Both of California's senators? Oh my!

Humm. I think he is on to something here. It explains a lot. GOOD research !

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Yeah - and like the last time when people where down there, they had not even seen a quarter of the places they had planned to see before they were called back because the politicians wanted to make short process. That one German control guy I read about was really more than upset to have been commanded to stop and leave before he could finish his task. Was his dissatisfaction with this fact biased?

Am I supposed to care why some foreigner wasn't allowed to finish his job a DECADE after it started? Well guess what.... The simple fact of the matter is that it had been a decade and Saddam was in direct violation of multiple UN orders, and we don't need your permission to invade other countries and don't really care if you approve either.

Well, I know several people who lost a fortune with these "Deutsche Telekom" stocks when their "worth" dropped to a fifth of their nominal prize. Everyone who bought "Deutsche Telekom" stocks thought they were Low Risk but lost most of their investigations. The bad thing on Stock Trading is that it's not predictable in the long run, that it's only for the short-term turn-over.
If I had enough money to invest, I'd rather spend it for a lower but sure and predictable long-term win, than for a higher but risky short-term win which I can not predict.

Low Risk doesn't mean you can't lose money, it means you don't lose your entire savings, your kid's college fund, your house and your car if the stock falls. You start with an initial investment and no matter how high the stock climbs, you can never fall below zero. I realize that's an overly simplified explanation, but it seems you don't understand how the market works anyway.

It's a difference between politically biased and subjectively biased. While politically biased media tend to ignore facts which don't fit to the opinions of the party/politicians they support, those media you call the "most biased" ones don't need to pass political/party-based taboos, they can tell their opinions and spread all facts frankly.

Well you keep telling yourself that and I'll continue to show you this is Earth and not whatever fantasyland you think it is.

Of course it's biased when returned soldiers say: "in war it's like hell, and I suggest everyone to refuse" - But: it is reasonable. Too many lost their lifes, and too many returned having lost limbs. And to get enough soldiers, too many young folks are talked into joining Army/Navy/Marines voluntarily, using false promises. And that's not biased. And too many are joining military only to come out of their poor neighborhood or to get a secure income - and that's also not biased.

America is about choices. The military isn't the only option for those who live in poor neighborhoods.

Well, it's your opinion that I don't know what I'm talking about - only because my statements are opposed to yours.

It's not an opinion, it's a fact and you verified it yet again with your comments about the stock market.

It's impossible that everyone has the same opinion as the other one, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one of them doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

When you opinions are based on lies, half-truths, and ignorance, then yeah, I can say you don't know what you're talking about.

Their opinions just are built on the experience and knowledge each one of them has made, and these are otherwise for everyone. So IMHO accusing me to have no clue what I'm talking about only because I can't agree with you in all terms seems to be quite ignorant and self-centered.

Guess why most Americans don't care what foreigners think...

Of course we Americans never agree with foreigners ! Their ideas and opinions always conflict with our total lack of information.

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Their ideas and opinions always conflict with our total lack of information.

Maybe that total lack of information is your fault and not that of America itself.

Good news for you though, ignorance is a very curable disease!!

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Their ideas and opinions always conflict with our total lack of information.

Maybe that total lack of information is your fault and not that of America itself.

Good news for you though, ignorance is a very curable disease!!

Sorry. First we have to cure the "Big Bone" disease that so many of us are infected with

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Sorry. First we have to cure the "Big Bone" disease that so many of us are infected with

Well you've got me stumped.

I'm not sure how to reply to someone who thinks curing his own ignorance should go on the back burner....

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Sorry. First we have to cure the "Big Bone" disease that so many of us are infected with

Well you've got me stumped.

I'm not sure how to reply to someone who thinks curing his own ignorance should go on the back burner....

Just playing with you. Cool site by the way. I worry about our schools. If they can graduate and not know where the U.S. is on the globe, we are lost. I wish we had Discovery TV and the History channel when I was a pup. I hope they watch it instead of going on my space. I just got my 2007 Almanac, coolest book in the world. Wish I had discovered this long ago. You in New Orleans ?

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Just playing with you. Cool site by the way. I worry about our schools. If they can graduate and not know where the U.S. is on the globe, we are lost. I wish we had Discovery TV and the History channel when I was a pup. I hope they watch it instead of going on my space. I just got my 2007 Almanac, coolest book in the world. Wish I had discovered this long ago. You in New Orleans ?

