Oct 14 2007
Two Women
Sandie Shaw: Those were the days
Dusty Springfield: I Only Want To Be With You
Sandy Shaw: Always Something there to Remind me
Dusty Springfield: Son Of A Preacher Man
Please do not recommend a Pony Party when you see one. There will be another along in a few hours.
Oct 14 2007
(great piece and recommend it! – promoted by pfiore8)
America the Beautiful O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
–Katharine Lee Bates
–1913
It’s a great song. But times have changed…
| America the Ugly
America, America |
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America, America –Robyn Elaine Serven |
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Oct 14 2007
Crossposted at dailykos and Truth and Progress
The conventional wisdom that Gore “won’t run” spread almost immedately, starting on the night BEFORE the Nobel Prize announcement. Interestingly enough, that opening salvo came not from the usual suspects on the Right, but from the Hillary camp, via an emissary by the name of Dan Gerstein, on Thursday’s night’s broadcast of MSNBC’s Hardball). But could the facts be more inconvenient, hence more threatening, to all those now pushing the status quo?
So back to Thursday night, a few hours before the Nobel is announced, and speculation is rife as to what Gore will do if he wins. And here’s Dan Gerstein, an obscure Democratic spokesman, not given to prime time media appearances that I know of, pushing this meme that Gore won’t run, because it’s just too late, and Hillary’s lead is insurmountable, and besides, he would not run because of his long-standing friendship with the Clintons.
Now just who is this Dan Gerstein, you ask? Why, he was Joe Lieberman’s spokesman, in that worthy senator’s primary campaign against Ned Lamont, just a year ago. You might remember him as the guy who put out the lie that Lamont’s campaign had hacked Holy Joe’s campaign website, putting it out of commission — a lie that threw a wrench in Lamont’s campaign for half a day, and was later discredited completely, but that turned out to do the challenger lasting damage. Lieberman of course went on to lose the primary and wage his ensuing re-election campaign mostly with backing, funding and logistical support covertly provided by the Republicans, who wanted to ensure the re-election of a proven reliable Dem ally and deny a vociferous war opponent a voice in the Senate.
And here the plot thickens, because Lieberman also received the strong and active endorsement of the Dem establishment, including the participation of Bill himself in his re-election campaign, although the support from Hillary was a little less vocal, for strategic reasons.
Bottom line: Gerstein was the perfect mouthpiece for Operation Stop Gore, whose prime movers hail from BOTH the Republican and the Clinton camps. Strange bedfellows indeed, but very effective, for the meme quickly spread to all the news outlets, quickly confirmed by anonymous “former advisors” and “friends” of Gore, all spouting the same talking points, while the real and current advisors and close friends of Al Gore were saying nothing, other than the usual “has no intention of running but hasn’t ruled it out sometime in the future’, except for one close, long-time staff member cryptically defined, on the record, as “sometime later than today”)).
By Friday night, just a few hours after Gore was awarded his prestigious inernational accolade, the meme that he would not run had metastasized and gone international, pushed by a cohort of well-known “former Gore” associates like Donna Brazile and known Clinton loyalists like Paul Begala, which would seem to indicate that Bill had been busy calling in chips six ways from Sunday, from every party and media contact in a position to spread it.
Personal sidebar here: Two nights ago, I dined at the home of a well-known Canadian journalist and his well-known pundit wife. While my friend, the wife, was out of the room, her journalist husband insisted on regurgutating the meme he’d been hearing all day from the Washington Beltway via Washington-based correspondents of Canadian media. And this morning I woke up to an editorial in my local paper of record, that categorically opined that Gore will not run, proceeding to spout the very same talking points, word for word.
As for me, here’s my bottom line take on this: Al’s prime concern is the climate crisis. He never takes his eyes off the ball, i.e. his goal of achieving a massive shift in the existing paradygm, in order to take on the challenge of salvaging human civilization from the worst to come. Because he has news for the Beltway gasbags and their pupeteers in both parties: We’re out of time, all of us.
Now rewind a few months to last srping. When The Assault on Reason came out, the same gasbags failed to grasp the substantive thrust and logical end of Gore’s message. For The Assault on Reasonwas a manifesto , a call sent out to his countrymen and women, a more substantive rhetorical iteration of Howard Dean’s fabled You Have The Power, demanding restoration of democracy, by and for and from the people. Anyone who has read The Assault on Reason carefully can have no doubt that never again will Al Gore play by “THE RULES” that determine the current American political landscape.
And anyone who watched Gore’s barnburner of a Martin Luther King Day 2006 speech before the Constitution Society on Restoring the Rule of Law knows he has shed every fear and inhibition that formerly constrained him and has turned himself into a orator of awesome, truth-telling force and power.
