There are plenty of reasons why you should vote for Ron Paul but try talking to a Ron Paul supporter and ask them to mention 1 reason why not to vote for Ron Paul and you will be called all sorts of names. They almost appear like the Bushies (thats slang for the Bush supporters) and almost think Paul is an incarnation of Christ who can do no wrong. I find this blind allegiance scary. It is okay to question even someone you support and I would certainly vote for RP if it Kucinich and Gravel weren’t on the ballot list. He is right on a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean he is right on everything. Also, questioning some of his policies or stance, doesn’t make you any less loyal than another supporter.

So here’s my list of 5 reasons why I would not vote for Ron Paul and the RP supporters would be well advised to ask him these questions.

1. War Reparations: Ron Paul doesn’t believe in providing war reparations to the Iraqis. He just dismisses that issue with a very cavalier atttitude saying “it was a mistake”. Well, yes, it was a mistake. But what mistake did the Iraqis commit? Did they ask the US to invade them and free them? Did they ask Saddam to rule over them in a despotic manner?

This position of RP is absolutely morally reprehensible to me. I detest this whole idea that the US is better than other countries. Every nation in the past has provided War reparations and so should the US of A. Not all Germans were Nazi sympathisers nor were all Japanese imperialists and yet Germany and Japan provided war reparations and that is the first step that the US should take while asking for an apology from the Iraqis and the world. Check this video see his position on War Reparations.

2. Net Neutrality: Comcast recently blocked some torrent traffic and everyday we hear of a new corporation choosing and picking what net traffic gets preference. Net Neutrality will make sure the Net remains Neutral but Ron Paul voted against it. I understand Paul is for limited government and intervention, but who else will police these corporations? Should the corporatiosn be left to police themselves. This is another ridiculous policy position by Ron Paul.

3. Global Warming: Ron Paul is obviously out to lunch here. His positions of free market and the cavalier attitude of personal responsibility is fatally flawed. That is all we have been doing so far. Asking the corporations to own up to their responsibility and it has not worked in the least bit. His positions are almost similar to Bush. When a majority of scientists in the world are pleading for some action his attitude on global warming is very scary.

4. Abortion: Ron Paul is against government intervention in private space but he doesn`t mind intervening in a woman`s uterus. He wants people to vote on whether a woman can have an abortion or not. The fact that he wants the states to choose and decide doesn’t change anything. What about a woman’s right in this issue since he is so for life and liberty. Since he is also against welfare, who will help the woman from the poorer class to feed her child. Who is he or anyone else to pass moral judgement on what a woman can or can not do.

5. United Nations: Ron Paul wants to move out of the United Nations. It is a noble organisation and its credibility is in tatters and that is all thanks to the US. Yet he will choose to completely move out of the United Nations and never intervene anywhere except if the security of the US is threatened. That means he won’t intervene in cases such as Rwanda and Darfur. That is morally reprehensible and disgusting.

It is no different than Bush’s position of intervening everywhere for US interests, just happens to be on the opposite SELFISH extreme.

Think about it Ron Paul supporters and question Dr. Paul on some of these issues. As Albert Einstein said: Unthinking Respect for Authority is the Greatest Enemy of Truth.

There is also another list of 10 reasons why not to vote for Ron Paul. Do have a look.

Just how profoundly ignorant from a historical perspective you have to be if you are in the Bush regime or indeed a supporter of the Bush regime was exemplified by none other than Dana Perino; the White House press secretary.The White House spokesperson who often starts sentences with “…if we take a historical perspective” knows nothing about history at all. How else can you justify her comments. According to this story when a reporter asked her:

“Do you want to address the remarks by President Putin, who said the United States setting up a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe was like the Soviet Union putting missiles in Cuba, setting up a Cuban missile crisis?”, she replied saying:

“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

Now this is a person who speaks for the White House or in other words for the President of the United States and she doesn’t even know the difference between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs invasion by the US. She is just like the other Bushies, profoundly ignorant of just about everything including history.

