Truth About Bush

RIA Novosti - World - White House preparing to stage new September 11 - Reagan official
White House preparing to stage new September 11 - Reagan official
13:58 | 20/ 07/ 2007

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WASHINGTON, July 20 (RIA Novosti) - A former Reagan official has issued a public warning that the Bush administration is preparing to orchestrate a staged terrorist attack in the United States, transform the country into a dictatorship and launch a war with Iran within a year.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, blasted Thursday a new Executive Order, released July 17, allowing the White House to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies and giving the government expanded police powers to exercise control in the country.

Roberts, who spoke on the Thom Hartmann radio program, said: “When Bush exercises this authority [under the new Executive Order], there’s no check to it. So it really is a form of total, absolute, one-man rule.”

“The American people don’t really understand the danger that they face,” Roberts said, adding that the so-called neoconservatives intended to use a renewal of the fight against terrorism to rally the American people around the fading Republican Party.

Old-line Republicans like Roberts have become increasingly disenchanted with the neoconservative politics of the Bush administration, which they see as a betrayal of fundamental conservative values.

According to a July 9-11 survey by Ipsos, an international public opinion research company, President Bush and the Republicans can claim a mere 31 percent approval rating for their handling of the Iraq war and 38 percent for their foreign policy in general, including terrorism.

“The administration figures themselves and prominent Republican propagandists … are preparing us for another 9/11 event or series of events,” he said. “You have to count on the fact that if al Qaeda is not going to do it, it is going to be orchestrated.”

Roberts suggested that in the absence of a massive popular outcry, only the federal bureaucracy and perhaps the military could put constraints on Bush’s current drive for a fully-fledged dictatorship.

“They may have had enough. They may not go along with it,” he said.

The radio interview was a follow-up to Robert’s latest column, in which he warned that “unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the U.S. could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.”

Roberts, who has been dubbed the “Father of Reaganomics” and has recently gained popularity for his strong opposition to the Bush administration and the Iraq War, regularly contributes articles to Creators Syndicate, an independent distributor of comic strips and syndicated columns for daily newspapers.

MichaelMoore.com : SiCKO : ‘SiCKO’ News : A fiercely effective call to arms
une 29th, 2007 11:25 pm
A fiercely effective call to arms

By Amy Biancolli / Houston Chronicle

Judging by its title, Sicko might be mistaken for a slasher flick, and the assumption is not far off the mark. Not because of violence. Not because of gore. But because it is, in some ways, a horror film.

Among its victims:

Rick, who sawed off two fingertips but could only afford to reattach one — for $12,000. Carole, who couldn’t pay her hospital bills and was dumped at a homeless shelter in her flapping white gown. Tracy, who was denied coverage for a bone-marrow transplant and died, weeks later, of kidney cancer.

Michael Moore’s latest documentary-as-soapbox-vituperation is a damning, touching, darkly comical exposé on the United States health-care system. It is also a deeply impassioned appeal for change. Moore haters like to dismiss the man as a whack job and a lying partisan crank, but he’s really an idealist.

Look past the omnipresent ball cap and slumping gait, and you’ll find a patriot — a true believer in the American dream. When he says, “We live in a world of ‘We,’ not ‘Me,’ ” he’s not being the least bit campy. He has, for a moment, no sense of irony whatsoever. He believes this stuff.

As he did to the American gun culture in Bowling for Columbine and the Bush administration in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore uses Sicko to assail the insurance industry and pharmaceutical companies and the politicians who accept their contributions. Bush gets slapped around some, but so do Hillary Rodham Clinton — once reviled by the industry for trying to establish universal health care — and former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who pushed for the Medicare prescription bill before leaving to head the drug-company trade group PhRMA.

As usual, Moore assembles his argument from poignant anecdotes and factoid-driven diatribes that use graphics, music and archival material to make his point. Just listen to that fuzzy audio of Nixon and Ehrlichman discussing Kaiser Permanente. But we also get lots of winking video footage (I especially liked the old Soviet agitprop) and choice music clips that run from the Khachaturian Saber Dance to a French rendition of Feelin’ Groovy.

With Sicko, Moore himself doesn’t pop on-screen until some 40 minutes in, a shrewd move for a filmmaker who understands his role as cultural irritant. People who hate him might continue to hate him. They might call Sicko an overly theatrical, sucker-punching screed that paints France as paradise, Canadians as smiling (but we knew that), Britain as maddeningly reasonable and Cuba as a cure for what ails us.

But it’s a fiercely effective call to arms — a film that persuades and shames and chills. And he asks why a group of ill 9/11 emergency workers, volunteers not on the New York City payroll, couldn’t find affordable health care until he took them to Havana.

You could dismiss it as a stunt, this trip to Cuba. You could point out the country’s problems or the movie’s cherry-picked health statistics. But nothing so illustrates Moore’s rumpled brand of optimism as those few minutes near the end of Sicko when Cuban firefighters stand at attention to honor their ailing American brethren. It’s as uplifting and heart-rending a thing as you will see at the movies all year. And it speaks of Moore’s enduring faith — his angry, nettled, exasperated belief that “despite all our differences, we sink or swim together.”