Gore will confound the “conventional wisdom” that has now set in cement, over the course of two short days. And if ever proof was needed of how broken the system is, how rigged the game, how our democracies have been subverted by and are hostage to Big Media conglomerates controlled by the very corporate interests that fund conventional political campaigns, then we surely have been given it.
Which is why Gore willl enter this race, at a time and place of his choosing, and seize the moment, electrifying the nation, throwing the race wide open and changing the tenor of the political conversation for good. And he will “do all (he) can” (read go for broke) to try and fix the broken system, for he has nothing to lose other than his self-respect if he sharank from the task, and nothing to loose except even more time wasted, when the planetary emergency he sees unfolding calls for a political earthquake big enough to flip the existing paradygm and make possible the emergency measures he knows must be taken immediately, by all countries pulling together. Because the science is in and he knows, better than any of us, that we and our kind have run out the clock and OUR TIME IS UP.
To succeed, candidate Gore will have to wage an unconventional, inconvenient campaign, that will extend and ramp up and inject momentum into the unconventional, inconvenientl campaign he has been waging until now, to preserve a habitable planet for all our children.
And he will bring to the fray an ever-growing army of followers from every political persuasion, that even now is gathering, an all-volunteer corps of unlikely acolytes, including the young, the disaffected, the discouraged, all of whom do not now vote, an army of and from the people, that will rally to his banner from every corner of the Nation.
And if there were any real journalists left, this would be the story they were covering, not some manufactured soundbite-laden falsehood handed to them with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, by some mouthpiece for Camp Rudy or Camp Hillary.
Gore will take up the fallen mantle of Howard Dean. He is a man who thinks strategically and whose vision extends well over the artiificial horizon of the next news cycle. Above all, he is a man humble and astute enough to learn from his own and others’ mistakes. He will campaign with thunder in his voice and the heart of a lion, and inspire us all with HOPE RESTORED.
It may look impossible to you now, but as late as Friday, when he had the perfect venue, before the offices of the Alliance for Climate Protection, and indeed the perfect opportunity to bow out gracefully and hand the political baton to the current field of primary candidates, he declined to do so.
No matter what the gasbags say, Gore HAS STILL RULED NOTHING OUT. And telegraphed many times that “a Shermanesque statement” would be forthcoming (as it was in 2003, when he called off his supporters and endorsed Dean) if he were to decide to stay out of the race.
So can we at least agree that it’s WAY too late for that? Hundreds of thousands of names have been gathered, both on online petititions begging him to run and on paper ones, designed to get his name on the ballot in every state in the Union. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been pledged, some of it spent on various efforts, including ads on TV and in the New York Times, to draft him into the race. His own current staff have watched and smiled in silence as Gore has toured the country, garnering ever more thunderous ovations, urged to run from all quarters, and they have allowed DraftGore people the run of lecture halls and convention centres where their boss has appeared to give his slideshow, and where his supporters were free to pass out DraftGore 08 buttons, T-Shirts, leaflets and petitions. Yet the traditional media barely mentions these things. Funny that.
I say remember this: in politics, for better or worse (and haven’t the Bushies proven it for the worst?) ANYTHING is possible. So please heed Al Gore’s own words:
The Sierra Club’s executive director, Carl Pope, said Gore had personally urged him to persevere.
“Once, when I was particularly frustrated by challenges I faced in my job, Gore heard me out and replied, ‘Never, ever give up,’ ” Pope said. “That would seem to be his motto, as reflected in the thousands of speeches he has delivered, the Live Earth concert he built from scratch, the nay-saying he has endured, the movement he inspired.”
“Never, ever give up.” That was also Churchill’s motto, to keep up the British people’s morale, even in the darkest days of World War II, when London was aflame with German bombs and Hitler and his allies had consolidated their hold on the whole of Continental Europe.
And so we watch. And we wait. Undeterred by pundits, anonymous sources, Republican and DLC operatives united by their common fear of the threat he poses to their comfortable world of RULES and media-manufactured “inevitabilities”. And we keep the faith. And you must work harder, and you must yell louder than ever before so you can be heard, now that a fierce noise has risen up from the motley crew of visionless powerbrokers, determined to STOP DEMOCRACY from springing to life from the scorched earth of the future world they have wrought for us.
Don’t listen to the din of denials and pundit puffery, but follow your hearts. And listen to Al. Until you hear him say that you should stop, press on, regardless!
Oct 14 2007
Just because it reminded me of something…
Here’s some good Sunday morning staring out the window while sipping hot coffee and scratching Magic (the cat) music:
I’ll bet it reminds you of something too.
