ThinkingBlue: DON'T LET BUSH PARDON THIS TURKEY!

Please sign the petition to tell Bush, we will not stand still for this pardon...
Click here to sign petition and read my note to President Bush.

Dear Mr. Bush, if you pardon Scooter Libby, after he is found guilty of his charges, you will be displaying your own guilt in the matter. But I know, you boys don't care about that or you wouldn't have blatantly showed America's middle and lower classes what you really think of them by all your Social Cuts, caving in to the Banking Corporations demand to change the Bankruptcy Laws and of course the really BIGGIE nose-thumb of Declaring an unnecessary WAR for the same proletariats to fight and die in! Thinking Blue

Only Real Turkeys Deserve a Pardon
Every Thanksgiving the president pardons a turkey. But this year George Bush may try to use the holiday to slip in another pardon -- of his friend and former senior aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements.
Conservatives around Washington are buzzing with rumors that George Bush will regain control of his lame-duck presidency by ending the investigation into manipulated intelligence on Iraq and the subsequent cover-up with a pardons for anyone involved.
Show that you are watching -- let George Bush know he can't get away with pardoning this turkey over the Thanksgiving holiday: https://www.democrats.org/page/petition/nopardon
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A Cyber Friend sent this my way:

Please read this. Consider the ending of this article carefully. It
would seem to be a true statement from all I've heard, witnessed, and
seen in my lifetime, whether in Haiti or here in the U.S., whether with
people of color or of religions or no religions or of "you name it." We
seem to have this insane racism that grows and feeds on itself and is
almost impossible to be rid of. It is the mother of all battles to be
won. It is the foundation for battles in places like Iraq and
Afghanistan and in all the Latin American countries. It is the mother
of all Freudian Projections that WE DO to our brothers and sisters
around the world. It is white-skinned arrogance that is killing the
world. We've seen that arrogance in the VX battle here in Dayton --
which continues elsewhere. We've seen it in the horrors of Fallujah
where our military is doing the same things as done in Vietnam with
White Phosphorus and Napalm where skin is literally peeled off to the
bone.

If we have been afraid to confront racism on our doorstep by speaking
out, by taking a stand, let's consider why we do that. And, let's give
THANKS for our bounty -- but let's also be strong in inviting "others"
to join in the bounty. Amen and have a nice Thanksgiving. God love
all of you who continue to stand up for peace, for dignity, for love,
for real freedom and democracy................................
Undermining Haiti

By Mark WeisbrotThis op-ed was printed in the December 12, 2005 issue of
The Nation. If anyone wants to reprint it, please let me know.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
History is repeating itself in Haiti, as democracy is being destroyed
for the second time in the past fifteen years. Amazingly, the main
difference seems to be that this time it is being done openly and in
broad daylight, with the support of the "international community" and
the United Nations. The first coup against Haiti's democratically
elected government, in September 1991, was condemned even by the George
H.W. Bush Administration. This although the CIA had funded the leaders
of the coup and--according to a founder of the death squads that
murdered thousands of people during the 1991-94 military
dictatorship--also sponsored the repression. All this was covert, and
the official position of the United States and most other countries was
that the dictatorship was not legitimate.

But when in February 2004 Haiti's democratically elected president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown for the second time by remnants
of that prior dictatorship--including convicted mass murderers and
former death squad leaders--this was considered a legitimate "regime
change." The Caricom countries, showing great courage, objected
strenuously, as did some members of the US Congress. But these voices
were not powerful enough to influence the course of events.

The fix was in: The US Agency for International Development and the
International Republican Institute (the international arm of the
Republican Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and
organize an opposition--however small in numbers--and to make Haiti
under Aristide ungovernable. The whole scenario was strikingly similar
to the series of events that led to the coup against Venezuelan
President Hugo Chávez in April 2002. The same US organizations were
involved, and the opposition--as in Venezuela--controlled and used the
major media as a tool for destabilization. And in both cases the coup
leaders, joined by Washington, announced to the world that the elected
president had "voluntarily resigned"--which later turned out to be
false.

Washington had an added weapon against the Haitian government. Taking
advantage of Haiti's desperate poverty and dependence on foreign aid, it
stopped international aid to the government, from the summer of 2000
until the 2004 coup. As economist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out, the
World Bank also contributed to the destabilization effort by cutting off
funding.

