"Maybe that's a way of killing 'em." Hilarious! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha.

This friendly guy, who drives a Ford F-550 with Virginia commercial tags TX 667, may have to look elsewhere for day laborers to hire for his commercial business from now on.  The 7-Eleven on Coverstone Drive was the site of some actual enforcement of the law by Prince William County Police today, and for the first time in years was cleared of illegal alien day laborers.  Efforts of the Crime Prevention Team of Help Save Manassas have started to make a difference in Prince William County, and between public efforts to discourage the unlawful employment of illegal aliens and quieter reaching out to business and property owners who are happy to have someone come to help them.

It will certainly take additional work to rescue these businesses and shut down day labor sites in the county, but for the first time, progress is being made.  Hopefully some of the folks like Mr. Happy Pizza-Eating No-Hands Driver above will also get a lesson from the Virginia Department of Taxation about the potential consequences of flouting the law as well.

Hear it here

Calvin Forum Moderator Becomes Orthodox

Posted Saturday, July 05, 2008

Kevin interviews Robert Meyering, the former moderator of the Calvin Forum, now Orthodox Christian.

A time-trial is called the race of truth because there's none on the road but the rider. He must beat the clock (or put in the best time). Today was a big day in that the entire GC was restructured. Gone are our French heroes of yesterday; enter the contenders. German Stefan Schumacher (Gerolsteiner) surprised somewhat by winning today (top, left pic).

Millar, Cancellara, Menchov--all put in great performances today. Tomorrow is a flat stage--a day for the sprinters. The next stage with GC implications is Thursday.


Hincapie-decent showing


Valverde had a very bad day

DARE WE TAKE A CHANCE ON THIS GUY AND STAY HOME FOR MCCAIN?

This is the kind of message that John McCain needs to be getting out there . . . rhetoric vs. reality.  The rhetoric of Barrack Obama vs. the reality of McCain's entire career.  For all the "change" that Obama's been promising, its McCain who has fought and won change over and over his entire Senate career. As for Republican candidates across the country, this kind of campaign - for country - is one that all factions can rally around without being bound to some of McCain's more moderate views. If Republican candidates can attach themselves to McCain in the manner of his personal popularity. Make this about experience, about what the country will face with a president in training pants. We don't have to love McCain, we just have to respect him. In close Senate races with GOP incumbents (Sununu of New Hampshire, Smith of Oregon, and Coleman of Minnesota come to mind), McCain has the caliber of appeal that can help these three come across the finish line. In open races here in Virginia and in Colorado, McCain's kind of appeal can really help the brand and with two candidates (Schaeffer and Gilmore) who are coming from behind but are in traditional red states. Furthermore, its hard to link Schaffer and Gilmore to Bush because one retired in '03 and the other in '02 

On my way to work this morning, I was listening to WMAL as usual.  I’ve enjoyed the ad that’s run a few times from Americans For Prosperity opposing new transportation taxes, but decidedly did not enjoy an ad from some labor union advocating that the General Assembly raise taxes so we can create jobs building roads.   At the end of the typical drivel about how raising our taxes is magically going to clear up all congestion in Northern Virginia in a month or so, we got to the real meat of their argument: it would create jobs. (more…)

I am writing this after consulting with the other editors of this site.  In that sense they know what I am posting, but ultimately this is MY statement, and mine only.  Those who agree can so indicate in the comments.  

The Deeds campaign attributed a quote to RK as a whole when that quote should have been attributed to an individual.  They also selectively quoted from that post in a way with which I personally had trouble.   Below the fold I will address the contents of that email.  But for now let the following be clear:

1) RK (that is the current name of this site) has made no endorsement in the Governor's race.  Many of us are friends with both Brian and Creigh.

2) The presence of information about either campaign on the front page does NOT indicate an endorsement.  We often promote diaries by others that we view as interesting for the sake of discussion.  Those of us who can post directly on the front page also want to ensure that people not on the mailing lists of the various candidates around the state can be assured that they can come here for important news.   That includes endorsements received by either of these two men, or of other Democratic candidates for office.

