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We are approaching critical mass, folks, fasten your seat belts:

From Pollkatz

Will it be a harmonic convergence?—or, as some [cough] pessimists are predicting, something more violent, more sinister?

All in all, Bush is sliding abysmally in all kinds of polls. Look at these:

Also, Pollkatz has a new analysis of the relationship between Halliburton stock performance and BushCo doings.

Bush-Nazi Link Confirmed
by John Buchanan, The New Hampshire Gazette, October 20, 2003

WASHINGTON—After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his “enemy national” partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.

Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush’s maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war. . . .

The Summer of ’42

The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months. . . .

Important Boston Globe editorial from October 18th on the Plame Affair:

Don’t ask, don’t know

AT A TIME when President Bush ought to be doing everything he can to show that he is an engaged commander in chief, he is acting as though there is nothing he can or should do to discover and punish the officials who leaked to columnist Robert Novak the identity of the CIA’s Valerie Plame Wilson. Bush’s passivity in response to a political dirty trick that harms US intelligence operations and demoralizes intelligence officers is an abdication of responsibility.

Bush has left the work of locating the leakers to the Justice Department and the FBI, while he plays the role of a detached observer. This stance makes him look like a weak leader presiding over a band of unruly subordinates who feud with each other, betraying patriotic Americans like Ms. Wilson, with no fear of being brought to hand by the president. . .

Also see Orcinus blog for an excellent analysis and links regarding the White House spin of the Plame Affair (scroll down to “Counterspinning Plame,” October 13) and how cheezy it really is.

And at Democratic Underground, a thread devoted solely to research on the Plame Affair, including a timeline and speculation with links about who the leaker is.

Some more about the corporation that to me epitomizes all that is wrong, wicked, and evil about the U.S. cheap-labor greed-head Republican version of capitalism:

Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and Supermarkets Crazy, by Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, October 19, 2003

. . . Wal-Mart has already helped push more than two dozen national supermarket chains into bankruptcy over the past decade. That list includes names like Grand Union; Bruno’s, once Alabama’s largest supermarket chain; and Homeland Stores, formerly Oklahoma’s largest. And unionized supermarket workers fear that Wal-Mart’s invasion will oust them from the middle class by pulling down their wages and benefits, which, taken together, are more than 50 percent higher than those of Wal-Mart workers. At Wal-Mart, the average wage is about $8.50 an hour, compared with $13 at unionized supermarkets.

“Wal-Mart’s superstores are going to have a devastating impact on California’s supermarkets,” said Burt Flickinger III, a retailing consultant, noting that union wages and prices are higher in California than in most of the country.

Eager to stay competitive against Wal-Mart, Albertsons, Vons (owned by Safeway) and Ralphs (owned by Kroger) have demanded a two-year wage freeze for current workers, a lower pay scale for new hires and greater employee contributions for health coverage. Those employees now pay no health insurance premiums, while Wal-Mart employees often must pay premiums of $200 a month and deductibles of up to $1,000 a year, if they qualify.

With Wal-Mart in mind, supermarkets have engaged in tough bargaining across the country. That has led to a 12-day-old strike by 10,000 supermarket workers in Missouri and a six-day-old strike by 3,000 workers at 44 Krogers in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio.

It is hard to underestimate the power of Wal-Mart. . . . Last year, 82 percent of American households bought at least one item there. . . .

Now Ashcroft’s own people are criticizing him “for failing to recuse himself or appoint a special prosecutor” to investigate the Wilson affair.

. . . The criticism reflects the first sign of dissension in the department and the F.B.I. as the inquiry nears a critical phase. The attorney general must decide whether to convene a grand jury, which could compel White House officials to testify.

The criminal justice officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, represent a cross section of experienced criminal prosecutors and include political supporters of Mr. Ashcroft at the department’s headquarters here and at United States attorneys’ offices around the country.

. . . Janet Reno was forced to turn to independent counsels seven times in her nearly eight-year tenure at the department. But her refusal to seek an outside prosecutor to investigate charges of campaign finance irregularities in President Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996 permanently damaged Ms. Reno’s standing in the capital.

Mr. Ashcroft’s relationship with the White House is far closer than Ms. Reno’s was with President Clinton. Mr. Ashcroft has closed ranks with President Bush in the war against terrorism, which has altered nearly three decades in which most attorneys general and F.B.I. directors sought to keep a distance from the White House.

