America Closing Her Door to Freedom

At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “soft tyranny” of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century “nanny state.” We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools, where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten -- required reading in those decadent days of my ‘70s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.



Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can’t make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress.” Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes reveled in such debate.

Similarly, so many high schools have become gated, closed campuses. Mine was wide open. “Zero tolerance” for drugs and violence policies punish students carrying aspirin, cough drops, and Tweety-Bird key chains. Now diligent do-gooders want to ban school Coke machines as well. And to think at my high school we could even smoke!

Today political correctness constipates free speech at many schools (as well as in much of the public and private sectors), and hysterical sexual harassment policies suspend children for hugging a classmate. If you had predicted all this to my 1980 senior high class, we’d have laughed that you’d smoked some mighty bad dope to conjure up such an Orwellian dystopia.

Young folks’ freedom has been lost off campus as well. The drinking age has of course been raised, and now there’s a host of teen driving restrictions I never had to obey.

But we’ve all lost so much liberty. Look how government’s neurotic nannies have restricted us with a host of seatbelt, child seat, and helmet laws. Likewise, so many cities and states ban smoking even in private restaurants and bars. A WWII vet can’t even light up in his own bar.

So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O’Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we’d all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that: "The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish. "

Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today, which means we’ve lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we’re set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea.

Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.

In recent years, obsessive-compulsive environmental regulations halted a Massachusetts town from using fireworks on Independence Day since an “endangered” bird’s nest was found near it. News flash: on July 4, we celebrate independence from a tyrannical government. Yet George III never taxed, regulated, or policed us remotely as much as Washington , D.C. does today. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory.”

Everywhere rules and paperwork mushroom as nit-picking bureaucrats grow in numbers and power. As a buddy bemoaned, the increasingly shrill message of the establishment is “Sit down – and shut up.” No wonder so many Americans feel frustrated and impotent.

Why has our liberty eroded so badly? Statist public schools have long taught that equality (of results) and “social justice” trump freedom since liberty is the handmaiden of “selfish” individualists harming “the community.” As we’ve grown affluent, there’s more desire to protect everyone from risk, and our burgeoning welfare state demands ever more of our economic liberty. Plus, as societies get more secular, they become more socialist (see Western Europe ).

We also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned: "Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Jefferson warned that “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” I pray Americans never forget that we are the heirs to the most libertarian, God-fearing revolutionaries in history.

by Douglas Young

Source: Strike at the Root

H.R. 2159: Government is proposing CONSTITUTIONALLY ILLEGAL legislation, and this administration wants it passed

THIS BILL ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT PASS! H.R. 2159 is the absolute worst example of unAmerican, anti-Constitutional legislation ever to threaten us. It is a bill that gives the Attorney General the sole and exclusive power to deny Constitutional rights to Americans WITHOUT A CHARGE, WITHOUT A TRIAL, WITHOUT DUE PROCESS, WITHOUT REPRESENTATION, AND WITHOUT ANY LEGAL RECOURSE FOR REDRESS!

America can never allow an administration to deny Constitutional rights as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights arbitrarily. This is absolutely insane. Our government has gone completely rogue, and they have forgotten who they work for. This bill is for the arbitrary denial of Constitutional rights to any person who is placed on a "secret list" that is not accessible to the American People.

The sickening news media is reporting on the bill with headlines like, "New bill will keep guns out of the hands of terrorists". Well, of course people would support that. WHY DON'T THEY REPORT WHAT THE BILL REALLY DOES? Do you really think that Osama Bin Laden will be applying for a background check to buy a semi-automatic weapon? Or is it more plausible that real terrorists who are funded and supported by Islamic Fundamentalist groups and governments are more concerned with acquiring weapons of mass destruction and other means of creating mass casualties?

All this bill will do is begin a back door assault on the Second Amendment. The secret list is reported to have at least one million names on it now. One million? YOU EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE THAT YOU HAVE OVER ONE MILLION PEOPLE THAT YOU SUSPECT AS LIKELY TO BE TERRORISTS AND ALL YOU DO IS PUT THEM ON A LIST?

In light of recent Department of Homeland Security reports naming average Americans as likely terrorist, and of the Department of Defense training questionnaire teaching military officers and troops that protest is a form of terrorism, DO YOU THINK I TRUST THIS GOVERNMENT TO GAIN THE ARBITRARY POWER TO DENY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS AT WILL AND WITH NO EXPLANATION?

PEOPLE: All you have to do is listen to what the government is telling you. THEY HAVE TOLD US, OVER AND OVER, THROUGH REPORTS AND TRAINING METHODS THAT SUSPECTED TERRORISTS INCLUDE: GUN OWNERS AND SUPPORTERS OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT; TAX PROTESTERS; PRO-LIFERS; ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS; MILITARY AND VETERANS; THOSE WHO FAVOR STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT OVER FEDERAL; THOSE WHO SUPPORT THE CONSTITUTION; AND ON AND ON

THAT MEANS YOU!!

They are telling us what they are doing.

Call your representatives NOW. Oppose the stripping of Constitutional rights without due process. No American should be denied ANY rights until they are lawfully charged with a crime and given the opportunity to prove their innocence through due process with the right to legal representation and a speedy trial.

This is a rogue government. They have forgotten who they work for.

The horrible and Constitutionally ILLEGAL bill:
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h2159/text

The DHS report that suspects YOU of terrorism:
http://www.wnd.com/images/dhs-rightwing-extremism.pdf

Source: The Fading American Dream: The Constitution Circumvented

Question Authority: Always and Forever Hereafter

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
~ H.L. Mencken

For some time, I have been trying to figure out why the nation and we as individuals are in the fix we are in now. Many reasons manifest themselves. We labor under a government of such monstrous reach and epic incompetence that it makes the Soviets now look like a paragon of efficiency and probity. We suffer under a ruling class that has not simply been a gangster government under Obamunism but has been this way since the defeat of the original Constitution in 1865. With each illegitimate war since 1898, the power of the Federal government has increased exponentially. With each manufactured crisis, liberties and freedoms have withered and died. This is simply the latest and greatest improvement in the ongoing process of our overseers to find emerging ways to increase the output of our slavery.

I have alluded before that we live in the country and have occasion to run across orphaned animals. We have horses and chickens and other assorted animals on the Circle A Ranch. My wife happens to be a fantastic gardener and the reincarnation of Dr. Doolittle. We discovered by following the horrid cacophony of rabbit screams three orphaned cottontails, two of which promptly died. My wife is now nursing the survivor and hoping to brighten his life expectancy in this mortal coil. As is her wont, she is an inveterate researcher and proceeded to go on the ’net and search out advice on care and feeding of a rabbit which is not one of our areas of husbandry expertise. What struck her were the countless admonitions to seek government assistance and report it to wildlife "authorities" or the zoo. I look around and converse with colleagues and associates to find my fellow Americans increasingly frightened or unfamiliar with doing anything without someone’s permission. Whether at work or play, we:

• obey speed limits that have nothing do with safety and simply provide revenue to our rulers
• pay property taxes which inevitably increase the yoke around our necks locally and pay for the intellectual suicide pact call government schooling
• pay extraordinary sales taxes on local and state purchases to subsidize the countless layers of bureaucracy that choke citizen and business productivity everyday
• stop locally at a US Border Patrol checkpoint nearly twenty miles north of the Mexican border to be asked if we are American citizens and a visual check of the interior of our vehicles
• sit idly by while the various levels of government erect observation devices at traffic intersections to increase revenue streams
• receive property tax bills on our real estate which increase in assessment while market prices decrease
• are required to have permission from the US Forest Circus or National Park Service to hunt, play or work on lands expropriated by our betters in government

