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Busking for Penning – Support Dissident Writers!

IF Empire Burlesque is important to you, please consider donating to Chris Floyd. I am covering the bills for hosting, security, and putting in whatever time I can afford. Whatever you donate will go to and has gone to him. Since losing his gig,  after close to a decade,  at the Moscow Times and subsequently truthout.org (he was considered a bit ‘old’ and let go…) Floyd has been struggling to make ends meet. If you can – please toss a coin into the hat for the man. He waxes words like few others do and he has been a Bush

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Blowback in Lebanon: Another Imperial Backfire

For anyone confused by the fragmentary and hot-buttoned reports (“Al Qaeda!” “Terrorists!” “Don’t think, just look at these scary words!”) coming out of Lebanon on the military assault on Palestinian refugee camps, Charles Harb of the American University of Beirut has a succinct primer in the Guardian. As Sy Hersh has already noted, what we are seeing in the violent carnage at Nahr al-Bared is yet another example of blowback, where militant sectarians are armed

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It’s Alright, Ma, They’re Only Bleeding: Dems Sell Out, Slaughter Goes On

As so often happens with some new sickening outrage, words fail me in confronting the base cowardice of the Democratic “opposition” in completely caving to the deeply unpopular Bush Administration and giving Little Caligula a blank check to continue his reeking slaughter in Iraq. Fortunately for us all, words did not fail the ever-incandescent Arthur Silber, who has written with blazing fury about this latest sell-out. [See A Murderer’s Confession, then immediately read

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Guardian at the Gates: Surging Toward War With Iran

If you have any doubt that the Bush Administration is planning a military strike against Iran, then check out the lead story in today’s Guardian: Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq. The story, which is based entirely — entirely — on the unchallenged statements of three anonymous “American officials,” not only alleges that Iran is “already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces” — including the increasing mortar attacks on the Green Zone — but also asserts that Tehran has entered into an

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The Powerful Odor of Mendacity: From Wiretaps to War

I.
Glenn Greenwald catches Bush’s “intelligence czar,” Mike McConnell, in howlingly flagrant lies in
a Washington Post op-ed about the need to “update” the secret FISA
court’s powers over governm
ent surveillance. Greenwald does a masterful
job of demolition — but in the end, it’s like shooting fish in a
barrel. All he does is go back to Bush’s own public statements after
the FISA system was, er, updated in October 2001, and show how the Dear
Leader himself contradicts every statement

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Father of Lies: The Pope’s Genocidal Revisionism

Almost no one in the West seems to have noticed the truly perverse and morally obscene remarks made by Pope Benedict in Brazil. But genocide scholar Adam Jones at CounterPunch noticed, and calls out Herr Ratzinger for his remarkable historical revisionism, which paints the genocidal destruction of America’s pre-Columbus cultures as a “purifying” act which gave the natives just what they were “longing” for. In this outburst, the conservative cleric and former Hitler Youth far surpasses revisionists like David Irving in

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Hallelujah Trail: Terror War “Regime Change” Comes to the Holy Land

The Bush Administration has now embarked on its fourth “regime change” operation in its global “Terror War.” Following the more direct overthrows in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the aggression by paid-for proxies in Somalia, we now have the civil war in Palestine, with U.S. arms and money backing the armed overthrow of the democratically elected Hamas government. As in Somalia, where the American-trained army of the Ethiopian dictatorship joined up with Somali warlords in the pay of the CIA, the latest regime change is being carried out by

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Killing Joke: The Liberal Misunderstanding of the Extremist Threat to America

Mark Crispin Miller gives us the lowdown on the religious extremists who pose a deep and genuine threat to our way of life. These sectarians seek nothing less than the complete subjegation of American democracy to their primitive theocratic rule. With ruthless and relentless cunning, they are using the very openness and tolerance of our secular society to infiltrate the centers of power, at the local, state and federal level, and employ the institutions of government to advance their radical agenda. Yet,

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Parting Shot: Blair Jails Two to Shield “Madman” Bush

These are days of troubled sleep. As in a dream, you walk familiar streets, living out your ordinary life — going to work, having love affairs, watching sports, getting the car fixed, worrying about bills, fighting a toothache, taking kids to school, listening to music — and everything seems as it was before, as it always was; you seem to be what you always were: a free person in a free country. Then some discordant noise reaches your mind; you stir, you open your eyes, and you remember: that’s not how it is here anymore.
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Bush Partners Cut Off Woman’s Head; President Signals Approval of Extremist Act

What, you’ve got a problem with that headline? Too much of a stretch, you say, for this story from AP? How so? Are not the Saudi royals very close friends and business partners of the president’s immediate family, going back several decades? Was not the long-time Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, not dubbed “Bandar Bush” by none other than the sitting president himself? Does not George W. Bush smooch and

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