Russia: NKorea test greater than reported

October 9, 2006
AP

MOSCOW - Russia's defense minister said Monday that North Korrea's nuclear test was equivalent to 5,000 tons to 15,000 tons of TNT.

That would be far greater than the force given by South Korea's geological institute, which estimated it at just 550 tons of TNT.

By comparison the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima during World War II was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT.

In 1996, France detonated a bomb beneath Fangataufa Atoll about 750 miles southeast of Tahiti that had a yield of about 120,000 tons of TNT.

The U.S. Geological Survey said it recorded a magnitude-4.2 seismic event in northeastern North Korea. Asian neighbors also said they registered a seismic event, but only Russia said its monitoring services had detected a nuclear explosion.

No one has reported detecting any radiation.

"We know the exact site of the test. The ecological situation is normal, including on Russian territory in Primorye," Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said, referring to the Russian Far East province that shares a short border with North Korea.

Interfax, citing an unnamed diplomatic source in Moscow, said that the North Korean Foreign Ministry had informed the Russian ambassador in Pyongyang about the test two hours before it was conducted. The report could not immediately be confirmed.

Comment: In spite of Bush’s stern; manly warning, North Korea went ahead with its test. Next, Bush will teach them a serious lesson for ignoring him. He will hit them with a deadly blow with his purse. BH

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., October 8, 2006: “Although Foley and his frantic defenders at Fox News and also by the convicted drug addict, Limbaugh, claim he “never had sex with minors,” a collection of his personal digital photos of  himself with nude boys now circulating around both the media and those of Congress still in D.C., show very graphically to the contrary.

Pages who have been snitching but redacting their names will be horrified to learn that a new report from the DoJ names them in detail, possibly as a means of frightening others to keep their mouths shut about the activities of this proliferate pervert and his friends.

And also, it is the general theme here among the straight Democrats, that whoever started this filthy story on its merry way, picked just the right time. The Democrats, by the way, had nothing to do with exposing Foley (and others) There is no doubt at all that Dennis Hastert and at least ten senior Republican members of both the Senate and the House had full knowledge of Foley’s ten year reign of sexual terror among young pages but did absolutely nothing about it.

There is also no doubt, from the squeakings of terror from inside the White House that Bush himself was fully aware of the charges. Of course he now “stands behind Hastert” (not a judicious choice of words, George) whom he put in as a totally obedient Speaker and does not want to see resign.

Also, someone just told me that the Evangelical Christians still think Bush and his deviants are wonderful people. Wait until their own sons have their pants pulled down and then listen to the howls of vindictive rage.

The snail-trail of vice and corruption not only covers the floors of the Republican side of the House but also extends right into the White House and also the halls of Congress and the main office of the GOP where the head of the Party is soon going to have his own problems with his expressions of his sexual nature.

And Rupert Murdoch’s supermarket tabloid papers are claiming that Foley only buggered boys over 21! Sure, Rupert, and don’t forget to put your pants on before going outside! (Rupert has small memory problems these days. Old age is shipwreck.)

Since Foley was a strong supporter of the needs of Evangelical Christians, can we now say that a good watchword for him and his cronies would be: “Bugger a Page for Christ?” I have also heard it said by jocular Democrats on the Hill: “Don’t bend the page over, please!”

We can say in all honesty that President Clinton, at least, preferred women as sex partners.

Can we say that with honesty about all Presidents?

If the shoe, or in this case the condom, fits, wear it.

I am sending to you nice people about 150 disgusting digital pictures taken in hotel bedrooms and elsewhere over about a nine year period. Why not call these ‘Foley’s Follies?:’”

(Editor’s note: Last week, we posted some of the less pathological romantic emails from Foley to underqged young men, and today, we are posting some of the less objectionable photos he took of his little friends. We are not showing any of the blatantly pornographic pictures but only just a few relatively innocent ones  to make very clear the true nature of Foley’s “warm and caring” relationship with underaged pages.. These pictures, a hundred at least are in the postings, and  are starting to pop up all over the Internet. I hope Dennis Hastert and George Bush are watching while their Titanic slips slowly down into the very cold ocean. The question is, how many Republican legislators were aware of these or have seen them previously? Foley was proud of his “conquests” and his type loves to brag. Frantic, and howlingly funny, right wing excuses that all of his “conquests” were over 21 are bigger lies than Bush’s WMD garbage.  Ed.)

The Paranoid Style

October 9, 2006
by Paul Krugman
New York Times

Last week Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, explained the real cause of the Foley scandal. “The people who want to see this thing blow up,” he said, “are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros.”

Most news reports, to the extent they mentioned Mr. Hastert’s claim at all, seemed to treat it as a momentary aberration. But it wasn’t his first outburst along these lines. Back in 2004, Mr. Hastert said: “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from.”

Does Mr. Hastert really believe that George Soros and his operatives, conspiring with the evil news media, are responsible for the Foley scandal? Yes, he probably does. For one thing, demonization of Mr. Soros is widespread in right-wing circles. One can only imagine what people like Mr. Hastert or Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of The Washington Times, who once described Mr. Soros as “a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust,” say behind closed doors.

More generally, Mr. Hastert is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers who seized control of the Republican Party in 1964. Today, the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater controls both Congress and the White House.

As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.

The “paranoid spokesman,” wrote Hofstadter, sees things “in apocalyptic terms. ... He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Sure enough, Dick Cheney says that “the war on terror is a battle for the future of civilization.”

According to Hofstadter, for the paranoids, “what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” and because “the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.” Three days after 9/11, President Bush promised to “rid the world of evil.”

