BartCop Entertainment Archives - Wednesday, 24 November, 2004

"The British-American Project for the Successor Generation, to give it its full title, was founded in 1985 'to perpetuate the close relationship between the United States and Britain' in the words of BAP's slim official history, through 'transatlantic friendships and professional contacts'. It has a membership of '600 leaders and opinion formers', drawn equally from both countries. It holds an annual conference (the next starts this Friday in Chicago) to which journalists are not invited and at which everything said is, officially at least, not to be repeated to outsiders. It rarely features in the mainstream media - instead, it makes tantalizingly vague and fleeting appearances in those corners of the internet where conspiracy aficionados gather."

- Andy Beckett: Friends in high places: You won't have heard of the British-American Project, but its members include some of the most powerful men and women in the UK. Officially it exists to promote the 'special relationship', but it has been described as a Trojan horse for US foreign policy. Even its supporters joke that it's funded by the CIA. Should we be worried? -

"Fallujah - a town of 300,000 souls of which many have already met their Maker - has finally been pacified. That'll teach them to lay off foreign mercenaries in the future. Oops! I mean contractors, of course. Congratulations USA!"

- Linda S. Heard: Fallujah - Murder Made Respectable -

"While we vigorously condemn the illegal theft of internal company documents, we must admit that they are in fact authentic. Further, the facts as stated in the memos recently released to news organizations are in fact true; namely, that it does appear that a sizable percentage of AOL subscribers do not, in fact, possess computers."

- Joe Redley: AOL's chief marketing officer - AOL Admits 40% of Subscribers Don't Have Computers -

"Well, these documents do explain one thing. I always wondered how AOL managed to maintain a customer satisfaction rate of 40%. Now we know exactly which 40% of their client base that is."

- Mary Kowshik: Wired News analyst -

"ANYBODY who does not believe that there are American prisoners of war in a conflict this extensive and dynamic is lying to himself. Any American Government official who denies that there are American military POWs is committing criminal deceit. Because America has so blatantly abandoned the Geneva Convention, the 'tat' Iraqi response of executing American POWs for our military's 'tit' of massively murderous war crimes being committed (even as I compose these words) against tens of thousands of Muslim non-combatants, the rest of the world will simply see it as a 'what goes around comes around' circumstance wholly produced by American imperial insanity."

- Dan Dwriter -

"A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today called for an apology from the MSNBC cable television network over comments on its Imus in the Morning program that referred to Palestinians as 'stinking animals' and suggested that they all be killed."

- Palestinians Called 'Stinking Animals' on MSNBC's 'Imus' -

"Many Bush partisans send me e-mails fiercely advocating 'virtuous violence.' They do not flinch at the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims who refuse to do as we tell them. These partisans do not doubt for a second that Bush has the right to dictate to Muslims and everyone else (especially the French). Many also express their conviction that all of Bush's critics should be rounded up and sent to the Middle East in time for the first nuke.

"These attitudes represent a sharp break from American values and foreign policy. The new conservatives have more in common with the Brownshirt movement that silenced German opposition to Hitler than with America's Founding Fathers."

- Paul Craig Roberts: There is no one left to stop them -

"'Arrogant' is the adjective used most often in any discussion of [Michael] Powell and the way he pushes his pet projects.

"Basically his theology is this: Commercial interests come first, second and third among priorities and 'the public interest, convenience and necessity,' which the FCC is mandated to uphold, straggles in a distant fourth. Powell ignores the pleas of public-minded groups who try to meet with him, critics say, but will rush off eagerly to any dinner or cocktail party sponsored by big corporate powers.

"We are at the top of a dangerous slippery slope. When you start fining people for uttering words, the list of words is bound to grow. And words are ideas.

"Powell is an agenda masquerading as a man. And a cunning politician. But on CNBC, he played the jolly old elf. 'I am still having fun,' he burbled. 'Right now, I just have no plans of going anywhere.'

"Alas! I could tell him one place to go. But it's a four-letter word and who knows, I might end up in jail."

