Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing. -- Arundhati Roy
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Favorite Forum Quotes
"So, just to get this straight once and for all: We don't hate you. We're not jealous of you. As a matter of fact, we are worried. Worried because of the effects your country's actions will have on our countries, and worried because, frankly, we just don't recognize the US anymore." - Snow (from Munich)
What a huge stinking shadow government olive green repturd pile of fragging disinformationalistic fusterclucked crap. -Anonymous
• The surface of Titan seems relatively smooth and uncratered, leading scientists to speculate that Titan may be geologically young.
• The moon's surface is largely devoid of any large-scale geologic features.
• There are dark areas and light areas on the surface, perhaps indicating liquid and solid areas, but measurements have shown those areas have very similar compositions.
• There are strange, streaky formations on the moon's surface as if material had been scattered by wind.
"We're seeing stuff, quite frankly, that's really hard to interpret," said Robert Brown, a UA planetary scientist who led the development of Cassini's Visual Imaging Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), which measures chemical composition. "We're trying to hammer around and bring in information from other instruments to try and get a handle on what we're seeing. It's a little mysterious," Brown said. "The bottom line is that on other solid bodies you see things you recognize. Craters, other geologic features. This is a relatively smooth surface."
And now I have to take a break. Must drive. I should be back late Sunday. Watch for any Friday releases of bad news for the Preznit. And don't be surprised at any bad news for the rest of us.
Four former Guantanamo detainees yesterday sued Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and 10 others in the military chain of command overseeing the American interrogation prison in Cuba, alleging that the officials are personally responsible for illegal acts of prolonged arbitrary detention and torture.
The lawsuit, believed to be the first of its kind by former detainees who have since been released from the prison, seeks $10 million for each of the men to be paid by the officials out of their own pockets as compensation for their role in the alleged abuses.
All four plaintiffs are British citizens who were taken into US military custody in December 2001 in Afghanistan, and released in March from Cuba. Although they were imprisoned and interrogated for more than two years, none has been charged with a crime.
Well, what a day for science - a discovery that's been hailed as the most significant find in the past 100 years.
A team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists has unearthed the skeleton of a new species of human in a cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores.
Less than one metre tall, it's been nicknamed the 'Hobbit' and it's estimated to be 18,000 years old.
Its discovery suggests early humans branched into more forms than previously thought and that there was a time, not so long ago, when two very different human species walked the planet.
Before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with a several-thousand vote lead for George W. Bush. That is, the mechanics of the new digital democracy boxes "spoil" votes at a predictably high rate in African-American precincts, effectively voiding enough votes cast for John Kerry to in a tight race, keep the White House safe from the will of the voters.
Excerpted from the current (November) issue of Harper's Magazine by Greg Palast
To understand the fiasco in progress in Florida, we need to revisit the 2000 model, starting with a lesson from Dick Carlberg, acting elections supervisor in Duval County until this week. "Some voters are strange," Carlberg told me recently. He was attempting to explain why, in the last presidential election, five thousand Duvalians trudged to the polls and, having arrived there, voted for no one for president. Carlberg did concede that, after he ran these punch cards through the counting machines a second time, some partly punched holes shook loose, gaining Al Gore160 votes or so, Bush roughly 80.
"So, if you ran the 'blank' ballots through a few more times, we'd have a different president," I noted. Carlberg, a Republican, answered with a grin.
...Even when computers work, they don't work well for African-Americans. A July 2001 Congressional study found that computers spoiled votes in minority districts at three times the rate of votes lost in white districts.
Based on the measured differential in vote loss between paper and computer systems, the fifteen counties in Florida, can expect to lose at least 29,000 votes to spoilage-some 27,000 more than if the counties had used paper ballots with scanners.
Given the demographics of spoilage, this translates into a net lead of thousands for Bush before a single ballot is cast.
"Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site," Mr. Bush told a Republican crowd in Lancaster, Pa. "This investigation is important and it's ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief." [emphasis added]
This November 2, voters in California and the state of Washington will weigh in on their states' primary election system. Both Proposition 62 in California, sugar-coated with the name "Voter Choice Open Primary Initiative," and Initiative 872 in Washington—the so-called "People's Choice" initiative—will result in a harmful change to each state's political system and a big loss for voters.
These ballot measures would transform their states' political primary systems into a system practiced by only one other state—Louisiana. Think about that for a second—Louisiana. Not exactly a place known for its clean elections or its moderate politics.
...Under California and Washington's earlier blanket primary, the nominees from all political parties competed against each other in a single primary free-for-all reminiscent of California's gubernatorial recall election. Then the highest vote-getter for each political party advanced as their party's nominee to the November election—Democrats, Republicans and third-party candidates. Voters had a range of partisan choices in the November election.
In contrast, under Proposition 62 and Initiative 872, only the top two vote-getters in the primary will be eligible to appear on the November ballot. And here's the catch: The top two could be from the same political party!
Greg Palast has written an article that seems to be slated for Tom Paine, but I don't find it there yet. It came as an e-mail from Palast, so I've created a webpage copy of the whole thing here. Excerpts follow...
Adventure Capitalism - The Hidden 2001 Plan to Carve-up Iraq by Greg Palast Wednesday, October 27, 2004
...In February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a 101-page document came my way from somewhere within the U.S. State Department. Titled pleasantly, "Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth," it was part of a larger under-wraps program called "The Iraq Strategy."
... Here's what you'll find in the Plan: A highly detailed program, begun years before the tanks rolled, for imposing a new regime of low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq's banks and bridges—in fact, "ALL state enterprises"—to foreign operators.
...Iraq-born Falah Aljibury was in on the drafting of administration blueprints for the post-Saddam Iraq. According to Aljibury, the administration began coveting its Mideast neighbor's oil within weeks of the Bush-Cheney inauguration, when the White House convened a closed committee under the direction of the State Department's Pam Wainwright....
...Besides Aljibury, an oil industry consultant, the secret team included executives from Royal-Dutch Shell and ChevronTexaco. These and other oil industry bigs would, in 2003, direct the drafting of a 300-page addendum to the Economy Plan solely about Iraq's oil assets...
...One thing stood in the way of rewriting Iraq's laws and selling off Iraq's assets: the Iraqis....
In this looming battle between what Iraqis wanted and what the Bush administration planned for them, the Iraqis had an unexpected ally, Gen. Jay Garner, the man appointed by our president just before the invasion as a kind of temporary Pasha to run the soon-to-be conquered nation.
Garner's an old Iraq hand who performed the benevolent autocratic function in the Kurdish zone after the first Gulf War. But in March 2003, the general made his big career mistake. In Kuwait City, fresh off the plane from the United States, he promised Iraqis they would have free and fair elections as soon as Saddam was toppled, preferably within 90 days.
Garner's 90-days-to-democracy pledge ran into a hard object: The Economy Plan's 'Annex D.'...Annex D lays out a strict 360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq. And there's the rub: It was simply inconceivable that any popularly elected government would let America write its laws and auction off the nation's crown jewel, its petroleum industry.
...Gen. Garner resisted—which was one of the reasons for his swift sacking by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld on the very night he arrived in Baghdad last April. Rummy had a perfect replacement ready to wing it in Iraq to replace the recalcitrant general...
Pausing only to install himself in Saddam's old palace—and adding an extra ring of barbed wire—"Jerry" Bremer cancelled Garner's scheduled meeting of Iraq's tribal leaders called to plan national elections. Instead, Bremer appointed the entire government himself. National elections, Bremer pronounced, would have to wait until 2005. The extended occupation would require our forces to linger.
The delay would, incidentally, provide time needed to lock in the laws, regulations and irreversible sales of assets in accordance with the Economy Plan.
On that, Bremer wasted no time. Altogether, the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority issued exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of the Economy Plan....
From a link via Bob comes this article about a documentary about to be aired by the BBC.
A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat [of a terrorist attack] is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion.
...[T]he central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."
...The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.
Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.
Curtis also cites the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.
In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts.
In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida industry. The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America's unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary....
As Curtis traced the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy" of the war on terror.
I still feel stunned when a woman tells me she's returning to live with a man who recently broke her jaw. With her teeth clenched and mouth wired shut, she says she's going back, "because he loves me and I love him."...
I still feel shaken by the boy who tells me, in great detail and with boundless enthusiasm, all about the father who abandoned him when he was 4-years-old. And I am still disturbed by the good soldier who blindly follows his leader's orders and marches into danger -- although his leader has shown, time and again, poor judgment, lack of planning, and disregard for the men who serve him.
As a psychologist, I should know better than to be stunned, shaken or disturbed by these images. After all, I know why humans behave irrationally. I even do it myself.
On Sept. 9, 2001, President George W. Bush's approval rating was 55 percent. Only three days later, after the worst attack on U.S. soil in history, his approval rating was 86 percent.
In psychology, the enhanced allegiance to a person associated with your abuse is referred to as trauma-bonding. It is a powerful phenomenon. It accounts for why a woman might return to the husband who broke her jaw. It explains why otherwise intelligent people begin worshiping those very people whose behaviors have threatened their safety.
...Bush and his people consistently claim to be results-oriented. That the American people and the press accept this statement is irrational. The facts and results suggest that Bush has repeatedly and sometimes perversely failed the American people.
...Bush said he was not interested in nation-building, but now we're begging the international community to help us build a new Iraq. He said he was a fiscal conservative but has racked up record budget deficits.
Still, despite the facts and, yes, flip-flops, we follow him. We still approve his performance. In this regard, we're being irrational in the massive and self-deceptive way characteristic only of humans.
The abuser never admits mistakes, never truly apologizes and never shows weakness. The abuser, despite his inconsistent and capricious decisions, insists he has not changed his philosophy. He is determined and resolute. The abuser manipulates us with fear.
Unfortunately, the abuser does not have our best interests at heart....He's interested in control and domination. He will act like he's concerned and compassionate, but when he has regained control, he will turn away from the poor, the weak, the hungry, the women and the children.
The choice is clear: Shall we believe in ourselves, risk his disfavor, and assert our independence, or will we continue to irrationally cling to our failed leader? Shall we boldly vote for change Nov. 2 or will we wire our jaws shut for another four years?
There are plenty of strangely unanswered questions about 9/11, about the stunning inaction of NORAD and Bush's stupefying nonreaction upon hearing of the attack, not to mention his administration's incredible attempts to halt any independent 9/11 investigations, and have you ever read a fully satisfying account of how this whole atrocity could have happened, one that answered all your questions and quelled your lingering doubts and squashed, once and for all, any hints of dread you had about our government's potential role in the tragedy? Neither have I. Neither has anyone.
Of course, no one in any major media will touch this stuff. It is professional suicide to dare suggest an alternate truth to the one supplied by the Pentagon and regurgitated by the media, despite the fact that most every journalist, trained as they are to be suspicious and wary and fully cognizant of the fact that there is always more to a given apocalypse than meets the eye, every journalist knows that buried just beneath the slippery surface of any good conspiracy theory is a gem or three of real truth, a question that begs to be solved or at least researched and, yet, most likely never will, because it has been cast into the madhouse of "outrageous" impossibility and is therefore rendered impotent and hopeless.
...And the truth is, we don't really want such unstable questions answered. We simply cannot tolerate to have our world, our leaders, our foundations so questioned. We prefer stasis to growth, security to true knowledge, blind faith to chaotic sticky self-defined wonder.
After all, once you allow the real possibility of UFOs or psychic healing or crop-circle phenomena or the notion that we could very well have a hugely malicious, criminal U.S. government capable of pulling a 9/11 on its own citizens, well, the happy capitalistic all-American Christian world begins to implode. Foundations crumble. Trust in our institutions vanishes. Gods fall and doctrines crumble and televangelists spontaneously combust and everyone starts reimagining the social order in ways that absolutely terrify those who now hold the reins.
Real truth, after all, often means anarchy, disorder, revolution. And God knows we can't have that.
Today the Iraq Body Count (IBC) website has published its analysis of the civilian dealth toll in the April 2004 siege of Falluja. This analysis leads to the conclusion that betweeen 572 and 616 of the approximately 800 reported deaths were of civilians, with over 300 of these being women and children.
A Falluja Archive carrying relevant and related excerpts from nearly three hundred contemporary news reports is also being made available on the website, and constitutes the largest publicly-available resource for investigators researching the human consequences of the siege. IBC's number for the civilian dead emerges from detailed and exhaustive analysis of these reports as well as others more recently published.
Previous posts about Falluja. (This week marks an entire year of blog posts on the destruction of Falluja. Twelve years of sanctions and a year-plus of bombing - bombing which is scheduled to be stepped up after elections next tuesday.)
The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the invasion of Iraq early last year, Pentagon and congressional officials said yesterday.
...Concerned that they won't get enough new troops from allies to help provide security for Iraqi elections in January, Pentagon officials are considering increasing the current U.S. force by delaying the departures of some U.S. troops now in Iraq and accelerating the deployment of others scheduled to go there next year.
The goal is to temporarily raise the number of U.S. troops in Iraq from the current 138,000 to almost 160,000 to help protect international and Iraqi election workers and secure polling locations.
That addition would bring the sustained U.S. troop presence in Iraq to its highest level since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003.
Hundreds of young militant Muslim men have left Europe to fight in Iraq, according to senior counterterrorism officials in four European countries. They have been recruited through mosques, Muslim centers and militant Web sites by several groups, including Ansar al-Islam, the Kurdish terrorist group once based in northern Iraq.
...Intelligence officials fear that, for a new generation of disaffected European Muslims, Iraq could become what Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya were for European Islamic militants in past decades: a galvanizing cause that sends idealistic young men abroad, trains them and puts them in touch with a more radical global network of terrorists. Many young Europeans who fought in those wars came back to Europe to plot terrorist attacks at home.
...Virtually all of the major terrorists arrested in Europe in the past three years spent time in Bosnia, Afghanistan or Chechnya.
"Now the new land of jihad is Iraq," the intelligence official said. "There, they're trained, they fight and acquire a technique and the indoctrination sufficient to act on when they return."
A network of recruiters for Iraq first appeared in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Norway within months of the U.S.-led invasion, officials said. Some officials said that the recruitment effort has now spread to other countries in Europe, including Belgium and Switzerland. The network provides forged documents, financing, training and information about infiltration routes into the country.
Thank the Bush administration for making the world safer. If Saddam weren't behind bars....
...The French official said many of these people are passing through Britain, once the major staging point for Muslims going to Afghanistan, or through Saudi Arabia, using the cover of a pilgrimage to Mecca to enter the Saudi kingdom before crossing into Iraq.
..."These young men know where the action is - they easily cross the borders of Syria or Turkey and they go directly to Falluja," the official said.
Which brings me round to my first thought at the beginning of this article....Before the U.S. finally declared itself officially involved in WWII, young American men were going to England and enlisting with the British to repel the German invaders. We called them selfless heroes with conscience.
In a letter Tuesday to the FDA, Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, said that a confidential source inside the FDA told him that the office of acting FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford had received documents describing the FDA's findings at the Liverpool plant and addressing "whether the flu vaccine crisis could be prevented."
The agency has so far refused requests from Congress and the media for copies of FDA inspection reports and other documents describing problems at the Chiron plant, including the results of an inspection in June 2003, about the time Chiron acquired the facility.
Because of problems at the plant in Liverpool, England, almost 50 million doses of flu vaccine were withheld from the market this year, about half of the U.S. supply.
Waxman quoted the source as saying that Crawford or someone in his office had "made a decision not to release these documents to Congress until after the election."
Yet another set of documents not to be released before the election. I wonder how many truck loads of shit are to be dumped November 3. And, just supposing the election would actually go off fairly (I know, I know, but play along here for a minute, I'm building to something), and suppose that John Kerry would be elected. There could be a whole lot of information that would find its way to the light of day in that case, and it could be very, very, very bad news for BushCheneyCo. I'm talking prosecutable stuff. So, considering the long shot of a fair election and a Kerry win, what might BushCheneyCo do in the three months left to them in office? It has been suggested that there will be a lot of document shredding going on. No doubt. They could quietly take on other actions that would completely cripple a Kerry administration. There's another alternative: a state of emergency. The POTUS is endowed with the right to declare a federal emergency and declare martial law - literally suspend the Constitution. You think removing the w's from typewriters is shocking....
Waxman and the Republican chairman of the government reform committee, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, asked for the FDA documents on Oct. 13. But last week, Davis granted Crawford more time to produce the documents and refused to grant Waxman's request to subpoena them, arguing that the FDA was too busy to assemble the requested documents.
...In a brief statement Tuesday, Davis said he agreed to a delay in the release of the information at Crawford's request to "let the FDA focus for the time being on the problem of finding and distributing more doses of the vaccine - because our priority is public health, not election-year politics."
Oh yeah, releasing those documents would really distract them. What in the name of Sam Hill were they doing back when they should have been focusing on a possible backup for vaccine? Smoking crack?
While patients are panicking over a shortage of flu vaccines in the United States, vaccination programs in the rest of the world are progressing normally with a good supply of medicine, health authorities say.
...Most countries contract with several vaccine manufacturers, in part to avoid critical dependence on one supplier. And though countries other than the United States had placed orders with Chiron for portions of their vaccine needs, no other country was so dependent on the Liverpool factory.
So the Bumbling Bush Administration mismanages yet another aspect of government. We're not a country, we're a freaking Woody Allen movie directed by an 8th-grade video class.
Say goodbye to Grandma. Or maybe you could wrap her in plastic and duct tape.
Update 12:21pm: I see Bob Harris' readers have other ideas about what Bush will do afer November 2.
G.D. Frogsdong has a post up today advising New Jersey citizens of their voting rights, as will be applicable on election day - what you might expect at the polling place. It's a good article for anyone to see what kinds of things might happen on November 2 at polling stations. These laws are not standard for all states, so if you are in any doubt about your own situation, please check with your local elections board.
How can they declare a war on terror and call the terrorists enemy non-combatants, thereby skirting the Conventions? If they're going to elevate terrorists to state level by declaring a war on them, then they should have to give them the state protections of the Conventions.
A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, administration officials said Monday.
The opinion, reached in recent months, establishes an important exception to public assertions by the Bush administration since March 2003 that the Geneva Conventions applied comprehensively to prisoners taken in the conflict in Iraq, the officials said. They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the C.I.A. to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.
The officials outlined the opinion on Monday in response to a report in The Washington Post over the weekend that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly transferred a dozen non-Iraqi prisoners out of Iraq in the past 18 months, despite a provision in the conventions that bars civilians protected under the accords from being deported from occupied territories.
Funny, I would have thought their previous "legal opinion" that Bush is king of the world and can ignore any law he wants would have covered this incident, like it did the Abu Ghraib tortures.
It's all in the interpretation, is it not? I wonder if the Bush administration's legal team ever sleeps, having to re-interpret laws to cover all of their bosses' illegal activities.
All the quibbling about whether the Geneva Conventions apply seems to me to be academic anyway. No one's arguing that the Conventions didn't apply to prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other Iraq prisons, but they certainly weren't adhered to there. No one's arguing that the Conventions don't apply to civilian populations, but we still hold family members hostage, break into and destroy homes, and engage in collective punishment against cities like Falluja, all in violation of the Conventions.
The Orlando Sentinel has backed every Republican seeking the White House since Richard M. Nixon in 1968. Not this time.
"This president has utterly failed to fulfill our expectations," the Florida paper said in supporting John F. Kerry, prompting some angry calls and a few dozen cancellations.
... The Sentinel is among 36 newspapers that endorsed President Bush four years ago and have flip-flopped, to coin a phrase, into Kerry's corner. These include the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, according to industry magazine Editor & Publisher. Bush has won over only six papers that backed Al Gore, including the Denver Post, which received 700 letters -- all of them protesting the move.
Nine more papers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday, abandoned Bush after four years but did not support the Massachusetts senator. Instead, these papers -- the Detroit News, the Tampa Tribune and the New Orleans Times-Picayune among them -- threw up their collective hands and made no endorsement.
...All told, Kerry leads Bush 142 to 123 in endorsements, and when measured by circulation, 17.5 million to 11.5 million, Editor & Publisher says.
...Kerry won over some editorial boards through personal campaigning. Earlier in the year, said the Sentinel's Healy, she believed that "Kerry was too liberal for us as a senator from Massachusetts." But through an hour-long interview with the board and the presidential debates, "we became convinced he would be moderate as president, and more moderate than President Bush in terms of fiscal responsibility and the war, in terms of bringing in international cooperation."
Imagine deciding offhand that someone would be too liberal simply on the basis of their residency in Massachusetts. I would think you might have a better understanding if you read their policy proposals, but maybe that's just me.
If that's how the Sentinel has been picking its endorsees, its readership is getting poor leadership.
The article doesn't say which, if any, of the papers switching their endorsements have changed ownership or editorial board members. That possibly accounts for some of the jumps, but if I had to guess, I'd say not many. Most interesting are the decisions by traditional Republican editors not to endorse either candidate.
In its no-one-to-endorse editorial, the Tampa Tribune put it this way: "We cannot support Bush because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, record deficits pending, assault on open government and failed promise to be a 'uniter not a divider,' but what Kerry stands for is unclear."
Again, perhaps the editors should read his policy statements.
For the first time in 80 years, the New Yorker has endorsed a presidential candidate. In one of the longest and strongest editorial endorsements we've seen, the New Yorker editors blast Bush and comes on strong for Kerry. It trounces Bush on virtually every front...from the war in Iraq to Ashcroft and the excesses of the Patriot Act, to its secrecy in the war on terror, to the economy and more.
Secret plans for the war in Iraq were passed to British Army chiefs by US defence planners five months before the invasion was launched, a court martial heard yesterday.
The revelation strengthened suspicions that Tony Blair gave his agreement to President George Bush to go to war while the diplomatic efforts to force Saddam Hussein to comply with UN resolutions were continuing.
Alan Simpson, the leader of Labour Against the War, said the documents were "dynamite", if genuine, and showed that Clare Short was right to assert in her book, serialised in The Independent, that Mr Blair had "knowingly misled" Parliament.
...Lt Col Warren said US planners had passed on dates for which the invasion was planned. The hearing was told Army chiefs wanted the training for the Army to start at the beginning of December 2002. However, due to "sensitivities" the training was delayed.
The court heard the training for the TA began two months late and for the regular Army one month late. Lt Col Warren was asked what the sensitivities were. He replied: "Because in December there was a world interest. If the UK had mobilised while all this was going on that would have shown an intent before the political process had been allowed to run its course."
How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal Derided by the mainstream press and taking on Reagan at the height of his popularity, the freshman senator battled to reveal one of America's ugliest foreign policy secrets.
How George W Bush reappointed Iran-Contra felons to prominent positions in his administration, many of them right back where they were when they committed the felonies
Following up on my post about our latest puppet's unruliness, this from the Independent...
Mr Allawi also publicly rebuffed claims by the US and British governments that the security situation was improving. Instead, he told the Iraqi National Council, which oversees the government, that the violence racking the country was likely to worsen.
...Senior Iraqi officials have said that there is growing evidence that the recruitshad been betrayed by fellow members of the Iraqi military.
Iraqi officials have complained that the US authorities do little checking of applicants to the forces because of Washington's desire for speed in replacing American and other Allied troops.
...Mr Allawi said: "It was a heinous crime, the outcome of great negligence on the part of some of the coalition forces. It seems there was some sort of determination on doing Iraq and the Iraqi people harm ... You should expect an escalation in terrorist acts."
Bad to worse.
"When you write it, call it the fall of the house of Bush."
The US military said yesterday that a senior associate of of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed in Fallujah in a "precision" air strike. Local people, however, insisted that an empty house was destroyed.
US troops cut roads and reinforced their cordon around Fallujah, with some units moving into the southern edges of the city.
Unconfirmed reports by local people claimed that a number of civilian drivers had been shot dead at checkpoints.
I'm telling you, things are much, much worse than you even imagine. But I think it's only a matter of time before those soldiers who are refusing to perform missions and those who are talking to people off the record about things like this, start talking more openly. And we still haven't heard the full extent of those things that Hersh and various congresspeople said were worse than what we have been shown at Abu Ghraib.
People, there is a horror of our creating happening in our names, and it is increasing.
Jesus' General gives us the rationale behind the failure to guard that ammo...
We didn't have enough troops to guard both the oil ministry and the explosives bunker. One of them had to remain unguarded.
Getting control of the oil was more important. Otherwise, the insurgents wouldn't have pipelines to blow up using the looted HMX and RDX.
D'oh!
Some might also question why we spent our time toppling statues rather than guarding the bunker. They're just showing their ignorance. Toppling the statues was the first step in achieving the vibrant democracy we're seeing in Iraq today.
That's why it took so long for own democracy to flourish. Our founding fathers didn't get it started with a killer photo op--they had to wait years for a painting to be made. We didn't have that much time to wait in Iraq. Not with all those insurgents running around with explosives.
The US military said yesterday that a senior associate of of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed in Fallujah in a "precision" air strike. Local people, however, insisted that an empty house was destroyed.
US troops cut roads and reinforced their cordon around Fallujah, with some units moving into the southern edges of the city.
Unconfirmed reports by local people claimed that a number of civilian drivers had been shot dead at checkpoints.
I'm telling you, things are much, much worse than you even imagine. But I think it's only a matter of time before those soldiers who are refusing to perform missions and those who are talking to people off the record about things like this, start talking more openly. And we still haven't heard the full extent of those things that Hersh and various congresspeople said were worse than what we have been shown at Abu Ghraib.
People, there is a horror of our creating happening in our names.
Democrats on Wednesday denounced a Republican lawmaker quoted in a newspaper as saying the GOP would fare poorly in this year's elections if it failed to "suppress the Detroit vote."
..."In the context that we were talking about, I said we've got to get the vote up in Oakland (County) and the vote down in Detroit. You get it down with a good message. I don't know how we got them from there to "racist,"' Pappageorge said. "If I have given offense in any way to my colleagues in Detroit or anywhere, I apologize."
Fathead, you have offended anyone who believes in the right to vote, regardless of skin color. Advocating "suppressing" the vote isn't quite, well...American...is it?
...This is the last day of Wolf Awareness Week, and a chief purpose is to help educate the public that the myths about wolves being threats to humans, are just that, myths. But the Bush campaign is using that fictitious stereotype in a manner that instills false fear.
...Today the Bush-Cheney campaign released a political ad, "Wolves" in which the endangered species' image is used to portray fear. Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund President Rodger Schlickeisen offered the following statement:
"The Bush-Cheney campaign's most recent bizarre political commercial, 'Wolves,' misuses the imagery of wolves to try to instill fear in the voting public.
How ironic for George Bush, who has been the most anti-wildlife president ever, to turn to the very symbol of endangered wildlife in America -- the wolf -- for assistance in perpetuating his administration.
Twelve times as many Americans die every year from the flu as died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Let me repeat that. Twelve times as many Americans die every year from the flu as died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The flu is fairly preventable because of the existence of vaccines against it. To not provide for the manufacture or a sufficient amount of vaccine to enable Americans who can safely have it to have the vaccine is as irresponsible as, oh, I don't know, going on vacation for a month after being warned that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the US.
