reference star

remember

don't even think about it

Unless you're willing to cry Havoc!

The point keeps coming up. Chaos is the plan.

all advertising is psyops

d'oh

man of steal

That'll show all those Democrats who want to save Medicare and Social Security from the rightful Wall $treet takeover.

your tax dollars at work buying coffee and donuts

...for watching people who watch the government.

So who really catches the real terrorists in America? Not the Feds.

These guys aren't even on their radar screens. Or their surveillance lists.

"...you gotta speak with it, too"

calling a spade a small digging tool

The New York Pravda has it's own reasons for doing so, but nevertheless it's correct here:

Republican leaders in the Senate have spent weeks gleefully deriding the Democrats who run the chamber for not producing a budget proposal in more than two years. It is a classic tactic, designed to deflect attention from their party’s toxic plan to privatize Medicare. The truth, though, is that the Republicans also have a point.

The 112th Senate has become a body that largely reacts to outrageous things that Republicans do or say. Rather than coming up with original ideas and sensible policies to counter to the extreme ones pouring out of the House, it simply votes down House bills, or refuses to take them up. Democratic senators, fearful of last year’s Republican tide, may think that a play-it-safe strategy will save their jobs in next year’s election, but the country could pay a high price for their timidity.

Without strong leadership, the Senate’s record is dismaying. Last Wednesday, for example, it took up the Paul Ryan budget plan passed by the House — famous for ending Medicare’s guarantee — and voted it down. Republicans brought up President Obama’s own 2012 budget, and the Senate voted that down, too. Two Republicans offered their own budget plans, and they failed as well.

But there will be no vote on a budget by the Democratic majority of the Senate, the traditional method for stating the majority’s priorities in black and white dollar signs. That’s because the Budget Committee has not agreed on one...

Most DINOcrats go to the Senate every day just to make a buck.

And it shows.

"...The kingdom is aggressively emphasizing the relative stability of monarchies. "

A place for every man and every man in his place.

And every woman under a man who owns her.

Look who's training their storm troopers.



It sounds like slavery to me, so I have nothing but contempt for the corporate mouthpieces that soft sell this trash. Whether it's the Royal House of Windsor or the Royal House of Saud, they're peddling garbage, and it's the real heritage of all free Americans to despise it.

Even, and especially, if we're told it's in our strategic interests to countenance it by our elite betters.

some people are more equal than others

You bet now John Galt will buy whoever he wants.

Looks like the DINOcrats win over the Democrats in 2012 even if the Reptilians don't.

only crazy people don't want to kill

A predictable smear.

Obviously only the weak-minded refuse to succumb to Sith Lord mind tricks.

some leaks are obviously less leaky than others

Greenwald realizes the DINOcrats are owned by the same folks who gave us Karl Rove.

Amazing that it's the Laureate's people now who claim even questioning the Patriot Act aids the Terra? Not at all.

the Center will not hold

Much is being made about the fact that even 'Merikans don't want to get rid of Medicare and Social Security, and that independents and even Mom & Pop Republicans will vote Democratic to keep it that way.

...Two months ago, the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, was considered an all-but-certain loser in the race against the Republican, Jane Corwin. But Ms. Hochul seized on the Republican’s embrace of the proposal from Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, to overhaul Medicare, and she never let up.

On Tuesday, she captured 47 percent of the vote to Ms. Corwin’s 43 percent, according to unofficial results. A Tea Party candidate, Jack Davis, had 9 percent.

Voters, who turned out in strikingly large numbers for a special election, said they trusted Ms. Hochul, the county clerk of Erie County, to protect Medicare...

There is just something about sending the old folks into the cold while the bank$ters, the oil barons, and the war pigs just get bigger and fatter that makes people angry enough to ignore the main$tream media psyops.

Imagine that.

Meanwhile, the $un never sets on the Laureate and the Empire, and once he comes home to take control of the Center, we'll just see about the Democrats beating the DINOcrats in 2012.

special loyal subjects

So very special among the colonies

Fresh from a triumphant stop in Ireland, President Barack Obama will kick off a visit to London on Tuesday looking to put the "special" back in the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Queen Elizabeth will fete first lady Michelle Obama and him with all the pomp of an official state visit Tuesday, and they'll stay overnight in Buckingham Palace. Obama also will huddle with Prime Minister David Cameron, unveil a new U.S.-U.K. security partnership and on Wednesday become the first U.S. president to address a joint session of Parliament in historic Westminster Hall...

