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Wednesday June 6 2007
06/06/07, NYT Editorial, Jail Time for Scooter Libby, Source.
Friday February 3 2006
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, walks from the Federal Court in Washington February 3, 2006. A federal judge on Friday set a trial date for early next year for Libby, who is facing perjury and other charges stemming from the leak of CIA operative's Valerie Plame's identity to the news media. Libby has pleaded not guilty to five counts of obstructing justice, perjury and lying in the two-year investigation by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leak.
October 29, 2005
Reuters: U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney pauses
[fnord while making remarks at a reception for former U.S. Rep. Mac Collins (R-GA), a candidate for Congress in Perry, Georgia, October 28, 2005. /fnord - Note on 'fnord' and I say there should be an HTML fnord Tag bedad!]
Cheney's chief-of-staff Lewis Libby was charged with one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of making false statements and and two counts of perjury in the two-year-old CIA leaks investigation on CIA operative Plame's identity to reporters on Friday. Libby, 55, the chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president and assistant to President George W. Bush, resigned after he was indicted.
Tell me that Lewis Libby is innocent until proven guilty. Tell me that Mr. Cheney did not know what his chief-of-staff was up to. Tell me that Mr. Bush did not know what his Vice President was up to. And what is this all about?! It is about spinning the reasons that America is fighting a war in Iraq. A diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, gets sent to Niger to check out reports of Saddam/Iraq trying to buy uranium. He says, "nope, no evidence". Some say he lied. Read the report and judge for yourself.
[another digression - This turns out to be easier said than done. The report is 500 plus pages with no executive summary, not to mention that the page numbers in the table of contents do not match the pdf reader page numbers, we could call this a 'media' (in at least two senses) fnord, I have always disliked pdf files, and Adobe's cheap techniques of garnering market share. Anyway, suffice to day that in 10 minutes of scanning here and there looking for conclusions I did not see anything that directly made the man a liar. If anyone can point me at it more closely I will appreciate it. For now this report is just more murk.]
Maybe Wilson was a pawn in some anti-Bush game. Nonetheless, Bush and Cheney say "Wha?". And as punishment for this truth-telling or lie-telling or whatever it was, they arrange for his wife, Valerie Plame, to be "outed" as a CIA agent. Maybe they didn't arrange it, maybe they didn't order it, maybe some brown-nose suck-up sycophant just figgured they would 'appreciate' it - what's the difference?
And now they are fighting over who said or didn't say what to whom when! Well no, they are not 'fighting', this is America - they are litigating. Ho hum.
And here I thought the verb "out" had to do with homosexuals. If Valerie had been a lesbian the story might have made more sense to me. Where is the sin in being a CIA agent exactly?
Joe Wilson / Valerie Plame / Lewis Libby
And meanwhile: the boys are pushing nuclear energy as a solution for the outrageous squandering of energy and resources that constitutes economic activity on this planet, and the nuclear garbage winds up on Somalia's beaches; the peace-loving people of Brasil have voted overwhelmingly in favour of continuing a more-or-less open trade in guns because the police there just cannot protect them from the traficantes, and Columbia's drugs find their way to world markets; the bureaucracies proliferate and thrive, eating up 60% and 70% of the GNP, while little boys (Jeffrey Baldwin) are starved and tortured to death in Ontario under the watchful eyes of the Children's Aid Society - ah what tender mercies!
Is it any wonder that some of the less-than-bright nitwits figgure spaceships are coming to take them out of all this if they will just cut off their genitals first? Somebody better tell 'em there is nowhere to run, no place to hide. If taxes and poverty don't get'cha, AIDS and the bird flu will! And this is coming to you from Houston, Texas, where the air is a noxious petro-chemical soup; and the churches (Episcopalians at least - I saw 'em!) are decorated with "Go Astros" banners, not that I am against the Astros y'unnerstan - just that I didn't think it was a christian issue; and where there are lots of homeless people and on rainy days the keystone cops chase 'em from one underpass to the next.
I feel I should apologize for this rant. Ranting (and permitting rants) does not serve us. It placates and enervates a few biochemical synapses that have upset our homoeostasis (had to dig deep in the OED for that one!) and we move on. The phony-utopian internet coincides with our desire for expiation: "Well, I put it 'out there' and my job is done." Except it is not done. One, almost no one reads it; and two, the time and energy spent not doing it has been gobbled up by the diabolical web machine - I am not only enervated but exhausted. This could easily become a vicious spiral of tiny-moment-of-enlightenment, guilt, remorse, false atonement, solace, and then do-it-all-over-again etc. - and it does!
If and when I figgure a way out of this I will tell you. Don't hold your breath. So, for the second time today the word "meanwhile":
William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Bob Dylan - Ring Them Bells
Ring them bells, ye heathen
From the city that dreams,
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries
Cross the valleys and streams,
For they're deep and they're wide
And the world's on its side
And time is running backwards
And so is the bride.
Leonard Cohen - Anthem
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
(pictures with Perla Batalla and Anjani Thomas)
Bob Dylan - When You Gonna Wake Up
When you gonna wake up,
When you gonna wake up,
When you gonna wake up,
And strengthen the things that remain?
Revelations 3-2:
Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die:
Apocalipse 3-2:
Acordem e fortaleçam aquilo que ainda está vivo, antes que morra completamente;
Neil Young - Keep On Rockin' In The Free World
There's colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes
But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away,
And she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she's done to it
There's one more kid that'll never go to school
Never get to fall in love,
never get to be cool.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
KEEP ON ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD.
Tags: America, Libby, Cheney, Fnord, Plame, Apocalipse, Scripture, Revelations, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Neil Young, Yeats.
Down, Thread Down: Bunnatine Hayes Greenhouse.
