And all the sons of Congressmen! And the two adorable 100 Proof Bush daughters! (Ginna and Tonic)

"As democracy is perfected, the office of  president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
- H.L. Mencken

“That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

Recommended reading

We gather information, on a daily basis, from many websites. There are a number of publications that are well worth viewing for their intelligent reporting of national and international news. All of those sources, listed below, are daily newspapers with the exception of the Asia Times. The latter is a very well written site with in-depth articles that are worth reading.

The New York Times:  www.nytimes.com
The Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com
The Christian Science Monitor: www.csmonitor.com
The Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk
Seattle Post-Intelligencer:  www.seattlepi.nwsource.com
Asia Times www.atimes.com

Note: Very little of the information in this edition of TBR news has come from the mainline American media. It is just not there. Most of it has come from foreign sources and the Internet. Most of our sources can be seen on the main page.

The Republican Congress in Action:  The Trickle-Down theory

The Voice of the White House

June 9, 2005: “This will be in a slightly different format than before. News from the CIA: Just before the DNC resigned (under pressure) he issued an order to delete over 200 secret files from the data bases at the CIA. These consisted of CIA reports, the publication of which would cause serious damage to Bush. Tenent’s reward? The nice Medal of Freedom. News from the White House: Recent revelations about Gannon are going to cause a great purge of gays from the White House staff. 35 are slated to be dumped. There was a similar, and like this one, strictly private, purge during the Clinton Administration and the Reagan one. These people get very bold and bring their lovers into the Monkey Palace for fun and games. News from the FBI: Both the Bureau and the DHS are growing increasingly frustrated. Vague and phantom threats against US security are of such a nature as to make enforcement of all the nice new Nazi-style laws impossible to execute. The solution? Grab anyone with an Arab surname and accuse them of being a member of a terrorist cell. After they have spent a year in the slammer, courtesy of the Patriot Act, the poor shits will say anything to get out. Result? Another great “anti-terrorist” victory for the draggers of knuckles. News from the DoS. Empress Rice is boiling mad because the OAS has summarily rejected her demands to permit the US to set up an “advisory board” to oversee and control political progress in Central and South America. Private comments among diplomats, monitored by the NSA, indicate that the opinion of Queen Condoleeza and Queen George are lower than whale droppings. General comments: The Bush people want a draft. They are also alarmed about the number of serious death threats pouring into the Chimpanzee Mansion and so are drawing up plans for an “exercise” in martial law. This will consist of sending loyal troops (there are some units that are certainly not loyal and Bush feels cannot be trusted in case of any kind of public “disobedience.”) as well as iron  control over the internet. There will be a “practice” shutting down of the non-business sector of the internet for a brief time, just to show people that Uncle Asshole means business and also to test the shut down system. Also, there is juice boiling in Congressional tails over the growing interest in and concerns about the huge genuine death and injury tolls that our Pentagon is sweeping under the rug. Mid-terms elections are coming and the natives are becoming very restless. More and more evangelicals are writing to the Chimp Palace, protesting the war, the gay connections, the slipping economy and Bush’s dismal failure to stop stem cell research, promulgate the Ten Commandments as a replacement for our Constitution and the general growing perception that Curious George is a fraud and a sham. Medical rerport: Two of my friends here tell me that in the middle of a small meeting last week, Bush suddenly stopped talking, his jaw dropped down and he began to stare at nothing. About the time his listeners were about to shout for a medic, he blinked, shook his head and began talking…about something not on the agenda. His dog was part of the mindless babble. We all pray that he does this live on CNN or better, FOX. George does not wear suits well being bowlegged and slightly humpbacked but he would look so wonderful in a straight jacket! On the 6 PM news at that!”

Desperate for Terror Arrests, FBI Turns to Entrapment

http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=6237

June 7, 2005
by Paul Craig Roberts

The U.S. has a vast and very expensive Homeland Security bureaucracy with nothing to do. There hasn't been a terrorist attack in America since 2001. There has been a vast quantity of terror alerts, the purpose of which was to scare Americans into supporting an unnecessary and illegal aggressive attack on Iraq.

As very few, if any, real terrorists have turned up, the FBI has resorted to creating terrorists by soliciting Muslim-Americans and appealing to them with schemes to aid "jihadists." Recently, two American citizens were caught in a FBI sting. One, an Ivy League-educated physician, is charged with agreeing to provide medical care to wounded holy warriors in Saudi Arabia. The other, a famous jazz musician, is charged with agreeing to train jihadists in martial arts.

According to the Washington Times of June 1, the FBI began its sting in 2003, so it took two years of work and cajoling to manufacture the case against these two Americans.

What the FBI has done to Dr. R.A. Sabir and Tarik Shah was once known as entrapment. Judges would throw out entrapment cases, because crime was believed to require intent. If the intent was given to the accused by the police through enticement or threats, it was not regarded as criminal intent on the accused person's part.

Unfortunately, "law and order" conservatives used fear of crime to "give our police more effective measures to clear criminals off our streets" and managed to eliminate the entrapment defense.

Some years ago, the FBI, posing as Arab oil sheiks, entrapped U.S. representatives in a sting operation. The FBI handed out large bundles of cash to congressmen who accepted the offer to represent the fake sheiks' interests. Film footage of the congressmen stuffing their pockets with money was all the FBI needed to convict the members. The fact that campaign contributions come from interest groups that expect to be represented did not count in the stung U.S. representatives' favor.

Note that the two latest victims, Sabir and Tarik, could not have offered their services to jihadists, because no jihadists were present. Note also that Sabir and Tarik are not accused of actually performing an act of service. Sabir and Tarik had no contact with real jihadists, and they committed no act of service to jihadists. Yet both face $250,000 fines and 15 years in prison.

All that happened was that two productive American citizens were deceived by government agents for no other purpose than those agents having to show "results" in the "war on terror."

How does it make us safer to put a medical doctor and a jazz musician in prison? Why did the FBI spend two years entrapping these two American citizens?

Both men have wives and children. Suppose both men agreed to provide some service to jihadists. (We don't know that they did. We only have the FBI's word for it, a word that is not worth much.) The reason could easily be fear of reprisals.

Suppose you are a Muslim-American and FBI agents misrepresenting themselves as dangerous jihadists demanded services of you? Neither of the accused agreed to participate in a terrorist act: no bombs, no shootings, no hijackings. A doctor agreed to keep his Hippocratic oath if presented with wounded people in Saudi Arabia. A jazz musician agreed to teach martial arts. When was the last time a terrorist attacked with judo or karate?

Many years ago, there was a movie, Captain Blood with Errol Flynn, about a British medical doctor who treated a man wounded in an act of rebellion against England. The English judge, portrayed in the movie as unjust in the extreme, ruled that being humane was tantamount to being a rebel, and the doctor was sold into slavery to the Spanish.

In the movie, the doctor did actually treat the wounded man. The charge against Dr. Sabir is that he agreed to treat a wounded man if presented with one in Saudi Arabia in the future. There is no way of knowing if he would have done so. But if the U.S. is prepared to deny medical treatment to its opponents, why does anyone doubt the torture stories?

The FBI is so desperate to capture a terrorist that it spent two years setting up a doctor on this specious charge.

Like the police who find it easier to frame people than to convict them on the evidence, the FBI will find it easier to manufacture "terrorists" with entrapment than to catch real terrorists.