MichaelMoore.com : SiCKO : Michael Moore’s Health Care Proposal

MichaelMoore.com : SiCKO : ‘SiCKO’ News : Muckraker for the YouTube age
Muckraker for the YouTube age

By Renée Loth / Boston Globe

AS A journalist, Michael Moore is the perfect antidote to the blow-dried network anchor. Biased, untidy, shambling like a flannel-shirted Columbo through his gotcha interviews, Moore is hot where the traditional newsman is cool, personal where the mainstream press keeps a professional distance. But in today’s fragmented media environment, Moore is a force — albeit an uncomfortable one — in the 2008 campaign.

Moore’s new documentary, “Sicko,” is clearly designed to influence the presidential policy debate. At the Democratic candidate’s forum held at Howard University last week, Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio called for guaranteed access to quality healthcare for all Americans and an end to for-profit medicine. “Michael Moore is right about this!” Kucinich declared.

And Moore has far higher name recognition than Kucinich. A muckraker for the YouTube age, Moore has taken on factory closings (”Roger and Me”) , gun violence (”Bowling for Columbine”), child labor at US companies overseas (”The Big One”), and the Iraq war (”Fahrenheit 911″) . Part agitprop, part popular culture, his films join blogs, videos, rock ‘n ‘ roll anthems, Washington tell-all books, and MySpace pages as powerful new ways to reach voters and shape the campaign storyline.

Voters and candidates are increasingly moving toward these new media. The trend first became evident to me in 1992, when I covered the role of the media in the presidential campaign. That was an extraordinary year, when pop culture discovered politics, and vice-versa. It was when MTV hired a 20-year-old political reporter, when appearing on Phil Donahue’s daytime talk show was as big a deal as “60 Minutes,” when Bill Clinton played saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show. (Clinton beat George H.W. Bush even though Bush outspent Clinton on traditional TV ads, which were already starting to lose their power.)

Now, with “Sicko,” Moore has tapped deep into the 2008 zeitgeist: Voters in both parties consistently cite healthcare as their number one domestic policy concern. As in most of his films, Moore focuses on the plight of ordinary working-class Americans — a silent majority to much of Hollywood, Washington and newspaper row. Their stories of medical neglect at the hands of faceless insurance bureaucrats are heartbreaking and enraging at the same time.

Moore isn’t the first filmmaker to recognize the people’s frustration with health insurers. Ten years ago James Brooks directed “As Good As it Gets,” starring Jack Nicholson, where in one brief scene Helen Hunt’s character is unable to get medical attention for her chronically ill son. She slams down a telephone with a frustrated, earthy epithet for her HMO. Audiences around the country broke into applause.

But unlike that passing moment, the “Sicko” phenomenon includes an elaborate infrastructure of Web postings, fact-checkers , and e-mails alerts. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who is gently lampooned in the film for her failed effort at healthcare reform in 1993, Moore has prepared for any opposition with a fortress of counterspin, even hiring Chris Lehane, John Kerry’s erstwhile media consultant, to advise him.

Working with the California Nurses Association and other advocacy groups, Moore has given an activist dimension to his film, making it into a kind of cinematic leaflet. His website exhorts visitors to post their insurance nightmares online and sign petitions to Congress. “This film stands the chance of igniting a movement,” Moore said in an e-mail to supporters.

“Sicko” is powerful enough — and just commercial enough — to do for the healthcare system what Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is doing for global warming. But there’s a hitch: With the exception of Kucinich, the Democratic presidential candidates are just offering variations on ways to expand health insurance to cover more Americans. Most of the desperate, ailing people in “Sicko” already have insurance. Instead, their lives are being ruined by a health insurance system that restricts care to maximize profits. It turns out Moore is trying not just to advance the political discussion about healthcare, but to challenge it.

With so little daylight between the major candidates on the issue, it takes a rogue agitator like Michael Moore to offer a second opinion. And that suggests it’s not just our healthcare system, but our political system, that’s ailing.

Ten Reasons to Impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney | Democrats.com
en Reasons to Impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney
I ask Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney for the following reasons:

1. Violating the United Nations Charter by launching an illegal “War of Aggression” against Iraq without cause, using fraud to sell the war to Congress and the public, misusing government funds to begin bombing without Congressional authorization, and subjecting our military personnel to unnecessary harm, debilitating injuries, and deaths.

2. Violating U.S. and international law by authorizing the torture of thousands of captives, resulting in dozens of deaths, and keeping prisoners hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

3. Violating the Constitution by arbitrarily detaining Americans, legal residents, and non-Americans, without due process, without charge, and without access to counsel.

4. Violating the Geneva Conventions by targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, and using illegal weapons, including white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new type of napalm.

5. Violating U.S. law and the Constitution through widespread wiretapping of the phone calls and emails of Americans without a warrant.

6. Violating the Constitution by using “signing statements” to defy hundreds of laws passed by Congress.

7. Violating U.S. and state law by obstructing honest elections in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006.

8. Violating U.S. law by using paid propaganda and disinformation, selectively and misleadingly leaking classified information, and exposing the identity of a covert CIA operative working on sensitive WMD proliferation for political retribution.

9. Subverting the Constitution and abusing Presidential power by asserting a “Unitary Executive Theory” giving unlimited powers to the President, by obstructing efforts by Congress and the Courts to review and restrict Presidential actions, and by promoting and signing legislation negating the Bill of Rights and the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

10. Gross negligence in failing to assist New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina, in ignoring urgent warnings of an Al Qaeda attack prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and in increasing air pollution causing global warming.