Busy Weekend News Bucked

16 Comments

1. 

   ask on November 3, 2007 at 9:24 am

   Pakistan’s Musharraf Declares Emergency

   ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) – President Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan on Saturday, state TV said.

   “The chief of army staff has proclaimed a state of emergency and issued a provisional constitutional order,” a newscaster on Pakistan TV said.

   THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

2. 

   ask on November 3, 2007 at 9:26 am

   Rice subpoenaed in spying trial

   A federal judge has ordered US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior colleagues to testify in the trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists.

   The lobbyists are accused of passing classified information to government officials and journalists in Israel.

   They say they were regularly asked by the US government to give information to the Israelis.

   Ms Rice’s court appearance could shed light on American policy-making in the Middle East.

   The two defendants in the case are former lobbyists for the influential American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac.

   They are accused of passing secrets obtained from a since-convicted Pentagon official to government officials and media outlets in Israel.

3. 

   ask on November 3, 2007 at 9:28 am

   Iraqi PM vows to stop PKK rebels

   Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki has pledged to stop Kurdish rebels using his country as a base for attacks against neighbouring Turkey.

   His vow came as international talks on promoting security in Iraq opened in the Turkish city of Istanbul.

   Foreign ministers of all six of Iraq’s neighbours are gathering along with top diplomats from the UN, the G8 and international Arab and Islamic groups.

   Tensions on Turkey’s border with Iraq could overshadow the meeting.

   “Iraq should not be a base for attacks against neighbours,” Mr Maliki was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

   “We will co-operate with our neighbours in defeating this threat.”

4. 

   ask on November 3, 2007 at 9:31 am

   Indonesia volcano erupts, villagers flee

   MOUNT KELUD, Indonesia – One of Indonesia’s deadliest volcanos began erupting Saturday, according to seismic readings, but there was no visual confirmation because the peak was cloaked in fog, a senior government volcanologist said.
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   Panicked residents fled the mountain’s slopes in police trucks and volcano monitors abandoned their posts Saturday, witnesses said.

   Although no lava or ash could be seen, seismic readings showed Mount Kelud, in the heart of densely populated Java island, was erupting, said Saut Simatupang, a leading scientist with Indonesia’s Volcanology Center.

   Hundreds of underground tremors have shaken the area and the temperature of its crater lake has reached the highest level since the mountain was put on high alert several weeks ago.

5. 

   ask on November 3, 2007 at 9:36 am

   Another Wake-up Call:

   Think tank: Climate affects security

   AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Climate change could be one of the greatest national security challenges ever faced by U.S. policy makers, according to a new joint study by two U.S. think tanks.

   The report, to be released Monday, raises the threat of dramatic population migrations, wars over water and resources, and a realignment of power among nations.

   During the last two decades, climate scientists have underestimated how quickly the Earth is changing — perhaps to avoid being branded as “alarmists,” the study said. But policy planners should count on climate-induced instability in critical parts of the world within 30 years.

   The report was compiled by a panel of security and climate specialists, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. The Associated Press received an advance copy.

   Climate change is likely to breed new conflicts, but it already is magnifying existing problems, from the desertification of Darfur and competition for water in the Middle East to the disruptive monsoons in Asia which increase the pressure for land, the report said.

   • 

     dada on November 3, 2007 at 11:46 am

     more than just a bumper sticker:

     At a time when concerns over climate change are increasing around the world, mayors from across the United States spent two days in Seattle, Washington to compare ways cities can help curb global warming.

     The organizer of the meeting, the United States Conference of Mayors, announced that more than 710 mayors, including participants, had pledged to reduce local carbon emissions by seven-percent below their 1990 levels, in line with the international Kyoto treaty.
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     At the meeting held at a hotel along Seattle’s downtown waterfront, the mayors wrestled with practical methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in their own communities.

     The[y] grappled with topics such as boosting mass transit and financing solar power projects. They talked about green-building standards and electric buses.
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     The mayors agreed with Will Winn, mayor of Austin, Texas, that the federal government can do more to combat the challenge of climate change. “Regardless of who gets elected to the White House next year, the next president of the United States is going to have to prioritize climate protection,” he said.

     link

     doesn’t mean the beltway bandits are going to pay attention, but the people are moving into the lead on this issue.

     lTMF’sA

     

6. 

   Connecticut Man1 on November 3, 2007 at 10:58 am

   Watch this Little Britain video to the end, which is only about a minute long:

   Read this little blurb from the WaPo:

   Staffers on Capitol Hill are howling over an e-mail sent from Sen. Larry Craig’s office Friday about a watch found — guess where — in the men’s room!

   The e-mail, which is being forwarded pretty much all over the place on Capitol Hill, is from Pat Olsen, the embattled Idaho Republican’s administrative director.

   The e-mail announced that a watch was found in the men’s room on the fifth floor of the Hart Senate Office Building, where Craig’s office is located. On its face, the message suggests that a male staffer (possibly even Sen. Craig, the notorious men’s room foot tapper) found the watch.

   Cleaning the coffee of of the screen that I made the mistake of taking a sip of before reading that…

7. 

   Indianadem on November 3, 2007 at 11:47 am

   Interesting you should quote Kin Hubbard, a man very close to  my childhood. I’m still surrounded by his legacy.

