cover up.
But he gets through it, recalling in vivid detail the day, March 13, 1969, when John F. Kerry snatched him out of a muddy brown river in Vietnam and saved him from a watery end.
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thanks to Eschaton
It's difficult to put into words why I'm linking to this article. Maybe you had to be in that time.
It's just an article about some dude who met Kerry, under rather extenuating circumstances, a long time ago in a far away place. Well, folks, that long ago time keeps coming back and hitting me in the face. And, for those of you that have been born since, I'm sure it keeps hitting a lot of others, too.
I was lucky. I didn't have to go. In the summer of 1962, at 18, I went to my pre-induction physical at the invitation of my Draft Board. I was planning on enlisting, since I would get to serve a shorter time than if I was drafted. I had grown up in a military family and felt that serving was something a citizen should do. Not that it would break my heart not to serve. And not to serve turned out to be it, when they found out about my asthma. I supported the war until 1968. After all, the government has access to information that civilians don't. Then, in January 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. They actually took over the American Embassy in Saigon for a brief period. That was my What the fuck? moment. I realized then that everything the government had told the American people was a lie and being in Vietnam turned into a nightmare.
Those were very intense times. It was a time of euphoria and a time of tears of rage.
It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe.
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse.
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?
Tears of rage, tears of grief,
Must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We're so low
And life is brief.
And the years have not stopped the tears. There are songs I can't listen to without tears.
Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
ooh, they're red, white and blue.
And when the band plays "Hail To The Chief",
oh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,
It ain't me, it ain't me,
I ain't no senator's son,
It ain't me, it ain't me,
I ain't no fortunate one, no,
Nor can I read articles like this without tears. Tears of rage. The whole fucking senseless waste. And what did we learn with over 50,000 American lives and a few million Vietnamese lives? Not a fucking thing.
Within the next couple of months, my sister and I will be going to Washington, D.C., to see my grandfathers paintings from another war. I will take some time to go to the Vietnam Wall.
There are over 50,000 names on that wall. I want to thank them for their sacrifice. I also want to apologize to them for not working hard enough to get them home alive.
Peace.
painting
Friends Of Sandorfi Art Works
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thanks to Cipango
iraq — vietnam on internet time
'It's the same old Iraq, just a tiny bit worse than it was last month'
by Robert Fisk
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Each time I return to Iraq, it's the same, like finding a razor blade in a bar of chocolate. The moment you start to believe that "New Iraq" might work - just - you get the proof that it's the same old Iraq, just a little tiny bit worse than it was last month.
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"Unknown Soldier" Speaks Out To Bring Troops Home
A soldier back from Iraq discusses the war and the U.S. soldiers fighting that war, the suicides, and much more.
Another excellent Karen Kwiatkowski piece. A must read.
The new Pentagon papers
A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war.
By Karen Kwiatkowski
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In July of last year, after just over 20 years of service, I retired as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force. I had served as a communications officer in the field and in acquisition programs, as a speechwriter for the National Security Agency director, and on the Headquarters Air Force and the office of the secretary of defense staffs covering African affairs. I had completed Air Command and Staff College and Navy War College seminar programs, two master's degrees, and everything but my Ph.D. dissertation in world politics at Catholic University. I regarded my military vocation as interesting, rewarding and apolitical. My career started in 1978 with the smooth seduction of a full four-year ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10 months of duty in a strange new country, observing up close and personal a process of decision making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution we had all sworn to uphold. Ben Franklin's comment that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia had delivered "a republic, madam, if you can keep it" would come to have special meaning.
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Iraq's Transitional Law: Sistani does okay
by Helena Cobban
Juan Cole has excellent links today.
US Intelligence Follies: Why Haven't Cheney, Feith and Chalabi been Impeached?
Sistani warns of his own Assassination, Civil War
Wave of Kidnappings Continues in Baghdad
More on Interim Constitution
whole wheat radio
J-Walk, at J-Walk Blog, goes on and on about Whole Wheat Radio, as well he should. Whole Wheat Radio is one of the best things on the web. Read what J-Walk has to say and then listen in. Trust me on this. And many thanks to Jim and Esther!
A Wheat-Head For A Year
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Exactly one year ago today, I had a life-changing experience. On that day, for the first time, I tuned into a webcast called Whole Wheat Radio. I wrote about my first impressions here.
