By Chris Floyd

01/19/06 “Empire Burlesque” — — Things are looking a bit grim for the Bush Faction these days. Their chief bagman, Jack Abramoff, is in the clink, naming names. Their top congressional enforcer, Tom Delay, is in the dock, sinking fast. Their “war of choice” in Iraq has stalled in murderous quagmire. Their poll numbers are plummeting , as scandal after scandal — corruption, despotism, torture, incompetence, deceit — turn the American people against them. What then will be the fate of these brutal, bungling, bloodstained goons when they face the voters in the coming elections?

Why, victory, of course!

In fact, this year’s congressional races and the presidential contest in 2008 are already over, and the Bushists have won. It’s true that some of the candidates have not yet been chosen – including whatever front man the goon squad picks to replace the kill-crazy klutz from Crawford – but the vast machinery of electoral malfeasance that propelled this extremist faction to power over the wishes of the electorate in both 2000 and, yes, 2004, is not only still in place, it’s growing stronger all the time.

No one has laid bare the malodorous innards of this democracy-devouring monster better than Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too, takes us back to the dastardy of Election Day 2004 and the hydra-headed campaign of vote-rigging that preceded it. This second heist of the White House is one of the great untold stories of our time – even though it was largely carried out in plain sight. Miller performs the simple but increasingly rare act of journalism and gathers a mountain of overwhelming evidence from publicly available material. This is no “conspiracy theory” stitched together from anonymous sources, strained inferences and dark innuendo, but a solid case based on official records, sworn testimony, eyewitness accounts, news reports – and the Bushists’ own words.
informationclearinghouse.info

Wilson Pickett, 64, the impassioned, raw-voiced soul singer who brought a hard-edged, sensuous urgency to a string of rhythm-and-blues hits of the 1960s, died Jan. 19 of a heart attack at Reston Hospital Center. He had lived in Ashburn since 1999.

One of the most exciting performers of his era, Mr. Pickett helped define the sound of classic soul music of the 1960s, along with Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, James Brown and Smokey Robinson.
washingtonpost.com

One of the most significant events in 500 years of Latin American history will take place in Bolivia on Sunday when Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, is inducted as president. People of indigenous origin have, on occasion, risen to the top in Latin America. But Morales’s overwhelming election victory took place on a tide of indigenous mobilisation that is especially powerful in Andean countries; elections in Peru and Ecuador this year might also bring success to indigenous movements.

…Morales’s victory is not just a symptom of economic breakdown and age-old repression. It also fulfils a prophecy made by Fidel Castro, who claimed the Andes would become the Americas’ Sierra Maestra – the Cuban mountains that harboured black and Indian rebels over the centuries, as well as Castro’s guerrilla band in the 50s. His prophecy exercised US governments in the 60s. Radical elected governments were destroyed by the armed forces – guardians of the white settler states – supported by Washington. Countries such as Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia were prevented from following anything that might have resembled the Cuban road.
guardian.co.uk

PARIS, Jan. 19 — President Jacques Chirac said Thursday that France was prepared to launch a nuclear strike against any country that sponsors a terrorist attack against French interests. He said his country’s nuclear arsenal had been reconfigured to include the ability to make a tactical strike in retaliation for terrorism.

“The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would envision using . . . weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and fitting response on our part,” Chirac said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in Brittany. “This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.”
washingtonpost.com

The chancellor wants to reclaim the flag from the right. Far more important is to face up to the reality of its barbaric history

On holiday in Sri Lanka, a Sinhalese friend lent me a book about Britain’s conquest of the island just under two centuries ago. Neither of us knew that Gordon Brown was soon to deliver a speech on Britishness, so my reference point at that stage was George Bush’s Iraq.

The similarities between April 2003 and British policy in Sri Lanka in 1815 were uncanny. Determined to remove the King of Kandy, who controlled the mountains of the island’s interior and was the last bastion of independence, the British conspired with local nobles to topple the autocratic ruler.

But, instead of withdrawing as the nobles had been led to believe, the British stayed on in Kandy. “You have now deposed the king, and nothing more is required – you may leave us,” one of them said in polite desperation.

I was reminded of the graffiti that appeared on the pedestal of Saddam Hussein’s statue less than a month after US marines pulled it down in central Baghdad: “All done. Now go home.”