Oct 14 2007
Ricky Nelson
Lonesome Town
What can I say? I grew up with this little smart ass singing on the television.
Travelin’ Man
It’s Late
It’s Up to You
Please do not recommend a Pony Party when you see one. There will be another along in a few hours.
Oct 14 2007
Updated: Originally posted at Talkleft & Edgeing February 2007
…………………………………………
Since the story of a cheap safe cancer cure first broke on Jan 23 in NewScientistdotCom, virtually NO US mainstream media has picked up on and reported the story.
Google news searchs on “dichloroacetate” now produce only 9 hits this morning (compared to 59 hits in February). Contrast that to 15,433 news search hits this morning on “al-qaeda”, for a bit of perspective. Cancer is a killer disease affecting millions of people every year, so the ignoring of this story cannot be due to any “lack of interest”.
It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.
It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.
Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells.
Where are the priorities? A short, pointed piece from TopCancerNewsdotCom, that even Google no longer picks up in those 9 news search hits, explains it in no uncertain terms:
One of the fundamental premises of cancer biology is that mitochondria — the energy producing units of cells — are permanently damaged by cancer. What DCA does is revive the mitochondrial function, encouraging the death of cancer cells.
The overwhelming hope is that DCA will move right to human testing. But the overwhelming fear is that it will not — because of economic reasons. There is no longer a patent on DCA so it is not owned by any one company. With little chance of one group making a large profit, there may be no incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invest in research.
Sadly, this drug — that appears to work remarkably well — may never benefit cancer patients. All because no one stands to make billions of dollars from it.
AxisOfLogic takes the explanation a step further towards the real truth behind this, in a February 02/07 editorial “The Real Cancer”:
A promising drug for fighting cancer is found. It has already been proven relatively safe. Laboratory and animal tests have shown it kills cancer cells and shrinks tumors.
You would think the drug companies would fall all over themselves to do the clinical trials necessary for the drug to be prescribed to cancer patients. Right?
Wrong.
This may be the biggest scandal to hit the medical world in years. Yet so far, all the commercial U.S. media have stayed away from reporting on it.
…
DCA is not a new drug. It has been used for years to treat michondrial disease. It is cheap and has limited side effects. Scientists decided to try it on cancer cells because it affects the metabolism of cells, the way they use energy. This is a different approach than the chemotherapy drugs now in use, which are toxic and kill off both cancerous and normal cells.What has scientists especially excited is that DCA has the potential of working against all types of cancers, including secondary cancers caused when cells break off and migrate to other parts of the body.
So what's the hitch?
…
The problem with the whole medical industry is that it's not an industry to promote health, it's an industry to promote profits. In fact, the more sick people there are, the more money there is to be made. Pharmaceuticals make up one of the most profitable industries in this country, raking in hundreds of billions every year.In the U.S., where the medical industry is the most advanced technologically, it's also the most expensive and the least efficient when the cost is measured against the general health of the people. That's why 47 million people here have no health coverage.
…
But issues like cancer and the messed-up environment, which can affect anyone, should make it clearer than ever that all humanity will benefit mightily when the parasitic billionaire class that currently stifles true progress is toppled from its seat of power.
This story should give us a pretty clear indication of what kinds of results to expect in the fight against another looming killer, Global Climate Change.
It's apparent that as a society we would rather be lied to and spun into spending hundreds of billions of dollars on chasing fantasies of ghosts and boogeymen, even at the cost of watching ourselves and our families and our children be systematically poisoned by pollution that threatens to upset the planetary environment, and at the cost of watching them die in agony from one of the most horrible diseases known.
The US has a Drug Lobby Second to None. No other industry has spent more money to sway public policy than the pharmaceutical industry: “Its lobbying operation, on which it reports spending more than $675 million, is the biggest in the nation.”
As a species we certainly have some serious issues….. inside us. One of which is that we are incredibly willing to allow ourselves to be spun. Another is our unbelievable willingness to sit back and just take it, over and over and over, even when we know it is being done.
If we are willing to treat ourselves and our families this way, what kind of response should we expect from the rest of the world when America pre-emptively invades and kills them to bring them the wonders of western civilization?
Oct 14 2007
Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was featured on his album Storm Front, which was released in 1989. Since then, the fire he wrote about has spread, many new fires have been ignited, and not very many have been put out. So I’ve written updated lyrics and am posting this video of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for those who may not be familiar with the song.