I have discovered the silver bullet and it is from the University of the Intuitively Obvious: question authority and maintain a skeptical attitude about all facets of government and governance. That’s it…simple. Even those of us who have invested considerable intellectual heavy-lifting in discerning why the government in all its consistent brutality and blood-raged destruction commands such a loyal and slavish quality in men are baffled by the absence of this simple epistemological tool to ask why on a consistent basis from stem to stern. If enough vigilance is maintained at the outset and embryonic stages of so much government mischief, much of the madness could be strangled in its statist cradle through peaceful discourse, non-compliance, shunning and development of innovative strategies to sabotage the government’s machinations. Most government programs start out with promises of nirvana and positive outcomes but the history of man shows that this is essentially iatrogenic and hubristic. The state is a violent actor by necessity to preserve its power and expand it, so inevitably the promises dissolve into a nightmarish brew of incompetence, lethality and baleful societal consequences and we are stuck with the myriad Frankenstein monsters shambling about with the vague promises of eternal goodness and heaven on earth.

One may say that the horse is out of the barn and we are truly stuck with the state of affairs and no amount of reform will fix DC and its loyal minions at this stage of their maturation and dominance and you would be correct. The rub is this: the FEDGOD will fall and it will be in the next 12–24 months and much like the USSR, it will perish of its own internal Marxoid contradictions. Foreign wars, self-induced economic calamity and sheer naked arrogance will force it to fold and dissolve as a ruling elite. This is a window that rarely opens and the opportunities will be tremendous – for both sides. The furloughed politicos will spread their contagion when they flee the ruins of the DC power structure and seek to encourage the usual suspects among government workers and gullible subjects to help resurrect this monstrosity that has been astride our necks like a decomposing albatross. Truth serum will be necessary and that all starts with the kind of skepticism and incredulity that seems to characterize most everything we do except our attitude toward our rulers. Cross-examination is the engine of truth. Question every bit of alleged government authority which emerges from the ashes. This is one reason Thomas Jefferson was agitating for constant revolt for the tree of liberty. Government is a fungal growth that cannot be checked without constantly striking the root and taking whatever measures are necessary to curb its growth.

You won’t find this kind of critical thinking taught in the universities or any facet of the school systems because skepticism and clear thinking will be the end of them and the whole rotting mold growth choking American civilization called government. When was the last time you saw a government sponsored university study which called for the reduction and/or elimination of a statist rule or department? You don’t have to be a philosophy major or graduate to realize that Socratic drilling works. This is simply the process where you repeatedly ask why to a set of explanations until either you are satisfied the meritorious answer has been given or the shoddy intellectual construction is bared for all to see. It bears repeating: the entire artifice of the state is based on the threat or employment of violence to meet its ends, so it is morally illegitimate and reprehensible from the starting blocks. You have the moral high ground because all government for the most part is an elaborate shell game to develop proxy relationships with servant classes who obey at the urging of a lash or worse for the material and power benefit of the ruling class. Wake up, helots!

This is the chance we have. A dozen, fifty or hundreds of resistance and secessionist entities are going to move into the vacuum left by the great sucking abyss of the FEDGOD collapse. Hundreds of laboratories will emerge to test every variant of political collective and ordered enterprise imaginable. I have little hope for the subjects and somnambulant mental zombies that stumble around the cities of the Left Coast and the Northeast (Vermont and New Hampshire excepted) will do anymore other than instantly resurrect facsimiles of DC patterns of rule and other processes of national socialism but between the Marxist coastlines; the life and times of ordinary Americans will take extraordinary turns to develop from scratch freedom-oriented communities and spasms of spontaneous order. People may finally awaken and look at their neighbors and try to do the right thing. They may seek a system that asks, persuades and cooperates instead of bullies, collectivizes and forces through violent means the shape and texture of human relationships. They will be the vanguard of the men and women who finally awaken from the five millennia fever-dream of enabling various strangers the power of life and death over thousands and millions simply because they have surrendered the most basic right of all; leave us the hell alone.

Turn off the television, grab a book(s) and have conversations with family and like-minded friends. Go out and do things. Start a garden, fix your fencing, move to the country and reach out to the community you live in. Open your mind to the possibilities before us. Most of all, question every aspect of your relationship with authority. Does it derive from fear or respect? Does it emanate from first-hand experience or second-hand knowledge? How many times have you truly asked why a certain bureaucratic edict must be followed? More importantly, what is your line in the sand where your servitude stops and your resistance begins? Just say no to big government. Once a man establishes his limitations for tolerance of interference in his life and adopts a resolute stand against the forces buffeting him against his will, the world will change.

If you are still reading this, you are the Resistance.

by William Buppert
Source: LewRockwell

Israel won't let Gaza boy see his only parent

In protest over the complaint the United States dared to lodge against Israel over the plight of Gaza Strip residents, the Defense Ministry declared there is no humanitarian crisis there, nor did one ever exist.

According to the ministry's criteria for humanitarian cases, our American friends got a little carried away. For example, is the case of a 7-year-old Gazan who lost his mother and wants to rejoin his father, who lives in Hebron, to be considered a humanitarian case by the Defense Ministry? That's not a sure thing.

The procedures of the office of the coordinator of activities in the territories for handling requests from Gaza Strip residents seeking to settle in Judea and Samaria stipulates that if there is a relative in the vicinity who can take him in, the boy should remain in Gaza. And what of a chronically ill or elderly person in need of assistance and whose only daughter unfortunately chose to live in Nablus? Is he to be considered a humanitarian case? Nonsense.

According to the rules for family reunification, dictated by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai (Labor), they will apply to the man only if there is no other relative in Gaza, not necessarily a first-degree relative, who can care for him. "Family ties, in and of itself, are not reason enough to justify a humanitarian case allowing residency in Judea and Samaria." Of course, when necessary, he writes, the petitioners will be summoned to an interview with officials from the office of the coordinator of activities in the territories' to reassess the humanitarian need.

But this is a humanitarian case.

Please note, there is no attempt here, perish the thought, to realize the right of return to Israel. The only thing these unfortunate people want is to move to another part of the occupied territories. The Gisha association and the Center for the Defense of the Individual, which appealed to the High Court of Justice over the matter, noted that according to the Defense Ministry rules, it is easier for a foreign citizen living in the West Bank to obtain the status of a resident of the territories than it is for a Palestinian from Gaza to move to the West Bank.

Israeli human rights activists say the procedures reflect a broad policy of encouraging Palestinians to move to Gaza, to permanently distance them from the West Bank. Families that cannot reunite in the West Bank must move to the Gaza Strip, even if their homes, livelihoods and family and social ties are in the West Bank. The new procedure contradicts a series of international, diplomatic commitments made by Israel, including a specific commitment in the Oslo Accords to maintain the status of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as "a single territorial unit." The interim agreement also stipulates that the Palestinians are entitled to choose their place of residence in the territories.

Plenty of room for growth in settlements

National leaders from President Shimon Peres to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are crying foul against U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who are dismantling families of Jews, of course, in the West Bank.

