Karla Adam of the Washington Post's article appearing in the July 31 Seattle Times writing from London explained:

"Britain began an independent inquiry into its role in the Iraq War Thursday with the panel's chairman (John Chilcot) confirming that former Prime Minister Tony Blair will not `shy away from making criticism!'

"John Chilcot, chairman, says the panel will cover 2001 until today.  He also said `The Anglo-American relationship is one of the most central parts of this inquiry' and the panel hoped to have `discussions' with the Americans involved in the war.  And at the same time, he said, discussions and evidence sessions are not necessarily the same thing, and of course we have no power to compel witnesses here, let alone in foreign governments.'

"Blair's decision to join the 2003 U.S. led invasion was deeply unpopular in Britain and was seen as one of the key reasons he stepped down."

This gauging of poverty was done by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, appearing in the Seattle Times December 12, 2008, which placed, out of the 30 major nations, analyzed that only Mexico and Turkey's poverty rates were greater than that of the U.S.A.

Perhaps that question could best be answered by one of Dallas, Texas' newest residents, George Bush.

Bush has apparently quit wearing that cowboy outfit that blended with his days at the Crawford, Texas ranch, where he took time out from the oval office chores to cut the ranch's weeds.

Recently Bush has been on a lecture tour, like the one in Canada, charging $400 for a lecture.

The April 6, 2009 Newsweek Magazine featured Paul Krugman on its cover with this bold-faced black headline "Obama is Wrong!"

The feature story by Evan Thomas left no doubt about Paul Krugman's background qualifying him to speak out on what is happening now to the U.S. economy.  Thomas explained:

"Paul Krugman has all the credentials of a ranking member of the East Coast liberal establishment:  A column in the New York Times, a professorship at Princeton, a Nobel Prize in Economics."

"In his twice a week column and his blog, conscience of a liberal, he criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking.  In conversation, he portrays Tim Geithner and other top officials as, in effect, tools of Wall Street.

The torturous truth is that the presidential candidate who blasted Bush policies which helped insure his claim to popularity now embraces some of the very Bush policies he hit hard to win the role of president of the U.S.A.

Is this a Ronald Reagan re-run, a brilliant orator but failing miserably when assuming the follow through with constitutional observance?  Shall we get precise about habeas corpus, an English institution for centuries?  

It means the right to a fair trial.  The Nazis had thrown people in prison without trials.

The U.S. is doing a copy cat routine, throwing Afghanistan terrorist suspects in prisons in with no trials.

"You cannot leave combat troops in a foreign country to conduct combat operations and call it the end of the war," insists Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

But the Republican candidate for president who lost to Democratic candidate Barack Obama registers delight as he cheers, "We are finally on a path to success -- the administration should not succumb to pressures, political or otherwise, to make deeper or faster cuts" says John McCain, who promoted an unlicensed plumber and income tax debtor, as a Republican regular Joe.  

He was coincidentally hailed as Joe the Plumber, a public relations promotion pitch.  

Now we are forced to ask the logical question, "Was all the hoopla celebration over Obama's inauguration as the 44th president of the U.S.A. a premature staged spectacle somewhat heavy on praise now that we have seen some performance?"

This is apparently what the Israeli military is quoted as saying in an article in the Seattle Times January 4 by Isabel Kershner and Taghreed el-Khodary:

"The Israeli military in a statement about the ground campaign stated, `Destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas!'"

The article is datelined Jerusalem, and stated:

"Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza Saturday night, opening a ground war against the militant group Hamas after a week of intense air strikes.

As someone who wrote a book, "Struggle for the Holy Land,"  on the Middle East encompassing the long histories of Arabs and Jews I recognized from the outset the imperative need for international leadership to be exercised through constructive diplomacy.

When I recently sent a manuscript to a British publisher with the reputation of tackling tough and controversial international issues, and that prided itself on being progressive, the editor sent me an e-mail declaring that it took him 32 pages to decide that I had concluded that Arabs and Jews were equally at fault for the conflict while he believed that the root problem lay at the doorstep of the Israelis.

I promptly e-mailed and took him over the route of my first 32 pages.  I pointed out that I had not found "fault" with either group and that this was not the objective and my effort, which was to address the long history of each people extending back some 3,500 years, focusing on points on common along with differences.  The objective was to develop understanding and point the way toward diplomatic conflict resolution.

My response to the editor's criticism, which pointed out areas that he had mentioned, and from which he had drawn an erroneous conclusion about my work, was greeted by silence.  This was not surprising.  Too many believe that all writers approaching the Middle East should ultimately praise one group and denounce the other.  

Could the collapse of the U.S. banking system represent capitalism's last gasp?

President-elect Obama declared the U.S. needed change.  With the economy collapsing after manufacturing ran away and big banks failing, obviously some drastic changes were desperately needed.

Time along can tell if the changes Obama is able to make can salvage our nation, that once was economically independent, that is a far cry from today's dependency on China, Saudi Arabia and Japan who are buying U.S. bonds to keep our nation's Iraq and Afghanistan long running wars going.

That plus the ever increasing welfare system must be kept going.  U.S. citizens depend on government funding for food (35 million in U.S now on food stamps), housing, health care and education.  With 10 million unemployed now welfare is obviously essential.

The former author and former Roosevelt justice department member Thurman Arnold formulated a truism that impressed many of us who have read it, and that I will attempt to pass along by paraphrase.