But Mr. Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, operate as major members of Mr. Bush’s antiterror team, a closeness that complicates a criminal inquiry at the White House managed by Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller. . . .

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has written to Karl Rove, asking for his resignation!

. . . Recent press reports have indicated that, while you may or may not have been the source of the Robert Novak column which revealed the status and name of a covert operative, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, you were involved in a subsequent effort to push this classified information to other reporters and give it even wider currency. This itself may be a federal crime, but regardless of that fact, your actions are morally indefensible. In my view, it is shameful and unethical that an Administration that promised to govern with “honor and integrity” and “change the tone” in Washington has now engaged in an orchestrated campaign to smear and intimidate truth-telling critics, placing them in possible physical harm and impairing the efforts and operations of the CIA. . . .

Over three decades ago, our nation was scarred by an Administration that would stop at nothing to smear and intimidate its critics. I do not believe the Nation will countenance a repeat of such activities. For your role in this campaign, I would ask that you resign immediately.

And in another area of BushCo that is crumbling, last night 60 Minutes II carried Scott Pelley’s interview with Greg Thielman (mp3 or QuickTime video), foreign-service officer for 25 years and former expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. His damning remarks pretty much clinch the fact that Colin Powell’s speech to the UN twisted and misrepresented the facts. “I think my conclusion now is that it’s probably one of the low points in his long, distinguished service to the nation.”

. . . At the time of Powell’s speech, Thielmann says that Iraq didn’t pose an imminent threat to anyone: “I think it didn’t even constitute an imminent threat to its neighbors at the time we went to war.”

But Thielmann also says that he believes the decision to go to war was made first, and then the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion. For example, he points to the evidence behind Powell’s charge that Iraq was importing aluminum tubes to use in a program to build nuclear weapons.

Powell said: “Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries even after inspections resumed.”

“This is one of the most disturbing parts of Secretary Powell’s speech for us,” says Thielmann.

Intelligence agents intercepted the tubes in 2001, and the CIA said they were parts for a centrifuge to enrich uranium—fuel for an atom bomb. But Thielmann wasn’t so sure. Experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the scientists who enriched uranium for American bombs, advised that the tubes were all wrong for a bomb program. At about the same time, Thielmann’s office was working on another explanation. It turned out the tubes’ dimensions perfectly matched an Iraqi conventional rocket.

“The aluminum was exactly, I think, what the Iraqis wanted for artillery,” recalls Thielmann, who says he sent that word up to the Secretary of State months before. . . .

Thielmann believes the decision to go to war was made—and the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion.

“There’s plenty of blame to go around. The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show,” says Thielmann.

See Lies about Iraq rise to level of the absurd by Jay Bookman in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Case in point: The campaign by leading members of the Bush administration to rebuild faltering support for their invasion of Iraq. To hear them tell it, everything that has happened since last March has just proved how right they’ve been all along.”

Good example: Letters from U.S. troops exposed as Pentagon fraud, and a NYTimes editorial on the subject. BushCo is desperate in its spinning, but the truth of the matter: interviews with five U.S. military servicemen who just returned from Iraq:

“I am trying to speak out and let the Americans know that they are sending us to be slaughtered. . . .”

“. . . I would like to thank Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Congress for that nice huge cut they made to Veterans Benefits as soon as the war started. I am in the Reserves after years of active duty and now I cannot get PTSD counseling or many medical benefits I used to take for granted. I knew I would have the benefits because I was laying my life down for my country. Now my benefits are cut by around 2/3 and I have to go to either group therapy or pay for a private counselor out of my own pocket. What happens when someone like me has been through enormous battle stress and combat fatigue and then comes home to no counseling?”

“I’ll tell you what is going to happen, he will either kill himself or take a bunch of people with him. Some of the guys coming back are going to have gone through the worst time of their lives with their buddies dying and getting hurt, and then they’ll find out they got screwed out of any counseling. It is the greatest disservice America is committing against soldiers who fought for this country and may come back wounded or horribly scarred. . . .”

“I want to talk about some of the children I saw killed for no reason, maybe it will wake someone up who doesn’t believe it was happening, or that it was very bad. I can tell you I will never forget the screams of the wounded or orphaned kids, or the wailing of the parents who lost their kids. . . .”

