Bush pushing the envelope!

Oops, Bush did it again. A month ago, while signing a postal reform act voted by the congress, he did not miss the chance to push the “envelope” by attaching a signed statement that gives the right to his administration to seize and open citizen mail “in exigent circumstances, for foreign intelligent collection”. As usual, nobody noticed right away, until recently when civil rights associations found out about this obvious Big brother law coming reminding us of Orson welles’ 1984.

This is becoming a pattern of this administration; they amend innocent laws at the last moment and take us back a few dozen years by taking our right to privacy. The reason as you can imagine is “Let us read your mail or terrorists will get us”, efficient isn’t?

There are two very dangerous aspects to such actions. First, it is the loss of privacy to American citizens and permanent residents. Second is the loss of credibility for the USA when they go teach lessons to other countries about human rights and freedom. How can they ask other countries to do what themselves don’t?

If this is not pushing the envelope, what is? :)

Le mouton de l’Aïd aux USA.

Je viens de découvrir que le mouton Tunisien est un animal fort apprécié aux US. En effet il s’avère qu’il y a une race qui s’appelle « American Tunis sheep » qui a été importé de Tunisie au 19eme siècle. Il parait même que le président Thomas Jefferson, auteur principal de la déclaration d'indépendance et un des pères de la constitution américaine en était un des importateurs !!J’étais agréablement surpris par cette nouvelle jusqu’au moment ou j’ai appris que cette race et a été mélangé avec des races européennes pour l’améliorer et faire réduire la graisse de la queue (Elliyya). Un crime pour tout Tunisien qui se respecte :-).

The Tunis is one of the oldest breeds indigenous to the United States. It is a medium-sized meat-type sheep characterized by creamy wool, copper-red colored faces & legs, pendulous ears, and minor fat deposits over the dock area.[...]

The earliest documented importation occurred in 1799. They came as a gift to the U.S. from the ruler of Tunisia, his highness the Bey of Tunis, and were entrusted to the care of Judge Richard Peters of Pennsylvania who became an outspoken advocate of the breed. By the 1820's, Tunis were in much demand by butchers in eastern Pennsylvania. Descendants of Judge Peters' sheep, as well as additional importations of fat-tailed sheep became established in Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. Thomas Jefferson imported "broad-tailed" sheep and kept them for many years.Source

Si cette race est fort appréciée aux US, j’espère que cela donnera des idées à nos éleveurs locaux ;-)

NBC: Iraq in civil war; White House disagrees

For the first time a major TV network in the US(NBC), described the situation in Iraq as a civil war, resulting in an official disagreement by the white house. This is very important to understand how the americans get their news. What is obvious to the rest of the world is not for americans who generally get their news from such networks.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NBC News on Monday branded the
Iraq conflict a civil war -- a decision that put it at odds with the White House and that analysts said would increase public disillusionment with the U.S. troop presence there.

NBC, a major U.S. television network, said the Iraqi government's inability to stop spiraling violence between rival factions fit its definition of civil war.[....]
Several analysts said NBC's decision was important as the administration would face more pressure to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq if the U.S. public comes to view the conflict as a civil war.

The decision "certainly is a major milestone," said Ted Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

"That does change the terminology and is likely to change the perspective of viewers, and one suspects other media outlets will sooner or later follow suit."

Public weariness with the conflict -- which has now lasted longer than U.S. involvement in World War Two -- helped Democrats take control of Congress from Bush's Republican Party in November 7 elections.

Analysts said Americans would not tolerate U.S. troops being used as referees between warring Iraqi factions.
NBC: Iraq in civil war; White House disagrees

What kind of people have we become?

We take our breakfast and enjoy our morning coffee while reading or watching the news of hundreds of Iraqis, being blown off by some suicide bomber whose act is supposed to free his country from the US occupation. And then we kiss our wives goodbye and drive to work enjoying our favorite music (George Michael’s for me). During lunch break, we eat a sandwich while surfing the news sites, looking at dead bodies and torn cars and bloody scenes and then go back to work. We’ve been immunized against pain and we got used to injustice, we’re loosing our humanity, we accepted the fact that Iraqis, Palestinians, Sudanese have a different destiny then ours. They die, we watch!

This is what we became, even the Americans who ask for US withdrawal, they do it to save US soldiers life and US money not for the poor Iraqis who are supposed to be free now, enjoying democracy paid by Uncle Sam.

It is as if we’re watching a big reality show, where children, women and men die because of decisions of some lunatic politicians who are telling us that they made it their job to change the world and make it a better place for all of us. BS!!

Isn’t so obvious that the war in Iraq is wrong? Why don’t we leave these poor people live and enjoy their life the way they want it, raise their kids and build their country their way, the same way we do. How can they dare, stand in front of cameras and tell us that this is the right thing to do, and that they’re dying for their own good!!

