From The Middle East Online
By Ben Tanosborn

Alongside the minutiae that made for interesting reading of the recent Newsweek piece by Thomas and Wolffe, Bush in the Bubble, a complementary thought did cross my mind. What if we, the American citizenry, are the ones living in a bubble– isolated, clueless, without a clear fit in the world’s puzzle?

It’s definitely relevant to Americans’ well-being whether Bush lives in a bubble: in the realm of his White House, surrounded by a retinue of ideologues and incompetent cronies. It’s of far greater consequence, however, whether the rest of us in America live in a bubble– while failing to recognize it, admit it, and change it.

Unlike the authors of the article, I don’t place Bush in the bubble because of any failure to listen to Jack Murtha; or because of his inattention to those around him who could offer sound ideas and counsel; or because his pigheaded character might prevent him from any form of compromise.

Nor do I see Bush in the bubble because of any missing social skills [Reaganesque humor the least of it]; nor because of his lengthy inarticulateness and short attention span; nor because of his lack of education and culture– or his disdain for the possibility of acquiring the smallest measure of either. In fact, I see no need to search for reasons: not when a bubble has always been Bush’s abode- if not from the time of conception, soon afterwards. And to this date, curiosity has yet to scratch his brain to elicit questions as to what might be happening outside that bubble.

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From The Free Press
By Bob Fitrakis

Top level Republican operatives with ties to the White House, Senate Majority Leader William Frist and the Republican National Committee (RNC) not only engaged in the suppression of poor and minority voters in the 2004 Ohio presidential election’ but they spun the election irregularities into a story linking blacks to cocaine and voter fraud. Bush allies in Ohio are now using this myth of voter fraud to pass a repressive “election reform” bill.

In the month prior to and immediately after the 2004 presidential election’ the Republican Party engaged in an orchestrated campaign to divert the mainstream media focus away from election fraud and irregularities in Ohio and manufactured the myth of “voter fraud.”

According to a former Columbus Dispatch reporter’ Ohio Senator Mike Dewine sent his spokesperson’ Mike Dawson’ to meet with the editorial board of the Dispatch and other Ohio newspapers. The primary talking point for the GOP was that there was no evidence of irregularities in Ohio.

The Republican state legislature used the “voter fraud” spin to introduce the draconian Ohio House Bill 3. The “election reform” bill has passed both Republican-dominated houses and is awaiting a conference committee at the start of the new year.

HB 3’s most publicized provision will require voters to show their ID before casting a ballot. But it also opens voter registration activists to criminal prosecution’ exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny’ quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or’ indeed’ any federal election result in Ohio. HB 3 will also reduce voter rolls by ordering county boards of elections to send cards to registered voters every two years. If a card comes back as undelivered’ the voter must rely on a provisional ballot.

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From Common Dreams
By Steven Laffoley

“The dream,” John Lennon once said of 60s idealism, “is over.” These were the words that came to me late one evening, sitting at my desk, in the glow of a computer screen, a glass of red wine at one hand, a spiral ringed notebook and pen at the other.

I had been searching the web for more than an hour, looking through mainstream newspapers for a chorus of principled complaint against the presidential breach of constitutional rights. But, depressingly, I found little. And after a while, when it was clear my search was in vain, I thought for a long time about Lennon’s words.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking of the idealists’ dreams of 60s peace and love (though those were nice dreams, too). No, I was thinking of a far older, far more noble, far more meaningful dream - the great American Dream: the truly enlightened dream of a nation of the people, for the people, and by the people; the Jeffersonian dream of a nation ruled by laws and not by men.

But sitting there, looking for hope against hope in the cold silence following the president’s defiant admission of warrantless, unconstitutional wiretappings, I was more certain than I had been in five years: the dream was indeed over.

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From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Gerald Rellick

Recent calls for George Bush’s impeachment for his transgressions against the Constitution, the rule of law, and the citizens of the United States, have encountered opposition even from those who, while in agreement with the legal arguments, believe it’s futile to go down this path because of the enormous odds against success. Not only are both Houses of Congress controlled by Republicans, but many Democrats are reluctant to challenge the president on war-related issues while American troops are serving in harm’s way.