The Americans haven’t, and nor did the British. The result was a guerrilla insurgency that the British put down with enormous savagery. PE Pieris’s book Sinhale and the Patriots 1815-1818 is a work of immense scholarship that includes testimony from the then British governor Sir Robert Brownrigg’s official papers as well as the reminiscences of army officers.

If we are to celebrate Britishness as the chancellor wants us to do then the lesser-known aspects of our past ought to be thrown into the mix. If one of the elements of Britishness today is fairness then let us remember that the year 1815 saw not only the triumph of Waterloo but also a vicious campaign of colonial brutality much further afield.
guardian.co.uk

BRASILIA (AP)–A Brazilian army general will assume the command of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Haiti, replacing the Brazilian general who committed suicide earlier this month, the government said.

“U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with Gen. Jose Elito Carvalho de Siqueira and invited him to take command of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Haiti,” read a statement issued jointly Tuesday night by Brazil’s foreign and defense ministries.

“Annan’s decision confirms the United Nations recognition of Brazil’s contribution to the (peacekeeping) mission,” the joint statement said, without detailing when de Siqueira would arrive in Haiti nor how long his command would last.

The 59-year-old de Siqueira will replace Lt. Gen. Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar who on Jan.7 was found dead of a gunshot wound in his hotel room in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince. United Nations and Brazil forensic specialists later concluded he had committed suicide.

De Siqueira, a three-star general who commands the Army’s 6th Military Region in the northeastern city of Salvador, will take charge of a 9,000-strong peacekeeping force from more than 40 countries that is meant to help restore democracy two years after a rebellion overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Brazil’s command of U.N.’s peacekeeping forces in Haiti has been a key point in the country’s foreign policy, which is heavily focused on giving Brazil a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.
nytimes.com

KALINGANAGAR INDUSTRIAL AREA, India, Jan. 13 – On the first Monday morning of the year, four bulldozers, accompanied by nearly 300 police officers, arrived on a rocky patch of farmland on the edge of a wooded village and began leveling the earth. It was meant to be the first step in the construction of India’s third-largest steel mill.

Soon, from the bowels of the wooded village came an army of resistance. Armed with scythes and swords, stones and sticks – and according to the police, bows and arrows – the indigenous people who live on these lands in eastern India advanced toward the police line by the hundreds. Exactly what happened next is a matter of contention, except that by the day’s end, the land was littered with the gore of more than a dozen dead and a fury that lingers.

“We will not leave our land,” Chakradhar Haibru, a wiry, stern-faced leader of the indigenous people, vowed in an interview. “They are trying to turn us into beggars.”

Reminiscent of the peasant uprisings in China, the standoff here has reverberated across the country and snowballed into a closely watched political storm.

The confrontation is effectively a local territorial dispute, over whether and how one of India’s most prominent industrial conglomerates, Tata, will build a plant on land that its current occupants, mostly indigenous villagers, refuse to vacate. But the dispute also raises a far wider challenge for India: how to balance industrial growth against the demands of its most marginalized citizens.
nytimes.com

DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.
Update: Earlier today, I asked a Justice Department spokesperson which search engines other than Google received requests to provide search records. The answer: Yahoo, AOL, and MSN were also asked to supply search records information, and all complied. Google did not, and that is why the DoJ asked a federal judge on Wednesday to order the company to do so.
Another fact to consider as you sift through news coverage: Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound.

It seems apparent that Google objected to the request not for privacy reasons, but on grounds that the request was too broad and burdensome. Privacy advocates I spoke to today, including attorney Sherwin Siy at EPIC, say while the DoJ’s request would not identify individual users, the scope and nature of this request sets a troubling precedent. Today, they argue, only search strings and urls; tomorrow, perhaps, the IP addresses of all users who typed in “Osama Bin Laden.”
boingboing.net

Documents released under a court order show that a government investigator studying the stranding of 37 whales on the North Carolina coast last year changed her draft report to eliminate all references to the possibility that naval sonar may have played a role in driving the whales ashore.

The issue of sonar’s effects on whales is a sensitive topic for the U.S. Navy. It has clashed with environmentalists in several court suits seeking to limit use of the technology because of its possible effects on marine mammals and other sea creatures.
washingtonpost.com

Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
breitbart.com