Isn’t so obvious that the people of Palestine are suffering from injustice and cupidity? Isn’t so obvious that it is time they have their own state? Don’t they deserve to live in security, the same way most of us do? How can they dare explain to us that they deserve this life (or death)!

Why is it that power falls always in the hand of unwise people, blind people, cupid and idiots? Even democracy is failing preventing these aggressions. The US government is staying in Iraq against the will of the majority of US voters, why? Why do the Israelis believe that they are better fighting the Arabs than cooperating with them? Why is it that these leaders who wanted to fight for the freedom of Iraq and liberating it from Saddam, don’t do the same thing for Sudan, or North Korea or a lot of these poor countries in Africa who are still fighting for food and water? Why do they think that we are idiots and will believe such lies? At least during the colonization era, the British or the French were not hiding it that they need these countries for their own use. Now they achieve the same thing by making us believe that they are helping.

Today 150 died and 300 got wounded in Iraq. 3800 died in October, 3300 in September, 3000 in August. 60000 civilians died form violence, more than 500,000 died from the effect of the war on the country infrastructure. A country is losing its population, its history is being looted, thousands of historical artifacts thousand years old are lost, and one of the seven world wonder is being a world blunder. Enough is enough! Stop helping them, leave them alone! Mr. Bush, it is a civil war that you created all right! So at least don’t insult us by saying it is not.

I think we do owe these people an apology, in the form of bringing to justice whoever is responsible for this mess. Whoever opened this Pandora box that is spreading death and misery should be held responsible for his acts.

---

Key points in the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq report released Wednesday:

CIVILIANS VIOLENTLY KILLED: October (3,709), September (3,345), August (3,009), July (3,590).

PROFESSIONAL TARGETS: Assassinations of professionals continued at an alarming rate in the past two months, including journalists, teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors and political and religious leaders.

DISPLACED PEOPLE: An estimated 1.6 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries since 2003. An estimated 418,392 people have been displaced by sectarian violence and 15,240 by military operations since Sunni-Arab insurgents bombed a Shiite shrine in Samara on Feb. 22, 2006. An estimated 100,000 people per month have left Iraq in the past few months.

DETAINEES: At the end of October, there were 29,256 detainees in Iraq, about 46 percent held in coalition facilities and 54 percent in Iraqi prisons.

TARGETED SCHOOLS: Schools have increasingly become a target for sectarian and other criminal attacks. More than 300 teachers and Ministry of Education employees were killed and 1,158 wounded in 2006 alone.

CLAIMING BODIES: During October, more than 200 unidentified bodies were transferred to cemeteries in the two Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. If a victim is killed in a military operation, family members may be reluctant to claim the body at the morgues, fearing militias or security forces there could take revenge against the rest of the family.

IRAQI SECURITY FORCES: Absenteeism is widespread among Iraqi army and police forces, some of which are infiltrated by militias and death squads. In Kirkuk alone, half of the 5,000 member police force and its 13,000 army soldiers reportedly are not reporting for duty at any given time and many fail to return to duty.
UN Report about Iraq (The Associated Press)

The Bush effect

It is amazing how some visionary people can predict or see through the cloud of current events. Georges Orwell in his “1984” fiction book described through the story of a couple of lovers how the world would be in 1984. The book was written in 1946, just after WWII and the start of the cold war era.

The deception, the totalitarianism, the despotism, the Big Brother concept, the population surveillance, the spinning of the news, the rewriting of history by governments to suit its politics, justifying the unjustifiable…etc. On all this, Orwell was right on.

And I am not talking here about governments of banana countries, I am thinking about the current administration of the USA, headed by President Bush.

I talked about one of the aspects of news spinning and truth twisting in a post, a couple of days ago. In the same series, I want to share with these blunders made by Bush’s administration.

1) Iraq war spending:
SIGIR, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is a body created by US congress to oversee the spending of over $3 billion of taxpayer’s money on Iraq reconstruction. This team audited hundreds of projects saving around $400M. It investigated 243 cases of abuse or embezzlement that sometimes resulted in arrest and jailing of such wrong doers. It also issued reports criticizing the white house effort of reconstruction.

