the einsteins at PNAC are at it again

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This has heavily to do with why I'm trying mightily not to obsess on the pushbutton revolutions in full swing right now.

In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage US intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to "immediately" prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Warning that Libya stood "on the threshold of a moral and humanitarian catastrophe", the letter, which was addressed to President Barack Obama, called for specific immediate steps involving military action, in addition to the imposition of a number of diplomatic and economic sanctions to bring "an end to the murderous Libyan regime".

In particular, it called for Washington to press NATO to "develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move naval assets into Libyan waters" to "aid evacuation efforts and prepare for possible contingencies;" as well as "(e)stablish the capability to disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians."

I know the place of their birth and it ain't in the GORGEOUS courage and transcendent love of the people rising and being slaughtered for it. No, no, no it ain't. I'm trying not to talk about it too much because I think I might go postal from more people reporting as though this were a sporting event and more citizens waxing so smugly confused about it all.

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love, 99
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may the buddhas of the ten directions protect him

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I can't express the contours of my solidarity with Walid if he has really seen the error of his ways.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's 30,000-strong Druze community, has thrown his weight behind Hezbollah and Syria in the political showdown with the US-backed March 14 alliance that is brewing in Beirut.

Jumblatt leads a bloc of 11 parliamentarians and his support could now give Hezbollah and its allies a veto over who becomes the country's next president. It is bitter blow to Saad al-Hariri, the caretaker prime minister, as he tries to secure enough votes to form a new government.

But even more significantly, Jumblatt's declared rejection of the UN-backed tribunal investigating the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister and father of Saad al-Hariri, has permanently sealed his break from the March 14 coalition.

This signals a return to his pre-2005 politics, when he viewed Hezbollah as a legitimate resistance movement against Israel, and officially brings his flirtation with pro-Western positions - which contradict his family's long history of alliances with the left and pan-Arab nationalists - to an end.

Jumblatt is known for vacillating between positions, but yesterday's announcement places him firmly in the Lebanese opposition camp and indicates a complete reversal from the strident anti-Syrian declarations that have marked his rhetoric in recent years.

I know I'm just flat out paranoid from EVERYTHING going spectacularly wrong in the Middle East for my ENTIRE life, but I hope we're not setting him up to give us some reason to do the kind of thing we did when Hamas won the Palestinian elections... only worse. They seem to have been setting up a thousand entrances into WWIII over the past decade or two and this could be one of them, or it could be the time when Lebanon FINALLY gets Lebanon for Lebanon, permanently stultifying Israel's attempts to take its resources if not its territory.

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love, 99
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bank of america is doing more than buying up negative domain names

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Unbelievably not dead from all the exposures over their fraudulent mortgage and foreclosure activities, they don't plan on dying behind anything WikiLeaks will put out either.

And, speaking of unbelievably not dead....

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IT'S OFFICIAL: We set up Saddam and then hung him.

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love, 99
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a rock star in lebanon

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Wow. Franklin Lamb did a FINE job of putting us straight on the matter of Elvis Ahmadinejad's visit to Lebanon. jo6pac put me onto it, but I went and hunted it down to its source. Much better at this link. Pictures and video along with a great article. I loved the part where the Lebanese merely locked-on to the Israeli provocation with a missile to drive it off and proceeded with their festivities. Viva Lebanon. Viva freedom fighters.

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love, 99
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the inexhaustible nightmare

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I don't think I've mentioned lately how much I hate these people. I propose that we mitigate the horror by blocking them from returning after their summer break. Instead of bodily removing them from their offices, let's just bodily prevent them from getting back into them.

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splendid idea

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But the part about this that rocks the most is hearing of the solidarity between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. My fist shot into the air! I'm probably still high from listening to the Progressive Dullards of America coming out strongly for unity with "paleo-conservatives" and libertarians, but, dammit, peace and freedom fighters the world over have my undying love and admiration.
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After all, we ARE talking about some of the worst murderating fucks of all time.
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quotes from a hersh assad conversation

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another potentially wonderful thing about which to be cautiously optimistic

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Did they forget to put the LSD in my coffee this morning?

Is the pill illness at last subsiding?

What the hell is going on here? The sun is shining....

they are freedom fighters, goddammit!

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And we would do no less. Anyone who cares to drop the conditioning of the ceaseless propagandistic "framing" of this scene could see it as plainly as the back of their hands. Hamas and Hezbollah are freedom fighters, defending their people from the horrific and inhuman onslaught from the immortal psychosis of Zionism. Iran recognizes the backs of their own hands. To help Hamas and Hezbollah in these times, despite the terrifying consequences, is actually bodhisattva work, actually decent and utterly humane. Yet we insist otherwise. Our new administration taking right up where the last one left off... preying on the hopes of the whole world that they will make sense prevail.