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” 1985-2007
Clarence Thomas, Tammy Faye, Nicaragua, Dr. J
Ferris Bueller, Bryant Gumbel, Achille Lauro
Bud McFarlane, Donald Regan, Ollie North on television
Arm the Contras, Sandanistas, Nancy just says no
Pentagon, Star Wars, Mike Tyson, WalMart stores,
Libya, Berlin disco, Cross this line and die
Iran-Contra, Springsteen, England’s got an old queen
Weinburger, Poindexter, See ya Gipper, goodbye
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Kremlin plotters, Moscow, Communism must go
Arafat, Intifada, Jihadist talk
Cuomo, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Fabio
Dow stalls, dollar falls, Thousand Points of Light
Feinstein, Celine, Cleveland’s got a winning team
Charles Bronson, World B. Free, Magic Johnson, HIV
Kuwait, Desert Storm, Coalition, Stormin’ Norm
Ethnic cleansing, Bosnia, Siege of Sarajevo
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Clinton, Newt attack, O.J. Simpson, maniac
NAFTA dogma, slaughter in Somalia
Whitewater, Limbaugh, blow jobs are against the law
Dead bodies, in a ditch, victims of Milosevic
Jerry Falwell’s Fatwa, oral sex, Monica
Katherine Harris, uh oh, Recount is a no-go
PNAC, RNC, burying democracy
9/11, Towers go, Rovians go psycho
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Niger, UN, Bush lies to the nation
CENTCOM, Tommy Franks, illegal invasion
Bin Laden of Arabia, BushCo terror mania
Blackwell, Diebold men, Bush and Cheney “win” again
Conyers should read Malcolm X, Men’s room politician sex
Bill of Rights blown away, what else do I have to say
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Glen Beck on CNN, Fascism is back again,
Chickenhawk big talk, right wing hate, oil stock
Rudy, Romney, Palestine, Rapture watchers see a sign
Cheney wants to nuke Iran, chaos in Afghanistan
Hope has died, Darfur cried, monks in Burma, genocide
Crushing debts, slandered Vets, FOX, sordid war profits
Blackwater’s on foreign shores, Hell has opened wide it’s doors
Billions more for endless wars, I can’t take it anymore
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Oct 14 2007
It’s an Open Thread: Play Nice
Brothers and sisters of the soul unite
We are one, indivisible and strong
They may try to break us
But they dare not underestimate us
They know our memories are long
USA
For many black women, it’s Clinton or Obama?
Loyalties tested in S.C. as voters contemplate Democratic primary
By Katharine Q. Seelye
Updated: 5:30 a.m. ET Oct. 14, 2007LORIS, S.C. – In the beauty parlors that are among the social hubs for black women in the Carolinas, loyalties are being tested as voters here contemplate the first Democratic primary in the South.
Clara Vereen, who has been working here in rural eastern South Carolina as a hairstylist for more than 40 of her 61 years, reflects the ambivalence of many black women as she considers both Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
$4.5 million for a boat that nobody wanted
By David Heath and Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporters
Tucked away on Seattle’s Portage Bay, a sleek, 85-foot speedboat sat idle for years – save for an annual jaunt to maintain its engine.The Navy paid $4.5 million to build the boat. But months before the hull ever touched water, the Navy gave the boat to the University of Washington. The school never found a use for it, either.
Why would the Navy waste taxpayer dollars on a boat that nobody wanted?
It may not be a bridge yet it still didn’t go anywhere.
Getting Around Rules on Lobbying
Despite New Law, Firms Find Ways To Ply PoliticiansBy Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 14, 2007; Page A01In recent days, about 100 members of Congress and hundreds of Hill staffers attended two black-tie galas, many of them as guests of corporations and lobbyists that paid as much as $2,500 per ticket.
Because accepting such gifts from special interests is now illegal, the companies did not hand the tickets directly to lawmakers or staffers. Instead, the companies donated the tickets back to the charity sponsors, with the names of recipients they wanted to see and sit with at the galas.
Laws are passed and new Rules are implemented: Why did they bother.
Europe
Terrorists in training head to Pakistan
By Dirk Laabs and Sebastian Rotella, Special to The Times
October 14, 2007
ULM, GERMANY — As Al Qaeda regains strength in the badlands of the Pakistani-Afghan border, an increasing number of militants from mainland Europe are traveling to Pakistan to train and to plot attacks on the West, European and U.S. anti-terrorism officials say.The emerging route, illuminated by alleged bomb plots dismantled in Germany and Denmark last month, represents a new and dangerous reconfiguration. In recent years, the global flow of Muslim fighters had shifted to the battlefields of Iraq after the loss of Al Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary in late 2001.
“There have always been people going to Pakistan, but it is more frequent now,” said a senior French intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity. “There is a return. It is a cycle. . . . And you have the attractive phenomenon that all the big chiefs of Al Qaeda are there.”