So how can WWR, clearly an insignificant corner of the Web, cause me to have a life-changing experience? Well, I figure that I've spent at least 2,000 hours listening to WWR, and I've probably wasted a few hundred hours at the WWR web site/chat room, interacting with Jim, Esther, and other listeners. During that time:
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Go read it and find out how Whole Wheat Radio could change your life.
The Gaza Striptease
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When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced his decision to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and dismantle 17 settlements, there was reason, one might think, for celebration in certain quarters. Yet few rejoiced. There is the uneasy feeling that his words do not bode an end to the 37-year-old Occupation, rather further entanglement.
Some call the would-be withdrawal an escape, some call it a threat against the Palestinians, and some call it a means to strengthen Israel's hold on the West Bank. One thing it is not: a step toward resolving the conflict.
In Israeli eyes, Gaza was always damaged goods. The campaign slogan of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 was "Pull Gaza out of Tel Aviv". The Oslo Agreement originally bore the title, "Gaza and Jericho First". (Hamas and others are mistaken, then, when they present an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a victory for the resistance.) It suits Sharon, whose approval rating has plunged, to propose disconnection" from this unwanted place. It makes a show of progress toward security, and it may distract the public from corruption scandals in which he is mired to the neck.
Under present conditions, however, Sharon will find it almost impossible to disconnect from Gaza. The hurdles are high:
Hurdle 1: The White House
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How Israel is founding a Hamas state
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Four years ago, when Ariel Sharon agreed to support the withdrawal from Lebanon, he proposed a prior condition: to deliver a powerful strike against the country, so the might of the Israel Defense Forces would be engraved on the collective memory and no one would try to operate against Israel after the IDF pullout. The recent spate of IDF actions in the Gaza Strip, and the large number of Palestinian casualties they have caused, are liable to create the impression that this is the realization of Sharon's "Lebanese" proposal: When withdrawal from Gaza is announced, accompany it by burning into the Palestinian consciousness the terrifying power of the IDF.
However, national memory, as everyone knows, is selective. The history of the 18 years of Israeli occupation in Lebanon ended with a Hezbollah "victory album," which demonstrates its ability to bend Israel's hand, and worse, is portrayed as a deterrent force equivalent to the IDF. The recent prisoner exchange deal certainly did nothing to detract from that image.
South Lebanon became the Hezbollah state, and a similar situation is liable to develop in the Gaza Strip. The point is that Israel is in the process of creating two Palestinian states, one in Gaza and the other in the West Bank. In Gaza, it is conducting its major military campaign against one organization, Hamas; it is proposing to withdraw from that organization's territory, evacuate settlements and demarcate a perfect boundary line with an enemy state. At the end of the process, Gaza is liable to become an entity cut off from the main Palestinian system, the autonomous province of an organization and not a separate section of the Palestinian state.
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ammunition art
AN ILLUSTRATED TREATISE ON AMMUNITION AND ORDNANCE
British 1880-1960
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thanks to Junior Bonner
blogs
The GOP and 24/7 news
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Republicans and Bush, in particular, thrived under the Ari Fleischer school of media management. An old story I read somewhere recounts how Ari, working for a congressman, dealt with a sticky situation. A reporter called to ask why Ari's boss had voted for a certain bill. Fleischer denied the vote. The reporter, flummoxed, said he'd confirm the vote and call back.
Fleischer's boss had voted for the bill. But having confirmed the vote, Fleischer made sure not to take that reporter's call again.
Simple and genius. Lie, force doubt into the reporter's mind, and change the subject as quickly as possible. It worked for Bush in 2000, and a complacent media went along for the ride.
The media stuck with the Bush bandwagon through the first three years of his term, through a disastrous war and one tax-cut-motivated lie after another (tax cuts create jobs! said the Republicans after presiding over the loss of 2.4 million jobs).
But something funny happened in 2003. The media landscape shifted. Suddenly, the Internet became a 24/7 oppo research and fact checking tool. The Republicans remain wilfully ignorant of their online would-be allies. The Democratic Party -- outgunned, outmanned, outfinanced, and out-of-power -- was not so myopic.
Hardly a day goes by when I don't see a blog-inspired email blasted out by some party functionary, be it the DSCC, DCCC, DNC or affiliated organizations. Those institutions -- the very core of the "Democratic Party Establishment" -- are linking to blogs at increased rates. And the results speak for themselves.
