Google news juxtaposition

Group charged with trading baby for car
Vail Daily News - 16 hours ago
PUEBLO - Three people were arrested on charges of swapping a 5-month-old boy for a downpayment on a used Dodge Intrepid and cash, police said Tuesday.

Bernanke Says Markets `Working Well,' Economy to Grow (Update2)
Bloomberg - 28 minutes ago

CNN hates hypocrisy

from Al Gore

Went to Manuel's last night to have a couple o beers with a friend. The televisions above the bar were tuned to CNN and ESPN as per usual. Sound off and no captioning, but who needs that? Do you need a dictionary when you talk to a three-year-old?

And, of course, the newscast was full of graphics and type. Many factoids, lots of questions. Questions that viewers must have answered. That's self-evident.

Last night the question in a rather large point type was "How Green is Gore?" Isn't that what we tune in for? The way these television journalists are so quick to point out the hypocrisy of our so-called leaders?

Remember how, right before the Iraq war started, they asked, "Who threatens the world with WMD? Iraq, or America?" And then, when we invaded and claimed we had to not because of WMD, but to promote democracy in the Middle East, remember how CNN immediately jumped up and asked, "How democratic is Bush?"

And who can forget these other memorable questions:

Does Bush support the troops? We examine the budget.

How did a policy paper written in the 90s predict the war on terror?

Where's Kucinich?

Does Israel even want peace?

How Christian is the right?

Should a corporation count our votes?

How does a plane disappear into the Pentagon?

Bin Laden and Hussein, what's the difference?

Green energy, should we care?

Capitalism: who made it God?

Left and Right: Who gets assassinated?

Who benefits from the War on Terror?

Is Bush fighting evil, or consumed by it?

What does WTC 7 tell us about September 11?

Who owns us, anyway, and what's their agenda?

Why are we always smiling?


Caption writer currently unemployed

Crimes, and the columnists who explain them

or, excuse me while I try to distract the "real" progressives

John Doraemi at Crimes of the State has an
excellent post analyzing the below Silverstein quote while making some important points about the need for credibility for citizen journalists.

I recommend his blog, which focuses on the monstrous crime committed on 9/11. His answer to George Monbiot's UK Guardian put down of 9/11 skeptics is full of facts that should get the attention of all conscientious people.

Two points about Monbiot, and the similarly dismayed,and insulting, Alexander Cockburn: Both seem unaware of WTC 7, and both feel the need to resort to name-calling. Usually, if you are confident in your position, you don't stoop to that level.

UPDATE:

Lots of good responses to Monbiot, but I thought this one particularly good:

gnaghi

February 20, 2007 10:17 AM

'Charlie Sheen is "highly credible", is he? A man whose expertise adds great weight to the 9/11 conspiracy theory.'

This is indicative - the dude lists quotes from 40 people, including numerous ex-army, intelligence analysts, politicians and structural engineers, many of them PhDs, then adds Sheen at the end and everyone ups and says 'lawl Charli sheen?!? he's just actor lol!1!' If you can't see how this makes you a fool... colour me unsurprised.

People keep likening truthers to creationists, but really; which side's argument rests more or less entirely in appeal to authority? - My holy book says it, therefore it's true. NIST says it, therefore it's true. It only takes a reasonably educated mind and a willingness to comprehend reality however ugly to dismiss both silly myths - Genesis and the OCT.

Yes, many, praps even most, of the alternative theories are wild - that's what happen when most of the evidence is withheld. But I don't think anyone with a functioning brain could look at the OCT and say 'it makes perfect sense, I can't think why anyone wouldn't believe it.' And if you accept that, what type of brain does it take to *not bother looking* at the OCT and then say 'it makes perfect sense, the telly told me so. You're dumb lol'?

And as for georgie - yes, it must be painful that so many of your pet causes fall by the wayside because people fixate on things as glamorous as 9/11. But when you bemoan the lack of response to the 'spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain's biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems', I feel you miss the point - it's too easy. Nobody disagrees, nobody has anything to debate. You mean the arms industry is up to no good, have their own private intelligence services and receive full support from reigning governments? Holy wow, I never would've guessed. Yawn. The whole point about 9/11 is that it's BIG; and we've got a foot in the door. All we need is for people like you to clean the dust off your eyelids and help us heave it open - then, maybe, probably by consequence even, we can tackle the petty, everyday crap you're always harping on about.

