BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

by David Warren President Barack Obama announced this week, in his latest glamour speech -- this one choreographed among cadets at West Point -- the substance of the new U.S. "Afghan strategy." I last wrote about this on Oct. 28, when we'd been waiting seven months for particulars to accompany the glamour-speech "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan," that was delivered last March. I suggested that Obama had shown himself to be a president unable to make hard decisions. He makes speeches instead -- vacuous speeches that sound very grand to a poorly-informed mass audience, but on reading we find only posturing narcissism. This is a serious flaw in the "leader of the free world." But even presidents who can't make decisions get cornered by "events," and eight months after his initial rhetorical offering, with much additional posturing, Obama finally gave the U.S. and allies a policy of sorts. It was designed to provide ...

Oh Puhllleeeezze! Does anyone believe these murdering animals? "WITH RESERVATIONS" - golly, wonder what those might be? How about: when we bomb Israel they can't defend themselves or fight back all Jews need to die Israel needs to be wiped off the planet Everyone must convert to Islam and Sharia law must rule There is NO TALKING to these people. Unfortunately the Moderate Palestinians are not the ones in charge. Hamas is. And this is what we got. Now people are angry Israel is defending itself? Sounds a lot like this to me: CLICK HERE. Hamas: We accept Egypt's proposal for Gaza truce - with reservations By Avi Issacharoff and Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz Correspondents and Reuters Hamas representatives held a press conference in Cairo Monday evening following talks with Egyptian officials, and announced that they have accepted in principle an Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire agreement to end the fighting between the Islamist group and Israel in the Gaza Strip, sa...

(I am not, nor have I ever been a Bolton fan. I find him to be a reactionary war-hawk. But, I am smart enough to know when someone speaks truth and open minded enough to agree with someone's ideas; even when I don't like the speaker. - Barbara) By John R. Bolton War in the Gaza Strip demonstrates yet again that the current governance paradigm for the Palestinian people has failed. Terrorists financed and supplied by Iran control Gaza; the Palestinian Authority is broken, probably irretrievably; and economic development is stalled in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians are suffering the consequences of regional power struggles played out through them as surrogates. Israel isn't a happy place, either. It endures opprobrium from the world's High-Minded for defending itself from terrorism yet still finds itself subjected to terrorist attacks from Hamas and terrorists based in Syria and Lebanon. Israel's domestic politics are increasingly muddled, and its way forward ...

By Ian O'Doherty So, it's genocide now, is it? Or is it actually another holocaust, something which one typically restrained Palestinian analyst described as "worse than Hitler's war against the Jews"? Are we watching the ethnic cleansing of an entire people? Are we witnessing the deliberate eradication of a race? Well, no actually, we're not. Yet the conventional dinner party wisdom which we've had to put up with in the media, both here in Ireland and generally across Britain, is that somehow Israel is the aggressor in the rapidly worsening situation in Gaza. Footage of air strikes with the ensuing photogenic explosions and dramatic plumes of smoke, quickly followed by clips of collapsed buildings and enraged mourners, makes far better copy than actually looking at the reasons why Israel has done what it's done. Anyone who devotes only a cursory glance at the news, both print and television, would be forgiven for thinking that, out of spite, might and...

(excerpts from the above titled book) by Susan Sontag In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas , her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow writers were rapt by the advancing fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as the very tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, "the educated class," a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is "some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting" that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy. What does an educated read: privileged, well-off-woman like her know of war? Can her recoil from its allure be l...

by John Pilger I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children to a US bomb - but mass murder in Afghanistan isn’t news. On 12 July, the Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the “ high drama ” and “ meticulously practised routine ” of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, “ saving a life took precedence over [their] security ”. Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that “ 47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday ”. Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk...

By Greg Palast for TomPaine.com/OurFuture.org I can’t make this up: In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it. The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the price of oil to $134 a barrel. It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill came due now. Barack Obama knows this. Or, just as important, those crafting his policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary Clinton’s team. There could be no more vital difference between the Republican and Democratic candidacies. And you won’t learn a thing about it on the news from the Fox-holes. Let me explain. In 1928, oil company chieftains (from Anglo-Persian Oil, now British Petroleum, from Standard Oil, now Exxon, and their Continental counterparts) were faced with a crisis: falling prices due to rising supplies of oil; the same crisis faced by th...