Thanks for the site compliment....negative on the New Orleans, although I plan on taking a trip down there on Feb. 24 for a concert. I'm about 500 highway miles Northwest in a little town called Natchitoches (oldest permanent settlement in the entire Louisiana Purchase)

As for the kids....highly unlikely they will choose educational TV over anything. Of course that's where proper parenting should come in.

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Just playing with you. Cool site by the way. I worry about our schools. If they can graduate and not know where the U.S. is on the globe, we are lost. I wish we had Discovery TV and the History channel when I was a pup. I hope they watch it instead of going on my space. I just got my 2007 Almanac, coolest book in the world. Wish I had discovered this long ago. You in New Orleans ?

Thanks for the site compliment....negative on the New Orleans, although I plan on taking a trip down there on Feb. 24 for a concert. I'm about 500 highway miles Northwest in a little town called Natchitoches (oldest permanent settlement in the entire Louisiana Purchase)

As for the kids....highly unlikely they will choose educational TV over anything. Of course that's where proper parenting should come in.

If they had 2 parents. Like in the song trapped in the USA, forgot who did it. it explained it all

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Just playing with you. Cool site by the way. I worry about our schools. If they can graduate and not know where the U.S. is on the globe, we are lost. I wish we had Discovery TV and the History channel when I was a pup. I hope they watch it instead of going on my space. I just got my 2007 Almanac, coolest book in the world. Wish I had discovered this long ago. You in New Orleans ?

Thanks for the site compliment....negative on the New Orleans, although I plan on taking a trip down there on Feb. 24 for a concert. I'm about 500 highway miles Northwest in a little town called Natchitoches (oldest permanent settlement in the entire Louisiana Purchase)

As for the kids....highly unlikely they will choose educational TV over anything. Of course that's where proper parenting should come in.

If they had 2 parents. Like in the song trapped in the USA, forgot who did it. it explained it all

lost in america is the song

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Kofi Annan and the U.N.'s limits

By William Shawcross

Shawcross is the author of “Allies – Why the West Had to Remove Saddam.”

December 29, 2006

Kofi Annan deserves a good send-off. For 10 years he has persevered with unfailing grace in what really is “a job from hell.”

I am biased – I've admired Annan since the early 1990s, some years before he became secretary-general of the United Nations. Like the U.S. government, I welcomed his replacing Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1996. Annan had been the one U.N. official brave enough to give Washington the green light to bomb the Serbs to the negotiating table in the summer of 1995. His intervention then was crucial.

It is easy to forget now that Annan's first five-year term was widely seen as a great success. He presented a wise, compassionate approach and a breath of fresh air. He also showed unprecedented honesty – commissioning independent inquiries into the disasters of Rwanda and Srebrenica and accepting all criticism from them, including criticism of himself.

Kofi Annan was (and is) pro-American, and he mended the United Nations' relations with Congress. He persuaded international businesses to help promote development. He concentrated much attention on the ravages of HIV-AIDS.

Not surprisingly, he was re-elected by acclamation in the middle of 2001. But then Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. As Annan himself said, the world entered the 21st century through a gate of fire. That fire still rages, especially in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.

Unlike Annan, I was and remain in favor of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. But the Security Council was and remains divided on the whole Iraq issue. The United Nations being what it is, no secretary general could have ignored that division.

Tragically for Annan and the United Nations, more than 20 of his best people were brutally murdered in Baghdad by al-Qaeda in August 2003. This assault, together with the political divisions, have crippled the United Nations in Iraq ever since. But Annan insisted that the United Nations help stage the successful January 2005 election in which so many millions of Iraqis voted freely for the first time in their lives.

The U.N. role in Iraq has been further complicated, if not diminished, by the oil-for-food scandal. This was indeed a disaster; the secretariat was incompetent, a few officials behaved corruptly and the perversion of the program by Saddam Hussein (as Charles Duelfer showed in his magisterial Iraq Survey Group report) enabled the dictator to prop up the Iraqi economy in the last years of his misrule.

But it is wrong to blame all this on Annan – members of the Security Council, particularly France, Russia and China, were all busily corrupting the program for their own ends. Even the United States and Britain turned a blind eye to sanctions-busting when it helped their ally Jordan.