We all know why. Because propriety demands appearances be maintained:

...Corporate capitalism—because it was trumpeted throughout the Cold War as a bulwark against communism—expanded with fewer and fewer government regulations and legal impediments. Capitalism was seen as an unalloyed good. It was not required to be socially responsible. Any impediment to its growth, whether in the form of trust-busting, union activity or regulation, was condemned as a step toward socialism and capitulation. Every corporation is a despotic fiefdom, a mini-dictatorship. And by the end Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs had grafted their totalitarian structures onto the state.

The Cold War also bequeathed to us the species of the neoliberal. The neoliberal enthusiastically embraces “national security” as the highest good. The neoliberal—composed of the gullible and cynical careerists—parrots back the mantra of endless war and corporate capitalism as an inevitable form of human progress. Globalization, the neoliberal assures us, is the route to a worldwide utopia. Empire and war are vehicles for lofty human values. Greg Mortenson, the disgraced author of “Three Cups of Tea,” tapped into this formula. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq or Afghanistan are ignored or dismissed as the cost of progress. We are bringing democracy to Iraq, liberating the women of Afghanistan, defying the evil clerics in Iran, ridding the world of terrorists and protecting Israel. Those who oppose us do not have legitimate grievances. They need to be educated. It is a fantasy. But to name our own evil is to be banished.

We continue to talk about personalities—Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama—although the heads of state or elected officials in Congress have become largely irrelevant. Lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. ...

It's only proper, of course. A place for every one, and every one in their place.

they're still here

...unfortunately they haven't been Raptured.

Oh, wait. Maybe it's not on daylight savings time.

not just flat wrong

but barefaced liars:

“The trustees’ report found that Social Security's surplus will be $69.3 billion in 2011. Those who say that Social Security is in deficit this year are flat wrong,” said Nancy Altman, Co-Chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign. “By law, Social Security cannot deficit-spend and cannot borrow, so it is obvious that Social Security cannot add a penny to the federal deficit...”

well yeah

Speculation explains more about oil prices than anything else

brother stephen we had to carry around in a bucket

...but was he ever smart and brave:

Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'

...A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a "fairy story" for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said.

In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time.

Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.

The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he added.

Hawking's latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an "elementary fallacy" of logic.

The 69-year-old physicist fell seriously ill after a lecture tour in the US in 2009 and was taken to Addenbrookes hospital in an episode that sparked grave concerns for his health. He has since returned to his Cambridge department as director of research...

In the interview, Hawking rejected the notion of life beyond death and emphasised the need to fulfil our potential on Earth by making good use of our lives. In answer to a question on how we should live, he said, simply: "We should seek the greatest value of our action."

In answering another, he wrote of the beauty of science, such as the exquisite double helix of DNA in biology, or the fundamental equations of physics...

Then there is the beauty of a sapient mind perceiving the universe as it is.

n-dimenional drill baby drill

the Republicrat way

President Obama, facing voter anger over high gasoline prices and complaints from Republicans and business leaders that his policies are restricting the development of domestic energy resources, announced on Saturday that he was taking several steps to speed oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters...

Look, over there, unfracked countryside! And a beach without tar!

rule of lawlessness

Of course, we're better than that now:

...There's no question that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack committed grave crimes and deserved punishment. But the same is true for the perpetrators of other grave crimes that result in massive civilian death, including when those perpetrators are American political officials. As Ferencz put it when describing one of the core lessons of Nuremberg: "every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone." More than anything, that precept -- the universality of these punishments -- was the central lesson of Nuremberg...

So 20th century.

what is this "charges" of which you speak?

Charges are for people who don't own the D.o'J. I like that title, "Department of Justice", it reminds me of "The Ministry of Truth".

But let's not get distracted: Tiabbi:

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it...

So what else is new? But by all means read it all, because nowhere else will you see it documented so thoroughly.

Four More Wars!

Because if they didn't kill him, they would have had to capture him.

And besides, they don't have to tell you why anyway.

every action creates a reaction

Two links via Avedon, and another for your consideration.

Chomsky:

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

The lefty Israeli Haim Baram at Haaretz is saying:

U.S. President Barack Obama ignored all the ethical criteria, and murdered bin Laden in order to achieve success at any price in advance of the elections. Even someone who prefers Obama to his opponents has good reason to fear the cynicism that Obama demonstrated in the bin Laden affair...

...the operation by the U.S. Navy SEALs was an act of licensed gangsterism, murder without trial, and a cruel operation that did not take into account the victims who fell around the main victim.

The humanist approach requires us to reject the act of terror against bin Laden for three reasons: ethical, legal and political-ideological. The president of the United States has no authority to operate in foreign countries arbitrarily and in contradiction to the principles of international law. Even inside his country, nobody authorized him to issue a death sentence, not to mention murdering people who were next to the victim...

