10-27-05, 10:00 am

NOBODY ASKED ME BUT... By Don Sloan




[December 2005]

• Evidence is building that the 1970 Lyme disease breakout that is plaguing us since was a result of a clandestine operation by the Department of Agriculture.

• Plum Island that went awry. The facility was studying tic-infestation syndromes conducted by Nazi scientists that were brought to the US under Project Paperclip.

• US Army recruitment goals are being missed every month by a wider margin.

• Mainstream newspapers just seem to be half ads and lies between the ads.

• Never, never take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

• Why was there so little protest over giving $2 billion to relocate the 9,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza but zip to those in Rwanda, Haiti, Darfur and…the Gulf Coast?

• Heard on the Internet re: Katrina: If we are to believe that President Bush and the Christian right have been talking directly to God these past six years, then it follows that this is his answer to their agenda.

• That agenda: The president has ordered that contractors who got no-bid contracts in Louisiana along with Halliburton to pay wages below the minimum standard as a part of a “national emergency.”

• Shades of deposed FEMA head Michael Brown: Washington is buzzing with the policy undermining the country’s parks of National Parks chair Paul Hoffman, a Cheney crony, despite his career having no parks experience.

• The Radio 4 Show In Our Time poll voted Karl Marx the greatest ever philosopher.

• The rate of governmental secrecy has nearly doubled since 2001. Over 15 million documents have been classified top secret by the Bush White House. It is so prevalent a practice now that some data already in schoolbooks and public Supreme Court decisions have been so marked.

• With Halliburton getting more contracts from the Feds from Iraq to New Orleans, one insider spokesperson said, “Why not just give them the keys to the US Treasury?”

• Ernesto “Che” Guevara used to say that the present is for struggling, but the future belongs to us.

[November 2005]

A resident of Layton, Utah, displayed a sign on his front lawn that listed the daily GI casualties in Iraq. He was informed by the city attorney’s office that it violated a municipal ordinance and must be removed. The details are not available only because no one is clear as to what ordinance it violates. Stay tuned. US real wages are falling at their fastest rate in the past 14 years, according to the Financial Times. World Health Journal reports that since the Iraq invasion started, the statistics for mortality and morbidity are worst for their children, whose rates have tripled since its onset. Law enforcement officials have made at least 200 formal and informal inquiries to libraries across the country seemingly to develop a pattern of what reading materials are attracted to which of their clientele. Of all the agricultural landmass in the US, 87 percent is used to raise animals for food. All military records that could have established the whereabouts of George W. Bush during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard have “inadvertently” been destroyed, according to the Pentagon. Slim-Fast diet drink Company has cancelled comedian Whoopi Goldberg from their ads stating that the executives were unhappy with her anti-Bush remarks during the campaign. Little known to the public, Senator Frank Lautenberg (Democrat of New Jersey) has started a preliminary probe into the Halliburton Cayman Islands operation in Iran where it is ostensibly illegal for US firms to function. Missouri’s state office has ordered that the Confederate flag be flown at cemeteries where former rebel soldiers were buried. Massive protests are being prepared. It has been suggested that to test the mettle of our Iraq occupation, a second general election be held that would have Saddam Hussein on the ballot. Wouldn’t that be something if he won hands down?



[September/October 2005]

Alice Walker said that just as people need each other, an angel cannot fly with one wing. Dick Cheney’s Halliburton is the largest single recipient of Iraqi oil funds since the occupation, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers. And what do you know? Final figures from the 2004 campaign reveal that the GOP was the largest single recipient of contributions by the US oil and gas industry at $1.8 billion dollars. Governor Arnold (R-CA) has already shown where he comes from. He has vetoed bills that would have raised the state’s hourly wage and forced behemoth retail chains like WalMart to account for the economic losses in neighborhoods that they enter. Two prominent legal groups headed by mogul Harry “Buckhead” MacDonald are mounting challenges to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The case is being handled in court by none other than former Clinton investigator Kenneth Starr. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, according to President Bush, but doing the same for everyone in the US is socialism. The public is entitled to know all about Hillary Clinton’s alleged cattle trading, but we are not privy to the President’s driving violations. Rain forests are being destroyed at the rate of 125,000 square miles per year. The World Health Organization states that over 20,000 children die daily in the worlds due to a lack of medicines solely because of service paid for by their governments to satisfy World Bank and IMF debts. None of the $145 million allocated for hospital beds and rescue gear by the government for Homeland Security for the DC area has been spent. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that you can have a mass accumulation of wealth or you can have democracy in any nation but you cannot have both at the same time.









--Don Sloan is assistant editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.