Karl Rove came to the heart of Manhattan last night to rhapsodize about the decline of liberalism in politics, saying Democrats responded weakly to Sept. 11 and had placed American troops in greater danger by criticizing their actions.

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, “I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.”

Told of Mr. Rove’s remarks, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, replied: “In New York, where everyone unified after 9/11, the last thing we need is somebody who seeks to divide us for political purposes.”

Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot or others.”

“Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?” Mr. Rove asked. “Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”

Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, speaking after Mr. Rove, also touched on the Sept. 11 attacks. He promised that the proposed Freedom Tower, the new building at ground zero, would retain patriotic touches in its architecture, like a height of 1,776 feet, despite the concerns of some observers who fear that it would become a target for terrorists.

“We’re going to have a Freedom Tower that soars 1,776 feet high, symbolizing our independence,” Mr. Pataki said. As for the memorial, he said: “No one is going to turn it into something that is a negative statement about America and our belief in freedom, so long as I am governor of this state.”
Full: nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — Cities may bulldoze people’s homes to make way for shopping malls or other private development, a divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday, giving local governments broad power to seize private property to generate tax revenue.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the decision bowed to the rich and powerful at the expense of middle-class Americans.

The 5-4 decision means that homeowners will have more limited rights. Still, legal experts said they didn’t expect a rush to claim homes.

“The message of the case to cities is yes, you can use eminent domain, but you better be careful and conduct hearings,” said Thomas Merrill, a Columbia law professor specializing in property rights.

The closely watched case involving New London, Conn., homeowners was one of six decisions issued Thursday as the court neared the end of its term. The justices are scheduled to release their final six rulings, including one on the constitutionality of Ten Commandments displays on public property, on Monday.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, said New London could pursue private development under the Fifth Amendment, which allows governments to take private property if the land is for public use, since the project the city has in mind promises to bring more jobs and revenue.

“Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted function of government,” Stevens wrote, adding that local officials are better positioned than federal judges to decide what’s best for a community.
washingtonpost.com

Sometimes we come across an eye-opening book by an American who is not part of the author circuit, and this is the case with the two-volume set, It Can Happen Here. George E. Lowe wrote a book in 1964 called The Age of Deterrence, but then went on with his career in the military. He served as a speech writer in the Reagan Department of Education, where he told BuzzFlash, he awoke to the threat from radical religious zealots taking over the Republican Party.

Lowe’s two-volume collection is a labor of love (originally and prophetically written in 2000) that offers a provocative and persuasive explanation about how the Neo-Cons became a logical partner with the “Rapture” Christians, whose goal is to precipitate Armageddon and a Second Coming of Christ. One clear common political goal is increasing weapons production, because it will both enrich the Neo-Con corporate interests and help precipitate a Messianic age for the radical fundamentalists.

For many BuzzFlash readers, following the subtleties of the religious right fanatics is a challenge. But Lowe takes the reader on a journey through the strange permutations of Christian extremism and the danger it presents to America as a Constitutional democracy. Moreover, the Christian fanatics seek a World War III, because it will lead to the triumphant return of a resurrected Christ and a transformed Israel.

* * *

BuzzFlash: You published a two-volume set — — It Can Happen Here: A Fascist Christian America — — in 2000. You pretty much forecast what has come to happen in the United States since then, although we don’t officially have a fascist Christian America.

George E. Lowe: We’re heading fast toward it.

BuzzFlash: There’s certainly the assertion by everyone from Antonin Scalia to Bill Frist to General Boykin and John Ashcroft that America is a country where God is king.

George E. Lowe: The famous phrase is: “I have no king but Jesus.”

BuzzFlash: You were ahead of the curve on this. What made you so motivated to write two volumes, together hundreds of pages, about this topic?

George E. Lowe: The answer is I lived among them. When the Reagan Administration came in, I was Secretary of Education Bell’s speech writer. I looked around and who did I see? Gary Bauer as an Assistant Secretary. Bob Billings, one of the founders of the Moral Majority — — another Assistant Secretary. Civil rights was handed over to Alan Keyes and Clarence Thomas. They dumped a lot of strange people into the department that had Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, and the Good Shepherd’s Yellow Pages. They had little cards that they would post up in the halls saying, “Listen to Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye.” They were revolutionaries. And here I am, an American historian, worried about this, because I was fighting the military fascists in the sixties. Here we get Christian fascists, and I just couldn’t comprehend it.