But,but, but Pakistan is your Allie in the war on Terror.
Rice worried by Putin’s broad powers
MOSCOW – The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow’s commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.
“In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,” Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.
Warrantless Wiretaps, Renditions, C.I.A. Secret Prisons, Torture, Enemy Combatants, National Security Letters and the US Attorney Scandal. Perhaps Condi should take a good look at the President she serves.
Africa
Awaiting Darfur Peace in Paris
By VIVIENNE WALT/PARIS Sun Oct 14, 1:30 AM ETThrough the windows of a Paris cafe on the Right Bank, the lunchtime crowd chatting over red wine and espressos can see water gushing from stone sphinxes under a carved column topped with a golden angel. It is hard to imagine a starker contrast between this gracious eatery and the ravaged villages of Darfur, yet among the diners here is a man who could hold the key to peace in the devastating conflict in western Sudan. “The Sudan regime is an outlaw regime,” Abdul Wahid el Nur, leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement, shouts, slamming his fist on the cafe table. “They do not respect peace accords.”
Congo’s Nkunda rejects ultimatum
Democratic Republic of Congo rebel leader Laurent Nkunda has told the BBC he will ignore Monday’s deadline to start disbanding his forces.He said more talks with the government were necessary before his troops could be integrated into the government army.
Americas
Venezuela’s Chavez meets with Castro
HAVANA – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez met for more than four hours Saturday with ailing leader Fidel Castro, Cuban state television reported.
Chavez arrived in Havana late Friday for a visit that will include the airing Sunday of the Venezuelan leader’s weekly radio and television program from the provincial capital of Santa Clara, where the Cuban government on Monday marked the 40th anniversary of the death of revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Colombia mine collapse kills 24
At least 24 amateur gold prospectors have been killed in a mine collapse in south-west Colombia.Some 18 people were injured and another 10 estimated to be missing after the accident near the town of Suarez, about 350km (220 miles) from Bogota.
Local residents were mining for gold with few security measures in place.
Rescue efforts have been called off for the night and were hampered by the fact that there was no record of how many people had entered the mine.
Asia
UN envoy heads to Asia as Myanmar junta rounds up activists
BANGKOK (AFP) – Myanmar’s military rulers are still rounding up activists, rights groups said Sunday, even as UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari was due in Bangkok for an Asian tour aimed at building pressure on the generals.
The junta relaxed a curfew in the main city Yangon and apparently lifted a block on Internet access, residents said Sunday, further easing restrictions put in place at the height of mass protests.But security forces continued to comb through Yangon’s neighbourhoods, rounding up people linked to the pro-democracy movement.
Report: NKorea fence near nuke site
SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea has started building a fence around the site of its first-ever nuclear test, a move U.S. and South Korean authorities believe may be to monitor the detonation’s effects and restore the area, a news report said Sunday.
South Korea has received intelligence that a barbed-wire fence is being erected near the nuclear site at the small town of Punggyeri in the North’s northeastern county of Kilju, the South’s Yonhap news agency quoted an unidentified South Korean official as saying
Oct 14 2007
(This essay shows just how important the Kurds are when comes to stabilizing that part of the Middle East. Promoted at 7:15 Pacific (10:15 Eastern) promoted by ekhornbeck – promoted by mishima)
Joseph Ralston: the former Nato Supreme Commander and Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was supposed to prevent a Turkish invasion of Iraq. As I noted in my preceding diaries on Ralston, here and here, Bush appointed Ralston one year to prevent the building crisis threating to engulf the region.
Neo-cons are freaking because they know that Bush support for PKK terror is actually making it harder for the US to attack Syria and Iran…
The MSM is clueless. How clueless? Fox and the Wapo ran identical stories, neither noting that Ralston ran away from his responsibilities months ago…
Things were different this time last year…
The New York Times gushed over Ralston.
NYT, October 2006…After a Kurdish group claimed responsibility for a series of recent bombings in Turkey that killed three civilians and injured many others, the United States appointed a retired Air Force general and former NATO commander, Joseph Ralston, to work with Turkish authorities. General Ralston will be responsible for coordinating American antiterrorist efforts with Iraq and Turkey, both of which have sizable Kurdish minorities – and minorities within those minorities who have resorted to terror.
Problem was General Ralston had a tiny little conflict of interest. Two reporters as Harper’s noticed:
…Three months ago, the Bush Administration appointed retired Air Force General Joseph Ralston to be U.S. “Special Envoy for Countering the PKK,” or Kurdistan Workers Party. Ralston’s job, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, was to work with the governments in Ankara and Baghdad “to eliminate the terrorist threat of the PKK and other terrorist groups operating in northern Iraq and across the Turkey-Iraq border.” But it appears that Ralston is representing the interests of the shareholders of Lockheed Martin rather than the interests of the American people.