I guess Bush’s administration did not like seeing these contractors having tough time trying to get the money, so in mid September, he instructed republicans in the congress to slip a small provision in a military bill they are working on, that would close this office by 10/07. They did, it passed and he signed it. A lot of congressman did not know that the just did that until 2 days ago! The new democrat led senate just introduced a bill that would extend the SIGIR mission beyond 2007. The fact that a lot of this

2)Bush Internment camps
In January 2006 Homeland Security awarded a $385 million contract to Kellogg, Brown and Root, the subsidiary of Halliburton Co., to build "temporary detention and processing capabilities" aka “internment camps” in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. Actually more clues about the US switching to be a police state can be found on this article “Toward a police state in America”

3) On October 17, 2006 Bush signed the Military Commissions Act (MCA). This law was barely covered in the US and it breaks all the rules of civil and human. Under the MCA the president or the secretary of defense can declare any person US citizen or not an "enemy combatant" who can be jailed, has no right to an attorney and can even be tortured. Jail time in unlimited!!!! Is this constitutional? You understand now how right was Orwell in “1984”.

4)In the same Military bill used in (1), republicans buried deep down the hundreds of acts, sections and titles a small provision that give full power to the president to use the state national guards, which in the US is normally equivalent to a state martial laws, since that’s the only time where state soldiers report to the president instead of their governor. Some call this a mini coup. This information was not mentioned in any newspaper and it came to light through blog rumors. A journalist took the time to check and confirm it. I did the same exercise by checking the congress site, and found it here, look for Title V, Subtitle B, section 531 :-). So now soldiers can be used on the US soil at any time, peace or war, whenever the president or the secretary of state requires it.

" To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. " George Orwell.

" Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. " George Orwell.

Mr. Bush’s covert propaganda.

I stumbled across a year old article in NYT about the Bush administration and the propaganda machine they built using our tax dollars. I heard last year about Armstrong Williams, the reporter who got paid $241,000 by the department of education in order to praise Bush’s education policy. But I was never aware by the extent of this unethical and misleading approach.

In fact it seems that the US government through dozens of its agencies is becoming a rival to Hollywood producers by producing fictions or fake reports concerning many subjects, even false interviews!!!! These pre-packaged news report are given to TV producers for free who under pressure of budget or for other unethical reason broadcast it as if it is exclusivity and never mention the origin of these reports!!!

Here are a few excerpts from the article:”Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News”



It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.



Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.



Confronted with such evidence, most news directors were at a loss to explain how the segments made it on the air. Some said they were unable to find archive tapes that would help answer the question. Others promised to look into it, then stopped returning telephone messages. A few removed the segments from their Web sites, promised greater vigilance in the future or pleaded ignorance


The explanation begins inside the White House, where the president's communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against terrorism. The idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq



United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the domestic dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, for example, allows Voice of America to broadcast pro-government news to foreign audiences, but not at home. Yet State Department officials said that law does not apply to the Office of Broadcasting Services. In any event, said Richard A. Boucher, a State Department spokesman: "Our goal is to put out facts and the truth. We're not a propaganda agency."

George Carlin, my favorite comedian…

George Carlin is one of these comedians who can make you both laugh and feel sad at the same time and this is by just telling the truth. He is one of the few comedians who depicts the average American and the American system as close as it gets and he does that using hilarious and very provocative jokes. I embedded for you his last show “Life is Worth Losing”. As any other provacative comedian, Carlin’s show cannot be broadcasted on the main TV or radio networks because it contains words (used everyday by everyone even by the president) banned by the FCC like shit and f…k, so he got adopted by HBO home for the best comedians in the US. Carlin is a pure atheist, so if you are a believer, open your mind and be prepared to hear jokes that you never thought could be said about religion or god. Be prepared also If you are a proud and patriotic American thinking that America is the home of the free and land of the brave, this can make you mad :-)

Some of Carlin’s Quotes:

“I think I figured out why Americans are so stupid. Think about how stupid the Average American is. Well, HALF of 'em are stupider than THAT!"

“I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.”

“One out of every three Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of two of your best friends. If they are OK, then it must be you. “

“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that ...”

“Not only do I not know what's going on, I wouldn't know what to do about it if I did”

“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity”

“When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat.”

“The reason I talk to myself is that I'm the only one whose answers I accept”

“People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think”

“The next time they give you all that civic bullshit about voting, keep in mind that Hitler was elected in a full, free democratic election”

If the "black box" flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn't the whole damn airplane made out of that shit?

The main theme of "Life Is Worth Losing " is a 24 hours suicide TV channel predicted to be the #1 most watched in the US......!!!

"Borat", A voir absolument !

Borat is the most controversial comic caracter I've ever seen. Created by the british Sacha Baron Cohen in his comedies series "Da Ali G show" on HBO where he acts as a roumnaian or kazak journalist and interview people who are uninformed about his real identity and that results in incredible scenes. I really love that show.

He's been accused of antisemitism, racism and created many diplomatic incidents, check here for more.

His latest creation is a movie called Borat telling the story of a Kazak sent to the US by his governement to learn from the americans, I can't wait to see it.


Movie trailer



Borat's answer to accusations



Borat learns about huniting in Texas