For years the U.S. has been bringing hostages to the horrifying concentration camp in Guatanamo, Cuba, and shamelessly torturing them. There is an international conspiracy of silence in most of the Western countries - which consider themselves enlightened - in regard to the acts of terror, looting and greed that characterize Washington's conduct in the international arena...

Now, bin Laden's survivors, and he has a whole tribe of them, are saying a few things too. Many of them claim Osama was sort of an Islamic Yoda, basically not really directly involved with the 9/11 thing at all other than as a spiritual leader. At this point, the facts are hard to discern, because they often seem contradictory and filled with disinformation from several directions.

If the family is right, then Hubris, meet Nemesis, because the Big One got away.

...ABC News reports that one of bin Laden's wives, who was captured in the U.S. raid, has told Pakistani investigators that one of the terror leader's sons escaped and is missing. Pakistani officials are said to have done a head count, and to believe it's true, though U.S. officials say they're confident no one escaped during or after the raid.

"Out of 21, one person is not accounted for," a Pakistani intelligence official told ABC. "I believe that's the son."

Pakistani investigators are probing whether the son could be 22-year-old Hamza bin Laden, known as "The Crown Prince of Terror." Hamza was credited with writing a poem praising the 2005 London bombings, and was accused by Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto of attempting to assassinate her. Bhutto was killed by Islamic extremists in 2007...

Hamza is the one mentioned by Bhutto in the video shown previously on Tuesday the 3rd here. Bhutto thought her secret police had killed Osama, but she was concerned about Hamza. The trained killer son of Osama, wiley enough to dodge 80 marines with a dog.

Company-trained man, doubtless, just like his dear old Daddy.

If the Laureate isn't losing sleep over that, he ought to be.

a failure to communicate

On contract to The New York Pravda, they publish it when Krugman speaks, but pretty much no one gives it air time:

...The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

Let me focus mainly on what happened in the United States, then say a few words about Europe.

These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000?

The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.

So who was responsible for these budget busters? It wasn’t the man in the street.

President George W. Bush cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority.

Similarly, Mr. Bush chose to invade Iraq because that was something he and his advisers wanted to do, not because Americans were clamoring for war against a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, it took a highly deceptive sales campaign to get Americans to support the invasion, and even so, voters were never as solidly behind the war as America’s political and pundit elite.

Finally, the Great Recession was brought on by a runaway financial sector, empowered by reckless deregulation. And who was responsible for that deregulation? Powerful people in Washington with close ties to the financial industry, that’s who. Let me give a particular shout-out to Alan Greenspan, who played a crucial role both in financial deregulation and in the passage of the Bush tax cuts — and who is now, of course, among those hectoring us about the deficit.

So it was the bad judgment of the elite, not the greediness of the common man, that caused America’s deficit. And much the same is true of the European crisis.

Needless to say, that’s not what you hear from European policy makers. The official story in Europe these days is that governments of troubled nations catered too much to the masses, promising too much to voters while collecting too little in taxes. And that is, to be fair, a reasonably accurate story for Greece. But it’s not at all what happened in Ireland and Spain, both of which had low debt and budget surpluses on the eve of the crisis.

The real story of Europe’s crisis is that leaders created a single currency, the euro, without creating the institutions that were needed to cope with booms and busts within the euro zone. And the drive for a single European currency was the ultimate top-down project, an elite vision imposed on highly reluctant voters.

Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public?

One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government.

But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.

Which, one is pretty well sure, is the plan.

Je me bats, donc je suis

do as i say, not as i do

When the Editors at The New York Pravda get uneasy about these sort of things, you know the backroom deals must have hedged them out:

Last year several pro-Republican advocacy groups degraded the Congressional elections by spending at least $138 million in secret donations on advertisements. The public did not know which lobbying interests gave money, or how much, or what they would demand in return. But the donations became a significant factor in the Republican gains in the House and the Senate.

Now several prominent Democrats are abandoning the high ground and have decided to raise millions of their own secret dollars. They have promised they will again try to pass a law preventing this secrecy if they win. (They were stymied in an earlier attempt by a Republican Senate filibuster.) Whatever they gain in money, they stand to lose far more by giving up principles that President Obama and party leaders once claimed to cherish.

Bill Burton, who until February was Mr. Obama’s deputy press secretary, said last week that he would help lead a group called Priorities USA, which will raise unlimited money from undisclosed sources to aid in the president’s re-election campaign. The initial money will come from the Service Employees International Union and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood producer, but more will inevitably begin to flow in from other unions and wealthy Democrats.