3) Statements which are not supported in fact and which may be defamatory are not acceptable practice here.  While in the heat of the moment all of us may be prone to excessive rhetoric, we ask those who post - and that includes us - to consider the impact of what they write, and will on occasion ask that a post either be modified or taken down.  We do reserve the right to edit or remove any post that we believe violates the rules of the site.

For myself -  I like both Creigh and Brian.  I have no intent of making a decision about whom I will support until we get through the current cycle.  We have a presidential race to win for the first time since 1964, a Senate seat to take back, and a number of House seats we hope to pick up.   While I will read material on the gubernatorial and other statewide races, my focus will remain on 2008.

And please go below the fold for the particulars.
In an email sent out announcing Creigh being endorsed by the International Union of Police Associations, we encountered the following:

And on the popular website Raising Kaine:

   "The endorsement came largely because Deeds is a leader who can be counted on to go beyond the empty rhetoric that we often hear during the campaign process.

   "...with Creigh's background he has illustrated how he is someone whose policy agenda will look after the best interests of the public and the officers. In other words, the law enforcement community believes that Creigh Deeds is the candidate most qualified to be the Commonwealth's chief executive officer."

The material is from a post by Bryan Scrafford entitled Creigh Deeds Picks Up Another Big Endorsement that we chose to put on the front page because of the newsworthiness of the endorsement.

The first sentence quoted is Bryan's analysis of why the IUPA made the endorsement, and needs to be read in that context.

Between the first sentence quoted and the material that begins with the ellipsis the Deeds email omitted several important things.  It is perhaps understandable that they omitted the blockquote of the endorsement Bryan was citing.  The email completely omitted this paragraph, which perhaps they felt was unnecessary to distribute to their readers, even though it reinforces the power of the IUPA endorsement:

One thing that is worth noting is the fact that the I.U.P.A. usually endorses a candidate based upon not only an examination of the candidate's record, but also by discussing the candidate with the local organizations and officers. In other words, there is a significant amount of time and energy that goes into deciding which candidate they should endorse in a particular race. Furthermore, it is also important because the local people are primarily the ones who will be interacting with the candidate and will perhaps have a more direct idea of which candidate would be the best person for the job.

   We will not quibble with omitting this, nor with omitting the blockquoted material from the endorsement.

But we have objection to the selective quoting of only part of Bryan's final paragraph.   I will reproduce the entire paragraph, putting in BOLD the words that were omitted:

One might wonder why Creigh is running for Governor instead of Attorney General if he has a background that would be so useful for the law enforcement community. A representative for the I.U.P.A. told me that it's important for the chief executive of a state to be someone who has illustrated a commitment to public safety. Furthermore, with Creigh's background he has illustrated how he is someone whose policy agenda will look after the best interests of the public and the officers.  In other words, the law enforcement community believes that Creigh Deeds is the candidate most qualified to be the Commonwealth's chief executive officer.

The omission of the beginning of the paragraph would have the reader believe that it is Bryan's assertion about what the law enforcement community believes, rather than his restating the implication of what he was told, and totally ignore the way the paragraph is framed.

Please note, Bryan may well agree with the assessment by IUPA.  But the question he raises at the beginning of the paragraph is important for context.  

Let me now speak for myself alone.

1) Please, if you are going to cite this blog, get the name correct:  it is now RK, no longer Raising Kaine.  The insertion of "Hussein" between the two letters that name the blog is an acknowledgement of our support of Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

2) When citing something, unless the posting says it is a statement of the blog or of all the editors, please describe accurately.  In this case it would have been sufficient to say that "one writer at the popular blog" and our objection to that part of the presentation would go away.

3) Please, we all know the dangers of quoting out of context.  Please take the time to ensure that what you quote is not misrepresenting the statement of the writer.  I think a fair-minded person, looking at the entire last paragraph, might have some questions as to whether what was quoted is a fully accurate representation of the author's intent.  

Again, we welcome information about all Virginia Democratic candidates.  And we are delighted to be a source to which people turn for more information about Virginia politics.  But as my nursery school teacher used to tell us, please play nice.

Peace.

.