We were among the signers of the statement issued last week by the Health Care Finance Group ( http://www.sunya.net/healthfi...). That statement challenged the claim, frequently presented in your speeches and campaign advertising, that your opponent’s health care proposals would amount to a “government take-over” of the health care system and result in “government-run health care.”
The nonpartisan statement, which neither endorses nor rejects any particular approach to health care policy, has been signed by ninety-five of the nation’s leading experts in health policy and health care finance. It makes clear that, whatever the merits of Senator Kerry’s proposals, it is simply not accurate to describe them as you have.
If you believe that we are mistaken, please direct us to any genuine expert in health care policy or health care finance who agrees with your claim, or any genuine analysis that supports it. Otherwise, we would respectfully suggest that it does not serve the nation or honor the office of the presidency to continue to make a charge so obviously contrary to fact.
Very truly yours,
________________________ Arleen A. Leibowitz Professor of Public Policy UCLA School of Public Affairs
________________________ Theodore R. Marmor Professor of Public Policy and Management and Political Science Yale School of Management
An aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist leader in Iraq with a $25 million U.S. reward on his head, was killed today in a U.S. air strike in the city of Fallujah, the U.S. military said.
"A precision strike in northwest Fallujah, conducted at 3 a.m., has taken another toll on the Zarqawi network," the military said in an e-mailed statement. "Multiple sources reported that a known associate of the Zarqawi network was present at the time of the strike." The military didn't identify the Zarqawi aide.
We don't ever have to relinquish Zarqawi as our bogeyman. As long as we have him, we can kill his "aides" and get about the same mileage.
Separately, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said carelessness by some in the U.S.-led military coalition was to blame for the killing on Oct. 23 of 52 Iraqi army recruits and their drivers, Agence France-Presse reported without giving details.
Hmmmmm....didn't see that reported by American news. Damned French press.
Number 1, "Gee thanks," says the tailor. Number 2, a poorly tailored shirt could not possibly cause a bulge in a jacket over top of it. So don't blame me if this story stays alive. It's their stupid responses.
Check out this interview with a fiction writer who was raided by the feds because of her research for a novel.
SB: What type of story were you researching?
Dilyn: Mainstream women’s fiction adventure. It was set in Cambodia, all about the theft of antiquities. In my research I learned, about the atrocities that still go on there even today, much of it coming from one the Al Qaeda-linked groups. I actually went back though my book and deleted those specific terrorist references after 9/11 and changed the terrorists to a rogue band of thieves because of 9/11 and terrorist sensitivity.
SB: What types of books did you buy/check out of the library?
Dilyn: I bought and checked out books on Cambodia-- its history, its present struggles, its antiquities and anything I could get my hands on concerning the terrorism going on there...landmines, in particular. And those were the kinds of Web sites I surfed too.
SB: Did you share your reasons for checking out the books with your librarian?
Dilyn: No. My library is huge and highly impersonal. I did the library book search on-line and simply went there to check them out. I also kept those books checked out for well over a year during the writing of my book. Plus, I purchased all my research books online--about six. As far as my Web surfing, I went dozens of places.
Many were for non-terrorist aspects of my book, but a few were for gathering specific terrorist information. To be honest, I was surprised to find the Al Qaeda linked to Cambodia. I was only going after the landmine atrocities because they played, a huge part in my story.
SB: Did you have any reason to suspect you were being targeted for a raid, any advance notice?
Dilyn: No. Not a clue. Although, for a while prior to the raid, I thought I was being stalked. Mail was missing from my box, I caught someone searching my trash, I saw a prowler in my yard and actually called the police. One of my neighbors saw someone watching from across the street--she wasn’t sure if it was my house or hers. She called the police, too--turns out they were taking surveillance photos.
SB: When did the raid take place, how long did it last, and what items were confiscated? What agency conducted the raid?
Dilyn: The raid took place last fall, pre-dawn, and it lasted three hours. They banged at my front door first, damaged it coming in, displayed weapons and threatened to kill my dogs. After that, imagine everything you’ve seen on TV, only worse. There were six male agents. One was in the “bad cop” mode the entire time, trying to intimidate me, yelling at me, threatening me. When I had to go to the restroom, he sent an agent along to the bathroom with me. It was a multi-agency raid: Postal Inspectors (for the Web site/email end of it), the FBI, and three officers who would only identify themselves as Federal Police. They took so much--computers, photocopier, files, books, discs, computer programs, CDs of the music by which I write, contracts, absolutely everything I had connected to the writing world. They took pictures off my walls, my office television, pens, a case of paper, postage stamps…even now, after all these months, I still go to get something only to discover it missing.
SB: Have you had any success in retrieving items that were taken?
Dilyn: They brought my computers back within a couple of months--bugged. I have this great computer guy who couldn’t wait to get inside to take a look, and sure enough, they had a program in there to monitor me. I got my discs back, too, all ruined. They still have everything else.
And for more similar stories and links about the misleadingly-named PATRIOT Act, check my webpage here.
A clip from an article just posted on the WaPo website that truly says it all ...
In a 45-minute speech in Greeley, Colo., today, Bush ignored the news about the missing explosives, Washington Post staff writer Mike Allen reported. Instead, Bush stuck to his stock assertion: "America and the world are safer with Saddam Hussein sitting in a prison cell."
Josh Marshall discusses the administration's claims about the missing ammo and concludes...
What I am trying to show is that Pentagon appointees like Di Rita don't seem to have any clear idea what happened to this stuff. And in an attempt to push back the story, they're cooking up various theories, most with very short half-lives, that just don't seem credible to a lot of folks who follow these issues.
If you look at the multiple contradictions in the different stories administration officials told reporters over the course of Monday, it's hard not to get the sense that they're caught without a good explanation and they're just making this stuff up as they go along.
Which is their proven M.O., but the more amazing thing is that we Americans believe it. Every time they make up a new story about something, even though it is only a few hours from the last story, we believe it. Unfuckingbelievable.
And maybe they do know what happened to the stuff. Maybe they conveniently turned a blind eye. It is not an action beneath them. There is no beneath them.
In Fallujah, they have created a new vague target,: AL ZARQAWI. This is a new pretext to justify their crimes, killing and daily bombardment of civilians. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext, and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women they said "we have launched a successful operation against Al-Zarqawi." They will never say that they have killed him, because there is no such a person. And that means the killing of civilian and the daily genocide will continue.
The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah and is probably not anywhere in Iraq. The people of Fallujah have announced many times that any person who sees Al-Zarqawi should kill him. Now everybody realises that this man is just a hypothetical hero created by the Americans. At the same time the representative of Fallujah, our tribal leader, has denounced on many occasions the kidnapping and killing of civilians, and we have no links to any groups committing such inhuman behaviour.
Kassim Abdullsattar al-Jumaily President The Study Center of Human Rights & Democracy
On behalf of the people of Fallujah and for: Al-Fallujah Shura Council The Bar Association The Teacher Union Council of Tribes Leaders The House of Fatwa and Religious Education
[To:]
His Excellency Mr. Kofi Annan Secretary General of the United Nations New York
Fallujah 14 October 2004
Your Excellency
It is very obvious that the American forces are committing crimes of genocide every day in Iraq. Now, while we are writing to Your Excellency, the American forces are committing these crimes in the city of Fallujah. The American warplanes are dropping their most powerful bombs on the civilian in the city, killing and injured hundreds of innocent people. At the same time their tanks are attacking the city with heavy artillery. As you know, there is no military presence in the city. There had been no actions taken by the Fallujah resistance in recent weeks because the negotiations between representatives of the city and the Government which were going well. In this atmosphere, the new bombardment by America has happened while the people of Fallujah have been preparing themselves for the fast of Ramadan. Now many of them are now trapped under the wreckage of their demolished houses, and nobody can help them while the attack continues.
On the night of the 13th October alone American bombardment demolished 50 houses on top of their residents. Is this a genocidal crime or a lesson about the American democracy? It is obvious that the Americans are committing acts of terror against the people of Fallujah for one reason only: their refusal to accept the Occupation.
Gibson interviews the pResident on the eve of the election, and this is their headline?
EXCLUSIVE Bush on Homosexuality and Same-Sex Marriage President Says He Doesn't Know Whether or Not People Are Born Gay
The burning issue to elect a president by.
Sad, sad, sad. Is there anything sadder? Well.....
"I view the definition of marriage difference from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights. And I strongly believe that marriage ought to be defined as between, a union between a man and a woman," Bush said. "Now, having said that, states ought to be able to have the right to pass … laws that enable people to you know, be able to have rights, like others."
Is he trying to have it both ways? Or just what is he saying? I think what he's saying here is that he wants us to believe he's okay with gays having rights, but marriage is not a right - it's a defined condition. In that case, I suppose we should have a Constitutional amendment defining man and woman. Perhaps one defining human. I think we can look forward to a Webster's Constitutionary.
Richard Swaney, 65, of Central Point, said had joined in a peaceful protest outside the Jackson County fairgrounds where Bush spoke, and then went to Jacksonville to join the protest there.
He said he was walking with the crowd away from the inn when he was hit in the back with three separate bursts, one of which knocked him down. He felt a stinging sensation he thought was rubber bullets and smelled pepper.
"I don't think I moved fast enough," said Swaney. "I can't believe this happens in the United States. It was very peaceful. I think this is the way tyranny begins."
...Jacksonville City Administrator Paul Wyntergreen said the protest was peaceful until a few people started pushing police. Police reacted by firing pepperballs, which he described as projectiles like a paintball filled with cayenne pepper. Two people were arrested for failing to disperse. There were no reports of injuries.
Leading senators expressed concern Sunday about a report that the CIA has secretly moved as many as a dozen unidentified prisoners out of Iraq in the past six months, a possible violation of international treaties.
Sen. John McCain said interrogations can help extract crucial information from detainees on plans for attacks against Americans. But international law, including the Geneva Conventions, must be followed, he said.
"These conventions and these rules are in place for a reason because you get on a slippery slope and you don't know where to get off," McCain, R-Ariz., told ABC's "This Week."
"The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights," he said.
Okay, maybe someone even as high up in the political affairs of this country as a senator could be ignorant of all the human rights abuses the CIA has been responsible for globally over the past decades, but has he been off the planet in the past year? Did he miss Abu Ghraib?
For some reason, I am just not buying comfortably into the idea that this is going to be a neck-and-neck election. Maybe for several reasons. One is that I have recently witnessed the Venezuelan process wherein the polls called for an excrutiatingly close election (some even calling it the opposite from the way it actually went down) that was anything but close. Another is that I see and read about too many Republicans who have become very sorry they voted for Butthead the first time. Another is that no matter what the media tell us, people all around are losing jobs and health care, and are in a personal financial pickle - that translates into some unhappy voters who don't know what the traffic problem is but they feel that they need to blame whoever is at the wheel. And another is that I keep thinking of the Reagan landslide that was a surprise to me at least.
I Googled up these articles trying to find some information on what the polls were predicting during that election.
The first one is a 1981 critique (pdf) of the pre-election polls in 1980, which can probably be extrapolated to present-day polls. The second is an article from May of this year.
The performance of the public polls during the general election campaign of 1980 has raised doubts about the capabilities of the pollsters and their survey methodology--doubts which have not been raised during the last seven presidential elections.
...There has been much speculation about what went wrong with the pre-election polls of 1980. All the major published polls seriously understated Ronald Reagan's margin of victory over Jimmy Carter...based mostly on interviewing completed late in the week before election day. The candidate polls, on the other hand, did continue their polling through election eve, and did indicate the correct magnitude of Reagan's victory.
That article goes on to describe in painful detail the methodology of voting polls. The second article (from May of this year) takes the position that there could be a Kerry landslide.
Everyone expected the 1980 election to be very close. In fact, Reagan won with 50.8 percent of the popular vote to Carter's 41 percent (independent John Anderson won 6.6 percent)--which translated into an electoral avalanche of 489 to 49. The race was decided not so much on the public's nascent impressions of the challenger, but on their dissatisfaction with the incumbent.
...Nor was Carter's sound defeat an aberration. Quite the opposite. Of the last five incumbent presidents booted from office--Bush I, Carter, Ford, Herbert Hoover, and William Howard Taft--only one was able to garner over 200 electoral votes, and three of these defeated incumbents didn't even cross the 100 electoral-vote threshold...
...2004 could be a decisive victory for Kerry. The reason to think so is historical. Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent--and in recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins. If you look at key indicators beyond the neck-and-neck support for the two candidates in the polls--such as high turnout in the early Democratic primaries and the likelihood of a high turnout in November--it seems improbable that Bush will win big. More likely, it's going to be Kerry in a rout.
Of course it is entirely possible that through some last minute surprise revelation about one or the other candidates, the public will stampede toward the other. One thing is certain, we don't have long to find out how this one goes.
I can't keep using that word, but we just don't have one in the English language to convey the sentiment.
Depending on what side of the fence people are on, crowd control was at an all-time high or low at the Wachovia Arena in Wilkes-Barre Township during President Bush's visit Friday.
A 27-year-old registered Republican and member of the U.S. Army, along with three other people around him, was forced to leave the arena before getting inside.
The Wyoming Valley man who did not want to be identified by name because of his loyalty to his service members is being deployed to Iraq in two weeks. His Army service and status were verified.
He explained that he was attending the event in hopes of finding the right candidate to vote for on Nov. 2.
"I thought seeing Bush would be enough to sway my opinion one way or the other. After today, it definitely has swayed," he said.
While waiting in line, he noticed a stranger standing alone and invited the person to stand with him.
"I didn't think that would be a problem," he said.
I assume that YWA is not your only source of news, and that you have seen the questions buzzing about whether the Iraqis might elect a cleric - nay, even a fundamentalist, women-repressing, rule-of-God (excuse me...Allah) president in January. It seems likely, if the elections are fair. (Yes, a very big "if".) And Bush has been recorded as saying he'd just have to accept it because that would be democracy.
Now, how are they going to prevent that from happening, is my question. Because that would be democracy in action at the voting place. And is democracy not synonymous with equal rights and secular laws? If the majority of people want someone to tell them what to do, if the majority want a tyrant king, then isn't that technically democracy? Won't that be rich if the Iraqis actually vote to have a fundamentalist dictatorship? Some reports say that a huge number would even vote for Saddam. Kind of ironic and wierd. What will be our reason for staying there and bombing them to hell then?
In February 2003, less than a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Bunnatine (Bunny) Greenhouse walked into a Pentagon meeting and with a quiet comment started what could be the end of her career. On the agenda was the awarding of an up to $7 billion deal to a subsidiary of Houston-based conglomerate Halliburton to restore Iraq's oil facilities.
...Then several representatives from Halliburton entered. Greenhouse, a top contracting specialist for the Army Corps of Engineers, grew increasingly concerned that they were privy to internal discussions of the contract's terms, so she whispered to the presiding general, insisting that he ask the Halliburton employees to leave the room.
...Greenhouse raised other concerns. She argued that the five-year term for the contract, which had not been put out for competitive bid, was not justified, that it should be for one year only and then be opened to competition. But when the contract-approval document arrived the next day for Greenhouse's signature, the term was five years. With war imminent, she had little choice but to sign. But she added a handwritten reservation that extending a no-bid contract beyond one year could send a message that "there is not strong intent for a limited competition."
...Greenhouse seems to have got nothing but trouble for questioning the deal. Warned to stop interfering and threatened with a demotion, the career Corps employee decided to act on her conscience, according to her lawyer, Michael Kohn.
In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.
Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.
The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.
White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.
But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted.
Although hundreds of innocent people have been persecuted.
Iraq's purchase of high strength aluminum tubes—claimed to be part of an effort to build uranium gas centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons—was presented as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for a revived Iraqi nuclear weapons program and, therefore, one of the strongest arguments for going to war. In fact, we now know that the preponderance of the pre-war intelligence suggested that the tubes were not suitable for centrifuges and were intended for conventional rocket bodies. Why was there so much concern about aluminum tubes? What role did they—or might they—play? And how do you recognize a centrifuge tube when you see it? This article discusses why centrifuges are important and their key requirements and characteristics and why they are central to concerns about nuclear proliferation.
Perhaps Tom DeLay will have some company in the ethics investigation room.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, chairman of this year's Democratic National Convention, has been operating a virtually invisible network of nonprofit organizations engaged in get-out-the-vote operations in Hispanic and American Indian communities in five battleground states.
...Richardson, the nation's only Hispanic governor, has another goal for his politicking, as articulated during the 2003 conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials: "The objective," he told reporters, "is going to be to win back the White House and to increase our numbers in the Senate," according to the Albuquerque Journal.
At issue is whether the activities of the foundation are philanthropic or partisan in nature. As the Internal Revenue Code states, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are "absolutely prohibited" from engaging in partisan election activities. "It's a fascinating area where sorting out relationships with politicians calls for some careful thought," says Professor Hill, "because you don't want them [charities] to be conduits around campaign finance law."
Hill told the Center that having charities actively involved in conducting voter registration and education drives is good government activity, but picking states for their electoral impact may raise questions. "Politicians, like everyone else, can create and organize and found 501(c)(3) organizations, provided that they're for 501(c)(3) purposes," she said. "The problem is when they redesign them into political campaign vehicles."
Actually, that's a pretty fitting name for what goes on. I was just asking myself, "who are these people?" after reading this October 21 "gaggle". Gee, Scotty, who does the president want the to win the ball game? What does he think about Teresa Heinz Kerry saying Pickles didn't have a real job? Wow! He's going to a lot of places this week. What else, Scotty?
Josh Marshall posts on a new report revealing the truth of the charges that the U.S. government has been trying to cover up the fact that during the invasion, while we guarded the oil ministry, we left weapons caches unguarded - serious weapons - which are now being used against us.
What also emerges in the Nelson Report is that the Defense Department has been trying to keep this secret for some time. The DOD even went so far as to order the Iraqis not to inform the IAEA that the materials had gone missing. Informing the IAEA, of course, would lead to it becoming public knowledge in the United States.
Jesus fuck, I think is the appropriate comment for that. Ordered them not to report it.
From the report:
Despite pressure from DOD to keep it quiet, the IAEA and the Iraqi Interim Government this month officially reported that 350-tons of dual-use, very high explosives were looted from a previously secure site in the early days of the US occupation in 2003. Administration officials privately admit this material is likely a primary source of the lethal car bomb attacks which cause so many US and Iraqi casualties.
...The Bush Administration barred the IAEA from any participation in the Iraq invasion and occupation process, and blocked IAEA requests to help in the search for WMD and other dangerous materials. As part of the UN sanctions regime still in place when the US invaded, the IAEA had “under seal” 350 tons of RDX and HDX explosives, since singly, and in combination, these materials can be used in the triggering process for a nuclear weapon. However, the explosives were allowed to remain in Iraq due to their conventional use in construction, oil pipe lines, and the like. Since the explosives went missing last year, sources say DOD and other elements in the Administration sought to block the IAEA from officially reporting the problem, and also tried to stop the new Iraqi Interim Government from cooperating with the IAEA.
...There was an expectation of a major newspaper story on it this morning, and perhaps also a segment on tonight’s 60 Minutes, on CBS Television. The newspaper report failed to materialize, the TV show may yet appear...stay tuned.
The same people who recently reported as news some fake papers about George AWOL Bush's time in the TANG? I guess there'd be two ways to look at it - a way to make up for the bungle, or information that would be trashed because of the messenger.
You can get a lot more information from Marshall's post.
The U.S. military has arrested a "senior leader" in the network run by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, along with five others during overnight raids in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, officials said Saturday.
...Intelligence sources said the man captured was previously thought to be a relatively minor member of the terror network. But because so many of al-Zarqawi's associates have been captured or killed, he moved up to take a more important role.
Drug maker Aventis-Pasteur [based in Strasbourg, France] has found an additional 2.6 million doses of flu vaccine that it will deliver to the United States in January, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said Tuesday.
The company had previously said it could provide about 54 million doses to the United States for the current flu season.
Click the graphic and click it again on the page that comes up, to get you this story:
The story concludes:
"Dudley," Harry cried, "did you hear that?" "Hear what?" Dudley replied. "That voice!" Harry said. "Are you all right Harry? Nobody is here but us," Dudley said. Harry told Dudley what he had heard and Dudley looked at his cousin smiling. "Harry," he said, "that must have been God speaking to you." All of a sudden, a perfect peace came over Harry. He looked at Dudley and said, "Dudley, I want to become a Christian!" Dudley leaped off the bed, and wrapped his arms around Harry. "Come on Harry, you can do it right now," he said excitedly. Dudley told Harry to get on his knees and led him in a prayer to accept Jesus Christ into his heart.
When he finished, with tears streaming down his face, Harry Potter realized that something special had just happened to him. It was not a magic spell. It was not anything that he had ever experienced before in his life. He had such a peace about him. Deep inside, he knew that something was different. As he stood up, his hair flew to the side and his cousin gasped. "Harry, look at your scar!" Dudley cried out. Harry looked into the the mirror on Dudley's dresser and froze . The scar in the shape of a lightning bolt that he had received as a baby when Voldemort tired to kill him, had changed into a cross! Harry Potter had found the KING!
THE END
***If you want to find the King and become a Christian like Harry Potter did, please take a moment and pray for God to open your heart, then read the words at this link: www.liveprayer.com/bdy_salvatn.html .
Also, please take a moment and say a prayer for Harry Potter's author, J.K. Rowling, that she will invite Jesus Christ into her heart and also become a Christian.
Can they do this legally? I wonder if Rowling knows about this use of her Harry Potter character.
Iraqi militants who kidnapped an Australian reporter in Baghdad and threatened to kill him Googled his name on the Internet to investigate his work before deciding to release him unharmed, the journalist's executive producer said yesterday.
John Martinkus, the first Australian confirmed as having been abducted in Iraq, was seized in Baghdad early Saturday and held for about 24 hours before being freed.
Returning home yesterday, Martinkus demanded an apology from Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who had said the journalist was abducted when he went to a Baghdad neighbourhood that he was warned not to visit. "He was advised not to go, but he went there anyway," Downer told Melbourne radio station 3AW.
"Alexander Downer doesn't know his geography very well,'' Martinkus told reporters after arriving at Sydney's airport. "I was actually across the road from the Australian embassy when I was kidnapped. He should apologize to me, actually — personally.''
... He told Australian Broadcasting Corp. from Jordan he was snatched at gunpoint by Sunni Muslim insurgents.
"I can't say very much but ... of course they said they were going to kill me," Martinkus said, adding he was treated well once he told his kidnappers he was an independent reporter not linked to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.
On Nov. 2, millions of Americans will troop to the polls to re-enact the quadrennial pageant. But nearly as many will opt out. They will be accused of sloth, though indifference is more apt—and remains the appropriate response to irrelevance.
If George W. Bush and John Kerry agree on anything —in fact, they agree on far too many things—it’s that we must vote. Elections maintain the illusion of opposing parties exchanging ideas rather than political animals competing for power. Selling voting as the ultimate expression of citizenship serves two purposes: it legitimizes the process that keeps them in control and makes the public docile by enforcing the notion that we rule ourselves.
Continue reading, and ponder the question: Are democracy and freedom positively corelated? There are some good points made in this article about justifying the decision to not vote in November, and while I can easily justify it (unlike most of my progressive compatriots), I cannot agree with the article's conclusion: Silence is a profound expression, and enough unraised voices eventually turn even the most partisan heads.
I don't know what the author's experience or reference for that statement is other than wishful thinking, but if by that, the implication is that not voting will eventually ensure that other choices than the two parties are offered, or that those silent voices will somehow then be offered representation, No. I think not. It will take more than remaining silent to effect any change in the system.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
American Conservative magazine endorses John Kerry
Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership. In an effort to deepen our readers’ and our own understanding of the options before us, we’ve asked several of our editors and contributors to make “the conservative case” for their favored candidate. Their pieces, plus Taki’s column closing out this issue, constitute TAC’s endorsement. —The Editors
There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to conservatives. The flip-flopper charge—the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry—seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.
But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.
It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush.
...Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy.
The Sarasota Herald Tribune obtained a “smoking e-mail” proving that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was “personally involved” in ramrodding a new voter purge list for the 2004 election, even though the data firm that prepared it warned of its many “flaws.”
...The new evidence of vote suppression by George Bush’s brother and others tied to the Bush-Cheney campaign was presented by Ralph Neas, president of People For the American Way (PFAW), and other leaders of the growing nationwide election protection movement, at an Oct. 19 news conference. (Details are available at www.pfaw.org.)
...An angry outcry by PFAW and African American leaders in Florida as well as many of the state’s 67 county election supervisors forced Gov. Bush to finally withdraw the new purge list. Yet many right-wing election supervisors are implementing it under the table. Neas demanded that Attorney General John Ashcroft name an independent counsel to investigate this racist vote suppression scheme.
Without fanfare, President Bush signed into law on Friday a nearly $140 billion corporate tax cut bill derided by both Democratic presidential rival John Kerry and Republican Sen. John McCain as a giveaway to special interests.
... Bush signed the measure into law aboard Air Force One en route to a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, forgoing a public signing ceremony that would have attracted attention to the tax cuts less than two weeks before Election Day.
The White House had marked the signing of Bush's other major tax bills with lavish public ceremonies. This one was marked with a one-paragraph statement by the press secretary.
Asked why there was no signing ceremony for the corporate tax bill, White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said: "There are a variety of ways the president signs legislation."
... McCain of Arizona, who has been campaigning for Bush, called the measure "the worst example of the influence of special interests that I have ever seen."
... The legislation would repeal illegal export subsidies and lower tax rates for domestic manufacturers to 32 percent from the top corporate rate of 35 percent.
The bill includes a $10 billion industry-financed buyout for tobacco farmers.
As for the tax cuts, I just can't say I've investigated them. But the illegal export subsidies had to be repealed. They were, number one, illegal. And the EU has promised sanctions if we didn't repeal them. I'm guessing the tax cuts were to make up for the subsidy cuts.
Gee, no fanfare. Unlike that "partial birth abortion" bill, say, with all the grinning white men standing around slapping each other on the back.
Jay sends an email with pictures of the price of gasoline compared to Bush approval and the cost of oil vs. the price of gasoline. Note the divergence in the latter this year.
According to the email Jay sent, the graph indicates that we should be paying about $2.60 a gallon for gasoline at the pumps if the price of gas were keeping pace with the price of crude. The most I have paid recently is $1.92.
It reminds me that a few months back, when the threat of oil price increase had reports saying Bush was in secret deals with the Saudis to increase the supply of oil to boost his ratings, the Saudis said that we Americans are fools enough to believe anything, when in fact, it's not the supply of oil that is causing the price increase at the gas pumps, but the lack of infrastructure for processing the oil.
