Sparky: Speaking of Schwarzenegger — We'll borrow from the pages of the once wonderful paper the likes of Judith Miller tried to tarnish with as a White House Stooge:
Then examine the evil that is this White House Administration by looking at past deeds of scummy Nazi Pal Prescott Bush and the new Cabal.
<> Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Death Penalty
The stadium in Graz, Austria, now has a generic name (top). Its old name was taken down as a protest over the California governor's decision to allow the execution of an inmate.
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BERLIN, Dec. 26 - For years the quaint Austrian town of Graz trumpeted its special relationship with its outsize native son, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Born in a village nearby and schooled in Graz, Mr. Schwarzenegger was an honorary citizen and holder of the town's Ring of Honor. Most conspicuously, the local sports stadium was named after him.
But early today, under cover of darkness, his name was removed from the arena in a sort of uncontested divorce between Mr. Schwarzenegger and the town council, which had been horrified that Governor Schwarzenegger ignored pleas to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, former leader of the Crips gang, who was executed by the state of California two weeks ago for murdering four people.
The 15,000-seat stadium had been named after Mr. Schwarzenegger in 1997 as an act of both self-promotion and fealty toward the poor farmer's son and international celebrity who has always identified Graz as his native place.
But when Mr. Schwarzenegger declined to commute Mr. Williams's death penalty, the reaction was swift and angry in Graz, which, like most places in Europe, sees the death penalty as a medieval atrocity.
"I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen," Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party, said in a recent interview. "The petition was accepted by a majority on the council."
Before a formal vote was taken on the petition, however, Mr. Schwarzenegger made a kind of pre-emptive strike, writing a letter to Siegfried Nagl, the town's conservative mayor, withdrawing Graz's right to use his name in association with the stadium. There will be other death penalty decisions ahead, Mr. Schwarzenegger wrote, and so he decided to spare the responsible politicians of Graz further concern.
"It was a clever step," Ms. Binder said. "He took the initiative," she continued, and then suggested a bit of the local politics that had entered into the matter. "It was possible for him to do so," she said, "because the mayor didn't have the courage to take a clear position on this point."
Needless to say, Mr. Nagl, a member of the conservative Peoples Party, who opposed the name-removal initiative, does not agree.
He is against the death penalty, he said in an interview, and on Dec. 1, he wrote a letter to Mr. Schwarzenegger pleading for clemency for Mr. Williams. But he blames the leftist majority on the City Council - consisting of Greens, Social Democrats and two Communists - for trying to score some local political points at Mr. Schwarzenegger's and, he believes, Graz's own expense.
"One stands by a friend and a great citizen of our city and does not drag his name through the mud even when there is a difference of opinion," Mr. Nagl said in a letter he wrote to Mr. Schwarzenegger. "I would like to ask you to keep the Ring of Honor of the City of Graz."
The heated nature of the debate revealed how much a relatively small place like Graz, certainly a place with no military might or diplomatic power to speak of, wants to play a role as a sort of moral beacon, waging the struggle for what it considers the collective good.
Graz, a place of old onion steeples, museums and Art Nouveau architecture, designated itself five years ago, with a unanimous vote of the City Council, to be Europe's first official "city of human rights." While the designation has no juridical meaning, it provides a sort of goal to live up to.
"We are against the death penalty not only in word, but really against the death penalty," said Wolfgang Benedek, a professor of international law at Graz University. He said the council's reaction reflected the special circumstances surrounding Mr. Williams: a man who had written a children's book aimed at steering young people away from violence, had already spent many years in jail, and seemed, to Europeans at least, to have reformed himself.
"Many people around the world pleaded with Mr. Schwarzenegger to show mercy in this case, and when he didn't, the city had somehow to react," Mr. Benedek said.
Mr. Benedek allows that there is an element of elite versus popular opinion on this matter. A poll by the local newspaper found that over 70 percent of the public opposed removing Mr. Schwarzenegger's name from the stadium. This adds to a practical consideration very much on Mr. Nagl's mind: that Graz will no longer be able to count on using its special relationship with the governor to promote its image.
"We had the great classical culture on the one side," the mayor's spokesman, Thomas Rajakovics, said, referring to other important figures who are associated with Graz, - like the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the Novel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, and the conductor Karl Böhm. "And on the other, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger and the popular culture. These were the two poles for us, but we're not allowed to use his name any more."