"This is especially true of Democrats. Many in Congress seem either disconnected from reality or intentionally disingenuous about our energy crunch. They have well-honed negative responses to common-sense ideas about solving our energy crisis, particularly drilling for more oil."

"We can't drill our way out of our energy crisis."

"Actually, we can. As we've noted before, conservative estimates put the total amount of recoverable oil in conventional deposits at about 39 billion barrels. Offshore, we have another 89 billion barrels or so. In ANWR, 10 billion barrels. In oil shale deposits, we have more than 1 trillion barrels of oil. In perspective, that's about four times the total reserves of Saudi Arabia. And if estimates of shale reserves as high as 2 trillion barrels prove true, we'll have about a 300-year supply of oil just from shale. This compares with current estimated total U.S. oil reserves of about 21 billion barrels."

"This is quite an argument coming from the Democratic Party, which has made keeping oil off the market a linchpin of its energy policy for decades.If President Clinton hadn't vetoed the idea of drilling in ANWR back in 1995, we'd have that oil on the market today. Ditto if Congress had approved ANWR drilling in 2002, when President Bush requested it.
Even so, the larger point is false anyway. New oil will be flowing in some cases within three to four years, according to industry estimates. But the impact on prices will be immediate. Why? Because markets would suddenly have to discount future oil prices for the expected gain in oil supply. That would cause oil prices, especially in futures markets, to drop."

Great Read at IBD

Business matters kept me away from the monthly Tuesday Morning Group Coalition meeting in Richmond today, but Steven Latimer helped fill the gap by providing a summary of the proceedings.

Apparently the host of the meeting, John Taylor of Tertium Quids, minced no words with regard to the special legislative session on transportation. Latimer notes:

Taylor reported that when he spoke with newly minted Republican Party of Virginia chairman Jeff Frederick, Frederick said that he did not anticipate that Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw's bill to increase the gas tax would be supported. Taylor then assailed HB 6055, describing it as "3202 - part deux" -- a reference to last year's unpopular HB 3202, parts of which were unanimously declared unconstitutional by the Virginia Supreme Court. According to Taylor, HB 3202 allowed regional transportation authorities to levy taxes, whereas HB 6055 would allow municipalities to increase taxes. Taylor finished by referring to Republicans who support tax increases as "weak sisters."

And that's just a taste of what went on. Read Steven's blog to find out more.

Can John McCain be trusted to tell the truth?

If McCain's attack on Obama's tax plan is any indication, it's clear that John McCain will lie about anything to get elected. An independent fact checking organization has looked at McCain's claims on Obama's tax plan and has concluded that John McCain is a liar.

The McCain campaign claims that Obama voted to raise income taxes on individuals who earn as little as $32,000 per year. That's wrong.

• The resolution Obama voted for would not have increased taxes on any single taxpayer making less than $41,500 per year in total income, or any couple making less than $83,000. The $32,000 figure is approximately the taxable income of a single person making $41,500 per year, after all deductions and exclusions.
• Obama's vote (for a non-binding budget bill) does not change the fact that his own tax plan would provide a tax cut of $502 for a non-married taxpayer earning $35,000.

You can read the complete analysis of how John McCain lies about Obama's tax plan here.

Is a candidate's honesty something that should be taken into consideration when they are running for the presidency? You bet your ass it should. After all the lies George W. Bush told: lies that got us into the War in Iraq, lies about leaking Valerie Plame's name, lies about the U.S. attorney scandal, lies about the Bush administration's role in getting Bush donors oil deals in Iraq, and on and on . . . after all this it is clear that one of the most important things we must consider is the candidates' willingness to tell the truth.

John McCain has shown himself to be a shameless liar when it suits his purposes.

There are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of stories about John McCain's temper. Here's a little recent video evidence:



Wow! Watch McCain stalk back and forth as he tries to evade that veteran's question. Why didn't he answer the man's question? He's a veteran: don't veterans deserve straight answers from Senator "straight talk"? Instead, it looks like it is all McCain can do to keep himself from physically attacking the man.

In the highly unlikely event that McCain is elected, I think we can look forward to more staged events where the crowd is carefully filtered to remove any potential dissenters. Just like McCain's mentor, George W. Bush.