It is incredible seeing the complete apathy of the populace in face of actions such as these. If actions such as holding a journalist from a Pulitzer prize winning AP journalistic team for 19 months without any charge alarmed you, that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Now the fire fighters are being trained to report people who express discontent with the government. Absolutely mind numbingly amazing! This is the sort of stuff that goes on in Burma and North Korea and used to happen in Eastern Europeans states like Poland, in Chile under Pinochet, in Russia under Stalin not to mention Hitler and Mussolini. State spies are everywhere and USA is definitely moving in that direction. This should be alarming but except the Keith Olberman show, this hasn’t even been mentioned in the so called liberal media. Here are some details that have emerged:

It was revealed last week that firefighters are being trained to not only keep an eye out for illegal materials in the course of their duties, but even to report back any expression of discontent with the government.

A year ago, Homeland Security gave security clearances to nine New York City fire chiefs and began sharing intelligence with them. Even before that, fire department personnel were being taught “to identify material or behavior that may indicate terrorist activities” and were also “told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States.”

This program seems to be turning [firefighters], essentially, into legally protected domestic spies, does it not?”

And before the Bush apologists come in here and try to defend this and call it a liberal conspiracy, this is not a partisan view. LewRockwell, one of the prominent conservative magazines says the same thing about the current state of affairs in the US of A.

Thought police anyone? It is pretty amazing that George Orwell’s predictions are all coming true in a hurry.

As Sinclair Lewis said: When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.

What I have always failed to understand is the almost unconditional support to the Indo-US nuclear deal. Anyone with the temerity to question it and set some conditions has to be labelled a communist sissy without so much as a second thought to the concerns raised. Whether those concerns are valid or not could only be determined with careful consideration but that almost never happens. While I want to make it clear that I am “for” the deal, although it is yet one more example of the hypocrisy of the US foreign policy, it should not be unconditional and without safeguards.

And the first safeguard should be non-intervention by the US in India’s foreign policy or internal affairs. For anyone who has read ever the bare minimum about US foreign policy or taken a peek into the history, there are multiple examples of the arm-twisting of nations by the United States. And that makes it a very valid argument. Today came yet another example of a US attempt to influence and India’s policy with a letter by Democrat Tom Lantos to the Indian prime minister warning him that “New Delhi’s ties with Iran had significant potential to harm India-U.S. relations and the landmark deal.”. According to this report:

The letter — signed by Democrat Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, senior Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and others — was the third, and strongest, in recent days expressing concern over relations between New Delhi and Tehran.

They urged India to end what they said was “military cooperation” with old friend Iran and terminate participation in the development of Tehran’s energy sector.

And this is not new. There has been instances in the past too where the US has tried to further its own interests by trying to influence Indian foreign policy. The Indian government should, and I believe it will, protest at this open interference in India’s internal affairs and foreign policy. I wonder what the realists think of this interference.

As Douglas MacArthur said -“No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation”

The highly delusional state of the US populace would be mildly entertaining, were it not for the gravity of the situation and the respect of basic human rights and the tenets of International law and democracy. United States is called the “land of the free and home of the brave”. Bravery, it seems, has taken on a different meaning. It now means invading a country that caused no harm to the United States and dropping cluster bombs from high up in the sky and killing civilians. And “land of the free” means, you can hold a journalist for 19 months without laying any charges because he dared to publish pictures and stories that the objective (pun intended) embedded journalists never cared to show.I am talking about the AP journalist Bilal Hussein who has been in custody for 19 months without any charge whatsoever. From this report in the Washington Post:

Bilal has been imprisoned by the U.S. military in Iraq since he was picked up April 12, 2006, in Ramadi, a violent town in a turbulent province where few Western journalists dared go. The military claimed then that he had suspicious links to insurgents. This week, Editor & Publisher magazine reported the military has amended that to say he is, in fact, a “terrorist” who had “infiltrated the AP.”

We believe Bilal’s crime was taking photographs the U.S. government did not want its citizens to see. That he was part of a team of AP photographers who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for work in Iraq may have made Bilal even more of a marked man.

In the 19 months since he was picked up, Bilal has not been charged with any crime, although the military has sent out a flurry of ever-changing claims. Every claim we’ve checked out has proved to be false, overblown or microscopic in significance.

And if the above sound ridiculous, it doesn’t stop there. Now suddenly the military is going to charge him with something. Yes, something. What the charges are won’t be discussed, not even with his lawyer.

