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The ethics of Palestinian resistance

With Jimmy Carter's book a best seller and the Iraq War a top political concern, many Americans may have an interest right now in thinking about Israel and Palestine.  I'd like to recommend to anyone with that interest picking up a copy of a short and brilliant book by the British philosopher Ted Honderich called "Right and Wrong and Palestine, 9-11, Iraq, 7-7." 

"7-7," for Americans who haven't memorized that number, is the date of the terrorist attack in London's subway.  Honderich addresses ethical questions raised by the four topics in his title, but does so after laying out a general understanding of the philosophy of ethics.  In fact, it is on page 114 of a 247-page book that he finally gets around to a preliminary discussion of the definition of terrorism and on page 131 that he first touches on the four topics named.  The preceding pages may, however, be the most valuable portion of his book.

Lawyer for DREs drops DRE suit, calls VVPAT "Fool's Gold"

Prof Dan Tokaji Drops Pro-DRE litigation as Moot, Calls VVPAT "Fool's Gold" says Congress should "Take a Breath" on Further Legislation

Prof./Lawyer Dan Tokaji is lead counsel in the most potentially damaging elections case in America (Stewart v Blackwell, 6th Cir.)  and he is also arguably the chief legal conjurer for a world of DRE technology, having sued on behalf of the ACLU in this case to require DREs and have them held constitutional while having paper-based punchcards and central count optical scans held unconstitutional on account of their relative residual vote rates (defined as overvotes plus undervotes). 

Wall Street project goes global with Gala 10th Anniversary Reception at United Nations headquarters

NEW YORK (December 29, 2006) – The Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s Wall Street Project celebrates its 10th anniversary as a force for economic justice and equal opportunity with a gala reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Wednesday, January 10, at the United Nations Headquarters, First Avenue at 46th Street, New York City.

The reception brings to a close the 10th Annual Rainbow PUSH Wall Street Project Economic Summit, to be held Jan. 7-10, 2007, at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, 811 7th Ave. at 53rd Street in midtown Manhattan. For more information regarding the economic summit go to www.wallstreetproject.org.

“When we originated the Wall Street Project a decade ago, our goal was to bring Wall Street to Main Street, broadening economic opportunities nationwide,” said Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., founder and President of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. “Today, the dominant force in business is globalization, and the Wall Street Project, accordingly, is expanding its scope to highlight the worldwide need for access to economic opportunity.”

Why these people should be locked up forever or worse

If anyone thinks that there is anything high minded, noble, patriotic or praiseworthy about what Dick Cheney and the Cons engineered in Iraq, they should sign up for SSI disability because they lost all brain function.

First, the 9-11 crock complete with Pearl Harbor hystrionic and media manipulation is about as credible as an invasion of purple space aliens off the Long Island Sound. That was engineered to support the fear based hellacious pretext for a world war of crusade proportion with the wierd conflation of the alleged terrorism of a secular country wholly unrelated to that still floating around nomad named Bin Laden.

Most devastating war in American history

Charles Mercieca, Ph.D.
President
International Association of Educators for World Peace
Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education,
Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament
Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University

Since its declaration of independence in 1776, the United States has been involved in many wars. Several books were written in this regard including an elaborate pictorial book, Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism by Dr. Joel Andreas who teaches in John Hopkins University in Baltimore. This pictorial book is also available in Spanish and has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Thai, Danish, and German in addition to other languages. More information from: www.addictedtowar.com or www.akpress.org

Military Held as Top Priority

Gerald Ford’s historic mistake

The pardon of Richard Nixon by President Gerald Ford started this nation on the path that eventually gave us the Constitutional abuses of George W Bush. The current media frenzy supporting the pardon is both simplistic and illogical.

Ford pardoned Nixon before Nixon was brought to trial or convicted. The rule of law was ignored in favor of a double-standard where Presidents were not held accountable for law-breaking. The illegal activities of Nixon in the political sphere were an assault on American Democracy and should have been severely punished. Because of Ford’s outrageous pardon, Right-wing Republicans never understood how un-American the tactics of Nixon were. The current national Republican leadership is still Nixonian to their core!

A 'vast carelessness' - the president's and ours

The year-end debate about the Iraq Study Group's unequivocal diagnosis of failure and its grim list of uncertain remedies is the real measure of the hopelessness of the mess America made. The ISG's 79 recommendations - some wise, some impolitic, some impossible - is itself a confession that all the choices are bad.

That's not the commission's fault: No one else has a persuasive idea either, least of all the president - the self-proclaimed decider - who started and ran this misbegotten war.

As Nick Carraway says about the privileged and insouciant Tom and Daisy at the end of "The Great Gatsby": 

"They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ...."

And the Empire Mourned . . . Dissecting the Big Lie

"If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone 'America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership'."
---Will Rogers

"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."
--Noam Chomsky

With the intensity of Dale Earnhardt, Jr vying for victory in the Daytona 500, America’s mainstream media outlets have been racing furiously to imbue the citizenry of the Empire with unusually large doses of heavily choreographed agitprop.

Another unindicted US war criminal has casually ridden off into a peaceful crimson sunset. In response, pundits, talking heads, reporters and various other infotainment personnel are working feverishly to perpetuate America’s collective delusion that we embody integrity, decency, and enlightened values.

Saddam's last weekend

So this is to be Saddam’s last weekend. So be it. The guy was a dick; let him die. No skin off my ass. The old bastard is even wishing us well in his exit, telling his people not to “hate the U.S.-led forces” –CNN Excellent.

Another barbaric country whose savage inhabitants are one execution closer to democracy.

Excellent.

Do we get to hear about the actual dynamics of the power struggle in Iraq? We might be interested in hear it in plain language...very confusing, of course. If you are an average American citizen, it may be too complex for you to understand...I will try to break it down in simple terms.

The press's worst failure this year

No task is more important for any newspaper than to impart the news convincingly to the people and their government that a war is wrong, futile or, ultimately, lost. The United States has been militarily defeated in Iraq. It has no sane options left. All talk of troop "surges," of the need for a "continuing presence," of the feasibility of training an Iraqi army, of any constructive capacities for the central Iraqi "government" is as hollow as kindred talk in Vietnam in the early 1970s. There is no light, of any sort, at the end of the tunnel. The failure of the major newspapers in 2005 and 2006 to disclose the United States's defeat in Iraq has been as disastrous as the earlier failure to challenge the claims of the Bush administration on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

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