…“Well,” says Vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”

The students seem to agree.

“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” Vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”

“You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.”

Off to a flying start, Vonnegut explains that this will be his “last speech for money.” He can’t remember the first one, but it was on a campus long, long ago, and this will be the end.

The students are hushed with the prospect of the final appearance of America’s greatest living novelist. Alongside Mark Twain and Ben Franklin, Will Rogers and Joseph Heller and a very short list of immortal satirists and storytellers, there stands Kurt Vonnegut, author of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE and SIRENS OF TITAN, CAT’S CRADLE and GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER, books these students are studying now, as did their parents, as will their children and grandchildren, with a deeply felt mixture of gratitude and awe.

Nobody tonight seems to think they were in for a detached, scholarly presentation from a disengaged academic genius coasting on his incomparable laurels

“I’m lucky enough to have known a great president, one who really cared about ALL the people, rich and poor. That was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was rich himself, and his class considered him a traitor.

“We have people in this country who are richer than whole countries,” he says. “They run everything.

“We have no Democratic Party. It’s financed by the same millionaires and billionaires as the Republicans.

“So we have no representatives in Washington. Working people have no leverage whatsoever.

“I’m trying to write a novel about the end of the world. But the world is really ending! It’s becoming more and more uninhabitable because of our addiction to oil.

“Bush used that line recently,” Vonnegut adds. “I should sue him for plagiarism.”

Things have gotten so bad, he says, “people are in revolt again life itself.”
commondreams.org

George Orwell remains a valuable writer, though he died in 1950. He was a man who was an active participant in his times, and since the new century appears to be going down the same road as the last one, we can still learn from him.

His essay “Politics and the English Language” ought to be read by every journalist and by everyone who reads journalists or listens to the babble on television.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

“In our age, there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia,” Orwell wrote. Earlier in the essay he had said, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

Our time and his time remain the same. We invade a sovereign nation based on lies, destroy its infrastructure, depose its government and kill 30,000 of its people, and we call that “spreading democracy” or “defending freedom.”

The phrase “war on terror” is a phony metaphor. We are not at war. Ninety-nine and 99/100ths percent of the American people are living the same way they’ve always lived. We have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting an insurrection that our invasions of those countries caused. They are at war – a war of their own country’s making – but the rest of us are not. Waving a flag or putting a bumper sticker on one’s car cannot be called a war effort.

The “war” is being relegated to the inside pages, and it’s a safe bet that no matter what happens in Baghdad, the Academy Awards will receive more coverage and notice than the war. In our nutty society, the choice of a comedian to emcee a Hollywood trade show is considered big, national news.
antiwar.com

Last night at the Academy Awards “Crash” took home the Oscar for best picture. The film starring Matt Dillon and Terrence Howard (Hustle and Flow) has been acredited with deconstructing the race issue in America by exposing the human frailties of its multi-racial cast of characters.

Indeed at first glance this collision course of incredible coincidence seems to push the limits by painting a provocative and ground breaking picture of race relations in the city of Los Angeles. However when everything is said and done, “Crash” is nearly as safe a flick as “Gone With The Wind.”

Just as it has been done for years in Hollywood, the roll of the black male in this movie is quickly reduced to that of weakness and ignorance. At every turn, the black man is portrayed as either powerless or out of control (Howard) while the white man gets away with murder, and more specifically in Dillon’s case, saves the day (that is, saves the life of a black women he initially harasses both racially and sexually).

Furthermore Dillon’s cop character is classic American myth!

Although it is established early on that he is deeply flawed, it is ultimately suggested that his sins are to be forgiven due to his heroics. Because Dillon’s character is never held accountable for his repugnance and moreover in the end romanticized, “Crash” does more to uphold the subconscious structures of white supremacy than destroy them.

If you have seen “Crash” and disagree with this synopsis I challenge you to watch it again and re-analyze what is so different about this movie in regards to race? It may not be as traditional an approach as the “Legend of Bagger Vance,” but it does not do much to actually test the underlying themes of racism in hollywood nor America.

In the end, acceptance and accolades for such a cinematic statement could be very harmful if left unchecked.

Think about it.
counterpunch.org

After all the outcry concerning the intolerance of the Islamic world in their impassioned response to the degrading cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed, where is the outrage in response to the silencing of Rachel Corrie by the New York Theater Workshop?

Is there a double standard in western values of free speech? You bet there is. The hypocrisy runs so deep that the vast majority of Americans does not know who Rachel Corrie is and, thanks to the self-imposed gag rule of cultural and media institutions, they never will.

In a year when Hollywood embraced such groundbreaking movies as Goodnight & Good Luck, Syriana, Trans America, Brokeback Mountain and Crash, a New York theater company cancelled a production of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie on the grounds that the public outcry would be unbearable.