Mr. Obama has long claimed to champion transparency and denounced the secret-money sluice operated by Republicans last year as a “threat to democracy.” As he said in October, “The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections, and you can’t stand by and let the special interests drown out the voices of the American people.” Last year, speaking for the administration, Mr. Burton called for a “bright light” to shine on the shadowy groups.

The White House says the president has not changed his view, but somehow he no longer seems to recognize Mr. Burton as the man who was recently a close aide. “We don’t control outside groups,” said Jay Carney, Mr. Obama’s press secretary. “These are not people working for the administration...”

No indeed in fact, they work for the people the administration wants to work for.

The Ba$e.

twight zoning

An excellent review.

we are special yes we really are

we're the only ones like us:

Consider the following scenario. A group of Irish republican terrorists carries out a bombing raid in London. People are killed and wounded. The group escapes, first to Ireland, then to the US, where they disappear into the sympathetic hinterland of a country where IRA leaders have in the past been welcomed at the White House. Britain cannot extradite them, because of the gross imbalance of the relevant treaty. So far, this seems plausible enough.

But now imagine that the British government, seeing the murderers escape justice, sends an aircraft carrier (always supposing we've still got any) to the Nova Scotia coast. From there, unannounced, two helicopters fly in under the radar to the Boston suburb where the terrorists are holed up. They carry out a daring raid, killing the (unarmed) leaders and making their escape. Westminster celebrates; Washington is furious.

What's the difference between this and the recent events in Pakistan? Answer: American exceptionalism. America is subject to different rules to the rest of the world. By what right? Who says?

Consider another fictive scenario. Gangsters are preying on a small mid-western town. The sheriff and his deputies are spineless; law and order have failed. So the hero puts on a mask, acts "extra-legally", performs the necessary redemptive violence and returns to ordinary life, earning the undying gratitude of the local townsfolk, sheriff included...

The difference between these scenarios and real life is that 'Merika and the Kingdom are owned by overlapping co-operating corporate baronies.

Given the first scenario, as long as the IRA doesn't touch North Sea oil or any other moneymaking enterprise, they'll be no such objection or need.

A Lone Ranger or Robin Hood figure threatening the money flow of the gangsters that run things in the current environment would be labeled a criminal terrorist, quickly found out by the surveillance state, and eliminated.

Because that's how Consumers are protected in the Free Market.

dissociation of causation

It isn't the driving urge to merge with the Free Market that's driving the Arab Spring.

Think urge to eat instead.

...Bankers recognized a good system when they saw it, and dozens of speculative non-physical hedgers followed Goldman's lead and joined the commodities index game, including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, to name but a few purveyors of commodity index funds. The scene had been set for food inflation that would eventually catch unawares some of the largest milling, processing, and retailing corporations in the United States, and send shockwaves throughout the world.

The money tells the story. Since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, there has been a 50-fold increase in dollars invested in commodity index funds. To put the phenomenon in real terms: In 2003, the commodities futures market still totaled a sleepy $13 billion. But when the global financial crisis sent investors running scared in early 2008, and as dollars, pounds, and euros evaded investor confidence, commodities -- including food -- seemed like the last, best place for hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds to park their cash. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture told me. In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

The money flowed, and the bankers were ready with a sparkling new casino of food derivatives...

Bring on the bubble, after all, people have to eat! Except when they have no money they will do anything to eat. Face stormtroopers, tanks, or hunter-killer drones... hunger does that.

It is useful for the Company.

The Real Thing

"Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. "

"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."

"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true."

Martin Luther King, Jr., via

It is interesting that there has been a mad rush on the 'tubes to declare these kinds of statements "misquotes". By whom, I will let the educated reader surmise.

Obviously, Dr. King would have been a great supporter of the War on Terra. Just ask this guy:

the low spark of high-heeled boys

Greenwald: "...Those primitive, bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics sure do love to glorify death and violence."

Before they got her, Benazir Bhutto had a word or two for the BBC about exactly what those high-heeled financiers had wrought in her country:



Shorter Chris Hedges: now he has become stronger than you can possibly imagine.

...We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy...

So yes, Bu$hie Bunnypants was right. They do hate us for our freedom. But it is important to remember exactly who they are. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

no, no, no, he's outside

looking in:

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President Obama announced.



In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea...

And of course they took his body to the ocean, 600 miles away, to be buried at sea because it seemed the right thing to do.

You know, the Laureate really is smarter than Bu$hie. The Company shoulda come up with this caper years ago. This is classic comedy at its best.