No sir, empathy and tolerance go hand-in-hand, I'm not a fucking out-of-touch dinosaur- I ALSO recognize that racism is an issue that garners that gut-reaction simply from seeing the word typed or written on a page with certain types of peeps too distracted by ancillary clap-trap (pretentious, insincere, or empty verbiage) to have any effect whatsoever on the world of the "real", whatever one perceives that to be.

I see Colin Powell's talk of racism in the republican party as a complete non-issue as in, "Why should I give a fuck about this Uncle Tom, proverbial, "house-nigger" who acted anything like a general or statesman when he addressed the U.N. in a rambling justification for bankrupting the country into the Gulf War(s)-He should regret his actions under Bush and go fuck himself into obscurity and stay the fuck out of politics forever, kinna like Nixon when he bellied-up and bailed-out before impeachment, and was subsequently pardoned by that OTHER ineffectual tool, Gerald Ford.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/13/colin-powell-regrets-u-n-speech-justifying-the-iraq-invasion/

The fantasy world I speak of you refuse to consider though under your nose where it rests and obfuscates world view.

The New World Order is happening, it's the mechanism of disinformation, obfuscation, world economic manipulation, etc, that has you right where you don't want to be, a willing slave, complicit in the breakdown of human societies worldwide. Welcome to the Matrix Wendy, enjoy your preoccupation with guns, racism, and voting booths


Oh, and for the record once again, I am apolitical and believe the parties democrat and republican interchangeable, and the equally meaningless terminology of political discourse in light of the fistfuck being perpetrated on all nations of the world, a complete and pathetic distraction.
The goddamn whore of Babylon wants your mind, money, and muscle and you're standing in line to be first on the train, in my , "fantastic" world of illusion.

Robert Reich has a little experience... "He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997." I usually agree with his ideas and I especially think the idea of trickle-down economics to be a load of crap.

>> ^alizarin:

Regarding assassination:
( ) President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning political assassinations in 1976. However, Congress approved the use of military force against al-Qaida after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. People on the target list are considered to be military enemies of the US and therefore not subject to the ban on political assassination.
I agree with John Stewart's main point at the end - Obama is leaving this stuff too open to abuse and needs to close possible loopholes right away.
You can make the case that Al-Qaida is a legit military target and as such it's not really an assassination, just warfare. But where do you formalize what groups are "terrorists" and which individuals get lumped in, and how do you decide if a situation is dire enough to assassinate a militant American citizen vs capture and put him on trial? I don't think Obama is likely to let anything nasty happen but that's way too big of a danger to leave out there.
This story got big when Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said this in congressional testimony:
“Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” He added, “We don’t target people for free speech; we target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”
Again, not crazy reasoning...if an American is hiding in Yemen and plotting to blow up a plane maybe we can blow him up first, but way to wide open to avoid abuse. I'm a big Obama fan but I'm pissed that he's running this free and loose with this stuff. Hopefully it's on his to-do list and nothing nasty will become of it before he's done.


Not crazy reasoning? What is this? Israel? That's pretty fucking crazy reasoning. Apologist jingoism is unbecoming. What happened to due process? All because the Criminal suddenly became an enemy of the state?

I point you to a Movie, The Unthinkable. It's just a movie, of course, but it's the thought that it invokes. Just how far are you prepared to go?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unthinkable

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

It's like legal precedence. You allow one case to become a trend setter and many more judgments will follow that case. It's not a slippery slope argument, its a matter of legal precedence. If the US starts assassinating *citizens*, even if they are *terrorists* where does that leave the rest of the citizens? It's a terrible and disgusting thing to think about.

I don't think that there's been a legally declared War since WWII.

Regarding assassination:

(*) President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning political assassinations in 1976. However, Congress approved the use of military force against al-Qaida after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. People on the target list are considered to be military enemies of the US and therefore not subject to the ban on political assassination.

I agree with John Stewart's main point at the end - Obama is leaving this stuff too open to abuse and needs to close possible loopholes right away.

You can make the case that Al-Qaida is a legit military target and as such it's not really an assassination, just warfare. But where do you formalize what groups are "terrorists" and which individuals get lumped in, and how do you decide if a situation is dire enough to assassinate a militant American citizen vs capture and put him on trial? I don't think Obama is likely to let anything nasty happen but that's way too big of a danger to leave out there.

This story got big when Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said this in congressional testimony:

“Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” He added, “We don’t target people for free speech; we target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”

Again, not crazy reasoning...if an American is hiding in Yemen and plotting to blow up a plane maybe we can blow him up first, but way to wide open to avoid abuse. I'm a big Obama fan but I'm pissed that he's running this free and loose with this stuff. Hopefully it's on his to-do list and nothing nasty will become of it before he's done.

>> ^westy:
oh common lol you have to be somewhat naive if you don't think that most of the large western countries dont engage in assassination and secret militasry BS operatoins.
its very usfull for the goverment to not know about operatoins so thay ar enot gulty for braking the law themselvs, then when sumone gets cought thay simply pardon them ore have some bs excuse setup , just give it a while when the government rolises this wont blow over everyone will get away with it some how.