Does Hillary think that a media splashed with her widest grins will convince us this is new diplomacy, a change, something we can believe in? Until they learn to treat reality instead of insanity, I for one will not believe in it.

c'mon pleeeeeeeeeeze!

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It's gotta happen.

Make It Happen

the dire need of an epiphany

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Life During Self Defense
by The Medium Lobster

Ah, Israel, the holy land, light unto the nations! Barely a month after valiantly killing 1300 Gazans, maiming and wounding thousands more, and leaving the rest for dead in an open-air prison, Israel has stood up for its right to stand up to other people's rights by forming its most hawkish possible government. A lesser nation might have wavered in the face of a merciless Palestinian onslaught of pleading and stump-waving, but Israel realizes this is a war between good and evil, right and wrong, civilization and those too poor to afford civilization. True, it's far from a fair fight - Israel has a mere three hundred nuclear warheads while the Palestinians have countless rocks to throw - but somehow the pluck and determination of this scrappy regional superpower has prevailed over the deadly horde of orphans, beggars and amputees who threaten to live next to it.

Israel's critics will forever bicker over the spilled milk of Israeli policy - a few thousand homes demolished here, a few thousand corpses over there - but we must allow that Israel has a right to defend itself, and we must also allow that defending itself necessarily entails the indiscriminate bombing of thousands of screaming refugees. After all, if an implacable terrorist enemy had been launching rockets at one of your villages, wouldn't you do everything in your power to stop them? And once those same implacable terrorist enemies agreed to a cease-fire, wouldn't you break that cease-fire by bombing them and their families, reasoning that they are, after all, implacable terrorist enemies, and not to be trusted? And when you went to bomb those terrorists and their families, wouldn't you also bomb everyone and everything around them, reasoning that only a terrorist would live near, go to school with, or be hospitalized in the same vicinity as a terrorist? And when you went to bomb everything around them, wouldn't you be sure to plan that bombing months before the event that nominally precipitated it? And before planning that massive bombing campaign, wouldn't you be sure to cut the entire population off from terrorist food, militant medicine, and jihadist electricity for months in advance? And when that population retaliated against your pre-retaliation retaliation by launching rockets at one of your villages, wouldn't that merely confirm their nature as implacable terrorist enemies who must be destroyed at any cost?

Yes, we may be tempted to mourn the civilian dead, but in killing those civilians, isn't Israel merely protecting itself against future terrorists who would otherwise go on to retaliate against Israel for the deaths of their children? And yes, we may be tempted to mourn the deaths of the children, but in killing those children, isn't Israel simply preemptively taking out future militants who would otherwise grow up to avenge the deaths of their parents? As much as we might all yearn for peace, history has shown that Palestinians understand only violence. Well, violence and Arabic, but Arabic is notoriously difficult to learn, while most of us can become fluent in violence in just under a semester.

practically a girly man

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Others have used the word "pusillanimity" and I'm glad it didn't die out with William F. Buckley, Jr. It's apt, goddammit. We can have all kinds of hope that he does lots of great things, but he's starting out in a downright "chickenshit" -- to use a logger term of art -- manner as regards the Middle East.

What's the sense in any of the stuff we do if we can't be doing it on the basis of the fundamentally real? Abbas is NOT the President of Palistine. That's just ONE of the many unreal considerations in Obama's first moves. This is not how effectiveness is achieved. This is not how effectiveness is achieved. This is NOT how effectiveness is achieved.

this calling up your victims bit

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...IS OUTRIGHT MACABRE! STOP THESE FIENDS.

we are all deathly afraid of the spread

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Seems like a thousand times I have passed on posting one crazed "prediction" or "worst case scenario" in the last couple weeks. This shit starts in and we are as desperate to know the end as to see it. Lebanon is hugely at risk, and so is Syria, and so is Iran. The only positive aspect is that it could end our perfidies there once and for all. I actually feel, now that our entire legislative branch has so roundly endorsed genocide, that we have lost our right to whine about the potential losses on our side. I feel the agony of knowing the abominations fed to the kids in our military to help them justify slaughtering for the evil gains of evil plutocrats, but, in truth, their lives are not worth more than the millions we are killing and just plain ruining.

nasrallah sounds perfectly lucid to me

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Think back on your whole life of being conditioned to think guys like him are just completely wacky.