BuzzFlash: What has happened since you wrote the book to accelerate this? Why has the influence of the radical Christian fundamentalists gone from being somewhat in the background and somewhat at arm’s length to being an overt part of the Bush Administration?

George E. Lowe: As I say on the cover of my book, it’s that they’ve taken over the party of Lincoln. You could just look at the electoral map and you know that. It’s the old Confederacy. And they’ve expanded it to the new booming Southwest. That and the Mountain West is their core base. There are people that essentially are the old David Duke crowd — the Northern European, white, Protestant, small town, middle and lower-middle classes — and their time has come. They’re tired of all these foreigners that came in after ’48 or after the Civil War, and all those two million Jews and all those Southern European Catholics — those dusty people — all those. They feel it’s time to take back America. In essence, this is the revenge of the South for losing the Civil War.
Full: buzzflash.com

Read on about ‘pre-emptive global nuclear war.’

…Zeese: What is: “Truth from These Podia”? How did you conduct this media analysis?

Gardiner: It is a paper I published on the web that reflected four months of heavy research.

I had followed press reports of the war closely as it unfolded because of a job I had. During the first couple months of Gulf II, I was under contract with the Newshour with Jim Lehrer. With another retired colonel, we did an almost daily on-air analysis of how the war was going.

As the war unfolded, I became increasingly uneasy about what was being reported out of the White House, Pentagon and Central Command. I was hearing things that just did not make sense with what I knew and what my intuition was telling me. I began tracking some of the stories. It was just a matter of going over what we were told and connecting that with the truth as it emerged later.
One of the first items that made me uneasy was when I heard we were encountering “terrorist death squads.” I was very familiar with the Iraq military forces. There were no terrorist death squads. It became obvious the Pentagon wanted us to connect Iraq with 9/11. Terrorists did 9/11. There are terrorists in Iraq. Iraq must have been behind 9/11.

Zeese: Regarding the management of information about Iraq, I’d like to focus on the build up to the Iraq War initially. There has been growing indications from a series of memoranda and meeting minutes from Great Britain that U.S. intelligence was “fixed” to support the war. In your analysis of media management before the war do you see any indication that the United States Congress and public was manipulated into supporting the invasion of Iraq by misinformation?

Gardiner: Kevin, I find it amazing that there is now a growing interest in the marketing the war. There is absolutely no question that the White House and the Pentagon participated in an effort to market the military option. The truth did not make any difference to that campaign. To call it fixing is to miss the more profound point. It was a campaign to influence. It involved creating false stories; it involved exaggerating; it involved manipulating the numbers of stories that were released; it involved a major campaign to attack those who disagreed with the military option. It included all the techniques those who ran the marketing effort had learned in political campaigns.

Zeese: Can you give some examples of false or exaggerated stories put out by the Bush administration in the build-up to the war?

Gardiner: In the summer of 2003, we know from the Downing Street Memo that the Administration was talking about justifying a war by arguing that Iraq was the nexus of terrorism and WMD.

The terrorism argument was what propaganda literature would refer to as the big lie. The Administration’s objective was to make enough arguments connecting Iraq to terrorism and Bin Laden that the American people would believe Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. They used a technique called the excluded middle. Iraq supports terrorists. The attacks were by terrorists. Iraq must been behind the 9/11 attacks.

We the WMD story fairly well. We know the story of the uranium from Niger. We know about the aluminum tubes that were not for uranium enrichment. We know the biological labs Powell showed to the UN did not exist.

Beyond these there are many exaggerations that have gotten very little notice. Let me mention just a few.
Full: counterpunch.org

NEW YORK (AFP) – China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) has agreed to launch the biggest ever takeover offer by a Chinese group with a 19 billion dollar bid for US oil major Unocal, according to a report.

The decision to trump a rival bid for Unocal by ChevronTexaco was reached by CNOOC directors in a tense six-hour board meeting held in Beijing on Wednesday, The Financial Times said in its online edition.

