Saturday, September 22, 2007

RON PAUL REVOLUTION - YOU MUST WAKE UP AND LISTEN

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Ron+Paul+Censorship+Continues&search=Search.

If you haven’t already, you must view this series of four videos on YouTube related to the RON PAUL campaign for President 2008.

Even as a canadian citizen the implications of not hearing this man’s message and the attempts by main stream media and the forces that drive it, are enormous.

To watch the strategic manouverings to silence or at best make impudent the voice of this sole crusader for rational thinking in what has become an irrational world of politics is frustrating to the point of making one’s blood boil especially when watching FOX News attempting to deflate the obvious. That being that Ron Paul’s message is resonating with the masses and they the media, do not like what they are seeing play out before them. It is pathetic to see their struggle to promote the obvious losers of the debate broadcast and wathcing their backpeddling to create the impression of support for candidates that tow the hollow sounding party line. It is all rather pathetic.

Much like Hollywood’s protraying of the lone underdog trying to claw his way through the myre against deep and relentous opposition – will RON PAUL’s story have a happy ending?

With a louder voice of support for what this man is attempting to do – the answer can be YES.

Ps Google the word AMERO and see what comes up. You might be upleasantly surprised whether you are an American or Canadian citizen. Especially Canadians who have just seen the loonie eclipse the US greenback for the first time in thirty years. Just when you think you are gonna have it good….they pull the economic carpet from under you..

I am looking forward to your comments on this…take care!

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Poll: Civilian toll in Iraq may top 1M

Tina Susman Los Angeles Times Saturday September 15, 2007

BAGHDAD -- -- A car bomb blew up in the capital's Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Sadr City on Thursday, killing at least four people, as a new survey suggested that the civilian death toll from the war could be more than 1 million.

The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful.

The military has said civilian deaths from sectarian violence have fallen more than 55% since President Bush sent an additional 28,500 troops to Iraq this year, but it does not provide specific numbers. According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million.

ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?"

Based on Iraq's estimated number of households -- 4,050,597 -- it said the 1.2 million figure was reasonable.

There was no way to verify the number, because the government does not provide a full count of civilian deaths. Neither does the U.S. military.

Both, however, say that independent organizations greatly exaggerate estimates of civilian casualties.

ORB said its poll had a margin of error of 2.4%. According to its findings, nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war- related violence, and 22% of households nationwide had suffered at least one death. It said 48% of the victims were shot to death and 20% died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.

The survey was conducted last month.

It was the highest estimate given so far of civilian deaths in Iraq. Last year, a study in the medical journal Lancet put the number at 654,965, which Iraq's government has dismissed as "ridiculous."

The car bomb in Sadr City injured at least 10 people and set fire to several shops. Also Thursday, police said they had found the bodies of nine people believed to be victims of sectarian killings across the capital.

In its latest salvo at Iran, the U.S. military accused the Islamic Republic of providing the 240-millimeter rocket that earlier this week slammed into Camp Victory, the sprawling base that houses the U.S. Army headquarters. The attack on the base near Baghdad's airport injured 11 soldiers and killed one "third-country national."

At a news conference, a military spokesman, Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, displayed a chunk of metal that he said had come from the rocket. Asked how he could be sure it was of Iranian origin, Bergner said its color and markings were unique to rockets from Iran.

The United States accuses Iran's Shiite leaders of providing weapons, training and other assistance to Shiite militias fighting U.S. forces in Iraq. Iran denies the accusation.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Bush restricting the travel rights of over 100,000 U.S. citizens

Sherwood Ross Prisonplanet Wednesday September 5, 2007

The freedom to travel of more than 100,000 Americans placed on “watch” and “no fly” lists is being restricted by the Bush-Cheney regime.

Citizens who have done no more than criticize the president are being banned from airline flights, harassed at airports’, strip searched, roughed up and even imprisoned, feminist author and political activist Naomi Wolf reports in her new book, “The End of America.”(Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the fascist playbook,” Wolf says. She noticed starting in 2002 that “almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration(TSA) and given a more thorough search.”

