Get your game on:

Hugo Chavez has just about everything a president could want: popular support, a marginalized opposition, congress firmly on his side and a booming economy as he starts his new six-year term.

Now, he's about to become even more powerful...

Associated Press 30.Jan.07
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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez poses a threat to democracy in Latin America through his populist influence in countries such as Bolivia, U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte said on Tuesday...

Reuters/WaPo 30.Jan.07

the way things are:

Thirteen percent of Americans have never heard of global warming even though their country is the world's top source of greenhouse gases, a 46-country survey showed on Monday.

The report, by ACNielsen of more than 25,000 Internet users, showed that 57 percent of people around the world considered global warming a "very serious problem" and a further 34 percent rated it a "serious problem."

"It has taken extreme and life-threatening weather patterns to finally drive the message home that global warming is happening and is here to stay unless a concerted, global effort is made to reverse it," said Patrick Dodd, the President of ACNielsen Europe.

commondreams/Reuters 29.Jan.07
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I don't think "reversing it" is really the best goal there Mr. Nielsen-guy.

Happy with the way things are:

Americans are divided in their opinions about the current level of influence displayed by organized religion in America today. Thirty-two percent would like organized religion to have less influence "in this nation," 27% would like it to have more, and 39% say that the current amount of influence should be kept as is.

NewsTrust/Gallop 30.Jan.07

God loves you
but He loves those little babies even more:

A woman who told police she had been raped was jailed for two days after officers found an old warrant accusing her of failing to pay restitution for a 2003 theft arrest.
While she was behind bars, according to the college student's attorney, a jail worker refused to give her a second dose of the morning-after contraceptive pill because of the worker's religious convictions.

Davis/SFGate 30.Jan.07

"certain doors" in the plant were locked at "certain times"

his courting of the London diaspora is part of a concerted effort by his ruling centre-right party to woo

"... it was not David who did this unspeakable crime but some other entity that slowly took him away from reality and into some other dark world"

the benefits from regeneration will be shown to outweigh concerns over increased gambling

"Monday the 29th January is an even bigger day for Ian Paisley"

Weiss on Hagel

Thursday, December 26, 2002:

Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, having just returned from a week-long fact-finding trip to the Middle East, addressed the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations Dec. 16 and said out loud what is whispered on Capitol Hill: "The road to Arab-Israeli peace will not likely go through Baghdad, as some may claim."
The "some" are led by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress, the former general leaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason why U.S. forces today are assembling for war.
"Military force alone," Hagel told his Chicago audience, "will neither assure a democratic transition in Iraq, bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians, nor assure stability in the Middle East."
Indeed, the senator returned from the Mideast more concerned than his prepared speech indicates. As the U.S. gets ready for war, its standing in Islam - even among longtime allies - stands low.
Yet, the Bush administration has tied itself firmly to Gen. Sharon and his policies. Gen. Amran Mitzna, the new Labor Party leader challenging the heavily favored Sharon in the Jan. 28 election, is denied access to senior U.S. officials. In private conversation, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has insisted that Hezbollah - not al Qaeda - is the world's most dangerous terrorist organization. How could that be, considering al Qaeda's global record of mass carnage?
In truth, Hezbollah is the world's most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel's standpoint.

Robert Novak/Townhall 26.Dec.02
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NewsTrust > Counterpunch

Molly Ivins gravely ill, still opposed to war

We have no concern about the long-term future of wolves
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turbofladry
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The Bailey Wildlife Foundation Proactive Carnivore Conservation Fund

This is so obvious it makes me feel childish to say it, but...
Imagine if the prisoners in Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib for that matter, and the dozens of bodies they're finding everyday in Baghdad - I know it'll be hard to do now that the images are so firmly in place - but try to imagine how you'd feel about them if they were blonde, if their eyes were blue, if they spoke English.
Now tell me there's nothing racist about it.