This expert says one thing and that expert says another. I certainly can't make an educated assumption about the worldwide availability of oil. I can, however, make what I think is an accurate assumption about the availability of oil products. You will pay the optimum price that can be garnered by any means the oil corporations choose to exact their profits. Notice I didn't say maximum price. The optimum price includes considerations like who do they want as president, and what other factors will be in their best interests in the short and long run. Bush, the deregulator, pro-big business, oil-invested president will be certain to make oil company interests America's interests (of course, I think Kerry can be counted on to do the same, but he may not be as reliable as George who has personal family fortunes invested in oil). And Bush's approval is tied to gasoline prices. Ergo, gasoline prices will not spike with oil prices until at least after the election.
Economist Jude Wanninski offers an explanation, some of which I understand, while insisting that there is not a shortage of oil in the world - just a shortage of infrastructure to process the oil (as the Saudis declared), outlining the reason for that lack (it wasn't profitable for the oil companies to invest in processing infrastructure when the price of oil went down), and concludes:
Why is the price of oil so high? It is because the US dollar is floating, free of gold or any commodity anchor. As long as it is, the entire world will be forced to somehow accommodate this wholly unnecessary volatility in energy supply and price.
It may be unnecessary, but you can count on it as long as there is big profit for private enterprise in it.
Reports speculated (and Diplomats insisted) that Iran, out of fear of U.S. insistence on sanctions if it refused, would accept the EU proposal whereby Iran would stop enriching urnanium in return for nuclear technology. Wrong.
The issue was never weapons of mass destruction—which did not exist—or a genuine fear on the part of the Bush administration that Iraq posed a threat. On the contrary, the conspirators who prepared the invasion of Iraq counted on the fact that the country was essentially defenseless.
The Bush administration chose to go to war with Iraq because it knew that the country was bled white, devastated by the sanctions, incapable of serious military resistance, and, consequently, ripe for the taking. It was an act of plunder, motivated by the desire to lay hold of Iraq’s vast oil resources and position American troops at the center of the Middle East, a strategic position which would give US imperialism a decisive advantage over all its rivals, both European and Asian.
This is a war crime in the fullest sense of the word. Under the Nuremberg precedent, the planning and preparation of aggressive war is a crime against humanity. The record of such planning and preparation by those who today wield power is ample. In the months before September 11, 2001, for example, Cheney’s closed-door energy task force, which included top US energy executives, pored over maps of Iraqi oilfields and discussed how they could be parceled out among the many claimants in the US and European oil industries.
...For all of Kerry’s current posturing as a critic of “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the Democratic Party has served as an accomplice and partner in the rape of Iraq, not an opponent. The Democratic administration of Bill Clinton helped starve the Iraqi people for eight years, bombing and killing, and perpetuating the myths that provided the basis for Bush’s war propaganda.
...The Democrats are caught in irreconcilable contradictions when they attempt to posture as critics of the war. They criticize the decision to invade, but pledge to continue the war. They declare the war a “mistake,” but vow to carry it through to victory.
...[T]he invasion of Iraq was not a sudden aberration on the part of George W. Bush. It arose out of a policy pursued for over a decade, under three administrations, both Republican and Democratic. Such as decision is not a “mistake,” as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry maintains. It is a monstrous crime: the criminal pursuit of a calculated policy, for which the entire US ruling elite must be held accountable.
The World Socialist Website has some good articles, including that one, and this one written in March of 2003, which accurately describes the likely outcome of the invasion of Iraq, details the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein through U.S. backing, and discusses the "crisis of capitalism" in this country, concluding:
Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies. Rather, the unforeseen difficulties and mounting resistance engendered by war will intensify all of the internal contradictions of American society.
Notwithstanding the opinion polls, which are no more believable than any other product of the mass media, there already exists substantial and growing opposition to the war. The demonstrations held on the eve of war were larger than anything held even at the height of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era. Above all, the demonstrations within the United States unfolded as part of a broad international movement against war. This expressed the emergence of an entirely new quality in social consciousness: the growing awareness that the great social problems of our epoch require international rather than merely national solutions.
I've been wondering where the war protest songs of today were. I absolutely do not listen to rap - it just doesn't "get" me (or maybe I just don't get it). Anyway, of all people, Juan Cole has been analyzing Eminem's new anti-Bush-Iraq-war song. Check it out (post one - post two), and get this:
Eminem knows about packing heat, and was accused of pistol-whipping a rival from the rap group Insane Clown Posse. (Actually, this would be a good epithet for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney and Bush).
Well, okay, they're talking about students - but I suspect that has a positive correlation to adults in the same states - unless not-so-smart students tend to stay in the state in which they went to high school, while smart students move elsewhere, in which case, Massachusetts could be full of smart teenagers and stupid adults. But that doesn't seem likely, because, just looking around me, it doesn't appear that smart students in general are spawned from not-so-smart adults, except on very rare occasions. I guess I need more information.
Still, check out the link if you want to see where your state falls on the smart-o-meter. And I know you do. It's a very striking pattern.
The video of Ann Coulter dodging a cream pie is at ifilm - if you didn't check it out when you were watching Triumph the Insult Dog in Spin Alley. James Wolcott comments:
Ann Coulter may be a travesty of humanity, as unacceptable a hank of flesh draped on a hanger ever to be foisted upon an ignorant populace hungry for more ignorance. Her racism, her character slurs, her whirlwind talent for rewriting history, her ability to leave a glossy coat of slime on any issue she discusses (when she licks a stamp, it curls up and dies), these are condemnable.
But credit where credit is due. The skank can shift ass on a dime.
I thought pretty much the same thing while watching the clip, but not in so colorful terms.
Win Back Respect has an ad that could have been better, but it runs that clip of the Son-of-a-bitch in Chief making a black tie joking affair of hunting for weapons of mass destruction. It's worth a look. And pass it around.
1. Kerry's proposal to cut the intelligence budget came after the 1993 WTC attack (and, more importantly, in the wind-down of the Cold War), not after 9-11.
2. The amount involved was about 3% of the intelligence budget.
3. Porter Goss, tthe former CIA officer and Congressman just appointed by GWB to run the CIA, proposed bigger cuts at the same time.
I am probably not the target audience for this spot, since my sympathies are with the wolves, which were slaughtered and tortured by Western settlers and hunted to near extinction. Is there an Elmer Fudd hunter in this commercial symbolizing Bush? I sincerely hope not, because in a fateful standoff between a hunter and a pack of wolves, I will find myself cheering for the wolfpack to rip the hunter to pieces, and this could be construed as a desire to see harm befall our president. I saw what happened to poor Nicholson Baker and I don't need that kind of grief.
Damschroder said there are two scams: The caller tells voters their precincts have changed or the caller offers to pick up an absentee-ballot application, deliver the ballot to the voter and return the completed ballot to the elections office.
Mostly elderly people are getting these calls. I am suspecting Republicans simply because all of the many vote scams I have been reading about over the past four years have been coming from the Republican party. Voters, beware.
Rethugs to mount election day challenges to Democrat voters
Election officials in...swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for...efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.
Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.
And the Republican party hopes for that. My suggestion to newly registered voters is that you first check with your local elections office to be sure your registration was turned in if you signed up somewhere outside a registration office, and to find out what documents you might bring with you for proof of your eligibility to vote should you be challenged. It could save a lot of headaches and frustration on voting day. Some states allow you to vote early, which could also save you voting day troubles. Just remember, if you are voting Republican, you probably don't need to be concerned about any of this, but if you are voting Democrat, while it might be frustrating, it is extremely important. Not because you are voting Democrat, but because there is an entrenched political faction in this country that would like to deny you your right to vote. Don't make it easy for them unless you are prepared to relinquish that right.
Update 10/24: Reader/commenter Autumn Snow reports that a month ago CNN was saying new voter registration in Ohio was up 27% for Republicans and 250% for Democrats. Indeed, that would trigger some GOP scrambling.
President Bush often has cited his work in 1973 with a now-defunct inner-city program for troubled teens as the source for his belief in "compassionate conservatism."
... "I was working full time for an inner-city poverty program known as Project P.U.L.L.," Bush said in his 1999 autobiography, "A Charge to Keep." "My friend John White ... asked me to come help him run the program. ... I was intrigued by John's offer. ... Now I had a chance to help people."
But White's administrative assistant and others associated with P.U.L.L., speaking on the record for the first time, say Bush was not helping to run the program and White had not asked Bush to come aboard. Instead, the associates said, White told them he agreed to take Bush on as a favor to Bush's father, who was honorary co-chairman of the program at the time, and Bush was unpaid. They say White told them Bush had gotten into some kind of trouble but White never gave them specifics.
"We didn't know what kind of trouble he'd been in, only that he'd done something that required him to put in the time," said Althia Turner, White's administrative assistant.
"John said he was doing a favor for George's father because an arrangement had to be made for the son to be there," said Willie Frazier, also a former player for the Houston Oilers and a P.U.L.L. summer volunteer in 1973.
Fred Maura, a close friend of White, refers to Bush as "43," for 43rd president, and his father as "41," for the 41st president.
"John didn't say what kind of trouble 43 was in - just that he had done something and he (John) made a deal to take him in as a favor to 41 to get some funding," Maura said.
"It was incorrect to say he was working there," spokesman Trent Duffy said. "He was doing volunteer service and getting paid by the Guard."
If he had the job because he was in some kind of trouble, then it must have been trouble while he was in the Guard.
Turner, who said she has avoided reporters for years, agreed to be interviewed only after phoning her pastor for advice.
When she hung up the phone, she turned to a reporter: "My pastor says if you found me, I should tell the truth."
Even then, Turner was hesitant. About 15 minutes into the interview, she asked if the reporter would accompany her to her pastor's home because she needed her support. Once there, she talked in detail for the first time while her pastor, Theresa Times, of Bless One Ministries, and five people who had been attending a prayer meeting listened.
"George had to sign in and out - I remember his signature was a hurried cursive - but he wasn't an employee. He was not a volunteer either," she said. "John said he had to keep track of George's hours because George had to put in a lot of hours because he was in trouble."
There are several video clips on this ifilm site you might enjoy watching, but I'd like to point you especially to "Triumph: Poop Valhalla" - Triumph the puppet dog at Spin Alley for the third presidential debate. Starts rather boringly and becomes smashingly hysterical. Use this link and just choose your video format and click "play".
Jay has sent some links recently that I'm trying to get posted for you. Catching up is hard work.
For the first topic....
It seems we're planning on imposing a new law in Iraq on agriculture. The law makes it illegal for a farmer to save seed from a given crop and plant a new crop from it the following year. Large corporations that are selling seed might be disadvantaged by such practice.
A new report [1] by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South has found that new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the US that prevents farmers from saving their seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations. This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country's food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations.
"The US has been imposing patents on life around the world through trade deals. In this case, they invaded the country first, then imposed their patents. This is both immoral and unacceptable", said Shalini Bhutani, one of the report's authors.
...When the new law - on plant variety protection (PVP) - is put into effect, seed saving will be illegal and the market will only offer proprietary "PVP-protected" planting material "invented" by transnational agribusiness corporations.
Yes, of course it's outrageous. Have you seen anything about it on the TV news? How about your favorite newspaper? I don't know what it means that "the market will only offer" proprietary material, because I don' t know how Iraqi farmers are buying seed now.
In case you are not aware of it, that is already the case here in the United States. Farmers cannot save seed from "proprietary material" - crops grown from seed grain purchased from a company selling patented grain (which is pretty much all of it) - since the 1994 amended Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA).
Seed produced from a PVPA variety with 1994 amendments cannot be sold, advertised, offered, delivered, consigned, exchanged, or exposed for sale without explicit authorization by the proprietary seed owner. In addition, a person is prohibited from soliciting an offer to buy the variety or transfer or possess it in any way. It is also illegal to condition the variety to resale for planting purposes. Dealers (retailers), seed cleaners (conditioners) and buyers (consumers) are all liable for these potential violations.
Meanwhile, chemical giant Monsanto has been trying to push through something here in the U.S. that would absolutely prevent farmers from saving seed, without the need for laws. And this is a much more troublesome idea. It would give corporations a stranglehold on America's (and eventually as projected, the world's) food source. The method is called "terminator technology". In Monsanto's view of total control, it would develop seed crops that produce sterile seeds. A farmer could then plant the seed he buys from Monsanto, grow and harvest the crop, but the seeds the crop produces would be sterile, and would not produce another crop. The technology is there, but I believe it is not yet marketed. I haven't heard anything about it for a while, so I Googled the subject and found this terminator page on the Global Issues website, last updated in 2001, saying Monsanto had backed off for a while, presumably to let the furor die down. But, it states...
[E]ven without such terminator technology, under patent laws in Canada, U.S. and a number of other industrialized nations, it is illegal for farmers to re-use patented seed, or to grow Monsanto's GM seed without signing a licensing agreement. Hence the underlying motives behind terminator technologies have still been achieved while being stacked against the farmer. In a prominent case, a Canadian farmer was found guilty of growing patented seeds, even though he did not know of it. The pollen from the patented canola seeds from a nearby farm had pollinated with his and thus he had to pay Monsanto for licensing and profit from the seeds.
The soldiers in Iraq who refused to go on a fuel convoy because of concerns over the safety of their vehicles won a partial victory for other troops who might be put in harm's way, McCook and Butler, the wives of two of the soldiers, said Wednesday. ``The military has already started to work on the vehicles and admitted, yes, the vehicles didn't have armor,'' said McCook. ``It's a partial victory.'' Both Butler and McCook said they had talked to their husbands on Wednesday and both soldiers said they still didn't know what punishment they face.
Eighteen soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company, based in Rock Hill, S.C., are under investigation for refusing to drive a fuel convoy from Tallil air base near Nasiriyah to Taji north of Baghdad.
...The company commander of [the] U.S. Army Reserve unit...has been relieved of her duties....
The decision to relieve the commander of the 343rd Quartermaster Company came at her request and is effective immediately...
The commander, whose name is being withheld by the military to protect her privacy, will be reassigned to another position commensurate with her rank and experience, the U.S. military said.
The mission was later carried out by other soldiers from the unit, which has at least 120 soldiers, the military said.
The fuel was contaminated. The soldiers who refused to deliver it had just been on a 3-day trip trying to deliver it to another outpost where it was refused, and they had to return with it still in the trucks. As I understand it, the fact that it was contaminated influenced their decision to refuse the order to take it to a post in a more dangerous zone (presumably because that post was more desperate and wouldn't quibble over contaminated fuel, or maybe wouldn't have the leisure to inspect it). So some other soldiers, presumably with better vehicles and more protection (but which included one of the guys who initially refused), pimped contaminated fuel to another military post. Real nice. Our troops are not just fucking over the Iraqis, they're over there screwing each other. Real nice.
[Brig. Gen. James E.] Chambers has called for the 343rd to undergo a two-week "safety maintenance stand-down," during which it will conduct no further missions as the unit's vehicles are inspected. Chambers also said the Army is adding steel armor plating on unarmed vehicles and upgrading maintenance.
Hey, there's an idea. I suppose if the reserve unit hadn't refused to make the run, they would go on using unarmed vehicles.
As was expected, Russia's lower house of parliament has approved the treaty (on a vote of 334-73) Iit is now going to the upper house, where it is expected to pass, and then to Putin for signature.
Russia's ratification is necessary to put the pact into effect, because the United States had declined to ratify the treaty. The pact must be ratified by 55 countries that accounted for at least 55% of global emissions in 1990.
The United States alone accounted for 36% of carbon dioxide emissions in 1990.
US forces have pounded the Iraqi town of Falluja for yet another day amid raging gun battles elsewhere in the country.
Fierce fighting erupted in the town of Buhruz northeast of Baghdad near Baquba after Iraqi fighters attacked a US patrol with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades early on Friday morning.
In Falluja, US warplanes and artillery targeted the al-Shuhada and Industrial neighbourhoods of the town....
The Alliance for Justice and the ACLU sponsored a letter on the "Bush Administration's Torture Memos" dated August 9, 2004. In part, it reads:
TO: President George W. Bush Vice President Richard B. Cheney Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld Attorney General John Ashcroft Members of Congress
This is a statement on the memoranda, prepared by the White House, Department of Justice, and Department of Defense, concerning the war powers of the President, torture, the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949, and related matters. The Administration’s memoranda, dated January 9, 2002, January 25, 2002, August 1, 2002 and April 4, 2003, ignore and misinterpret the U.S. Constitution and laws, international treaties and rules of international law. The lawyers who approved and signed these memoranda have not met their high obligation to defend the Constitution.
Americans have faith that our government respects the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, laws passed by Congress, and treaties which the United States has signed. We have always looked to lawyers to protect these rights. Yet, the most senior lawyers in the Department of Justice, the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Vicethe most basic rights of all human beings.President’s office have sought to justify actions that violate the most basic rights of all human beings.
...These memoranda and others like them seek to circumvent long established and universally acknowledged principles of law and common decency. The memoranda approve practices that the United States itself condemns in its annual Human Rights Report. No matter how the memoranda seek to redefine it, torture remains torture. The belated repudiation of the August 2002 memorandum (which had been signed by Jay S. Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel and now a Federal Judge) is welcome, but the repudiation does not undo the abuses that this memorandum may have sanctioned or encouraged during the nearly two years that it was in effect. The subsequent repudiation, coming after public outcry, confirms its original lawless character.
Moreover, the claim that the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief allows him to ignore laws, treaties, and the Constitution relevant to human rights, and thereby to shield those acting on his authority who violate domestic and international law by their interrogation methods and other behavior, directly contradicts several major Supreme Court decisions, numerous statutes passed by Congress and signed by Presidents, and specific provisions of the Constitution itself.
While the facts cited above are established, much, however, is still not known, for the Administration refuses to produce other memoranda and documents relating to treatment of prisoners and detainees.
We therefore:
(1) Call upon the Administration to release all memoranda relating to such treatment and on Congress to require their production if they are not released; and (2) Call for an appropriate inquiry into how and why such memoranda were prepared and by whom they were approved, and whether there is any connection between the memoranda and the shameful abuses that have been exposed and are being investigated at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and at other military prisons.
There follows two-and-a-half three-column pages of attorney signatures.
I'm guessing the letter never made it to some of its intended recipients. And I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for those memoranda to be produced. In fact, when Bush loses the election, I expect the document shredders will be running day and night through January.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
More documents released regarding Abu Ghraib torture
[T]he US government released thousands of pages of documents on prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, including details on three deaths at Abu Ghraib and alleged molestation of a female inmate by soldiers on Friday.
The old release-it-on-Friday so the weekend will absorb it without much media attention trick.
The government released the documents to the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union after a court ordered the government to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU said.
Gee, that didn't take long. And isn't it nice that the government has to be forced to release the information, rather than adamant to uncover and rectify an immoral and illegal situation?
You can find a list of the documents released to the ACLU on their website here. Most of the documents are those withheld from the Taguba investigation and report and are listed here with a brief description of their contents.
And don't think that there aren't more documents and photographs that you won't be seeing any time soon.
I guess I just never think of Norway as an oil supplier.
The famously upright Norwegians might feel a touch aggrieved, in a mild Scandinavian kind of way, that they rank slightly lower than the other Nordic nations in Transparency International's regular survey on perceptions of public corruption across the world, released yesterday. But our friends in Oslo can comfort themselves with the thought that, while they are marginally less corruption-free than some of their northern European neighbours, they do spectacularly well compared with other countries whose national income is substantially boosted by oil.
Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela, Ecuador, Russia: the survey's lower ranks are dominated by economies that pump oil but do little else.
What a surprise. Corrpution in oil producing countries.
This Financial Times article suggests that rich oil-dependent countries have some responsibility to curtail the corruption.
It is not enough, as the US administration has done in the oil sector - ironically, in view of the US's good record overall in prosecuting American companies that pay bribes overseas - to point the finger at governments of developing countries and urge them to improve. Bribery requires payers as well as receivers.
Justice Department officials agreed yesterday to distribute to dozens of federal investigators in the 2001 anthrax case a document they can sign to release journalists from pledges of confidentiality.
Apparently this is happening because lawyers for Stephen Hatfill, who was listed by investigators as a "person of interest" in the case and is now suing for defamation of character, want to ask reporters questions instead of the investigators who may have leaked Hatfill's name to reporters, since the anthrax case is still open and still being investigated, so they are limited to who is permitted to talk to them. (Yeah, I know, you've forgotten all about the anthrax case.)
It's a bit complex for my blood right now, but I thought the idea of signing a release to allow reporters to discuss confidential information was a rather interesting idea. It derives from the Valerie Plame outing case where investigators can't seem to find any information, so they're putting pressure on reporters to help them out. (Of course, if they'd put some pressure on the White House, they might have solved their case a long time ago.)
The list of those who are to receive the forms includes Ashcroft and Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, as well as numerous FBI agents, postal inspectors and federal prosecutors.
The releases will be accompanied by a letter advising the recipients that signing them is voluntary.
That's a rich, eh?
What it will boil down to is how big a threat (or carrot) can you carry? I mean, let's say for instance, the leaker of the Valerie Plame information was somebody like Karl Rove or John Ashcroft (or one of their whores). If a reporter felt threatened enough by the name behind the leak, he or she would opt to lie or cover for the leaker, rendering the release meaningless. If, on the other hand, the leaker were some small time government employee who did not have the backing of the big guns, then a release would be more likely to result in a reporter turning over the information. Oui?
I mean, if Karl Rove leaked information to a reporter, and then signed a release to let the reporter testify about their conversation, I'm pretty sure the ground rules have already been established. The threat of retaliation, the knowledge of what people in power like Karl Rove can do to you, will be pressure enough. A release would simply be a worthless formality. 'Sure, Novak, go ahead and testify. Just remember who you're talking about, if you get my gist.'
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said it was "ridiculous" to think that waivers sent by the Justice Department to its employees would be viewed as voluntary.
Duh.
"The ultimate result of this," Dalglish said, "will be that in the future, less information will get to the public."
Well, that's pretending that the press gives us information now. So, if it that is what it means, then I guess we can expect a big zilch in the future.
The polls, nearly all showing a dead-even race, fail to account for the new voters, who have no past records. They do not measure those for whom a mobile is their main phone - 6% of the population - who will vote Democrat by a margin of two-and-a-half to one.
...Since September 11 infused Bush with a mission, he has evoked hovering angels, crusades, mushroom clouds, evildoers, shades of a universe of death. His imagery induces a dynamic of paralysis before the threat and fervour in embrace of his absolute reassurance and power. Dread without end requires faith without limit.
Yet Bush found himself on the defensive when the New York Times reported on the closed gathering of his campaign contributors, where he revealed his radical programme for his second term - rightwing capture of the supreme court, privatising social security, turning over national land to the oil companies, more tax cuts. Kerry was prompted to raise these issues. And Bush whined that Kerry was practising "the politics of fear". The next day Dick Cheney projected terrorists exploding nuclear weapons within the US, and offered Bush as saviour from looming apocalypse.
...Bush's job approval has fallen now to 47 in this poll; presidents below 50 always lose. Bush has not campaigned in Ohio for three weeks, though he plans to stop there this week. Unemployment continues to rise in the state. "There is no other explanation for his absence," says Stanley Greenberg, Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign pollster, "other than his numbers go down when he's there. His position on jobs is implausible."
...The Democracy Corps poll, however, filters in newly registered voters. Four months ago, the newly registered made up only 1% of the sample. One month ago, they comprised 4%. Now they are at 7% and rising. And they will vote for Kerry over Bush by 61% to 37%.
...The deciding factor will be turnout: the higher the turnout the larger the vote for Democrats.
Following are some excerpts from the executive summary of the recently released (September) Commission on Civil Rights report assessing George's job of protecting and ensuring America's civil rights while in office. Funny, I don't recall any big news stories.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency established by Congress in 1957.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Commission) examined the George W. Bush administration’s commitment to that end. What follows are the results of the Commission’s examination, expressed in terms of: (1) whether civil rights enforcement is a presidential priority; (2) federal efforts to eradicate entrenched discrimination; (3) expanding and protecting rights for disadvantaged groups; and (4) promoting access to federal programs and services for traditionally underserved populations.
This report finds that President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words. The report reaches this conclusion after analyzing and summarizing numerous documents, including historical literature, reports, scholarly articles, presidential and administration statements, executive orders, policy briefs, documents of Cabinetlevel agencies, federal budgets and other data.
Priority of Civil Rights Through public statements and actions, by establishing a diverse executive branch that affirms civil rights, and by funding enforcement, an administration can express its commitment to equal opportunity. This report finds that President Bush has not defined a clear agenda nor made civil rights a priority.
Statements and Action: Public statements are a means by which Presidents draw the country’s attention to important matters. However, President Bush seldom speaks about civil rights, and when he does, it is to carry out official duties, not to promote initiatives or plans for improving opportunity. Even when he publicly discusses existing barriers to equality and efforts to overcome them, the administration’s words and deeds often conflict.
Federal Diversity and Support for Civil Rights: Although not to the extent of the previous administration, President Bush has assembled a commendably diverse Cabinet and moderately diverse judiciary. However, many of his nominees and appointees do not support civil rights protections. The effect may be eventual weakening of civil rights laws.
Civil Rights Funding: Requests for funding is one means by which Presidents make their priorities known. In his first three years in office, the net increase in President Bush’s requests for civil rights enforcement agencies was less than those of the previous two administrations. After accounting for inflation, the President’s requests for the six major civil rights programs (Departments of Education, Labor, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) amount to a loss of spending power for 2004 and 2005.
Eradicating Entrenched Discrimination While judicial and legislative achievements of the 1960s and 1970s largely broke down the system of segregation and legal bases for discrimination, the effects persist and hamper equal opportunity in education, employment, housing, public accommodations, and the ability to vote. President Bush has implemented policies that have retreated from long-established civil rights promises in each of these areas.
...Native Americans: President Bush has acknowledged the great debt America owes to Native Americans. However, his words have not been matched with action. Commission reports document that the President has not effectively used the stature of his office to speak out on ending discrimination against Native Americans. Nor has he engaged in a consistent effort to alleviate their problems. He has not applied resources to improving conditions or adequately funded programs that serve Native peoples.
...Women: President Bush’s record on women’s issues is mixed. Economic gains for which he has paved the way are overshadowed by other actions that have set back women’s rights.
...Gay Men and Lesbians: President Bush appointed some gay rights supporters to Cabinet and administration positions. However, other actions he and his administration have taken have almost completely eclipsed the efforts he made.
Nice job, George.
Now we know why he kicked those three teachers out of his rally the other day.
It is normal during elections for supporters of presidential candidates to have fundamental disagreements about values or strategies. The current election is unique in that Bush supporters and Kerry supporters have profoundly different perceptions of reality.
From a nation of immigrants to a nation of ignorants.
[T]he only issue on which the survey found broad agreement between the two sets of voters was the role of the Bush administration in actively promoting the claims about Iraq's WMD and connections to al Qaeda.
"One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these (erroneous) beliefs [about Saddam's alleged possession of WMD and support of al Qaeda] is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them," notes Steven Kull, PIPA's director. "Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree."