Habayit Hayehudi leader Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz went as far as comparing the American refusal to allow building in the settlements for the needs of "natural growth" to the plague of the firstborn. Then the right-wing paper Makor Rishon reported from a first-hand source that not only is there no shortage of apartments for the firstborn and for the youngest children, there is also room enough for unnatural growth.

In his weekly column, Hagai Segal, a rabbi of the settlers and a veteran of the Jewish underground, urges residents of Ra'anana to vote with their feet against the leftist solution as it appeared in Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan speech. "If someone in Ra'anana is wondering what he can do now to save Israel from a Palestinian state, let him move to Judea and Samaria," writes Segal and elaborates: "It won't be so simple, because Netanyahu and Barak are not going to sign building permits in wholesale quantities, but in almost every veteran community there is still an unused reservoir."

Segal calls for energy to be invested "not in outposts that are there just to make a statement, and not in anti-Netanyahu presentations, but only in quiet and quick growth."

It is unclear whether Segal is correct in his assessment of Barak's attitude on building permits. And not just in the "legal" settlements; the minister of defense (Labor) is also investing energy in the outposts that are there to make a statement. Activists for Bamakom association, which works for justice and human rights in planning and knows a thing or two about the situation in the territories, have discovered that Barak recently authorized the Civil Administration to submit a plan for the construction of 300 housing units in the unauthorized outpost of Givat Habrecha, near the community of Talmon. The new construction is located around 13 kilometers east of the Green Line, on the "Palestinian" side of the separation barrier. According to the Sasson Report, this outpost was built without government approval and without a master plan and damaged private Palestinian property.

The objections submitted by Bimkom (with the Al-Ghaniya village council) say the planned construction is on lands formerly declared "state lands" and the plan apparently is a bid to whitewash the illegal construction of 60 housing units that have already been put up and to allow the construction of another 240 housing units, public buildings and roads.

Bimkom argues that adjacent to the area of the plan on the ground, which even according to the Civil Administration is private Palestinian land, several permanent structures were put up by the residents. So far there have been wide-scale building violations at Givat Habrecha, including the paving of roads and the building of public structures and residential buildings - all without permits and contrary to the master plan defining the area as agricultural. In its objection to the plan the association argues that approving the construction would be tantamount to blessing the start of unmonitored construction in unauthorized outposts.

Source: Haaretzs News Jerusalem

Bilderberger treason goes unpunished!

It is ironic, as Daniel Estulin points out, that America’s fledgling democracy established the Logan act in 1799 to protect itself from Americans fostering foreign associations to intrude in our affairs. Named after Dr. George Logan, a pro Republican and prescient Quaker from Pennsylvania, it has remained almost unchanged and unfortunately unused since its passage, though it reads with great relevance in the shadows of the New World Order’s operatives . . .

It states, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

In fact, it is amazing that the Bilderberg Group has met since 1954 with funding from the CIA and is made up of the world’s most powerful people, notably US and world heads of state, made and in the making, numerous international corporate CEOs from business, banking, industry, media, as well as world royalty, plus high-ranking members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-Lateral Commission.

The Bilderberg goal has been to shape policy that deeply concerns the United States and its citizens in regards to innumerable foreign alliances without providing US citizens any awareness of same. And not once has any US member been indicted for their treasonous breaches in these actions.

Even though high-ranking members of the press attend Bilderberg annual meetings, there is little or no press coverage. They are there, as it were, to get with and push the program, albeit disguised. The meetings’ locales are announced only days before the events, always in a small town near a big city -- this year’s at the five-star Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, May 14-17.

There are no press reports of discussions, agendas or conclusions released. Yet the matters discussed ranged this year from all facets of the US economy, including the dollar’s future, whether there will be depression or prolonged stagnation, US unemployment; more frighteningly, even to the destruction of the United States as we know it into the North American Union of Canada, the US, and Mexico.

Even though I read and favorably reviewed Estulin’s Bilderberg 2007: Welcome to the Lunatic Fringe, this new edition of the story lends new urgency to what has been happening in the darkness of the political night we live in, both north and south of us, including newly made associations of corporations, plans to usurp US laws to North American Union imperatives, all part of a scheme to hammer America into the pieces of this NAU like broken glass into an unrecognizable mosaic of oppression.

There will also be a push for the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, which depends on the Irish voting YES on the treaty in September or October. One of the Bilderberg concerns is neutralizing the anti-Lisbon treaty movement, Libertas, led by Declan Ganley. One of the Bilderberg strategies, for instance, is a whispering campaign in the US media, suggesting that Ganley is funded by arms dealers in the US linked to the US military. Right there you have a bird’s eye view of the Bilderbergers in action, with enough evidence to imprison a weighty handful of them, including some top dogs. And dogs they are, dogs of overt and covert war.

Most notably, they include the multi-billionaire David Rockefeller and ex-Secretary of State and war criminal Henry Kissinger. The Rockefeller family, influence, and fortune constitute the very hub of the Bilderberg Group. Its various spokes connect to international finance, economics, media, science, world health, politics, public works, any phase of life and death you can think of.

Together they form the wheel of the New World Order, rolling towards a vast collectivist society in which free nation states are subsumed under the Bilderberg Big Brothers, most notably Rockefeller, with an expanded UN military force, supported by taxes on oil at the wellhead to maintain order and security.

It is a strangely utopian notion of a “World Company,” an uber capitalist corporation vs. the nation state, a whole new Brand X of authoritarian rule. Its model most closely resembles a free-trade capitalist China with a communist authoritarianism to buttress it, in which the individual vanishes literally and figuratively; in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and two classes are de rigueur, rich and slave-class.

It’s no wonder one of the first familiar faces we see on the introduction’s page xxx is Chinese-speaking, India-born Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. He is at the 2005 Germany-based Bilderberg meeting, then as president of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank, connecting as it were with those of common interests. How far he’s come since then and how deep we’ve sunk in Treasury debt.

You will find this highly secret organization’s history exposed with an encyclopedic level of documentation, including over 100 pages of participant photos, documents, names, titles, endnotes by Daniel Estulin, in this The True Story of The Bilderberg Group, updated revised and expanded in his latest North American Union Edition, 385 pages in all. To date, the editions of this groundbreaking work have sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide in 48 languages. The reason is its relevance for citizens of every free nation in the world, now an endangered species in the wake of Bilderberg connections and activities.

Estulin’s text reads like a mixture of Robert Ludlum, John LeCarre and Ian Fleming, given the world of intrigue he inhabits at the highest levels, meeting in the most luxurious, private-army and police guarded hotels. Estulin delivers secrets from an eyewitness point of view, having researched the group for the past 17 years and actually pierced the secret annual meetings well before his first 2007 edition.

One time it nearly cost him his life as he waited for an elevator in a hi-rise hotel with an information “source.” As the door opened, he stepped forward and was hauled back by the source’s iron grip. There was no floor. The elevator had been jimmied 800 feet down. One more step and he’d been silenced. Fortunately, Estulin’s family emigrated from Russia to Ottawa, Canada. His grandfather was high-level KGB, which gives him a genetic leg up in this predator’s game.

Estulin’s research has been augmented by many persons working in these hotels who, repulsed by the Bildies, have shared information on their dubious agendas, attendees, and locales. Then there are past and present intelligence officials from around the world, who report in as well, as the Bildies play “good old boys” club. They permit only a few wives to attend, a few noted media women, and the Queen of the Netherlands, one of the richest women in the world.