Now the coup government, headed by unelected Prime Minister Gérard
Latortue, is trying to organize an election. But it is an election that
would not be seen as legitimate in any country, not even Iraq.
Everything is being arranged so that the country's largest political
party, Fanmi Lavalas--which at any moment before the coup would have
overwhelmingly swept national elections--cannot win. Many of the party's
leaders are in jail, generally on trumped-up or nonexistent charges,
including the constitutional prime minister, Yvon Neptune, and Father
Gérard Jean-Juste, a Catholic priest and likely presidential candidate
if he were not jailed. Jean-Juste has been declared a prisoner of
conscience by Amnesty International. Other leaders are in hiding or in
exile, since the murder of political opponents is common. In one
massacre in August, witnesses described Haitian police arriving at a
soccer match and pointing out people in the crowd, who were then hacked
to death by civilian accomplices with machetes. UN troops have also been
implicated in some of the violence, and the UN has promised an
investigation.

The coup government, with an electoral commission that has no pretense
of impartiality, is also set to disenfranchise a huge number of its
opponents. There have been about one-twentieth as many registration
sites for this election as there were for previous elections, and it is
mostly Fanmi Lavalas voters who have been excluded. According to party
spokespeople, the party has not registered any candidates for president,
and many of its voters will boycott the election unless their demands
for the release of political prisoners and an end to the persecution are
met.

The election has been postponed three times, most recently to December
27. Setting the date two days after Christmas will also help minimize
voter turnout.

Will the world accept this farce of an election? The Bush Administration
and its allies seem to be hoping that Haiti is just too poor and too
black for anyone to care about whether democratic, constitutional or
even human rights are respected there. They have also cited the violence
from both sides of the conflict to disguise the fact that most of that
violence is directed at supporters of the ousted government to prevent
them from returning to power through a fair election.

But if this election goes forward without the release of political
prisoners and the restoration of basic rights and security, it will not
only be a tragedy for Haiti. It will be a throwback to the days when the
United States was able to destabilize, overthrow and replace elected
governments that it did not like. It will be a huge step backward for
democracy in this hemisphere.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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My reply:
For the life of me... I could not figure out why Bush and his Bullies were
interested in Haiti... After reading your article I searched Google and
came up with these few reasonings, from this link... http://www.madre.org/articles/lac/haiticoup.html

Thanks m, for your heartfelt words of wisdom, ThinkingBlue

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Why is the US Interested in Haiti?

As pointed out by the Dominion weblog and other observers, the
fact that Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere makes it,
paradoxically, important in several ways.
As a source of cheap labor: For years, US-based assembly
plants have paid Haitian workers pennies an hour to produce
name-brand clothing sold in the US.
As an anchor against rising wages: Haiti’s poverty wages keep
production costs down across the hemisphere: corporations can
always threaten to relocate to Haiti when workers elsewhere demand
better pay.
As a dangerous example: Haiti, the first country founded by
slaves, has always been suspect in the eyes of the US, founded by
slave-owners. Today, the US worries that if the hemisphere’s
poorest country can determine its own course, other countries may
also claim the right to formulate their own policies without
interference from Washington. (Bingo!
ThinkingBlue)

Double Standards and Double Speak

We have been told that Aristide is a tyrant guilty of human
rights abuses. Yet Colombia, the hemisphere’s worst human rights
offender, is also the hemisphere’s number one recipient of US aid.
We’re told that Aristide presided over flawed elections in May
2000 – the same year that Bush stole the White House. Also in May
2000, Peru’s President Fujimori denied an outright victory to the
opposition presidential candidate, without retribution from the
US.
Since 2000, the US has encouraged Haiti’s opposition to refuse
to participate in elections and, at the same time, declared that
elections will only be considered legitimate if the opposition
participates. In fact, the Bush Administration has upheld a long
US tradition of talking about respect for democracy in Haiti while
supporting the country’s most anti-democratic, pro-business
forces.
The US role in Haiti’s overlapping crises has consistently
been obscured by mainstream media, which routinely refers to
terrible conditions in Haiti without context or explanation. We
hear about the death squads that killed thousands in the 1990s,
but little about CIA funding and training for these forces. We
read that international aid to Haiti is suspended, but not that
the embargo is entirely a product of US demands. We hear about
hunger and poverty in Haiti, but less about the US policies that
created those conditions (e.g., forcing Haiti to lift tariffs on
heavily-subsidized US-grown rice, bankrupting millions of peasant
farmers and forbidding Aristide from raising the minimum wage).

THAT IS HOW THE REPUBLICANS CONTROL.... ThinkingBlue