Colin Powell, French Scientologists,Rigging the Lebanese Elections

Paul Krugman
Colin Powell
Michael Mullen

“Rush will not get his wish, and Mr. Cheney was misinformed. I am still a Republican.” - Colin Powell

"California, it has long been claimed, is where the future happens first. But is that still true? If it is, God help America." - Paul Krugman


OK, so I am done with the Obama - Cheney controversy, but I guess I have to weigh in on the Powell - Cheney snarkfest. Yesterday Colin Powell was interviewed on Face the Nation, click on the link above for full transcript. The NY Times has the story: "Mr. Powell’s appearance underlined an extraordinary public struggle among Republicans over the future of the party and the legacy of the Bush administration, particularly on national security. Mr. Powell broke with Mr. Cheney on the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, saying that he agreed with President Obama that it should be closed and that Mr. Cheney disagreed as much with his former boss as with Mr. Obama.
“Mr. Cheney is not only disagreeing with President Obama’s policy,” Mr. Powell said. “He’s disagreeing with President Bush’s policy. President Bush stated repeatedly to international audiences and to the country that he wanted to close Guantánamo. The problem he had was he couldn’t get all the pieces together.” This follows what I've thought all along, that George Bush became disenchanted with with Cheney and his bulldog tenacity to a few beliefs that produced the low ratings and lack of trust in the Bush administration. It is also why George Bush is smart and ignoring the arguments and is not coming to Dick Cheney's defense. I can almost hear him quoting Oliver Hardy: "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into..."


Say what you will about the French, in many ways they are leading the world. Here, we have the story of France taking the church of Scientology: "The Church of Scientology's French branch went on trial on Monday on charges of organised fraud, in a case that could lead to the group being dissolved in France.
Registered as a religion in the United States, with celebrity members such as actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta, Scientology enjoys no such legal protection in France and has faced repeated accusations of being a money-making cult.
The French branch of the group said on Monday religious freedom was threatened.
Its Paris headquarters and bookshop are defendants in the case. If found guilty, they could be fined 5 million euros ($7 million) and ordered to halt their activities." Scientology was founded by the science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard as a joke. More to his credit he helped found Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Scientology gained momentum in the '60's and '70's and was legally declared a church in California. They have systematically taken to court anyone who has ever criticized them, and held L Ron Hubbard a virtual captive on his yacht, keeping him drunk and stoned, during his later years. He was secretly put in a nursing home in San Luis Obispo until he died, and then didn't tell the public or members of his family that he had died...

First we had Joe Biden going to Lebanon and bumbling his way about, telling them to vote the way Washington wants them to, or kiss foreign aid good-bye. Now we have the Christian Science Monitor writing about a revelation that Hezbollah was behind the assassination of a former Prime Minister: "A bombshell revelation tying Lebanon's militant Hezbollah to the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister has generated a rare consensus among rival political camps less than two weeks before crucial parliamentary elections.
The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported this weekend that the Netherlands-based international tribunal established to trace and judge the killers of Rafik Hariri has uncovered evidence that Hezbollah was responsible for the February 2005 truck bomb assassination.
Hezbollah described the allegations as "evil fabrications" aimed at "influencing the election campaign" and called on the international tribunal to refute the allegations.
A spokeswoman for the tribunal refused to discuss Der Spiegel's claims, saying, "We don't know where they are getting the story from. The office of the prosecutor doesn't comment on any issues related to operational aspects of the investigation."
The revelations, coming just two weeks before Lebanon holds closely contested parliamentary elections, have the potential to ignite simmering Sunni-Shiite tensions here. On Sunday night, a Shiite supporter of the Hezbollah-led opposition was killed during a clash with partisans of the Western-backed March 14 coalition." It's pretty obvious that Western intelligence forces don't want Hezbollah to win the upcoming Lebanese election... and the ploys being used seem petty, how can anyone fall for such gross manipulations? But we have blinders on when it comes to these same forces trying to manipulate us, uh uh, I came up with the socialist idea all by myself...