This last week I think marks when Iraq is finally sinking into genuine civil war. And our troops are caught right in the middle with no loyal allies, no goal, no exit strategy. I'd say there's a 50/50 shot it will calm down again, but if so it will be on Sadr's terms. Like last time. It could also spiral into even worse chaos and the Republicans have no idea what to do. I fear for our troops and I fear for the civillians of Iraq. 50/50 it calms down if Sadr wants it to...50/50 it will get really ugly.

Joe Klein's column in Time June 18 represents a window into his current thinking as he along with other mainstream media figures spin the ongoing Democratic Party presidential primary contest.

In viewing Klein on television and reading his ongoing commentary in both Time and Newsweek he maintains a steady pattern cautioning Democrats against straying too far to the left, and that ignoring basic rules of politics pertaining to the "vital center" will result in potential calamity for the party.  

In his June 18 column Klein was particularly dismayed by the level of antagonism and verbal hammering he received on Time's blogging site, Swampland, after reporting an anticipated vote of Representative Jane Harman of California on the Iraq War funding bill.  

When Representative Harman changed her mind and voted against the bill after earlier telling Klein that, after a personal visit to Iraq, she had decided to vote for it, the political journalist describes an angry deluge that descended on him that he believes could auger badly for the Democratic Party should this conduct continue.

Rome celebrated spectacular killing events at the Colosseum.  Watching a lion tear apart a Christian was great sport.

Likewise the U.S.A. does some things in an unprecedented spectacular manner.  Certainly dropping the atom bomb following Japan's refusal to accept unconditional surrender during the last days of World War Two calls into question a fateful decision.

Should President Truman have allowed Japan to keep its emperor, whom they considered divine or incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents when this request was refused?

This remains a debatable question mark in U.S. history.  Some claim the atom bomb attacks saved scored of U.S. lives by ending the war early.  Then came the Vietnam War, spawned dramatically with the domino theory.  Politicians insisted that if Communists weren't stopped in Vietnam then all of Asia would definitely collapse like a row of dominoes.

Appeasing The Gods Of The Shareholders

There was a time when, as a matter of policy, America went to war only as a response to an attack by an aggressor. In 1962 John Kennedy had every reason to make war with Cuba and Russia when Kruschev talked Fidel into parking several dozen  Soviet nuclear missiles ten minutes from Washington and 90 miles from spring break.

Most of the Joint Chiefs, especially Curtis Lemay,(General Bat Guano?) along with a sizable faction of Kennedy's closest advisers urged the President to invade. Lemay wanted to send his B52s, (presumably not to drop leaflets) while others preferred a massive land invasion, perhaps to restore the Cosa Nostra to control of Cuban Casinos, the way God intended.

There is an apocryphal story told that Marine Commandant David Shoup (under whom I served at the time) presented the assemblage of top level civilian and military advisers with an easel containing a map of Cuba, over which he had placed an acetate overlay of a tiny Pacific atoll named Tarawa. Tarawa, which the Marines had invaded early in WW2 was shown graphically as a small speck against the background of Castro's Caribbean worker's paradise.

He then proceeded to inform the gathering that the insignificant speck had not been at all pacific, having cost the lives of over 1000 Marines and the wounding of 2200 others, creating a great storm of protest at home over what was seen as a needless squandering of lives to gain a tiny piece of real estate. Tarawa, he is reported to have explained, was defended by 4500 Japanese while Castro would field 150,000, and perhaps as many more.

The zeal for a land invasion was somewhat diminished by General Shoup's presentation. Cooler heads prevailed, the young president proceeded to threaten Kruschev with massive nuclear retaliation, Niki packed up his nukes and went home, diplomacy or a good bluff, worked, the republic was saved, 250,000 young troops did not have to wade ashore and spill their guts on Fidel's beautiful but hostile beaches and I pull shore leave in San Juan and discovered how to drink Cuba Libras past the point of absurdity.

Those were still the good old days in the world of war making, when Presidents, Congress, large segments of the press and a sizable portion of the body politic banded together with the men and women who were to be slaughtered, made whatever sacrifices necessary to get through the horrible, bloody task and achieve victory.

Businesses as well, were asked to make sacrifices, to retool from the making the products of peacetime, the creation of tractors or Packards or hula hoops to building tanks, rifles and ships, and asked to bid competitively for the right to participate in the glorious business of waging war.

It worked well, victories were had, foes were vanquished, medals were awarded to the mothers of the dead, the prosthetics business flourished and everyone was happy.

Then came Vietnam.

We stand at the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedies. No solid answers have been provided.  An unconvincing cover-up has been presented, and only under great public duress.  

It is time to assess what really happened on 9/11 and conceive of creative strategies to dig the truth from out of the dusty caverns to which a thoroughly unprincipled unelected government has buried it.

In that the law has been creatively used in a class action lawsuit regarding 9/11 on behalf of deceased victims' family members, another lawsuit that should be promptly filed in federal court is one pertaining to the unconscionable, blood-stained profits that neoconservative warmongers representing America's invisible and unelected government have realized over the corpses and shattered bodies of service personnel and civilians in the Middle East.

The class action lawsuit alluded to earlier creatively employs the RICO statute in an attempt to demand the truth about the causes of the World Trade Center calamities as well as the repercussions that followed.  

According to a new report, Henry Waxman has compiled a list of audits and investigations that find federal procurement spending has gone up 175 Billion dollars. Halliburton, the poster child for Bush's fraud and corruption campaigns, gained 600 %. So what does this mean for us?

We have all heard the White House's many statements of the separation of Vice President Dick Cheney and his contacts with Halliburton were severed when he became the Vice President.

