Here's how it's done - Part III

Journalists on Ukraine's state-owned channel - which had previously given unswerving support to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych - have joined the opposition, saying they have had enough of "telling the government's lies".

Journalists on another strongly pro-government TV station have also promised an end to the bias in their reporting. The turnaround in news coverage, after years of toeing the government line, is a big setback for Mr Yanukovych.

  BBC article

That's how it's done in a country where truth, freedom and democracy are more than campaign slogans and war pitches.

For the first time in years, the UT1 bulletin aired opposition views in a balanced way after the station's management acceded to the journalists' demands.

Oh for some journalists with intergrity in America.

A friend from Kenya said yesterday that he was confused about America's direction and Americans' seeming blindness to reality. It appears, he said, that America (or half of it, he said) believes that America is leading the world, when the reality is that the rest of the world is moving in a different direction, toward peace, democracy and social justice.

Kudos and best wishes to the Ukrainians.

From Falluja to Mosul and back again

In early November, insurgents carried out a series of co-ordinated attacks against local police stations.

They occupied and ransacked buildings, taking with them anything worth keeping including uniforms, weapons, radios and police cars.

The attacks caused the police force to collapse. The chief of police has left his job.

US commanders estimate that more than three quarters of local policemen are no longer showing up for work.

[...]

The attacks on police stations punched a hole through the US strategy for Mosul.

US forces had wanted to take a back seat in policing and controlling this city. They wanted Iraqi forces to do the job themselves.

[...]

Many of the US troops in Mosul have only been here for about a month.

Few have learned more than a few words of Arabic. Few have any direct contact with the local population.

[...]

This is the city where US forces killed the sons of Saddam.

Last year the Americans thought they had fought off their enemies and freed Mosul for good.

But now the city is back under nightly curfew. Many Iraqis still live amid fear and uncertainty.

And the Americans have found their way into another fight.

  BBC News article

Bring 'em on, eh?

U.S. forces found 13 more bodies in and around the northern city of Mosul, the military said Friday, bringing to 35 the number of corpses discovered in the past week in the area shaken by an insurgent uprising.

[...]

U.S. military said that 11 of the 35 bodies found have been identified as members of the Iraqi security forces, who have been targeted by insurgents. The others have not been identified.

[...]

Meanwhile, Iraqi forces arrested four insurgents who said they were planning attacks against coalition bases and police stations in the southern city of Basra, officials said Friday, a day after a joint British-Iraqi operation netted three dozen men in the area.

Iraqi National Guardsmen arrested the four after a brief gunfight at the Al-Yarmouk Hotel. Three of the men came from Fallujah and the fourth from Samarra, according to an Iraqi National Guard official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The four men told Iraqi officials they were planning a series of attacks in southern Basra, which is the headquarters for some 8,500 British troops, in an attempt to relieve the U.S. military pressure on Fallujah.

[...]

In Fallujah, insurgents ambushed U.S. troops as they entered a home during house-to-house searches in the former rebel bastion, killing two Marines and wounding three others, the U.S. military said Friday.

Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said the Marines responded with gunfire, killing three rebels hiding inside.

  ABC News article

Anyone left in Falluja is now considered a "rebel", no doubt. If you were a Fallujan, after the past two weeks of seeing everyone shot on sight, and hearing how they also shoot and kill the wounded, I don't think you would wait for the the troops to open fire on you once they get inside your home either, not if you had a gun, and apparently every Fallujan home has at least one. The report says they have finished "clearing" half the city in their house-to-house operation. Mission Not-Quite-Accomplished.

"There will be efforts to disrupt the elections," England said on a visit to Marines at a camp outside Fallujah. "The insurgents don't want the elections to be held and certainly not that they be successful. But we will prevail. We will provide the necessary stability."

And the Sunnis boycotting the elections - will they be considered insurgents as well?

All Falluja posts

Dollar devaluation

Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar gained against the yen after Yu Yongding, a Chinese central bank official, denied saying his country had trimmed its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities.

The U.S. currency earlier today fell to the lowest since 2000 after China Business News reported Yu said China had cut its holdings of U.S. debt. Yu, a monetary policy committee member, said the report was "distorted,'' in a statement on the Web site of the Institute of World Economics and Policies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where he is a director.

  Bloomberg article

He says the statement was a "distortion", but did the holdings cut take place?

The dollar is still set for a weekly drop against the euro amid concern the U.S. current account deficit will undermine demand for the currency and policy makers will refrain from stemming its slide. Speculation central banks will reduce their dollar holdings contributed to the currency's drop, said Adrian Hughes, a currency strategist at HSBC Holdings Plc. in London.