Wednesday June 6 2007
06/06/07, NYT Editorial, Jail Time for Scooter Libby, Source.
Friday February 3 2006
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, walks from the Federal Court in Washington February 3, 2006. A federal judge on Friday set a trial date for early next year for Libby, who is facing perjury and other charges stemming from the leak of CIA operative's Valerie Plame's identity to the news media. Libby has pleaded not guilty to five counts of obstructing justice, perjury and lying in the two-year investigation by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leak.October 29, 2005
Reuters: U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney pauses[fnord while making remarks at a reception for former U.S. Rep. Mac Collins (R-GA), a candidate for Congress in Perry, Georgia, October 28, 2005. /fnord - Note on 'fnord' and I say there should be an HTML fnord Tag bedad!]
Cheney's chief-of-staff Lewis Libby was charged with one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of making false statements and and two counts of perjury in the two-year-old CIA leaks investigation on CIA operative Plame's identity to reporters on Friday. Libby, 55, the chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president and assistant to President George W. Bush, resigned after he was indicted.
Tell me that Lewis Libby is innocent until proven guilty. Tell me that Mr. Cheney did not know what his chief-of-staff was up to. Tell me that Mr. Bush did not know what his Vice President was up to. And what is this all about?! It is about spinning the reasons that America is fighting a war in Iraq. A diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, gets sent to Niger to check out reports of Saddam/Iraq trying to buy uranium. He says, "nope, no evidence". Some say he lied. Read the report and judge for yourself.[another digression - This turns out to be easier said than done. The report is 500 plus pages with no executive summary, not to mention that the page numbers in the table of contents do not match the pdf reader page numbers, we could call this a 'media' (in at least two senses) fnord, I have always disliked pdf files, and Adobe's cheap techniques of garnering market share. Anyway, suffice to day that in 10 minutes of scanning here and there looking for conclusions I did not see anything that directly made the man a liar. If anyone can point me at it more closely I will appreciate it. For now this report is just more murk.]
Maybe Wilson was a pawn in some anti-Bush game. Nonetheless, Bush and Cheney say "Wha?". And as punishment for this truth-telling or lie-telling or whatever it was, they arrange for his wife, Valerie Plame, to be "outed" as a CIA agent. Maybe they didn't arrange it, maybe they didn't order it, maybe some brown-nose suck-up sycophant just figgured they would 'appreciate' it - what's the difference?
And now they are fighting over who said or didn't say what to whom when! Well no, they are not 'fighting', this is America - they are litigating. Ho hum.
And here I thought the verb "out" had to do with homosexuals. If Valerie had been a lesbian the story might have made more sense to me. Where is the sin in being a CIA agent exactly?Joe Wilson / Valerie Plame / Lewis Libby
And meanwhile: the boys are pushing nuclear energy as a solution for the outrageous squandering of energy and resources that constitutes economic activity on this planet, and the nuclear garbage winds up on Somalia's beaches; the peace-loving people of Brasil have voted overwhelmingly in favour of continuing a more-or-less open trade in guns because the police there just cannot protect them from the traficantes, and Columbia's drugs find their way to world markets; the bureaucracies proliferate and thrive, eating up 60% and 70% of the GNP, while little boys (Jeffrey Baldwin) are starved and tortured to death in Ontario under the watchful eyes of the Children's Aid Society - ah what tender mercies!
Is it any wonder that some of the less-than-bright nitwits figgure spaceships are coming to take them out of all this if they will just cut off their genitals first? Somebody better tell 'em there is nowhere to run, no place to hide. If taxes and poverty don't get'cha, AIDS and the bird flu will! And this is coming to you from Houston, Texas, where the air is a noxious petro-chemical soup; and the churches (Episcopalians at least - I saw 'em!) are decorated with "Go Astros" banners, not that I am against the Astros y'unnerstan - just that I didn't think it was a christian issue; and where there are lots of homeless people and on rainy days the keystone cops chase 'em from one underpass to the next.
I feel I should apologize for this rant. Ranting (and permitting rants) does not serve us. It placates and enervates a few biochemical synapses that have upset our homoeostasis (had to dig deep in the OED for that one!) and we move on. The phony-utopian internet coincides with our desire for expiation: "Well, I put it 'out there' and my job is done." Except it is not done. One, almost no one reads it; and two, the time and energy spent not doing it has been gobbled up by the diabolical web machine - I am not only enervated but exhausted. This could easily become a vicious spiral of tiny-moment-of-enlightenment, guilt, remorse, false atonement, solace, and then do-it-all-over-again etc. - and it does!
If and when I figgure a way out of this I will tell you. Don't hold your breath. So, for the second time today the word "meanwhile":
William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Bob Dylan - Ring Them Bells
Ring them bells, ye heathen
From the city that dreams,
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries
Cross the valleys and streams,
For they're deep and they're wide
And the world's on its side
And time is running backwards
And so is the bride.
Leonard Cohen - AnthemRing the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
(pictures with Perla Batalla and Anjani Thomas)
Bob Dylan - When You Gonna Wake Up
When you gonna wake up,
When you gonna wake up,
When you gonna wake up,
And strengthen the things that remain?
Revelations 3-2:
Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die:
Apocalipse 3-2:
Acordem e fortaleçam aquilo que ainda está vivo, antes que morra completamente;
Neil Young - Keep On Rockin' In The Free World
There's colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoesBut there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage canNow she puts the kid away,
And she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she's done to it
There's one more kid that'll never go to school
Never get to fall in love,
never get to be cool.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world.
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless manWe got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world,
KEEP ON ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD.
Tags: America, Libby, Cheney, Fnord, Plame, Apocalipse, Scripture, Revelations, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Neil Young, Yeats.
Down, Thread Down: Bunnatine Hayes Greenhouse.