To give you a sense of its scope, the new Bilderberg edition is broken up into four sections: Part One: the Bildberg Group, including its foundation, bedfellows, objectives, puppets, a tale of the Watergate con game, and Bilderberg unmasked.

Part Two: The Council on Foreign Relations, includes Hit or Miss [that is a near miss of a hit on the author’s life in Italy], 1999, Crossover Partners, Journalistic Courtesans?, Enforced Disarmament, CFR Cabinet Control, CFR and Psycho-Political Operations, CFR and the Marshall Plan, Visible Partners.

Part Three: The Trilateral Commission, Back to the Future, Sophisticated Subversion, Packaging a President, Game of Monopoly, Bolsheviks’ Benefactors, Treason for Profit, Sacrificing a Nation [America].

The all-New Part Four: The North American Union (NAU), Detention, 2004, Overture, A Coming Union? Behind the Closed Door – In Documents & Pictures, Endnotes, a PS: actual Bilderberg Meeting Reports – 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, Author’s Afterward, and Index.

Again, as someone who read the earlier edition, I can say that all the new information is a substantial leap forward in exposing this shadow government that is working steadily for the US and other nations’ coups and subjugation to its New World Order.

The Bilderberg Meeting Reports give you a candid view of this motley crew, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe. The reports survey crossover relationships between ex-presidents, chiefs of state from yesterday and today, from their involvements in pointless wars and conflicts, all ending in private profit. You walk away with a real idea of the world elite’s plans for today and tomorrow, which are definitely not wine and roses for you.

In fact, the New World Order can be seen as a giant step backward in time to a form of feudalism governed with today’s technology and power brokers. It is an order ruled by raw power. The smell of this power seems to ooze out of the pages of the book and its tales, from Woodrow Wilson and his alter-ego, Edward M. House, working together to establish a NWO through the League of Nations . . . back to the financing of the Bolshevik Revolution by JP Morgan to undermine the power of the Czar and Russia.

As an alternate title to this review, I thought of “Flipping the Bilderbergers,” for in fact so many household names and faces of 20th and 21st century politics -- from history, business, media, banking and finance -- are revealed, involved in various predatory schemes to deflate or inflate currencies, destroy alliances, but most of all, to weaken America. And towards that end, is it any surprise that we find our industrial infrastructure in ruins, General Motors in bankruptcy, Chrysler about to be sold to Fiat, millions of American high tech jobs outsourced to India, millions more to near and far-eastern sweatshops, our economy bankrupted?

Is it any wonder that we find one bubble after another created and then broken in the stock market until the market itself is broken, a conspiracy of deregulation, and Greenspan’s photo turning up in various Bilderberg meetings, along with the ubiquitous Kissinger’s, like so many grinning cats who have swallowed the canaries? Is it any wonder that the Trilateral Commission has broken the world in three pieces: The Americas, Europe, and Asia, assigning South and Central Americas as our new sweat shops, Africa as Europe’s, and Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines as Japan’s?

And so, reading this True Story of the Bilderberg Group -- The North American Union Edition is an act of revelation. One that is necessary to help us protect ourselves against this final trashing of our borders as well as Canada’s and Mexico’s, which would pummel us into one entity ruled by the money-lust of corporate deal-makers, the same who have been planning this for years in their poisonous meetings.

Bottom line, the Fix is in. Innumerable deals have been and are being made between the north and south to weaken America like a brave bull by picadors, bleeding our strength, until the matadors thrust the final swords in us. Do not by any means underestimate their power or be overly afraid of it. When push comes to shove, there are more of us than them.

In fact, being exposed, opposed, deposed are the worst nightmares of the Bilderbergers, starting with its pointy-nosed, grinning zillionaire posing as a philanthropist, Dr. Doom himself, along with his cronies, from Bill Gates to Goldman Sachs, et al. We have to seek punishment for these men (and women) who have undermined the strength of our government and people with foreign alliances profitable only to them. We have to bring these treasonous persons to stand for their crimes. We have to use the Logan Act as it has never been used before and any and all other means to gain justice or face the consequences. That is Estulin’s message, loud and clear. Read it. See it. Believe it!

By Jerry Mazza

Source: Online Journal

DOJ moves to reverse AIPAC espionage case guilty plea and jail time

On May 1, government prosecutors dropped their espionage prosecution of former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employees Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.

Many expected a criminal trial to yield unprecedented accountability -- AIPAC’s opaque internal operations and unquenchable thirst for classified government information would finally be laid bare. Others saw the unprecedented application of the 1917 Espionage Act against non-government employees as a threat to freedom of speech.

Presiding Judge T.S. Ellis’ pretrial rulings made it nearly impossible for government prosecutors to prevail -- requiring them to reveal sensitive government information in court. Curiously, Ellis even wanted prosecutors to prove the defendants’ states of mind and ethereal intentions to harm the US rather than strict statutory culpability under the 1917 Espionage Act. Normally, Americans could now be either thrilled, outraged, or just blissfully unaware that the case has finally ended.

Except that it hasn’t ended.

Those concerned with rule of law were provided mixed relief but subtle hints of future maneuvers. In their formal motion (PDF) that Judge T.S. Ellis drop the case government prosecutors fired a Parthian shot by highlighting the “requirement of meeting an unexpectedly higher evidentiary threshold in order to prevail at trial.”

The New York Times recorded Joseph Persichini Jr. -- the top official at the F.B.I.’s Washington office -- was “disappointed” while FBI agents were “infuriated.” But the Times also hinted at politicization, reporting the decision chain extended from career attorneys all the way up to Attorney General Eric Holder -- who approved dropping the case. Dana J. Boente, Obama’s new acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was omnipresent at negotiations. Boente’s formal statement seemed to exude remorse “the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment.”

The AIPAC investigation did yield Colonel Lawrence Franklin’s guilty plea for leaking classified information to Rosen and Weissman. Franklin was sentenced to a $10,000 fine, 151 months of prison, and three years of supervised release. Surely with Franklin ensconced in jail, few would be again tempted to influence US policies through high stakes classified information gambits. Justice would have been done, to some degree. But is all the scripted remorse and regret just a ruse?

On May 19, a powerful coalition of 125 Rabbis signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting a probe into whether “anti-Semitism and/or anti-Israel sentiments” played any role in the original investigation of AIPAC. Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post published an article titled “Was Case Against AIPAC Lobbyists Anti-Semitic?“ It sternly noted that the case “wasn’t a total loss for the government” because it did win Franklin’s guilty plea. That plea is the only remaining evidence that wrongdoing occurred -- but for the Israel lobby, history reveals even this is totally unacceptable.

Last year, shortly before George W. Bush left office, intense lobbying finally won the posthumous pardon of Charles Winters. Winters was convicted of violating U.S. arms embargos for his role in the illicit shipment of aircraft to Jewish fighters in Palestine in 1948.

A Protestant from Boston, Winters didn’t have the lifelong ideological drive of co-conspirators Hank Greenspun and Al Schwimmer. Neither ever served any jail time. Greenspun, a newspaper man in Nevada, won a presidential pardon when John F. Kennedy entered office. Schwimmer simply emigrated to Israel. Both subsequently went on to play major roles in the Israeli arms smuggling segment of the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. But the fact that only Winters ever did time for crime (18 months in jail and a $5,000 fine) was a lingering stain that couldn’t be erased. This has relevance for the plight of Lawrence Franklin.