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I might add that the blog this piece comes from, daily KOS, is one of the blogs spreading the truth and, if you are going to follow one political blog, this is the one.
cameras
Early info on the Epson/Cosina digital rangefinder is out.
Epson Launches the World's First Rangefinder Digital Camera
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Stephen Gandy has some of the details.
Digital Bessa shown at PMA 2004, a joint effort of Cosina and Epson
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Leica M mount
Traditional optical Viewfinder / Rangefinder
LED meter readout in finder
Compatibility with most Leica M mount lenses and screw mount lenses
6.1 Megapixel Digital Sensor
SD Memory Card
APS Size C Digital Sensor, 1.53x crop factor
Traditional ISO film setting in shutter dial, ISO 200, 400, 800, 1600
Color Light Balance: Auto, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Florescent, Sun, Custom
Black & White Modes: Green filter, Yellow filter, Orange filter, Red Filter
Digital output JPG or RAW
Large 2" LCD display
1x Viewfinder magnification, 85% frameline coverage
Manually selected 28, 35, and 50 framelines
Rangefinder effective rangefinder 38.2mm
Electronic Shutter, 1 to 1/2000th, 1/125th flash sync
Rechargeable Lithium battery
Metering in Manual or Aperture priority AE
Centerweighted Metering
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No price. It's the digital camera I need, but I fear it may be a bit much.
Update: It appears that it may be going for $2,700. Too high. Garret points out this link at Digital Photography Review, with pictures and links to other pictures.
Epson R-D1 Digital Rangefinder Camera
abstinence makes the heart grow fonder
US study of teenage sexual disease destroys basis of virginity crusade
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American teenagers who take the pledge to remain virgins until they marry have almost the same rate of sexually transmitted disease as other young people, a new study of adolescent behaviour says.
The finding destroys a key rationale for the abstinence crusade - that it prevents disease - and poses a strong challenge to a social engineering project that has been embraced by the White House.
The eight-year study of 12,000 young people by two American sociologists found that the graduates of abstinence programmes were nearly as likely as other young people to catch sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhoea or chlamydia.
Other findings, yet to be published, also suggest that abstinence programmes do not prevent early pregnancy, Hannah Bruckner, a sociologist at Yale University and co-author of the study, said.
That challenges the very underpinnings of a movement that has attracted 2.5 million American teenagers in recent years, and which is endorsed by church organisations and the Christian right.
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naked frame
The fixed-gear bike project continues. Blaine returned the frame Monday, without braze-ons. Great job, Blaine. Thanks! No unsightly cable stops anymore on this frame. The naked frame has it's own charm. You can see the brazing and grinding that were hidden by the paint. The marks made by people on metal. Now to figure out how to paint it and cover those marks up again.
griff's story
Good news for those that have been following Griff's Story, the website on my grandfather. I have been putting scans, from the books, of his paintings on the website. Color reproduction from the 1940s isn't the quality I would like, but that is all that I have. There are a number of paintings that I only have black and white electro-static copies. They were in the package that Gale Munro, of the Naval Historical Center, sent to my sister, Madelane, almost 10 years ago. As I mentioned earlier, Madelane and I are planning a trip back to the wrong Washington (D.C.) to see the paintings and make copy negs. I figured that the Naval Historical Center already has some, so I called them. I just got of the phone with Gale Munro and they have made 4x5 copy negs of many of his paintings (there are 53) and have scanned the negs. She is sending me a CD with what they have. That should, at least, give me some improved pictures to put up. The long term goal is to be able to make high quality inkjet prints available of all his Navy paintings. I'm excited.
photography
Zoe, her mom, and I are off to Seattle today so this is will probably be the only link today.
Gordy's Dinner March 9, 2004
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jobs
The Unrecognizable Recovery
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The Bush crowd couldn't have been more pleased with the timing of the Martha Stewart verdict on Friday afternoon.
The big news heading into the weekend was almost guaranteed to be the awful jobs report released by the Labor Department Friday morning. The White House needed a world-class distraction and the Stewart jury, eager to wrap things up before the weekend, obliged. It strolled in, as if on cue, with a verdict of guilty on all counts. Distractions don't get much bigger.
The Labor Department report was as grim as faces on a bread line. Despite all the president's promises, the economy added just 21,000 jobs last month. No jobs were added by the private sector. The 21,000 additional jobs were all government hires.
The report also showed that job growth in December and January was worse than previously believed. The January tally was revised from 112,000 to 97,000. The December count dropped from 16,000 to a pathetic 8,000.