In referring to numerous statutes on the books condemning various living room and bedroom moral practices abhorred in certain biblical passages as well as what passed as "polite society" Thurmond noted that citizens insist that such passages be enacted since it makes us feel moral but openly shun them because of an insistence that we will do what we please.

Frank Rich's column last Sunday in the New York Times on the swiftness of condemnations of Illinois Governor Rod Bagojevich alongside the corruption of pillory and destruction of U.S. democracy and the Constitution makes the Illinoisan look comparatively like a naughty choir boy grabbing some spare change from a collection plate.

Take those meetings of the leading nations of the New World Order in Cheney's office along, including his own company of Halliburton, the no-bid contracts that ensued culminating with death, destruction and occupation in Iraq to set the super rich of the corporate world in power and Blagojevich's activities shrink all the more.

The Sunday incident where Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi threw shoes at George Bush during a news conference while calling him a "dog", a term more insulting in Arabic than in English represents the latest example of an administration in what a psychiatrist or psychologist would term "reality denial."

It was so typical of Bush himself to shrug off the incident by joking that Muntader al-Zaidi wore a "size 10 shoe" and state that he "just wanted to be noticed".  Andrea Mitchell, also known as Mrs. Alan Greenspan -- if you will recall he was a major instrument in helping destroy the U.S. economy -- said on CNN Monday that Bush had won points with Iraqis through injecting humor into the picture.

This is that same good old reality denial that the unholy trio of Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity have turned into a media art, albeit a sick and distorted style of media art designed to bury the truth.

In Monday's New York Times a story written by Timothy Williams and Sharon Otterman with a Baghdad place line bore the headline: SHOE-HURLING IRAQI BECOMES A FOLK HERO.

The Los Angeles Times on November 23 reported that tens of thousands rallied in Baghdad against a security pact with the U.S.

Tina Susman and Caesar Ahmed reporting from on the scene in Baghdad wrote the following:

"At the spot where U.S. forces toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003, protestors Friday tore down an effigy of President Bush and set it afire during a demonstration over plans to keep American troops in Iraq through 2011."

The people of Iraq are recognizing the fact that the U.S. embassy in Iraq is among the largest in the world.  They also are aware of the U.S. request for 50 bases for the U.S. to operate from.  

That is the question!  Exactly why is the U.S. continuing the Iraq War that everyone now knows, the world over, that it was launched on lies?

Can anyone explain why, under President Reagan, we put the most extremist Islamic government, the Taliban, in power?

And now, after training the Taliban with the latest U.S. high-tech weapons exactly why are we suddenly determined to overthrow the Taliban?  Could all of the botched Middle East series of battles have anything to do with oil?  Dare we ask?

When the "weapons of mass destruction" war cry hysteria proved phony, Bush suddenly declared that all of the fighting and dying was to deliver democracy to the Iraqis and it would spread to the entire Middle East.

Look in any dictionary and you will find that the word "stimulus" is connected to stimulate, meaning the act of generating a form of positive assistance.

This is the type of action that, by acting in a shrewd, timely manner, can prevent a negative response.  It makes one think of that old saying, "A stitch in time saves nine."

Canada's Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, speaking in Ottawa, is apparently working on a different operational definition where stimulus and the act of stimulation are concerned.  While Canada is headed for a likely recession, Flaherty said that he had no plans to introduce an economic stimulus package before next spring's budget.

"We've made dramatic tax cuts already," Flaherty explained.  He later added, "We're not in a recession right now."  While conceding that Canada is "not in a recession right now" he concedes that it is "reasonable" that the nation will be in a "technical recession," which is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, by the first quarter of 2009.

That is the burning question!  As Alan Greenspan revealed in his memoir "Age of Turbulence", "It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows, the Iraq War is largely about oil."

When one analyzes the horrifying death and destruction in Iraq, with 600,000 to a million Iraqis dead, 55,000 U.S. service personnel wounded and 4,195 dead, can Bush, who avoided impeachment, forever avoid any accountability?

You can rest assured that the 2 ½ million Iraqis who fled to Iran, Syria and Jordan are anxious to see if George Bush can escape any accountability, for all of the havoc his nightmarish eight year reign has been responsible for.

In an article by Charlie Savage in the New York Times November 13 datelined Washington, D.C., we gain an informative glimpse of the manner in which Bush has tried to keep his administration's secret rule permanently secret.  We quote the following:

It would be amusing but not for the tragedies involved and cumulative suffering of Americans who have been victimized by eight years of Bush-Cheney policies, but here they are, seeking now to squeeze off the hook by blaming those they ardently supported who followed policies that their ardent right wing preachers blessed and to which they vigorously assented.

The new interview of the moment Republican, Governor Sarah Palin, loudly lamented this week that last week's election victory by Barack Obama and extended majorities of Democrats in the Senate and House occurred through no fault of theirs.  It was that man Bush and his cohorts that she and John McCain were eagerly running away from who was at fault.

The reason why Bush was singled out after the election is that the preposterous tactic of seeking to blame Democrats for the meltdown and overall economic calamity the nation currently confronts.  Many of us have seen that patented right wing Republican "fact sheet" that has been distributed all over the internet.

That "fact sheet" lists all the economic tragedies that occurred in the past two years and concludes with, "What will it be like if the Democrats can continue to control the House and Senate while adding the presidency?" or words to that effect.