   • 

     ask on November 3, 2007 at 12:07 pm

     Thanks for the links.
     I was quite ignorant about his life and work before reading those.

8. 

   dada on November 3, 2007 at 11:49 am

   gore vidal, who, if you have not read lately, is still in great form, as evidenced by his latest article:

   President Jonah, Meet Oliver Cromwell!
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   Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon’s Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that `30s movie “The Good Earth.”
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   …”We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be `morning in America’; twenty-odd years later, under the `boy emperor’ George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture–a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; as well as, today, the political and economic marginalization of our culture…. The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current rulers: “The Closing of the Western Mind.”

   Mr. Bush, as God knows best, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, `the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’ This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud.” In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the “reality-based” community, to which Berman sensibly responds: “If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.”

   much more at truthdig

   and…

   lTMF’sA

   

   • 

     dada on November 3, 2007 at 11:50 am

     geoffrey wheatcroft, of the Guardian UK gives us a glimpse into the british sentiment with a scathing indictment:

     The calamity of Iraq has not even won us cheap oil

     We knew the war was built on lies – but to have increased petrol prices as well as terror will surely seal history’s verdict

     Although “the judgment of history” has a sonorous ring, it doesn’t necessarily require the long gestation that phrase might imply: sometimes there’s no need for the owl of Minerva to hang around waiting for the sun to go down. When one eminent historian, Sean Wilentz of Princeton, pronounces bluntly that George Bush the Younger is “the worst president in American history”, and another, Tony Judt of New York University, calls the Iraq war “the worst foreign policy error in American history”, not many of us will argue with them.

     And yet history still doesn’t know the half of it. It has long since ceased to be a matter for debate that the Iraq adventure began in mendacity and ended in calamity. Sir Richard Dearlove’s public penitence this week merely confirmed what he had already said privately, and not only has every single one of the original official reasons for the invasion been falsified, they have all been stood on their heads. Now even what many suspected was the ulterior motive – a war for oil – has gone awry
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     In April 2003, our previous prime minister confidently pronounced that “just as we had a strategy for war, so we have a strategy for peace”. It is not pre-empting the judgment of history to say with even greater confidence that no good whatever has come out of this war, that no single good reason for it can any longer be adduced – and that “we” had never had any plan at all, not to say the faintest idea what “we” were doing.

     Guardian UK

     one more…

     lTMF’sA

     

   • 

     dada on November 3, 2007 at 11:52 am

     jerry sanders at the nation takes a look at the great debate that’s not occurring in the run-up to the primaries with an excellent essay at The Nation:

     The Great Debate of 2008

     If ever the time was right for a Great Debate on America’s purpose and place in the world, that time is now. But if early auditions leading up to primary season are any indication, the top contenders are either not up to the task or unwilling to take on the challenge of correcting the current course of failure in US foreign policy.
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     It is surprising, though, that these majority views are ignored by those seeking the Oval Office. It is not as if the current course is at all sustainable and that there is a more clever way smarter people can get it right. The more the United States projects power out over the world, the more distrusting and resentful the world becomes, as America itself becomes dangerously overextended from the effort. Faced with capability and credibility gaps of the Bush years, the mythic strain of American exceptionalism, which insists that the United States by destiny and necessity must be the leader of the world–by one formula or another–over those who do not need or wish to be led, is a conceit the United States can ill afford.

     Not only is hegemony unsustainable as a strategy of global governance, it is also unnecessary for electoral success. When a Third Way poll queried the public on its opinion of the exceptionalist narrative, a majority (58 percent) of Americans agreed that “It is a dangerous illusion to believe America is superior to other nations [and therefore] we should not be attempting to reshape other nations in light of our values.” Only 36 percent agreed with what seems to be a bipartisan consensus among the presidential front-runners that “America is an exceptional nation with superior political institutions and ideals and a unique destiny to shape the world.” The public grasps the paradox of power today in ways elites have not, defying the conventional wisdom that holds that when it comes to foreign policy the former is provincial and the latter cosmopolitan in their views. Today the reverse is true.

     America’s standing in the world cannot be restored by dusting off old strategies from the past for reuse in a new century. The times require more, and the public deserves better. The presidential candidate who says as much and begins to chart the cartography of “responsible globalism” fitted for the demands of a global era will find a welcoming audience abroad and a receptive constituency at home. He or she will, of course, have to buck the politics of fear and attacks from the peddlers of crisis, as well as the predictable counsels of caution from assorted policy elites and advisers. But this is where real leadership will be sorted out in 2008, and why we are in desperate need of a Great Debate to find it.

     The Nation

     and finally, chris floyd, arthur silber are always worth a visit.

     lTMF’sA

     

     • 

       olivia on November 3, 2007 at 12:04 pm

       thanks for all those links.

       And thanks ask for the w/e news diary.

       • 

         dada on November 3, 2007 at 12:10 pm

         blog walk-about, but since ask had the w/e edition up, l got to it early.

         have a great w/e!

         lTMF’sA

         

         • 

           olivia on November 3, 2007 at 12:12 pm
9. 

   on November 4, 2007 at 8:40 pm

   Real ID again.  Mainstream major network news did a piece Friday morning, nothing short of sales propaganda.  666, the Mark of the Beast implantable microchip,  that is the agenda.