LONDON – President Bush has a fresh mandate to pursue an “aggressive” foreign policy, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday.

In an interview with Britain’s Financial Times newspaper, Powell said Bush had no intention of pulling back and insisted the newly re-elected president had a mandate to pursue American national interests in international affairs.

“The president is not going to trim his sails or pull back,” Powell told the newspaper. “It’s a continuation of his principles, his policies, his beliefs.”

Powell made no mention of any specific country or region, but said U.S. foreign policy had been “aggressive in terms of going after challenges, issues” and Bush was “going to keep moving in this direction.
Full Article:commondreams.org

Well I’m sure the world will be surprised by this announcement. Aggressive/Aggression…what’s the dif?

WASHINGTON — The first military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was halted Monday after a federal judge here ruled the proceedings invalid under U.S. and international law — dealing a blow to the legal process set up by the Bush administration to handle accused terrorists.

The case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan was suspended after U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the Yemeni man had been denied due process.

The ruling affects all of the nearly 500 detainees from Afghanistan at Guantanamo.

“The practical outcome of this is that the government is not going to be able to maintain this system,” said Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law school professor who has challenged the military commissions in court on behalf of two detainees.

Robertson ruled that the Bush administration had not followed a lawful procedure in declaring Hamdan an “enemy combatant” who was not entitled to protections and privileges under the Geneva Convention. The “combatant status review tribunals” — used by the Pentagon to decide whether to hold detainees — are not a “competent” court to make such a determination, Robertson said. And the military commission process, which prosecutes detainees using secret evidence and unnamed witnesses, “could not be countenanced in any American court,” the judge ruled.

“The government has asserted a position starkly different from the positions and behavior of the United States in previous conflicts, one that can only weaken the United States’ own ability to demand application of the Geneva Conventions to Americans captured during armed conflicts abroad,” wrote Robertson, who served as a lieutenant in the Navy between 1959 and 1964 and was appointed a judge in 1994 by President Clinton.

To correct the system, Robertson said, the government must recognize the detainees as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention until it has a legally valid way to declare they are not.
Full Article

by Gary Younge
American voters’ priorities differ substantially from those set out by President Bush in the immediate aftermath of his victory, polls suggest.

An Associated Press poll showed voters support, by a huge majority, cutting the country’s enormous deficit rather than slashing taxes.

By a narrow margin, voters also back the nomination of a supreme court judge who will preserve abortion rights.

More than 25% of the respondents, who were questioned in the three days after the election, listed Iraq as the top priority for Mr Bush’s second term, ahead of terrorism, the economy and healthcare in that order. Seven out of 10, including a majority of Democrats, said they would prefer US troops to stay in Iraq until the country is stable.

Only 2% named taxes as the top priority and when asked specifically whether they would prefer the president to balance the budget or cut taxes further they favoured balancing the budget by two to one.

Following his victory President Bush said: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”

Yet few of his priorities, namely the privatisation of social security, tax laws and medical malpractice surfaced as being a big concern for voters.

Most were relieved that the election had been concluded quickly compared with 2000.
Full Article:guardian.co.uk

Well the big debate is whether the American people are hopelessly out of it or the election was stolen. I choose both.

US troops pushed into the centre of Falluja yesterday, fighting their way from house to house and shooting their way through bands of militants in their drive to recapture the city that has been the centre of insurgency since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

On the second day of the assault, US army forces pressed into the city from the east, reaching the centre as marine units drove their way down in two prongs from the north. Fighter bombers and heavy artillery fire cleared the way as the troops advanced.

US officials said 10 American and two Iraqi troops had died in Falluja since the offensive began.

Although some officers reported heavy resistance in some districts, overall the insurgents appeared to have put up less of a coordinated fight than expected.

“We expected a much fiercer reaction,” said Major General Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem, the head of Iraqi forces in Falluja and the province’s newly appointed military governor.

He admitted some of the fighters may have already left. “There is movement in and out. It is a vast and difficult area. Some people even swim in and out,” he said.

Full Article:guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON – Republican gains in the Senate could give President Bush (news – web sites) his best chance yet to achieve his No. 1 energy priority — opening an oil-rich but environmentally sensitive Alaska wildlife refuge to drilling.

If he is successful, it would be a stinging defeat for environmentalists and an energy triumph that eluded Bush his first four years in the White House. A broader agenda that includes reviving nuclear power, preventing blackouts and expanding oil and gas drilling in the Rockies will be more difficult to enact.

