President Bush's visit last week to Jacksonville, Ore., a tiny mountain town of fewer than 3,000 souls, was heralded by the usual black helicopters bristling with guns. When peaceful protesters lined the main street hoping the President might glance at their signs from his bulletproof limo, they were shot at with paintball guns firing pepper spray.

CNN the next morning gave a few chipper, upbeat seconds to the abuse. Transcript: "Well, good morning, Heidi," Suzanne Malveaux said. "Of course, as the campaign heats up, so do those protests, as well. It was last night in Jacksonville, Ore., is where there was a group of protesters blocking the street along the motorcade route. And a group of local police hit them with pepper. This is fire from paintball guns. A couple of people were arrested during that scuffle. But for the most part, things were rather peaceful.

"There were also a lot of Bush supporters that were along that route. And for the most part, President Bush, of course, projecting optimism along the campaign trail."

Of course, Suzanne.

In fact, Jacksonville residents reported after the attacks that even small children were sprayed, and innocent bystanders shot in the back at point blank for helping the fallen.

The Wehrmacht Oath of Loyalty to Adolf Hitler - 2 August 1934

"I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath."

The Bush Loyalty Oath - 2004

"I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

"I'm nervous and angry," said Pte Manny Lynch, 19, from Fife, as he was about to board a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft. "I was supposed to be going home last Monday and I only found out that I was being deployed four days before ... Finding out just days before I was due to go home is hard to take."

Ben Brereton, 19, from Truro, Cornwall, a craftsman with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, said: "I don't know how they justify it."

He’s going to be a Skull-and-Bones man from Yale, the scion of a wealthy New England family. He supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act and the No Child Left Behind Act, while opposing the right of gays and lesbians to be married. And he completely supports the Israeli government’s war against the Palestinian people.

Of course, we know who the winning candidate is because the foregoing profile could describe either John Kerry or George W. Bush. This is yet another example of an election without a choice on most of the major issues on which elections are supposed to be fought.

The first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war suggests that at least 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since their country was invaded in March 2003.

More than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes, researchers say. Previous estimates have put the Iraqi death toll at around 10,000 - ten times the 1,000 members of the British, American and multi-national forces who have died so far. But the study, published in The Lancet, suggested that Iraqi casualties could be as much as 100 times the coalition losses. It was also savagely critical of the failure by coalition forces to count Iraqi casualties.

Within 30 years, world living standards could start falling, Meadows predicts. "We are living on borrowed time." The rising expense of protecting the rising population from starvation, pollution, soil erosion, and shortages of nonrenewable resources will cut into the capital available for boosting industrial output...

The next day, two men arrived at the store and showed Cox their badges. The lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube. She said yes. The Magic Cube, he said, was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

The whole thing took about 10 minutes.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that the Homeland Security agents had it wrong. The Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on rival toy's trademark.

True to their family tradition of personal sacrifice, Jenna and Barbara Bush are the first to sign up for Spring Break Fallujah 2005. "Isn't that an MTV thing?" asked party girl Jenna, "because I'm totally there." How cute! It's armed conflict in the Middle East, spring break style. And the twins will have plenty of company - all guys and girls from the age of 18-34, and medical personnel up to the age of 44! Awesome!

The next hoop to jump through was the Revenue Office, which refused to issue the little piece of plastic because--you guessed it--he didn't have a birth certificate. A friend of ours said if we took the proof we had south a few miles to a smaller town, they had a Revenue Office that would accept his alternative (an entry in the family bible that has been notarized). Duh? While in this office, the woman working there was very belligerent, which of course is the typical attitude of the exalted ones who work to make us jump through their little hoops, and in the time he was there, said at least 10 times, "You are going to have to sign up for the draft."

Interesting? I didn't even know there was a draft, but now I am starting to wonder. The great Wizard of Arkansas has passed an edict that you MUST sign up with Selective Service before you can be issued a driver's license. Exactly WHAT this has to do with driving is beyond me. But as you can see, the driver's license is becoming a hostage to any new government edict. Don't pay child support, loose your driver’s license. Don't sign up for Selective Service, we won't give you one.

The Selective Service has been updating its contingency plans for a draft of doctors, nurses and other health care workers in case of a national emergency that overwhelmed the military's medical corps.

In a confidential report this summer, a contractor hired by the agency described how such a draft might work, how to secure compliance and how to mold public opinion and communicate with health care professionals, whose lives could be disrupted.

...the momentous decision awaiting Americans is ... whether they re-elect a man who, it is now clear, has become palpably unstable.

The evidence has been before our eyes for some time, but only during the course of this election campaign has it crystallised - just in time, possibly, for the 2 November election. The 43rd US President has always had a much-publicised knack for mangled syntax, but now George Bush often searches an agonisingly long time, sometimes in vain, for the right words. His mind simply blanks out at crucial times. He is prone, I am told, to foul-mouthed temper tantrums in the White House. His handlers now rarely allow him to speak an unscripted word in public.

"Our all-volunteer army will remain an all-volunteer army," Bush began, to cheers from supporters here in Florida...

"My opponent seems to be willing to say almost anything he thinks will benefit him politically," he said. "After standing on the stage, after the debates, I made it very plain we will not have an all-volunteer army."

"And yet this week..." he continued, before suddenly realizing the gaffe and shouting: "We will have an all-volunteer army."

"Let me restate that: We will not have a draft. No matter what my opponent tries to tell people and scare them, we will have an all-volunteer army," promised the president, who is known for frequent verbal stumbles.

You have to feel sorry for the man who ends up in the Oval Office the next four years. He'll preside over the singular event of the global oil production peak and all the turbulent emanations from it, including the de-stabilization of most of the complex systems that the industrial world depends on: agriculture, finance, trade, transportation, and electric power generation. Oh yes, and peace between nations, which is more a condition than a system.