And there’s still some more, as if the above wasn’t enough. According to this report by Associated Press:

The Pentagon also raised the possibility that Bilal Hussein, who was part of the AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo team in 2005, could continue to be held even if the Iraqi court acquits him.

So why have a trial at all? Why not just hang him like Saddam with a puppet court.

USA is indeed the land of the free and home of the brave. Shameful!!

digg story

From time to time you come across some news which would be just hilarious, if it weren’t so ridiculous.

According to this Reuters report in the Washington Post, a lot of older ladies, to be politically correct, are travelling to Kenya, which is a country “just full of big young boys who like us older girls” according to two ladies who travelled there. Read the full report here.

I guess “raping Africa” just took on a very different and literal meaning now. Ridiculous!

The United States’ media and the populace always seem averse to asking the questions that are the most important. After 9/11, the question should have been what drove those people to fly those planes into the towers and what is the reason for the hate. Sadly, that question was never asked and when it was the populace drank the kool-aid and accepted the reason given by the politicians - “they hate us because we are free and they hate what we stand for“. A few people that questioned this ridiculous claim were shut out by being labelled sissies, unpatriotic and traitors.

Now after a few disastrous years of occupation we begin to see a semblance of normalcy; only by Iraqi standards, returning. So what caused this? That should be the most important question, shouldn’t it. No one seems to be asking that. Again, we are forced to accept the premise that the so-called “surge” is what caused it and people and the media have accepted it at face value, even with the shameful history of lies and deceit by the Bush administration.

Lets analyse this a bit further. First, the surge was never really a surge. Anyone who has followed the troop numbers and compared that month by month knows that the troop numbers after the surge only matched the numbers in early 2007. I accept though that the violence did go down and quite dramatically. Why it went down though is another question and the answer to that has very little to do with the surge.

When the US went in to Iraq and disbanded the Iraqi army and the Baath party, a lot of people were unemployed with no way to feed their families. The local tribal militias which are a part of middle east in any country also found their influence over defined boundaries being eroded and all power centralised with the US forces. The tribal war-lords, Sunni or Shia weren’t going to take this lying down and they shook hands with Al-Qaeda likes and started targeting the US forces and indeed, even civilians to ensure that the US would eventually turn to them and grant them semi-autonomy over regions they controlled before the invasion. The US flatly refused initially. But as time wore on, the US was forced to accept the reality on the ground and rescinded from its earlier pledge never to negotiate with these warlords. Now the US granted them autonomy and even handed them bourses trying to bring them on their side. And these tribal warlords accepted this offer readily. Their only concern was autonomy and rule over the areas they already controlled before the invasion. After joining forces with the Americans these warlords started targeting the foreign fighters as per the terms of their agreement with the Americans. The violence naturally took a downward turn.

This has gone completely under-reported in the media, which is not surprising in the least bit. The one time I heard a reporter actually talk about this was on CNN with Michael Ware. But Wolf Blitzer immediately cut him off.

Read this report in the Times: Sunni sheiks turn their sights from US forces to Al-Qaeda. From the report:

One of the younger members of Moltz’s A Company acknowledged that he found it hard to grasp such a rapid shifting of alliances. “I’m not sure about this,” he said. “Two months ago, these guys were shooting at us. Now we’re supposed to be friends. It’s kind of hard when you know that guy blew up your buddy.”…[...]

Some critics also worry that the deals with Sunni sheikhs might ultimately turn them into warlords, even if the stated aim is for their private armies to be absorbed into the Iraqi security forces as soon as possible.

The above report was from a while back. Now look at this report that again appeared in the Times, today, which says: American backed killer militias strut across Iraq. From this report:

The US military is delighted with the results achieved by the brigade in Abu Ghraib and by similar groups in other former “hot spots” of sectarian conflict that have seen a sharp decline in violence. For Shi’ites such as Kahiriya Musa, however, a Sunni militia represents another potential source of terror in a country where millions have been traumatised by ethnic cleansing.

Officials in the Shi’ite-led government also fear the burgeoning of fresh forces beyond its control. The question being asked in government circles is: have the Americans achieved a short-term gain in security at a cost of long-term pain that may be inflicted by the Sunni militias, which are already threatening to go to war against their Shi’ite counterparts?