We have been told that all he receives is deferred compensation from monies previously earned. We were told that his office played NO role in the award of the Halliburton contracts in the immediate aftermath of the invasion in 2003.

That he has not benefited financially because of the war.  The following documents and information obtained thru FOIA suits by Judicial Watch have uncovered documents showing the lies, and the links to the VP's office and the Corps of Engineer's thru the Pentagon.  Links after the jump.

Last week in Charlotte, North Carolina those Americans paying attention and not hypnotized into robot status through Fox News saw another illustration that Karl Rove is far from the genius nonpareil that a subservient corporate media depicts.  

Concerned about his sharply dropping poll numbers, Rove decided to actually turn his puppet, the faux Texas cowboy, loose on a wide audience without the normally careful screening process that prevailed as established operational policy.

The result at a town meeting at Central Piedmont Community College was something that Rove should have anticipated.  Harry Taylor, a real estate broker, was someone who did not get the Fox message.  He stepped before a microphone and told the emperor to his face that he was devoid of clothes.  

Taylor revealed his shame over Washington leadership in the wake of preventive detention, the right to arrest and hold a citizen without even preferring charges indefinitely, along with the emperor's right to tap telephones without so much as a hint of a warrant issued by a magistrate.  

One point that commentators, news presenters, and pundits fail to point out about this Administration is that policy decisions, whether foreign or domestic, are guided by one overriding principle:  GWB's legacy, future power status, and personal economic security.  If there is anything that is clear about this President, it is his singular ability to ruin bidnesses (in this case, the U.S. government) ( view complete resume). Therefore, he continually needs to focus his efforts on his next enterprise, his next link in a circuitous financial chain.  After all, now that everyone recognizes that the War in Iraq was motivated primarily by self-proclaimed "democratic" neocons, it's fairly easy to connect the dots between Bush's back-room dealings that team his personal interests with cronies, foreign alliances, and personal, corporate interests.  9/11?  WMD?  Regime change? Nuclear threats? Spreading democracy?  Whatever the latest rationale du jour, it's curious that few ever mention the oil bidness.  

In trying to peg the ruling Cheney-Bush Junta the term that comes to mind is Let's Make a Deal Democracy provided by a brigade of hypocritical Chicken Hawks.  

Isn't it funny that this evil beast Saddam Hussein was not really such a bad fellow when we were in the midst of Operation Let's Make a Deal with him during the Reagan years?  Even the coiner of the memorable term "Evil Empire" for the Soviet Union did not mind.

Our own CIA helped bring the Iraqi dictator to power in the first place and when deals were there to be made that we felt were in our interest then Donald Rumsfeld could sit there in Saddam's office and smile as the brutal dictator was gassing his own Kurdish population.  

At one point Senator Allen Simpson of Wyoming, a close Dick Cheney home state compatriot and prominent Capitol Hill Republican, went to Baghdad and openly apologized to Saddam, lamenting that he had received a bad public relations rap from our presumably "left wing" media.

Is this the kind of democracy the U.S.A. wants to export to the Middle East?  After the "shock and awe" Iraq War had toppled Saddam Hussein and his regime, the big business representatives for the U.S.A. descended on Iraq like locusts.  A couple of beheadings and they got the point that the much heralded "welcome mat" prior to the Iraq invasion was Administration propaganda and they fled back to the safety of their corporate sponsors in the U.S.A.

Perhaps they understood for the very first time that Iraqis might have welcomed seeing Saddam ousted from power, but the last thing they wanted for the U.S.A. to linger on and dictate how the Iraqi government should be run.  Rest assured, they recognized the magnetic pull of Iraqi oil.  U.S. oil barons with their staggering current gas prices have shown what a greedy lot they are while profits skyrocket.  The Bush Administration, of course, does nothing about it.  After all, oil companies were fabulous Republican campaign contributors.

Enron's notorious Kenneth Lay still walks around as a free man after all the Enron corruption debacle.  Lay and his Enron cronies nearly bankrupted the "Golden State" with their ruthless rape of California's economy.  Instead of calling Kenneth Lay Inflation Enemy Number 1, Bush socialized with him and enjoyed box seats at baseball games together.  He called him "Kenny Boy" and treated him as a close friend.  

California's catastrophe victims called this tycoon something else.  Friends in high places haven't hurt Kenneth Lay, that's for sure!

While U.S. service personnel are fighting and dying in Iraq, just as they did in Vietnam.  Anti-war activists seek to confront White House resident George Bush to ask a simple question, "Why did the United States go to war in Iraq, and why are they still there?"

Of course, that is the burning question that also should be asked in the most appropriate place, in The Hague before a panel of judges who can determine if the Iraqis and U.S. service personnel who died, and the thousands wounded, met their tragic fate because of a fraudulent war.  Did this debacle take place because U.S. intelligence made the tragic mistake of not wanting to share information that might have prevented 9/11, and even the rush to the Iraq War?

These are legitimate questions that must be answered by an unbiased international court in The Hague, where the Geneva Convention war guidelines if followed can prevent corrupt politicians or barbaric madmen from going to war without any legitimate reason.

Remember how Republicans and Democrats were so confident when the bombs began falling over Iraq?  This administration and its robotic Democratic followers triumphantly proclaimed they were out to save the world, spreading democracy first over the Middle East with ceaseless bombings, destruction and death.  The lies spewed out by the one-sided media contributed to this nightmare scenario.

Iraq has proven itself a breeding ground for fraud.  It's no shocker, given our nation's history of private-contractor dealings.

Despite this, the federal government withdrew auditors that were monitoring Iraq-contracts last year.  And it just became news this month.