- Tom Shales: Nipple sets off wave of arrogance that's fine with FCC boss -

"We go. They want us out of there - the longer we stay, the more they're going to kill us, and the more they will be killed. And the more outrages they will perpetrate on us here at home. Get out. No more adventures. Forget about our friends in the Middle East who want us to attack Iran and Syria. Forget them. Tell them to get lost. Cut the Pentagon budget by 50 percent. That'll give you enough money to properly educate the people so they will know their own history, and when a bunch of thugs come along proposing to fleece the taxpayer - they will recognize them, because they will know about them from past history."

- Gore Vidal -

"Question: If resistance to an invasion, war of aggression, and occupation of a sovereign and independent country constitutes 'terrorism,' as U.S. officials claim, then does that mean that the Polish resistance to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939 constituted 'terrorism?' And don't forget that President Franklin Roosevelt ended up forming a partnership with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet communists to resist Nazi Germany's invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union (after Germany had invaded and occupied Poland before Stalin and the Soviet Union had). Was Soviet resistance 'terrorism?' And keep in mind that FDR agreed that Stalin and the Soviet communists could occupy Eastern Europe as part of the 'liberation' of Poland and the other Eastern European countries. Was resistance by the Eastern Europeans to the joint U.S.-USSR 'liberation' of their countries 'terrorism?'

"What if China invaded and occupied the United States? Would some Americans cooperate with their occupier? What if some Americans decided to resist? Would resistance to the Chinese occupation of America constitute 'terrorism?'

"What if Chinese citizens resisted their own communist regime? Would that constitute 'terrorism?'

"Well, at least we know that the answer by U.S. officials to that last question is definitely 'Yes,' at least when the training is provided by al-Qaeda. See this New York Times article, which details how the U.S. military has seized and incarcerated - and is threatening to execute - Chinese 'enemy combatants' in the 'war on terrorism' at the Pentagon’s prisoner gulag in Cuba simply because the men received weapons training from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to help them in their fight for independence from the Chinese communists. Ironically, it was the U.S. government that helped train al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan."

- Hornberger's Commentary -

"You cannot have a war against an abstract noun - which is what terrorism is. I hate to be a grammarian here. But its perfect nonsense. When the Soviet Union folded and we stopped the war on communism, we pretended we had won it. We didn't. We lost it. And the Russians lost it too. We were both broke, and we both gave up. But, we had to have a replacement for it to keep up this great military budget which started with Reagan and is now just out of control.

- Gore Vidal -

"In the days ahead, we must find common cause. We must join in common effort... I leave this campaign with a prayer that has even greater meaning to me now that I've come to know our vast country so much better thanks to all of you, and what a privilege it has been to do so, and that prayer is very simple: God bless America."

- John Kerry -

"Unity and prayer. I cannot think of a less helpful farewell sentiment to leave the many thousands of first-time Democratic volunteers with. Let's talk about unity and prayer.

"First, unity. If you are a professional Democratic politician, 'unity' translates into making the best deal for yourself with the other side, double-talking the volunteers who busted their butts for Mr. Kerry and refusing to tolerate, whatever else may come, any kind of looking back on Mr. Kerry and the kind of campaign he ran.

"Since his winning was the sole and entire raison d´être for Mr. Kerry's candidacy, his losing has left Democrats and their fellow travelers with a hole in the ground, with nothing. John Kerry was not the champion of a cause which orators can say will go on after him. His cause was beating George Bush and so making sure a clump of hideous, faith-based horrors do not take over the Supreme Court. Duh? This is not a Democratic version of the famous 1964 Goldwater campaign, in which the Republican candidate got skunked but left the G.O.P. with a cause, a goal and a high purpose which would animate hundreds of thousands for years and victories to come. Not the Kerry campaign: It has left us with the hole in the doughnut."

- Nicholas von Hoffman: Now Is Not the Time For National Unity! -

"The ability of the assembled politicians, less than three weeks after the conclusion of a bitter election campaign, to rub shoulders and pat one another on the back says a number of things about contemporary American political life.

"First of all, it reveals that, when all is said and done, the differences between the Democrats and Republicans on issues that matter to the ruling elite are minute. How else is this mutual-admiration society to be explained?"

- David Walsh: Opening of Bill Clinton's library: a sordid gathering of the fat cats -

"After its celebrated reopening on November 20th, 2004, following a renovation project that cost $858 million, the Museum of Modern Art will begin charging visitors $20 for admission. The cost represents a 60% increase from the previous fee of $12 and makes MoMA one of the most expensive urban museums in the world.