The rationale is a lie on its face. As anyone in theater knows, controversy is manna from heaven. It was not public outcry that silenced the voice of a martyr; it was the censorship imposed by Israeli loyalists. It was the promise that generous public funding and contributions would suddenly come up short. It was intolerance for any view, any story, that does not portray Israel as the righteous party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Who was Rachel Corrie?

She was an all-American girl who was impassioned by the cause of the Palestinian people. In an act of civil disobedience, like the anonymous hero of Tiananmen Square, she stood before an Israeli bulldozer preparing to demolish a Palestinian neighborhood. She stood against injustice and oppression. She stood courageously for the values that all Americans cherish and she was crushed by the heavy and heartless hand of Israeli indifference.

She stood in the way of the “Road Map” to peace. She stood in the way of Ariel Sharon’s new deal for the Palestinians: let them eat dirt and suffer as we assassinate their leaders with American-made precision bombs and reduce their homes to rubble.

Rachel Corrie had the audacity to care and, beyond caring, to act on her convictions. Without regard to any judgments you may impose on the validity of her cause or means, Rachel Corrie was the essence of courage and heroism. She was what every mother’s child should endeavor to be. She chose the ground upon which she would make her stand and paid for it with her life.
dissidentvoice.org

She was crushed by an Israeli army-manned Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza.

Attempts to brand the left as anti-Jewish because of its support of Palestinian rights only make it harder to tackle genuine racism.

Variants of this theme have become common since the breakdown of the Middle East peace process, and especially since 9/11. The left is said to be in the grip of what the rightwing American columnist George Will has called an “anti-semitic chic”. Instead of declaring its hatred of Jews openly, this new antisemitism is expressed indirectly through criticism of Israel or even opposition to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. A particularly meretricious version suggests that opposition to American foreign policy, or even criticism of neoconservatives, is really a coded form of anti-semitism.
guardian.co.uk

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli troops killed five Palestinians on Thursday during the biggest raid against West Bank militants for months, stoking tension as Hamas Islamists held talks to form a new Palestinian government.

“This is a war crime aimed at continuing the escalation and undermining Hamas efforts to form a government,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. “We are committed to resistance and the occupation will pay the price for these crimes.”
reuters.com/news

Israel and Hamas united on ditching road map
Kadima and Hamas, the ruling parties of Israel and Palestine, united at the weekend in burying the international road map, the blueprint for peace that was previously endorsed by the governments of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.

Since Hamas won the Palestinian election and refused to recognise the Jewish state, renounce violence or accept previous agreements, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s acting Prime Minister, is no longer even paying lip service to the road map presented by the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia.

Instead, Kadima is drafting a four-year plan to evacuate at least 17 outlying West Bank settlements. If, as the polls suggest, it wins the general election on 28 March, it will unilaterally draw a new border that will keep major settlement blocks under Israeli rule.

In Moscow on Saturday, Khaled Meshal, the exiled head of Hamas’s political bureau, rejected a Russian request to accept international terms for a dialogue. Although Hamas is floating the possibility of an extended ceasefire, its long-term objective remains an Islamic state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. “We believe that Israel has no right to exist,” said Mr Meshal, the target of a failed Israeli assassination attempt in Amman in 1997.

MIR ALI, Pakistan (AP) – Authorities imposed a curfew in this tribal region’s main town Monday as thousands of people fled a third day of clashes between Pakistani security forces and al-Qaida and Taliban supporters. An official said at least 100 militants may have been killed.

Clerics tried to mediate a cease-fire to the fighting, most of which has been in Miran Shah. Security forces conducted mop-up operations Monday after artillery and helicopter gunships targeted militant strongholds in the town.

More than 100 militants might have died, based on intelligence reports and questioning of injured and arrested fighters, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said. Security forces had yet to regain control of all compounds in Miran Shah, so he could not give an exact toll. Journalists were barred from the town.

The fighting in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border is the bloodiest in more than two years and marks an escalation in President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s campaign to crack down on al-Qaida and Taliban militants and their local sympathizers.

It also underscored Islamabad’s failure to establish governmental control in the rugged region – a possible hiding place of Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri – where fiercely independent Pashtun tribesmen have resisted outside authority and influence for centuries.
guardian.co.uk

Bloody, fierce, lawless, tribal…ooga booga boo.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency today said he was optimistic that the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme could be resolved without the intervention of the UN security council.
Speaking as the 35-nation IAEA board prepared to meet, Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters he was hopeful that an agreement could be reached with Iran “in the next week”.

The meeting of the UN’s nuclear watchdog will forward a report on Tehran’s nuclear activities to the security council, which will then have to decide whether to impose sanctions.

EU-led diplomacy has been geared towards persuading Iran to stop making nuclear fuel, but calls for a tougher response have intensified since the country resumed some enrichment work.

Mr ElBaradei did not elaborate on the reasons for his optimism that the crisis could be resolved.