At the time, it was not clear why Ralston was chosen for the post. As a former supreme allied commander for NATO and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he would appear overqualified for the job.
Then came the mid-September announcement (just weeks after Ralston’s appointment) that Turkey would be purchasing thirty new F-16’s from Lockheed Martin. … A deal between Lockheed and Turkey would be worth as much as $10 billion…On August 11 of this year, seventeen days before he was named Special Envoy, Ralston was appointed to The Cohen Group team that lobbies for Lockheed.
However over-qualified the former NATO Supreme Commander may have been to end PKK activities in Northern Iraq, Joe Ralston’s seat on the Lockheed board made him the ideal candidate to lobby on behalf of the company.
Bush Smoke and Mirror Piss-off Turkey
The Wheels Start to Come of Big-time.
Time running out on Kurdish rebels in Iraq, Turkey tells US
Publication time: 23 December 2006, 12:53Turkey wants the United States to take concrete steps against Iraq-based separatist Kurdish rebels, a special Turkish envoy said, warning that time was running out for Ankara to see substantial progress in eliminating the threat posed by the militants.
Retired general Edip Baser, Ankara’s coordinator with Washington in the fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said he would discuss “priority concrete steps” with his US counterpart, retired general Joseph W. Ralston, when they meet in January…
There could be a “parting of ways” if the United States rejects measures that Turkey believes should be in place against the rebels, Baser said.
Six months later Baser had been fired. Neo-Cons Panic
NY Sun, June 7, 2007 … the director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Soner Cagaptay, estimates that there are now 250,000 soldiers, most of whom have gathered in the last four weeks, massed at the Qandil mountain range on the border with northern Iraq. Those troops, according to Mr. Cagaptay, include heavy artillery and tanks, the most significant troop buildup by the Turks since they nearly invaded Syria in 1998…
Even in the teeth of an imminent Turkish attack on Iraq, Bushco and their Iraqi proxies were still tap-dancing. Eli Lake in the same NY Sun piece begged them to do something:
An Iraqi official who spoke on condition of anonymity explained the delicate American diplomacy as follows: “The Americans want the Kurds to make their lives easier. They need the Kurdish government to show they are willing to do something to tackle terrorism in the north. They are asking for them to be creative. They don’t expect them to go after every cell, but maybe alert Turkey of a threat, act on intelligence, arrest some people, make an effort.”
Turkey had 250 thousand troops on the border in June this year and the Iraqis were talking about ‘arresting some people’. Talk about disconnect. Meanwhile, Ralston discreetly slipped back to Alaska. And while Ralston had been busy pitching for Lockheed instead of ending PKK attacks, Bush had been promoting PKK/PJAK terror in Iran.
Bush’s bellicose saber-rattling predictably drove Syria to seek regional allies. In 1998, Turkey was ready to invade Syria, not Iraq, over the PKK. In 2004 Syria pledged to work with Turkey against the PKK and signed a number of agreements with Turkey. Syria, Turkey and Iran are now working closely together with Russia nodding in approval.
Iran is dangling the ultimate carrot: nuclear technology in front of Turkey. Bush’s feckless indifference to Turkey’s demand that the US end PKK activities in Iraq have created a monumental diplomatic crisis for the US.
MSM outlets fail to grasp how Bush torture and terror continues to transform the region. The Ralston appointment was an un-mitigated disaster; and the only media outlets willing to mention Ralston are neo-cons who fear the new Syria, Turkey, Iran alliance will make it impossible to launch a fresh war. The MSM is completely asleep. What will it take to wake them up?
Indeed the entire fiction that Iran is trying to destabilize Iraq hinges on keeping Turkey out of Northern Iraq. These efforts may fail. It’s a nightmare.
Oct 14 2007
He did it. He absolutely went there. On the op-ed page.
Frank Rich just ran through the unspoken barrier that got Dick Durbin in
such hot water two years ago. He’s made the historical comparison that no one has been allowed to make, for fear of diminishing the scope and scale of an evil that reigned a half-century ago. A comparison that someone in the MSM has needed to make, because we are surely walking down that same road.
Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.//
Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.
//
Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.
There you have it: They are the Gestapo. And we are the “Good Germans.”
Oct 14 2007
Quoting most of this article probably breaks all the rules, but I just don’t feel like embellishing it. It’s an interesting dilemma.
Lured by cheaper costs, more Americans head south of the border
to live out their leisure years
AJIJIC, MEXICO – Drawn by the eternal spring weather and laid-back lifestyle, American retirees have been migrating to this lakeside village deep inside Mexico for decades.