HT: Raising Kaine

I originally posted this at OpEdNews on June 28, 2008 and here it is now for Mosquito Blog viewers:

Ball Girls, Big Lies and Bombing Iran

The Distortion of Reality

Take a look at this video for a minute: click here. Pretty amazing, pretty fantastic, right? When I first saw it I remarked to myself that that has got to be the most amazing catch I've seen since Willie Mays' famous catch in 1954. And then later in the day, very curious about the amazingly talented ball girl, I ran across Snopes.com's exposure of the whole video sequence as an extremely clever, viral Gatorade commercial. The ball girl had been flung into the air by stunt men above who hoisted her up with cables, and digitized editing and speech had done the rest, even adding the ball, to create an apparently seamless, very real sports event. Ball girl, I am pained to say, is a phony. To read how the producers did it, click here. And what is the moral here? We can no longer believe our own eyes in the media.

Now what has this got to do with Iran exactly? Actually, it has something to do with the entire fabric of modern civilization, with the media, with politics, with our perception of reality, for this little video is so convincingly real to the average eye, so minutely nuanced in every little detail that it is stark proof-positive that technology has now ushered in limitless horizons for propaganda, falsehood and deception. Let us think back to Colin Powell in February 2003 giving his infamous Power Point presentation that was essentially setting up Iraq for the kill. At one point he had to revert to some 3-D animations to show those supposed mobile biological/chemical warfare labs in the desert. That software technology in and off itself wowed millions, but some of us knew then and there, because Powell was really resorting to fancy cartoons, that something was definitely not right.

Indeed, nothing was right, as it turned out. But if they had gone to the extent taken in making the Ball Girl video, with actual video footage, they would have possibly fooled everybody at that point in time. Maybe they had that capacity but thought better of it, because the White House, State Department and Pentagon still would not have found their fantasy mobile labs in the desert, and this would have exposed the fact that they had utilized cutting edge video technology to create great new levels of deceit.

But in light of the proven capabilities of media technology to now manipulate or fabricate reality, we have to start asking ourselves, what else might we have been shown in the media in the last few years that just isn't real, that is pure lies, pure propaganda, pure wizardry? What readily comes to mind is the veracity of the infamous Osama bin Laden "Confession Tape" in late 2001, in which a healthy, suddenly plump and rounder-faced bin Laden is sandwiched, chronologically, between an earlier and then later al Qaeda video showing an increasingly gaunt and sickly bin Laden.

In fact, some of us have intuited that bin Laden likely died in December of 2001, which would mean that somebody has been pulling the Ball Girl routine on the world for some seven years now, with artistic renditions of bin Laden in audio and video format. This is why I am rather convinced that bin Laden will never be captured and never be prosecuted, despite the melodramatic pledges of both Senators McCain and Obama to do so. Good luck Senators! Meanwhile, both Pro-Taliban tribal warlord Baitullah Mehsud recently and the late Benazir Bhutto, in an interview before she died, have stated that bin Laden is dead. But this kind of fly in the ointment news never reaches the mainstream media, with its ever-fleeting relationship with truth.

Regurgitating Hitler

The media's pathetic acquiescence to White House/Pentagon propaganda in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq was part and parcel of the grand Neocon strategy to capture the media and play it like a talking puppet. The Neocon strategy in turn is lifted right out of the pages of Mein Kampf, and let us never forget that. Hitler's autobiographical manifesto is actually one of the first extensive works on mass psychology and how to manipulate the masses. His propaganda principles are now time-tested and proven to work, and work well, so long as you are dealing, of course, with ignorant and authority-craving people, eager to believe whatever their rulers throw at them. That they were so effective in 2002 and 2003 during the propaganda onslaught against Saddam Hussein doesn't speak well of the sophistication of the American people or of much of the planet for that matter, for Bush had his cheerleaders in many, many countries brainwashing their citizens, particularly those that became the Coalition of the Willing.