It quoted people close to the situation as saying CNOOC had decided to bid about 67 dollars a share for Unocal and would offer to take on 1.6 billion dollars of the US energy group’s debt.

At that level, the offer would value Unocal at 19.8 billion dollars, the newspaper said.

It would be higher than Chevron’s cash-and-shares offer of 16.4 billion dollars plus debt, and represent a modest premium to Unocal’s share price, which closed in New York Wednesday at 64.86 dollars.

If successful, it would represent the biggest overseas acquisition by a Chinese company, dwarfing the Lenovo Group’s recent 1.25 billion dollar takeover of IBM’s personal computer business.

But the FT quoted New York bankers as saying that CNOOC will have a difficult task persuading investors that its offer is high enough to compensate for any risk that the deal might be blocked by US regulators.

“CNOOC will have serious difficulties closing this deal given legal, bureaucratic and political barriers,” Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, a Washington consultancy, told the newspaper.

CNOOC, China’s third-largest oil group, confirmed in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange earlier this month that it was considering launching a possible bid for Unocal.

It said a further announcement would be made “if and when appropriate.”

If CNOOC were to go ahead with an attempt to take over Unocal, it would fit into a larger Chinese strategy of securing access to energy sources overseas for the country’s power-hungry industries.

Unocal has gas and oil reserves in Thailand, Indonesia and Central Asia. It has more than 6,000 employees, with most of its activities in Asia and North America. It has no refining or marketing operations.

ChevronTexaco, the number-two US oil company, announced its takeover bid for Unocal in April. The bid received US regulatory approval on June 10.
Full: news.yahoo.com

Unocal is the big player in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than a quarter of voters, and more than half of black voters, experienced problems at Ohio polling places during the 2004 presidential vote, a Democratic Party report said on Wednesday.

But the problems were not enough to have changed the outcome in the state that put President Bush over the top in his battle for the White House with Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, it concluded.

The report cited long lines that discouraged voting, poorly trained election officials and difficulties with registration status, polling locations and absentee ballots.
Full: washingtonpost.com

‘Hackers bombard financial networks”, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Government departments and businesses “have been bombarded with a sophisticated electronic attack for several months”. It is being organised by an Asian criminal network, and is “aimed at stealing commercially and economically sensitive information”. By Thursday afternoon, the story had mutated. “G8 hackers target banks and ministries”, said the headline in the Evening Standard. Their purpose was “to cripple the systems as a protest before the G8 summit.” The Standard advanced no evidence to justify this metamorphosis.
This is just one instance of the reams of twaddle about the dark designs of the G8 protesters codded up by the corporate press. That the same stories have been told about almost every impending public protest planned in the past 30 years and that they have invariably fallen apart under examination appears to present no impediment to their repetition. The real danger at the G8 summit is not that the protests will turn violent – the appetite for that pretty well disappeared in September 2001 – but that they will be far too polite.

Let me be more precise. The danger is that we will follow the agenda set by Bono and Bob Geldof.

The two musicians are genuinely committed to the cause of poverty reduction. They have helped secure aid and debt-relief packages worth billions of dollars. They have helped to keep the issue of global poverty on the political agenda. They have mobilised people all over the world. These are astonishing achievements, and it would be stupid to disregard them.

The problem is that they have assumed the role of arbiters: of determining on our behalf whether the leaders of the G8 nations should be congratulated or condemned for the decisions they make. They are not qualified to do so, and I fear that they will sell us down the river.

Take their response to the debt-relief package for the world’s poorest countries that the G7 finance ministers announced 10 days ago. Anyone with a grasp of development politics who had read and understood the ministers’ statement could see that the conditions it contains – enforced liberalisation and privatisation – are as onerous as the debts it relieves. But Bob Geldof praised it as “a victory for the millions of people in the campaigns around the world” and Bono pronounced it “a little piece of history”. Like many of those who have been trying to highlight the harm done by such conditions – especially the African campaigners I know – I feel betrayed by these statements. Bono and Geldof have made our job more difficult.

