The victim is West Papua, the loot is that nation’s gold and copper which the Bechtel built Freeport McMoRan mine has been digging up for the pass forty years. Unfortunately Mobil and Chevron owned 60% of the NNGPM company which during 1936 discovered the world’s richest gold & copper deposits were in West Papua. The geologist named it “Ertsberg” – Mountain of Ore – and the company unable to get a mine license for the country, kept Ertsberg secret.

Then in March 1959 the New York Times revealed the Dutch had discovered gold was flowing into the Arafura Sea and were searching for the mountain source of this gold.

Soon Rockefeller’s Freeport Sulphur was asking a Dutch company for a partnership via which to lodge a claim for the Timika area as a possible copper deposit. After the Indonesian military proved unable to take the territory itself, inside the White House a McGeorge Bundy and Robert Komer began telling Kennedy that he had to force the Netherlands to sell the people and lands of West New Guinea (West Papua) to Indonesian control.

The rest is history. As too was May 2003 when news reports were telling of another ten Papuan towns being decapitated and burnt to the ground by Indonesian military or Laskar Jihad forces.

Instead of the world media responding to this genocide, the media followed George Bush’s White House declaration that Darfur was ‘genocide’ even though no legal expert has given that opinion. What we learnt a year later, was that the Yale Law School was conducting a one year report on the GENOCIDE of West Papua.

No wonder George W Bush wanted to dis-arm the word “genocide” before that report was published.

Source Reference Links for above are at http://wpik.org

- First published as USA-Today Opinion piece
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/03/post_10.html

Pro-choice with some qualifications
Anti-income tax
Anti-Affirmative action
Pro-War on terror
Pro-marriage rights for all
Anti-Welfare
Pro-environment

That doesn’t sound much like the “outcries of a right winger,” it sounds like a pretty open-minded mix and match of calling the issues like I see them. I’m not a partisan hack, which you would know if you used my words and thoughts to attack me and not my reading list.

You wrote a similar post on your own blog
here, attacking fellow center-right coblogger Michael VDG. Apparently your closed mind sees anyone who disagrees with you as immoderate?

You write: “And of course, the question always is, how to distinguish them from the ‘pure’ wingers, left and right. Imho an important characteristic of a moderate is that he listens to both sides, and uses arguments from the whole spectrum as it fits his views.”

I pretty obviously fit that spectrum if you know anything about me. But thanks for jumping to conclusions – it gave me and anyone familiar with my views a good chuckle on this Friday afternoon.

Do you have anything useful to add to the debate, or are you just going to complain about my views because you can’t address my point? If you’re looking to pick some petty fight, kindly take your business elsewhere.

Yeah and that Smash guy is the biggest neocon propaganda clown on the net. Its a good thing he’s not popular. Maybe because his stuff is so laughable…I don’t Its just disgusting.

I think that Joe has stated before that he is aware that some of the co-bloggers lean to right or left of center but he doesn’t believe that reading them causes brain cancer . I think the point is that some people can write from a non-centrist view but still be very rational and moderate in tone.

Maybe you could try actually addressing whatever it is that you disagree with in Andrew’s post instead of attacking the messenger? Having blog posts that aren’t necessarily the centrist view just gives people an opportunity to discuss varying viewpoints, IMO.

Who named this blog ‘The Moderate Voice’? Did he want to mislead readers?

I totally agree. Because we no longer have the backing of our traditional allies, we have been forced into a weakened position in the world-both diplomatically and militarily. Bolton symbolizes the unilateral approach which has failed miserably.

Not even Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly, whose site recently received a Warnlogger Award for ‘Best Liberal Blog’ by the Right Wing News.

You’re a moderate, Andrew? Yeah, sure, and I’m the reincarnation of Elvis.

Excuse me pls, where are the moderate voices among those links? Balloon Juice? Moderate Voters? Not even Andrew Sullivan? The only thing close to the middle is QandO, and, be serious, it’s more of a libertarian blog. And not a single liberal source, not even Glenn Greenwald or Brad DeLong (who are regarded by some as middle of the road, though). Essentially, this is a blogroll that is typically for republican or conservative bloggers.

Joe, how, if at all, are TMV bloggers vetted for trally being a moderate voice???

As for John Bolton, good riddence.