Annan tried hard to reform the U.N. system. He has had less success than he'd hoped. In the spring he devised a complicated reform plan that, though supported by John Bolton, then the U.S. ambassador, and agreed on by the Security Council, was scuttled at the last minute by the “Group of 77” developing states. To put it crudely, too many ambassadors and their presidents were frightened of losing too many jobs for their “nieces” in the cozy U.N. system. Annan was deeply disappointed. Blame the members, not him.

Annan has worked endlessly on myriad, often unseen problems. Traveling with him to countries around the world, I was astonished at the number of international calls he had to take daily from leaders begging for help in settling disputes. He dealt with such requests in a calm and conscientious manner that inspired confidence and conciliation.

Darfur has been an agony for Annan the past two years. I was with him in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in November; at a meeting of the Security Council's “permanent five,” he was desperate to get agreement to send a U.N. peacekeeping force into Darfur to stem the mass murders and ethnic cleansing promoted by the Sudanese government.

After a long day of negotiations, hopes rose that Sudan had finally agreed to Annan's plan, but it was a trick: Soon after the meeting, Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, announced he would allow no such thing.

The bottom line is that, like Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and all too many other leaders of member states, al-Bashir is a gangster and a murderer. It is not Annan's fault that the world has failed to confront al-Bashir effectively – the truth is that he has far too much support, tacit if not overt, among African, Arab and other governments. It's the same with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and other despots.

Millions of people around the world place hope in the United Nations. It all too often disappoints. It does do vital things, but there is much it cannot do, and it is stuffed with cronyism and hypocrisy. It reflects the horrors of the world, as well as trying to keep those horrors at bay. Annan has dealt with such problems with more skill, patience and decency than any recent secretary-general. If he was unable to create the decent, reformed, efficient and humane organization he sought, that is because far too few of its members want any such thing.

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me@rescam.org

Prosecutor accused of ethics violations in Duke rape case

By Aaron Beard
ASSOCIATED PRESS

December 29, 2006

RALEIGH, N.C. – The North Carolina bar filed ethics charges yesterday against the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case, accusing him of saying misleading or inflammatory things to the news media about the athletes under suspicion for rape.

The punishment for ethics violations can range from admonishment to disbarment.

Among the four rules of professional conduct District Attorney Mike Nifong was accused of violating was a pro-hibition a-gainst making comments “that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.”

The charges will be heard by an independent body called the Disciplinary Hearing Commission, made up of both lawyers and non-lawyers.

In a statement, the bar said it opened a case against Nifong in March, a little more than two weeks after the party where a 28-year-old student at North Carolina Central University hired to perform as a stripper said she was raped.

Nifong had no comment yesterday about the bar action.

Another of the rules Nifong was charged with breaking forbids “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” The bar said that when DNA testing failed to find evidence that a lacrosse player raped the accuser, Nifong said the players might have used a condom.

According to the bar, Nifong knew that assertion was misleading because he had received a report from an emergency room nurse in which the accuser said her attackers did not use condoms. Defense attorney Joseph Cheshire, who represents one of the three lacrosse players charged with sexual offense and kidnapping, declined to comment.

Last week, Nifong dropped the rape charges against the athletes after the stripper wavered in her story.

The accuser told Nifong's investigator last week – nine months after the party – that she was no longer certain she was penetrated, as she had claimed several times before.

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me@rescam.org

Britain pays off last of its WWII debt to U.S.

BLOOMBERG NEWS SERVICE

December 29, 2006

Britain will transfer $84 million to the U.S. Treasury today, the final payment on a debt used to finance the defeat of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II.

The U.S. extended $4.34 billion in credit in 1945, allowing Britain to stave off bankruptcy after devoting almost all its resources to the war for half a decade. Since 1950, Britain has made payments on the debt at the end of every year except six.

At the time it was granted, the loan strained trans-Atlantic relations. British politicians expected a gift in recognition of their contribution to the war effort, especially for the lives lost before the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor.

“The U.S. didn't seem to realize that Britain was bankrupt,” said Alan Sked, a historian at the London School of Economics. The loan was “denounced in the House of Lords, but in the end, the country had no choice.”

The loan was double the size of the British economy at the time.

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me@rescam.org

Britain pays off last of its WWII debt to U.S.

BLOOMBERG NEWS SERVICE

December 29, 2006

Britain will transfer $84 million to the U.S. Treasury today, the final payment on a debt used to finance the defeat of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II.

