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POPSBest Buy Says "Happy Eid" - Christian Conservatives Miffed 'Tis the season for bitching about nothing ... In another publication, Hawks said that, in addition to Eid wishes, “you will see greetings of Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa and Feliz Navidad in various Best Buy communications during the holiday season.” That might rile conservatives, too. Already, the American Family Association has lashed out at the Gap for giving equal billing to Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Solstice in a new TV commercial — although that group’s main concern is the inclusion of Solstice. Imad Hamad, the regional Midwest director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, sees the greeting as a “welcome gesture from Best Buy,” adding that many of the complaints against it illustrate the kind of “anti-Islamic virus we’ve been hearing and dealing with.”
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POPSThe sleazy advocacy of a leading "liberal hawk" What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he "stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars." In other words, he had a direct -- and vast -- financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region. As Cobban wrote: Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush's late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.
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POPSInvested In War n 2004, the first full year after the current Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers-both hawks and doves invested between $74.9 million and 161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD. No wonder the Democratic congress kept approving the enormous spending bills on the war, since a significant portion of it happens to end up in their deep pockets. Interestingly, the report also mentioned that members of the senate foreign relations and armed services committees which oversee the Iraq war had between $32 million and $44 million invested in companies with DoD contracts. The burning questions for many people are the following: Are there any ethics left in politics? Could the universe ever exist without wars? The answer is no, because wars have been a major part of our social make up, in addition they force geostrategic changes, make profits for the elite, and reduce population.
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POPSDick Cheney Takes It To Obama on National Security It appears that Obama’s dissenters are piling on his back. As a result, the foreign policy hawks and neocons are making a successful comeback. We all witnessed how capable and successful Cheney was when he took his case to the airwaves, TV shows, and editorials in defending the Bush administration’s legacy. It is beyond dispute that Cheney can make a convincing case and draw a sharp contrast between the Obama administration on what it takes to secure America and defends its interests. As more and more Americans see President Obama as indecisive in making his decision in Afghanistan, even as his commanders on the ground request direct action and troop increases, the more this type of onslaught will sink him further in the polls and erode what little is left of his political capital and public confidence. October 22, 2009 by Jason
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POPSStudy Finds Humans Still Evolving, and Quickly Human evolution has been increasing at a stunning rate since our ancestors began spreading through Europe, Asia and Africa, quickening to 100 times historical levels after agriculture became widespread, according to a study published today.
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POPS‘Leopard Behind You!’ A human in a blue shirt is announced differently from a human in a yellow shirt. In and of itself, it’s not surprising that the sounds animals make are not just noise, or a reflection of the state an animal’s in (scared, happy and so on). But the subtlety of the calls — the full amount of meaning they contain — is only now being appreciated. Animals of one species often respond to the alarms of another. In a small way, it’s like those childrens’ stories that have rats talking to toads, or elephants arguing with ostriches. Predators sometimes respond too. After all, alarm calls don’t just let other animals know there’s danger in the area. They can also let a predator know that it’s been seen. Ambush predators, like leopards, often give up and go away once an alarm has been sounded. <<
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POPSLate Night Monkey Business OK, the David Letterman Top Tens are piling up. Here’s mine, posted on Twitter last night while the show was being aired. So I’m claiming the first: ”No 10. Because he can really bossanova.” “No. 9. Has writers for his pickup lines” “No. 8. Because behind that wrinkly American Gothic exterior pounds the heart of an irresistible love monkey.” “No. 7. Hey, lots of women like ‘em old, rich and married. Heh heh.” “No. 6. What are you going to do, impeach me?” “No. 5. Because Leno has the cars, and I needed an expensive hobby.” “No. 4. Because the Obama administration isn’t funny enough. Heh heh heh. Ba-dum-dum.” “No 3. Because I don’t like broccoli. Ha ha!” “No. 2. This has bin a test of the Emrgncy Paparazzi System. It was only a test. If this had bin a real paparazzi emrgncy … heh” “And No. 1. My cardiologist ordered me to get more exercise. Heh heh heh. Exercise. More of it. Heh heh. Ba-dum-dum”
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POPSThe Neoconservative Resurgency With Obama--Neoconservativism 2.0 Well documented article worth reading entirely. Then there is this article too : That must be the meaning of change. The goal was not to restore the rule of law and constitutional legitimacy, but to transcend the Bush administration's cowboy unilateralism and tactfully reassert a neo-conservative normalcy in America's foreign policy. And this more recent article: ‘No change from Bush to Obama', say Neocons and Liberals 16 Sep 2009 American foreign policy under Barack Obama has not changed course after the Bush years, according to a group of prominent commentators from both sides of the political divide. (except for the breaking missile shield policy)...from a UK media source. Yet the U.S. Media are absolutely silent.
