It should frighten you out of your wits
To learn what was done to those tits
The Great Berluscosa,
Who does nothing sub-rosa,
Had them touched up with clothing that fits.

Degenerate art? Degenerate audience? Degenerate past? Past as prelude?

While we've been very busy here arguing election politics, a fascist billionaire has seized dictatorial powers in Italy.  Sivio Berlusconi's "Iron Fist" legislation has passed the Italian Senate.

I guess Mussolini has been dead too long.

From the BBC So apparently Bush can export his notion of democracy to places other than Iraq. Like to Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi just got passed a law exempting him from prosecution. Sound familiar?

The LA Times and New York Times are reporting tonight on the testimony of one of Italy's top counter-terrorism cops in the rendition trial in absentia of 26 Americans. From the LA Times:

Testifying in the trial of 26 Americans, most of them CIA operatives, who are accused of abducting a radical Egyptian cleric in Milan, the senior officer described tracking massive amounts of cellular telephone traffic to piece together Europe's only prosecution of the much-disputed practice known as extraordinary rendition.

Remember Silvio Berlusconi, Bush's Italian pal?

Bush: We welcome the Prime Minister as a good friend ... He understands the history and the values that our two countries share."

Well, yes, it does appear that Silvio has an interest in history, in particular a fascination with the 1930s.  Now that Berlusconi's conservative party has once again taken control of Italy, they've been sharing their history lessons with the country.  First, there was the election of one of Berlusconi's lieutenants as the new mayor of Rome.

On Monday night, the area around Rome's city hall rang to chants of "Duce! Duce!", the term adopted by Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German "Führer". Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

Does Godwin's Law still apply if people are proudly waving the banner of fascism?  While one Berlusconi lieutenant was celebrating his mayoral victory, another was reminding the opposition that not following the new government didn't mean just getting a beating at the ballot box.

The prime minister-elect's closest ally, Umberto Bossi, the Northern League leader, kept up the intimidating rhetoric, arriving for the first session of Italy's parliament warning of violence if the centre-left did not go along with his plans for federalism.

"I don't know what the left wants [but] we are ready," he told reporters. "If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand."

And if there was any doubt at all about where this is heading, Berlusconi put his signature on the official fascist embrace.

Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy's leap to the right by declaring: "We are the new Falange." Although he took care to wrap his remark in a classical context, his choice of words appeared to be a nod and a wink to his most extreme supporters. The original Falange - the word means "phalanx" - was the Spanish fascist party, founded in the 1930s, which supplied Francisco Franco's dictatorship with its ideological underpinning.

Once again Bush has demonstrated the kind of keen human insight that he got from peering into Vladimir Putin's baby blues and discovering him to be "straightforward and trustworthy."  It's clear that in sitting down with Silvio, Bush partnered with a man who's determined to bring fascism back to Italy, even if it requires violent suppression of opposition. Either Bush was completely taken in by two men who were determined to put in place non-democratic nationalist governments run by threat and cronyism, or he was sympathetic to those positions.  Neither choice is particularly comforting.

Earlier, Bush had bragged of his partnership with Berlusconi.

The people of the United States and Italy love freedom. And we know that freedom must be defended.

We also understand that defending freedom requires cost and sacrifice.

Having helped to secure a foothold in Europe for neo-fascism, what future sacrifices might be needed to ensure that Italian freedom is retained?  

I hear there's a good beach at Paestum, down in Salerno.

A bitter (no pun intended) irony unfolded this morning when I got an e-mail from my cousin down in Sant'Agnello, Italy, near Naples and Sorrento, where she has been living for the past five years and where I had hoped to escape in exile should McCain win in November.

She gives me bad bad news; Well it turns out the Italian people, by a wide margin, made Italy a little less desirable for me.

More on the flip

Italian parliamentary elections take place today.  Unfortunately, according to the exit polls, Berlusconi's coalition is poised to lead again.  However, the new Partito Democratico led by Walter Veltroni (the extremely popular mayor of Rome) is currently the #1 party.

How did a new party gain so much support in so little time?  Veltroni's adoption of a positive campaign, modeled after Obama's, seems to have struck a note with Italian voters.  He even used the "Yes We Can" slogan--in Italian, "Si Può Fare."  

al Jazeera is reporting a story that appears to have been archived in the Europe section of Agence France-Presse [Please note that al Jazeera has some original reporting on this story] about the recent no confidence vote in Italy that has thrown the government of Romano Prodi into turmoil following his resignation.

Prodi's party is the center-left coalition.  Naturally, the center-rightist group headed by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is hollering for snap elections, as the right wing in Italy appears to have a lead in the polls.

Let's go below the fold.    

The Italian senate has just voted 156 for 161 against,  Prime minister Romano Prodi is now the former prime minister of Italy.