Money Trumps Peace...

One of the problems -- not specifically on this issue, just in general -- let's put it this way, money trumps peace, sometimes. In other words, commercial interests are very powerful interests throughout the world.

-- George W. Bush, White House Press Conference, Feb. 14, 2007

via Golby

It's strictly business

-- Michael Corleone

"I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building [WTC 7] collapse."

-- Larry Silverstein

Just business.

Freedom to Fascism

Who can deny that this is the direction of the New World Order, aka globalization? According to filmmaker Aaron Russo, it's the unaccountable banking corporations, the Federal Reserve chief among them, that want it this way.

See the site for his film, "America: Freedom to Fascism," for and some good clips, particularly the interview with the Conscious Media Network.

By the way, he's listed on Wikipedia as one of those "conspiracy theorists." That puts him in good company.

UPDATE: Russo's movie is on Google Video

RELATED:


Two words: WTC 7

RELATED:

Information Warfare, Psy-ops and the Power of Myth

A look at the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra

by Mike Whitney

Global Research, February 14, 2007
Uruknet

The bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra is the cornerstone of Bush’s psychological operations (psy-ops) in Iraq. That’s why it is critical to have an independent investigation and discover who is really responsible. The bombing has been used as a "Pearl Harbor-type" event which has deflected responsibility for the 650,000 Iraqi casualties and more than 3 million refugees. These are the victims of American occupation not civil war.

The bombing was concocted by men who believe that they can control the public through perception management.

h/t church and empire

Creating a Market II: Easy as S-A-I-C

UncleScam at American Samizdat provides the following excerpts from a Vanity Fair article on Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), contractor to the military-industrial-congressional complex:

SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word "terrorism."

[]
SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government.

[]
Civilians at SAIC used to joke that the company had so many admirals and generals in its ranks it could start its own war. Some might argue that, in the case of Iraq, it did.

[]
In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.

There's no business like terror business.

Creating a market

At bottom, the War on Terror is nothing more than a scheme to keep the military industrial complex from decline.

The seminal document Rebuilding America's Defenses, a product of the Project for the New American Century , begins like this:

The Project for the New American
Century was established in the spring of
1997. From its inception, the Project has
been concerned with the decline in the
strength of America’s defenses, and in the
problems this would create for the exercise
of American leadership around the globe
and, ultimately, for the preservation of
peace.

Our concerns were reinforced by the
two congressionally-mandated defense
studies that appeared soon thereafter: the
Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review
(May 1997) and the report of the National
Defense Panel (December 1997). Both
studies assumed that U.S. defense budgets
would remain flat or continue to shrink. As a result, the defense plans and recommendations outlined in the two reports were fashioned with such budget constraints in mind.

more

[my emphasis]

What better way to remove constraints than to engineer a new and endless war? If profits are up, it's double plus good.

And profits are up:

Bush Budget Delivers the Bacon

By Robert Scheer

President Bush’s outrageous military budget has nothing do with fighting terrorism but everything to do with pumping up the profits of the administration’s generous political donors in the defense industry. So, the question is: Will the Democrats have the guts to stop this betrayal of the public trust?

Ever since some lunatics, mostly citizens of our longtime ally Saudi Arabia, used $3 knives to hijack four planes on the same morning, President Bush has exploited our nation’s trauma as an opportunity to throw trillions of dollars at the military-industrial complex to build weaponry for a Cold War that no longer exists.

That is the subtext of the more than $700-billion defense appropriation requested by Bush in his budget, released Monday. Sure, it includes $141.7 billion explicitly dedicated to fighting “the global war on terror”—but that much-abused phrase falsely encompasses the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or the perpetrator, al-Qaida. In fact, that amount rises to $235.1 billion when the additional supplemental funds to cover Iraq for the remainder of this budget year are added in.

Some of the commentors correct Mr. Scheer on his reflexive use of the ridiculous "Arabs with box cutters" conspiracy theory.