...Remarkably, when asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war without evidence of a WMD program or support to al Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said no. Moreover, 61 percent said they assumed that Bush would also not have gone to war under those circumstances.
That's interesting. Fifty-eight percent say that we should not have invaded Iraq if there were no WMDs and no support for the terrorists. I suppose that answers the question why they believe those things are true. If they aren't true, then their man did the wrong thing. Can't have that, so given the choices, we'll just have to ask reality to take a pass.
Apparently 42% of Butthead's supporters are just as rabid as he is and would have been willing to go kick some Arab ass on principle.
A Democratic U.S. Senator on Thursday accused a senior Pentagon official of distorting intelligence information to back claims of links between Iraq and al Qaeda in the run-up to last year's U.S.-led invasion.
A report issued by Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also questioned assertions of pre-war links between Baghdad and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who since the invasion has emerged as a leader in the anti-U.S. insurgency.
The report, compiled by the committee's Democratic staff, criticized the Office of Special Plans, which operated under the auspices of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.
U.S. warplanes have pounded and obliterated suspected weapons storage sites in Falluja, according to the U.S. military.
Hospital officials in Falluja said Friday that eight people were killed and two wounded, according to The Associated Press. The U.S. military said it had no reports of casualties.
...Britain announced on Thursday that it would move elite troops nearer Baghdad to allow U.S. forces to redeploy and ratchet up operations against militants in Falluja and other rebellion-stoked cities. (Full story)
Judging by what has been happening, "ratchet up" for Falluja must mean annihilation. And for every ratcheting up, more rebellion is guaranteed. What once were pacific cities are lining up in the "rebellion-stoked" category. "Ratcheting up" leads in one direction only.
I completely missed this week-old news. I haven't seen anything about it in the part of the blogosphere that I frequent, either. A "top secret" threat that Senators have been briefed about, but can't disclose? One so scary that Senator Dayton decided he should close his Capitol Hill offices?
"We're unaware of any credible threat information indicating al Qaeda is targeting a specific location in Washington or the United States," said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. "Homeland Security has not made any recommendation for any member of Congress or other official in Washington to vacate their offices."
Apparently Senator Dayton decided otherwise.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
All that training that Butthead has been bragging about?
The Oct. 1-2 offensive in Samarra was the first major test of newly trained and equipped Iraqi security forces since April, when several battalions of national guard and army troops refused to fight in Fallujah and Baghdad's Sadr City after revolts.
Since then, the U.S.-led military coalition has upgraded training and provided more equipment and weapons to their Iraqi counterparts.
At least 300 Iraqi soldiers abandoned their 750-man unit after they were deployed to Samarra earlier this month as part of a U.S.-Iraqi operation to retake the militant-controlled city. Like similar incidents earlier this year in Fallujah and Baghdad's Sadr City, the desertions are prompting coalition officers to improve training for Iraqi recruits.
Apparently, it's not working.
You know, this is getting to be the rule, rather than the exception.
Journalist Patrick Graham, who has been in Iraq, and specifically in Falluja during the first bloody assaults, tells us what to expect when the Marines make their planned seige after the election (ours).
The Americans have more than enough troops to attack Falluja, but as soon as they do the area will once more erupt, and it will take everything the Americans have to control the surrounding villages of Habbaniya, Khaldiya and Al Kharma. According to the Iraqi president, Ghazi al-Yawar, there is a good chance that when the marines hit Falluja again, even Mosul, home to three million Sunnis, will explode. Unlike the US army, Mr Yawar knows what he is talking about and understands the way the tribes are grouped in northern Iraq, an intricate web of families that runs through the Sunni triangle. If Mosul is pushed over the edge, holding the north will be like trying to keep the lid on a pressure cooker by hand.
Josh Marshall wants to know why Team Bush left Jim Tobin (who has been forced to step aside now that the news has gotten out) in charge of campaign oversight in an area where he had already been caught in a phone-jamming, election tampering, scam during the 2002 elections, and why no reporters are asking.
A lawyer from U.S. Department of Justice urged a judge yesterday to block efforts by Democrats to disclose evidence on the illegal phone jamming allegedly conducted by the New Hampshire Republican State Committee during the November 2002 state election.
On Thursday, the Republicans were to produce documents and a designated GOP official who would answer questions about who ordered and who paid for computer-generated calls that kept phone lines tied up at six get-out-the-vote phone banks.
But about 20 minutes before the deposition was to take place, Hinnen called both sides to say he would ask that the court to shut down discovery in the civil case for six months.
Hinnen told Judge Mangones yesterday that disclosures would harm the criminal investigation which he said was in a critical stage.
There's a criminal federal conspiracy trial over the 2002 phone-jamming election tampering, involving two other guys who have testified that Tobin was in on it. Isn't that handy? But the question remains - why did the Bush campaign keep this guy on? I think you know.
Team Bush promises to quit playing the same old song
That is because the entire situation is a blow-by-blow replay of a scandal that erupted in October of 2000. Same song by the same convicted pedophile rock star. Used by the same presidential candidate. Exposed by the same political commentator (that would be me!) Same challenge to the campaign by the same British newspaper. Same dumping of the song by the Bush team. And same claim of ignorance of Gary Glitter’s pedophile conviction by the campaign.
This just gets creepy. Not using the pedophile's song, but that they did the same exact thing in 2000. There is such a sense of time- and reality-warping with this administration. Do you think that it's an artefact of the millenium? I mean, maybe, just maybe, the world really did come to an end, and we're in some sort of recapitulation mode in purgatory. That might explain a lot of stuff.
Cheney's remarkable life story involves the relentless accumulation of power in every form and regardless of the outcome of this fall's election, he will continue to be one of the most powerful and well-connected men in the world. The fifth estate will show how he accomplished this, what it involved in terms of costs for others and what history's judgement could be.
Click graphic
More about Cheney, if you can take it, is linked on my webpage here.
How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?
None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.
Last night at my CAD class, I saw a hand-made sign in the rear window of an auto in the parking lot. It said, "Kerry: Wrong in 1970, Wrong Now." Just before I went into my philosophical mode of "there is no right or wrong" (which is the ultimate truth, but that's a different blog), I thought, "Kerry: Right in 1970, Wrong Now." This morning, I see that Zeynep at Under the Same Sun has it spelled out quite nicely.
...Just how did that young man die, and who is this opportunist, war-mongering, death-celebrating politician I can't bear to listen to, masquerading around in the remmants of that man's shell? I really recommend reading his testimony in full, and reading it often. Then he spoke a deep truth -- now he talks about "Iraqification" the same way politicians of his day spoke of Vietnamization, which that Kerry understood perfectly well:
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
And the Kerry-then, speaking on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, proclaimed their desire to fight one last battle, a noble one unlike the ignominious one they had been pushed into:
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
...I'd like to ask the current Democratic Party presidential nominee, also named John Kerry, another question. How do you kill your own soul for a shot at power? I would have hoped that it were not possible, that once awakened, a conscience could not be discarded as if it were just another empty campaign promise by just another power-hungry politician.
I would have liked to think that, too.
Sadly, sadly, I'm afraid that one of Zeynep's commenters has the only rational reason I've yet seen to vote for Mr. Kerry....
Still, better than Bush, but what sort of standard is that? Here's the best argument for Kerry I can come up with: "Vote Kerry--he'll be easier to impeach."
Witnesses in the trial of a U.S. soldier charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib have told the court that the CIA sometimes directed abuse and orders were received from military command to toughen interrogations.
The evidence, from an officer and a chief warrant officer who served at the jail, is among the strongest so far in the Abu Ghraib trials pointing to more senior involvement in the abuse and direct orders from above to "soften up" detainees.
See what happened in Jacksonville, Oregon, last week:
Some residents of Jacksonville feel that their First Amendment rights were taken away as they witnessed an encounter that resulted in pepper balls fired into crowds of men, women, and children as an abrupt “sweep” of a sidewalk erupted into chaos as the presidential motorcade drove by last Thursday.
According to a news story in the Medford Mail Tribune, one man said he was shot in the back seven times with pepper balls (plastic paint balls filled with capsaicin). He said he saw a man get hit with a baton and fall to the ground. “With my back to the police — as I was picking him up — that’s when I was shot.”
Trish Bowcock, a resident of Jacksonville and a retired attorney who is formerly of Austin, Texas, was an eyewitness to the disturbance and penned her impressions of the scene from a personal standpoint. She has agreed to allow The Iconoclast to reprint her thoughts.
Mail Tribune staff members confirmed her contention that law enforcement concentrated on anti-Bush protestors, rather than pro-Bush demonstrators, and that the order to stop the protests came from the U.S. Secret Service.
Police armed with high powered rifles perched upon our rooftops as the presidential motorcade approached. Helicopters flew low, overhead. A cadre of motorcycle police zoomed into town. Black SUVs followed, sandwiching several black limousines carrying the president, his wife and their entourage as they sped to the local inn where they would eat and sleep. The main street was lined with people gathered to witness the event. Many supported the president. Many did not. Some came because they were simply curious. There were men, women, young and old. The mood was somewhat festive. Supporters of John Kerry sported signs, as did supporters of George Bush. Individuals, exercising their rights of free speech began chanting. On one side of the street, shouts of “four more years” echoed in the night air. On the other side of the street, chants of “three more weeks” responded. The chants were loud and apparently could be heard by President Bush. An order was issued that the anti-Bush rhetoric be quieted. The local SWAT team leapt to action.
It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the Congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.
"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."
Makes it look like? I think we already have plenty of information confirming those very facts.
When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."
..."What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."
LaBelle got a treat in her driveway recently, and her husband took it in to the Tribune, which ran a story. Excerpts:
The terrorism threat in Missouri is real, but it’s not al-Qaida foreign fighters we should fear.
It’s a white man from Kirksville named Alex Linder....On Sunday, the neo-Nazi punk announced his presence in Columbia.
...Not satisfied with a tiny hold of the Internet hate world, Linder started a newspaper for his Vanguard network...."Vanguard News Network presents the Aryan alternative. Uncensored news for whites," it trumpets.
...In Missouri, the...white-power movement is alive and well thanks to men such as Linder. He is one of two Missouri men to appear on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s "40 to Watch" list, which tracks some of the nation’s most dangerous hatemongers. The center calls Linder a "foul-mouthed but nattily dressed neo-Nazi" whose Internet site is so vulgar that it offends "even many of the most extreme racists and anti-Semites."
...His newspaper lists a Springfield man named Glenn Miller as responsible for printing his vile screed. Miller doesn’t answer his phone, though the one-time member of North Carolina’s White Patriot Party has plenty to say on the Web site belonging to the equally racist Church of True Israel. "The U.S. government is our enemy because it is controlled by Jews. Never forget it," he posted in a forum earlier this year.
In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center has had its eye on Miller for years. He’s an ex-Army soldier with Special Forces training who has a violent past. "He’s a pretty scary guy," says Mark Potok, director of the SPLC Intelligence Project. Miller has ties to the violent group called The Order and at one time was in the witness-protection program for testifying against other white supremacists.
Linder isn’t the only Missourian on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s watch list. There is also Bridgeton’s George Baum, head of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist group that until the late 1990s tried to present itself as a legitimate political power. Baum has since shed the cloak of respectability and now, like Linder, publishes a newspaper intended to bring more white supremacists into the fold.
"The U.S. government is our enemy..." I wonder if these guys are on the no-fly list. We turn out the worst of the worst here. We do things whole hog in Missouri. You can add Linder, Baum and Miller to your list of Missourians we wish we never knew, along with John Ashcroft and Rush Limbaugh.
The founder of the U.S. Christian Coalition said Tuesday he told President George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq that he should prepare Americans for the likelihood of casualties, but the president told him, "We're not going to have any casualties."
Pat Robertson, an ardent Bush supporter, said he had that conversation with the president in Nashville, Tennessee, before the March 2003 invasion U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He described Bush in the meeting as "the most self-assured man I've ever met in my life."
"You remember Mark Twain said, 'He looks like a contented Christian with four aces.' I mean he was just sitting there like, 'I'm on top of the world,' " Robertson said on the CNN show, "Paula Zahn Now."
Lifting a quote from Kerry: You can be certain and be wrong. But, what moron would have believed there would be no casualties? Even Jean D'Arc expected casualties.
The fool lives in La-La Land.
On the other hand, God tells Robertson the truth. And therefore, I think we can see that when he makes his next run for president, maybe we'd better wise up and vote for him.
Robertson...said he wishes Bush would admit to mistakes made.
"I mean, the Lord told me it was going to be A, a disaster, and B, messy," Robertson said. "I warned him about casualties."
...Asked why Bush has refused to admit to mistakes on Iraq, Robertson said, "I don't know this politics game. You know, you can never say you were wrong because the opposition grabs onto it..."
Okay, maybe we better not vote for him. If he doesn't know the game.
Even as Robertson criticized Bush for downplaying the potential dangers of the Iraq war, he heaped praise on Bush, saying he believes the president will win the election and that "the blessing of heaven is on Bush."
"Even if he stumbles and messes up -- and he's had his share of stumbles and gaffes -- I just think God's blessing is on him," Robertson said.
I wonder why God doesn't tell him the truth about casualties in the event of war, then. Doesn't want him to have second thoughts about starting one, I guess.
Aside from securing the Canadian border so that future draftees can't easily skip the country, we are in the process of shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world in commerce with our overly restrictive border policies. Every time I hear some redneck screech about how everybody wants to come to the United States proving that we are the best country in the world, I'll think of this.
U.S. and foreign hospitals are building medical centers in cities such as Singapore and Shanghai for wealthy patients who no longer can or want to travel to the United States. New regulations threaten to crimp commerce along the U.S.-Mexico border. Experts in the cutting-edge technologies that are likely to drive growth in the 21st century face long waits for visas, or outright rejection. Instead of attending the best U.S. schools, foreign graduate students are heading to Britain and Australia.
Wealthy foreigners are shopping, buying vacation homes and investing elsewhere. That has contributed to a plunge in direct foreign investment in the United States, which dropped to $40 billion last year from $72 billion the year before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Firms such as Dresser-Rand, Boeing and Merck are outsourcing work, moving meetings to less restrictive locations abroad or expanding foreign operations.
...[T]here is no program for expediting visas for frequent business or academic visitors, and it can take several years for workers with specialized skills to obtain them.
Over-reaction to 9/11 and our nationalist focus are going to shut this country down.
Visa delays alone have cost U.S. exporters $30.7 billion in lost contracts, delayed shipments and other areas, according to a study released in June by Reinsch's group and seven other leading U.S. business organizations. The restrictions impede access to fast-growing markets in countries such as China, which has supported the administration's campaign against terrorism.
...Some of the companies hit hardest are those that have been doing business with the Middle East or Muslim countries elsewhere. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. firms have lost at least $1.5 billion a year in contracts, tourism receipts and tuition from the Arab world, says the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, a Washington-based trade group.
...Midamar, an Iowa food products trading company, is one of them. Founder Bill Aossey's customers include the foreign outposts of McDonald's, KFC and other large U.S. restaurant and hotel chains.
Aossey couldn't get visas this year for any of his top dozen foreign clients to visit his facility and attend the nation's biggest restaurant trade show, in Chicago. Last year, only two were able to get into the country.
"I've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in business over the last three years," said the frustrated 62-year-old, who recently lost an order for $175,000 worth of bakery equipment to a Belgian firm because his Saudi customer couldn't get its Egyptian engineer into the United States.
...Applications for visas to visit Dresser-Rand's headquarters disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole. The company's foreign-born employees also had problems reentering the United States, particularly if they were returning from a country deemed a security risk. One of its engineers, an Egyptian who has been working legally in the United States for four years, has been delayed at the airport for as long as 10 hours on numerous occasions. With Dresser charging $2,000 a day for the services of an engineer, the losses add up quickly.
...Steve Churbock, 43, manager of the controls field services team, said Dresser-Rand was forced to forgo bidding on a number of contracts valued at $300,000 to $400,000 apiece.
The visa problems also have hurt Dresser-Rand's cash flow. Since its equipment is sophisticated and custom-made, customers visit the factory to oversee final testing, a process that can take two weeks. And they don't pay until they're satisfied.
"Enough is enough," Churbock said. "We're being choked by these policies, and Americans don't have a lot of friends left in the world."
And Dresser-Rand is in business in the oil sector. Like many companies in that sector, it's got to do business with people from the Middle East - the very people who are being targeted with our repressive policies. How long before Dresser-Rand and others decide it's costing them too much money to do business in America?
I can't quite figure out how capitalists reconcile their truly anti-business fear-based policies with their love of capitalist profits. We have a saying here in Missouri - probably they have it in Texas, too - you cut off your nose to spite your face.
[C]areer scientists and enforcement officials are resigning en masse from government agencies, citing an inability to do their jobs due to what they see as the ruthless politicization of science by the Bush administration. Bruce Boler, Marianne Horinko, Rich Biondi, J. P. Suarez and Eric Schaeffer are among those who have resigned from the EPA alone. In a letter to The New York Times, former EPA administrator Russell Train, who worked for both Nixon and Ford, wrote, “I can state categorically that there never was such White House intrusion into the business of the EPA during my tenure.” Government meddling has reached such a level that European scientists are voicing concerns that Bush may not merely be undermining U.S. dominance in sciences, but global research as well.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently published the results of an investigation into the administration’s misuse of science called “ Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” with a letter signed by over 60 leading scientists, including 20 Nobel Laureates.
... The troubles in Iraq are not so much proof of the failure of the neocon vision for democratizing the Middle East, as they are a reminder of the disastrous consequences of removing empiricism from deliberation. All the problems that have popped up in Iraq were predicted long ago—from troop strength to the resilience of the insurgents—and available to anyone who cared to look. The administration not only chose to look away but actively swept them under the rug.
...“Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue,” George Will wrote recently. “Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.” Bush has finally met his match. The Universe is the one foe more steadfast than he is. It cannot be bullied or intimidated. The laws of physics know no compromise. This is a game of chicken Bush will lose. If he doesn’t take his foot off the accelerator, then the only question is: how will we recover from the crash?
U.S. service members based in Iraq and across the globe can't be confident that their votes will be counted in this year's presidential election, analysts and military advocates said this week.
Those warnings came despite a stepped-up Pentagon campaign - developed in response to the 2000 election, when as many as 30 percent of service members stationed overseas were unable to vote - to encourage troops to register and vote early.
Observers praised the military's efforts but said a cumbersome voting process, a confusing patchwork of state laws and likely ballot challenges almost certainly would disenfranchise some military voters.
Conventional wisdom says that George W. Bush flip-flopped (you might say) in the debates from petulance in Miami to belligerence in St. Louis to grins in Tempe. True enough, but the consensus story line of Bush’s inconsistency masks the more significant invariant pattern: The president’s idea of resolve is to repeat slogans.
Believe it or don't, that isn't from a blog, it's from a CBS webpage.
Replaying his phrases (“hard work,” “30 countries,” “he voted to increase taxes 98 times”), Bush revealed that what he suffers from is not a speaking deficiency but a thinking deficiency. When confronted by pesky facts and annoying objections, Bush can only repeat the ready-made phrases lodged in his mind. His face reverts to the startled look of a bully unfamiliar with counterarguments.
Only we, who ignored a daily briefing called Osama Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US, can protect you from the terrorists.
Only we, who have been so focused on Iraq -- which had no WMD -- and thus allowed North Korea and Iran to join the nuclear club, can protect you from the nuclear threat.
Only we, who were completely unable to anticipate that Iraq would spiral horribly out of control, have the vision to rule this country safely.
US warplanes unleashed a series of strikes in the Iraqi city of Falluja overnight on buildings claimed to be connected to al-Qaida-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network.
...US and Iraqi forces have also surrounded the town of al-Dhuluaiya, north of Baghdad, raiding homes, detaining scores of suspected insurrectionists and calling in helicopter strikes on suspected hideouts in surrounding orchards, Iraqi officials said.
"This film aims to pass through the looking glass and to show how the Bushes, father and son, have not only dined with the devil but have often invited themselves to his table."
One of Iraq's leading judicial champions of the rule of law has been sacked, fueling concerns the US-backed government is adopting strong-arm tactics reminiscent of the old regime in its war against insurgents.
The central criminal court's chief investigating magistrate, Zuhair al-Maliky, said the authorities had given him no reason for his dismissal, which came after repeated clashes with state security agencies over arbitrary arrests and other suspected abuses.
But the judge insisted he was unrepentant about his crusade for due process by the security services.
Ad Dustour Jordanian newspaper reported on October 19, 2004 that the Interim Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, announced yesterday that he would fire 40,000 Iraqi policemen within three months because they are suspects (of collaboration with the Iraqi resistance).
Iraqi firefighters tackle a large blaze on an oil pipeline 10 km north of the Baiji refining center October 19, 2004. An explosion blew up a section of Iraq's northern oil export pipeline on Tuesday and set it on fire, but exports to Turkey kept flowing, oil officials and police said.
A protester holding a sign that reads ' Bush is the #1 terrorist,' has her sign grabbed by rally volunteers as President Bush speaks Saturday, Oct. 16, 2004 in Sunrise, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)
Shouldn't politicians be required by law to accept debate challenges? Shouldn't they have free debate time on the public air waves? Shouldn't they be required to hold town hall debates that are free and open to the public and broadcast on public airwaves? I can't believe they can get away with refusing to debate.
Republican values. There really is no low to which they will not stoop. Sinclair Broadcasting officers sold stock in their company knowing that they were about to force an issue that would drive the stock down.
Famed shareholder attorney William S. Lerach will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. today to discuss insider self-dealing by officers of Sinclair Broadcasting, the Baltimore-based television chain that is forcing its affiliates to show a propaganda film that attacks presidential candidate John Kerry. He will release a set of demands aimed at making Sinclair executives disgorge millions of dollars in unjustified profits taken out of the firm when stock prices were high during the past 12 months. Yesterday the company's stock fell a further 8 percent after being down more than 50 percent from the year's beginning, as advertisers pulled back to avoid the station's self-generated political controversy.
This report is based on official documents and on interviews with more than three dozen current and former civilian and military officials who participated directly in planning for the war and its aftermath. Most still support the decision to go to war but say many of the subsequent problems could have been avoided.
Every effort was made to get those who were interviewed to speak for the record, but many officials requested anonymity because they didn't want to criticize the administration publicly or because they feared retaliation.
One official who was deeply involved in the pre-war planning effort - and was critical of it - initially agreed but then declined to cooperate after expressing concern that the Justice Department might pursue a reporter's telephone records in an effort to hunt down critics of the administration's policies.
"The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious," warned an Army War College report that was completed in February 2003, a month before the invasion. Without an "overwhelming" effort to prepare for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the report warned: "The United States may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."
A half-dozen intelligence reports also warned that American troops could face significant postwar resistance. This foot-high stack of material was distributed at White House meetings of Bush's top foreign policy advisers, but there's no evidence that anyone ever acted on it.
"It was disseminated. And ignored," said a former senior intelligence official.
..."We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory," said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.
...In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.
Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.
The truth is that President George W. Bush does not speak for me or for many other moderate Republicans on a very broad cross section of issues.
Sen. John Kerry, on the other hand, has put forth a coherent, responsible platform of progressive initiatives that I believe would serve this country well. He wants to balance the budget, step up environmental protection efforts, rebuild our international relationships, support stem-cell research, protect choice and pursue a number of other progressive initiatives that moderates from both parties can support.
As a result, despite my long record of active involvement in the Republican Party, and my intention still to stay in the Republican Party, when I cast my ballot November 2, I will be voting for John Kerry for President.
Continue reading why William G. Milliken (Served in the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II; member of Michigan state senate 27th District, 1961-64; alternate delegate to Republican National Convention from Michigan, 1964; Lieutenant Governor of Michigan, 1965-69; Governor of Michigan, 1969-82) will be voting for John Kerry.
Sinclair Broadcasting's Washington Bureau chief Jonathan Lieberman got canned this afternoon for denouncing Sinclair's Swift Boat stunt in an interview for this morning's Baltimore Sun.
What President Bush warns could happen under the Kerry health care plan, shortages, rationing, that's exactly what is happening now. So the issue is whether the Kerry health care plan would solve the problem, or as Republicans charge, make it worse.
Digby has the transcript of a CNN piece that you might find interesting. He calls it Hell Froze Over.
Remember the strange tale of Jonathan Keith Idema, running a private torture prison in Afghanistan? Jay sends this link to more background on him. And there's a lot. Keith has been a busy boy. During his Afghan trial, he claimed he was working with the knowledge and blessing of the U.S. military, which the military predictably denies. Of course I don't know whether he was or not (there is a video of him with General My-God-Is-Bigger-Than-You r-God Boykin, and he was all over the news media, so they at least must have known about him), but one of the tactics that appears to be working well for the U.S. government and its shady agencies is to use people with similarly shady backgrounds for their dirty work, as those people can be easily discredited when the need arises.
Remember lying scumbag general Ricardo Sanchez from the Abu Ghraib tortures? True to Bush administrative mode of rewarding the bad and punishing the good, he is up for promotion. But, a little bit of leakage also puts him in the news as a direct contradiction to the administration's continuing rosy picture of Iraq.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq complained to the Pentagon last winter that his supply situation was so poor that it threatened Army troops' ability to fight, according to an official document that has surfaced only now.
The lack of key spare parts for gear vital to combat operations, such as tanks and helicopters, was causing problems so severe, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez wrote in a letter to top Army officials, that "I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with rates this low."
...Lt. Gen. Claude V. Christianson, the senior logistics officer on the Army staff at the Pentagon, said the readiness problems in Iraq peaked last fall but largely have been addressed.
For years, The Box has been a stage for the Army's elite "opposition force" — soldiers expert at assuming the roles of enemy fighters, be they the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. Their mission is to toughen new soldiers with elaborate simulations — staging sniper fire, riots, suicide car bombings and potentially dangerous culture clashes.
Staging such scenes has long been the work of the fabled 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, or Black Horse Regiment. But starting next month, the 3,500-member unit will begin shipping out to Iraq from the Ft. Irwin National Training Center, near Barstow.
..."No one ever thought the Black Horse would be taken out of the National Training Center; they are just too valuable here," said Maj. John Clearwater. "But the Army is stretched too thin, and Iraq is a big mission."
But just remember Bush's pledge of no draft. Suckers.
As for the Black Horse regiment, well they did win the war games set up before the invasion of Iraq, which might have been an indication of how the war would go to anyone paying attention. I guess we're hoping they can win one against the guys they portray, since the regular army couldn't.
President Bush's New England campaign chairman stepped down Friday after the Democrats accused him of taking part in the jamming of their telephone lines on Election Day 2002.
"The Democrats' allegations against me are without merit," James Tobin said in the statement. "But to avoid any harm to the campaign from their underhanded tactics, I elected earlier this week to step down from my voluntary position with the campaign."
Without merit. That's what they all say as the step aside. Josh Marshall has been on this one since the phone jamming incident. His post on 10/15:
A few suggested questions for national political reporters needing to do catch-up on this story.