Russian central bank official Alexei Ulyukayev told reporters in Moscow three days ago it may reduce the share of dollars held in its currency reserves. Indonesia may reduce holdings of dollars should the currency continue to slide, said Aslim Tadjuddin, deputy governor for monetary policy at the central bank, in an interview in Jakarta today.

[...]

China is the second-largest foreign holder of U.S. notes. The country's central bank declined to comment on the report that it had reduced its holdings.

[...]

China reduced its U.S. Treasury note holdings to $180 billion, China Business News said. Yu said in his statement that he knew "nothing about the actions that (the State Administration of Foreign Exchange) has taken and will take.''

[...]

DaimlerChrysler AG, the world's fifth-largest carmaker, said the dollar's decline against the euro will reduce the earnings of the Mercedes-Benz luxury car division.

"We weren't prepared for the dollar to be at this level,'' Thomas Weber, the management board member responsible for research, told journalists at a dinner in Frankfurt yesterday. "It will influence the results at Mercedes and 2005 won't be an easy year.''

Yeah, well, ready or not....

Top CIA directors resign

Two more top officials at the CIA's clandestine unit are retiring in the latest sign of upheaval in the agency under its new director Peter Goss.

The two officials have headed operations in Europe and the Far East and were in the highest level of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the powerful unit that recruits foreign spies and conducts covert operations overseas.

An intelligence official said there would be no public announcement on the retirement of the two chiefs and that neither could be identified because they were working under cover.

A former intelligence official described the two as "very senior guys" who were stepping down because they did not feel comfortable with new management.

[...]

President Bush last week ordered the CIA director to increase by 50 percent the number of intelligence analysts and officers in the clandestine unit as part of a push to strengthen U.S. intelligence operations.

  Capitol Hill Blue article

Increase it by half with people who are loyal to the administration. Some strengthening of intelligence that will be.

Yellow Dog Democrats

The other evening, a few old Texas Yellow Dog Democrats got together to chew the fat. There may be some readers who won't know the definition of a Yellow Dog Democrat. If the only candidate on the Democratic ticket is an old cur yellow dog running against an esteemed Republican, we'd vote for the Yellow Dog. It isn't that we don't like Republicans. You can paraphrase a popular saying a few years ago and affirm, "some of my best friends are Republicans." It is that we just don't trust them to run the government. Of course, there are not many Yellow Dogs left. For that matter, there may not be many Democrats left. With Senator Lieberman coming out as cheerleader for President Bush, I am not sure about the state of today's Democratic party. I guess most of us are just a bunch of old fuddy-duddies who spent our working days at a time when you didn't need a program to tell who belonged to either party. Today, you can't tell which is which.

[...]

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Yellow Dog Democrats, the few of us who are left, are liberals. I can just see Pat Robertson curling his lips and snarling with disdain, "Liberals." Nowadays, it is not fashionable to be considered a liberal. The right wing has done a yeoman's job in making people salivate, like Pavlov's dog, when they hear the word "liberal." Yet, being a liberal isn't half bad. To my mind, it's a heck of a lot better than being a Republican.

[...]

Give me a bunch of liberals any day of the week. Give me a bunch of Yellow Dog Democrats eight days a week, thirteen months a year. Unrestrained capitalism has had its days. What has it brought us? An internal economy in shambles, political dictatorship, lack of social services, and, worst of all, the beginnings of a war that might very well be the gateway to another Dark Age in the history of the world.

[John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President, Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises, an independent oil and gas company...]

  Yellow Times article

This is a fine article about the dying Democrat party and what it means to be a liberal. I found it this evening while looking for the meaning of the term "Yellow Dog Democrat". I only just heard it this afternoon at a memorial service for my uncle who passed away a few days ago at the age of 83. A Republican friend of his called him that - a true Yellow Dog Democrat.

Blogging will probably be rather light for the next few days, but I imagine reading will be also, with the long holiday weekend.

But before you go, read the Yellow Dog article.

...or do what you want...you will anyway.

Falluja's refugees

Meanwhile, many refugees who left Falluja are living in poor conditions with inadequate shelter and food in areas surrounding the besieged city.

Shaikh Yunus al-Hamdani, a member of the Iraqi Relief Body from Saqlawiya told Aljazeera the relief process was difficult as electricity had been disconnected for 15 days.

"Water supply stations which depend on electricity do not work so water has been cut for 15 days.

"Medical aid has not reached us and I confirm that we have not received any aid from the Iraqi government which said it would send relief. People have nothing to protect them from the freezing weather.

