Random News & Views Roundup

- I see the tories have pulled their French attack ads apparently citing 'they expect they'll be less effective during the campaign, when voters will be focused on provincial politics'. What a crock. They got well-deserved heat over their smear of Ralph Goodale and that's why they really backed down. Goodale should have sued the party.

- My friend Janet from Peace Gone Wild is protesting in Portland tonite outside of a TV station that's hosting a comfy town hall meeting with invited guests loaded with pre-scripted questions for Senators Smith and Wyden. Stay safe, Janet! She'll post about it when she's able to.

- Rice ended another my way or the highway ME summit on Monday that pretty much went like this:

A senior Palestinian official who attended the summit, told Reuters: "Olmert told Abbas during the meeting, 'you cheated me' by reaching the deal with Hamas. President Abbas responded (by saying), 'you gave me nothing and didn't keep your promises."'

- Check out Dahr Jamail's new article about the lack of food security in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Feb 19 (IPS) - The lack of security in Iraq is leading now to a collapse in food supplies.

"Look at us begging for food despite the fortunes we have," 60-year-old Um Muthanna from Baghdad told IPS. Standing at a vegetable market in central Baghdad where vegetable supplies are not what they used to be, Um Mahmood despaired for Iraq.

- Cheney: Infighter aka shit disturber and liar.

- MSNBC shows a new video of JFK just 90 seconds before his assassination (via Raw Story), but the crawl on the bottom of their news coverage says "JFK Jr" and where has this clip been all of these years??

- River of Baghdad Burning has a new post up, The Rape of Sabrine.

As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.

She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name...

Reality. Again.