Tobin was named by the two men who've pled guilty in the case as part of their plea agreements. The Bush campaign has known for months of Tobin's involvement in this case. The only reason he resigned today is that this information was finally pried free from court documents. Why did they keep him in such a senior post if they knew of his role in such serious wrongdoing?
At the time the incident happened Tobin was the Northeast political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This was under Sen. Bill Frist's tenure as chairman. Did anyone else at the NRSC know about this at the time?
That's the fifth person from the scandal-ridden Bush campaign that I have come across who has resigned in the past two months.
Here's the freedom we're exporting to the Iraqi women
Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), was one of the recipients awarded part of a $10 million grant to train Iraqi women in the skills of democratic public life. IWF’s website states that their mission is to counter “the dangerous influence of radical feminism in the courts” and to combat “corrosive feminist ideology on campus.”
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that "if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3." The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
So that would be one positive outcome.
"This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . ."
Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions.
And have been told point blank he doesn't have to explain himself because he's the president.
As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!" (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)
I wonder what they threatened her with.
"When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking," Wallis says now. "What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him."
...The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic "base" that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God.
Hey, I say, let them have their anti-Christ. And let them book passage to Mars. I hear there's water there.
President Bush has tried to avoid any responsibility for the flu vaccine shortage by making misleading statements. During the presidential debate last Wednesday, President Bush said the problem was that "we relied upon a company out of England." That isn't true. Chiron Corp., the company whose vaccine plant was contaminated, is a California company - subject to regulation by the U.S. government - that operates a factory in England.
During the debate, President Bush also said, "we took the right action and didn't allow contaminated medicine into our country." That isn't true either. It was the British authorities who, after inspecting the plant, revoked the factory's license on October 5th.
In June 2003, the United States Food and Drug Administration inspected the Chiron plant. Initially, the FDA found that the plant was contaminated with bacteria but later announced, "the problems were corrected to their satisfaction," and allowed the plant to continue to operate.
Actor Brad Pitt will make an MU homecoming of his own this week.
Pitt will attend a showing of “Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry” Wednesday night, hosted by the MU College Democrats. Director George Butler also will attend.
The showing is set for 6 p.m. in Jesse Auditorium at MU.
...Pitt grew up in Springfield and attended MU.
...[MU College Democrats President Caleb] Lewis said he thinks the event will be free and open to the public.
He thinks? Well, at any rate, I think I'll have to miss it. I get enough of MU and Kerry by virtue of my day job and my blogging. And I can watch Brad Pitt do what he does for the price of a rental movie. Snatch comes to mind. And Twelve Monkeys. I liked those.
Weeks after Texas National Guard officials signed an oath swearing they had turned over all of President Bush's military records, independent examiners found more than two dozen pages of previously unreleased documents about Bush.
I am now expecting the White House to suddenly find some positive documents much to its own surprise, having insisted numerous times that all documents had been released.
A Texas National Guard spokesman defended the continuing discoveries, saying Guard officials didn't find all of Bush's records because they are disorganized and in poor shape.
"These boxes are full of dirt and rat (excrement) and dead bugs."
About half of the roughly $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds disbursed by the US government in the first half of this year cannot be accounted for, according to an audit commissioned by the United Nations, which could not find records for numerous rebuilding projects and other payments.
...The audit, released yesterday, found serious gaps in how the Development Fund for Iraq -- a pool of money drawn from Iraqi oil revenues and international aid, including some from the United States -- was handled by American occupation officials responsible for funding reconstruction projects and the operations of Iraqi ministries and provincial governments. The development fund is separate from the $18.4 billion in US reconstruction funds set aside last year to rebuild the country.
All the funds -- more than $5 billion -- were spent between Jan. 1 and June 28, 2004, during the period when the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority ran the country.
...Hundreds of projects worth more than $100 million covered by the Commander's Emergency Response Program, designed to allow US military officers to quickly fund small reconstruction projects around the country, had either no contracts on file, no evidence that bids were obtained through competition, no purchase invoices, or no payment vouchers.
Weapons were paid for under a buyback program with funds specifically prohibited for such use.
The coalition authority gave money to the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, which then maintained two different sets of records. The report said a ''reconciliation between these two sets of accounting records was not prepared and the difference was significant."
Checks were made payable to the coalition authority's senior adviser to the Ministry of Health, rather than to suppliers, raising questions about whether the money was spent for its intended purposes.
A number of projects were awarded without bids ''without justification" by treasury officials in one Iraqi province.
President Bush taught three Oregon schoolteachers a new lesson in irony – or tragedy – Thursday night when his campaign removed them from a Bush speech and threatened them with arrest simply for wearing t-shirts that said “Protect Our Civil Liberties,” the Democratic Party of Oregon reported.
The women were ticketed to the event, admitted into the event, and were then approached by event officials before the president’s speech. They were asked to leave and to turn over their tickets – two of the three tickets were seized, but the third was saved when one of the teachers put it underneath an article of clothing.
"The U.S. Constitution was not available on site for comment, but expressed in a written statement support for “the freedom of speech” and “of the press” among other civil liberties," a Democratic news release said.
The Associated Press and local CBS affiliate KTVL captured Bush’s principled stand against civil liberties in news accounts published immediately after the event.
I hate reading stuff like this. I hate that stuff like this is happening repeatedly, unchecked, in our country today.
It just floors me that Republicans these days aren't even embarrassed to admit it. I would be thoroughly ashamed. Rich said last night that putting up a Bush-Cheney sign in your yard is like having one that says, "Yes, I am a selfish, misogynistic bigot." (Or something like that.) I think we need to add one more adjective: anti-democratic.
Thursday’s actions in Oregon set a new standard even for Bush/Cheney – removing and threatening with arrest citizens who in no way disrupt an event and wear clothing that expresses non-disruptive party-neutral viewpoints such as “Protect Our Civil Liberties.”
...The women said they did not intend to protest. "I wanted to see if I would be able to make a statement that I feel is important, but not offensive, in a rally for my president," said Janet Voorhies, 48, a teacher in training.
“We chose this phrase specifically because we didn't think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene," said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.
Some 2000 US citizens opposed to the Iraq war will be sending Iraqis personal photos with protest messages to show not all Americans condone the invasion.
...An initiative of the peace group Fellowship of Reconciliation, the photos and messages are aimed at convincing Iraqis that most US citizens were shocked by the photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners and many regret a war being waged in their name.
A veteran's group, however, says the initiative undercuts US soldiers.
John Newberry, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said: "This type of thing only serves to undermine the effort and the sacrifice of our military in Iraq. These people on the face of it seem to have a political agenda. It implies that what we are attempting to do in Iraq is shameful".
A top Falluja negotiator who has been released from US custody says peace talks with the interim Iraqi government have been called off.
"The people of Falluja have suspended negotiations, despite the fact they had made progress, because of arrests like mine and American policies," Khalid Hamud al-Jumaili said.
Al-Jumaili was released at 2am (2300 GMT) on Monday after his arrest three days ago.
Puppet Tough GuyAllawi last week threatened to crush Falluja (which the Americans are already doing) if the city does not cooperate by "turning over" terrorists, something the people of the city have no ability to do. And now suddenly he says he's going to provide $2 million in aid to the ravaged city. Your guess is as good as mine, but I'd say this man is even less stable than Saddam Hussein.
Battles between US forces and insurgents in Falluja lasted for nine hours on Sunday and were punctuated by air strikes.
"I think the residents of Falluja don't want this sort of peace. They want real peace, not a peace that stabs in the back and strikes and destroys homes and kills women," Jumaili said.
"Who asks for peace while bombs strike? Who agrees to peace when women are being killed?"
Oh, wow. We never thought of that.
Al-Jumaili is a member of the Mujahideen Shura (council) of tribal notables and insurgent leaders in Falluja, which has been in the hands of guerrillas since a US offensive in April failed to dislodge them. Police there do not answer to Baghdad.
The negotiator said he had met US civilian and political representatives, not Iraqi police or the US-established Iraqi National Guard.
"The US representatives said Falluja will receive their rightful reconstruction aid and compensation soon, but they need time," said al-Jumaili.
"We told them that they had enough time and it was time for them to hold talks and achieve peace."
Ah. The reason Allawi has flip-flopped to an offer of aid money. I would trust that puppet asshole as much as I trust Bush. And I'm sure that al-Jumaili is at least that smart.
US civilian and political representatives are negotiating the deals. Sovereign, eh? What a joke. Because you'll believe anything.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Previous posts on the systematic razing of Falluja are linked here.
A number of Army officers contacted in recent days said such an apparent act of insubordination was very unusual, particularly among such a large number of soldiers in a single unit and especially since the military is all volunteer.
The incident has prompted widespread interest among military families who have complained in months past of inadequate equipment and protection for their soldiers.
Nancy Lessin, a leader of Military Families Speak Out, which opposes the war, said she had been flooded with calls and e-mail from families with a simple message: What had happened to the reservists echoed the conditions their own soldiers experienced in Iraq: a shortage of armored vehicles, especially for part-time soldiers' units; convoy missions through dangerous stretches without adequate firepower; and constant breakdowns among old vehicles owned, especially, by National Guard and reservist units.
"This is absolutely striking a nerve," Ms. Lessin said. "People are saying, 'This is the same thing that happened to my son,' and if the Army tries to spin this as 'just a few bad apples,' people need to know that these are common problems and what these soldiers did required a tremendous amount of courage."
... "This is not the first time that there has been a problem with these charges and stuff, with them not having armor, not having radios," said Beverly Dobbs, mother of Specialist Dobbs. "My son told me two months ago - he called me, he said, 'Mom I got the scare of my life.'
"'I said what's wrong?'" Ms. Dobbs said. "He said, 'They sent us out, we come under fire, our own people was shooting and we didn't even have radios to let them know.' They're sending them out without the equipment they need. I don't care what the Army says."
Families that spoke to the soldiers this weekend received slightly differing accounts of what happened the morning of Oct. 13. They all said, however, that fuel the soldiers had to deliver was unusable because it had been contaminated with a second liquid. They all said the soldiers were under armed guard. General Chambers denied both assertions. Relatives say that Sergeant Butler, Sgt. Larry McCook of Jackson and Specialist Scott Shealey of Graysville, Ala., have been identified as three of five "ringleaders" of the incident and reassigned to other units on the air base. Specialist Shealey's parents said their son said in a telephone call that he was going to be discharged.
Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan has been withdrawn from his post for "operational reasons" following a series of public differences of opinion with his employers.
Craig Murray has courted controversy since being appointed to the embassy in Tashkent in 2002 by publicly accusing the Uzbek government of torturing political and religious prisoners.
Earlier this week, details were revealed of a furious memo he sent to the Foreign Office, complaining that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was using information passed on to it by the CIA but originally obtained in Uzbek torture cells.
As well as being morally and legally wrong, the practice was unreliable because prisoners under torture could be expected to say whatever their tormentors wanted to hear, he warned.
And he wrote: "We are selling our souls for dross."
...Mr Murray caused a stir by speaking out publicly in 2002 about brutality in Uzbek jails, highlighting the case of two men who were boiled to death.
At least Mr. Murray has kept his soul. I don't know what Bush and Blair got for theirs, but I doubt they were worth dross.
Uzbek is our buddy. So if they boil people in Uzbekistan, I take that to mean it's okay. I assume the rendered fat is valuable. Maybe that's what we'll be replacing oil with when we run out.
Mr Murray - who was not invited to the meeting - alleged that the country's hard-line president, Islam Karimov, was seeking to portray his Government's suppression of Islamists as part of the global war against international terrorism.
And he warned: "Tortured dupes are forced to sign confessions showing what the Uzbek Government wants the US and UK to believe - that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.
"This is morally, legally and practically wrong."
Well, Mr. Murray, the US and UK have no use for morality. Morality doesn't fill the coffers, now, does it? It doesn't get you elected to high office, now, does it? Go sit on the sidelines, Mr. Murray. And keep your mouth shut if you want to stay alive. We might not yet be able to boil you here or in London, but there are still flights to Uzbekistan.
KKKarl Rove testified before the Grand Jury on the Valerie Plame case on Friday, and the DNC chair has issued a statement regarding that testimony, as you might imagine.
In the meantime, reporters who had nothing to do with the story are facing contempt charges and jail time. The White House knows who committed the act of treason. That person (or persons) is being shielded from justice while other people pay the penalty.
Only two days. I have to go out of town. I'll be back Sunday night. In the meantime, just keep reading that last post. Oh, and check out the links in the sidebar on the left and here.
When the troops rebel, you can really stop believing BushClown's happy talk.
The Army is investigating reports that several members of a reservist supply unit in Iraq refused to go on a convoy mission, the military said Friday. Relatives of the soldiers said the troops considered the mission too dangerous.
The reservists are from the 343rd Quartermaster Company, which is based in Rock Hill, S.C. The unit delivers food and water in combat zones.
According to The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., a platoon of 17 soldiers refused to go on a fuel supply mission Wednesday because their vehicles were in poor shape and they did not have a capable armed escort.
The paper cited interviews with family members of some of the soldiers, who said the soldiers had been confined after their refusals.
...The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina...
"I got a call from an officer in another unit early (Thursday) morning who told me that my husband and his platoon had been arrested on a bogus charge because they refused to go on a suicide mission," said Jackie Butler of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Michael Butler, a 24-year reservist. "When my husband refuses to follow an order, it has to be something major."
The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., whose daughter Amber McClenny is among those being detained.
McClenny, 21, pleaded for help in a message left on her mother's answering machine early Thursday morning.
"They are holding us against our will," McClenny said. "We are now prisoners."
Of course, we are only hearing about this because some soldiers managed to alert their families in the States.
Patricia McCook said her husband, a staff sergeant, understands well the severity of disobeying orders. But he did not feel comfortable taking his soldiers on another trip.
And get this....
Harris said conditions for the platoon have been difficult of late. Her son e-mailed her earlier this week to ask what the penalty would be if he became physical with a commanding officer...
Vice President Dick Cheney is an angry dad. And he is blaming Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for dragging his lesbian daughter into the campaign.
Kerry referred to her during a debate with President Bush on Wednesday. Kerry responded to a question about whether homosexuality is a choice by mentioning Cheney's daughter, Mary, who has publicly acknowledged being a lesbian.
What is this B.S. about Kerry "outing" Mary Cheney and dragging her into the campaign? Jeezus, we are a nation of idiots. First Lynne Cheney is bitching, now Oil Slick Dick is pretending to be outraged. WTF?!? Did Oil Slick not personally speak to the issue in his debate with Edwards a mere ten days ago? Did they not talk about it and exchange pleasantries, howdy-doo's and hail-fellow-well-mets? I know our attention spans and memories are short, but come on.
EDWARDS: Now, as to this question, let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy....
IFILL: Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds.
CHENEY: Well, Gwen, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.
Perhaps I didn't miss anything by not seeing it. Except more of the same? Wulfgar offers up a summation that I think might stand me in good stead from having to read the actual transcript. He also asks why there weren't any good questions from the moderator. I have essentially given up on the "mainstream", and so I don't expect any good questions, but I wonder if the questions had to pass approval by the candidates, as they did in the "town hall" debate.
P.S. Wulfgar links to World O' Crap, where there's an excellent and amusing analysis of the debate.
G.D. Frogsdong has hit the frog on the dong. Or something like that.
Let me tell you about an experience I had while phone banking for local candidates. Understand that our county candidates have absolutely nothing to do with abortion. I called one woman and began to talk to her about the county candidates. I explained to her that the people I was talking about were running for freeholder and sheriff. When I tried to tell her a little about them (I had been talking for maybe fifteen seconds), she cut me off and asked, "Which candidate is against abortion?" I told her I didn't know, that these candidates had nothing to do with the abortion issue and made no decisions affecting abortion. She said, "Well, whichever one is against abortion, that's who I am voting for." I asked her, realizing that this was a wasted phone call anyway, "And which one is that?" She answered, "I don't know. That's what I asked you." She doesn't know who the candidate against abortion is, but she's voting for him. If I were a Republican, I would have told her that all the candidates I mentioned are opposed to abortion. I still regret that I didn't, but that wouldn't have been honest, so I told her the truth, which is that I don't know.
That is something we are up against. There are a lot of people who don't care about anything but one issue. "Is he a Christian?" "Does he support abortion?" "Is he someone I would want to have a beer with?"
You can tell those people the facts all day long and they won't hear a word you are saying.
[The] South Dakota campaign official who resigned after questions arose over absentee-ballot applications will work in Ohio for the Bush-Cheney campaign, an internal Republican Party memo indicates.
Larry Russell, who was chairman of the South Dakota Republican Party's get-out-the-vote operation, resigned this week after questions were raised about the validity of some of the 1,400 absentee-ballot applications gathered, largely on college campuses, by the program Russell led.
...When South Dakota Republican Party Chairman Randy Frederick announced the resignations of Russell and five others Monday evening, he said the state party has a "zero-tolerance policy."
But an internal Republican Party memo obtained by the Argus Leader said Russell would be going to Cleveland "to lead the ground operations" for President Bush and Vice President Cheney there.
Ohio is a swing state considered vital to a successful presidential victory.
Attempts to contact Bush-Cheney campaign officials in Cleveland were unsuccessful.
And he's taking three of the other fraudsters who were forced to resign with him. When the State of Missouri fired John Ashcroft, he went to work for BushCo. When the state of Michigan fired Spencer Abraham, he went to work for BushCo. Yessir. No sleezebag left behind.
Update immediate:
The unindicted co-conspirator in a 2002 election fraud case, which has already yielded two felony guilty pleas, is none other than Jim Tobin, New England regional chair of Bush-Cheney 2004, according to court documents filed Thursday by the New Hampshire Democratic Party and now reported by the Manchester Union Leader.
...Now the Justice Department is intervening to delay discovery and depositions that would almost certainly bring more of the facts to light before election day.
Tobin's alleged role has been an open secret for some time within the Bush campaign, political and journalistic circles in New Hampshire and, of course, among the lawyers involved in the case.
When President George W. Bush spoke of importing Canadian flu vaccine during Wednesday's election debate, many in the U.S. public health community were struck by the irony of an administration that slams the door on cheaper Canadian drugs, but looks north for help with an embarrassing vaccine shortage.
Because some people were believing his drivel about the danger of reimportation. Duh.
The company has between one million and 1.5 million surplus doses it has offered to sell to American authorities who have been scrambling since vaccine giant Chiron Corp. revealed it could not provide the up to 48 million doses it had contracted to supply to the U.S. market.
Their hopes may have been dampened later in the day, though, when Tommy Thompson, the U.S. secretary of health, said it was doubtful that vaccine from producers not currently licensed in the United States could be imported to help with this year's massive shortage.
Be prepared. I think that's the Homeland Security motto. How're we doing? At the mercy of Big Pharma, eh?
Female Fox coworker details lewd behavior of cable TV star
OCTOBER 13--Hours after Bill O'Reilly accused her of a multimillion dollar shakedown attempt, a female Fox News producer fired back at the TV star today, filing a lawsuit claiming that he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. Below you'll find a copy of Andrea Mackris's complaint, an incredible page-turner that quotes O'Reilly, 55, on all sorts of lewd matters. Based on the extensive quotations cited in the complaint, it appears a safe bet that Mackris, 33, recorded some of O'Reilly's more steamy soliloquies.
Twenty-eight US soldiers face various charges ranging from involuntary manslaughter to conspiracy in the deaths of two prisoners in Afghanistan two yearsago, the US Army announced Thursday.
One of the soldiers, a military police reservist, has already been charged in connection the deaths. Commanders of the other 27 "will consider the full range of appropriate administrative and disciplinary measures from taking no action to recommending trial by court-martial," the Army said.
The announcement came after a 22-month investigation into the two deaths. Both prisoners, one died on Dec. 4 and the other Dec. 10, 2002, suffered "blunt force injuries," according to the Army. Military medical examiners classified their deaths as homicides.
Allawi warned Wednesday that Fallujah must surrender al-Zarqawi and other foreign fighters or face military attack.
Abu Asaad, spokesman for the religious council of Fallujah, said that ''handing over al-Zarqawi'' was an ''impossible condition'' since even the Americans were unable to catch him.
''Since we exhausted all peaceful solutions, the city is now ready to bear arms and defend its religion and honor and it's not afraid of Allawi's statements,'' Asaad said in a live interview with Al-Jazeera television.
... ''Military operations didn't even stop when the negotiating delegation was in Baghdad,'' Asaad said. ''Dozens are killed every day. Entire families have been eliminated.''
The government made no comment about the breakdown of the Fallujah talks. However, national security adviser Qassem Dawoud said military operations against Fallujah ''will continue'' until the city ''has been cleansed'' of ''terrorists.''
Dawoud said he is hopeful the delegation will succeed in ridding the city of insurgents.
''I hope they can succeed and can take them away from Fallujah as soon as possible, or otherwise, we're preparing ourselves to smash them ... by military means,'' he said.
...Late Thursday, residents of the city, 40 miles west of Baghdad, reported shuddering American bombardments using planes and armored vehicles in what they said was the most intensive shelling since U.S. forces began weeks of ''precision strikes'' aimed at al-Zarqawi's network.
In Washington, however, a senior military official, speaking on operational matters on condition of anonymity, described the latest fighting as strikes against specific targets and of the same scope as previous attacks into Fallujah.
Warplanes and artillery pounded the city as two U.S. Marine battalions attacked rebel positions to ''restore security and stability,'' 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told CNN.
Total destruction will henceforth be known as "restoring security and stability."
Maj. Francis Piccoli, spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told The Associated Press that two Marine battalions were engaged in the fight backed up by aircraft.
He would not say the attack was the start of a major campaign to recapture the city, saying he did not want to jeopardize any future operations.
Piccoli said the goal of the operation was to ''disrupt the capabilities of the anti-Iraqi forces.''
James Wolcott is perplexed about why Butthead didn't bother to know anything or prepare for the debates.
Now that the three debates belong to history, furnishing boring anecdotes from Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin for years to come, I'm struck by a single defining element that permeated each encounter: Bush's cavalier lack of preparation. Forget the cosmetics for a moment: the menagerie of mannerisms Bush displayed. He simply didn't come loaded with ammo. I assumed that he'd have some killer line at the ready, some surprise dug up from Kerry's record to spring, a practiced bit of eloquence that would lift the debate at a dramatic moment out of the recitation of facts and figures. He not only didn't have the eloquence, he barely had the facts and figures. For some bizarre reason best left to future psychologists, Bush doesn't seem to have approached these debates seriously. He refused to acknowledge he couldn't get by with simply rehashing his stump speech. When I saw on the news that Bush has prepared for this final debate by rehearsing during his spare moments on the campaign trail in Air Force One and the limo drives, I thought: that's now true preparation, that's lazy last-minute cramming.
...Bush barely seemed to know or care what state he was in. It was as if for him a studio was a studio was a studio.[Emphasis added]
The obvious reason is the same one for why he sat so calmly last November during the Florida count saying he was sure he'd "win". It's fixed. One way or another. Hang on to your hats, because I'd hate for it to be the 9/11 way, but it could well be.
I missed all but the last question because I was in an AutoCAD class. I'm just now getting to read some blogger comments, and I'm going to venture that it's obvious now the Idiot in Chief is not wired to anyone with a brain, or they wouldn't have let him finish his sentence when he said he hadn't ever said he no longer cared about Osama bin Laden. To have that particular claim, which he did indeed make, repeated over and over at this time while news sources and the rest of us remind each other that he said it, is really not a good thing for him as he continues to try to claim that he's saving us from terrorists.
Bush's statement was obviously a lie, and it lends itself so well to a video comparison that it's probably going to get played over and over and over. It was a big mistake to give news and talk shows such a good excuse to play that old video again.
Biiiig mistake. But are they playing it?
When I turned on the tube, Bush was finishing up a last rebuttal, saying something and punctuating it by slapping his hand on the podium. A couple of articles I've read mention him pounding the podium - one wondered if he might pull off his shoe to pound with, and I realized I had the same image of Nikita Bush. Did he do that throughout the debate?
I'll try to get the transcript read, but I do have a point to make about what little I did see, the last question: What have you learned from your wives and daughters? Neither one of them wanted to admit to much. Buthead shot back in what seemed like a snarky poor hen-pecked man mode: "To listen to 'em." And then paused for a long time - waiting for a laugh? Trying to think of something he might have learned from them? Maybe he was serious. But remember in the first debate, he said he tried to keep a leash on his daughters. I don't expect he listens much to anybody, much less the women in his life. Something tells me his relationship with his mother pretty well set his attitude toward women. His answer was all about how wonderful his wife and daughters are and how much he loves them. Like when Jenna was in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy and he went on vacation, saying if she didn't get to come, she could stay home and clean her room?
I'd like to ask each of you, what is the most important thing you've learned from these strong women?
BUSH: To listen to them.
(LAUGHTER)
To stand up straight and not scowl.
(LAUGHTER)
I love the strong women around me. I can't tell you how much I love my wife and our daughters.
While Kerry at least gave his mother credit for saying that integrity was the most important thing for him to mind while running for president, he did the same thing as Butthead - repeated how wonderful his wife and daughters are and how much he loves them, and what they do for him. Apparently neither of these men thinks they have anything to learn from their women. Gee, why am I not surprised?
The head of a trade association that represents competitors of the large regional telephone companies resigned after his lobbying plan was published by mistake on the Federal Communications Commission's Web site.
...Details of a lobbying strategy -- and lobbyists' assessments of the officials they lobby -- are usually top secret. Lawmakers and regulators exhibit a strong distaste for any hint that interest groups are working to manipulate them, even though that is precisely what lobbyists regularly do.
Well, yeah, but we're the people who can't even shift our working hours up an hour without setting our clocks to pretend it's still the same time.
The disclosure of the candid document embarrassed ALTS and subjected it to ridicule among other lobbying organizations. The incident was also the latest in a series of setbacks suffered by ALTS in recent months. The FCC and federal courts have ruled that regional telephone companies no longer are required to share key parts of their telephone networks with rivals, including ALTS member companies. The result of those decisions is likely to make it more difficult for ALTS member companies to compete for customers.
...The document alleged that FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell will support President Bush's push for high-speed Internet growth "before the election" and that Commissioner Kathleen Q. Abernathy, also a Republican, "will follow the lead of the Chairman."
...In addition, the document said ALTS has "helped" with five fundraising events this year, for Stevens, Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) and Rep. Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (R-Miss.). It also suggested that ALTS and its member firms needed to raise even more money for lawmakers.
Just a little peek at the way things really work. So, beyond the embarrassment and horror for the hopeful competitor, is the real message in all of this that there is no chance in hell mega communications companies can be challenged?
Over strenuous objections from the Bush administration, Congress is moving to increase protections for federal employees who expose fraud, waste and wrongdoing inside the ... Lawmakers of both parties say the measures are needed to prevent retaliation against such whistleblowers
The Senate has already passed its bill. The House has a similar measure in the works. But the White House has been complaining about the bills as strongly as the innards of Mount St. Helens are protesting the movement of tectonic plates.