AIPAC and other arms of the Israel lobby can’t now openly lobby President Barak Obama for a Franklin pardon so soon after his administration graciously dropped the case. But AIPAC also can’t wait four to eight years for a pardon or even function effectively while Lawrence Franklin languishes in prison for what many supporters consider heroic behavior.

The Bureau of Prisons -- which assigned Franklin inmate number 70425-083 -- indicates he is still not yet in custody, Fortunately for Franklin he may never set foot into his assigned minimum security prison in Cumberland, Maryland. Attorney General Eric Holder holds the key to his future.

The Department of Justice has recently admitted errors and asked a federal court to free two Alaskans and review their convictions in connection with the Senator Ted Stevens corruption probe.

Former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder’s earlier and seemingly inexplicable recommendation that President Bill Clinton pardon tax fugitive Marc Rich once looked both tawdry and even career threatening before he became attorney general in the Obama administration Given recent moves to free other Bush era convictions, the incident looks highly relevant and so is the process to secretly erase Franklin’s guilty plea and sentence in court.

On May 14, US attorneys quietly filed a sealed motion (PDF) “as to Lawrence Anthony Franklin” in the Eastern District of Virginia. Judge Ellis then granted a hearing for June 12 at 9AM. On June 2, they filed a sealed memorandum about Franklin. Though sealed motions are of course secret, it is likely that under the watchful eye of Eric Holder the DOJ’s political appointees are arranging yet another special favor for the Israel lobby in order to steer around the Obama pardon dilemma.

As is now customary, any potential future downsides and details of such a sealed deal are not allowed to be publicly debated. Just as quiet clemency for Schwimmer and Greenspun paved the way for weapons smuggling to Iran, this quiet effort will undoubtedly yield some future crisis.

If Eric Holder springs Franklin he will have issued a facto license to AIPAC -- the likes of which haven’t been seen since former Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach quashed the DOJ’s massive drive to register the entire lobby as Israeli foreign agents. AIPAC can then not only traffic in as much classified US national defense information as it can carry, but execute larger and more audacious covert activities at US taxpayer expense under the immunizing banner of Israel.

In the broadest sense the AIPAC espionage scandal hasn’t ended -- it may be only just beginning.

By Grant F. Smith

Source: Online Journal

Mossad still stalking malls near U.S. military bases

Cells of young Israeli intelligence operatives continue to openly solicit relationships with U.S. military personnel from shopping mall kiosks, according to an informed source.

WMR has learned that one such kiosk operates at the MacArthur Center Mall in Norfolk, Virginia, where a number of U.S. Navy personnel from the nearby naval bases are regularly confronted by aggressive young Israelis selling Dead Sea cosmetic products who inquire about where the personnel are stationed and the nature of their jobs. Young Israeli women working at the kiosk also appear to want to strike up a closer relationship with some of the naval personnel.

The use of young Israelis, many of whom continue to serve in a reserve status with the Israel Defense Force, as intelligence agents, has changed somewhat over the past decade. Young Israeli “art students” first conducted unsolicited visits to the homes and offices of federal and military employees trying to sell cheap Chinese-made bogus Israeli artwork while casing neighborhoods and office buildings.

Israeli-operated mall kiosks have transitioned from selling toys to cosmetics.

On August 7, 2005, WMR reported: In November 2001, the INS arrested several Israelis, including some with military backgrounds, selling Puzzle Car and Zoom Copter toys from shopping mall kiosks and vending carts. Many of the malls were located near U.S. government facilities, including the Pentagon and CIA. A majority of the Israelis, arrested for visa violations instead of espionage, worked for a Florida-based company called Quality Sales. A spokesman for the company admitted the company hired vacationing Israeli students but they had the wrong visas. The spokesman also revealed the Israelis were deemed “special interest” cases by INS-- a new government designation applied to terrorism suspects in the wake of 911. Federal authorities suspect the Israelis were using the kiosks as intelligence fronts in the same manner that Israelis were using door-to-door art sales as covers. The National Counterintelligence Center (NCIX) stated in a report issued in March 2001 that, “In the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities connected with individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling or delivering artwork. Employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings.” The report was temporarily removed from the NCIX web site.

One of the malls where the Israeli”toy sellers” based their operations was the Pentagon City Mall, just across Interstate 395 from the Pentagon. In July 2004, the mall served as the rendezvous point for alleged Israeli Pentagon spy Larry Franklin and Keith Weissman, an AIPAC official. Franklin warned Weissman that Iranian agents were going to start attacking American soldiers and Israeli agents in Iraq. Weissman then went to brief the account of the meeting to Steve Rosen, another senior AIPAC official. They both informed the Israeli embassy in Washington and Glenn Kessler, a reporter for The Washington Post. Those phone calls were being wiretapped by the FBI as part of its investigation of a major Israeli spy ring in the United States, an investigation that had been going on since before the 9/11 attacks. The FBI was also monitoring meetings between Franklin, Weissman, and Rosen, including one held in February 2003 at the Arlington, Virginia, Ritz-Carlton hotel, which adjoins the Pentagon City Mall.

In February 2005, an Israeli man named Ohad Cohen was deported, along with four other Israelis, from Omaha, Nebraska. In what was becoming a common occurrence in the United States, a total of 10 Israelis, who were working at shopping mall kiosks in the Omaha and Lincoln areas, were deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for illegally working in the United States on tourist visas. The Israelis operated out of Omaha’s Oak View Mall and Lincoln’s Gateway Westfield Mall. The Federal government probe was reported to be part of a wider probe of Israeli shopping mall kiosk activity throughout the Midwest. In December 2004, FBI and immigration officers arrested 15 Israelis in Minnesota and three operating from a mall kiosk in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Omaha is also the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC).

On January 13, 2009, WMR reported: WMR has also learned of other Israeli mall kiosks around the country that hired aggressive Israeli young men and women who badger customers and ask personal questions. Israeli mall kiosks engaged in the aggressive sales practices have been set up at the North Shore Mall in Peabody, Massachusetts, and Northeast Mall in Hurst, Texas, a Dallas suburb. The mall kiosks in Peabody sell Israeli hand cream and nail files. The kiosk in Hurst has a male overseer, about 45 years old, who lives in the Bahamas.

Many of the Israeli mall vendors claim ignorance when told by customers that Israeli mall kiosks were identified as Mossad front operations in a Fox News report. More incredibly, some Israelis feign ignorance when the term “9/11” is used. They claim not to know what the term means.

In the same report, WMR reported: Last month, police in New South Wales, Australia, arrested the leader of an Israeli “art student” ring who was selling mass-produced paintings from China as valuable artwork from Israel. The Israeli man arrested, age 23, fit the profile of a number of Israeli “art students” rounded up, detained, and deported by U.S. authorities in the months prior to 9/11. The “art students” were casing federal offices, military installations, and the homes of federal agents and officials.

The Israeli was arrested by police in Wamberal on Australia’s eastern central coast. Fifty Chinese-made oil paintings were found in the Israeli’s Mitsubishi station wagon. He was attempting to sell the paintings for between 500 and 1,000 Australian dollars. The Israelis in Australia visited a number of homes and claimed they were university students from Israel. The Israeli arrested lived in Sydney’s Bondi Beach neighborhood.