The paranoid “demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals” — instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, we’ll try to remake the Middle East and eliminate a vast “axis of evil” — “and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.” Iraq, anyone?

The current right-wing explanation for what went wrong in Iraq closely echoes Joseph McCarthy’s explanation for the Communist victory in China, which he said was “the product of a great conspiracy” at home. According to the right, things didn’t go wrong because the invasion was a mistake, or because Donald Rumsfeld didn’t send enough troops, or because the occupation was riddled with cronyism and corruption. No, it’s all because the good guys were stabbed in the back. Democrats, who undermined morale with their negative talk, and the liberal media, which refused to report the good news from Iraq, are responsible for the quagmire.

You might think it would be harder to claim that traitors are aiding our foreign enemies today than it was during the McCarthy era, when domestic liberals and Communist regimes could be portrayed as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. What does the domestic enemy, which Bill O’Reilly identifies as the “secular-progressive movement,” have to do with the religious fanatics who attacked America five years ago?

But that’s easy: according to Mr. O’Reilly, “Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have got to be cheering on the S-P movement,” because “both outfits believe that the United States of America is fundamentally a bad place.”

Which brings us back to the Foley affair. The immediate response by nearly everyone in the Republican establishment — wild claims, without a shred of evidence behind them, that the whole thing is a Democratic conspiracy — may sound crazy. But that response is completely in character for a movement that from the beginning has been dominated by the paranoid style. And here’s the scary part: that movement runs our government.

Most news reports, to the extent they mentioned Mr. Hastert’s claim at all, seemed to treat it as a momentary aberration. But it wasn’t his first outburst along these lines. Back in 2004, Mr. Hastert said: “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from.”

Does Mr. Hastert really believe that George Soros and his operatives, conspiring with the evil news media, are responsible for the Foley scandal? Yes, he probably does. For one thing, demonization of Mr. Soros is widespread in right-wing circles. One can only imagine what people like Mr. Hastert or Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of The Washington Times, who once described Mr. Soros as “a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust,” say behind closed doors.

More generally, Mr. Hastert is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers who seized control of the Republican Party in 1964. Today, the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater controls both Congress and the White House.

As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.

The “paranoid spokesman,” wrote Hofstadter, sees things “in apocalyptic terms. ... He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Sure enough, Dick Cheney says that “the war on terror is a battle for the future of civilization.”

According to Hofstadter, for the paranoids, “what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” and because “the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.” Three days after 9/11, President Bush promised to “rid the world of evil.”

The paranoid “demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals” — instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, we’ll try to remake the Middle East and eliminate a vast “axis of evil” — “and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.” Iraq, anyone?

The current right-wing explanation for what went wrong in Iraq closely echoes Joseph McCarthy’s explanation for the Communist victory in China, which he said was “the product of a great conspiracy” at home. According to the right, things didn’t go wrong because the invasion was a mistake, or because Donald Rumsfeld didn’t send enough troops, or because the occupation was riddled with cronyism and corruption. No, it’s all because the good guys were stabbed in the back. Democrats, who undermined morale with their negative talk, and the liberal media, which refused to report the good news from Iraq, are responsible for the quagmire.

You might think it would be harder to claim that traitors are aiding our foreign enemies today than it was during the McCarthy era, when domestic liberals and Communist regimes could be portrayed as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. What does the domestic enemy, which Bill O’Reilly identifies as the “secular-progressive movement,” have to do with the religious fanatics who attacked America five years ago?

But that’s easy: according to Mr. O’Reilly, “Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have got to be cheering on the S-P movement,” because “both outfits believe that the United States of America is fundamentally a bad place.”

Which brings us back to the Foley affair. The immediate response by nearly everyone in the Republican establishment — wild claims, without a shred of evidence behind them, that the whole thing is a Democratic conspiracy — may sound crazy. But that response is completely in character for a movement that from the beginning has been dominated by the paranoid style. And here’s the scary part: that movement runs our government.

The Green Zone Follies

Baghdad, 8 Oct 06: “There are any number of matters that should be of interest to stateside readers.

They are preparing quarters for an expected flood of new troops when Bush activates the entire National Guard after the elections. “By Christmas,” is the theme here.

Tons of clothes, food and other necessary supplies are brought in daily and new construction of housing is in full swing. The civil war here is also in full swing with casualties on both sides escalating.

The resistance people have captured at least a half dozen GIs and have indicated that because Bush has rejected the Geneva Convention (which our people have never observed here, ever) they will put these young men on trial and execute them on camera. If this is done before the elections, it won’t do Bush any good at all.

If there are new elections in Britain soon, there is a strong believe here that the Brits will pull out of the south. They don’t do much down there except whine and complain, in between bouts of murdering civilians. They aren’t as proficient at it as our boys are, though.

As I said earlier, our equipment is shot to hell and Rummy won’t replace a single sand-totaled Humvee or helicopter.

Rummy is a stone nut, babbles like a badly confused old woman and  is hated over here worse than Bush and that is saying a very great deal.

The resistance is very well organized and equipped, backed logistically by Iran and of course Iran is backed by Russian arms.

We can’t win here and as the rubber bags filled with rotting meat, America’s maggot-infested youth, stack up awaiting refrigerated shipment to Dover, it can only get worse.

Only the truly sadistic want to stay here (they really enjoy ongoing torture and murder of small children and women) but Bush has said that as long as he is President, U.S. troops will stay here and in Afghanistan.

That’s not a smart thing for him to say, is it now?