Republicans in the House and Senate said this week they plan to push for Alaska refuge drilling legislation early next year, and they predict success, given the 55-44-1 GOP Senate majority in the next Congress. Democrats and some environmental activists say continued protection of the refuge has never been as much in doubt.

“It’s probably the best chance we’ve had,” Rep. Richard Pombo (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., chairman of the House Resources Committee and a vocal drilling advocate, said in an interview.

Sen. Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record), R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he will press to open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as part of the government’s budget deliberations early in 2005. That would enable drilling proponents to skirt an otherwise certain Democratic-led filibuster that would be difficult to overcome.

“With oil trading at nearly $50 a barrel, the case for ANWR is more compelling than ever,” said Domenici. “We have the technology to develop oil without harming the environment and wildlife.”

Bush is also expected in his second term to renew his call for action by Congress on a broader, largely pro-production, energy agenda — from easing rules for oil and gas drilling on federal land in the Rocky Mountains to expanding clean-coal technology and improving the reliability of the electricity grid.

New tax incentives to spur construction of next-generation nuclear power plants also will be back on the table after Democrats and some moderate Republicans scuttled it last year. Greater use of corn-based ethanol in gasoline also has wide support at the White House and in Congress.

Full Article: news.yahoo.com

The dollar could slide still further, in spite of hitting an all-time low against the euro last week in the wake of George W. Bush’s re-election, currency traders have said.

The dollar sell-off has resumed amid fears among traders that Mr Bush’s victory will bring four more years of widening US budget and current account deficits, heightened geopolitical risks and a policy of “benign neglect” of the dollar.

Many currency traders were taken aback on Friday when the greenback fell in spite of bullish data showing the US economy created 337,000 jobs in October.

“If this can’t cause the dollar to strengthen you have to tell me what will. This is a big green light to sell the dollar,” said David Bloom, currency analyst at HSBC, as the greenback fell to a nine-year low in trade-weighted terms.

The dollar’s fall comes as the Federal Reserve is widely expected to raise US interest rates by a quarter point to 2 per cent when it meets on Wednesday and to signal that it will continue with a measured pace of rate increases.

Speculative traders in Chicago last week racked up the highest number of long-euro, short-dollar contracts on record. Options traders have reported brisk business in euro calls – contracts to buy the euro at a pre-determined rate.

However, the market has been rife with rumours that the latest wave of selling has been led by foreign governments seeking to cut their exposure to US assets.

India and Russia have reportedly been selling US assets, as well as petrodollar-rich Middle Eastern investors.

China, which has $515bn of reserves, was also said to be selling dollars and buying Asian currencies in readiness to switch the renminbi’s dollar peg to a basket arrangement, something Chinese officials have increasingly hinted at. Any re-allocation could push the dollar sharply lower and Treasury yields markedly higher.
new.ft.com

by Gary Younge

A suburban American school board found itself in court yesterday after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution was “a theory, not a fact”.

Atlanta’s Cobb County school board, the second largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2,300 strong petition attacked the presentation of “Darwinism unchallenged”. Some parents wanted creationism – the theory that God created humans according to the Bible version – to be taught alongside evolution.

Shortly after the stickers were put on the books, six parents launched a legal challenge, with the support of the the American Civil Liberties Union. It started yesterday.

“I’m a strong advocate for the separation of church and state,” one of the parents, Jeffrey Selman, told the Associated Press. “I have no problem with anybody’s religious beliefs. I just want an adequate educational system.”

The board says the stickers were motivated by a desire to establish a greater understanding of different view points. “They improve the curriculum, while also promoting an attitude of tolerance for those with different religious beliefs,” said Linwood Gunn, a lawyer for Cobb County schools.

The controversy began when the school board’s textbook selection committee ordered $8m (£4.3m) worth of the science books in March 2002. Marjorie Rogers, a parent who does not believe in evolution, protested and petitioned the board to add a sticker and an insert setting out other explanations for the origins of life.

“It is unconstitutional to teach only evolution,” she said. “The school board must allow the teaching of both theories of origin.”

Her efforts galvanised the fundamentalist community.

“God created earth and man in his image,” another parent, Patricia Fuller, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Leave this garbage out of the textbooks. I don’t want anybody taking care of me in a nursing home some day to think I came from a monkey.”