Recently, there was yet another story about the use of Israeli mall kiosk operators as intelligence agents. In the most recent case in Perth, Australia, an Australian man was arrested and charged with violation of an Australian hate crime law for exposing the activities of Israeli-run mall kiosks owned by an Israeli firm in Melbourne whose products are called “Seacret -- Minerals From The Dead Sea.” The president of the Australian Union of Jewish Students lodged a criminal complaint against the investigator who maintained that Israeli nationals were attempting to obtain classified information on the Royal Australian Navy’s Collins class submarine as well as other defense programs.

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Online Journal

Stop and search? Carry the card

Download this handy card, warning police officers that if a stop and search is intrusive, unlawful or malicious, you will take action

The debate about the use of stop and search – be it protesters or young black and Asian men, be it in the case of stopping knife crime or deterring terrorism – is one that has (understandably, perhaps) been fixed on the police results rather than the times they get it wrong.

But it is in the cases where they get it wrong that attitudes towards police are sharpened and the rights we feel we have as citizens practically defined. So I offer this card for readers to download, print and carry. It warns police officers that if a stop and search is intrusive, unlawful or malicious, you will pursue the issue through the Independent Police Complaints Commission and, if necessary, to civil proceedings. You might want to offer this card to an officer before a search takes place. Enjoy.

Click here to download a pdf of the card. Then print, cut it out, fold it in half and carry it around with you.

Source: The Guardian

The police even follow me into the loo

Photocopy of a police officer’s notebook received by Marc Vallée after a data protection request.

The Metropolitan police are reluctant to reveal why they've been filming journalists. But we've got a special weapon – the law

On Monday – the day the Guardian published a police surveillance film showing Emily Apple and Val Swain being violently arrested at the Kingsnorth climate camp last year – solicitors acting for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) wrote to Christopher Graham, the new information commissioner to make a formal complaint on behalf of five frontline journalists – I am one of them.

Why the complaint? For some time now the NUJ has had "serious concerns about the manner in which press-card carrying journalists are being monitored by the police, specifically by the Metropolitan police's forward intelligence team (Fit)".

These concerns have been raised by the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, in ­letters to and meetings with the Home Office and the Metropolitan police. The NUJ

"suspect that certain journalists are the target of police surveillance because they speak to people who the police ­consider to be "anarchists"; and/or because they frequently cover protest situations; and/or because the police consider them likely to have footage which may be relevant in criminal proceedings involving others".

As the complaint states, all the journalists have been

"filmed and photographed on numerous occasions by the forward intelligence teams; they are clearly known by the Fit officers as they are referred to by name; their personal details have been taken by officers on many occasions; and they have all been subjected to repeated searches under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and/or section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994."

When covering a Gaza protest early this year, I was even followed by two Fit officers when I nipped into a pub to use the toilet.

In an attempt to get a clearer picture of the extent of police monitoring, five journalists – including me – applied to the Met and other police services in an attempt to discover what information is being held on us – photographs, documentation, details of when we have been stopped and searched. The Data Protection Act 1998 gives the public the right of subject access: in short, the right to find out what information is held about us in electronic and paper records.

In my case, the only piece of data that I have received from the Metropolitan police service after a four-month wait was a copy of a page of a police officer's notebook (above). This is despite the fact I sued the Met in 2006, and in legal correspondence the Met refers to Fit film footage of me being assaulted by police officers. The purpose of the NUJ letter was to see if the information commissioner "would be willing to investigate whether the ­Metropolitan police service are ­complying with their obligations under the Data ­Protection Act 1988 and Human Rights Act 1998."

Why is this important? Why are the police targeting journalists in this way? And why are the police refusing to hand over the files when requested?

If this type of targeting worked, investigations by the press into police treatment of groups such as Fit Watch would not see the light of day. To me it seems clear that the police are targeting journalists to discourage us from working on investigations they do not like.

At the NUJ photographers' conference in May, Roy Mincoff – the NUJ legal officer – asked for an assurance from Commander Bob Broadhurst, the head of the Met's public order branch and boss of the Fit, that journalists' details were not being kept on a database.

His reply did not inspire confidence:

"What I will do on that one is I'll give you a written answer. I'm pretty sure we don't. There might be the odd journalist whose name we know and whose photograph appears somewhere and to say we don't keep a database and then you'll find that one or two are on it. I can guarantee that we don't as a matter course take your photographs to create a database."

The NUJ is still waiting for that letter

Source: The Guardian

Arrested for asking a policeman for his badge number

The Guardian has obtained police footage of Emily Apple and Val Swain being arrested by surveillance officers after asking for their badge numbers at the Kingsnorth climate camp last year. The two women speak to Paul Lewis about their arrest, 4-day imprisonment and official complaint. All charges were dropped.
more

source www.guardian.co.uk

700 doctors demand the removal of WMA president for involvement in torture

700 doctors from 43 countries sent a letter of protest to the Word Medical Association (WMA), which is considered the WMA’s governing body, demanding the removal of the newly appointed president, an Israeli doctor, for ignoring the participation of medical staff in the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the Guardian reported.

The Israeli doctor, Yoram Blachar, has been the head of the Israeli Medical Association since 1995, and became the head of the WMA of November of last year.

The physicians, who signed the protest letter, are senior professors and physicians from England, Europe and the United States.

They stated that Blachar had failed to respond to charges that a number of Israeli doctors are involved in the torture of Palestinian detainees during interrogation in Israeli prisons.

In 1996, the Amnesty International reported that doctors, working with the Israeli security services, are taking part in torturing Palestinian detainees, mistreating and humiliating them in a manner that violates medical ethics.

Pediatrician Alan Meyers, from Boston University School of Medicine, in the United States, said that the presidency of Blachar to the WMA mocks the principles of the association which was founded in 1947.

A 1975 declaration in Japan states all Physicians in all situations should not participate of help in torture or any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures, including in armed conflicts and civil unrest.

In its annual meeting two years ago, the institution decided that all doctors are obliged to document cases of torture they are aware of, and that the lack of documenting such cases would be considered tolerance to torture, and lack of assistance to the victims.

The Guardian said that Blachar sent an email to it promising to respond to the allegations, and described the news as baseless imaginary allegations.

In 1997, Blachar sent a letter to the Lancet medical Journal defending the participation of physicians in torturing Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.

In his letter, Blachar claimed that ‘moderate physical pressure’, similar to the torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration against Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and other CIA black sites in several countries, ‘does not violate the international law’.

This so-called ‘moderate’ torture used by the CIA includes beating the detainees, depriving them from sleeping, isolating them, subjecting them to extreme hot and cold, humiliating them in addition to various illegal methods.

Meyers, who is also Jewish and well known for his stances for human rights in Israel since many years, stated that physicians who are involved in torture should not be allowed to practice medicine, and should be held accountable for their participation in torture.

In June 26 of 2008, the Israeli Physicians For Human Rights published a report accusing Israeli doctors of ignoring the human rights of the Palestinian detainees.

It is worth mentioning that dozens of Palestinian detainees died due to torture, dozens more died due to medical negligence, while hundreds of detainees are currently in urgent need for medical care, including cancer patients, and detainees who suffer chronic illnesses and disabilities, but are not receiving the needed medical treatment.

Saed Bannoura - IMEMC

Source: RINF News

Amend smoking ban says AWT

Forest patron Antony Worrall Thompson (above) launches the new Save Our Pubs & Clubs: AmendTheSmokingBan.com campaign.