During one preboarding search, a TSA agent told her “You’re on the list” and Wolf learned it is not a list of suspected terrorists but of journalists, academics, activists, and politicians “who have criticized the White House.”

Some of this hassling has made headlines, such as when Senator Edward Kennedy was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004, suggesting no person, however prominent, is safe from Bush nastiness. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia has also been mistreated. And it can be nasty. Robert Johnson, an American citizen, described the “humiliation factor” he endured:

“I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal,” Wolf quotes him as saying. And it gets worse than that. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, said he was detained at Kennedy airport by officers who “threatened and shoved” him. And that was mild. Maher Arar, a Canadian software consultant was detained at Kennedy and “rendered” to Syria where he was imprisoned for more than a year by goons that beat him with a heavy metal cable.

After the Canadian furor over Arar’s illegal kidnapping and torture, he was eventually released as he had zero ties to terrorists. Yet the Bush gang refused to concede error; refused to provide documents or witnesses to Canadian investigators; and claimed last January it had “secret information” that justified keeping Arar on the watch list, Wolf noted.

Again, Chaplain James Yee, an American citizen born in New Jersey who had converted to Islam and had the Christian compassion to call for better treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, was nabbed in Sept., 2003 on suspicion of “espionage and possibly treason” and flung into the Naval brig at Charleston, S.C., where he was manacled, put in solitary for 76 days, forbidden mail and family visits, demonized in the media and warned he could face execution. Wolf writes, “Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee,” claiming it did so to avoid making sensitive evidence public, not because the chaplain was innocent.

Over and again, the Bush gang claims it can prove terrible crimes about suspects but, like the men imprisoned at Guantanamo, it repeatedly turns out to have “conspiracy” zilch in its briefcase rather than hard proof of actual misdeeds. Yet it goes on punishing hundreds of suspects with solitary confinement and worse without ever bringing them to trial. Globally, the number of such detainees is in the tens of thousands. Stalin would have understood. Apparently, favorite targets of the Bush tyranny are peace activists like Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, detained at the San Francisco airport; a political leader such as Nancy Oden, of the Green Party, prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago; King Downing and David Fathi, both of the American Civil Liberties Union and both detained (proves ACLU’s case about Bush, eh what?); and Constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, of Princeton University, who had attacked the illegalities of the Bush regime. He was put on notice his luggage would be ransacked.

“When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something you said or wrote, it has an impact,” Wolf writes. “…you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.”

Wolf traces the “watch list” back to a 2003 directive from Bush to his intelligence agencies to identify people “thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts.” After the list was given to the airlines, CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes got a copy. The list was 540 pages long and there were 75,000 names on it of people to be taken aside for extra screening.

The more stringent “no fly” list has 45,000 names on it, Wolf reports. Prior to 9/11, the list had just 16 names, but 44,984 suspects were quickly manufactured to justify the creation of the vast airport security apparatus at God knows what cost to American taxpayers.

One ludicrous “no fly” story concerns John Graham, president of the nonprofit Giraffe Heroes Project, an organization that honors people who stick their necks out. A former government careerist who served in Viet Nam, Graham is an inspired speaker that receives standing ovations from groups such as West Point cadets, yet is kept from flying from his Langley, Wash., base by the National Security Agency. NSA won’t tell him why, either. Maybe they have “secret” information on him, too.

Author Wolf notes that dictatorships from Hitler’s Germany to Pinochet’s Chile have employed arbitrary arrests to harass critics. And Bush’s airport detention policies are more of the same. As Wolf writes, “being free means that you can’t be detained arbitrarily.” Somebody ring the fire bell!

Sunday, September 2, 2007

How Strong? Hartford's Mayor Perez

HARTFORD'S MAYORAL RACE: Former Friends Find Eddie Perez Bullheaded. Some Of His Dealings Are Suspect. But, He Asks: Have You Hit Any Potholes Lately?