The U.S. extended $4.34 billion in credit in 1945, allowing Britain to stave off bankruptcy after devoting almost all its resources to the war for half a decade. Since 1950, Britain has made payments on the debt at the end of every year except six.

At the time it was granted, the loan strained trans-Atlantic relations. British politicians expected a gift in recognition of their contribution to the war effort, especially for the lives lost before the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor.

“The U.S. didn't seem to realize that Britain was bankrupt,” said Alan Sked, a historian at the London School of Economics. The loan was “denounced in the House of Lords, but in the end, the country had no choice.”

The loan was double the size of the British economy at the time.

As far as I know, East Germany had paid all Germany's WWII debts to the former Soviet Union until the end of the '80s (OK the Soviets took it out of that country year by year, including interests), while West Germany not only never had to pay WWII debts to the USA but was given big money from them with the Marshall plan. No wonder that East Germany was financially broke then while West Germany became prosperous.

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Account frozen...

Britain pays off last of its WWII debt to U.S.

BLOOMBERG NEWS SERVICE

December 29, 2006

Britain will transfer $84 million to the U.S. Treasury today, the final payment on a debt used to finance the defeat of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II.

The U.S. extended $4.34 billion in credit in 1945, allowing Britain to stave off bankruptcy after devoting almost all its resources to the war for half a decade. Since 1950, Britain has made payments on the debt at the end of every year except six.

At the time it was granted, the loan strained trans-Atlantic relations. British politicians expected a gift in recognition of their contribution to the war effort, especially for the lives lost before the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor.

“The U.S. didn't seem to realize that Britain was bankrupt,” said Alan Sked, a historian at the London School of Economics. The loan was “denounced in the House of Lords, but in the end, the country had no choice.”

The loan was double the size of the British economy at the time.

As far as I know, East Germany had paid all Germany's WWII debts to the former Soviet Union until the end of the '80s (OK the Soviets took it out of that country year by year, including interests), while West Germany not only never had to pay WWII debts to the USA but was given big money from them with the Marshall plan. No wonder that East Germany was financially broke then while West Germany became prosperous.

The difference in economic position was more an effect of Communist economic policy than otherwise. The Marshall Plan provided seed money to rebuild infrastructure, not total economic support. This probably halved the recovery time for West Germany, but everything after that came from the effort and genius of the German people.

Justice – if imperfect – served by execution

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

December 30, 2006

The Iraqi government's execution of Saddam Hussein inevitably will prompt many reactions. Few question Hussein was a bloodthirsty tyrant in his 24 years as Iraqi dictator and deserved severe punishment.

But there will be complaints that his trial – for the 1982 killing of 148 people in the town of Dujail after a failed assassination attempt against him – was not fair. There will be gripes that Hussein should have stood trial for his even more appalling atrocities, such as the massacre of tens of thousands of Kurds and the use of nerve gas against Iranian troops.

We believe, however, that justice – perhaps rough and imperfect – has been served. Yes, Hussein's trial was a chaotic affair, subject to obvious political interference. But those who raise this objection ignore a crucial point: Hussein didn't dispute the most damning evidence against him. He freely admitted to ordering the murder of the 148 men and boys from Dujail, even though he had scant, if any, evidence that most were involved in the attempt to kill him. Hussein said this was his right as head of state.

As for the decision not to proceed with other trials involving other horrors, it ultimately and appropriately rested with the Iraqi government, not outsiders. Those who consider the execution hasty and ill-advised might have a different take were they part of the family of Ahmed Hassan Mohammed al-Dujaili, the first witness in the Dujail trial. As he testified, Hussein looked him in the eye and made a throat-slitting gesture broadcast throughout Iraq – an obvious threat. Since then, one of Ahmed's nephews has been killed, one brother has been shot, another has been attacked and two of his cousins have disappeared.

Yes, Saddam's death doesn't mean such bloodshed will end in Iraq. But at least he will no longer be able to add such murderous codas to his blood-soaked record while seated in court. Good riddance to a monster.

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me@rescam.org

The year in review - 2006

Happy New Year!

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me@rescam.org

As far as I know, East Germany had paid all Germany's WWII debts to the former Soviet Union until the end of the '80s (OK the Soviets took it out of that country year by year, including interests), while West Germany not only never had to pay WWII debts to the USA but was given big money from them with the Marshall plan. No wonder that East Germany was financially broke then while West Germany became prosperous.