“We could see the body parts flying up into the air after the bombs hit. It was terrible and we could not do a damn thing but watch it happen and scream into the radio at the dumb sh.t pilot that was dropping the bombs. After the strike was over we went to see if there were any survivors and all we found was bits and pieces of little kids and here and there an arm or leg you could still identify.” . . .

“It’s just like Nam was in the beginning. I was twelve when my dad got back and I’ll never forget the pain and agony he lived with the rest of his life. It’s kind of what I feel now, I suppose. I never thought I would ever serve in some stuff that’s so much like Nam it isn’t funny. Now I really see what my pop went through, and if I could I would go back in the past a few months, I would go AWOL or turn conscientious objector on them, but it’s too late for that now.”

“I damn sure will not go back over there even if they throw me in Leavenworth. I never could understand how a guy could be a conscientious objector until what I just went through. I wish more guys would stand up and tell Bush and the Pentagon they will not fight their war for oil. We should not have to die for these rich bastards’ profits and enrichment.”

“Wake up America! Your sons and daughters are dying for nothing! This war is not about freedom or stopping terrorism. Bring us home now! We are dying for oil and corporate greed!”

While you are writing, calling, and faxing your Congress people in what I hope are weekly protests, please include your outrage over the fact that U.S. soldiers are bulldozing crops, “ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking U.S. troops.”

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a U.S. commander in the region, as saying: “We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks [on U.S. soldiers], or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn’t tell us.”

Informing U.S. troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: “It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth.”

For example, spin-meister Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary and a major PNAC architect of endless war says U.S. will not be driven from Iraq: “Our troops will not be deterred by the desperate acts of a dying regime or ideology . . . We are winning,” he told a meeting of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think-tank that honored him as “Keeper of the Flame.” He mentioned that “This will go down in the annals of military history as one of the great acts of liberation of a country from a brutal tyrant.” Likewise, Dick Cheney has gone on the offensive about Iraq, “delivering a blistering rebuttal [on Friday the 10th] to critics of the administration’s foreign policy and arguing that a consensus-based foreign policy is obsolete.”

The vice president’s acerbic speech went well beyond milder versions delivered in the past two days by Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. . . . But while Bush asked the nation on Thursday to be more optimistic and look beyond the negative headlines from Iraq, Cheney barely mentioned the hardships in Iraq. Instead, he took aim at Democrats and foreign leaders, such as French President Jacques Chirac and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who have raised objections to U.S. “unilateralism.”

Also noted: “Bush this week told reporters that we may never find out the real story” behind the alleged White House leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA cover. Can’t find Osama bin Laden, can’t find Saddam Hussein, and now can’t figure out who in his own staff has committed treason. But as John Podesta notes in the Sunday, October 12th Washington Post, Bush better take this leak seriously:

. . . the president’s problems are multiplying. First, if press reports are accurate, he has a grave national security problem. Someone in the White House has made public the identity of a woman who may have been a “nonofficial cover” operative of the CIA, potentially causing multiple sources of intelligence to go cold. Second, he has a legal problem, for not only is a leak of this kind a breach of national security, it is also a grave criminal offense. Third, he has a political problem, as this story was brought to light by a senior administration official who apparently was so offended by efforts to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that he or she exposed the White House’s connection to the leak to The Post. Finally, given the failure of the White House so far to demonstrate any urgency in addressing this growing scandal, he faces a loss of public trust.

. . . the administration’s handling of this incident is at best curious and at worst irresponsible. . . .

If the administration opts to handle the matter proactively, it should take three immediate steps. First, it would be wise for the president to require everyone in the White House to sign a certification that he or she was not the source of the original leak to columnist Robert Novak or involved in “pushing the story” once Novak published. . . .

Second, White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales should expedite a review of the documents turned over by White House staff relating to this matter and should ensure himself that the "self-certification" review that he has established is adequate to locate all relevant documents.

Finally, the president should make clear to his White House political operatives, the RNC and friends of the administration that they are to cease and desist from the attacks on Wilson and his wife. Wilson served our country with distinction under both Republican and Democratic administrations. His only offense appears to be that he told the truth. He does not deserve the treatment he is getting, and further efforts to malign and intimidate him would raise serious questions of obstruction of justice. . . .

Bush’s reaction to the Wilson affair has indeed been strange. When Plame’s identity was first mentioned in Novak’s article, several weeks ago, why wasn’t Bush all over it like a fly on excrement? Why so laissez-faire, indeed annoyed that there was general concern about the matter? Why isn’t he irate? Until very recently he hasn’t even pretended to care that someone on his own staff has committed treason by jeopardizing national security.