HARTFORD MAYOR Eddie Perez leaves after speaking at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Caribbean Resource Center at The Center for Urban Research on Albany Avenue in Hartford Thursday. Perez has galvanized the mayor's office but left a wake of new-found enemies behind him; some are running against him. (ROSS TAYLOR / August 30, 2007)

He is mayor. He is chairman of the board of education and is overseeing the massive rebuilding of city schools. He appointed the police chief, helped choose the school superintendent and influenced the makeup of the city council and housing authority.

Hartford is Eddie A. Perez's city.

But in consolidating power over the past six years to an unprecedented degree, Perez has bruised friends, marginalized opponents and antagonized the governor and state legislators. Many of his most vocal critics are former supporters.

In next week's Democratic primary, he is opposed by three candidates for mayor, with some opponents describing his tenure in apocalyptic terms.

"This is a reign of terror," said Geraldine Sullivan, one of Perez's disenchanted former supporters who now runs the campaign of challenger I. Charles Mathews. "We can't have this in the city."

Adding to his political woes is a criminal investigation of city parking lot deals and improvements to the mayor's home by a city contractor. Perez put one of the deals back out to bid and apologized for the home-improvement arrangement as a "mistake."

But Perez admits to few other regrets as he looks back over his efforts to redesign government and change the political culture of a city in which power was diffuse and no one was accountable.

He predicts that Hartford will give him a third term in recognition of jump-starting a tired and listless city. Hartford, he insists, is now a city that works in ways large and small.

And people know who is in charge.

"The first thing I say to people - real people, not the pundits, not the insiders - I say, `How many potholes have you run into lately? How many?'" he said during an interview. "I start with that, because I think that's what matters to people."

His supporters say they are willing to overlook the mayor's brusqueness in the pursuit of progress. They point to luxury apartments downtown, dropping crime rates and new schools as measures his success.

The Rev. Cornell Lewis, one of his staunchest supporters, said Perez has brought a "fresh breeze through city hall."

"The first thing he did when he got into office was fix the streets," Lewis said. "I was driving down the street and I said, `Something is wrong. My truck isn't shaking.'"

But while Perez has been facing questions about his style for some time now, on the eve of the primary he is - for the first time - facing questions about whether he used his office for personal gain.

Last month, state investigators searched the mayor's Bloomfield Avenue home and the office of a city contractor who did roughly $20,000 worth of kitchen and bathroom work for Perez. The contractor, Carlos Costa, has millions of dollars of work with the city.

"I made a mistake," Perez said. "I've acknowledge the mistake. I was very transparent with people, and said it happened. I wished I hadn't done it the way it happened. I hope it was a minor distraction, and at the end of the day it won't be a significant distraction. It takes away from all the good work that we've done."

Andrea Comer, a school board member who worked for Perez's first election, said one peril of his all-encompassing management style is that he can't convincingly say he was not attentive enough on the parking deal or home project.

"If you want to be the strong mayor, the end-all and be-all, you don't get to not know," said Comer, who stepped down as the mayor's spokesman in his first term after a falling-out with Perez's chief of staff, Matt Hennessy.

But it is unclear how much the latest questions about the mayor will affect his chances on Sept. 11.

The same investigators have for months been reviewing documents at city hall as part of a probe into parking-lot deals made with Abraham L. Giles, a North End political boss who helped Perez get the Democratic Party's endorsement.

So far, the Perez campaign has seemed insulated from the investigation. His detractors are distributed among the campaigns of three primary opponents: Mathews, a former council leader; Art Feltman, a state legislator; and Frank Barrows, a former state senator.

John B. Kennelly, a former city councilman who fell out with Perez during the mayor's first term, described what appears to be a tepid reaction to the investigation as a kind of "political combat fatigue."

"People aren't outraged," Kennelly said. "They are kind of like, `Whatever. These are just politicians.' They are almost resigned to this being true about their politicians. The impression is that they are all crooks, so what's it matter? Anyone who sits in that seat becomes a crook. There is no sense of moral outrage."

The episode also appears to have had little effect on Perez's support within the business community.

"Short of an indictment," one prominent member of that community said, "I'm having a hard time seeing the business community going to any one of the other candidates."

But Hyacinth Yennie, a community activist and organizer, is upset with Perez.