Wendi Hill, one of the parents who signed the petition, said: “We believe the Bible is correct in that God created man. I don’t expect the public school system to teach only creationism, but I think it should be given its fair share.”

Cobb county achieved what it believed to be a compromise by adding stickers to the books which read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

But secular parents believed the board had been browbeaten.

“I’m shocked Cobb County is handling it this way,” said Gina Stubbart, who served on the textbook selection committee. “The average person knows evolution is a widely accepted scientific theory.”

This year Georgia’s schools superintendent, Kathy Cox, removed the word “evolution” from the state’s science teaching standards, but she quickly backtracked after receiving nearly 1,000 complaints.

In 1987, the supreme court ruled that creationism was a religious belief that could not be taught in public schools along with evolution.

Since then creationism has been repackaged as the theory of “intelligent design”.

This contends that life on Earth results from a purposeful design rather than random development and that a higher intelligence is guiding this process.

Pennsylvania’s Dover area school board has already voted to teach intelligent design.

The hearing in Georgia will have to establish whether intelligent design is in fact a religious theory; and if so, whether the stickers which mention neither intelligent design, nor religion by name, violate the separation of church and state.

The issue of creationism in schools has long been a point of contention between fundamentalists and secularists in the US. In 1925, John Scopes went on trial for teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee, in what became known as the monkey trial.

It ended with Scopes being fined $100 for violating a Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of divine creation as taught by the Bible and to teach instead that man was descended from a lower order of animals”.
guardian.co.uk

This nasty fundamentalist streak is never far from the surface in the U.S. These tendencies are being deliberately exploited now.

by Todd S. Purdum
t was not a landslide, or a re-alignment, or even a seismic shock. But it was decisive, and it is impossible to read President Bush’s re-election with larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country – divided yes, but with an undisputed majority united behind his leadership.

Surveys of voters leaving the polls found that a majority believed the national economy was not so good, that tax cuts had done nothing to help it and that the war in Iraq had jeopardized national security. But fully one-fifth of voters said they cared most about “moral values” – as many as cared about terrorism and the economy – and 8 in 10 of them chose Mr. Bush.

In other words, while Mr. Bush remains a polarizing figure on both coasts and in big cities, he has proved himself a galvanizing one in the broad geographic and political center of the country. He increased his share of the vote among women, Hispanics, older voters and even city dwellers significantly from 2000, made slight gains among Catholics and Jews and turned what was then a 500,000-popular-vote defeat into a 3.6 million-popular-vote victory on Tuesday.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Well even aside from the very real possibility that the books were cooked, this analysis is nonsense. ‘Moral values’ now. Really? In times of fear America retreats into this insular ‘moral values’ bit, as if US foreign policy has no place in the moral equation, and all of us wicked Easterners and big-city slickers are bereft of ‘morals.’ This was a campaign of fear, and uninformed people were manipulated into the illusion that Bush and the Republicans are going to make us safe. America’s narrow-mindedness and mean-spiritedness are on full display and moral values have nothing to do with it. Nostaligia, yes. For simpler days when gays were quiet in the closet and abortions were performed on ‘bad girls’ in back allies. Some kind of 50’s retro throwback is what we’re seeing here, the incredible smallness Americans are capable of when they perceive a threat. It is so pathetic that this country has such weak powers of self-reflection, and knows itself so little. It turns all that high-flown patriotic rhetoric into pure poison. This is the most dangerous nation the world has ever known, and so many of its people have fled into some soft-lens hallucination of porch swings and apple pies cooling on the windowsill. This is the alternative to taking responsibility for what we have become as a result of all the realities we repress. Is that a tortured black body hanging off the big tree in the backyard?
The self-indulgent self-serving mythologies of ‘America.’ I wish I could say ‘spare me,’ but really we deserve to be spared nothing.

by Donna J. Volatile
It is now the morning after, the morning after, and Kerry supporters should be moving from mourning into anger as the ice cold splash of reality begins to settle in.

Your guy lost, plain and simple but was he really your guy to begin with?

Most of the people who got behind Kerry were people vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq and the use of pre-emptive strikes. Most of you are caring, thoughtful and intelligent people who truly wanted to make a difference. Yet, in mass you got behind a man who didn’t represent your ideas and values, a man who couldn’t define himself or differentiate himself from his opponent, a man who supported the invasion of Iraq and continued to do so throughout his campaign. Was Kerry really your guy?