"A museum is only a custodian of our collective cultural inheritance, and has a responsibility to make its holdings available to people from all walks of life. The $858 million dollars that MoMA has spent in its renovation serves only its own vainglory. That sum could have provided the old MoMA's 1.8 million annual visitors with free admission for forty years. Instead, the museum will jealously hoard its collection, allowing only the wealthiest elites access to our collective cultural treasures."

- Free MoMA! -

"For anyone who doubts that we are entering a new era, let's flash back just a few years. Saving Private Ryan, with its CSI-style disembowelments and expletives undeleted, was nationally broadcast by ABC on Veteran's Day in both 2001 and 2002 without incident, and despite the protests of family-values groups. What has changed between then and now? A government with the zeal to control both information and culture has received what it calls a mandate. Media owners who once might have thought that complaints by the American Family Association about a movie like Saving Private Ryan would go nowhere are keenly aware that the administration wants to reward its base. Merely the threat that the F.C.C. might punish a TV station or a network is all that's needed to push them onto the slippery slope of self-censorship before anyone in Washington even bothers to act. This is McCarthyism, 'moral values' style.

"What makes the Ryan case both chilling and a harbinger of what's to come is that it isn't about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast Saving Private Ryan also own major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next. If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions' efforts to present the graphic truth of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that are exercised by Bono and Saving Private Ryan are often the same ones who are campaigning to derail any news organization that's not towing the administration line in lockstep with Fox."

- Frank Rich: Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan' -

"History teaches us that men composing all denominations of religious faith, when clothed with ecclesiastical and temporal power, have been tyrants."

- Sam Houston -

"Bev Harris of http://www.blackboxvoting.org/, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures.

"Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.

"Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, 'They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door.'"

- Thom Hartmann: Black Box Voting Investigators Find Stinking Evidence in Florida -

"Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, the source of most of the opium and heroin on Europe's streets, was up sharply this year, reaching the highest levels in the country's history and in the world, the United Nations announced on Thursday... Afghan officials and foreign diplomats called the sharp rise in cultivation and production a major failure for President Hamid Karzai and the international effort to counter narcotics."

- Bush Gets Afghanistan Economy Moving -

"Poppies. Poppies will make them sleep."

- The Wicked Witch of the West -

"Last year, about one in three low-wage full-time workers in this city [New York] experienced one of more of these hardships:

- their gas, phone, or electricity was turned off because they couldn't pay the bills;

- they used a food bank or pantry to avoid going hungry;

- they couldn't pay the rent;

- a prescription cost too much for them to fill it."

- Linda Ostreicher: The New Yorkers You Don't Hear About -

"Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history. Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant's claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes."

- Alan Berlow: Gonzalez Kept Key Information from Governor -

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

- Albert Einstein -

"The fact that George H.W. Bush was working for them while his son was president, while his son, in fact, was dramatically increasing defense spending - that seems to me one of the most blatant conflicts of interests in history."

- Dan Briody: The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group -

"Ohio's 2004 presidential vote will be challenged as soon as next week in the state Supreme Court, a coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday.

"The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from county election officials and Election Day exit polls to make a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day."

- Steven Rosenfeld: Ohio Presidential Results to be Challenged -

"The fact that Israeli operatives are now in Iraq explodes once and for all the oft-repeated claim that America is an honest peace broker. The whole world will now understand that this was just another of Washington's many deceptions. Bush's uncritical support of Sharon's iron fist shows that even the pretense of impartiality has now evaporated."

- Mark Gaffney: Slipping Towards Armageddon - Israel in Iraq -

"House and Senate negotiators have tucked a potentially far-reaching anti-abortion provision into a $388 billion must-pass spending bill, complicating plans for Congress to wrap up its business and adjourn for the year.

"The provision may be an early indication of the growing political muscle of social conservatives who provided crucial support for Republican candidates, including President Bush, in the election.

"The abortion language would bar federal, state and local agencies from withholding taxpayer money from health care providers that refuse to provide or pay for abortions or refuse to offer abortion counseling or referrals. Current federal law, aimed at protecting Roman Catholic doctors, provides such 'conscience protection' to doctors who do not want to undergo abortion training. The new language would expand that protection to all health care providers, including hospitals, doctors, clinics and insurers."

- Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Carl Hulse: Negotiators Add Abortion Clause to Spending Bill -

"Pictures force us to collect our thoughts. They make us think about motivation, intent - they make us think about how we interpret our experiences, how we think about the world, how we try to understand the motives of others. (Maybe it's in our DNA. We look at pictures of other people and we want to know: what were they thinking?) And when it's a photograph of a crime or of violence, we think even harder. Such images make us care because they make us part of the mystery of what happened. We are not merely spectators; we are investigators. We are involved. What do the images mean? What do they show? What led up to these events? Are there mitigating circumstances? Is it as bad as it looks?

"Pictures provide a point around which other pieces of evidence collect. They are part of, but not a substitute for, an investigation. There are real questions to be answered. That's why we have international law, rules of engagement and codes of military conduct. There is a fact of the matter to be determined; whether this was done in cold blood and therefore constitutes a war crime and who, if anyone, should be held responsible. The Abu Ghraib photographs turned out (following an investigation) to be what they seemed to be - pictures of torture and abuse. They were as bad as they looked - even worse. Some of the soldiers involved were held accountable. But accountability did not proceed very far up the chain of command. And, of course, there were those who felt that the torture and abuse were justified.

"Unhappily, an unerring fact of human nature is that we habitually reject the evidence of our own senses. If we want to believe something, then we often find a way to do so regardless of evidence to the contrary. Believing is seeing and not the other way around."

- Errol Morris: Not Every Picture Tells a Story -

"Liberal policy wonks -- and even some who aren't so liberal - did a double take when they read the new tax plan floated by the Bush administration in the Washington Post on Thursday. Was the White House really suggesting eliminating incentives for employers to offer their employees health insurance plans? Was it really proposing to shift the country's tax burden even further onto states like that didn't vote for Bush, like New York and Massachusetts? It was."

- Michelle Goldberg: More relief for struggling millionaires - If you thought the current Bush tax rate rewarded the wealthy, wait until you get a load of his administration's latest plan. -

"A six-month study of 'a la carte' cable and satellite pricing, ordered by Congress, found that consumers would save money on their monthly bills only if they pick and pay for fewer than nine channels.

"However, the study found, most households regularly watch an average of 17 channels, including traditional broadcast staples such as ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. Under the a la carte plan studied, consumers would see their monthly bills rise between 14 and 30 percent if they purchased 17 channels, the report said...

"'For people on Capitol Hill, this should raise more questions than it answers -- if you charge the same for nine channels as you do for 50 channels, doesn't that mean there's something wrong with the cable market?' said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union."

- Frank Ahrens: FCC Says A La Carte TV Would Cost More- Advocates Fault Pricing Study -

"Arguing that voters in populous states like California are underrepresented by the Electoral College, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, introduced a constitutional amendment Friday to eliminate it and provide for direct election of the president and vice president."

- Abolishment of Electoral College proposed -

"A research team at UC Berkeley reported Thursday morning that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more in excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study showed an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods."

- Buzzflash -

"We have seen too much trickery and shamelessness to sustain the belief that this wasn't something arranged. Bin Laden makes the documentaries that decide elections."

- Fidel Castro -

"Drama has to show people who are better than we are. But comedy has to show people who are worse in some way than we are."

- Amy Coplan, PhD, California State University Fullerton Philosophy department Professor -

"The art of [storytelling] belongs to the genius or the madman; of these the first are adaptable, the second can step outside themselves."

- Aristotle: Poetics -

"When George H.W. Bush was linked to the misguided strategy of covertly arming Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, again major U.S. news outlets with the exception of the Los Angeles Times did little to dig out the truth. Even today, after the junior George Bush has sent more than 1,100 U.S. troops to their deaths to clear Iraq of non-existent WMD stockpiles in 2003-04, the U.S. news media won't tell the American people about the senior George Bush's role in helping Hussein build a real WMD arsenal in the 1980s."

