sonny photos

Dick, being (a) Dick

William Rivers Pitt writes: "I was absolutely savaged by an unexpected emotional detonation on Thursday. Every rough emotion I am capable of experiencing - anger, fear, sorrow, rage, bitterness, despair, loathing, astonishment, woe, regret, horror, fury - erupted within me at the same time that day. I spent hours in the aftermath trying to type an accurate description of what had happened to me and why, but I failed. For the first time in a long, long while, I was completely unable to write. What could have been powerful enough to huff and puff and blow my house down? What manner of mind bomb could hurl me so far off kilter that I was incapable of explaining it on paper? It was, of course, Dick Cheney."

War profiteers

Two Hearings, One Reality
    By William Rivers Pitt
    Friday 11 May 2007

    The fur was most definitely flying in Washington, DC yesterday. Newspaper reports revealed a White House meeting between several GOP House members and Mr. Bush. Those congressmen, according to the stories, read the riot act to Bush regarding the situation in Iraq, and further warned him that the Republican support he has enjoyed to date will fall to dust if progress isn't made soon. Several reporters and pundits were reminded, by this, of that "Long Walk" to the Nixon White House taken by GOP senators seeking his resignation.

    The main event on Thursday, however, was a House Judiciary oversight hearing chaired by Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) and starring Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The hearing was a reprise of the Senate Judiciary grilling Gonzales endured back in April, during which he deployed dozens of "I don't recall" replies to his questioners and essentially debased the entire concept of public testimony itself.

    Thursday's hearing wasn't much different. Despite the best efforts of Conyers and his fellow committee members, the hearing became, for the most part, another empty exercise. House member after House member attempted to pin Gonzales down on some basic details surrounding the firing of several US attorneys, but had little success in the endeavor. "You can answer these questions in three sentences," Chairman Conyers noted at one point, but to no avail. The "I don't recall" answers from Gonzales were so thickly applied once again that, by mid-afternoon, most of the committee members began to preface their questions with, "You may not be able to answer this, but...." More often than not, they were correct in that assumption.

Anti-US Uproar Sweeps Italy

The U.S. government has proposed to make Vicenza, Italy, the largest US military site in Europe, but the people of Vicenza, and all of Italy, have sworn it will never happen.

    As with the story of the Downing Street Minutes two years ago this week, a major news story and huge controversy in Europe right now is unknown to Americans, despite the fact that it is all about the policies of the American government. In February of this year, 200,000 people descended on the Northeastern Italian town of Vicenza (population 100,000) to march in protest. Largely as a result, the Prime Minister of Italy was (temporarily) driven out of power. Meanwhile, just outside Vicenza, large tents now hold newly minted citizen activists keeping a 24-hour-per-day vigil and training hundreds of senior citizens, children, and families every day in how to nonviolently stop bulldozers. The bulldozers they are waiting for are American.
The conflict, should it come about, will be as surprising to American television viewers as were the attacks of 9-11, unless someone tells them ahead of time what is going on. This week a group of Italians is in Washington, D.C., attempting to do just that. A group of Italian Members of Parliament also visited Washington last month in opposition to the base

Follow up

A little follow up on the post I made a few days ago about the L.A. police department heavy handed tactics at the peacefull may day rally. This article just in .

L.A. Police Attack peacefull crowd

This made me sick in the stomach. I been to L.A. a few times, and those police really are class A arseholes.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050307B.shtml

Article in NY Times

How can a group of men in robes, take away the right of choice to women when it comes to decision about their health ?

Denying the Right to Choose
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Thursday 19 April 2007

    Among the major flaws in yesterday's Supreme Court decision giving the federal government power to limit a woman's right to make decisions about her health was its fundamental dishonesty.

    Under the modest-sounding guise of following existing precedent, the majority opinion - written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito - gutted a host of thoughtful lower federal court rulings, not to mention past Supreme Court rulings.

    It severely eroded the constitutional respect and protection accorded to women and the personal decisions they make about pregnancy and childbirth. The justices went so far as to eviscerate the crucial requirement, which dates to the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, that all abortion regulations must have an exception to protect a woman's health.

OOOh, they knew alright, and he just sat there and read a children's book ,upside down, and pretended he did not know what was goign down

  September 11, 2001: The French Knew Much About It
    By Guillaume Dasquié
    Le Monde

    Monday 16 April 2007

    It's an impressive mass of documents. From a distance, one would imagine a doctoral thesis. On closer inspection: nothing of the kind. Red stamps "Confidential-Defense" and "Strictly National Usage" on every page. At the top on the left, a royal blue logo: that of the DGSE, Direction générale des services extérieurs [General Directorate for Foreign Services], the French secret services. In total, 328 classified pages. Notes, reports, syntheses and summaries, maps, graphs, organization charts, satellite photos. All exclusively devoted to al-Qaeda, its leaders, its seconds-in-command, its hide-outs and training camps. Also to its financial supports. Nothing less than the fundamentals of the DGSE reports compiled between July 2000 and October 2001. A veritable encyclopedia.

    At the end of several months of investigation of this very special documentation, we contacted DGSE headquarters. And on April 3, the present chief of staff, Emmanuel Renoult, received us there, within the confines of the Tourelles garrison in Paris. After thumbing through the 328 pages that we set on his desk, he can't keep himself from deploring such a leak, all the while allowing us to understand that the packet represents virtually the entirety of DGSE production on the subject for this crucial period. On the other hand, it was impossible to draw the least comment from him on the substance of the material. Too sensitive.

    It's true that these secret services chronicles about al-Qaeda, with their various revelations, raise many questions. And at first, a surprise: The high number of notes devoted exclusively to al-Qaeda's threats against the United States, months before the suicide attacks in New York and Washington. Nine whole reports on that subject between September 2000 and August 2001, including a five-page summary entitled, "Airplane Hijacking Plans by Radical Islamists," and dated ... January 5, 2001! Eight months before September 11, the DGSE reports therein tactical discussions conducted between Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies from the beginning of 2000 on the subject of hijacking American commercial airliners.

Or was it because Rove had to hide something

Fitzgerald Cited Missing Emails During Plame Probe
    By Jason Leopold

      Friday 13 April 2007

    In late January 2004, Patrick Fitzgerald, the US attorney appointed as special prosecutor to investigate whether White House officials knowingly leaked the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, sent a letter to then-acting Attorney General James Comey. Fitzgerald was seeking confirmation that he had the authority to investigate and prosecute suspects in the leak case for additional crimes, including evidence destruction.

The lenghts they will go to hide the fact he can't spell

Millions of White House Emails Missing
    By Matt Renner
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Friday 13 April 2007

    A report Thursday details steps taken by the Bush administration to intentionally subvert the mandatory archiving of official email.

Danzer, Trans-M, TB, NST, Olan, and Sicobois

Should these companies not be blacklisted. Anyone out there in the import industry and or building industry, the above mentioned companies should be banned or at least boycotted, read here as to why

Vast Forests With Trees Each Worth £4,000 Sold for a Few Bags of Sugar
    By John Vidal
    The Guardian UK

    Wednesday 11 April 2007

Congo village chiefs not told value of concessions. World Bank blamed over deals causing "catastrophe."

(Graphic: Greenpeace)

    Kisangani - Lamoko, 150 miles down the Maringa river, sits on the edge of a massive stretch of virgin rainforest in central Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). On February 8 2005, representatives of a major timber firm arrived to negotiate a contract with the traditional landowners.
Few in the village realised that the talks would transform all their lives, but in just a few hours, the chief, who had received no legal advice and did not realise that just one tree might be worth more than £4,000 in Europe, had signed away his community's rights in the forest for 25 years.