And here's a surprise: the bill's sponsors are Republicans.
Although the legislation is bipartisan, the chief sponsors of the bills are Republicans. Both Rep. Todd R. Platts of Pennsylvania and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine have been urging the president to drop his opposition. They say that federal employees need more protection if they are to continue exposing the kinds of abuse that so often emanate from their agencies.
It would seem there are some Republicans who are not too happy about the new Republican tank being driven over them by Bush, DeLay & Co. What these two fail to realize is that Bush probably has the most to lose with better whistleblower protections and is about as likely to drop his opposition to their bill as I am to sprout wings. And his opposition is for the very reason that they are pressing him to drop it. Of course the Bush administration is "strenuously" objecting. Their Ace in the hole is that people know they are strenuously vindictive. And, considering the number of prominent whistleblowers who have already decided to take the risk anyway, I'd wager a guess that there is a whole parade of people with stories to tell just waiting for better protection.
For more information about blowing the whistle, visit the various links on my web page here.
As soon as they get that far down the list of wiping out terrorists and those who aid them.
Here we are on the map. Terrorist-aiding Columbia, Missouri.
COLUMBIA — The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday froze the assets of a Columbia-based Islamic charity, alleging that it has supported terrorists, including Osama bin Laden.
Update 8:30pm: LaBelle's husband, who works for the local newspaper, says the FBI informed the reporters of the intended raid so there would be good coverage.
Four Americans killed in bombings in the Green Zone in Baghdad on Thursday were all employees of the private U.S. security firm DynCorp, a U.S. official said Thursday.
...The firm, Dyncorp, helps provide security primarily in areas where Americans work in the Iraqi capital.
...Only Wednesday night, in a Washington speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell said "we are facing a difficult time in Iraq." He called the insurgents monsters but expressed confidence the U.S.-led coalition would gradually gain the upper hand.
When things have deteriorated so badly that the Green Zone isn't even defendable, you should stop believing the happy talk coming out of the White House.
Who do you think these people see as the monsters?
Iraqis search for survivors following a third US military airstrike on the northern part of Fallujah, outside Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, Oct. 14, 2004. At least five people were killed and 16 wounded according to Fallujah General Hospital. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Haji Hussein restaurant was reduced to a pile of rubble source
This is really not good news, but it is news the likes of which I have been waiting to hear ever since 9/11 "changed everything". I missed, but thankfully Bob caught it.
The US government move to shut down nearly two dozen antiwar, anti-globalization web sites on October 7 is an unprecedented exercise of police power against political dissent on the Internet. The World Socialist Web Site denounces the attack on the Indymedia sites and demands a halt to all such attempts at suppressing political criticism of the US government.
The shutdown was carried out by Rackspace, a US-based web-hosting company with offices in San Antonio, Texas, and greater London, in response to an order from the FBI requiring it to turn over two of its British servers that were hosting dozens of Indymedia sites.
...At least 20 national web sites, including those for Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Uruguay were taken down when the hard drives for the servers were given to the FBI. Most of the sites were restored to service by the end of the weekend, but they may have lost significant digital content because of the removal of the hardware.
The seizure appeared to be politically timed. It came just one week before the start of the third session of the European Social Forum (ESF), a large gathering of antiwar and anti-globalization activists, scheduled to take place in London October 15-17. The ESF was to be broadcast live via streaming video on many of the Indymedia sites.
It's the obvious political ad that has just been waiting to be made -- a young Iraq war veteran, missing a body part, talking simply and directly to the camera about the sacrifice he made in the service of official lies. The idea didn't come from the Democratic Party, or MoveOn.org, or the Kerry campaign.
The new ad is the creation of a group of Iraq war veterans, most in their 20s, operating on a shoestring budget. Their organization, Operation Truth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group of 150 members, is dedicated to elevating the perspective of soldiers and holding elected officials accountable for their policy decisions.
Watch this first ad featuring Robert Acosta. Their goal is to raise $200,000 to air it nationally next week.
I am Robert Acosta. When my country called, I went to Iraq without hesitation. Make no mistake, I am proud of my service and proud of my fellow troops. But for many troops like me, there was a tremendous cost. See, while driving with another soldier, a grenade was tossed into the cab of my truck. I saw the pin was pulled and smoke was starting to come out of the top. I struggled to reach the grenade as we sped off, but I couldn't get to it in time. My leg was severely injured and I lost my arm as a result of the explosion. I swore I was going to die, and even told my friend who was driving to tell my parents that I loved them.
I'm not looking for pity by telling my story or by being in this ad, I'm a soldier and do what I have to do. But, I'm trying to make an important point. The Pentagon will only refer to me as a number -- one of the 7700 wounded in action. They don't want you to know who I am or who the others coming back severely injured are. They don't want you to see what we see in the mirror everyday. I'll be the first to tell you, it's tough to look at. But it's important because no American can make a fully informed judgement about the war without looking at and listening to the men and women coming home.
That's what Operation Truth is allowing guys like me to do - show you my face and tell you my story.
Check out the ad, and then look around the website.
You can donate to their organization from a link on the website. If you have any money to spare. If not, you can email their address around to get the word out.
Imagine Bush filches another election in November. Nations mourn, black clouds gather, children cry, colons spasm, the remaining shreds of the American experiment wither and die.
And within a very short time, as many as 30 U.S. states have recriminalized abortion and made repressing women and hating sex fun again, as young American females everywhere who thought their right to choose was pretty much incontrovertible and indisputable and unfailing and who therefore didn't bother to vote in '00 or '04 suddenly go, oh holy freaking hell.
Go let Mark Morfordexplain to you why Oprah wants women to vote this year.
"There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability," said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president's back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.
Darbut speculates that the device the president wears is provided by the Secret Service, noting, "They're not going to have him driving around the countryside on his ranch without being in instant contact with him."
Wouldn't it just be easier to have a phone in his truck? Just asking.
But hey, I'm up for the game.....maybe the wire thing explains why he was so pissed off about somebody at the Queen's place in London capturing a picture of him in his T-shirt. He came this close to having somebody see him getting wired. It's just all starting to fall into place, isn't it? Or maybe that's the wire they use to hang him in the closet when they put him away for the evening.
On Tuesday, in response to repeated questions from Salon, the Bush camp finally issued a flat denial. Campaign spokesman Reed Dickens denied that Bush has ever used an electronic device to aid his public speaking, insisting the president was wearing "nothing during the debates."
Dude! Can I quote you on that? The Emperor has no clothes.
On Tuesday, the New York Daily News produced a master tailor named Frank Shattuck who, after viewing photos from both debates, confirmed, "There's definitely something there, in between the shoulder blades. I can't say what it is, but it's not hidden very well. They should have come to me. I can hide a pistol under the breast."
And fire that damned French tailor who makes those puckery suits.
When asked about the pictures taken at the Bush ranch, Dickens said the president has never used any devices except for cutting tools and earplugs to protect his ears from the high-decibel chainsaw. Nor has the Secret Service outfitted Bush with a hidden communications device, according to Dickens: "He doesn't need something like that because the Secret Service is always with him. They ride in the truck in the back. Wherever he goes, they're with him."
Of course they are. By the droves, from what I've seen and read.
So anyway, just what is that wire thingy under his T-shirt?
Somebody is right this minute combing every single tape of presidential appearances. One thing's for certain. Butthead doesn't have to worry about watching his back any more. Everybody will be doing it for him.
We have to be on our toes for tonight's debate. It's very probable that Our Furious Leader will go into a violent fit of rage, pull a piece from his waistband, and shoot Bob Schieffer. We can't prevent it from happening--killing is how Our Leader deals with frustration. We can, however, try to put a positive spin on it. I've created the following talking points to help you do just that.
Norwegians including artists and politicians made a rare foray into U.S. politics on Tuesday with an advertisement in a U.S. newspaper saying that President George W. Bush's war on terror was backfiring.
The Norwegian group "www.tellhim.no" said it used about $50,000 in donations from 4,000 people to fund the advertisement in the Washington Post to tell Bush that 80 percent of people in NATO-member Norway opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has threatened military action unless the rebel-held city of Fallujah hands over foreign militants led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is said to be based there.
...Allawi said on Wednesday he hoped the Fallujah negotiators he had met would return to the city and put more pressure on guerrilla factions and the city's people in general to give up the fight.
"I hope they will respond. If they don't then we will have to use force," he said.
A Tiny Revolution has an excerpt from a recent Seymour Hersch interview.
Seymour Hersh spoke at Berkeley last Friday, October 8th. He told a story about recently receiving a call from an American lieutenant in Iraq who'd just witnessed other American soldiers killing non-combatant Iraqis.
I'd like to say what follows is unbelievable. Unfortunately, I can't. Read on.
Sometimes somebody has to be paying attention for you
Rich, bless his heart and soul, pointed out to me last week that You Will Anyway was about to have its first anniversary, and he planned a celebratory event for the occasion. (At this prompting, I had to go back into the archives to find out just when it was that I started the blog.) Of course I've known Rich for a little longer than a year, and I've come to believe that he is perpetually on the lookout for an occasion to celebrate something. What a joy.
But let's pretend for a moment that the birth of YWAis something to be celebrated. When Bob suggested I start blogging, I dismissed it out of hand as something that I wouldn't even keep up for one month, much less one year. But here we are, a year down the road, and I've only truly thought about quitting two or three times. Time is a funny thing, isn't it? Somebody wise once said to me that it's not time that's important, but timing.
Our world is currently undergoing a great awakening. Even though the majority of the people seem to be still sleeping (some actually walking dead), a core group on the leading edge of eternity are experiencing that awakening in various ways. It's the evolution of mankind. Expect it to be rocky. Expect it to be difficult and strenuous. After all, it really is a birth. I don't know what we will be called post homo sapiens, but somebody probably already has us named. In fact, I think the extreme fundamentalists, including the sleeper in the Oval Office, who are cheering on the Apocalypse, have a sense of what is happening, but not the ability to understand the true meaning of it. They understand that there is a point in human existence where some will leap into another realm, while most stay behind. They just don't understand that they are the ones staying behind. No problem. Everything is cyclical in this universe. They'll get picked up on a future revolution.
But I got tangential there. What I meant to do with this post (See what happens? You think you mean to do something, but you actually do what you are meant to do.) was to note the auspicious day and timing of the birth and anniversary of You Will Anyway, since we are pretending that it is cause for celebration.
October 13. First of all, 13 is not an unlucky number. It is, in fact, a number well honored in the wisdom of the ages - ancient understanding of cosmic reality. It belonged to the realm of the feminine, which was understood to be the birthing realm. Thirteen 4-week periods in the Earth's trip around the sun. Women's bodies are still attuned to that natural cycle. It was kings who decided to steal nature from mankind and set up false calendars with their names on the fabricated months. It was men desiring power over nature and other men who denigrated everything to do with that natural rhythm of the world, because it was attached to feminity and goddess worship. It was they who systematically destroyed all things of that goddess worship (leaving the virgin Mary as a token) and turned the number 13 into something associated with evil. It was they who robbed men of their feminine aspect and will to nurture. In the unfolding of a new human, men are finding and reclaiming their feminine aspect. Balance. Kings will rule no more. We are becoming sovereign and self-directing, balanced human beings.
After finding out that I started this blog on October 13, a couple more October 13 notices made their way across my e-desk. (Three 10/13 "messages" in three days?) One was an article talking about the Third appearance of Our Lady of Fatima. The following is an excerpt from "text of the Pastoral Letter released by Dom Jose Carreia da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, on October 13, 1930 taken from Robert Bergin's This Apocalyptic Age."
"The solar phenomenon of October 13, 1917, described in the papers at the time, was something marvelous and caused a great impression upon those who had the happiness to witness it. The children had previously announced the day and the hour when it would occur. The news spread rapidly over the whole of Portugal, and despite the day being a tempestuous one, with copious rain, the thousands who had assembled at the hour of the final Apparition (October 13, 1917), witnessed all the manifestations of the sun, paying, as it were, homage to the Queen of Heaven and earth.
The second October 13 message came from a notice at Freeway Blogger: Freeway Free Speech Day: Driving America to Think - October 13, 2004.
On October 13th, over a thousand activists nationwide will post signs critical of the Bush Administration on area freeways, reaching millions of voters in states from Maine to California.
You can be part of the effort. Go to the website and see how.
So there. Today is an auspicious day for the anniversary of You Will Anyway. Rich and his lovely wife, together with LaBelle (my wonderful sister Jean) and me, will be celebrating on Sunday (and in thought today, of course) by going to see What the Bleep Do We Know? and then kicking back at the local micro brewery afterward to ponder together all things great and small...maybe even why the bleep we're here and doing what we're doing. Maybe not. Maybe just getting tipsy. If you happen by the Flat Branch Sunday evening, stop and join us. (For those of you who will be in New York on Sunday, you're invited to a Greg Palast viewing of his movie Bush Family Fortunes at Village East Cinema at 7:00pm and an after party at the Pioneer Bar, 218 Bowery. Get your tickets online here.)
Rich also created some bricks for my garden and dropped them off last night with a six-pack of Grolsch (especially for the bottles, 'cause they make bottling my home brew so easy!). I didn't realize you get gifts with your one year blogging anniversary. Much as I like the Grolsch and the bottles, I am just goofy about the bricks. Nobody will be hiring me for my brick-laying skills.....but hey, it's my yard, and I'll do what I want.....
P.S. For all you Goddesses out there...tonight brings a new moon and a solar eclipse. Now there's some symbolism for you.
GOP funded group is trashing Democrat voter registrations
Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.
Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.
The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
...Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.
So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.
The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters.
...The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.
And here's a careerbuilder.com listing for the same company looking for door-to-door canvassers. Paid for by the GOP. And here it seems that the same outfit was doing work for Nader in Arizona.
Anything to win. Fuck democracy. Fuck the Constitution. Fuck you. Republicans intend to stay in control.
[On the basis of a six-question quiz,] "Daily Show" viewers know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news...
..."Daily Show" viewers came out on top "even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age and gender are taken into consideration."
You can take the quiz by clicking a link at that CNN page. YWA readers will ace it. Honestly, it's very easy. Amazingly enough, these were the score results...
You got 6 out of 6 correct on your first attempt.
Excellent work! But when do you sleep?
Check your score against these averages: • "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart viewers - 3.59 correct • "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno viewers - 2.95 correct • "Late Show" with David Letterman viewers - 2.91 correct • No late-night comedy viewing - 2.62 correct
And you wonder why I have no faith in the American electorate.
Anyway, here is some more surprising information about Daily Show viewers....
Comedy Central was waiting for news like this. On September 17, Stewart appeared on Bill O'Reilly's "The O'Reilly Factor" only to be told his viewers are "stoned slackers" and "dopey kids."
"You know what's really frightening?" O'Reilly asked Stewart. " You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary, but it's true."
Comedy Central used its viewers' test scores Tuesday to strike back at Fox News Channel and O'Reilly's viewers.
It also trotted out stats from Nielsen Media Research to show that Stewart's viewers are not only smart, but more educated than O'Reilly's.
"Daily Show" viewers are 78 percent more likely than the average adult to have four or more years of college education, while O'Reilly's audience is only 24 percent more likely to have that much schooling.
Plus, the network noted, "Daily Show" viewers are 26 percent more likely to have a household income more than $100,000, while O'Reilly's audience is only 11 percent more likely to make that much money.
I hope somebody is rubbing Douchebag O'Reilly's nose in that.
The Brat King keeps reminding us that freedom is a wonderful thing, and that because of our freedom-spreading efforts, Afghan women and Iraqi women are getting to vote. I wonder when we're going to spread some of that wonderful freedom to the women of Saudi Arabia.
Women will not be able to participate in Saudi Arabia's first nationwide elections because authorities in the strictly segregated country did not have enough time to prepare for both sexes to run and vote, the head of the elections committee said Tuesday.
Prince Mansour also could not say whether women would be allowed to take part in the next round of municipal elections in 2009, stressing that would be up to the committee planning those polls.
Oct. 12, 2004 | Washington -- Federal regulators proposed a record indecency fine of nearly $1.2 million Tuesday against Fox Broadcasting Co. for an episode of its reality series "Married by America."
The Federal Communications Commission cited the network for the April 7, 2003, program, which included scenes from Las Vegas bachelor and bachelorette parties featuring strippers and various sexual situations.
Update 10/13: Gee, sorry I didn't proof this post or something. I didn't realize it was cut off at the beginning, and frankly, I don't remember what it was I had written.....
The filmmaker behind the new pro-John Kerry documentary plans to offer it to Sinclair Broadcasting-- free of charge -- to see if the company is interested in showing its viewers a balanced presentation of the candidate.
... Earlier this week as the controversy brewed, a Sinclair spokesman told the New York Times the company would consider running a Kerry documentary from a different perspective. Alexander's offer may effectively, and publicly, call Sinclair's bluff.
..."Sinclair's using public airwaves to broadcast, at a politically sensitive time, an anti-Kerry message," says Paul Alexander, director of the critically-acclaimed "Brothers in Arms" film, which examines Kerry's experience in Vietnam, and casts him in a favorable light. "My argument is if they're going to air 'Stolen Honor' then they should run my film, and preferably in the hour right after it. I'm sending them a letter tomorrow demanding that."
...He says he's also willing to offer his movie for free and to cut it down to match the exact the time length of "Stolen Honor." "I'll do whatever it takes," he says. Adding, "If they don't air it, then their intention with "Stolen Honor" is clear; it's a political move to assassinate the character of John Kerry."
All this at a time when His Slowliness the Dope is getting hit with the wired story. (Which apparently has now made it to Late Night with David Letterman. I suspect Jon Stewart on the Daily Show as well. I'll check.) Tsk. Tsk.
The increasingly strange behavior of Republican Sen. Jim Bunning has led to speculation that he is suffering from some kind of dementia -- and tightened a race he once had in his pocket.
Over the past few months, Bunning has angrily pushed away reporters, exchanged testy words with a questioner at a Rotary Club and stuck to brief, heavily scripted remarks at campaign events, delivered in a halting monotone. The former major league baseball star now travels the Bluegrass State with a special police escort, at taxpayer expense. His explanation? Al-Qaida may be out to get him.
...At an annual Kentucky political event called Fancy Farm, Bunning was captured on videotape stalking off from a TV reporter after a Mongiardo supporter waved a campaign sign in view of the camera. The reporter gaped in surprise, her microphone still extended, as Bunning disappeared into the crowd.
...Also in August, Bunning got into a testy exchange with a longtime member of the Rotary Club of Paducah about military force readiness. Chick Ward, a Republican and a 27-year veteran of the Navy, challenged Bunning's assertion that U.S. forces were not stretched too thin with the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bunning, apparently unused to such challenges, got red-faced and bristled. The club later asked Ward to resign, saying he had embarrassed the senator, according to the Paducah Sun and the Rotary Club's newsletter.
...More substantively, the incumbent would agree to only one debate with his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo. And the rules Bunning negotiated were bizarrely rigid: The encounter could not be live; the taping has to occur in the afternoon, not the evening; no audience could be present in the studio; and, under threat of legal action, Mongiardo could not use any sound clips or video of Bunning's debate performance in campaign advertisements.
...Saying falsely that he was needed in Washington this week for Senate votes, Bunning tore up his own carefully crafted debate agreement and refused to return to Kentucky on Monday for his one scheduled debate with Mongiardo. It was to have taken place at 2:30 p.m. Monday in the Lexington, Ky., studio of WKYT-TV. Instead, Bunning insisted on "debating" via satellite from the womblike conditions of the Republican National Committee headquarters studio in Washington.
The senator refused to allow a member of the Kentucky media to be present at the RNC studio to monitor whether Bunning was receiving assistance with his answers, according to Mongiardo campaign manager Kim Geveden and WKYT news director Jim Ogle. And Bunning refused to engage reporters via satellite in a previously agreed upon post-debate news conference, insisting instead that his 15 minutes of answering questions occur by telephone, without accompanying video footage.
...Mongiardo campaign manager Geveden said Bunning is "clearly afraid" of debating. "For six months we have been pursuing debates with Jim Bunning, and all he does is hide. He's hiding from the people of Kentucky, he's hiding from the press corps, and when he does on occasion travel into the state, he surrounds himself with bodyguards.
...The broadcast is slated for 8 p.m., right before the third presidential debate. To symbolize Bunning's retreat from the public square, WKYT's Ogle said he planned to leave the screen blank when airing the audio of Bunning's post-debate news conference. He said he would not fill the empty visual with a photograph of the senator.
Actually, it all sounds a lot like the Oaf of Office.
Reality has simply popped its garters, hasn't it? Maybe there was a threshhold, and Republicanism reached it - passed beyond it, so that all Republicans are now experiencing some degree of dementia. The hundredth monkey - or maybe that's chimp - syndrome.
James Wolcott has hit on something that I didn't think of to explain Butthead's blinking habit in the debates. Speaking of the possibility of him using a wire (or wireless) feed, Wolcott says...
If he needs to cheat for the debate, he can write cryptic notes on his cuffs like everybody else, or deploy the Morse Code blinking system he and Karen Hughes invented to send messages to each other across a crowded room.
The Anti-Defamation League has gotten in on this one. It was only a matter of time. Excerpt from an ADL letter to the Washington Post:
Regardless of Mr. Hyman's opinion of the quality of news coverage relating to Presidential campaign issues, his analogy to those who deny the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others is insensitive and painful. Usage of Holocaust imagery to score a political point is unacceptable. He should repudiate the comment.
Sincerely,
Abraham H. Foxman National Director
Josh Marshall has taken up the Sinclair Broadcasting flap. And Josh Marshall gets answers. He has apparently written to Reed Hundt (ex-FCC commissioner who wrote the "warning" letter) to Sinclair. It concludes:
Broadcasters understand that they have a special and conditional role in public discourse. They received their licenses from the public -- licenses to use airwaves that, for instance, cellular companies bought in auctions -- for free, and one condition is the obligation to help us hold a fair and free election. The Supreme Court has routinely upheld this "public interest" obligation. Virtually all broadcasters understand and honor it.
Sinclair has a different idea, and a wrong one in my view. If Sinclair wants to disseminate propaganda, it should buy a printing press, or create a web site. These other media have no conditions on their publication of points of view. This is the law, and it should be honored. In fact, if the FCC had any sense of its responsibility as a steward of fair elections its chairman now would express exactly what I am writing to you here.
-- Reed Hundt
Marshall also has the confirming transcript of Mark Hymen's comments regarding the bombing of Iraq being a free Kerry campaign ad.
And....he has comments from readers about the way to get Sinclair's attention:
I’ve worked in the media business for 30 years and I guarantee you that sales is what these local TV stations are all about. They don’t care about license renewal or overwhelming public outrage. They care about sales only, so only local advertisers can affect their decisions.
Here's how to have an impact on the local Sinclair stations: first, watch the station and make a list of all of the local advertisers. Then, write to the sales manager -- not the general manager, but the sales manager -- and tell him that you're going to contact all of the local advertisers to register a protest about the station airing this program. Be specific -- link
As suggested in a post you have further down, I just called the Cincinatti station's sales mgr. He was really concerned when I read him a list of local adverstisers and said I'd be calling their advertising managers to express my displeasure that they choose to advertise on a Sinclair station. He practically begged me not to, saying "this involves people's livelihoods." And then I did call the local advertisers.
So you are correct. Local stations -- SALES MANAGERS and local advertisers AD MANAGERS are the pressure point. -- link
Lastly, Marshall offers some pointers on calling the advertisers (including, don't be a dick - but not in those words), and a list of Sinclair's local stations.
Hey, reader! There is a good chance that you are an idiot. Luckily, I have a simple test to let you know for certain. Do you believe that you got a tax cut in the last few years? If you answered “yes” to this question, it’s confirmed. You are an idiot. Your government loves you.
This is a point I can never seem to make with the people at work who bitch about tax increases. Maybe because of the way I put it. As I keep trying to point out to them, there is a balance that government/companies strike. It's an economic one. The ratio of what they pay out to what they get is a high priority to them. I didn't understand Economics 101 all that well, but if Professor Johnson said it once, he said it a thousand times (per lecture): "Supplyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy...Demaaand!" Two words illustrated with two lines on his chalkboard chart. Two lines with an intersection.
Business - with a capital B - knows how much to give you in wages to maintain a profitable relationship between expenditures and income (theirs). You are never going to gain. Wages will go up only when living costs go up. And, I hate to tell you this, but it looks like the former isn't keeping up with the latter. But if the change is gradual enough, we will simply adjust to having to have a two-income family, as is commonplace these days, and complain that it's because our taxes are too high and some welfare queen isn't working.
I also want to point out that the amount of any tax "cut" you get is going to be handily gobbled up in the increase in the price of gasoline, or interest rates, or consumer products of some sort, or the things mentioned in the article linked above. Bet on it. If your taxes are higher, and you threaten not to buy so much other crap, manufacturers and retailers will keep the cost of that crap down. Government/Business is going to look at every line item and every possible calculation to keep you, the wage earner, at just the right intersection of income to expenditure to keep you from forming revolutionary mobs in the streets. I'd just as soon pay some taxes and have decent roads and schools and health care and clean air and clean water. My wages are going to fluctuate with whatever is left over after taxes. Bet on it.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
How's that for understanding the economy? Not too good?
Bink, at Daily Kos, posts some incredible stuff about Sinclair Group's Mark Hyman:
Wow, this guy is a major scumbag.
On CNN just now, he said that John Kerry and the Democrats are like "Holocaust Deniers." Then he said that, if the broadcast of anti-Kerry programs on Sinclair stations is an "in-kind donation to George Bush," then "every suicide bomb that goes off in Iraq is an in-kind donation to John Kerry."
I can't verify the quote, but two other commenters offer:
this was actually the SECOND time this same guy used the "holocaust deniers" comparison on air on CNN. He was on Newsnight last night with A. Brown and I couldnt believe what he was saying... apparently no one told him in the last 12 hrs to drop that line...
by End of Shrub on Tue Oct 12th, 2004 at 18:07:12 GMT
I saw Hyman last night on Aaron Brown and he made the same charge that a bomb going off in Iraq is anti-Bush. Then I can only suggest that he forbid his stations from reporting bomb blasts in Iraq.
by DemInGeorgia on Tue Oct 12th, 2004 at 18:12:24 GMT
What a nimrod. But, okay, the war in Iraq - Bush's war - is an advertisement to vote for Kerry. I'm not surprised they don't want to show it to us.
Sinclair's web based news, News Central, offers a bio of Mark Hyman. There's also a web poll to send your vote on whether the "documentary" should be aired on Sinclair stations. It's currently running at 37% yes to 63% no. (That's also on News Central's home page.) Here's a link to send comments to Sinclair Broadcast Group (offered on News Central's home page).
Update 1:00pm: The quote has been confirmed, and further updates are offered here.
South Dakota's GOP have forced a "reparation process", a mini-Venezuelan fiasco.
Tonight six people connected with the South Dakota republican party have resigned over questions surrounding absentee ballot applications.