"I call on non-governmental organisations to take the initiative to aid the people of Falluja in Saqlawiya who face very critical conditions", he said.

It is estimated there are about 15,000 families who fled Falluja and are now living in makeshift shelters outside the city.

Aljazeera article

Meanwhile...

More than 5000 US, British and Iraqi troops have attacked areas south of the Iraqi capital in the latest push to pacify the country before planned elections in January.

The operation on Tuesday came as world powers and Middle Eastern states meeting in Egypt threw their weight behind the war-torn country's first free and multi-party elections in decades.

US marines and an Iraqi Swat (special weapons and tactics) team swept through the small south-central Iraqi town of Jibla, starting a fresh campaign in the north of the Babil (Babylon) province, the US military said in a statement.

All Falluja posts.

Woman Is Still the Nigger of the World

A worldwide "pandemic" of violence against women is fueling the spread of HIV/AIDS, human rights group Amnesty International said Wednesday.

Mass rape and sexual violence in conflicts, coupled with collapsing health systems in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, put women at much greater risk of contracting HIV, it said in a report released a day after the United Nations said nearly half of adults with HIV are women.

"The increasing spread of HIV/AIDS among women and sexual violence are interlinked," Amnesty said. "If governments are serious in their fight against the disease they also have to deal with another worldwide 'pandemic': violence against women."

Reuters article

World reaction to Falluja assault

World revulsion against the US attack on Fallujah reached a crescendo during the past five days, with significant street protests breaking out in the Middle East and Latin America. Turkey, Palestine and Libya in the region, and Chile in the New World saw thousands of angry protesters come out against the US.

Juan Cole post

Gee, you hear anything about any of that?

No wonder Bunnypants was so scared to be without his SS bodyguard in Chile.

All Falluja posts

Colombia sucks up

And Chile will be next on our list of evil countries. Find me another Pinochet to install. I guess we're gonna have to "make the [Chilean] economy scream" again.

Vote Scam

In his news conference yesterday at Berkeley (who attended? Who phoned in to the conference call? Why didn't they try?) Professor Hout analogized the report to a ''beeping smoke alarm.'' It doesn't say how bad the fire...is, it doesn't accuse anybody of arson, it just says somebody ought to have an extinguisher handy.

Without attempting to crack the methodology, it's clear the researchers claim they've compensated for all the bugaboos that hampered the usefulness of previous studies of the county voting results in Florida. They'e weighted the thing to allow for an individual county's voting record in both the 2000 and 1996 elections (throwing out the ''Dixiecrat'' effect), to wash out issues like the varying Hispanic populations, median income, voter turnout change, and the different numbers of people voting in each county.

And they say that when you calculate all that, you are forced to conclude that compared to the Florida counties that used paper ballots, the ones that used electronic voting machines were much more likely to show ''excessive votes'' for Mr. Bush, and that the statistical odds of this happening organically are less than one in 1,000.

They also say that these ''excessives'' occurred most prominently in counties where Senator Kerry beat the President most handily. In the Democratic bastion of Broward, where Kerry won by roughly 105,000, they suggest the touch-screens ''gave'' the President 72,000 more votes than statistical consistency should have allowed. In Miami-Dade (Kerry by 55,000) they saw 19,300 more votes for Bush than expected. In Palm Beach (Kerry by 115,000) they claim Bush got 50,000 more votes than possible.

Hout and his research team consistently insisted they were not alleging that voting was rigged, nor even that what they've found actually affected the direction of Florida's 27 Electoral Votes. They point out that in a worst-case scenario, they see 260,000 ''excessives'' - and Bush took the state by 350,000 votes. But they insist that based on Florida's voting patterns in 1996 and 2000, the margin cannot be explained by successful get-out-the-vote campaigns, or income variables, or anything but something rotten in the touch screens.

[...]

But more importantly, they say that they ran a similar examination on the voting patterns in Ohio, comparing its paper ballot and electronic results, and found absolutely nothing to suggest either candidate got any ''bump'' that couldn't otherwise be explained by past voting patterns, income, turnout, or any other commonplace factor.

Full Keith Olbermann post.

And as he says, no mainstream media are anywhere near this. He suggests it's because it's hard work.

Ukranians on the march, refuse to accept vote fraud

What it looks like:

Picture and post at Under the Same Sun

But look how lovingly Putin gazes on

Maru has a question:

Dignitude
Whose turn was it to dress him?

Is Bush's fly open?!

The economy - Part II

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.

But you should hear what he's saying in private.

Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity.

His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic "Armageddon."

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