Fortunately there are those in Congress who are not going to let this die. Senators Tom Daschle, Joseph R. Biden, Carl Levin, and Charles E. Schumer sent a letter to the president on Thursday the 9th expressing their “continuing concerns regarding the manner in which your Administration is conducting the investigation into the apparently criminal leaking of a covert CIA operative’s identity,” noting that, indeed, the White House and Justice Department procedures actually compromise the investigation.

And as if all of this, and the Republican coup in California, weren’t depressing and scary enough, an old Buzzflash piece, from December 2001, detailing the right-wing’s calculated strategy to destroy “leftists,” should be a wake-up call to anyone who thinks BushCo is simply an aberrant cyst on the ass of humanity: Buzzflash chilling alert about a Karl Rove/Bush Advisor’s plans for neutralizing “liberals” (Buzzflash, December 10, 2001):

[below are] excerpts from the Free Congress Foundation’s lengthy strategic statement for the Traditional Conservative Movement. . . . It lays out the expedient, propagandistic, dishonest, morally relativistic strategy supported by some on the far right. Recall that the Free Congress Foundation is headed by prominent and influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich (who also founded the Heritage Foundation). To really understand just how scary this strategy is, just remember how cozy the Bush administration is with Weyrich and people of his ilk. . . .:

Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions. . . .

We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment’s rest. . . .

We must create a countervailing force that is just as adept as the Left at intimidating people and institutions that are used as tools of left-wing activism but are not ideologically committed, such as Hollywood celebrities, multinational corporations, and university administrators. We must be feared, so that they will think twice before opening their mouths. . . .

Unfortunately (or maybe not) the original links to the Traditional Conservative Movement’s article are now nonfunctional.

William Rivers Pitt, traveling in Europe, offers solid insights with historical references into this phenomenon of the sudden and inexplicable ascension of the right when “America had everything going for it,” in The Mission:

. . . An analysis of the facts, and the record, reveals Clinton to have been one of the most effective progressive Presidents in American history. By 1998 he had managed to create an economic system that filled the Federal treasury with unprecedented amounts of available money, and he had also managed to pass a variety of progressive social programs that benefited vast numbers of middle-class Americans. When Clinton stood up in 1998, with a massive budget surplus waiting in the wings, and cried, “Save Social Security first!” he was roaring a battle cry across the trenches that had been there since 1932. Such a surplus would fund social programs all across the country. Such a surplus would, at long last, settle the argument: An activist Federal government can be a force for good within the American populace, and once more, can be paid for with extra left over. The New Deal/Great Society wars seemed to be coming to an end.

This was why he had to be destroyed.

The rest is coda. The impeachment, funded by right-wing activists and business interests, stormed along by a mainstream media whose Reagan-era deregulated status led to a complete breakdown in journalistic ethics, and all buttressed by years of unsubstantiated scandals pushed along by congressional zealots with subpoena power, left the American population exhausted enough to vote against their own best interests in 2000. Too many didn’t vote at all. The “Clinton! Clinton! Clinton!” drumbeat that lasted over 2,000 days drove the voters into thinking a change was required. Though Gore won the election, the margin of victory was small enough to be exposed to theft by a partisan Supreme Court which, by rights, should not have come within a country mile of touching that case. A corrupted news media, again, pushed the whole farce along.

Now, we have a nation run by profiteers who preach the gospel of privatization in all things. . . .

When I explain all this to these Europeans, they want to know if the war is over. Not hardly, I tell them. The hubris of these zealots has led to economic problems in America that are quickly moving beyond the reach of spin. The hubris of these zealots has caused the Central Intelligence Agency to act in their own defense, a deadly turn of events for the Bush administration. The last two Presidents who found themselves on the bad side of the CIA, Kennedy and Johnson, did not end their terms comfortably. The war in Iraq, begun in no small part to further loot the Treasury, has loosed a tiger with very sharp claws. Internationally, the realization that the Atlantic Alliance is gone has begun to take root, and forces beyond the control of the Bush administration are coming together globally to act as a counterweight to all that is happening in America. . . .

The corrupted media is still there, of course. The zealots hold all the high ground for the moment. Ending this massive catastrophe will cost oceans of blood and sweat and tears. But it can and will be ended. You can bank, I tell these Europeans, on that.