The Schwarzenegger name has, as it were, been erased. The new name is now simply Stadion Graz-Liebenau (a district of Graz), though there were other proposals. One was to name the stadium after the Crips, the gang that Mr. Williams founded, but that idea did not get widespread support. Another was to name it Hakoah, after a Jewish sports club that was banned after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.
But the first "city of human rights" did not seem quite ready for that either. It is not that there was vocal opposition but, as Ms. Binder put it, Austrians do not generally want a daily reminder of the terrible wartime past.
Meanwhile, city officials are holding on to Mr. Schwarzenegger's honorary citizenship ring, which arrived from Mr. Schwarzenegger during the holidays. Mr. Rajakovics said they will keep it for him in the hope that one day he will take it back.
Apaches accuse Prescott Bush of robbing Geronimo's grave
December 25, 2005
Native americans are petitioning Congress to investigate the elite Skull and Bones group and return what they believe are the remains of Apache warrior Geronimo for reburial.
The petition alledges that Geronimo's grave was robbed in 1918 by members of the society, including Prescott Bush, President George W. Bush's grandfather. The alledged graverobbers stole Geronimo's head and his prized silver bridle, which had been buried with him. These allegations are also within a book by Yale graduate, Alexandra Robbins, titled; "Secrets of the Tomb". Robbins suggests that the reason these men robbedgraves is; "Bones as a society is preoccupied with death; skulls, skeletons, and artwork depicting death are prevalent in the tomb. When Bonesmen steal things they use the euphemism that they are taking 'gifts to the goddess' whom they honor within the tomb."
Robbins also said; "I think it's ridiculous that Bonesmen's sense of entitlement is broad enough to include items that allegedly don't belong to them. The items they supposedly steal as a prank or competition may be valuable and meaningful to the actual owners. It's appalling that proper authorities have not forced their way into the tomb to retrieve the items that don't belong in there."
An economics professor at Clark College,James Craven, suggests that; "In the near future, there will finally be large groups of Natives showing up in front of 'the tomb' to protest this ugly racism and grave robbing by the Bones, and they will not be leaving until that skull and any other Native artifacts have been returned...[The theft] is a metaphor for something much bigger and even uglier. It is the ugly racism and hubris of the in-bred power elites who seek to infiltrate positions of power."
In her book, Robbins also reports that Apaches met with Skull and Bones representatives following their admission by letter that they did in fact have a skull they called "Geronimo". The Apaches were offered some bones, but refused to accept them at that time because, according to the petition; "It was obviously not the skull seen in the smuggled photograph."
Endicott Davison, an attorney for Skull and Bones, denied that Geronimo's skull is in the possession of the group.
Online Petition Sources- Brenda Norrell "Congress petitioned for return of Geronimo's remains". Indian Country Today, December 25, 2005
- CBS News "Skull And Bones". 60 Minutes, June 13,2004
- CBS "Skull And Bones video". 60 Minutes, June 13,2004
- NOAM RUDNICK "Of skulls and bones: More secrets of the tomb". Yale Herald, October 24,2003
- Cecil Adams "Is Geronimo's skull residing at Yale's Skull and Bones? Was it stolen from the grave by Prescott Bush?". Chicago Reader, November 11, 2005
- Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin "Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale". George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, 1992,reprint 2004
- Alexandra Robbins "Secrets of the Tomb, book extract". Secrets of the Tomb, 2003
Cheney-Rumsfeld "Cabal" alleged in the USA
December 25, 2005Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief-of-staff, is attracting news headlines around the globe [1] by publicly accusing members of the Bush administration. He said in a speech at the New America Foundation: "What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."
Regarding Karen Hughes's attempts to improve the country's image abroad? "It's hard to sell [manure]," Wilkerson said. "If you're unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you're declaring the Geneva Conventions not operative, if you're doing a host of things that the world doesn't agree with you on and you're doing it blatantly and in their face, without grace, then you've got to pay the consequences" said the man who was chief of staff at the State Department until early 2005.
Wilkerson also described President Bush's behavior as "cowboyism" and Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak."
The colonel described Colin Powell as "the world's most loyal soldier," but said he felt his loyalty belongs not to the administration, but to the country.
An email allegedly from Powell told Wilkerson: "Don't characterize my loyalty."
Related document:
- AFP "Former aide to Powell opens fire on US administration". Yahoo News, December 24,2005
- Dana Milbank "Colonel Finally Saw Whites of Their Eyes". Washington Post, October 20, 2005
More later - Sparks
posted by Coat @ 5:45 PM
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