It’s worth reviewing briefly past presidential impeachments. The only two presidents formally impeached and tried by the Senate were Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Johnson assumed the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination and inherited a bitter and divided country. The articles of impeachment against Johnson were purely political, rooted in the heated issues of racism, slavery and reconstruction following the Civil War. Johnson was exonerated by the Senate, although by a mere one vote.

The impeachment of Clinton was no less politically motivated. It centered about Clinton’s sexual escapade in the Oval Office with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, an act which was extremely irresponsible, but was never considered grounds for impeachment itself. However, the civil lawsuit against Clinton for sexual harassment by Paula Jones opened up the opportunity for the Jones lawyers to probe Clinton’s sexual past, whereupon he was obligated to testify under oath about his affair with Lewinsky. It is here that the Republicans in the House seized upon Clinton’s evasive testimony to charge that he lied under oath. It later surfaced that the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, acted in unethical fashion by colluding with the Jones lawyers to set Clinton up for what Starr hoped would be damaging testimony and grounds for impeachment. Starr and the Republicans won that round but the Senate rejected the charges. Above all, the American people saw through the political charade and continued to support Clinton throughout the impeachment and subsequent trial.

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From The NY Times
By David E. Sanger

For six days, President Bush has stayed in nearly complete isolation on his ranch here - just mountain-biking and brush-clearing, the White House insisted daily, with only one houseguest, his mother-in-law, Jenna Welch. He never even ventured into this little town of about 700, not even to the cheeseburger joint that he often used as a political stage to show that he is in touch with his Texas neighbors.

But on New Year’s Day, after a brief stop at an Army hospital in San Antonio to visit wounded soldiers, Mr. Bush is scheduled to return to the White House earlier than usual from his break and start a campaign to set the tone for 2006 and, perhaps, the remainder of his presidency.

As part of an ambitious strategy the White House has mapped out for the next four weeks, Mr. Bush has scheduled two major speeches - one on the economy on Friday in Chicago, another on Iraq - ahead of the State of the Union address, which is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 31.

By the time he appears before Congress, Mr. Bush’s aides are hoping, two of the immediate challenges the president faces, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. and the permanent renewal of the Patriot Act, will be behind him.

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From The Guardian UK
By Ryan Lenz

U.S. Army soldiers sit cross-legged in a room thick with kerosene fumes from a whistling heater while a sheik puffs quietly on a cigarette.

Dressed in a dapper brown coat and robe, the aging Iraqi is not a suspect in any roadside bombings or as someone who helps insurgents. He is a prominent figure who knows the area’s residents well, and the soldiers need his help tracking rebels.

U.S. military units across Iraq often rely on the personal touch in hunting for clues about insurgents, sitting down to sip tea - chai in Arabic - with locals and building a rapport with tribal leaders.

“Our primary focus, which isn’t what we trained for, is to get the town on our side. It’s, ‘This is the type of protection I can offer if you help me out,”’ said Staff Sgt. Gary Frisbee, 28, of Chattanooga, Tenn., one of those at the meeting in Bujwari.

The village sits near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad. Iraq’s largest refinery is in Beiji and threats by insurgents to kill tanker-truck drivers have shut down refining since Dec. 18, creating a fuel shortage in much of Iraq. The Americans want to find those making the threats.

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From CounterPunch
By Peter Montague

One of the top developments of 2005 is a kind of genetic engineering on steroids — a new field called “synthetic biology” in which scientists are setting out to create new forms of life that have never existed before.

In “genetic engineering,” natural genes from one species are inserted by force into a different species, hoping to transfer the properties or characteristics of one species into another. Trout can live in cold water, so maybe a trout gene blasted into a tomato will help tomatoes withstand cold weather. The limitation on this system is the characteristics that nature has built into the genes of species.

Now scientists have overcome that limitation. They are learning to develop entirely new species, new forms of life. Awareness of this new scientific specialty — called “synthetic biology” — began to appear in the press in 2005.