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One Million Payroll Jobs Short Since October
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book art
The Art Deco Bookbindings of Pierre Legrain and Rose Adler
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thanks to Languagehat
global climate change
Global Warming as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
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Lord Peter Levene, board chair of Lloyd’s of London, says that terrorism is not the insurance industry’s biggest worry, despite the fact that his company was the largest single insurer of the World Trade Center. Levene says that Lloyd’s, like other large international insurance companies, is bracing for an increase in weather disasters related to global warming. Likewise, following his assignment as chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix said: “To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I’m more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.” Sir John Houghton, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agrees. “Global warming is already upon us,” he said. “The impacts of global warming are such that that I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction.” So what do they know that George W. Bush doesn’t?
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citrus art
Floating Fruit
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haiti
Godfather Colin Powell
The Gangster of Haiti
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"The deed is done. Haiti has been raped. The act was sanctioned by the United States, Canada and France." – Editorial, Jamaica Observer
Colin Powell is “the most powerful and damaging black to rise to influence in the world in my lifetime.” – TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson
Colin Powell is "the most powerful and damaging black to rise to influence in the world in my lifetime." – TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson
"All the people that supported [Aristide] will be dead in three months." – Haiti government attorney Ira Kurzban
The new order congeals like blood on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Haiti’s dance of death begins anew, a convergence of low-life assassins, high-living compradors, preening French imperialists and global American pirates – an unspeakable bacchanal.
"I am the chief," declares Guy Philippe, the 36-year-old, Green Beret-trained, three-time coup-meister and sometime police chief. "The country is in my hands."
Not really. Haiti is in the same American and French hands that snatched President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Central African Republic – an involuntary destination on its face, where a French-approved military dictator sits in a palace that he seized from an elected President precisely one year ago. Pleased with the finesse of the "perfect coordination" between Paris and Washington, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin no doubt savors the grotesque, near-symmetric poetry of this joint venture in international piracy, in which Aristide is transported from the site of one coup to another.
"The niceties of democracy were thrown out the window, and the matters of principle so vigorously defended by President Chirac and Foreign Minister de Villepin over Iraq were quickly shunted aside," said the Jamaica Observer in a March 1 editorial. "nd new Canadians went with the flow." The Caribbean Community must understand, "if they thought otherwise," that "democratically-elected leaders are easily expendable if they, at a particular time, do not fit the profile in favor with those who are strong and powerful."
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songs about astronomical objects
We Like the Moon
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Check out the other animations from rathergood.com — if you dare. Be afraid of the kittens.
iraq — vietnam on internet time
Sistani and the Green Zone...
by Riverbend
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Today was a mess. It feels like half of Baghdad was off-limits. We were trying to get from one end to the other to visit a relative and my cousin kept having to take an alternate route. There's a huge section cut off to accomodate the "Green Zone" which seems to be expanding. We joke sometimes saying that they're just going to put a huge wall around Baghdad, kick out the inhabitants and call it the "Green City". It is incredibly annoying to know that parts of your city are inaccessible in order to accomodate an occupation army.
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Civil War, Carnage: Coincidence?
by Robert Fisk
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Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq. Al-Qaida has never uttered a threat against Shias -- even though al-Qaida is a Sunni-only organization. Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a letter said to have been written by an al-Qaida operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists enthusiastically have taken up this theme. Civil war.
Somehow I don't believe it.
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Juan Cole's excellent comments on the signing of the Basic Law..
Basic Law Signing: "Fallout from Crisis Remains
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Hamza Hendawi of AP reports today on the signing of the Basic Law in Baghdad. The five Shiite hold-outs decided to sign "for the sake of national unity" despite severe reservations about some of the clauses. In particular, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had signalled to them his objection to a provision that allowed any three provinces to reject a new constitution when it is crafted. In other words, the new constitution will have to be approved by an enormous supermajority of 90 percent of Iraq's provinces. This is more than the already rigorous 75% of states that are needed to pass constitutional amendments in the US. Grand Ayatollah Sistani is concerned that this 90% rule will allow small minorities to take the constitutional process hostage. Shiites have pointed out that provinces in Iraq are not equally propulated, with some only having a few hundred thousand inhabitants. Theoretically, less than a million persons could reject a constitution passed by all the other 24 million. (The provision seems to allow for a popular referendum, such that if a 2/3s majority of the province rejects the constitution, it fails). The provision was put in for ths ake of the Kurds, who worry about a tyranny of the Arab majority.