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POPSJimmy Carter's racist campaign of 1970 Carter criticized Sanders, a former governor, for preventing Alabama Gov. and notorious segregationist George Wallace from speaking on Georgia state property. "I don't think it was right for Governor Sanders to try to please a group of ultra-liberals, particularly those in Washington, when it means stifling communication with another state," said Carter. "'I have no trouble pitching for Wallace votes and black votes at the same time,' Carter told a reporter. Carter also said to another reporter, 'I can win this election without a single black vote.'" "The campaign paid for radio ads for a fringe black candidate, C.B. King, in an effort to siphon black votes away from Sanders." "Then there was the radio commercial in which Carter said he would never be the tool of any 'block' vote, slurring over the word 'block' so that it could be mistaken for 'black.'
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POPSU.S. Backs Away From Missile Shield
Analysis: Demise of U.S. shield may embolden Russia hawks The U.S. move on the shield -- due to be announced later on Thursday but already flagged by Czech and Polish officials -- removes at a stroke the biggest outstanding obstacle to bilateral relations between the former superpowers and will be hailed by the Kremlin as a big victory. Russia's leaders have fiercely resisted the missile shield, saying it would upset regional security because it could be used to neutralise Moscow's vast nuclear arsenal. Ignoring U.S. assurances that the system was not targeted at Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev threatened last year to station missiles in a Russian enclave near Poland if the United States implemented the plan. But the shield's demise in its originally planned form may also have unintended consequences in the former Soviet bloc. Russian diplomacy is largely a zero-sum game and relies on projecting hard power to force gains, as in last year's war with Georgia over the . .
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POPSWhat Just Happened? 06.17.2009 “In the most dramatic turnabout since the 1979 revolution,” they wrote, “Iran has evolved from theocratic state to military dictatorship.” If this analysis is correct – and right now, it looks like it is – the White House may need to start over from scratch. Iran is the same country it was a week ago, but it no longer has quite the same government. Some will argue that Mr. Ahmadinejad may be in a conciliatory mood because he needs talks with the United States to underscore his own legitimacy, but that can only be read as a self-serving Washington perspective. Meanwhile, the Iranian people will have suffered the consolidation of power by a ruthless regime and the transformation of a theocracy to an ideological military dictatorship. That Iran neither needs nor wants accommodation with the West.
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POPS Insurrection; Day Two Defrauded opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi belongs to the establishment. The regime is coming apart and turning on itself. Even clerics are turning against the “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei. Grand Ayatollah Sanei in Iran has declared Ahmadinejad's presidency illegitimate and cooperating with his government against Islam. There are strong rumors that his house and office are surrounded by the police and his website is filtered. He had previously issued a fatwa, against rigging of the elections in any form or shape, calling it a mortal sin. Kevin Sullivan at RealClearWorld: What's emerging here could be interesting. Iran hawks prefer to label the Iranian police state as simply "The Mullahs," but the legitimate clerics in this dispute are the ones standing with Mir-Hossein Mousavi against ONE Mullah and his secular police apparatus. . . .
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POPSThe General Thinks The Republican Party Is 'In The Desert' In fact, the GOP's tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians' insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don't get the warhawks' obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can't see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless half-hearted semicolonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times.
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