I'm sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. You're point is, "Everyone does it. So we should do it."? And then you go on to say, "It's beneficial to place control of an assassination squad in one man's hands so that other people don't need to know about it. This way the 'government' can break all the laws it wants to, but without repercussion."? That couldn't be right, could it? Because that would show a significant misunderstanding of the entire point of our government.

First of all, "secret military operations" are separate from political assassinations. Any military operations the CIA or armed forces engage in that are classified are "secret military operations." That's not what's being discussed here, so don't confuse the two. Political assassinations are the subject, and in case you missed the very first thing Olberman said, he read an Executive Order from 1976, from the desk of President Gerald Ford, that no member of government is to engage in or conspire to engage in political assassination. The matter at hand isn't "does [insert name of 'large western country' here] do this?" The question is, if the allegations are true, is this in direct breach of an executive order? And the answer to that is unequivocally yes.

Secondly, if it's "useful" for governments to not know about operations so "they are not guilty for breaking the law," then the person who DOES know about the operations IS breaking the law. In this case that person is Cheney. Furthermore, it is NOT useful for members of the government to break laws put in place to dictate their behavior because, wait for it, those laws are in place for a reason. It may be useful for me to kill other people. For example if I'm in the running for a promotion, but so is Steve, well It would be quite useful for me to kill Steve. This way, less competition. But there are explicit laws preventing me from doing that, and they are there for good reason. Just because people are members of government doesn't mean that they are not subject to laws. They are subject to additional laws, including one from the desk of the president of the United States explicitly forbidding the practice that Cheney is now accused of. Keeping a matter like this quiet, keeping it from other members of government, is only a way of circumventing laws that were created because what they are forbidding has been deemed improper conduct for a member of the US government. It IS improper conduct for a member of the US government. And if the allegations are true, one hopes that it builds enough steam to scrutinize the actions of the Bush-Cheney administration.

I'll take that as a No.

Anyone surprised? It's like Nixon and the Gerald Ford pardon all over again.

I hope the American don't let this just slide.

I know Obama just wants to get rid of this as an issue because it would mean retroactive analysis of policy by any administration down the line.

Fuck ups wouldn't be tolerated.

That's not acceptable to most politicians, you know being accountable for their actions in office.

Yep, if Gerald Ford hadn't put an end to people disliking each other once and for all, things could have been really polarized by now!

If a therapist tells a client to kill themselves, and the client does so, that person didn't need to live. So in that case, I'd thank the therapist for ridding the earth of a weak person who took the advice of anybody in authority because they were too weak to make their own informed decisions. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

If a leader orates beautifully about killing millions of Jews, but he is speaking to an empty room because everyone is at home enjoying time with their families and neighbors, where does his message go? Do six million people end up in gas chambers? It's the people who propel the leader, not his message. That is why I absolve the leader of much of the blame, but condemn the followers. If the German people hadn't been so easily manipulated by a flatulent meth addict because they were reeling from a devastating loss in World War I, Hitler would have been reduced to nothing.

Some people would argue that Hitler was just as much to blame as his followers, but he was just a man with ideas. He couldn't have sent ten million people to their deaths by himself. And Charles Manson couldn't have massacred seven people on his own, either.

You think if he'd said to bake them brownies, instead of murder them, those people would still be alive?

That depends on how well the Manson Family could bake.

Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Gerald Ford, if you recall. I don't think Manson told her to do that. Some people are just crazy on their own. Maybe the murders would have still occurred, but maybe not. *shrugs*

>> ^Crosswords:
I'm very glad you have high moral standards and a strong will, not everyone does. In fact some people are pretty easily influenced by authority or their peers. And while this doesn't belay that these people are responsible for their actions it also doesn't exonerate those who push them into said actions. If somebody worships the ground I walk on, and I turn around and tell them to go kill some people, am I not responsible for how I used my influence over them? Isn't my influence and direction over them the catalyst? Again unless the influenced was coerced under extreme duress, they still retain responsibility for their action, but person who told them to is also responsible, it was their actions, their misuse of their power that caused the other person.
If a therapist tells a client, "wow you really don't have anything to live for, you should kill yourself", and the client does, is the therapist not responsible? Didn't they, in a position of authority, give the emotionally vulnerable client instructions to do something that would cause irreparable harm?
I would also like to add people can go to prison for conspiracy to commit murder. If somebody told you to kill someone, and you said no, then told the cops that person had tried to get you to kill someone and had solid evidence to the fact, that person is going to jail for a long time, if not life.
So I guess to sum things up, yes the people who actually did the killings were responsible for what they did, and as far as I know, none of them went free. But Manson, who directed them, is also responsible for his actions. You think if he'd said to bake them brownies, instead of murder them, those people would still be alive?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Best Brokaw ever! Even better than Dana Carvey's.