Let us recall Hitler's core tenets, repetitiveness and simplicity, the Big Lie, and a unified organization, with the following quotes, first with:

"But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success." -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Ralph Manheim translation, p.184)

Then there is what can only be described as the Nazis' grandest propaganda principle:

"All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, p. 134)

Finally, Hitler points out the need to have a focused, overbearing and passionate organization:

"Propaganda tries to force its doctrine on the whole people.....Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea, while the organization achieves victory by the persistent, organic, and militant union of those supporters who seem willing and able to carry on the fight for victory."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Ralph Manheim translation, p. 582)

Thus, all of the above principles must be implemented to be truly effective, and done so by a strong propaganda apparatus, dedicated and single minded, that brooks no internal dissent, and ultimately no external dissent. When you stop to analyze the last seven years of the Bush Administration in general, and the strategy and tactics employed to drag America into war against Iraq in particular, then you will see all these principles at work.

We indeed saw the effort to purge the government of all dissent, as whistle-blowers and contrarians were forced out on the street or resigned in disgust, while true believers were hired by the droves to fill the ranks of the various departments of the Executive Branch. We saw the corollary attempt to stack all the Federal courts with the same true believers. And we saw the Republican Party become ascendant, for a time at least, in the Legislative Branch, although even when later back in minority status, the Neocon Republicans still seem to frame the debate and control the issues.

Furthermore, the effort to create a united front marching for the victory of the "Idea", the comic-book "War on Terror", extended well into the ever-consolidating and petrified-of-being-lambasted-as-unpatriotic, corporate media. And once Iraq was actually invaded, we then saw the spectacle of the embedded reporter who seemed to do everything except take a gun and shoot some "Hajis" to fit in with the troops, and who waited around expectantly, much as a dog waits for crumbs to be thrown at it, for the next press conference by some puerile officer who would present the latest Pentagon adjustment of reality.

We also saw two Big Lies arise, the great WMD myth, followed up by the great Saddam-al Qaeda-link myth. These were hammered into our heads daily, relentlessly, with evidence even being fabricated, during and after the buildup to war, fulfilling the third essential component to propagandizing the masses, repetitiveness.

Applying the Principles to Iran

Thus first we saw the perfect propaganda storm engineered to invade and occupy Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan, and now we are witnessing the same phenomenon being put into play again against Iran. There is absolutely no doubt that the Neocon movement wants to attack and emasculate Iran, and so, as all inherent Fascists would do by instinct, they have crafted three key Big Lies about the Republic of Iran: 1) that Iran is a terrorist state threatening the Middle East and actually the entire world. 2) that the Iranian government is training and supplying various Iraqi elements to kill Americans inside Iraq as well as destabilize the Iraqi government, and 3) that Iran is Hell-bent to create weapons-grade uranium and nuclear weaponry.

To support the first allegation, the Bush Administration depends to a great extent on the support Iran gives to Hamas and Hezbollah, whom the State Department ritually declares terrorist organizations annually, and thus to paint Iran as guilty of terrorism by association. Yet the fundamental reality that even Israel tacitly admits to is that both Hamas and Hezbollah are popular resistance movements, not al Qaeda-like terrorist organizations, that are borne from the Israeli occupations, past or present, of Palestine and Lebanon respectively. Israel, to underscore this point, has just negotiated a ceasefire, however unstable, with Hamas, recognizing that Fatah leader, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, is basically a politician without a constituency, utterly weak and compromised, propped up only by Israeli and American support. It is Hamas that represents the majority of the Palestinian people.

Then there have been vague and shadowy reports and rumors surfacing in the media that Iran is in league with al Qaeda, not only historically absurd, but again without confirmable substance. But this serves the purpose of reinforcing the image of Iran as a terrorist state, guilt by insinuation.

Regarding the second Big Lie, that Iran is supplying lethal explosive devices to the Iraqi resistance, this has been debunked rather regularly by various independent journalists, who also point out that what weapons do reach Iraq from Iran are largely bought from the Black Market and then smuggled in. Meanwhile, Iraqis are fully capable of manufacturing their own IEDs and EFPs. Gareth Porter has also just written a devastating piece in Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch Newsletter entitled "The Story of Gen. Petraeus' Deception and How It Easily Duped the Press and Congress", which has not been released to the public yet, so I will not try to quote from it, but the crux of it is that General Petraeus, who is an embarrassment to the memory of men like Eisenhower and MacArthur, has been colluding with Dick Cheney in a full scale propaganda campaign against Iran with no real substance, one that has been consistently exposed and debunked by Iraqi officials, including Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, as well as by foreign reporters. Even the American military has had to renege on some of its past accusations against Iran publicly, they were so patently untrue.