These are the real reasons why the so-called surge has worked. Will it continue to work is what no one can say right now, but if history teaches us anything, I would not say it will. US has again managed to ravage a country and create such divisions that it will be almost impossible for it to return to any sort of normalcy. I guess the Americans never ever learned anything from their experience with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and how they morphed into the dreaded Taliban.

And as has become the norm the US citizenry and the media continue to sleep.

If anyone still had doubts that most conservatives are hypocrites, here is the some more proof.

I am talking about Conservapedia. I didn’t even know such a site existed. Well, it is supposed to be a conservative encyclopedia, whatever the hell that means. Here’s what Wikipedia says about this website:

Conservapedia is an English-language wiki-based web encyclopedia project with the stated purpose of creating an encyclopedia written from a socially- and economically-conservative viewpoint supportive of Conservative Christianity.

So they accept upfront that they are not going to be unbiased. Rather it is going to be a biased look from the socially conservative point of view. Hmm…. Reading further:

Many of its articles support the Young Earth creationism point of view. Andrew Schlafly, the site’s creator and son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, stated that he founded the project because he felt Wikipedia had a liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias.

Apparently, Wikipedia is very biased news source, so they created their own biased news source. I guess the primary audience they are targetting is the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Malkin fans.

We all know how much these “Conservative Christians” are against homosexuality, don’t we? I guess, we were wrong. Those Republicans being caught in bathrooms with their pants down aren’t exceptions, lest anyone think that. Take a look at the below list. The list the the top 10 most popular pages on the conservative encyclopedia - Conservapedia. Any discerning human (not just a liberal) would never consult Conservapedia as a source, so all of those visitors have to be conservatives. So guess what they are looking at. Here’s the list:

1. Main Page‎ [1,916,070]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,586,035]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [517,533]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [421,328]
5. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [395,931]
6. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [388,714]
7. Homosexual Couples and Domestic Violence‎ [373,352]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [331,740]
9. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [292,836]
10. Homosexual Agenda‎ [271,005]

[source]

Did you just “Laugh Out Loud”.

I will end with just one word - Hypocrites.

Surprise surprise!! It is not the Iranians? Who would have thought?

However, this is not what the MSM and the Bush regime have been repeating, is it? We are being fed story after story of how Iran is involved in arming and training the insurgents and is the primary source of foreign fighters. It ain’t so. The record of this administration when it comes to speaking the truth or anything remotely similar is so abysmal that I get angry at anyone who believes their lies in the first place. According to this report in the New York Times:

Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior American military officials.

…Saudis accounted for the largest number of fighters listed on the records by far — 305, or 41 percent — American intelligence officers found as they combed through documents and computers in the weeks after the raid.

But we all know this information is not what the US wants to propagate. This information does not sit well with the neocons and their plans of attacking Iran by blaming them for anything and everything that goes wrong in Iraq. And that is not the end of it. There is a concerted effort by the US to seek evidence incriminating Iran. Does anyone remember Cheney’s trips to the CIA headquarters and his time spent talking to the CIA analysts trying to come up with something on Saddam’s WMD. The same thing is being repeated here. But yet, US govt mouthpieces Bill O’Reilly, Limbaugh and the like and indeed the all of the mainstream media with the notable exception of CNN’s Michael Ware keep on repeating and propagating these lies and thereby making a case for a strike on Iran.

As this report on the Guardian says:

US military officials are putting huge pressure on interrogators who question Iraqi insurgents to find incriminating evidence pointing to Iran, it was claimed last night.Micah Brose, a privately contracted interrogator working for American forces in Iraq, near the Iranian border, told The Observer that information on Iran is ‘gold’.

…Other military intelligence officials in Iraq refused to comment, but one said: ‘The message is, “Got to find a link with Iran, got to find a link with Iran.” It’s sickening.’

Of course this is nothing new. 15 of the 19 hijackers according to govt itself came from Saudi Arabia but the countries that were attacked were Afghanistan and Iraq. This is just a continuation of the same.

Meanwhile the American populace continues to sleepwalk towards fascism.