~from the book "Money Creators" by Gertrude M. Coogan (1935)"
P.S. Man-made global warming does not exist, of course. Even if it did, it could not be cured by a few countries buying and selling carbon scams while polluters continued to pollute. (sm)
Political Islam has been at the heart of Middle Eastern politics since the late 1940s.
Throughout the Cold War, the US regarded Islam as a bulwark against communist penetration into the Middle East. Washington supplied Afghanistan's fighters with arms and money to drive the Soviets out of the country, helped Iran in the early days of the war with Iraq and supported Islamic conservative regimes from Indonesia to Morocco.
After the Cold War, political Islam fell from grace, but retained a role in regional politics. Washington overlooked the activities of some Islamists and provided sanctuary to their leaders - the case of Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, leader of the Egyptian Al Jama'a Al Islamiyya is a case in point.
The logic behind this policy was to use Islamists as a leverage to extract concessions from Middle Eastern regimes and consolidate US hegemony in the region. In addition, and by way of applying pressure on Arab governments to secure an (Israeli) peace and also to prevent a repetition of the Iranian scenario, Washington recognised Islam as a major political force and did not hide its intentions to co-operate with Islamist regimes as long as they did not pose significant threat to its two intrinsic interests: oil and Israel.
The Bush administration came to power looking for an enemy to justify its aggressive foreign policy agenda and convince a wary public of major increases in military expenditures. In the early days of its tenure, China was the target, but 9/11 supplied the Bush administration with a more credible and much needed enemy to pursue its priorities. A new policy line was established and some US scholars volunteered to provide the logic for the long-awaited crusade. ...
Should Barack Obama change this policy? I think he should. But would he?"
(Jake Tapper blog): "On the Chicago TV show "Public Affairs with Jeff Berkowitz" on June 27, 2002, state Sen. Obama said, "Right now, my main focus is to make sure that we elect Rod Blagojevich as Governor, we..."
"You working hard for Rod?" interrupted Berkowitz.
"Hot Rod?" asked the host.
"That's exactly right," Obama said.
In 2004, then-Gov. Blagojevich enthusiastically endorsed Obama for the Senate seat after he won the nomination, and Obama endorsed Blagojevich for his 2006 re-election race in early 2005.
In the Summer of 2006, then-U.S. Sen. Obama backed Blagojevich even though there were serious questions at the time about Blago's hiring practices.
At the time, numerous state agencies had had records subpoenaed, with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald telling authorities he was looking into "very serious allegations of endemic hiring fraud" with a "number of credible witnesses.""...
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About your Nobel Peace Laureate:
7/18/11, "The War on Terror, now starring Yemen and Somalia," Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
"There is a concerted campaign underway to ensure that the War on Terror bonanza continues unimpeded in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, and even despite Leon Panetta's acknowledgment that Al Qaeda has a grand total of "fewer than two dozen key operatives" on the entire planet. That effort relies primarily on touting a growing villainous alliance -- the scariest since Marvel Comic's Masters of Evil -- between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (mostly in Yemen) and the al Shabab group in Somalia. To accomplish this, all the standard fear-mongering propaganda is being trotted out, and the War on Terror apparatus is simply being re-directed to those nations. Most notably,
Just like The Communist was seamlessly replaced by the Terrorist when
In December, 2009, U.S. cruise missile carrying cluster bombs were dropped in Yemen, killing 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children. Cables released by WikiLeaks subsequently revealed that the Obama administration perpetrated that attack, as well as a second air strike that same month (which targeted Awlaki). In May, 2010, the Obama administration launched another attack in that country, one that
Those 2009 and 2010 attacks...are playing a very significant role in why there is a Terrorism problem in Yemen in the first place. As The Christian Science Monitor explained when reporting on the 2009 American cluster bomb attack in Yemen:
Just as high civilian casualties in US attacks on militants have fed extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same phenomenon is now playing out in Yemen, says Yemen specialist Gregory Johnsen....
If you drop cluster bombs in a country and slaughter dozens of women and children with drones and then kill a popular governor, you're going to spawn pervasive amounts of anger and hostility towards the responsible foreign country and also embolden the message of extremists that they are under attack from the U.S and jihad is thus warranted: a shocking observation, I know -- but readers of the LA Times, or at least this article on the supposed emerging threat, would have no idea that the U.S. has even been doing that in Yemen. That the U.S. is creating the very Terrorism problem it claims to be combating is one of the most crucial points in discussions of American Terrorism policy -- it was one explicitly recognized even by a Rumsfeld-created Terrorism task force back in 2004 -- but it barely is heard in American political discourse....
American media reports such as the one appearing this weekend in the LA Times reflexively depict escalating American military attacks as a response to the growing Terrorist threat rather than as what they are: a leading cause of that threat. One might also take cognizance of the obvious connection between these escalating attacks under Obama and the
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Here are just some of the “highlights” of the Wilson Research Strategies poll of 1,000 voters whose demographic breakdown was an exact replica of the total voting population and whose results totally vindicate the controversial Zogby poll:
