THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN.

  END OF DECEMBER

redacted version

1. The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
2. Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
3. The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry
   state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
4. The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
5. An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country’s ‘Golden Years’.
6. Your country is purportedly ‘selling’ 2 million barrels of oil
   a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market
   gasoline for the generator.
7. For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public
   electricity and then the government announces it’s going to cut back on
   providing that hour.
8. Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is ‘sectarian bloodshed’ or ‘civil war’.
9. People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that’s been missing for two weeks.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give
an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due
to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a
prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was
created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three
years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale
at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees
for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our
National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in
geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is
disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the
geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.'”

In a letter released today, PEER urged the new Director of the
National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, to end the stalling tactics,
remove the book from sale at the park and allow park interpretive
rangers to honestly answer questions from the public about the geologic
age of the Grand Canyon. PEER is also asking Director Bomar to approve
a pamphlet, suppressed since 2002 by Bush appointees, providing
guidance for rangers and other interpretive staff in making
distinctions between science and religion when speaking to park
visitors about geologic issues.

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to
block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by
Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather
than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened
and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of
Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that
there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information
Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone
conducted or completed. Read on…

Homeland Security Department Adviser Fran Townsend was on the
Situation Room to speak about Iraq and the War on Terror.  Bless
her little heart, she tried to spin it as best as she could for the
administration, but since reality is well known for having a liberal
bias, her attempts fell rather on the pathetic side.  I’m going to
try to get video for it (John’s having some connectivity issues related
to the power outages earlier), but here are the transcripts, courtesy of CNN:

HENRY: But now as 2006 ends, Osama bin Laden is
still at large. Heading into 2007, how confident are you that he can be
brought to justice this coming year?

TOWNSEND: Well, there’s no question in my mind that he’ll be
brought to justice. The real question is whether or not it’s going to
be this year. I will tell you that I feel increasingly confident, you
know, it was interesting. There’s a recent poll and the American people
said 71 percent of them were optimistic that we can protect the country.

And I think they’ve got reason to be optimistic. We’ve made a
lot of progress. They see the progress we’ve made. We’ve disrupted
plots. We’ve made reforms in our system, in our security system. So on
bin Laden, do I think we are going to get him? I absolutely know we’re
going to get him.

The question is will it be this year. And I will tell you I
think there’s increased activity both the part of the CIA, JSOC and our
partners, the Pakistanis.

HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president
said, dead or alive, we’re going to get him. Still don’t have him. I
know you are saying there’s successes on the war on terror, and there
have been. That’s a failure.

TOWNSEND: Well, I’m not sure — it’s a success that hasn’t occurred yet. I don’t know that I view that as a failure.

TIME :

Whenever critics complain about the high cost of
prescription drugs, the pharmaceutical industry’s standard defense is
that companies have to plow so much money into researching innovative
new medicines. But a recently released report from the Government
Accountability Office casts doubt on that rationale. Yes the industry
is spending heavily on R&D, the GAO found, but it turns out big
pharma isn’t actually generating such a good return on their
investments.

The congressional watchdog agency’s 48-page study came up with
disturbing numbers. From 1993-2004, spending by U.S. drug companies on
research and development jumped 147%, from $16 billion to nearly $40
billion annually. But the number of applications the pharmaceutical
firms submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for potentially
groundbreaking new drugs during that 10-year period increased only a
meager 7%. And since 1995, the applications for these innovative drugs
have been dropping each year. “The productivity of research and
development investments has declined,” the GAO concluded.

Read on… 

Glenn Greenwald:

The paramountcy of neoconservatism and Joe Lieberman

American political conflicts are usually described in terms of “liberal
versus conservative,” but that is really no longer the division which
drives our most important political debates. The predominant political
conflicts over the last five years have been driven by a different
dichotomy — those who believe in neoconservatism versus those who do
not. Neoconservatism is responsible for virtually every significant
political controversy during the Bush administration — from our
invasion of Iraq to the array constitutional abuses perpetrated in the
name of fighting terrorism — and that ideological dispute is even what is driving the war
over Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat. It is not traditional conservatism or
liberalism, but rather one’s views on neoconservativsm, which have
become the single most important factor in where one falls on the
political spectrum.

Like a bad satire of The First Two Rules of The Fight Club, neoconservatives used to vehemently deny that there even was such thing as “neoconservatism,” even going so far as to smear
anyone who used the term as being anti-semitic. But with every aspect
of their foreign policy in shambles, and due to (an understandable)
fear that they will be blamed for these disasters, neoconservatives are
assertively coming out of the closet — for self-defense reasons if no
other. They are insisting that neoconservatism hasn’t failed, but
rather, it has been failed, by those who lack the necessary
resolve, courage and brutality to do the dirty work that has to be
done. In short, they are demanding more war, more militarism, and more
barbarism, and are claiming that the reason for our foreign policy
failures is because — thanks to the Chamberlian-like cowardice of
virtually everyone other than them — we don’t have nearly enough of
all of that.

Bill Kristol yesterday complained in The Weekly Standard that the
Bush administration is getting pushed around by Iran, Syria, North
Korea and even that dove-ish General Casey, who wants slowly to
withdraw from Iraq. Because of this collective weakness, our enemies
“must be feeling even less intimidated,” and as a result, the lines
drawn by American foreign policy are no longer drawn in warrior red,
but instead are weak, effeminate “pink lines and mauve lines.” Kristol
has a long roster of other countries on whom we have to wage war, or at
least credibly threaten to wage war, and our cowardice and lack of
resolve is responsible for every failure, from Bush’s political
collapse at home to anti-American animosity around the world:

But
hey, we’re in sync with the EU-3 and the U.N.-192. And our secretary of
state–really, the whole State Department–is more popular abroad than
ever. Too bad the cost has been so high: a decline in the president’s
credibility around the world and sinking support for his foreign policy
at home.

A few weeks ago, Michael Rubin lamented in this
magazine that Bush’s second term foreign policy had taken a Clintonian
turn. But to be Clintonian in a post-9/11 world is to invite even more
danger than Clinton’s policies did in the 1990s.

To
neoconservatives like Kristol, Americans have abandoned the President
and the U.S. has lost credibility around the world because we have been
insufficiently militaristic and belligerent. We haven’t
threatened and invaded enough countries, and we are too eager to leave
Iraq. To underscore the claim that the Bush administration’s failure is
a lack of commitment to neoconservative principles, Kristol
even hurls the ultimate insult: Bush has become “Clintonian” in his
foreign policy because he is too weak and eager to negotiate with the
long list of countries on whom we need to wage more war.

ASSOCIATED PRESS INTERVIEWS TROOPS’ FAMILY MEMBERS WHO DON’T AGREE WITH BUSH!