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Zabriskie on Iraq: "There is Anger Everywhere"
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Sometimes I talk to or read a correspondent who spent a few weeks in Iraq, and I don't recognize the Iraq he or she reports back. Max Boot went embedded last summer can came back with tales of bustling bazaars and a quick return to normal. Since he had not seen the bazaars the year before, he had no grounds for judging whether they were more or less bustling. Nor do bustling bazaars mean everything is hunky dory. (When I was in Beirut during the civil war, people shopped. It was just that some of them got sniped at while they were in line.) One reporter told me last fall that Iraqis are not very nationalistic; that if you just make their tribal leaders happy everything will be fine; and that the capture of Saddam meant the end of the insurgency. But Iraqis are very nationalistic; tribal leaders are less important than they used to be; and the insurgency was never about Saddam; it probably isn't even about the Baath party in any meaningful way.
In contrast, Zabriskie's Iraq sounds like the one I read about in Arabic and hear about from people outside the green zone who are not embedded.
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photography
joseph maida
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thanks to Conscientious
Things like this don't happen in a democracy.
Moving to Canada, far from the Israeli police
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"Bryan, get up! Wake up!" Two months ago, three burly policemen not in uniform entered Bryan Atinsky's bedroom in Rehovot after quickly brushing past his wife, Efrat, who got up to see who was knocking on the door at 6:30 A.M. The three said they had a search warrant. "They didn't waste any time and started opening drawers and searching the shelves, but they didn't show us any document," says Atinsky, 34.
"When they finished, they said my computer was confiscated and that I must come with them for questioning. Efrat continuously asked what I was suspected of, and they said `you tell us.' In the end, I asked if it was because of the caricature." And indeed, it was because of the caricature.
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The above article had an ad that I accidently clicked on...
jewishanddating.com
The site is pushing a book titled Why Marry Jewish? What would people say if someone published a book titled Why Marry White?? it seems like the same thing to me.
Israel has stepped up the pace of settlement building
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Israel continued to build settlements in the occupied territory at a rapid rate last year, despite US calls for building to stop in accordance with the road map to peace with the Palestinians.
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Disengaging from the disengagers
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The behavior of the Jewish settlers' lobby is reminiscent of a child who acts wild in class and keeps misbehaving despite all the punishments. During a period of less than 10 years, they have brought about the fall of four prime ministers who dared to try their hand at nonbrutal solutions. During that period, the political configuration allowed them to add new Jewish settlements in the territories but the political and the international reality slapped them in the face again and again. Only three years ago just a small portion of the things Sharon said in his Herzliya speech would have been enough to send both him and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out to the balcony in Zion Square in order to attack the speaker. For more moderate heresies than these, Tzachi Hanegbi (now public security minister) unplugged microphones.
[...]
What will happen after the all-or-nothing lobby topples Sharon? He, like Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak, has not turned from a patriot into a traitor. Like his predecessors, from the Prime Minister's Bureau he apparently began to realize that if he insists on it all, he will end up with nothing. After Sharon is demobilized, it will be NRP leader Housing and Construction Minister Effi Eitam's turn to take his punishment there.
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photography
philip kwame apagya
- fascinating images from the realms of commercial studio portraiture -
'at the airport', selfportrait, 1996
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thanks to Conscientious
theocracy is coming
Scourging the schools
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OK, OK, you say. Enough on The Passion of the Christ. It's only a movie, right?
Well, it is. And it isn't.
Obviously, Mel Gibson's religious revenge melodrama has become more than just a movie. It's now a cultural event -- a broad volley, as it were, in the raging Culture Wars. In that context, it's also become a kind of Rorschach test for the million-dollar question, Which Side Are You On?
And it is in that respect that the film has real significance -- not so much for what it actually says, but for what it symbolizes to the religious right: namely, a hard right hook thrown at the forces of "anti-Christian" secularism. A blow against the liberal empire, as it were.
The real role of The Passion is to serve as a propaganda victory in service of a larger cause -- namely, the multi-faceted offensive to remake America as a "Christian nation" by fundamentalist True Believers. By leaping to promote it, the right reinforces the idea of remaking of the Constitution -- and by extension, American society -- currently being promoted on a variety of fronts. These range from the "Constitution Restoration Act" to the rabid right's railing about Janet Jackson's exposed breast to the fight over gay marriage to the appearance of The Passion on the scene.