...Many absentee ballot applications are what led to [the] half dozen resignations. The people involved in securing the forms may not have always made sure a commissioned notary witnessed the voters' signatures.
In a statement, party executive director Jason Glodt says, "The South Dakota Republican Party has a zero tolerance policy regarding such matters..."
Do you think this might have anything to do with Sinclair's questionable decision to require its affiliates to pre-empt network broadcasts in favor of the anti-Kerry film? .....
NEW YORK, September 21 (newratings.com) - Analysts at Wachovia Securities downgrade Sinclair Broadcast (SBTA.BER) from "outperform" to "market perform," while reducing their estimates for the company.
In a research note published this morning, the analysts mention that the company's revenue growth is likely to slow down in the near term. Sinclair Broadcast's advertisement revenues are unlikely to be boosted significantly by the upcoming major political events in the US, the analysts say. The FCF per share estimates for 2004 and 2005 have been reduced from $0.97 to $0.91 and from $0.83 to $0.74, respectively.
September 22; Sinclair execs: We need a boost. What can we do?
Pakistan successfully test-fired Tuesday an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads as parts of its efforts to boost its defenses, a military statement said.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan conducts regular missile tests, despite a revived peace process with nuclear rival India. The last time Pakistan test-fired a nuclear-capable missile was on June 4.
"Pakistan this morning carried out another successful test of the indigenously produced intermediate range ballistic missile Hatf V (Ghauri)," the statement said.
On the question of the continuing fallout of nuclear proliferation, [a spokesman] said that Pakistan was a responsible nuclear weapons state, but would not under any circumstances allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to its scientists. Simultaneously, he also said that no request had come from Washington to question Pakistan's defamed top nuclear scientist A Q Khan.
"Pakistan would not allow any country, including the US, to question Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan," the spokesman said, adding "that the 'Nuclear Black Marketing Network' in the country had been wiped out."
You remember A.Q. Khan - he's the Pak hero who was selling Pakistan's nuclear information on the black market for about ten years to "rogue states", including North Korea and Iran - the one Butthead said in the debates had been brought to justice. That justice consisted of dismissing him from his state position with a presidential pardon, because to actually punish him as a terrorist-aiding evil doer, which he is by Butthead's definition, and a clear threat to international security, would not be in Butthead's personal best interest, partly because Pakistan is expected to capture bin Laden and his bad guys on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and dole them out when Butthead needs another "capture", and partly because to do so would have been risking the wrath of the Pakistani people and the ouster of our Pakistani puppet Musharraf.* He can't even be questioned.
Musharraf also admitted that he could not be sure that Pakistani investigators had unearthed all the customers and transactions of the network stretching back probably over a decade or more. David Albright, a former IAEA weapons inspector, says Pakistan may not push Khan too hard because that could expose the illicit networks that the country still uses to buy nuclear technology.
...At the time of Khan's confession, ElBaradei raised alarms, saying Khan was "the tip of an iceberg" in an illicit nuclear supply network with connections in many countries. "We need to know who supplied what, when, to whom," ElBaradei said.
... The world may never know exactly who bought from Khan's network. And that is intolerable.
The IAEA has been asking Pakistan regularly to help it investigate the international black market allegedly run by Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Pakistan's cooperation with the probe is crucial in resolving how Iran, and other states like North Korea, have supplied themselves with nuclear parts and technology that can be used to make atomic weapons.
...Mr ElBaradei said Dr Khan's network had "more than 30 companies and 30 countries all over the globe involved in this fantastic sophisticated illicit trafficking".
...Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said in Tehran in August that his country was cooperating with the IAEA probe into Iran's suspect nuclear programme but ruled out allowing international inspectors into Pakistan.
September 30: The hunt for Osama bin Laden was Topic 1 last week when Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf met with President Bush at the White House. The two leaders discussed other things, including Musharraf's efforts to retain his post as chief of the army. But apparently one thing that failed to rank high on the agenda was the threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.
To be specific, Bush reportedly didn't even try to persuade Musharraf to allow U.S. or International Atomic Energy Agency officials a crack at interviewing Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of Pakistan's nuclear program and one of the world's most brazen nuclear profiteers.
Discussion goes something like this: "Okay, Pervie, I need bin Laden before November 2. I'll let you know when to announce it. You don't have him? Who else you got? Maybe. But if I lose ground in the polls, that's not gonna cut it. I'll need bin Laden." An actual threat of terrorists acquiring nukes? Ho-hum.
----- *Whew. That was a long one. Must have some German in me......."Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." --Mark Twain.
By the way, have you noticed the "Daily Twain" quotes in the left sidebar?
Tuesday, the military resumed airstrikes in nearby Fallujah, said to be the hideout of the terrorist network run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant responsible for numerous bombings, kidnappings and beheadings, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.
Wire service reports said at least one of the buildings hit [on Tuesday] was a restaurant. The Associated Press reported that five people died in the strike on the restaurant.
Precision air strikes aren't quite what they're cracked up to be.
Remember when we were actually hunting for Osama bin Laden in the Afghan desert? Remember the leaflets we dropped over the desert that said the bad guys couldn't get away from us, we are so tough, and our weapons are so awesome? That we have missiles that can target bad guys to such accuracy that we can aim them through windows? While watching the TV news report that incredible, ridiculous, juvenile tripe, my then 17-year-old son said, "Oh my God! They're in caves. They don't have windows." Well, yeah. That, too.
And now, we've thrown out all caution and sensibilities, and are going straight for their Iraqi hiding places - the mosques. That should improve things.
Treading into yet another flashpoint city, U.S. Marines and Iraqi security forces began a series of raids Tuesday on mosques in and around the Sunni city of Ramadi...
The military took pains Tuesday to explain the mosque raids, issuing a statement detailing recent attacks in which a mosque was used as a base or refuge.
Most recently, the Marines said they were attacked Monday from the Sharqi Mosque in the city of Hit near Ramadi, with insurgents engaging in a three-hour firefight using small arms, machine guns and mortars.
Marine airstrikes were called in to end the battle, the military said. Wire services reported that the mosque caught fire after the fight.
...Brig. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford of the 1st Marine Division said in a statement that the mosques are suspected "of participating in a spectrum of insurgent activity, including harboring known terrorists, storing illegal weapons caches, promoting violence against the Iraqi people and encouraging insurgent recruitment."
... "Mosques are granted protective status unless they are being used for militant purposes," said Dunford. "At that time they lose their protective status as places of religious worship."
Angry residents were unreceptive to the explanations, according to wire service reports from the scene.
Yes, I imagine they were.
If it is Armageddon we are looking for, I'm sure I couldn't have done a better job of finding it myself.
The Bush administration will delay major assaults on rebel-held cities in Iraq until after U.S. elections in November, say administration officials, mindful that large-scale military offensives could affect the U.S. presidential race.
You know, I've made some decisions on Israel that's unpopular. I wouldn't deal with Arafat, because I felt like he had let the former president down, and I don't think he's the kind of person that can lead toward a Palestinian state.
And people in Europe didn't like that decision. And that was unpopular, but it was the right thing to do.
... I made a decision not to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is where our troops could be brought to -- brought in front of a judge, an unaccounted judge.
I don't think we ought to join that. That was unpopular.
And so, what I'm telling you is, is that sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you think they're right.
...People love America. Sometimes they don't like the decisions made by America, but I don't think you want a president who tries to become popular and does the wrong thing.--George W. Bush, presidential debate
Unless you're talking about popularity at home nearing an election, he didn't explain. Those are the times when you forget about "the right thing" and do whatever it takes.
Josh Marshall posts what he claims is a letter from the FCC to Sinclair Broadcasting. According to the LA Times (analyzed here at Left Coaster), Sinclair, a publicly traded company has told its affiliate stations to show an anti-Kerry film a few days before the election. The FCC letter from Chairman Reed Hundt concludes:
How can it be part of a broadcaster's public interest obligation to aspire to alter the perceptions of the audience about a presidential candidate by showing biased content that in no way reflects either breaking news or even-handed treatment of the issues? Why should a broadcaster keep its licenses if it behaves in this manner? I hope you will reconsider your edict -- unless, of course, I am misinformed, in which case I do hope you forgive this message.
Update 4:30pm: If you haven't read my first post on Sinclair (linked above), go do it for more information on other Sinclair B.S.
Steve Soto at Left Coaster also gives some suggestions as to what can be done to make Sinclair less likely to pull the stunt. What I wanted to point out here, though, is his first few reader comments:
"whereas this piece of propaganda is being beamed into your home on the public airwaves with the specific intention of swinging the election by using taxpayer-subsidized airwaves"
Turn the channel.
Enough said. Posted by Right Coaster at October 11, 2004 10:41 AM
---------
Not if they're using the public airwaves for it, RC, and calling it news. Posted by Steve Soto at October 11, 2004 10:44 AM
---------
"Turn the channel.
Enough said."
Rightcoaster,
Don't have an abortion.
Enough said. Posted by muckcat at October 11, 2004 10:46 AM
Touché! and nice fielding, muckcat.
One commenter says that Sinclair is 5% publicly traded, but 95% owned by a Bush supporter. Another commenter has some more information on Sinclair...
I used to live in Asheville, and on WLOS (local ABC affiliate there), they would play a taped two minute segment once a week where a Sinclair executive offered up the latest GOP talking points, usually finishing with a snide remark about Democrats. There was no strong advocate of the Democratic position, no opportunity for dissenting opinion at all.
I assume that Sinclair forces this segment on all of its affiliates. Let's get 'em.
...We will present an interim petition to Sinclair, its advertisers, and the FCC on October 15 and will present a final petition on October 20. (Stop Sinclair.org)
Some disgruntled Marines in Iraq give an interview.
Asked if he was concerned that the Marines would be punished for speaking out, Autin responded: "We don't give a crap. What are they going to do, send us to Iraq?"
Just as the Department of Health and Human Services did last year with the White House's Medicare reform bill, it seems the Department of Education has been sending out faux 'news' videos to local TV stations promoting the No Child Left Behind bill.
(They even use the same faux reporter -- 'Karen Ryan' -- as appeared in the earlier HHS videos.)
...The company that the Department of Education hired to produce the 'news' videos was also hired to analyze and rank news coverage of the law in order to gauge the success of their PR campaign.
...[A]ccording to the AP story, in the rankings paid for by the Department, "points are awarded for stories that say President Bush and the Republican Party are strong on education."
What's the public interest in that exactly. That's campaign work, paid for by tax dollars.
Obviously they are not interested in the public interest. How much plainer do they have to get than to use the same phony "reporter" in the same ploy that got them busted on the Mediare bill?!? Jeezus. "Fuck you, public. You're stupid. We can poke you in the eye, then slap you on the back of the head and then give you the full measure. You're gonna bend over for it every time."
Well, this is the same Department of Education that asks "How high?" when Lynne Cheney says "Jump".
At a July meeting in Amman, Jordan, a team from the University of Missouri International Center for Psychosocial Trauma was exposed to strong anti-American feelings.
The team, led by child psychiatrist Arshad Husain, first took part in a five-day program presented for doctors from Iraq, who interacted quietly and carefully. Immediately after this training program, the Federation of the Islamic Medical Association held its biannual convention with 500 physicians from 56 countries.
At this convention, Husain gave two keynote speeches, one on "Spirituality and the Mental Health Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" and one a dinner talk to the Jordanian Medical Association on "Trauma: Resiliency and Recovery, Lessons from War Zones." Emotions in the audience caused by the latter speech reached such a peak that the dinner’s host grew concerned about the team’s welfare.
...This attack on Americans as individuals was a change from previous trips the team has made. Before, participants talked negatively about the U.S. government; now they were directing their hostility and anger toward the American people.
...The feeling of the audience of professionals from Islamic countries was that the American people are responsible because they allow their government to do these things.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators began Monday trying to determine why a tour bus lost its roof and crashed in Arkansas, killing 14 people.
The chartered bus was carrying mostly elderly passengers, and was bound from Chicago to the Grand Casino in Tunica, Miss., on a weekend gambling excursion when it crashed on Interstate 55 Saturday morning near West Memphis.
I think you have your answer right there. God reached down and ripped that roof off. That'll teach those sinners to gamble.
Okay, a post about the roof blowing off an OATS gambling bus isn't a political post in any way, so I'm going to have to just blow the segue (in the time-honored manner of the president of the United States) and go straight to this about the Sadr forces weapons handover...
At Habibiya police station, the biggest of three designated collection points in Sadr City, cameramen were allowed to film only one batch of arms police said had been brought earlier in a civilian vehicle. The weaponry included RPGs, rusty mortars and artillery shells, anti-tank land mines and assault rifles.
"One man brought a Sam-7 anti-aircraft missile," National Guard Captain Duraid Fadel told Reuters, adding that militiamen were receiving $50 for each weapon they surrendered.
One Mehdi Army fighter, Kamel Hussein, walked off later with $14,500 for delivering a big stash of RPGs and mortars.
But those three handovers were the only ones to take place at Habibiya in the space of three hours.
And they trust this government? Coupon? Sorry, your coupon has expired. (Hey, maybe there was a segue to be had in there after all - something to do with blowing things off....)
Update 9:00 am:
Iraqi police at one of three arms collection points told Reuters they had received only a handful of weapons from Mr Sadr's Mahdi army militia so far, while officials at at another said they had received no weapons at all.
At Baghdad's al-Nasr police station, Maj Kadhim Salman told the Associated Press that fighters had turned in machine guns, TNT paste, land mines and other explosives. The rebels were supposed to be compensated for the weapons they turned in, but Maj Salman said those responsible for the payments had not turned up yet. Receipts were issued instead.
The arms transfer is supposed to last five days, after which Iraqi police and national guardsmen will assume responsibility security in Sadr City, which is home to more than two million people.
In return, the government has promised to release detained Sadr followers provided they have not committed crimes. It has also suspended armed raids into the Shia stronghold in north-eastern Baghdad.
I mentioned that Bush lost one of his with the Afghan voting....now Kerry has lost one of his regarding stem cell research and his hopes that his friend Christopher Reeve might one day walk again. Reeve died yesterday.
We'll visit that subject again this morning, and probably more later, as this story is just going to keep growing, especially since it has been tied to questions about Butthead's health. A diagnosis of pre-senile dementia, which was offered by a physician who has not actually examined Bush personally, but makes his diagnosis from video footage, is following the audio-feed story around the internet - or internets, as Butthead pronounced in his second debate. LaBelle sends a link to a video clip comparing Butthead's speaking ability ten years ago to that of today. It's just one speech they're taking the past ability from, and while it does seem much more coherent than today's stuff, I think there's a very simple explanation. Not that he isn't losing it as he ages, and not that I think he doesn't have something called senile dementia - hell, I think he just has plain old dementia - but a very simple explanation is offered by his alcohol and cocaine use. Although he claims he doesn't do either any more, I wouldn't bet a nickel that that's the truth. Someone who abuses alcohol and drugs for as long as he did has physiological and/or psychological issues that need to be treated.
Alcoholics Anonymous literature makes it clear that the disease does not stop its progression even after a person quits drinking. And, for my money, Butthead is still using drugs - Powell says everybody's on Ambien (perhaps he was including Butthead). Butthead's drugs may well be prescribed at this point, but that could still include some very powerful anti-depressants or even anti-psychotics. If you've ever watched anyone who is being prescribed either of these types of drugs, you've seen behavior, both actions and speech, identical to Butthead's.
Venezuela has moved to secure sovereign control over its massive petroleum resources by insisting on compliance with a law which requires foreign oil firms to pay a 16.6% royalty on their production instead of the previous 1% which President Hugo Chavez Frias describes as "negligible." The move comes after a 3-year 'grace period' for compliance.
The Venezuelan 'get tough' policy is dictated because, for decades, mainly US oil companies have exploited Venezuela's oil reserves in the Orinoco heavy crude belt without much oversight and an insignificant level of taxation which often ended up in the pockets of corrupt politicians.
...Chavez says he does not think current international oil prices above US$50 per barrel are excessively high. Although he has strongly supported efforts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to coordinate oil output strategy he adds that "some say it's a very high price putting at risk the economic stability of the world .... that's a lie!"
...Speaking on his weekly radio/TV program 'Alo Presidente' from Puerto La Cruz today, President Chavez Frias said "I have decided to use my executive powers to increase the exploitation tax to 16.6% with immediate effect."
Until the "debates" I couldn't make myself watch or listen to Crawford's Village Idiot. Back when I started writing YWA (one year ago October 13), however, I did start to read transcripts of his rare press conferences and conversations with journalists. I was surprised to find bizarre speech patterns and nonsense, starts and stops, and abruptly unfinished sentences with complete changes of direction. I decided there were two likely explanations: he was either experiencing some neurological damage symptoms (possibly alcohol- or disease-related), or he was wearing an earpiece through which he was being fed instructions, corrections and prompts.
The question has come up and exploded across the internet after the first Bush-Kerry debate, because of these photographs:
That certainly looks like something in the middle of his back underneath his jacket, and it looks like there's a component of it that snakes up over his right shoulder.
The story has jumped out of the blogosphere, as stories are doing these days much, much more rapidly than they were when I started blogging.
"There was nothing under his suit jacket," said Nicolle Devenish, a campaign spokeswoman. "It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric." Ms. Devenish could not say why the "rumpling" was rectangular.
Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate?
...Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with the claim that the Bush administration insisted on a condition that no cameras be placed behind the candidates. An official for the Commission on Presidential Debates, which set up the lecterns and microphones on the Miami stage, said the condition was indeed real, the result of negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn't stop Fox from setting up cameras behind Bush and Kerry.
...Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and the owner of the Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance shop in Spokane, Wash., looked at the Bush image on his computer monitor. "There's certainly something on his back, and it appears to be electronic," he said. McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge could be the inductor portion of a two-way push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a system makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that is pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is virtually invisible. He also said a weak signal could be scrambled and be undetected by another broadcaster.
...Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies -- notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's appearance. "They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera," Schechter said. "The Democrats weren't doing that at their convention."
But back to the internet...there's a website that is totally devoted to this one thing: Is Bush Wired?.
That site offers an explanation from a reader to the double-talk at thte D-Day speech:
"I think the Bush - Chirac clip is pretty simple to explain. Many networks run a text-service for their live programming, where they use a speech-recognition engine and a re-speaker to dictate to that engine what is said by whoever speaks in the program. The text is then fed to be overlaid the "live" programming in progress. Live here means delayed so that the timing of the text is more or less matched with what is going on on-screen. The re-speaker needs to be a second or two ahead of the "live" feed for the recognition engine to be able to generate the text. What I think you hear here is the voice of the re-speaker that has for some reason been overlaid the "live" voice-feed."
Another website is doggedly following the story (calling it Promptergate) - Cannonfire - where you'll find these...
Such a unit is composed of two pieces. The "earpiece" is either lodged deep within the ear or (as current technology permits) placed next to a molar. The within-the-ear version is very difficult to see unless one knows what to look for.
post [I added the link to the molar listening device.)
"Shadowing" (the simultaneous or near-simultaneous repetition of a word or phrase) has been much discussed in the technical literature of linguistics...One of the findings of shadowing experiments is that "listeners need to hear only 200-250 ms of a word to repeat it." I imagine this process would lead to "false positives" -- for example, a listener may guess that the word is "botanical" when it is actually "botulism." This may explain some of Bush's more amusing malapropisms.
They say this is a photo of Butthead wearing an earpiece.
I wonder what the WH will eventually come up with. So far, according to the NYT, they have said he wasn't wearing a bullet-proof vest (which is what I figured it probably was), and that it probably was just a wrinkle.
Mark McKinnon, media director of the re-election campaign, as you would expect, has said, 'The President has never been assisted by any audio signal."
For the time being, it looks like Butthead's tailor is falling on his needle.
Georges de Paris, who made the suit worn by Bush, said the bulge was nothing more than a pucker along the jacket's back seam, accentuated when the president crossed his arms and leaned forward.
His tailor is French?!? That pucker sprouted a tail curving up over the dimwit's right shoulder blade. And look at this one from the second debate...
Do his shoulder blades really extend all the way down his back? Is he having his suits made with some whalebone stays to give him some particular look? Is Georges de Paris just a bad tailor? Is Dufus wearing back braces or something? He certainly slumped all over that podium in the first debate. I don't know. This picture of his famous huff sure did make him look like he was wearing a badly tailored suit.
But that "bulge" in the back of those jackets does look like some device. Maybe it's his wind-up key. We'll see. Somebody with a fixation is going to keep after this one. And my last comment is this: think how inept the man truly is if this turns out to be true, and he still can't speak with any intelligence.
The Pentagon said yesterday it was investigating cockpit video footage that shows American pilots attacking and killing a group of apparently unarmed Iraqi civilians.
The 30-second clip shows the pilot targeting the group of people in a street in the city of Fallujah and asking his mission controllers whether he should "take them out". He is told to do so and, shortly afterwards, the footage shows a huge explosion where the people were.
While President Bush insists that sovereignty was returned to Iraq three months ago, 10-square-kilometers in the heart of the Iraqi capital along the banks of the Tigris river - the site of several Saddam Hussein-era palace complexes and some of the city's finest real estate - remains U.S. territory.
..."It's a world within a world," said a Western diplomat who has only left the Green Zone twice in three months. "I imagine there are some people here who never meet Iraqis."
While car bombings, kidnappings and gunfights rage across the capital, life behind the blast walls resembles suburban America: women in shorts jog along tree-lined avenues, off-duty soldiers lounge by the pool and the Green Zone Cafe and two Chinese restaurants are packed in the evenings. Everything from pornographic movies to mobile phone accessories are on sale at the local bazaar.
So now we know where those pictures of all the happy Iraqi entrepeneurs come from. In fact, as I understand it, journalists don't even leave the Green Zone these days. Green. As in American dollars, I guess. And, it's not safe there any more, either.
U.S. authorities raised a security alert in the Green Zone after an improvised bomb was found in front of a restaurant there on Tuesday....
A mortar shell exploded in the Green Zone on Thursday.
...The Green Zone also suffers an average of three mortar attacks a day.
...In September, a U.S. government employee was beaten in the parking lot of the U.S. Embassy by two men who muttered something in Arabic before running away....
The American planners who drew the Green Zone perimeter had to include hundreds of middle class homes because they were located near important government buildings that couldn't be left out.
"There are young men crawling all over perimeter and nobody knows whose side they are really on," the security official said.
...[E]ven the thousands of normal Iraqis whose homes wound up in the U.S.-occupied Green Zone want the Americans to move out and the fortress dismantled.
The first signs of a fascist government or repressive dictatorship seem always to include taking over the media (if not taken over, they are at least cow-towed by this administration) and targeting intellectuals and academics.
David Horowitz, the head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and the conservative women at the Washington, DC-based Independent Women's Forum are focusing their homeland security operations on a...specific target -- liberal academics.
...Going after progressive academics has been a longtime favorite sport of right wing ideologues:
In November 2001, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization co-founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, issued a report entitled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," which branded university professors as the weak link in the fight against terrorism.
...Horowitz and the Independent Women's Forum are upping the ante by placing advertisements in college newspapers across the country encouraging students to turn in profligate professors.
...Two of the campaigns first victims are Ball State's Professor Alves and David Gibbs, an Associate professor of History and Sociology at the University of Arizona, who last spring taught a course entitled "What is Politics?"
On the Ball State University campus, ["WANTED" posters with a headshot of Professor Abel Alves were] put up by Amanda Carpenter, a senior, who said she put up the posters in order to attract attention to her Web site...The professor's "alleged offenses include indoctrinating freshmen with liberal books, such as Fast Food Nation, and guest lectures by the Humane Society."
...When Gibbs received student evaluations, "a student who said I'm anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking that America sucks," said that "I should be investigated by the FBI, and the FBI has been contacted." Later on, "another student on a weblog during the summer said he took my class and also said that he didn't like my politics and suggests that students shouldn't take my class but should drop by and try to disrupt it."
Central Command's basic mission was originally enunciated in the Carter Doctrine of January 23, 1980, which designated the secure flow of Persian Gulf oil as a "vital interest" of the United States. Claiming that this key interest was threatened by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (which had begun in December 1979) and the near-simultaneous rise of a radical Islamic regime in Iran, President Jimmy Carter told Congress that Washington would use "any means necessary, including military force," to keep the Oil flowing....In order to back up his proclamation, Carter established the Rapid Deployment joint Task Force (RDJTF) at MacDill Air Force Base and gave it responsibility for combat operations in the Gulf. Three years later, on January 1, 1983, President Ronald Reagan elevated the RDJTF, naming it the Central Command (because it encompasses the "central region" between Europe and Asia) and putting it on an equal footing with the other regional commands.
Centcom's critical role in protecting the nation's and its allies' oil supply finds blunt expression in the testimony its commanders in chief regularly deliver to Congress. "America's vital interests in the Central Region are long-standing" General J. H. Binford Peay III told a House subcommittee in 1997. "With over 65 percent of the world's oil reserves located in the Gulf states of the region -- from which the United States imports nearly 20 percent of its needs; Western Europe, 43 percent; and Japan, 68 percent -- the international community must have free and unfettered access to the region's resources." Any disruption in this flow, he warned, "would intensify the volatility of the world oil market [and] precipitate economic calamity for developed and developing nations alike." All of Peay's successors have echoed this judgment.
...Centcom's forces got their first taste of combat in 1987, when President Reagan ordered US. warships to escort Kuwaiti tankers -- hastily re-flagged with the American ensign -- while traversing the Persian Gulf and to protect them from attack by Iran and Iraq, then in the final throes of their bloody eight-year war. Such action was essential, Reagan declared, to demonstrate the "U.S. commitment to the flow of oil through the Gulf." Three years later, in August 1990, President George H. W. Bush used similar language to justify the deployment of Centcom forces in Saudi Arabia, to deter a possible attack by the Iraqi forces then encamped in Kuwait. "Our nation now imports nearly half the oil it consumes and could face a major threat to its economic independence," he said in a nationally televised address on August 8. Hence, "the sovereign independence of Saudi Arabia is of vital interest to the United States."
...Moreover, soldiers from the other regional commands are increasingly being committed to oil-related operations of this sort. Already troops from the Southern Command (Southcom) are helping to d fend Colombia's Cano Limón pipeline, a vital link between oil fields in the interior and refineries on the coast, which has been under recurring attack from leftist guerrillas. Likewise, soldiers from the European Command (Eurcom) are training local forces to protect the newly constructed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Georgia. Eurcom also oversees all U.S. forces deployed in Africa (except in the Horn, which falls under Centcom's jurisdiction) and has begun seeking bases from which to support future operations to defend the region's oil facilities. Finally, the ships and planes of the US. Pacific Command (Pacom) are patrolling vital tanker routes in the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the western Pacific.
...Slowly but surely, the US. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.
Yes, that's an actual snapshot of a page off U.S. Senator Jim (Kentucky) Bunning's website from March 21, 2003. The original name for the invasion was Operation Iraqi Liberation - OIL. And, while most references quickly changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Ole Jimbo isn't ashamed to leave it.