Petraeus has taken his own Faustian plunge into the world of lies, fabrications and deceit, and how the Devil gets his due from him will remain to be seen.

If you are frantic to read Porter's article, by the way, go to http://www.counterpunch.org/ The first paragraph of the home page tells you how to subscribe to the newsletter. The newsletter you want is Volume 15, Number 11.

Regarding the third Big Lie, that Iran is developing weapons-grade uranium for a secret nuclear weapons program, Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, has written a hard-hitting, well-researched article for Asia Times eviscerating this canard. It is entitled "The myth of 'weapons-grade' enrichment".

First he points out the almost abject servility of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toward one of the worst longtime offenders of various United Nations statutes and resolutions over the decades, Israel, one of those statutes being that member nations do not threaten each other. Ban is very quick to criticize Iranian President Ahmadinejad's rhetoric against Israel, but is totally silent while Israel has repeatedly, over the past few years, threatened to bomb Iran, not in self-defense from any attack, but as a preemptive strike against some hypothetical future threat.

This is uttered while the head of the IAEA, Mohammad ElBaradei, has stated, fatalistically, that an Israeli attack on the Middle East will provoke a regional fireball. Yet Ban is doing nothing to defuse tensions, and is actually tacitly taking sides in the confrontation, another blow to the credibility of the United Nations.

Worse still, Kaveh points out, is the American media's actively taking sides in the dispute by faithfully regurgitating all of the Neocon propaganda, from Bush to Cheney to Bolton to McCain to Olmert, ad infinitum, about Iran's phantom Nuke program. I quote:

Instead, the US media in particular have allowed themselves to become an unwitting accomplice of Israel's anti-Iran propaganda machine, dutifully recycling the line that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons, has amassed "weapons-grade" enriched uranium, and is thus on the verge of arriving at "the point of no return" with respect to bomb-making.

In a word, the race to dupe public opinion about a "clear and present danger" posed by Iran's nuclear program, to justify Israel's threatened attack (with the US's tacit approval) is in full gear and the US media are by and large about to receive another "F" card, just as they did with the US's 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the "pluralistic" media became a shell of itself by blindly echoing the White House's spin about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. (Asia Times source)

Kaveh excoriates the corporate media, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal and the other usual propaganda channels for what is a cartoonish distortion of facts about Iran's legal nuclear energy program. To wit:

With leading nuclear experts, media pundits and members of the US Congress recycling it, this serious distortion has now acquired the status of a truism about Iran, and a dangerous one that lends itself to an unprovoked attack on Iran by Israel and or the US.

But, no matter what the influential position of their signatories, the narratives in the US media that persist in their claim that Iran has manufactured "weapons-grade" enriched uranium simply cannot stand the weight of scrutiny and are refuted by the IAEA's findings to the contrary. These narratives routinely refer to the IAEA's reports on Iran, yet turn a blind eye to those reports' explicit references to Iran's "low-enriched uranium" (up to 4%). (ibid.)

Meanwhile, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, speaks about the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program as if it already in place and being poised for launch against Israel, against Europe and against us, while, simultaneously, every little tidbit about any IAEA criticism against Iran is immediately blown out of proportion by disingenuous journalists like the smug Michael Gordon:

Thus, for instance, in a front-page article in the New York Times, [3] dated June 20, Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt break the sensational news about Israel's extensive maneuvers in preparation for an attack on Iran, indirectly rationalizing Israel's belligerency by omitting any mention of the IAEA's latest report confirming the absence of any evidence of military nuclear diversion and, instead, confining themselves to the following comment: "In late May, the IAEA reported that Iran's suspected work on nuclear matters was a 'matter of serious concern' and that the Iranians owed the agency 'substantial explanation'."