We were joined at the Buckingham Arms in Westminster by the Rt Hon Greg Knight MP (Conservative) and David Clelland MP (Labour). Lib Dem MP John Hemming sent a message supporting the campaign.

The campaign is supported by Forest, the liberal think tank Progressive Vision, the Adam Smith Institute, which champions the free market, and the Manifesto Club which campaigns for “freedom in everyday life”. See press release HERE.

Apart from Antony, Greg Knight and David Clelland, speakers included Progressive Vision's Mark Littlewood and Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club.

Other speakers were landlords Paul Lofthouse (Queen's Head, Coggleshall), Simon Esnard (Butcher's Arms, Luton) and Sean Spillane (Luton Social Club).

UKIP leader Nigel Farage made a surprise appearance and said his party would support the campaign in any way it could.

The ASI's Eamonn Butler has blogged about the launch HERE. Likewise Dick Puddlecote HERE.

Meanwhile:
TV chef joins campaign for limited pub smoking (Independent)
Amend smoking ban, save pubs (Morning Advertiser)
Campaigners launch bid to amend smoking ban (Publican)

Update: to support the campaign please click HERE.

Source: Taking Liberties

Change? We spunk on change. And fuck improvement.

Once upon a time there was a tedious, corrupt little cunt called John "Socialist Shitbag Masquerading As A Tory" Bercow.

Mister Bercow had some unfortunate experiences with some "expenses": essentially, he quite happily, and with malice aforethought, took the taxpayer to the cleaners and ran away laughing. Because he's a corrupt cunt.

Last month, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that Mr Bercow “flipped” the designation of his second home between London and his constituency when he sold two houses in the space of a year, enabling him to avoid paying capital gains tax (CGT) on the profits from either sale.

He denied any wrongdoing but said he would pay £6,508 plus VAT to HM Revenue & Customs to cover the tax he could have been asked to pay on the sale of one of the homes.

The Tory MP for Buckingham also claimed almost £1,000 for the cost of hiring an accountant to fill in tax returns. Members of the Government were criticised for submitting similar claims because it was rare for members of the public to be allowed to reclaim accountants’ bills as a legitimate expense.

Not only did John Bercow use "the rules" to avoid tax that any of the rest of us would have to pay but, as Guido so helpfully points out, he also maxed out his allowances in previous years.


In other words, John Bercow is a filthy fucking trougher who is never happier than when spending our hard-earned cash on... well, whatever he fucking fancies, frankly. He is a disgustingly corrupt, unpleasant little cock-weasel with dumplings for testicles.

I just want to make this absolutely fucking clear, because it has a bearing on what follows: John Bercow is a corrupt little fuck who has not only maxed out his expenses account with our money, but he has also bent the rules to within breaking point in order to avoid the taxes that he is happy to impose on us—the taxes, in fact, that fund his lavish lifestyle through his fat fucking salary and his ludicrously high expenses claims.

I would also like to point out that the Speaker of the House of Commons resigned because not only had he happily presided over the raiding of the public purse by MPs, and not only because he did his level best to stop any of the details coming out (using lawyers paid for with our money), but also because he himself was incredibly corrupt—bending the rules to within breaking point (sounding familiar?) and maxing out his expenses claims.

So, the Speaker has resigned.

At this point in time, the reputation of our Parliament is at an all-time low; rarely has the entire institution been held in so much contempt. This is because those who occupy the House—those who plonk their well-padded arseholes on the well-padded seats—have abused our trust, lived above the laws that they make to control us, raped our wallets and bankrupted the country.

And now this institution needs a new Speaker—the previous Speaker having resigned for being, basically, a corrupt, Glaswegian fucknuts.

So, what MPs should do is to elect a reasonably uncorrupt person to be Speaker, don't you think? Especially since it is the Speaker who oversees the MPs and ensures that they stick to the rules (such as they are).

After all, these very same MPs have been telling us how ashamed they are, how they realise that their actions were wrong, how they understand the people's anger. As such, they surely must want to elect an untainted Speaker who will be able to summon some moral authority when bringing reform to the system of allowances benefits-in-kind.

No. These corrupt little bastards have elected another corrupt little bastard as Speaker.

The only good thing about this whole sorry episode is... at least they didn't elect that fucking horse-faced cunt, Margaret Beckett.

Source: The Devils Kitchen

'Munich' Shouldn't Be Such a Dirty Word

Seventy years ago this month, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler once, twice and then a third time. On Sept. 30, 1938, they agreed that the German-speaking "Sudetenland" of Czechoslovakia should be ceded to Germany. Ever since, the name of this Munich agreement has been used as the ultimate political curse.

In truth, the story of the agreement is far from what is usually supposed. Over and again, "Munich" has been wilfully misunderstood and misinterpreted, with repeatedly disastrous consequences.

The Georgian crisis has just brought more cries of "appeasement" and "Munich." One writer in the Times of London described French President Nicolas Sarkozy as coming back from Moscow "waving a piece of paper and acclaiming peace in our time," the ill-fated words Chamberlain used on his return to London. Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia to the 1938 "Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia." These are only the latest in a long line of mischievous claims that any compromise is "another Munich" -- and they run alongside a line of sorry military adventures for more than 50 years conditioned by the fear of emulating Chamberlain.

When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal in 1956, one London politician after another recalled the 1930s. "It is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war," said Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 to protest appeasement even before Munich, was driven by the dread of being seen as another Chamberlain. Eden mounted a foolish military expedition that turned into a national humiliation and ended his career.

Although the Suez plot was thwarted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who asked Eden, "Anthony, have you gone out of your mind?"), not all Americans agreed with Ike. The Senate majority leader told him he should let the British know that "they have our moral support to go in." Ten years later, that senator -- Lyndon B. Johnson, by now the president -- learned the hard way that going in could be easier than getting out, and became another victim of the "Munich complex."

One of his top military advisers was Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had angrily told President John F. Kennedy to his face that refusing to take military action against Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis was "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich." Still spooked by the shadow of Munich, LBJ would escalate the Indochina war to show that he "wasn't any Chamberlain umbrella man."

Nor did President Bill Clinton want to be another Chamberlain. He bombed Serbia in 1999 and mused, "What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?"

And of course, the present administration has endlessly exploited the rhetoric of Munich. Former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compared opponents of the Iraq war with the earlier appeasers, and last May, President Bush derided the idea of negotiating with terrorists: "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' " So Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, Bush is another Churchill (at any rate, he keeps a bust of Churchill in the White House), and there must be no more Munichs. We see the outcome today.

Quite apart from their unhappy consequences, all these invocations of Munich begin by rewriting history. Chamberlain was a democratic leader who knew that most of his people understandably did not want to go to war in 1938, only 20 years after another terrible war in which about three-quarters of a million British men had been killed.

Besides which, Chamberlain was far from alone in thinking that he was addressing a real grievance. The one accurate thing about Kagan's quaint comparison is that the residents of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia no more want to be ruled by Georgia today than the Sudeten Germans wanted to be ruled by the Czechs 70 years ago.

While it's lamentably true that German resentment at "the slave treaty of Versailles" following World War I helped bring Hitler to power, there is another inconvenient truth: Between the wars, British and American liberals almost universally believed that the post-1918 settlement had been unjust. H.N. Brailsford, the leading leftist English commentator on foreign affairs, had written in 1920 that, of all the Versailles treaty's redrawing of borders, "the worst offence was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule." Experience seemed to show that nationalism was the great force of the age and that it needed to be assuaged -- or appeased, a word first used, it should be remembered, by those who advocated doing so.