All of you claimed you wanted regime change! Some of you really believed your guy would be capable of saving the country by implem! enting real change but many of you got behind Kerry because anybody would be better than Bush.

Hey, don’t feel too bad, you were in some pretty good company! You had a wagon load of intellectuals, progressives and even some down right radicals that climbed on board the same bus. You all fed into the fear factor, not the Republican one, spewing trumped up terror alerts and threats but rather the one put forward by the Democrats: DON’T VOTE FOR NADER OR ELSE!

The Republicans cleverly played the fear factor and the terror card but the Democrats were equally duplicitous and devious in their political maneuvering. I wonder if it ever occurred to any of you just how un-democratic the democrats truly were throughout the course of this election? The Democrats didn’t promote democracy, they impeded it and in the end, they decimated the third party alternative and spent billions of dollars doing it.

Regardless of whether! or not the Bush cartel stole yet another election (and there is plenty of evidence to suggest they did…), you backed the wrong horse. A chimpanzee was able to figure out a Diebold electronic voting machine faster than any of you pushing buttons for Kerry. I’m sorry, I don’t wish to be mean. The truth hurts and you’ve got to hear it, better to hear from a friend who knows that in spite of good intentions you all behaved like naive and errant children.

So, here’s the reality, slowly sinking in, as another day dawns over the evil Bush Empire: we cannot change the system from within. The Democratic party is washed up. You were failed by Kerry and by the party that foisted him upon you, against your better judgment.

There was no choice in this election! Repeat after me: There was no choice in this election, only the illusion of choice, more than that, the bill of goods you were sold was the illusion of democracy. Maintaining that illusion cost billions of dollars, like an over budgeted Hollywood epic that fails at the box office, that money would have better spent elsewhere.

Now, those of us that didn’t jump on the Kerry bus were greatly relieved and yes, we gloated just a little bit but by the time John Kerry conceded, few of us had any doubts: the fix was in. Kerry caved before they had a chance to tally the remaining votes! Once again, just as in 2000, the democrats didn’t put up any fight and instead called for unity. Unity?! Everybody just fall in line, get with the program, let bygones be bygones, let’s all learn to get along, after one of the most emotional and divisive political campaigns in our history?!
Full Article: counterpunch.org

The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of Lesser Evilism
by Sharon Smith
…The entire supposition of lesser evilism, of course, is that the best we in the U.S. can hope for is the election of a slightly better version of the Republican candidate. The logic of lesser evilism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when no left wing party ever gets built to challenge the two-party system.

The 2004 election exposed the reverse logic employed by the ABB left–when Kerry’s “electability” (that is, his similarity to Bush) failed to get him elected. That is how, in a country where a majority of the population views the Iraq war as a mistake, the man who led the country into that war on false pretenses managed to eke out a victory.

Using the same strategy as Gore and Clinton before him, Kerry abandoned the Democratic Party’s traditional base to appeal to swing (i.e., white middle-class) voters. That meant that Kerry allowed Bush to define the framework of the debate, which in this case was terrorism. Kerry did not even pay lip service to the labor movement, while distancing himself as far as possible on abortion rights and opposing gay marriage outright. His opposition to the Iraq war was so conditional, contradictory and confusing–since he was a pro-war candidate–that he squandered the enormous opportunity to congeal the massive antiwar sentiment into a coherent electoral opposition.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

It really is quite the spectacle watching the progressive pundits who told us to shut up and vote for Kerry falling all over themselves now trying to make sense of what must be the inevitable outcome of ‘Anyone But Bush.’ It’s aka ‘No one but Bush,’ and the anti-war majority sold themselves out.

by Mark Mazetti
WASHINGTON — In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.

The witnesses’ accounts of the looting, the first provided by U.S. soldiers, support claims that the American military failed to safeguard the munitions. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. nuclear watchdog — and the interim Iraqi government reported that about 380 tons of high-grade explosives had been taken from the Al Qaqaa facility after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The explosives are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon.

During the last week, when revelations of the missing explosives became an issue in the presidential campaign, the Bush administration suggested that the munitions could have been carted off by Saddam Hussein’s forces before the war began. Pentagon officials later said that U.S. troops systematically destroyed hundreds of tons of explosives at Al Qaqaa after Baghdad fell.

Full Article: commondreams.org

Ah well, just another baldfaced lie. We’re used to them.