"This is not about the person. This is about what the person has done," Yennie said. "I like Eddie, because I knew him from the grass roots, and that is why we supported him in the past. But when you take the power and misuse it, that is a fine line. And when you cross it, there need to be consequences."

Strong Man

Six years ago, Perez took office as a phenomenon. He had grown up poor, joined a gang and then became an effective community organizer, impressing people like Geraldine Sullivan, who viewed the Perez biography as "a gritty Hartford success story."

"I just admired him so much," said Sullivan, who urged him to run for city council when her brother, Mike Peters, was mayor. "Instead, he decided to run for mayor, and I was thrilled."

Perez was elected in 2001 to a two-year term under Hartford's old council-manager government, backed by a coalition of activists who advocated a strong-mayor charter.

With no statutory power, Perez assembled a council coalition that allowed him to reorganize city hall. He also initiated a new charter revision campaign. In 2004, he was elected with token opposition to a four-year term as Hartford's first strong mayor.

Over the next four years, Perez asserted control over all corners of government and politics.

In addition to taking control of the schools, he ousted the commissioners at the Hartford Housing Authority. He had showdowns with the governor, the city's legislative delegation and House Speaker James Amann.

He clashed with the legislative delegation over legislation intended to blunt the impact of property revaluation on homeowners. When he failed to prevail in April 2006, he issued a press release saying legislative inaction could force him to fire police and make other cutbacks.

His rough style has left some bruises. And while he chalks it up to getting the job done - he says he's driven by "projects, not politics" - others aren't so sure.

"I believe the delegation's feeling toward Eddie is one of disappointment and not knowing what he may pull next - and try to have us blamed for that," said Rep. Marie Kirkley-Bey, D-Hartford.

In one of his most visible fights, Perez elevated a dispute over the location of the Pathways to Technology magnet school into high political drama. Over the objections of the legislative delegation, Perez began construction without clear title to what had been state land.

Perez said he simply was defending the choice made by a city panel, but it ended with a rebuke from Gov. M. Jodi Rell, renewed hard feelings among state legislators and an opinion by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal that the city had no authority to build a school on the site.

The episode reinforced an image of a mayor unwilling to accept limits on his power or tolerate dissent.

Perez has seemed to chafe at some of the checks and balances written into the new charter. While the mayor now denies any role, his council allies blocked the appointment of two independent, strong-willed men to an internal-audit panel.

"Eddie or his opponents should go back and recognize the value - not just to the city, but to the mayor - of having strong instruments of government other than the mayor's office," said Allan B. Taylor, chairman of the charter revision commission.

Sullivan's husband, Tim, an activist whose disagreement with Perez on a property tax relief plan turned ugly, said Perez developed a habit after the 2003 election of elevating policy disagreements and petty differences into blood feuds.

"He was making enemies of people he didn't need to make enemies with," Tim Sullivan said.

But Perez still has a strong contingent of supporters.

Some applaud the mayor's accomplishments; others fear losing their livelihood. Still others have personal memories of Perez that outweigh the questions that have been raised about Perez's behavior. He's a friend. A guy they simply like.

"Eddie has passion, but sometimes that passion is funneled in the wrong direction," said John Bazzano, the council president. "He sets his mind on something and he doesn't want to bend, and that is where he gets himself into a bit of trouble. But for the most part I think Eddie has a good heart, is passionate, and really cares."

Perez has been a friend of business, people in that community say. And apart from a few instances that made them wince - his support of a union organizing effort at the Connecticut Convention Center, for example - they are supporters.

The city's businessmen like Perez's nerve and his pull-me-up from poverty story, and they recognize the difficult task he has to synthesize disparate communities. Perez's campaign coffers are overflowing with cash, mostly from the city's business community. The mayor has raised more than $370,000.

Comer was once among the mayor's biggest fans, but she now supports Mathews and said the estrangement of Perez from his early supporters troubles her.

"Despite the fact I am supporting Charles, I take no joy in this," Comer said. "At the end of the day, I think it's sad for the city. People did have such high hopes."