-- continued.

One year after the US-instigated coup, President Gerald Ford - in the oval office thanks to some domestic White House "black ops" that garnered unfavorable attention in the imperial homeland (Watergate) - claimed that US actions in installing Pinochet were "in the best interests of the people of Chile and certainly in our own best interests."


Historical Connections

Twenty-eight years to the day after Chile's 9/11, the world witnessed a different, more spectacular form of unimaginable violence, broadcast live on national TV, with different ideological and geo-political parameters. The culprits were almost certainly based in the extremist Islamic terror networks of the Middle East.

There are some interesting, dark connections, however, between these two Nine-Elevens. The US policy of deterring democracy and social justice in the perceived interest of US multinational corporations and world capitalism was hardly restricted to Chile and the official Cold War era (1945-1991). In pursuit of the same basic goals that informed the US/Pinochet coup, the US has supported and in some cases conducted anti-democratic coups against excessively (from a US perspective) "left" governments (any state that proposed to encourage development of its sovereign territory in significant autonomy from the US-dominated world capitalist economic system) in Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Iraq (1963), Indonesia (1965), and Greece (1967). It provided massive economic and military assistance to authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes that suppressed democratic and left opposition and kept their domestic economies open to foreign and especially US corporate penetration and domination. It armed Israel, waged war and enforced a deadly, decade-long sanctions campaign against Iraq, stationed troops indefinitely in the Islamic Holy Land, and provided cover for Israel's prolonged, racist annexation of Palestinian territory. The US funded the Arab far-right, supporting arch-reactionary Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden, valued as weapons in the same Cold War that provided cover for the US campaign to crush national self-determination, democracy, and social justice in places like Iran, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Chile.

By largely eliminating the left, undercutting democracy, and generally subjecting regional developments to imperial fiat both during and after the official Cold War, the US shrunk the available space for "normal" (Western-style/parliamentary) airing of social, political and related international grievances in the Middle East. This, in turn, brought "blowback" (an internal CIA term for the unintended consequences of secret US foreign policies) from America's imperial periphery to the skies and streets of New York City and Washington DC, where Pinochet's henchmen (part of a CIA-sponsored team of international assassins code-named "Operation Condor") killed a former Allende supporter and his American driver (Olando Letelier and Randy Moffit) in 1976. How darkly appropriate, then, that George W. Bush attempted to put Kissinger, a leading perpetrator in the state-terrorist events of 9/11/73, at the head of a federal commission to investigate US security lapses prior to 9/11/2001, which opened the door for new levels of US and US-sponsored state terrorism.


Worthy and Unworthy 9/11s

Of course, only a tiny percentage of the US population knows about Chile's 9/11, for reasons that go beyond obvious gaps of time, geography, and language. A relevant explanatory text here is the second chapter, titled "Worthy and Unworthy Victims," of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1988), published as the Cold War was nearing its partial conclusion with the collapse of the Soviet deterrent (itself part of the context for 9/11/2001) to American global ambitions. "A propaganda system," the authors noted, "will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy." Identified with the official US Cold War "enemy" force of socialism or Marxism - really social egalitarianism and national self-determination (still the basic adversaries of US policy in the "post-Cold-War era") - Pinochet's victims have only recently attained a small measure of historical worthiness in dominant US corporate-state media. This slight retrospective legitimacy comes far too long after the terrible facts. It is no match for the worthiness bestowed on the most officially precious victims in US History: the Americans who died on the only 9/11 that matters in a nation that drifts through history in a dangerous fog of selective, top-down remembrance.


Paul Street (pstreet@cul-chicago.org) will speak on "State-Run Media" on Friday, September 26, 2003 at a conference titled "Is Our Media Serving Us?" at Columbia College, Hokin Annex, 623 S. Wabash, Chicago, IL, 12:45 PM.


Appendix: Selected Sources on US Involvement in 9/11/73 and Related Developments in Chile

US Senate, Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); United States Congress, Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94th Congress, 1st Session, November 10, 1975 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (London: Zed, 1986), pp. 232-243; Seymour M. Hersh, "The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile," Atlantic Monthly, 250 (1982), no. 6, 21-58; Poul Jensen, The Garotte: The United States and Chile, 1970-73 (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1988); Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York, NY: Verso, 2001), pp. 55-76; "Why Is the U.S. Mum About Pinochet?," CNN.com (November 25, 1998), available online at http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9 811/25/pinochet.us/; National Security Archives, The Chile Documentation Project (2000-2001), available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~ nsarchiv/latin_america/chile.htm.

A bit off subject, but I was watching Gerald Ford's funeral yesterday and couldn't help but notice the similarities at the end of this video.

The Carvey clip (linked below) is the gold standard of Ford tributes. meg had the foresight of the Reaper on that one.

There are not too many other Gerald Ford clips out there that don't involve Squeaky Frome. And I say to hell with Squeaky Frome.