“These narco-developments, parallel with 1) other financial and political reasons why a new Mynamar government would be preferred; 2) a fragile and teetering world economy facing numerous financial bubbles and insolvency; and 3) continued failure to control either the Middle East or contain the rising political and economic power of China, cast a different light on the sudden burst of interest on the part of the Bush administration to back a coup or regime change in Myanmar.”
Ron Paul’s 114 percent increase is in stark contrast to the decrease suffered by Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain. Romney’s fundraising was down 29 percent. Giuliani was down 40 percent. McCain was down 55 percent.
New details emerged Tuesday in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police inquiry into an Edmonton Police Service attempt to arrest a newspaper columnist over articles that criticized the police. On November 18, 2004, several officers were involved in a stake-out of the Overtime Bar in a failed attempt to arrest Edmonton Sun writer Kerry Diotte and police oversight commission chairman Martin Ignasiak.
Yesterday’s disciplinary hearing focused on the head of the traffic section, Sergeant Bill Newton, who is charged with abusing his authority. According to testimony heard yesterday, Newton had been angered by an April 4, 2004 column in which Diotte criticized the city’s photo radar program. The column became a hot topic of discussion throughout the police force.
Diotte cited statistics that showed speed cameras raised a lot of money for police but led to an increase, not a decrease, in accidents. “In 2001 alone, city police issued 194,500 speeding tickets,” Diotte wrote. “Photo radar and red-light cameras raise about $14 million annually for police. Yet last year fatal collisions jumped to 32 from 20 in 2002.”
Looks like it was a coordinated attack, involving planes, bombs and moles in the system who were able to set it all up. Nice to get it straight from the horse’s mouth, though.
Let me cover the big picture. I do think we’re approaching the end of the world as we know it…I think there is such thing as the business cycle. It exists. And we’ve had the longest expansion - and the strongest expansion - in the world history. But we’re at the end of a 25-year boom. It’s gone on more than a full generation now. And I’ll tell you how it’s going to end: It’s going to end with a depression, and not just a depression; not just another Great Depression; it’s going to be the Greater Depression.
Bush’s “war on terror” quickly became Bush’s war on Iraqi civilians. So far over one million Iraqi civilians have lost their lives because of Bush’s invasion, and four million have been displaced. Iraq’s infrastructure is in ruins. Disease is rampant. Normal life has disappeared.
Self-righteous Americans justify these monstrous crimes as necessary to ensure their own safety from terrorist attack. Yet, Americans are in far greater danger from their own police forces than they are from foreign terrorists. Ironically, Bush’s “war on terror” has made Americans less safe at home by diminishing US civil liberty and turning an epidemic of US police brutality into a pandemic.