However, diplomats told the Associated Press that Iran’s recent talks with Russia and the EU trio of negotiators, France, Britain and Germany, had touched on the possibility of allowing Tehran to run a scaled-down uranium enrichment programme.
guardian.co.uk

Bolton warns Iran of ‘painful consequences’
WASHINGTON – Iran faces “tangible and painful consequences” if it continues its nuclear activities and the United States will use “all tools at our disposal” to stop this threat, a senior U.S. official said Sunday, ahead of a crucial international meeting on Iran.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, speaking at a convention of Jewish-Americans, said it is too soon for the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran but other countries are talking about doing so and Washington is “beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat.”

Monday’s meeting of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency governing board is expected to take stock of Iran’s continued defiance of U.S. and European demands to end sensitive weapons-related uranium enrichment activity and then hand the case over to the security council.

ABU DHABI — The U.S. Navy has deployed its latest aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet said the USS Ronald Reagan has been deployed for maritime security operations in the Gulf region. The nuclear-powered surface vessel headed a carrier group that contains a guided missile cruiser, two destroyers and support ships.

The Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was assigned to patrol the Fifth Fleet area of operations, which includes the Arabian Gulf, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean, Middle East Newsline reported. “Our past nine months of training have been in preparation to support our troops on the ground in Iraq and carry out maritime security operations,” Carrier Strike Group Seven Commander Rear Adm. Michael Miller said.

Officials said the arrival of the Reagan Carrier Strike Group, which contains more than 6,000 sailors, was part of a routine rotation of U.S. ships in the Gulf. The strike group consists of the USS Reagan; USS Lake Champlain missile cruiser, USS McCampbell and USS Decatur destroyers; USS Rainer fast combat support ship; and Explosives Ordnance Disposal Unit 11 Det 15.
worldtribune.com

* MAHMUDIYA – Three people were killed, including two Iraqi soldiers, and five wounded when two car bombs, about 10 minutes apart, one driven by a suicide bomber, detonated in the town of Mahmudiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
One civilian was killed and five people were wounded, including two policemen, when a car bomb went off in Mahmudiya earlier in the day, police said.
* BAGHDAD – Mubdir al-Dulaimi, a senior Iraqi Army official, was assassinated while travelling in his convoy in the western Ghazaliya district of the capital, police said.
BAGHDAD – Three policemen were killed and one was wounded when a car bomb went off near their patrol in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Three civilians were wounded when a car bomb went off in central Baghdad, police said. The target was not known.
BAGHDAD – Ali Hussein al-Khafaji, the dean of the college of engineering, was abducted by gunmen while going to work in Baghdad, police said.
BAQUBA – A car bomb exploded in a busy market in Baquba northeast of Baghdad on Monday, killing six people, including two girls under four, and wounding 23, police said, adding most of the casualties were children.
BAGHDAD – One civilian was killed and 10 were wounded when a car bomb went off in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – One civilian was wounded when four mortar rounds landed in Sadr city in eastern Baghdad, police said.
ANBAR PROVINCE – A U.S. soldier was killed by “enemy action” on Sunday in western Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD – Two civilians and two policemen were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a bank in Baghdad’s Doura district, police said.
BAGHDAD – Two policemen and four civilians were wounded when a car bomb exploded as their patrol passed by in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAQUBA – Three civilians were killed by gunmen in separate attacks in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
alertnet.org

Expert on Iraq: ‘We’re In a Civil War’
“We’re in a civil war now; it’s just that not everybody’s joined in,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.

“It’s our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq,” added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, “If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they’d say we’ve been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004.”

What a stupid semantics game. When ‘we’ finally decide that this is indeed a civil war, what then? What’s different for people on the ground?

Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals assassinated by death squads
Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals have been assassinated since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a petition to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary Executions from the European peace group BRussells [sic] Tribunal on Iraq.

The petition has been signed by Nobel Prize winners Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, José Saramago, and Dario Fo, as well as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Cornel West, and Tony Benn. A Green party member of the European Parliament from Britain, Caroline Lucas, has called for support for the investigation.

The exact figure of deaths is unknown; estimates range from about 300 to more than 1,000. According to Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana, writing in the Guardian last month, Baghdad universities alone have lost 80 members of their staffs. These figures do not include those who have survived assassination attempts.

‘14,000 detained without trial in Iraq’
US and UK forces in Iraq have detained thousands of people without charge or trial for long periods and there is growing evidence of Iraqi security forces torturing detainees, Amnesty International said today.
In a new report published today, the human rights group criticised the US-led multinational force for interning some 14,000 people.

Around 3,800 people have been held for over a year, while another 200 have been detained for more than two years, the report – Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq – said.

“It is a dangerous precedent for the world that the US and UK think it completely defensible to hold thousands of people without charge or trial,” Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin said.

The detainee situation in Iraq was comparable to Guantánamo Bay, he added, but on a much larger scale, and the detentions appeared to be “arbitrary and indefinite”.