Now, facing the sobering prospect that their money will run out before their last breath does, some are considering Ajijic and other expatriate communities across Mexico as a cheaper place to get needed care through the end of their lives.
Though few come with dying on their minds, tens of thousands of retirees long have been heading to this community on the shore of Mexico’s largest lake – and dozens of other towns and cities nationwide – looking to spend their leisure years in paradise.
The Margaritaville moments might last decades. But the life cycle spins on no matter where they may live, and the aging Americans face much the same tough choices on health care here that they would at home.
Increasingly, they have decided that Mexico is as good or better a place as any to face the inevitable.
“I would never go back home,” said Harold “Skip” Waggoner, 67, a former deputy sheriff from Central Florida who retired 12 years ago to Ajijic. “My mother spent five years in a nursing home. That’s scary.
“The Mexicans value old people, and they take care of them.”With 78 million Americans hitting retirement age through the next three decades, and many finding themselves financially unprepared for the transition, the number of southbound seniors looking for warmer and cheaper climes is expected to surge.
Sales of retirement or vacation homes (like those that people flock to on Rental Cloud and other sites) for foreigners already are booming in places such as Ajijic, San Miguel Allende and Mexico’s coastal resorts. The same is happening in Costa Rica, Panama and even in impoverished Nicaragua.
Entrepreneurs are planning retirement villages and assisted living facilities to service the graying Americans. Pressure is building to allow Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits to pay for care in Mexico and elsewhere overseas.
Ajijic may prove a guidepost as the boom develops. Developers already have established a handful of assisted-living and extended-care nursing homes catering to the foreigners.
Yet the market remains small, and many American professionals in elderly care caution that moving out of the U.S. often is not the best solution, as services such as gycseniorcare.com exist within the United States’ borders that could offer assistance to the aging population.
Despite plans for other facilities, the only convalescent homes focused on caring for the foreign elderly in Mexico are in this town and several others along the shore of Lake Chapala, just south of Guadalajara.
A matter of numbers
The homes’ paying residents total fewer than 150 people. That’s just a sliver of the 50,000 Americans, most of them of retirement age, that the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara estimates live in the region.
The Ajijic convalescent homes charge about $1,200 a month for room, board and maid service, about a third of the price of similar facilities in the United States.
“When it gets down to the dollars and the number crunching, they’re going to come,” said Dudley Baker, 61, who retired to Ajijic nine years ago from a job with the IRS in Houston.
“I think all of us, if we’re fortunate to live so long, will end up in a place like this someday.”
Baker’s mother, Agnes, came here two years ago to visit and ended up staying.
While spending Christmastime with Baker and his brother, Ron, she caught pneumonia, and she was treated in an Ajijic clinic for five days. After her release, Baker moved her to an assisted-living facility to recover.
Then Baker and his brother persuaded her that it was best to sell her home of 40 years in San Antonio and move to Mexico. She was living alone and had fallen several times.
“I hated to leave my house, and I had my sister there,” an animated Agnes Baker, 88, said in a soft Texas drawl as she sat in an easy chair inside her clean, large bedroom at Alicia’s Convalescent, the assisted-living facility that is her home now. “At first it was all new, so I was a little apprehensive.”
But with time, Baker learned to adjust.
Her sons visit her daily now, instead of a few times a year. She said the food at the home is very good, and her room opens onto a pleasant garden. She has become good friends with the registered nurse who is the home’s owner, Alicia Sandoval, and her children.
“She wants you to just act like this is your home,” Baker said of Sandoval, who with her husband and two sons operates four Ajijic houses serving 25 foreign residents with conditions ranging from mild walking problems to Alzheimer’s disease.
“If you want to go to the doctor, she’ll take you, or if you need medicine, she’ll go buy it for you,” said Baker, whose husband of 60 years died in 2002. “It’s a lot more reasonable than in the States to go into a place like this.”
Still, the leg injury she suffered in one of her falls prohibits Baker from walking Ajijic’s cobblestone streets. And though Sandoval and her sons speak English well, many of the women working in the home do not. It can get lonely.
“It’s hard to communicate with them,” Baker says of the staff, for whom she translates her needs with a Spanish-English dictionary and writes them down. “If I could just learn the language. I wish I could. I think it’s a pretty language.”
Words of caution
Like Agnes Baker, most residents of the assisted-living homes in the Lake Chapala area have children or close relations here or have been down here themselves for years.
Professionals trying to solve the crisis in U.S. elderly care caution that moving to a foreign land is hardly the solution, despite its economic advantages.