The difference in economic position was more an effect of Communist economic policy than otherwise. The Marshall Plan provided seed money to rebuild infrastructure, not total economic support. This probably halved the recovery time for West Germany, but everything after that came from the effort and genius of the German people.

I think that's also the reason why East Germany could endure so much time, they rebuilt the industry, and tried to keep regular prices, though being ripped off regularly by their "Big Friend", the Soviets...

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Dictators don't usually go easily

JIM HOAGLAND
THE WASHINGTON POST

January 1, 2007

Dictators die harder than most of us. Having wielded unlimited power in life, they seem to be sustained by a stubborn belief in their ability to stare down death, too. But secret police, arbitrary executions and torture finally provide no lasting defense against their own date with the grim reaper.

That lends a particularly morbid, even pathetic, quality to the last days of Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, as it did to those of Francisco Franco and of many other tyrants-in-extremis before el rais Saddam and el jefe Fidel were confronted, respectively, with a hangman's rope and the withering ravages of disease.

Survival is the dictator's primary occupation – as well as his justification for ruthlessness. “His main contribution to life, finally, is fear; but fear such as thunder, cancer or madness may provoke,” author William Kennedy wrote of the fictional caudillo that Gabriel García MÁrquez created in “The Autumn of the Patriarch.” Facing death, the dictator is “the embodiment of egocentric evil unleashed,” Kennedy continued in a masterful 1976 book review for The New York Times.

The year before, García MÁrquez was in Madrid, as was I, for Franco's 40 days and nights of dying, inch by inch. Moreover, meetings I had with Saddam around the same time and later with Castro instantly gave me the impression that neither intended to go into the night quietly – or at all. They could not and would not let others pretend to command their people, or allow history to tamper with the image they willed for themselves.

When he ruled Iraq, Saddam left nothing to chance. A visitor who might greet him had to wash his or her hands with a mysterious blue liquid and pass through a maze of metal detectors in his vast palace. Among the scores of guards and aides, only one was trusted to know which room Saddam would use to greet the visitor.

For years after that encounter, I published open letters to Saddam urging him to get out of the dictator business, or at least quit slaughtering his nation's Kurds, Shiites and Sunni dissidents. I can stop. The approach of the hangman's rope finally focused his mind on my point.

Or so it seemed in the farewell letter that Saddam's lawyers claim the deposed tyrant wrote. Released one day after Iraq's highest court upheld his death sentence last week, the letter urges Iraqis “not to hate, because hatred does not leave space for a person to be fair. . . .” Even U.S. troops should not be hated.

The lawyers would have us remember Saddam as a pious, forgiving ruler concerned about his people's welfare. They see this as a useful legal tactic. But I doubt it is the way Saddam wanted us to remember him. On the witness stand in his two trials, he remained generally fierce and defiant, refusing to be anything other than a man whom others must fear or else.

Those who would blame all of Iraq's current evils on the American occupation are already busy airbrushing Saddam's image. But we cannot let death obscure his role in creating the inferno that is Iraq today. He leaves behind a country successfully recast in his own ferocious image to a degree far greater than I had imagined.

Before 2003, I believed that Iraqis were largely a people held hostage by Saddam, his murderous clan and the Baathist machine. But far more Iraqis turned out to be like Saddam – ready to use torture and assassination in the pursuit of wealth and power – than the world's best intelligence agencies had predicted, as David Kay's official analysis of the CIA failure to understand pre-invasion Iraq details. These Iraqis are Saddam's enduring legacy.

I suspect that Saddam preferred to go out in a grim finale that will be portrayed by his disciples as victor's justice than to waste away, in solitude and yet under the public's watchful gaze, as Castro is doing in Havana.

Cuba's situation after Castro will not be as traumatic or bloody as Iraq, in large part because Castro did not feel it necessary to rule as harshly and sadistically as did Saddam. As Gabrial García MÁrquez, Castro's friend, has written: “The Latin American reality is totally Rabelaisian.” It misshapes Latin dictators in ways different than do the blood feuds of the Middle East.

But both dedicated their lives to what García MÁrquez calls “the solitary vice of power.” Their deaths will lighten their crimes and responsibilities not a whit.

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me@rescam.org

500th POST!

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me@rescam.org