The construction of living things from raw chemicals was first demonstrated in 2002 when scientists created a polio virus from scratch. They found the polio virus genome on the internet, and within 2 years had created a virus from raw chemicals. The synthetic virus could reproduce and, when injected into mice, paralyzed them just as a natural polio virus would do. They said they chose the polio virus to demonstrate what a bioterrorist could accomplish.

“It is a little sobering to see that folks in the chemistry laboratory can basically create a virus from scratch,” James LeDuc of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said at the time.

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From CNN

A pulsing heart of red lights shone from Sydney’s Harbor Bridge early Sunday as tens of thousands watched fireworks ushering in the new year. Revelers around the world began partying, visited places of worship and gathered with family to welcome 2006.

Celebrations were taking place amid tight security as such cities as Sydney and Paris feared repeats of recent ethnic riots and authorities were on guard against terror attacks. In Indonesia, a bomb killed eight people and wounded 45 at a market crowded with holiday shoppers.

Workers in London’s subway system began a 24-hour strike at midday Saturday, complicating travel plans for revelers preparing to celebrate the new year across the city, including at a huge open-air party in Trafalgar Square.

Families in Sydney trooped to vantage points around the harbor to watch a spectacular fireworks show that began at midnight.

The message of love in the celebration, however, went hand-in-hand with a huge police presence aimed at preventing a repeat of mid-December’s two nights of racial violence in beach suburbs. More than 1,700 officers were on duty and police helicopters and boats patrolled.

Read more New Years

From The Washington Post
By Vladimir Isachenkov

President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s state-owned natural gas monopoly Saturday to supply Ukraine with natural gas at the current price for three months, if the government in Kiev immediately agreed to a big price hike to take effect later.

Putin said in televised remarks that his offer was valid only until the end of the day. There was no immediate acceptance by Ukraine, which faced a Russian threat to cut off gas supplies Sunday morning.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s office said he told Putin in a telephone conversation that he felt a compromise could be reached. “It’s extremely important that the sides refrain from political or ecomonic pressures,” he was quoted as telling Russia’s leader.

Valentyn Mondriyevsky, a Ukrainian Cabinet spokesman, said only that talks with Gazprom continued. Putin said OAO Gazprom should continue the current price if Ukraine signed an accord Saturday accepting Gazprom’s price increase starting in the second quarter. Gazprom has demanded Ukraine pay $230 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas _ more than four times the current price of $50.

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From Common Dreams
By Ralph Nader

Civilian control over the military is a long established democratic tradition in our country. It was the military that was believed by our founding fathers to be susceptible to plunging our country into foreign adventure. Presently, however, the boondoggles, crimes and recklessness of draft-dodging George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and former Air Force pilot, Donald Rumsfeld, together with their draft-dodging neo-con associates, have turned this expectation upside down. The civilians are the war-mongers.

Probably the least told story of the Iraq war-quagmire is the extent to which the Pentagon military, especially the U.S. Army brass, disagrees with and despises these civilian superiors. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most disliked of the Secretaries of Defense, has spent much energy making sure that high level dissent in the military is muzzled and overlayered by his loyalists.

Just last week Rumsfeld demoted three military service chiefs in the Pentagon hierarchy and replaced them with three loyalists who previously worked for his buddy Dick Cheney.

Right from the beginning the U.S. Army brass opposed the invasion of Iraq for both military and strategic reasons. They believed such an attack would absorb massive human and material resources that would divert from the chase after the 9/11 terrorists and the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They disagreed with the paucity of soldiers that Bush/Cheney and Rumsfeld were to send there. They were appalled by the lack of post-war planning directives by the Administration.

At the 4 star general level, the Army brass knew Saddam Hussein was a tottering dictator, embargoed, surrounded and contained by the U.S., Britain, Turkey, and Israel, and unable to field an army equipped with minimum loyalty and equipment. They also knew that going to Iraq would be the gigantic equivalent of batting a large bee hive.

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