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POPSText of Obama State of the Union speech: 1/27/10. Opening remarks Like many other Democrats, I was more than pleased with President Obama's assessment of the state of the union. My reasons: minimum high rhetoric, limited ambitions, occasionally even handed between political parties, call to the better angels in Republicans, took on the recent controversial Supreme Court decision, focused on jobs, but did not walk away from health care reform. He showed sensitivity and leadership when it was of paramount importance.
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POPSAlfred McCoy; Surveillance State U.S.A. More from the article below: "And yet for an imperial power past its prime, foreign wars, even ones fought thousands of miles from home, have a way of coming back to haunt. Alfred W. McCoy tends to be ahead of the curve in his writing. In the Vietnam era, he had to fight the CIA to get his book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, published; in the Bush years, he was perhaps the first person to recognize that the photos from Abu Ghraib represented no anomaly but the product of a long history of CIA torture research -- and published a powerful book, A Question of Torture, on the subject. "
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POPSUS:Repression abroad leads to degradation at home. .. Alfred W. McCoy tends to be ahead of the curve in his writing. In the Vietnam era, he had to fight the CIA to get his book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, published; in the Bush years, he was perhaps the first person to recognize that the photos from Abu Ghraib represented no anomaly but the product of a long history of CIA torture research -- and published a powerful book, A Question of Torture, on the subject... His latest book, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, meets counterinsurgency, another topic direct from today's headlines, head on. McCoy lays out just how that impulse for repression and policing, so vividly and violently expressed abroad in these last years, is now quietly taking aim at us.`
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POPSObama: No U.S. Troops To Mexico Border For Now By TODD J. GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News Last month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry visited El Paso – whose neighbor, Ciudad Juarez, has taken the brunt of drug violence that has claimed more than 7,000 lives in Mexico in 14 months – and called on Washington to send a thousand troops or border agents. US Constitution Article IV, Section 4 The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence. “We’re going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense,” Obama told The Dallas Morning News “I’m not interested in militarizing the border.” http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/030909dnmetobamaborder.263f12df.html
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POPSBring the Guard home National Guard are for domestic protection, not for imperial wars. Use of National Guard in the occupation of foreign country is one more point of charge. And change.
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POPSObama Inauguration to Include Terrorism Propaganda
The visual props supporting a "threat of terrorism" will dominate the inaugural scene, and is very deliberate in its real purpose which is to frame the context of Obama's presidency in the public mind . It is pure propaganda designed to gain the public's submission and the American people, as under George W. Bush after 9/11, are being manipulated. head of the US Northern Command--"(It's) not because we see a specific threat This hyper-paranoid prep is really propaganda for setting the stage in the public mind that "we are under constant threat of terrorist attack" which is to CONTINUE (not change) the same foreign policy war and Homeland Security domestic agendas. The Constitution, which he will be swearing to uphold, will be drown out by this, and shouted down, as the continued plea of Emergency Powers is invoked to nullify its articles and leave the government unrestrained and headed by another Unitary Executive with his rubber stamp Congress.
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POPS60th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights
For women around the world, domestic violence and discrimination in employment are a daily reality. Minorities suffer stigma, discrimination, and violence in developed and developing countries. The right to information is denied to millions through censorship and media intimidation. Poverty is our greatest shame. At least one billion very poor people, 20% of humanity, are daily denied basic rights to adequate food and clean water. While gross inequalities between rich and poor persist, we cannot claim to be making adequate progress toward fulfilling the ambitions set down 60 years ago. As we mark this anniversary, the question is how to protect the inherent dignity and equal rights of all people. A key part of the answer lies in more effective systems of accountability, so that rights are recognised and laws enforced. Yet if we take a long, hard look at what has been achieved over the past six decades – and at what remains resistant to all our efforts – then it is also clear
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POPSPentagon reserves troops for domestic emergencies I feel safer already. Please excuse my snarkiness, but since my trust in Bush's reasoning has been shaken (by just about everything he does) I get just a little concerned when the military begins beefing up their numbers in the name of 'domestic security'. I want to believe the Pentagon is looking out for our best interests but I can't help thinking they know something we don't and won't tell us. If the U.S. is attacked it would be good to already have more security available but I can't shake the admitted paranoid feeling that something big is waiting just around the bend. And I don't think it is going to be welcomed.
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POPSWeather Underground: Honoring the Cops They Killed Ayers, who has long held a position as a college professor in Chicago, has a surprisingly nefarious past. He happens to be the founder of a domestic terrorist group called the Weather Underground, which he has written about extensively in his own memoir, Fugitive Days: A Memoir. The Weather Underground was responsible for bombing several government targets throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and a building used by the New York City Police Department. To finance their domestic terrorism activities the group also conducted “traditional” robberies, which occasionally led to murder. What you don’t usually hear in modern-day news coverage of the group, is that three of those murders were of police officers killed in the line of duty.
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POPSArmy Will Deploy Homeland Defense Unit Welkommen sie zu Homeland Security. HALT! Starting Oct 1 in case of "civilian unrest", just in time for the elections and financial crisis. This mission will become a "permanent one". The US will now become "occupied", gradually, just like Iraq. Can you say "police state"? According to this article this could be called the invasion of the C-smurfs (see last line). So much for posse comitatus that forbids the military for domestic policing.
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POPSFor Sale: High-Tech, Lethal Weapons From Blackwater, others Some companies manufacture large-scale military equipment, like Blackwater’s GRIZZLY Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) - a 22-foot long (6.7 meters), 15-tonne heavily armored land vehicle able to transport up to 10 people and resist “projectiles up to .50 caliber and to provide an IED-survivable envelope.” Manufactured at Blackwater’s Moyock, North Carolina compound, the GRIZZL is equipped with a roof turret designed to mount a 12.7mm machine gun, a feature that is undoubtedly attractive to militaries possessing such a weapon. While the vast majority of the private military and security industry is made up of US and UK companies, there are explicit differences between the two. The GRIZZLY is symbolic of the US industry, often characterized by heavy-duty, lethal military equipment. The UK industry is in many ways softer, characterized by less lethal security technologies.
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POPSDr. Bob Bowman's Open Letter To Today's Military Officers "Based on the above, I contend that should some civilian order you to initiate a nuclear attack on Iran (for example), you are duty-bound to refuse that order. I might also suggest that you should consider whether the circumstances demand that you arrest whoever gave the order as a war criminal." "Also in hindsight, President Bush could be court-martialed for abuse of power as Commander-in-Chief. Vice President Cheney could probably be court-martialed for his performance as Acting Commander-in-Chief in the White House bunker the morning of September 11, 2001 ."
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POPSthe art of deception meanwhile - back @ tv-- what might be going on in other places as saddam has center stage ??? i been thinking for a cpl days that he's probably a decoy... & it wouldn't surprise me .
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