What ought to have been added was that the same IAEA report states unequivocally that it had received "no credible information" regarding the alleged "weaponization studies", nor has the agency detected any nuclear activity connected to those alleged studies. Besides, the same IAEA report more than a dozen times stresses the evidence of peacefulness of Iran's nuclear program. (ibid.)

So Hell-bent are the Bush Administration, AIPAC, the Israeli government, and certain blood-sport Europeans to attack Iran that all of Hitler's tenets of successful propaganda have already come into heavy and ever increasing play: the full-court press against the public and media and the constant, daily repetitions of the "mushroom cloud" fear factor, "killing Americans" and "evil terrorist state" from multiple directions. Glaring contradictions to their hype, such as the recent NIE report, as well as regular IAEA reports, are simply ignored. For example:

Thus, Mike McConnell, the US national intelligence director, told the right-wing Fox TV last Sunday that Iran was a year or two from developing its first nuclear bombs. McConnell's alarmist estimate on Iran is clearly at odds with the US's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, released late last year, that confirmed that Iran's nuclear program was, and had been since 2003, peaceful.

McConnell's own deputy, Donald M Kerr, has repeatedly defended the NIE report before the US Congress, stating that the US intelligence community does not plan to "revise" it. (ibid.)

If Iran was actually manufacturing weapons-grade uranium, Kaveh points out, the IAEA would certainly know it:

.....with the IAEA's robust inspection of Iran's enrichment facilities, any such diversion to "weapons-grade" enrichment would be instantly detected, simply because significant modifications, re-assembling and re-configuration of the cascades of centrifuges would be necessary and that could not possibly evade the IAEA's watchful eyes.

Yet, all of this is ignored, with the tacit suggestion that Iran's program is "unsupervised" when, in fact, it is one of the most exhaustively inspected and supervised nuclear programs in the world, in light of some 3,500 hours of inspection of its facilities since 2003. (ibid.)

Neocon Failure

Despite employing the Hitler paradigm again against Iran, the Neocon movement has been unable to maximize the tenet regarding a unified organization forcing its doctrine upon the public. The recent NIE report is a case in point. The Bush Administration is no longer able to repress dissent within the federal government and military. Too many people have woken up and are moving against the Neocons, just as within Nazi Germany during WWII, at a certain point, key generals and officers began plotting Hitler's overthrow. The only way the Neocons can whip everyone back into lockstep, and that may not work anyhow, is if another "9/11" occurs to provide the emotional drive to rally everyone around "the Fuhrer" once again.

And while the Neocons may control the corporate media, they are getting racked through the coals endlessly on the Internet. Their lies are being lacerated daily on various sites.

On the world stage, many governments, no longer enthralled with the "War on Terror", are disputing the Neocon agenda, in particular Russia, which has stated that it has asked the United States and Israel for any real proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and received none (see my diary entry, "Russia Calls Israel's and the White House's Bluff" (click here)) How damning a proof is that that the whole game is a charade?

What peace and truth-loving people have to do now is to continue to neutralize the three tenets of Hitler, by debunking the Big Lies, confronting the daily repetition of these lies with equal intensity, and resisting all attempts to beat and brow-beat, threaten and intimidate everyone into conformity, conformity to a sick death cult. For us to fail now invites further disaster. And, I might add, watch out for ball girls.

Former RPV Finance Chairman Fred Malek notes the recent addition of Steve Schmidt to the McCain presidential team.

Malek doesn't post terribly often... but when he does, you learn some insight every time.

With my two favorites - Jim Webb and Wes Clark - apparently out of the picture as Barack Obama's running mate, I was already starting to think about John Edwards being just what the doctor ordered.  Now, along comes this analysis by Open Left, indicating a potential "Obama-Edwards landslide."  I don't know about you, but I can certainly deal with that! :) So, what are the chances that Obama will pick Edwards?  And what are the chances that Edwards will say "yes" if Obama asks him?  I guess we'll find out in the next few weeks.  Meanwhile, feast your eyes on this map!

Electoral College: Obama 344, McCain 90, Toss-up 104
National popular vote: Obama 51.1%-40.0% McCain