- Robert Parry: Big Media, Some Nerve! -

"As JUS reported at the time, based on information from reliable sources close to the Mujahideen in Iraq, the kidnapping of Margaret Hassan was an operation concocted by British agents inside the country, in an effort to divert attention away from the British troop deployment into Latifiyah - a deployment that was required so that the Americans could strike Fallujah. The deployment of British troops at the time caused a great deal of commotion but was a deployment that Tony Blair was not at liberty to refuse on orders from his US masters.

"Iraq's Mujahideen exposed the British insurance policy at the time of Hassan's capture and has denied any JTJ involvement in the kidnapping. The kidnapping and now alleged murder of Hassan, who selflessly dedicated years of her life to help impoverished Iraqis, will send the message that the Iraqi Resistance is comprised of monsters and serial murderers. This is exactly the desired outcome of the release of news of Hassan's alleged death at this critical juncture, when reports of bodies of dead women and children being eating by dogs in the streets of Fallujah and US soldiers killing unarmed and wounded civilians are surfacing."

- Bruce Kennedy: Hassan's Alleged Death: A Close Encounter Of The Intelligence Kind -

"Here was our tactical kindness: By threatening the invasion of Falluja for months and launching a bombing campaign against parts of the city long before the assault was to begin, the Bush administration managed to turn an unknown but staggering number -- up to 90% -- of that city's 250,000-300,000 residents out of their homes and into refugees living off relatives elsewhere or in the most pitiful of makeshift camps often without enough food, or clean drinking water, electricity, or medical aid. The first mainstream account of such a camp finally appeared Friday in the New York Times (Robert A. Oppel, Jr., Refugees: Fallujans in Flight: Transit Camps Are Not Much Safer Than Siege They Left), even though some of the residents described in it had been relocated there weeks, if not months before."

- Tom Engelhardt: On "Iraqifying" the Quagmire - Draining the Swamp -

"Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind."

- Bhagavad Gita 3:19-20 -

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin -

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- Lewis Carroll -

"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."

- Giordano Bruno -

"It is my belief that whereas the twentieth century has been a century of war and untold suffering, the twenty-first century should be one of peace and dialogue. As the continued advances in information technology make our world a truly global village, I believe there will come a time when war and armed conflict will be considered an outdated and obsolete method of settling differences among nations and communities."

- His Holiness the Dalai Lama -

"Don't cling to your own understanding. Even if you do understand something, you should ask yourself if there might be something you have not fully resolved, or if there may be some higher meaning yet."

- Dogen -

"You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him."

- Leo Aikman -

"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects."

- James Madison -

"We should begin by setting conscience free. When all men of all religions shall enjoy equal liberty, property, and an equal chance for honors and power... we may expect that improvements will be made in the human character and the state of society."

- John Adams -

"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must believe?"

- Thomas Jefferson: letter to Dufief, April 19, 1814 -

"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient allies."

- James Madison -

"All national institutions of churches appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

- Thomas Paine -

"So, who are they? Who are the ones who have no problem watching a Monday Night Football game in which huge sweaty steroid-packed men in cutely homoerotic tights smash each other as hard as possible hoping they break bones and induce aneurysms and draw blood during our most violent and drug-addled and corrupted national televised sporting spectacle, but yet who actually picked up the phone to complain to ABC about that "racy" ad promoting the very mediocre "Desperate Housewives" that led into the game?

"Who are they who apparently have no problem having their gladiator-style violence interspersed with all manner of Barbie-doll cheerleaders who giggle and jiggle in a sea of Botox and silicon, but who cannot possibly tolerate the exposed shoulder blades of Housewives actress Nicollette Sheridan in a tame promo spot lest they clutch their hearts and call their senators in a seething colon-clenched fury?"

"Let this be the rallying cry. These people, they must be outed. They must be brought into the open and shorn of their hollow indignation and held up to the glaring light of truth and sex and conscious culture, dragged like shy recluses into the purview of our utterly baffled universal God, the one who is omnipresent and pansexual and carnivorous and ironic and full of raunchy bliss and deep humor and who isn't perpetually short of cash or firearms or false chastity."

- Mark Morford: Monday Night Softcore - Who dares call into a TV network to complain about sex? And can they be stopped? -

"If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it."

- Jonathan Winters -

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."

- Howard Zinn -

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."

- Bertrand Russell -