It may be tempting to view these cases in isolation. The religious right's legislation seems unlikely to pass. The issue of gay marriage seems like it is working its way through the courts. And on the outside, The Passion is just another movie.
But placed in their larger context, they collectively represent a serious surge in the power of the theocratic right to in fact enact their agenda. This is not merely an abstract problem, or Margaret Atwoodesque paranoia. It's manifesting itself right now in our everyday lives.
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photography
Rudy Burckhardt
An Afternoon in Astoria
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thanks to gmtPlus9
health care
A Heftier Dose To Swallow
Rising Cost of Health Care in U.S. Gives Other Developed Countries an Edge in Keeping Jobs
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For each mid-size car DaimlerChrysler AG builds at one of its U.S. plants, the company pays about $1,300 to cover employee health care costs -- more than twice the cost of the sheet metal in the vehicle. When it builds an identical car across the border in Canada, the health care cost is negligible.
In the battle for manufacturing jobs, the United States has always been at a disadvantage compared with underdeveloped countries where wages are low. But the rapidly rising cost of health care in the United States means that even developed countries sometimes have an edge when it comes to keeping jobs, according to interviews with dozens of corporate executives, legislators and health care consultants.
[...]
Jim Stanford, an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers union, said employers who could operate in either country save $4 per hour per worker by choosing Canada. "That's a reasonably significant differential. . . . It's one of the reasons Canada's auto industry has done a lot better," he said.
In a joint letter circulated in Canada in November 2002, officials from Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler said "the public health system significantly reduces total labour costs . . . compared to the cost of equivalent private health insurance services purchased by U.S.-based automakers."
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thanks to Needlenose
photography
New York During the War:
Photographs from the Office of War Information
Automat Entrance, 182 Broadway, ca. 1940
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thanks to plep
don't stand between the US and it's oil!
Mission Accomplished in Haiti
Onward to Venezuela?
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Hugo Chavez, in no uncertain terms, has warned the Bushites he will use the oil weapon against the United States if Bush attacks Venezuela, America's fourth-largest oil exporter.
"[I]f Mr. Bush is possessed with the madness of trying to blockade Venezuela, or worse for them, to invade Venezuela in response to the desperate song of his lackeys... sadly not a drop of petroleum will come to them from Venezuela," Hugo Chavez recently told supporters, according to AFP/Reuters.
Is Chavez paranoid?
Hardly.
Recall the CIA attempted coup against him in 2002.
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poster art
It's been awhile since I've been back to this site. Many very tasteful additions.
The Propaganda Remix Project
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thanks to The J-Walk Weblog
kerry
I have a Kerry sticker up but his foreign policy is not good.
Kerry’s Foreign Policy Record Suggests Few Differences with Bush
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Those who had hoped that a possible defeat of President George W. Bush in November would mean real changes in U.S. foreign policy have little to be hopeful about now that Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has effectively captured the Democratic presidential nomination.
That Senator Kerry supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq and lied about former dictator Saddam Hussein possessing a sizable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify it would be reason enough to not support him. (See my March 1, 2004 article “Kerry’s Support for the Invasion of Iraq and the Bush Doctrine Still Unexplained” )
However, a look at his record shows that Kerry’s overall foreign policy agenda has also been a lot closer to the Republicans than to the rank-and-file Democrats he claims to represent.
This is not too surprising, given that his top foreign policy advisors include: Rand Beers, the chief defender of the deadly airborne crop-fumigation program in Colombia who has justified U.S. support for that country’s repressive right-wing government by falsely claiming that Al-Qaeda was training Colombian rebels; Richard Morningstar, a supporter of the dictatorial regime in Azerbaijan and a major backer of the controversial Baku-Tbilisi oil pipeline, which placed the profits of Chevron, Halliburton and Unocal above human rights and environmental concerns; and, William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, member of the Carlisle Group, and advocate for major military contractors.
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thanks to Yolanda Flanagan
more shiny things
before
after
I've been going through all my bags and boxes of old bicycle parts. I even went on an archeological expedition to my basement and returned with treasures — I found my old Sugino Mighty Comp crank set. Above is one of my Universal brakes all shined up and ready to go. The Universal brake lever needs a little modifying but I think it will work just fine and look a little unusual. A little more prep work on the fork and it will be ready for painting. I really need to get that paint booth built.
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