BUSH-RICE BIRTHDAY PRESENT TO THE JEWISH NATION by Emanuel A. Winston PART 1. WHAT DO PRESIDENT BUSH AND SECRETARY-OF-STATE RICE HAVE IN MIND? On her 60th birthday party, May 10th, America's President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will present the Jewish people a birthday present which may come in the form of a poisoned apple. Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will knowingly accept the poison and feed it to the Jews of Israel and World Jewry –– as he did in Gush Katif/Gaza. Actually, we do not yet know what poison will be chosen and the Bush/Olmert regimes will, of course, not tell us in advance lest we find an antidote. Let us speculate on what this black hearted cabal might have been working on for Israel's 60th Birthday: 1. It might be an under-the-table document like the Oslo Accords were when then PM Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres brewed up, in secrecy, the surrender of 7 cities in Eretz Yisrael to Yassir Arafat which inevitably became offici...

Obama is already backpedaling on that "soaring rhetoric" that has all his cult members in his thrall. The NLP is starting to crack when the reality of the state of affairs of this country is dropped near his neophyte lap. Excerpts from Michael Goodwin's column in today's "NY Daily News" After watching hours of the dreary Senate hearings on Iraq on Tuesday, I have only one remaining question: Why would anybody want to be the next President of the United States? There is no clear way forward or out of Iraq. Beyond changes on the margins - forcing the Iraqi government to pay more reconstruction costs, for example - the most likely prospect is more of the same slog in the hopes Iraqis eventually will build for themselves the country we are unable to build for them. I say that despite knowing that Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have promised to withdraw our troops within a year or so, no matter the ground conditions. I don't believe it...

"Teachers' Religious War On Kids Is Everywhere"* Really It Is. Bill Said So...Over...And Over. By Steve Young *Everywhere: How Bill O'Reilly defines the battle when a teacher in Bismark, ND, purporting to push religion is thrown out and a teacher in Santa Ana, CA purporting to push atheism is not. You can tell when the War on Christmas is waning. O'Reilly has put out the warning. All over the country, Christian and conservative kids are being persecuted by secular progressive teachers. "SP teachers are running wild all over America, bullying conservative kids like crazy!" Bill has the tape to prove it. Dr. James Corbett, a high school history teacher in California, was caught on tape calling religion "irrational," accusing conservatives of wanting women to be "pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen," and calling Bill and Sean Hannity "liars." He even pronounced Roger Ailes name wrong and said that Ailes had advised President...

ONCE A LIAR... (Some Listening While You Read) WOULD I LIE TO YOU? Click Here Lied into one war, this Chump sat at Annapolis and lied to Israel and treated Israel like toilet paper. And now he's determined to lie us into another mess before he leaves office. Former CIA Officials: Bush Iran Claims "Preposterous" Thomas B. Edsall and Max Follmer Four former CIA officials who provided intelligence information to past presidents described as preposterous President Bush's claim that he was unaware until very recently that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. "It's unbelievable," said Melvin Goodman, who worked for the CIA from 1966 to 1990 and now is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Goodman's assessment of Bush's assertions were very similar to those of Larry C. Johnson, who worked at the CIA from 1985 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1993 served as Deputy Director in the U.S. State Department's Office of Counter ...

The Treason of the Mainstream Democrats by R.W. Behan "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." --Article III, Section 3, United States Constitution (emphasis added) The mainstream Democrats—represented, say, by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Christopher Dodd—have not levied war against the United States. Their treason lies instead in committing the second offense: they adhere to enemies of the country, giving them aid and comfort. The enemies are President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. Like no other president and vice president in history, these men attacked their country. It was not our geography George Bush and Richard Cheney invaded. Instead they abandoned and subverted the bedrock institution of our Constitutional democracy: the rule of law. By word and deed, Mr. Bush repeatedly and arrogantly ...