I understand the game they’re playing. They believe that praising the world’s most powerful men is more persuasive than criticising them. The problem is that in doing so they turn the political campaign developed by the global justice movement into a philanthropic one. They urge the G8 leaders to do more to help the poor. But they say nothing about ceasing to do harm.
Full: guardian.co.uk

This is because they don’t have the smarts to understand that they are products of centuries of European imperialism, and it takes work to start seeing ‘out of the box’. They may like to believe that their motives are great, but they are just buffoons for the G8.

Plans by De Beers to expand its diamond retail empire with the opening of a new shop today on Fifth Avenue in New York will be dogged by controversy after a human rights group called for a boycott.
Survival International said it had enlisted the American feminist Gloria Steinem to join a picket line urging people not to enter the shop.

The charity, which campaigns on behalf of tribal peoples, is protesting at De Beers’ alleged involvement in the eviction by the Botswana government of the last remaining Gana and Gwi bushmen from their homes in the central Kalahari game reserve.

Survival International organised a similar demonstration when De Beers opened its first standalone shop in Bond Street, London, in 2002. The company already had three in-store concessions in Tokyo.
The diamond company said yesterday that previous boycotts had not dented sales in Britain and argued it was unfair to target the retail arm because it was an independently managed joint venture with the luxury goods group LVMH in France.

De Beers said: “Survival International’s misleading and dishonest claims are based on supposition and hearsay. They have failed to attract any significant, internationally recognised support from other civil society organisations and De Beers challenges them to provide any credible evidence to support their claims.”

De Beers accused Survival of threatening to inflict “untold damage on one of Africa’s success stories, dependent on its diamond revenues for the fight against HIV/Aids”.

De Beers said it has a licence from the government of Botswana to search for minerals but has discovered no commercial deposits. Even if it had it would not need to “arbitrarily remove or resettle any communities”, it said.
Full: guardian.co.uk

“…their homes in the game reserve.”

Condoleezza Rice hailed the understanding between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the need to destroy the homes of the 8,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza as a historic step on the road to peace. This is a fatuous statement by one of the most vacuous US secretaries of state of the postwar era.

American foreign policy has habitually displayed double standards towards the Middle East: one standard towards Israel and one towards the Arabs. To give just one example, the US effected regime change in Baghdad in three weeks but has failed to dismantle a single Jewish settlement in the occupied territories in 38 years.

The two main items on America’s current agenda for the region are democracy for the Arabs and a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. America, however, insists on democracy only for its Arab opponents, not for its friends. As for the peace process, it is essentially a mechanism by which Israel and America try to impose a solution on the Palestinians. American hypocrisy is nothing new. But with Dr Rice it has gone beyond chutzpah.

With Ariel Sharon, by contrast, what you see is what you get. He has always been in the destruction business, not the construction business. As minister of defence in 1982, Sharon preferred to destroy the settlement town of Yamit in Sinai rather than hand it to Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel. George Bush once described his friend Sharon as “a man of peace”. In truth, Sharon is a brutal thug and land-grabber.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Condoleezza Rice hailed the understanding between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the need to destroy the homes of the 8,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza as a historic step on the road to peace. This is a fatuous statement by one of the most vacuous US secretaries of state of the postwar era.

American foreign policy has habitually displayed double standards towards the Middle East: one standard towards Israel and one towards the Arabs. To give just one example, the US effected regime change in Baghdad in three weeks but has failed to dismantle a single Jewish settlement in the occupied territories in 38 years.

The two main items on America’s current agenda for the region are democracy for the Arabs and a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. America, however, insists on democracy only for its Arab opponents, not for its friends. As for the peace process, it is essentially a mechanism by which Israel and America try to impose a solution on the Palestinians. American hypocrisy is nothing new. But with Dr Rice it has gone beyond chutzpah.

With Ariel Sharon, by contrast, what you see is what you get. He has always been in the destruction business, not the construction business. As minister of defence in 1982, Sharon preferred to destroy the settlement town of Yamit in Sinai rather than hand it to Egypt as a reward for signing a peace treaty with Israel. George Bush once described his friend Sharon as “a man of peace”. In truth, Sharon is a brutal thug and land-grabber.
Full: guardian.co.uk