FYI from BATR

Babbittry is the idea that the average Joe lives within the passionless routine of marriage, the tyranny of consumerism, and the regimentation of small-town civic life . . . People who don’t live in New York, Hollywood, or divide their time between Virginia, Hyannis Port, or Nantucket estates and their Georgetown mansions view the rest of us as Babbitts. Who can blame them?

Better than anyone to date, the Media Education Foundation has quietly and accurately documented the most important history of 21st century thus far in their recent video and DVD release, Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire.

This preliminary report of the BHHRG's observers on the controversial second round of the Ukrainian presidential elections challenges the widely-disseminated media image of government-sponsored fraud at the expense of an untainted opposition on the basis of first-hand reporting.

First question: do you believe there are secret forces at work that are attempting to dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

The preceding is a partial transcript of an interview with Congressman Ron Paul on February 23, 2004. The full interview can be found in my upcoming book, Webs of Power: Government Agencies, Secret Societies, and Elite Legacies.

The greater the authority of supra-national bodies, the smaller and more remote the individual, so the more individuals will need to pursue their rights privately.

This privatisation of justice is set to increase. Governments will increasingly ‘sell off’ further traditional areas of justice that once rested solely upon them.

The Thursday before the election, Tom Brokaw interviewed Kerry on the “NBC Nightly News” and told him, “Someone has analyzed the president’s military aptitude tests and yours and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.”

The two men were clearly fairly similar in mental ability when seniors at Yale. Based on my research into the details of these two similar but different tests, if I had to bet, I’d wager Bush would have scored higher if they had both taken the same test back in the Sixties.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, supression and rationalization - the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.

In light of this "visit" "Lawyers against the War" have sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister and various other officials demanding that Bush be treated as a war criminal and either indicted or barred from entering the country as "persona non grata".

Robert Anton Wilson is a writer and philosopher with a huge cult following. He is the author of over 35 popular fiction and nonfiction books, dealing with such themes as quantum mechanics, the future evolution of the human species, weird unexplained phenomena, conspiracy theories, synchronicity, the occult, altered states of consciousness, and the nature of belief systems.

Text of live interview via satellite with Iraqi Political Analyst Zafir al-Ani in Dubai conducted by Jamal Rayyan in the studio in Doha; broadcast by Qatari Al-Jazeera satellite TV on 13 November

Text of live interview via satellite with Iraqi Political Analyst Zafir al-Ani in Dubai conducted by Jamal Rayyan in the studio in Doha; broadcast by Qatari Al-Jazeera satellite TV on 13 November

Revealed by US Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, SR from Minnesota before the US Congress sometime during his term of office between the years of 1907 and 1917 to warn the citizens.

Of all the critical analyses of Seymour Hersh’s latest book, the best and most telling review appeared before Chain of Command came off the press. The Pentagon press office, in a pre-emptive strike designed to neutralize a blow they knew was coming, had this to say:

Based on media inquiries, it appears that Mr. Seymour Hersh’s upcoming book apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources.

This policy briefing is the first of a series of post-election reports planned by the IRC program staff.

The United States doesn't have to refight the Civil War to set matters right. Rather, North and South should simply follow the example of the Czech Republic and Slovakia: Shake hands, says it's been real, and go their separate ways.

Although Kirk, unlike his opportunistic successors, was not a country club Republican or a neocon lackey, he was certainly not politically uninvolved. He was a fairly conventional Republican, but one who did move out of step in 1992 to back his personal friend, Pat Buchanan, for president.

Gore Vidal looks past the election

Spending restraint - Social Security reform - Tax reform

All three of these goals are among the Bush administration's self-identified top priorities, and all three are ostensibly supported by Republican leaders in Congress. Progress toward them during the next four years will reveal whether the Republicans' avowed principles amount to anything in practice.

This then is a moment to return to history and remind ourselves of exactly what mayhem and misfortune the CIA has actually caused – us as well as the rest of the world. That makes the Chalmers Johnson essay below on the CIA and Afghan blowback a must read. Johnson is the author of the prophetic book Blowback, written before 9/11, and more recently The Sorrows of Empire, which explores our military reach in the world. This piece has been slightly adapted from a review that originally appeared in the London Review of Books, a lively English literary/political publication, and that is reprinted with the Review's kind permission.

In its first electoral test, Tancredo's new immigration-control PAC — Team America — won half the races it supported, quite an accomplishment for a start-up organization.

Also, every member of Tancredo's Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus seeking reelection won, and Tancredo's staff expects the caucus to grow even larger in the next Congress.

The thing to notice is that Russert and Brokaw make out like Bush and Kerry had diametrically opposed policies. Both supported the war, the Patriot Act, big government and dozens of other issues.

The nineteen months since the war in Iraq began, some of the most outspoken critics of President Bush's plan of attack have come from a group that should have been the most supportive: retired senior military leaders. We spoke with a group of generals and admirals that included a former supreme Allied commander and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and they all agreed on one thing: Bush screwed up.

Scott Horton discusses the future of the American empire with the republic's most intransigent defender, Rep. Ron Paul (R, Texas). Interview conducted Oct. 16, 2004.

Following is the full English transcript of Usama bin Ladin's speech in a videotape sent to Aljazeera.

My Op-Ed piece made the following simple points to refute the dogma.
1) Prominent Jews like Albert Einstein and Judah Magnes (the first Chancellor of Israel's Hebrew University) opposed the idea of a Jewish state.
2) What makes Israel a Jewish state is that it officially declares the ultimate sovereign authority in Israel to be "the Jewish people" rather than all Israeli citizens regardless of their religion.
3) One fifth of Israeli citizens are non-Jews and therefore are officially second class citizens as long as Israel remains a Jewish state. (The word limit on the Op-Ed prevented it from pointing out that this second class citizenship is the basis for discrimination against non-Jewish Israeli citizens in their ability to own, buy and lease land, live in certain neighborhoods, gain access to public services and government benefits, marry a Jewish person, and so forth – the kind of discrimination which the ADL would denounce as anti-Semitic if directed against Jews in the United States.).
4) The founder of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, in 1896 rejected the principle of democracy -- that a state's legitimacy derives from the consent of all whom it governs, not just those of a favored religion or race or ethnicity. Herzl argued, instead, that the Jewish state's authority would derive from the need of Jews for a state to be their guardian, even if Jews were a minority of its citizens.
5) In 1948 when Zionist leaders founded the state of Israel as a Jewish state they knew that it could only gain legitimacy by purporting to be a democracy. But this required that Jews make up the overwhelming majority of the citizenry. And this in turn required ethnic cleansing, which -- as documented by pro-Zionist Israeli historian Benny Morris and others -- Israel's new leaders did indeed carry out, resulting in the Palestinian refugees whom Israel continues to bar from returning to their homes in Israel.
6) Far from being anti-Semitic, opposition to the idea of a Jewish state is the only way to consistently embrace the universal values of equality and democracy.
7) Exactly the same arguments apply to a Muslim, a Christian, a Black or a White state.