Don't you think it's time you reëxamined the contents of your own skull? I mean, these fucks have been working on your ass for a very long time. They're on full blast right now. Are you too lazy to open your true eyes and finally see?

settle down, now

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Suddenly, it's being put about that rockets were fired into Israel from Lebanon. Did that sound like a declaration of war? Do we even believe any rockets were really fired from Lebanon, and do we believe it would not have been the Israelis themselves if they were? Are we falling for this crap?

Of course, Sadr piped up -- right on schedule, according to Old Uncle Dave... according to all of us sitting here hoping every nation on earth would follow Venezuela and boot out their ambassadors -- which is sure to help the brains of almost everyone in Europe and America snap shut, just as were beginning to get them back open over this relentless carnage.

Fuck.

they are ready for this fabled israeli attack....

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This would also be about helping retaliate if Israel [or the United States] attacks Iran and/or Syria. They don't want the America-friendly powers in Lebanon undercutting them.

I don't think they'll stand down until Obama is in office, and if he doesn't make it, they'd be crazy to let down their guard.

seeeeerious business

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Atul Aneja reports from Dubai:

Russia has accelerated its naval build up in Syria following its decision to beef up its forces in the Mediterranean Sea.

Ten Russian warships have been positioned at the Syrian port of Tartus, said Iran’s Press TV. The deployment of these ships follows a military accord between Syria and Russia in August after the conflict in Caucasus surfaced.

Rear Admiral Andrei Baranov, the chief of Russian’s Black Sea Fleet, was quoted as saying that Russian engineers were expanding the capacity of the Tartus harbour to accommodate more ships. Besides, Russian teams were also increasing the capacity of Syria’s Latakia port.

Analysts point out that Russian presence in Syria, a key ally of Iran, is likely to deter a military strike against Damascus and Tehran. Russian ships are equipped to shoot down hostile aircraft.

As you may have noticed, I've been rather distracted for the last few days. There were earlier mentions of the Russian ships at Syria, but I guess they needed to hit me over the head with it....

I mean, come on. No shit this means they're ready to retaliate if Israel tries anything. Whoa.

it all means hope to me

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You see, plutocrats would rather not commit genocide to get what they want. They just do that if they have no other means to get what they want. As long as you appease them other ways, they don't slaughter masses. Since the masses never slaughter plutocrats out of existence, this really is the best that could realistically be hoped for right now. I see Russia's willingness to call them on it and to extend protections to the peoples at highest risk from them as a great sacrifice for the good of humanity. I am also hoping that the Israelis will respond more to Russian pressure to stop slaughtering Palestinians than they have our non-pressure.

You may think my outside-the-box take on geopolitical affairs is "cute" or even "naïve", but I'm telling you I know for sure that naked inhumanity is the last resort of plutocrats. They know how to milk their trillions out of cold wars, and they prefer it to open slaughter they can only keep CALLING righteous, against visible evidence to the contrary.

It's also encouraging that Biden is a master of the kind of blather that is required of cold warriors, and Obama shows every indication of becoming even greater still in this regard. They can greatly thrill the plutocrats, and they will... even give them a chance to self-righteously throw McCain to the dogs, calm the natives. The plutocrats are capable of squashing Rove, and they will if they are certain Obama and Biden will give them what they want. They were already certain Hillary would. They just needed this encouragement from Obama.

People of good conscience are forced to vote for people of little conscience in order
to oppose those of no conscience. -- [quoth me]

As long as it suits the plutocrats, we will have that option.

That's the way I'm coming to understand this shit he calls "hope". It is hope. Just not the kind we came to know at the movies, not the kind that suits the dreamers of a decent world, probably not even the kind he could ever let himself admit even to himself. It's not the kind the kids signed on for either. It's not the kind people can stand to stare in the face. It's too damning. We will go back to going crazy with love for Braveheart and Maximus, the heroes we are desperate to know but only dream.

the reason to fight iran

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This is a book review and a quick summary of some of the Israeli atrocities against Palestine. It ends with:

Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: "Speak up for the Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge."

More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of Israel, tried again to awaken Americans' moral conscience with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.

Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel's bidding, and the media and evangelical "Christian" churches have been preparing the American people for the event.

It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin's doctrine that violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian Zionist churches agree.

As you may know, I have listened with extreme attention to everything I can get my hands on that has Ahmadinejad speaking. He never wavers from exhorting us to cease the violence and cruelty and let the matter of who controls what territory be resolved by referendum, by peaceful and democratic means. Some of the best men we have here have been saying the same thing. This really is as insane as us helping intransigently evil and murderous forces. Click the wailing wall and at least skim the piece by Paul Craig Roberts.