Press release, 23-01-2007:

Today, the NGO Wetlands International released the Fourth edition of their 'Waterbird Population Estimates', a publication based on annual monitoring of millions of waterbirds, that presents estimates and trends of 878 waterbird species. The new edition reveals a decrease in waterbird populations since the third edition of 2002.
At a global level 44% of populations for which trend data is available are decreasing or have become extinct, 34% are stable, and 17% are increasing. Asia is the continent where concern is greatest.
In Asia, 62% of the populations are now decreasing or have become extinct, and only 10% show an increasing trend. In Oceania one in six species have already become extinct.
The most frequent known cause of population decrease is habitat destruction, often caused by unsustainable human activity. The frantic pace of economic development in Asia is clearly having adverse impacts on the environment, including numbers and population trends of waterbirds.

Wetlands International
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via JeromeTaylor/IndependentUK/CommonDreams

I owe Phil Weiss an apology and this is that apology. I misread his genuine concern for a timidity that it wasn't. Phil Weiss is one brave dude. Kumbaya.

"I'm so sick of these kids dying," she said.:

"These untimely deaths are a reminder of the extraordinary circumstances under which our professionals voluntarily serve to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people," the Blackwater statement said.

The helicopter was shot down after responding to assist a U.S. Embassy ground convoy that came under fire in a Sunni neighborhood in central Baghdad, said a U.S. diplomatic official in Washington.
A second helicopter also was struck
[...]
The crash occurred in an old neighborhood of narrow streets on the east bank of the Tigris River, north of the central city.
[...]
Blackwater USA provides security for State Department officials in Iraq, trains military units from around the world, and works for corporate clients.

Qassim Abdul-Zahra/AP/Yahoo - 24.Jan.07
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U.S. embassy convoy in Iraq gets in trouble and who do they call? The "voluntary professionals" of Blackwater.
Which almost but not quite says they're over there working for free. They're not.
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A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.

And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.

Chris Hedges
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The US is hiring mercenaries in Chile to replace its soldiers on security duty in Iraq. A Pentagon contractor has begun recruiting former commandos, other soldiers and seamen, paying them up to $4,000 a month to guard oil wells against attack by insurgents.
Last month Blackwater USA flew a first group of about 60 former commandos, many of who had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, from Santiago to a 2,400-acre (970-hectare) training camp in North Carolina.

Franklin/Guardian 05.Mar.04

There is no moral justification for a minimum wage lower than a living wage

A half truth is a whole lie:

The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifiable anger to propel them into 'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region

Nick "They chose to go berserk" Cohen in the ObserverUK 21.Jan.07
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The US and their Iraqi puppets in the green zone chose to execute Saddam on the first day of Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice. This is the most joyous day in the Muslim calendar when more than 2 million pilgrims in Mecca start their ancient rituals, with hundreds of millions of others around the world focused on the events. They then further humiliated Muslims by releasing the official video of the execution...
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Compounding the shock, it turns out that it was the police who made the film, and that they then transmitted it to the cell phones of the victim's friends in order to humiliate him.
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09.Jan.07: New mobile phone footage showing Saddam Hussein after his execution has appeared on the Internet.
The former Iraqi president was executed almost two weeks ago after being found guilty of crimes against humanity.
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...when Spc. Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The next day, the Army launched a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photos and stories that introduced the world to devastating scenes of torture and suffering inside the decrepit prison in Iraq.
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In Israel, the Carter issue remains a non-issue:

Unless, that is, Carter's true intended target was the organized American Jewish community.
In fact, even if Carter's intent, as some observers have suggested, was to curry favor with the Palestinians and be seen and celebrated as an honest broker on the Middle East, even that effort has fallen short.
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His latest book, currently a best seller, shows that Carter has the courage to match his decency and commitment to peace in the Middle East.
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We all know how Jimmy Carter had besmirched his own Carter Center at Emory University. But he is a bigot, which no one has actually ever charged Bush with being.
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Fourteen members of the Carter Center have resigned in protest over former president Jimmy Carter's book,"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." AP hints that they were mostly themselves Jewish Americans. The Jerusalem Post says all were. This is only 7% of his board, which has 200 members.
The lobby is drawing wagons around this one, even though Carter's book is actually very biased toward Israel and makes historical errors in Israel's favor.

many business lobbyists expressed relief