To be sure, Churchill denounced the Munich agreement in a resonant speech: "This is only the first sip, the first bitter foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time." But he was speaking as someone untroubled by any sympathy for national self-determination.

As the blogger Andrew Sullivan has said, every Republican nowadays wants to be Churchill. But they should look at his record more closely. A few years earlier, Churchill had broken with the Conservatives (and all enlightened opinion) over his opposition to any form of self-government for India: He had no time for Indians (or later Egyptians) taking their own "stand for freedom." Churchill was a realpolitiker who believed in imperialism and spheres of influence -- the very things that Bush and the neoconservatives now profess to abhor.

And Americans most of all should pause before invoking Munich. After 1918, the United States had withdrawn from the world, with Congress slamming the door on immigrants (even desperate Jews fleeing Nazi Europe) and refusing to join the new League of Nations (a fact of which Bush seems unaware whenever he refers scornfully to the League). In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, the Democrats were at least as isolationist as the Republicans, and as late as the fall of 1940, FDR was still campaigning for a third term on the unambiguous promise to keep the United States out of any foreign wars. That helps explain why he sent a telegram reading "Good man" to Chamberlain when his British counterpart returned from meeting Hitler, and subsequently told the U.S. ambassador in Rome, "I am not a bit upset over the final result."

No American of any significance advocated military resistance to Hitler in the 1930s, and no such intervention would have been possible anyway. In September 1939, the U.S. Army was smaller than the Belgian army, and as the first grave setbacks in North Africa in 1942-43 would show, it was scarcely ready for serious fighting even after the United States entered the fray.

Some other words of Churchill's are too rarely quoted. They are from one of the finest and most moving, though least known, speeches he ever gave, paying tribute to Chamberlain after his death from cancer in November 1940. It had been Chamberlain's fate "to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man," Churchill said. "But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? . . . They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart -- the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour."

In his bow to Chamberlain's memory, Churchill showed a magnanimity and wisdom that others have lacked. "Long and hard, hazardous years lie before us," he continued, "but at least we entered upon them united and with clean hearts."

Never once did Churchill advocate preemptive war, and he always recognized that democracies should use arms only as a last resort. Maybe the presidential candidates should be asked whether the United States entered the Iraq war "united and with clean hearts." That could be the real "lesson of Munich."

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Source: The Washington Post

How Good Was the Good War?

Patrick J. Buchanan deserves respect for blasting open an important historical question that the gatekeepers of allowable opinion probably assumed they had welded shut. According to the official version of American history, we are supposed to draw from World War II only a series of neat lessons about “appeasement” and our government’s unquenchable thirst for justice. Innocently wondering if there might have been some alternative to 50 million deaths and the most terrible war in history is enough to make you an object of suspicion—what are you, some kind of extremist?

Even from parts of the Right, the subject of World War II elicits the shrill denunciations, the smears, and the unchallengeable orthodoxies for which conservatives have traditionally condemned the politically correct Left. Buchanan may be wrong (though I do not think he is), but there is nothing wicked or perverse about considering contrary-to-fact scenarios in light of historical evidence. His prose is measured and non-polemical, and his judgments, which are shared by a great many historians and other figures of distinction, deserve to be considered on their merits. Claims that Buchanan’s version of history is politically motivated can hardly be taken seriously, especially coming from people who have made comfortable livings out of distorting the historical record on behalf of their own foreign-policy ambitions.

Munich is the most obvious example. Counting on popular ignorance, neoconservatives never weary of applying the “lessons of Munich” to modern American foreign policy. These so-called lessons turn out to be a decontextualized muddle of half-crazed maxims about the pointlessness of negotiation, the self-serving fraudulence of all enemy grievance claims, and the risk that unless the United States responds with overwhelming force to the slightest modification of the status quo—the justice or injustice of which is not up for discussion—we’ll soon be speaking Ruritanian. Cartoon history begets cartoon policy.

If only the matter had been as simple as modern propaganda about Munich would have it. In 1919, in defiance of the much heralded principle of self-determination, 3 million Germans had been consigned to what became second-class status in the new Czechoslovakia. German grievances, most of which were considered reasonable by just about everyone, had to be addressed one way or another if an endless cycle of war and punishment was to be avoided.

In other words, crushing Germany in a war over the Sudetenland would merely have returned Europe to square one: more punitive peace terms, further German resentment, and yet another episode of hyperpatriotic German politics aimed at revenge. Diplomats in the real world, denounced today as fools and appeasers, had a difficult situation on their hands as they approached this problem.

Buchanan makes a strong case against Britain giving a war guarantee to Poland rather than drawing a realistic line in the West that Hitler could not cross without risking war. George Kennan, as mainstream as they come, said so in a letter to Buchanan in 1999. And Ernest May, my old professor at Harvard, noted, “a government that a half-year earlier had resisted going to war for a faraway country with democratic institutions, well-armed military forces, and strong fortifications, now promised with no apparent reservations to go to war for a dictatorship with less-than-modern armed forces and wide-open frontiers.” A swashbuckling Polish regime was thus given the power to decide whether Britain would be drawn into war, a war Britain was absurdly unprepared to wage, much less win.

The number of politicians—and, later, historians—who considered Chamberlain’s war guarantee reckless and ill advised will surprise most readers. Lloyd George called it a “frightful gamble” and laughed out loud at the suggestion that it would deter Hitler. Even Churchill, in his official history, wondered (albeit disingenuously in light of his own position in 1939): “How could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? … Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”

Why should legitimate opinions like these be beyond the pale?

Probably the most important reason that free discussion of World War II—the diplomatic blunders, the Allied atrocities, all the what ifs—has been frowned upon or suppressed is that some people perceive an implicit disregard for the unspeakable fate of Europe’s Jews. Yet it was the war itself that put Europe’s Jewish populations in danger in the first place, an obvious point that has been missed by all but a few writers.

In February 1942, for example, Goebbels wrote in his diaries, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe. … The Führer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.” A month later, after describing the deportations from Poland’s ghettos, Goebbels observed, “Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.”

“Because Britain issued the war guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany,” writes Buchanan, “by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans.” If he’s right, then with more sensible British diplomacy, the Jewish populations of Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, and Yugoslavia would have survived, just as the Jewish populations of Sweden, Switzerland, and the Iberian Peninsula did.

David Gordon, a (Jewish) scholar Buchanan thanks in his acknowledgments, has likewise wondered in light of all this: “Was it not a clear moral imperative to avoid the outbreak of war and, if possible, to secure the evacuation of the Jews from parts of Europe likely to fall under German control? Further, once war broke out, was it not imperative to end the war as soon as possible?” This, surely, is a morally serious position.

No one would have begrudged Buchanan a quiet retirement. He chose instead to re-examine a historical episode that all sectors of society treat with religious reverence, knowing full well how his work, which most of his opponents would not bother to read, would be received. But once the guardians of acceptable opinion have finished venting their spleens at what a scoundrel Buchanan is for not dutifully repeating the things he was taught in seventh grade, normal people may begin to evaluate his thesis rationally. The existence of this symposium suggests that that process may have begun.

by Thomas E. Woods Jr

Source: The American Conservative