This, of course, is exactly what the American public is not hearing about from the candidates or, for that matter, what they are not putting to the candidates in any forum of public discussion, whether it is a staged debate or the editorial pages. But over the next four years the public will find out exactly what the War in Iraq has been about -- not a favor for Haliburton by Bush & Cheney, but a natural consequence of the public's own sick dependence on cars.

Have you not noticed that Americans don't give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... I don't give a rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don't. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah - and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.
Wading River, NY

Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys.
United States

KEEP YOUR FUCKIN' LIMEY HANDS OFF OUR ELECTION. HEY, SHITHEADS, REMEMBER THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR? REMEMBER THE WAR OF 1812? WE DIDN'T WANT YOU, OR YOUR POLITICS HERE, THAT'S WHY WE KICKED YOUR ASSES OUT. FOR THE 47% OF YOU WHO DON'T WANT PRESIDENT BUSH, I SAY THIS ... TOUGH SHIT!
PROUD AMERICAN VOTING FOR BUSH!

Real Americans aren't interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions. If you want to save the world, begin with your own worthless corner of it.
Texas, USA

   

Since Saddam was toppled in April, Iraq has paid out $1.8bn in reparations to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi tribunal that assesses claims and disburses awards. Of those payments, $37m have gone to Britain and $32.8m have gone to the United States. That's right: in the past 18 months, Iraq's occupiers have collected $69.8m in reparation payments from the desperate people they have been occupying. But it gets worse: the vast majority of those payments, 78%, have gone to multinational corporations, according to statistics on the UNCC website.

Here is a small sample of who has been getting "reparation" awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18m), Bechtel ($7m), Mobil ($2.3m), Shell ($1.6m), Nestlé ($2.6m), Pepsi ($3.8m), Philip Morris ($1.3m), Sheraton ($11m), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam's forces damaged their property in Kuwait - only that they "lost profits" or, in the case of American Express, experienced a "decline in business" because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. One of the biggest winners has been Texaco, which was awarded $505m in 1999. According to a UNCC spokesperson, only 12% of that reparation award has been paid, which means hundreds of millions more will have to come out of the coffers of post-Saddam Iraq.

Goodstein writes that the worldwide peak will almost surely be highly disruptive, if not catastrophic, considering the difficult American experience of the early 1970s, when U.S. production met its own peak. Since then, U.S. production has been on a downslope that will continue until the tap runs dry.

But even the 1970s' experience would be nothing compared to a worldwide peak, Goodstein explains. Indeed, the country then experienced serious gas shortages and price increases, exacerbated in no small part by the Arab oil embargo. But frustration and exasperation aside, there was oil to buy on the global market if one could locate a willing seller. By contrast, the global peak will mean that prices will thereafter rise steadily and the resource will become increasingly hard to obtain.

Goodstein says that best and worst-case scenarios are fairly easy to envision. At worst, after the so-called Hubbert's peak (named after M. King Hubbert, the Texas geophysicist who was nearly laughed out of the industry in the 1950s for even suggesting that a U.S. production peak was possible), all efforts to deal with the problem on an emergency basis will fail. The result will be inflation and depression that will probably result indirectly in a decrease in the global population. Even the lucky survivors will find the climate a bit much to take, because billions of people will undoubtedly rely on coal for warmth, cooking, and basic industry, thereby spewing a far greater quantity of greenhouse gases into the air than that which is currently released.

"The change in the greenhouse effect that results eventually tips Earth's climate into a new state hostile to life. End of story. In this instance, worst case really means worst case."

In the best-case scenario, he writes, we can squeak through a bumpy transition to a natural-gas economy while nuclear power plants are built to get us past the oil crisis. In the worst case, ''runaway inflation and worldwide depression leave many billions of people with no alternative but to burn coal in vast quantities for warmth, cooking and primitive industry.''

President Bush has pointed to hydrogen as the ultimate answer to our need for transportation fuels, but Goodstein correctly points out that hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is a fuel produced by using energy. We can use coal to produce it, or solar power, or something else, but it is only a way of converting energy into a form that can be used in vehicles; it doesn't do anything to ease the transition away from oil.

"Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century"

The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh...

..."How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"

"They asked me, 'Are you a part of an equal rights organization or blah or blah or any group opposed to the President?"

And then they got personal, he says.

"They started asking me about my relationship with my roommates," he says. "And whether I went out to clubs. They asked whether I smoke, or drank, or took drugs. Then they started asking about my physical characteristics: If blond was my natural hair color, if I wore contacts, and if had any identifying marks, like tattoos, moles, and scars, and where they were or what they were from, and whether I had ever had any plastic surgery."

When they were done with the questioning, the agents had an assignment for Kjar.

"They asked me to write a statement about the sticker, why I got the sticker, where, how, and why I put it up," he says.

He complied. "It was about a page and a half," he says. "They made me sign it. Basically, I said I found it on the Internet, I thought it was funny, and it was a little edgier than most that I'd seen, so I printed it up and put it in my car hoping to get a few laughs."

Before they left, they took three photographs of Kjar, he says, and they warned him: "Do not post or print or hand out the sticker again."

Kjar feels that his rights were violated. "I've almost lost my freedom of speech," he says. "I make one statement, and I get shot down, while everyone is out there with their bumper stickers and signs."

Kjar suspects that his neighbors with Bush stickers all over their car turned him in. "They won't even speak to us," he says. "Since the incident, the police have been over at my neighbors' house several times. For a while, I just felt trapped. I didn't want to leave my house because I thought my neighbors would hassle me. Or if we had a party at my house, the neighbors might report us."