Mr Prodi, who has led his centre-left coalition for 20 months, is now obliged to hand in his resignation.

BBC

Little bit more after the flip.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is in.
Who else is in the Bush Rat Pack?

We finally know - Who is Joey Bishop? - ta da! - French President Nicolas Sarkozy!

I started thinking about the Bush Rat Pack when I saw this photo of George Bush and Sarkozy the other day.

In my concept The Bush Rat Pack should include current world leaders who support George Bush in his quest to remake the middle east in the image of Mordor (whatever it is that Bush thinks he is doing).

More below and take the poll.

Crossposted at European Tribune and Booman Tribune

I just wanted to let everyone in on a little news tidbit that could be taken as both hysterically funny and tragically frightening, depending on how you want to look at it.

As I was taking a glance at the headlines in this morning’s online version of Rome’s daily "Il Messaggero" (the online version of the actual newspaper was not up yet, and would not be for another 2 hours), I found this little blurb amidst the sum-up of Bush’s day in Rome yesterday.

As could have been expected (also because before he arrived Berlusconi boasted that the "real" reason Dubya was coming to Italy was to see him), he obviously went to visit his pal Silvio (as we all know, first-name basis is de rigeur for International Dubya) and, after the one-hour visit, Berlusconi made a statement to the press.

That was strongly implied in an interview of Italian journalist/author Carlo Bonini author of Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror done by Bill Moyers last night.  

Because of the power of ‘the Internets’ I’ve read just about everything I could on the Niger forgery caper, but I can’t recall reading that Berlusconi directly gave the information to Bush. I’m attaching key points of the transcript for those interested.  

Transcript below:

    If you think OUR Senate is tough, try Italia.....see, e.g., CNN, Prodi wins confidence vote in the Senate,

    "Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi won a confidence vote in the Senate on Wednesday, ensuring the survival of his center-left government.
    The vote was 162-157.
    Prodi resigned last week after a defeat in the Senate on the government's foreign policy. But the Italian president had asked him to stay on and put his Cabinet to new confidence votes in parliament.
    The prime minister faced his toughest test in the Senate -- the upper house -- which was almost evenly split between the ruling center-left and the conservative opposition. Any defections could have swung the vote.
    On Friday, Prodi faces a confidence vote in the lower house, where he has a comfortable majority. ...
    Coalition allies have put differences aside, at least momentarily, and vowed to support Prodi -- largely to avert a return to power of their archenemy, conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi. ..."

(more "-odi/oni/ani" below)

On Tuesday Italian prosecutors asked a judge to indict 26 CIA agents, along with several top officials from the Italian spy agency, for the kidnapping and 'rendition' of Abu Omar off the streets of Milan in February 2003. It will be the first time that anybody involved in the 'extraordinary rendition' program has faced criminal prosecution.

Few experts believe that the U.S. will cooperate by extraditing the CIA agents to stand trial in Italy. Never the less, it's a major step in the campaign to stop this lawless program. The information exposed by the trial will get more embarrassing day by day.

The men-in-black can thank George Bush for blowing their last shred of cover, when he admitted to the existence of secret CIA prisons overseas.

Many specifics of this program...cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country.

Bush might have added "or just prosecute our thugs".

'London's bridge is falling down'

In a devastating verdict on Tony Blair’s decision to back war in Iraq and his “totally one-sided” relationship with President Bush, a US State Department official has said that Britain’s role as a bridge between America and Europe is now “disappearing before our eyes”.

Kendall Myers, a senior State Department analyst, disclosed that for all Britain’s attempts to influence US policy in recent years, “we typically ignore them and take no notice — it’s a sad business”

I am tempted to call Silvio Berlusconi a George Bush clone, but I might just as well call Georgie Pordgie a Berlusconi clone, and a bad clone at that.  Berlusconi has a number of advantages over Georgie that make him an improved version of our American dope. Berlusconi doesn’t have to seek friends in the media, as Georgie does, because as the fourth richest man in the world, Berlusconi owns three major Italian television channels, the newspaper Il Giornal, and Italy’s largest publishing house, Mondadori. He also owns a few advertising companies and his political party, Forza Italia, gave his appointees control over Italy’s three government owned TV channels.  It was enough to make you wonder how this guy could have ever lost an election.

Watching Countdown, I was hit by a bolt of white lightning, when Mo reviewed the massage-a-fraulein, chew-with-your-mouth-open policies of our prez.

Just out - Vanity Fair has a story with named sources saying, "the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public."

The article's lead paragraph:

The Bush administration invaded Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. As much of Washington knew, and the world soon learned, the charge was false. Worse, it appears to have been the cornerstone of a highly successful "black propaganda" campaign with links to the White House

The damning part:

..at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.

The sources are listed explicity... (more on the flip)