“Trying to do that at an advanced age? Wow!” said Bill Thomas, an assisted-living expert at the Erickson School on Aging at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. “The pressure is there because of the costs. But I don’t think you can globalize your family.
“It’s not the money or the facilities or the experts,” Thomas said of effective care for the aged. “It’s the connectiveness. It’s very unusual for a person in their 80s to move somewhere new. Part of what makes old age meaningful and worthwhile is community.”
Still, retiring relatively young to Mexico, assuming that friends made in an expatriate community stay put, could create what Thomas calls a “cohort effect” of growing old together and watching out for one another along the way.
Though relations with the Mexican residents are often limited – many find it difficult to master Spanish later in life – the foreigners living along Lake Chapala have formed a tight-knit community.
Home prices have skyrocketed in Ajijic recently, but a dollar still buys more than it might back home. A relatively frugal person’s U.S. Social Security check can cover his or her monthly living expenses in Mexico, including the services of a maid and gardener, residents say.
In small houses in town or gated communities nearby, the retirees can spend their days playing golf and tennis, doing charity work in local communities, moving from one cocktail party and potluck dinner to another, traveling the country.
“Sometimes there’s too much going on,” said Waggoner, the retired sheriff’s deputy.
But the foreign community seems in constant flux. Many people stay only a few years, then move on. Others return home as their health problems worsen. Still others stay, their world shrinking as their infirmities prevent them from leaving their houses.
In-home care is much cheaper than it would be in the U.S., retirees and Mexican health care professionals say. But a long-term illness such as cancer can bust a budget.
Many of the foreign retirees don’t adequately prepare to pay for a major crisis, Mexican medical professionals say.
“Coming here is more than buying a pretty house,” said Lidia Zamudio, a registered nurse who has run a home health care service for expatriates in Ajijic for a dozen years. “Once serious illness appears, they aren’t prepared.”
She explained: “A long illness costs a lot here in Mexico. As a medical professional, it’s very sad to turn people away. But we aren’t a charity.”
For instance, cancer treatment here can cost up to $3,500 a month for medical personnel alone, Zamudio said, and medicine “is very expensive.”
Comprehensive medical insurance has become widely available in Mexico and often is much cheaper than that sold in the U.S. Retirees say a policy here costs between $300 and $500 a month.
But many opt to pay out of their pocket for lesser ailments – a doctor’s visit costs as little as $15 in Mexico. And with prescriptions unnecessary for most drugs, self-medicating is easy.
Many Americans rave about Mexico’s social security system, known as the IMSS, which for about $300 a year in premiums covers them for surgery and hospital stays, should anything go seriously wrong.
But Mexico’s social security hospitals, designed to treat the country’s working class, are short of doctors, swamped with patients and simply overwhelmed. Although the medical treatments may be fine, long waits for care are the norm. Those Mexicans who can afford to, avoid IMSS hospitals.
“You have to realize it’s a public service,” Juan Lastra, a physician who treats many foreigners in Ajijic, said of the IMSS.
“If you get sick, where do you end up? This isn’t paradise.”
‘He came prepared to die’
But Mexico seems close enough to nirvana for many of the aging immigrants.
His health in an irreversible slide, Lyle George came to Ajijic to spend his final days.
A retired telephone lineman from northern Montana, the 72-year-old had contracted an incurable nerve disorder that ravaged his body.
He and his wife, Jeanette, had spent time in central Mexico a decade earlier, before he took ill. When the prognosis turned hopeless, the couple decided his life would best end in Mexico.
“He came prepared to die,” said Jeanette George, 66, who with the help of their gardener and a house-calling physician home-nursed her husband of half a century until his final breath last year.
She set up a hospital bed in the living room of their Ajijic house for him, and she mostly cared for him herself.
“He could look out his window and see the birds and the roses and the trees,” George said. “He could watch the baseball games on television.”
But the ordeal exhausted her. She asked her gardener to recommend a nurse who could help some days, letting her get some rest or time to herself. The man replied that he would be honored to help take care of Lyle George.
At the very end, when her husband could no longer swallow, the Georges’ doctor asked them what they wished to do. Take no extraordinary measures to prolong his life, they replied.
For six weeks of daily care and visits, the doctor billed her just a little over $600. He suggested that maybe it was too much.
“I can’t describe the compassion and care we experienced here,” Jeanette George said. “The people who work for me are like my family.”
She returned home to Montana after his death 17 months ago. But after three months, she returned to Ajijic. She had returned to stay.
“I knew that Mexico is where I needed to be,” she said. “I will always live here.”
She said she and most of her friends in Ajijic plan to “stay home to die,” when their time comes.
“And what could be more beautiful?” she asked.
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