Just the threat of incurring Cheney displeasure has the US Dept of Education destroying material.
The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed.
...In a widely read opinion piece published in 1994, she complained that "We are a better people than the National Standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it."
...The booklet included several brief references to the National Standards for History, which were developed at UCLA in the mid-1990s with federal support. Created by scholars and educators to help school officials design better history courses, they are voluntary benchmarks, not mandatory requirements.
At the time, Lynne Cheney, the wife of now-Vice President Cheney, led a vociferous campaign complaining that the standards were not positive enough about America's achievements and paid too little attention to figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere and Thomas Edison.
...The standards contained repeated references to the Ku Klux Klan and to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the anti-Communist demagogue of the 1950s, she said. And she noted that Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who helped run the Underground Railroad, was mentioned six times.
But Revere, Lee, the Wright brothers and other prominent figures went unmentioned, she said.
...In response to the criticism, the UCLA standards were heavily revised, most critics were mollified and the controversy faded — but not for Cheney and her staff.
Black-outs on certain ugly truths. We like to keep certain things hidden. Even from ourselves. Education in this country can safely go back to the days when Lynn Cheney was in grammar school. Scary. Very scary.
And there's more...
Cheney is prominently quoted in the [revised] booklet as a "noted author and wife of the vice president." Two books on history that she wrote for children are mentioned in the booklet.
The acknowledgments also credit her office for helping with the guide, which cost $110,360 to print....
CIA analyst Charles A. Duelfer's report on Iraq's weapons programs included lists of governments, political parties, companies and individuals from at least 44 nations who received vouchers to buy oil -- both legally and otherwise -- from the Iraqi government during Saddam Hussein's reign.
The names on the politically explosive list are French, Russian, Chinese, Canadian and Japanese; if Duelfer had had his way, U.S. companies and individuals would have been included, too.
But he was overruled by CIA lawyers. The report instead lists some voucher recipients only as "U.S. person" and "U.S. company," explaining in a footnote that disclosure was barred by the 1974 Privacy Act and "other applicable law."
"This is all bunk. It is a sign of the desperate straits they find themselves in and their willingness to discard the truth and say anything they think that will get them a vote," he said.
I know. You're thinking that's a liberal describing the administration. But you're wrong. That's Karl Rove, who says he's got a couple surprises up his sleeve for the campaign, talking about the Kerry campaign.
As we used to say when we were kids....it takes one to know one.
Bush still keeps touting how we are doing great things in Iraq and Kerry still says nonsense like "we are opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them down in [fill in swing state]". Both claims are based on premises well-known to be false but they can keep on doing it. For one thing, journalists will not challenge them. There will be separate articles telling the truth about the reconstruction but unless you are a detailed and careful reader of many newspapers, you may well miss them. Thus, unsurprisingly, most Americans probably do think we have spent a ton of money and what problems that exist with the reconstruction are due to the more recent security problems.
It's the same thing with the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction. By now, it's been well-reported that Iraq did not possess any at the time of the invasion. But only with the latest report are we seeing reporters include that fact along with Bush's claims and implications to the contrary. But it's all a bit moot now. After many years of unchallenged assertions by Bush, Cheney, Kerry, Edwards and most everyone else, the whole exercise seems a bit academic. It's well established in most people's heads that Saddam Hussein was some real, grave threat to the American people. It looked like the debate was over how to quantify and best handle this major threat.
So it goes. Parts of the anti-war movement had long ago pointed out most everything that has been "revealed" with great fanfare over the past year or two -- everything from the bogus Niger documents to the limitations of the aluminum tubes cited by Powell before his U.N. speech. However, we don't seem to be able to make inroads into the general popular conciousness just because we were right then, and just because every passing day proves how right we really were.
...This is a serious and entrenched problem we face, one we must find a way to overcome if we are to free the monopoly the warmongers have on general public conciousness.
Paul Begala and Dick Gephardt and every single Democrat should REFUSE to appear against this fucking Nazi whore on television. It is a travesty that this insane harpy is part of any decent commentary on broadcast television.
Please spare me any more whining and weeping about Michael Moore in the future. This heinous douchebag makes Moore look like Winston Churchill. If she's giving that pathetic old fuck Larry King bj's that's her business, but the Democratic party really should draw the line at appearing on television with the GOP Paris Hilton version of Benito Mussolini as if she's a rational person. What will we tell the children?
Digby has some quotes in this post from Ann Coulter. Go read it if you want. I can't. I have quit reading anything that woman says or writes. My elder son thinks she's just the cat's pajamas and funny. She's not funny. She's just rabid and vicious. She's neither literate nor human. Just stupid and mean, making a fortune channeling the world's ignorant hate.
The Bush administration is backing off plans to require hospitals to ask emergency-room patients their immigration status, after hospitals and advocates for immigrants protested.
The hospitals and immigrant groups said the questions would make people afraid to seek care and lead to serious public health problems.
I'm sure the administration sees nothing wrong with that. Like the abortion issue. So what if we drive people back to the dark ages of medical care? There were kings in the dark ages.
The prime minister's alliance with George W. Bush, who is widely seen here as having dragged Britain into a disaster, has become a huge political liability, one that Downing Street tries, often effectively, to play down.
What's more, Britons who followed the first debate between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry felt their contributions to the U.S. war effort passed almost unmentioned, even by the president's supposedly worldly, alliance-loving Democratic challenger. Being America's ally today is seen here as a dangerous, thankless task.
... Downing Street had also done a consummate job of minimizing Blair's public contact with Bush and senior administration officials. Bilateral visits were kept formal and, if possible, under wraps. Photographs à deux at international gatherings, such as the G8 summit, were avoided. Britain's foreign secretary, not Blair, represented Britain at the recent U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. If you ask his office when Blair plans to collect the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor he was awarded more than a year ago, you are told no date has been set.
The British government instead has recently made a show of Blair's personal affairs and public contacts with Europe and other countries.
...When Parliament reconvenes this week, Blair will face renewed pressure to issue a formal apology for supporting what a growing constituency regards as the U.S. president's ideologically inspired war. There is now a real possibility that in trying to cement the special relationship by following the Americans to Iraq, Blair may have accelerated its dissolution.
[Ex-Air Force purchasing agent Darlene] Druyun, 56, is at the center of the biggest weapons procurement scandal in terms of dollar value to ever hit the Pentagon. She has been sentenced to federal prison for nine months for conspiracy to violate conflict of interest laws.
In a U.S. district courthouse, Druyun earlier this month admitted she had steered huge contracts to the Boeing Co. in return for employment for herself, her daughter and a son-in-law.
When she left the Air Force in late 2002, Boeing hired her as a $250,000-a-year vice president. The company later fired her after disclosing that she had improperly negotiated her position while at the same time she was sitting in judgment over a $20 billion Air Force program to lease 100 tanker jets from the Chicago-based company.
The company also fired Michael Sears, Boeing's chief financial officer, who had hired Druyun.
...Based on Druyun's admission and newfound cooperation, federal investigators are expanding their probe into her relationship with Boeing.
Boeing, in a statement, said Druyun's admissions came as "a total surprise" and pledged continued cooperation with government investigators.
Militiamen loyal to anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr will begin handing over their heavy weapons to Iraqi police next week from their stronghold in Sadr City, as part of a deal to disband the insurgent force and end weeks of fighting with U.S. forces, Iraqi and American officials and aides to al-Sadr said yesterday.
As part of the deal, American forces have agreed to cease military operations in Sadr City, the vast slum area of eastern Baghdad that is the stronghold for al-Sadr's militia, known as the al-Mahdi Army. Iraqi police and national-guard units will move into the area and have the right to search homes for weapons. U.S. soldiers also will retain access to the area.
Al-Sadr's record in keeping agreements is not good, however. During the fighting in Najaf last spring and summer, he pledged several times to disband his militia, only to keep fighting.
... Under this agreement, al-Sadr's fighters will begin turning in their heavy weapons, such as mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, tomorrow at a series of agreed collection points, and will be paid for them.
Senators are turning their attention to a wide-ranging $136 billion corporate tax bill as lawmakers whittle down their workload before leaving town for the elections.
In an unusual Sunday session, the Senate planned to vote on ending procedural roadblocks opponents have used to snarl the tax legislation, which contains breaks for everything from large corporations to importers of Chinese ceiling fans. Supporters of the measure were predicting victory, and final passage was possible later in the day.
...The House approved the tax legislation Thursday by 280-141.
...The House adjourned Saturday for the campaigns after approving a trio of bills. They were a $14.5 billion hurricane and farm disaster package; a $33 billion bill financing the Department of Homeland Security; and legislation shaping $447 billion in Pentagon programs for the new budget year.
The Senate approved the defense bill but didn't get to the hurricane or Homeland Security measures.
There will be no independent investigation of the unethical (to say the least) activities of House Leader DeLay.
On a party-line vote of 210 to 182, the GOP killed a Democratic bid yesterday for an outside counsel to probe the majority leader.
...''He's always survived incidents that have been spread out one at a time," but after three admonishments in one week by the ethics panel, DeLay is more vulnerable, said Lou Dubose, coauthor of ''The Hammer: Tom DeLay -- God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress."
...Three DeLay associates have been indicted in a Texas criminal investigation into alleged laundering of corporate money to Texas legislative campaigns through TRMPAC, a committee DeLay founded. If Delay, who has not been interviewed in the case, is indicted, he must step down as leader, according to House rules.
Statement of U.S. Labor Against the War on the Occupation of Iraq “We call for an end now to the U.S. occupation and for all military, political and economic authority to be transferred to the people of Iraq. . . . We call upon all public officials and candidates for office to oppose this war and the never-ending occupation and to support steps that can be taken immediately to end it. . . . It is time to acknowledge this tragic mistake and to hold to account Bush and those who prosecuted this disastrous war.”
U.S. Labor Against the War PMB 153, 1718 M Street NW, Washington, DC 20036
Veterans and Military Family Members in the Labor Movement Talk Sense about Supporting the Troops
We are trade unionists. We are military veterans and family members of active and reserve military personnel. We say we must repudiate our militarized foreign policy, dismantle our worldwide network of military bases prepositioned for intervention and renounce preventive and preemptive wars. Otherwise we will only send more of our loved ones to die for no good reason, in a world made more dangerous for them and for us by the arrogance and ignorance of our own government.
The best way to support our troops is to bring them back alive and well, and to bring them home now. If you agree, we urge you to sign on to this statement and circulate it widely in your union, workplace and community Sign Petition
U.S. Corporations in Iraq
U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel received no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars for reconstruction and other activities in Iraq. This was the first step in the Bush administration's plan to privatize and sell of key sectors of Iraq's economy. USLAW has produced a report on 18 of these corporations which exposes their anti-union, environmentally irresponsible and socially immoral record. This report and news accounts are gathered in this area from various sections of the website.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader believed to be responsible for the abduction of Kenneth Bigley, is 'more myth than man', according to American military intelligence agents in Iraq.
...Several sources said the importance of Zarqawi, blamed for many of the most spectacular acts of violence in Iraq, has been exaggerated by flawed intelligence and the Bush administration's desire to find "a villain" for the post-invasion mayhem.
...No concrete proof of the link between Zarqawi and bin Laden was offered until US officials this year trumpeted the discovery of a computer disk, allegedly intercepted by Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas. Among its files was an apparent draft of a letter from Zarqawi to bin Laden.
"We will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders and indeed swearing fealty to you publicly and in the news media," the letter read.
That seemed proof enough for the US government. "Zarqawi is the best evidence of the connection to al-Qa'eda affiliates and al-Qa'eda," Mr Bush said in June.
But senior diplomats in Baghdad claim that the letter was almost certainly a hoax. They say the two men may have met in Afghanistan but it appeared they never got on and there has been a rift for several years.
And never forget that we let him alone when we could have captured him, no less than three times, because he was useful as fuel for Bush's invasion plans.
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
The conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose television outlets reach nearly a quarter of the nation's homes with TV, is ordering its stations to preempt regular programming just days before the Nov. 2 election to air a film that attacks Sen. John F. Kerry's activism against the Vietnam War, network and station executives familiar with the plan said Friday.
...Sinclair has told its stations — many of them in political swing states such as Ohio and Florida — to air "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," sources said. The film, funded by Pennsylvania veterans and produced by a veteran and former Washington Times reporter, features former POWs accusing Kerry — a decorated Navy veteran turned war protester — of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the war. Sinclair will preempt regular prime-time programming from the networks to show the film, which may be classified as news programming, according to TV executives familiar with the plan.
...The company made headlines in April when it ordered seven of its stations not to air Ted Koppel's "Nightline" roll call of military dead in Iraq, deeming it a political statement "disguised as news content."
...David Wade, a spokesman for the Democratic nominee's campaign [responded], "It's beyond yellow journalism; it's a smear bankrolled by Republican money, and I don't think Americans will stand for it."
Oh, yes there are reasons. Mine was that John Kerry would be capable of sweeping America's worst offenses back under the rug from which the Bush administration has pulled them and made them unavoidable except by the most willfully blind. That, and maybe that within two years the Asshat would be so despised and his illegitamacy and outrages so outrageous that he would face impeachment, or maybe even prison, taking the rest of the criminals along. Let me dream.
I'm just not at all confident that America will wake up and really, truly turn the corner with John Kerry. I may not need to concern myself with that, however, as it's a sure bet the Rethugs will hit harder than ever before to destroy a Kerry White House. Some people, however, still have hope. A woman I traveled with in Venezuela put it this way: We must work hard to get John Kerry into the White House. And then we must immediately hit the streets and work harder than ever before to make him change.
A Bush victory would bring certain doom to the dying dream of authentic democracy whereas a Kerry victory would bring continued uncertainty: I choose uncertainty over certain doom. And I choose what Howard Zinn called last summer "the small ledge to stand on" that a Kerry presidency would bring to social movements. We must occupy that ledge and expand that tiny space into multiple spaces, platforms, and gardens that retake a whole damn country, a planet, and a human race that craves change in a different direction than that which the current economic and other fundamentalisms foist upon us.
On the other front, looking at reasons to keep Bush in office, LA Times columnist Jonathan Chait offers these...
To say that I consider Bush a "bad" president would be a severe understatement. I think he's bad in a way that redefines my understanding of the word "bad." I used to think U.S. history had many bad presidents. Now, my "bad" category consists entirely of George W. Bush, with every previous president redefined as "good." There's also the fact that, on a personal level, I despise him with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. What I'm saying is, advocating Bush is kind of tricky.
...I won't attempt to deny that [Bush] has done some awful things. What I'll argue instead is that his very awfulness is the reason he deserves reelection.
...[If]f John F. Kerry is elected and tries to raise taxes or rein in spending, he'll probably suffer substantial political damage...But...he'll not enjoy Democratic majorities in both Houses, which means he stands a good chance of failing. That would be the worst of all worlds: Democrats would suffer the political costs of demanding sacrifice from the public, without the corresponding benefit of making the country better.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker has estimated that there's a 75% chance of a major financial crisis within the next five years if we don't reduce our budget deficit. That may be too high, but assume he's right. Whoever holds office would quickly become extremely unpopular, whether he had tried to deal with the deficit or not. If the choice is Bush doing nothing versus Kerry doing nothing, why not let Bush take the blame for his own mess? Why have a Democrat bail him out?
...Now it's probably too late to do anything but salvage something short of total anarchy [in Iraq]. If Kerry is president, conservatives will blame him for the failure in Iraq — if only we still had a leader of Bush's unwavering resolve, they'll claim, we would have won the war. If Bush is president, he'll be held accountable for his own bungling of the invasion.
...[Republicans] get tens of millions of social conservatives marching to the polls to vote for them every two years but, because key points of the social-conservative agenda never gets enacted, they suffer hardly any political consequences for their positions.
Now, suppose Bush does appoint a couple justices. Maybe they will overturn Roe vs. Wade. If Roe falls, presumably states would decide how to deal with the abortion issue, and a reinvigorated pro-choice, center-left majority would be able to protect abortion rights in most places. In fact, the fear of a backlash would probably cause Bush's justices to chicken out and uphold Roe anyway. Then how would Republicans persuade social conservatives to keep supporting them?
I don't know. There are a lot of non-thinking, "moral" and uneducated people who are scared shitless after 9/11 and watching their jobs melt away from under them. They need somebody to lynch and somebody to blame. But it has to be a "liberal" or an "evil doer" - which are two descriptors of the same target in their view. Those people will support Republicans come Hell or high water. Republicans depend absolutely upon ignorance of the electorate. Bush's justices, presumably, would be people like Antonin Scalia - a man who has shown that he is not afraid to adjudicate with ideology.
Otherwise, Mr. Chait makes some good points.
The issue of choosing justices came up in the "debate" last night. Butthead was asked who he'd appoint. He thought he'd be cute, I guess.
BUSH: I'm not telling.
[Ed: Smarmy smile.]
I really don't have -- haven't picked anybody yet. Plus, I want them all voting for me.
[Ed: Smarmy smirk.]
I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.
Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn't pick.
I wouldn't pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn't be said in a school because it had the words under God in it. I think that's an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.
But John Kerry's rebuttal was exactly what a thinking person would want to hear.
A few years ago when he came to office, the president said -- these are his words -- What we need are some good conservative judges on the courts.
And he said also that his two favorite justices are Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas.
So you get a pretty good sense of where he's heading if he were to appoint somebody. Now, here's what I believe. I don't believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don't believe we need a good liberal judge. I don't believe we need a good judge of that kind of definition on either side.
I subscribe to the Justice Potter Stewart standard. He was a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. And he said the mark of a good judge, good justice, is that when you're reading their decision, their opinion, you can't tell if it's written by a man or woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian. You just know you're reading a good judicial decision.
What I want to find, if I am privileged to have the opportunity to do it -- and the Supreme Court of the United States is at stake in this race, ladies and gentlemen.
The future of things that matter to you -- in terms of civil rights, what kind of Justice Department you'll have, whether we'll enforce the law. Will we have equal opportunity? Will women's rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman's right to choose be protected?
These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law.
The transcript doesn't give you the visuals and the pauses, and so you miss the amazing moment when Butthead jumped from his seat (which he did quite often) and took on the moderator, Charlie Gibson, when he apparently thought Gibson might not give him rebuttal time. After a moment's pandemonium with Butthead talking over top of the moderator, Charlie apparently thought better of insisting on the rules he set out in the beginning. Wouldn't have mattered anyway. Butthead was going to have his say. Talk about shrill.
I watched the debate on CNN, and listened to a few people who called in immediately after the broadcast to comment. The ones that said Bush was more articulate and direct must be from another planet (Oklahoma, for one that I recall). Some nimwit woman called in to say she was voting for Bush because Kerry's a lawyer and speaks like one, and she can't understand what he's saying. Which in fact is what Butthead said in the debate, too. After Kerry spelled out his position on the abortion issue, the smirking butthead covered his inability to quickly pick up that ball and his pregnant pause (Dufus spontaneously aborts more thoughts than anyone I've ever heard) by saying, "I'm trying to decipher that."
And here's a perfect example of why we might actually prefer a lawyer as president....
Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.
That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America. -- Butthead
If you'd seen the dolt while he was stammering this one out, you'd have realized that he has no idea what the Constitution says, and he himself realized it halfway through his sentence.
Another caller said he'd been undecided even after the first debate, and going into this one, but he was now leaning toward Kerry. When asked what weighted his decision, he said that when the question to Bush was to name three mistakes he's made as President and how he would correct them, he didn't even offer one. The caller said that everybody makes mistakes and if a man can't even admit to one, there's a problem. Actually, Butthead did admit to mistakes. He said he made mistakes in some appointments of people, "but I won't name them", said with a smirk. Asshole. The Idiot Son of an Asshole, actually.
Again- Bush just delievered the same canned answers he's given time and time again. Kerry was conversational- spoke with the audience, the camera (directly), and cross-referenced questions given earlier. He proved himself in command of the issues, and the forum, against someone who was just there, blinking, delivering lines with an attitude of "what don't you morons not get about what I'm telling you?"
So true.
KERRY: Mr. President, countries are leaving the coalition, not joining. Eight countries have left it. If Missouri, just given the number of people from Missouri who are in the military over there today, were a country, it would be the third largest country in the coalition, behind Great Britain and the United States.
LaBelle sends a quote from James Wolcott, explaining perfectly the real reason for Bush's apparent electronic feed...
Indeed, he is able to tune into favorite frequencies simply by adjusting his head like an antenna trying to pick up a Spanish station on UHF.
When he turns his head to the right, he hears the voice of Karen Hughes telling his tie gives him secret powers. When he cocks his head to the left, he hears the voice of God telling him that Democrats are a race of devil-men. And when rotates his head semi clockwise and pauses, he hears the ruby-lipped, husky-FM-radio voice of Sister Cocaine telling him she knows her baby would like a taste of her sweet white goodness, yes he would, you know you want it, baby, Sister Cocaine make you feel so fine...and so on, as he begins to sway on his feet and a strange smile strays across his face.
After Bush loses the election, many will be sad that we have lost a President who so easily finds ways to make us laugh. Don't worry, the new guy is well qualified:
Afghanistan’s historic moment turned sour as all 15 challengers to interim Afghan President Hamid Karzai withdrew in the middle of voting in the nation’s first direct presidential election today.
...The opposition candidates met at the house of Uzbek candidate Abdul Satar Sirat and signed a petition saying they would not recognise the vote results.
...They accused the government and the United Nations of fraud and incompetence which allowed people to cast more than one ballot.
...The boycott was a blow to the international community, which spent just under £120 million staging the vote.
...Taliban rebels got into a skirmish with US troops that left at least 25 insurgents dead, and managed to kill three Afghan policemen accompanying ballots back to a counting centre after the vote.
...Ray Kennedy, vice chairman of the joint U.N.-Afghan electoral panel, of the opposition demands: “There have been some technical problems but overall it has been safe and orderly.”
Kennedy said it could take time for the electoral body to reach a decision on the vote’s legitimacy.
...Even if the vote is ultimately validated, Karzai’s ability to unite this nation, fight rampant warlordism and crush a lingering Taliban insurgency in the nation of 25 million might be fatally compromised if his opponents refuse to accept the results and insist that his rule is illegitimate.
Yeah, like that's a surprise. But I did wonder about his remark in the debate about Kerry's tax plan hurting small business owners, knowing how many "conservative" guys who think of themselves as "small business owners" and bootstraps kind of guys are buying into everything Republican because they think Democrats favor lazy people. Daily Mislead has some clarification on Cheney's comment.
During Tuesday's debate Vice President Cheney claimed that John Kerry's plan to roll back tax cuts for individuals making over $200,000 would negatively impact nearly a million small businesses. Cheney said that, "about 900,000 small businesses will be hit if you do, in fact, do what they want to do with the top bracket." The figure Cheney cited is highly misleading.
Under Cheney's definition a small business is any taxpayer who reports some income - even just $1 - from a small business investment or partnership. By this logic, "every partner at a huge accounting firm or at the largest law firm would represent small businesses." Also, by Cheney's definition, President Bush would have counted as a small business in 2001 because that year "he reported $84 of business income from his part ownership of a timber-growing enterprise." The overwhelming majority of actual small businesses are in the lower tax brackets and would be unaffected by the Kerry proposal.
People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me once, but he won't fool me twice.
It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian.
...I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a front man, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.
It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint press conference recently.
John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.
But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.
Josh Marshall points out that there are some fishy circumstances surrounding the issue of that oil-for-food scam the Oaf of Office and That Man Behind the Curtain would like you to focus on in the latest report that says Saddam had no WMD program. Fishy circumstances like no American companies that were involved in the scam have been named - privacy laws. (Yes, you're right - your privacy is not protected, thanks to the PATRIOT ACT and some other anti-terrorist laws, but corporations who deal in scams do have that protection.) And fishy circumstances like the information comes from records that our once friend Ahmad-the third biggest liar on the planet-Chalabi (who either chumped the Bushies or simply provided them cover with phony information for what they wanted to do anyway) supposedly has in his possession and refuses to hand over to independent authorities to have their authenticity verified. Of course I can't blame him for that - they're probably his life insurance policy.
There's a separate question about why U.S. firms on the list aren't being identified, only foreigners. But, setting that aside, has any independent body yet reviewed those documents? And if not, why are they being given such credence considering Chalabi's record as a convicted criminal, forger of documents, producer of phony intelligence and, in all likelihood, someone who passed on American intelligence to Iran?
I am assuming that these documents are part of the Hussein files that the U.S. permitted Chalabi to take control of when we "liberated" Baghdad and "accomplished" our "mission", when Chalabi was His Slowliness the Dope's favorite to be installed as Saddam's replacement. And again, I am assuming, from what Marshall is saying, that they were not amongst Chalabi's possessions when we accused him of being an Iranian agent and raided his offices.
The Chalabi story seemed awfully big to have blown out of the news so quickly. I've done a little light Googling to see whether his name comes up. It does, but not much.
It seems that an Iraqi court has dismissed the counterfeiting charges against him for lack of evidence. He blames the U.S. for those charges, saying that Rice's NSC has put out a memo delineating steps to "marginalize him". There's currently an investigation here in the U.S. into who might have leaked the classified information to him that he allegedly passed to Iran - an investigation we don't hear anything about.
I think Ahmad Chalabi is an important piece of an incredible plot, but he seems to have dropped from the U.S. news, with the exception of some headlines when somebody tried to assassinate him last month, and that was quickly passed over as well. It seems only reasonable to think that knowing which American companies are on his list of oil-for-food scam deals would give us some clues as to why Chalabi isn't in Guantanamo. I wonder if he's going to be on the presidential ballot. I imagine he is, since he's leader of the INC party. Running against Saddam Hussein. And Allawi.
Josh Marshall snags another fine detail. It appears that Thomas S. Ryder, the Dept. of Energy's intelligence chief who vetted flawed intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear program based on the forged Niger documents, was put in his position having only a background as a human resources manager, and a friendship with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
Ryder directly overruled [the department's] technical experts who wanted to dissent from the NIE findings on an Iraqi nuclear program.
Then after the NIE was published and just before the war began, Abraham awarded Ryder a $13,000 bonus for "exceeding performance expectations."
This was in addition to an earlier $7,500 bonus he awarded Ryder prior to the NIE's publication.
And then, job done, Abraham moved him to another position. In short...
Spencer Abraham taps a friend for a position for which he seems to have no qualifications whatsoever. Then that friend overrules his technical experts to greenlight a finding that Iraq is building nuclear weapons. Then Abraham gives him a big bonus for outstanding performance -- performance so outstanding that he doesn't keep him on in the job. -- Josh Marshall
I believe that the reason Dear Leader's election campaign does well is that it has abandoned issues and facts, and can do so because the press is completely unwilling or unable to do its job and examine the issues and facts. Instead of filtering or gathering information, the press, whether through laziness or willfulness, has chosen to stand on the sidelines and make remarks about ties and haircuts and whether someone looks tired.
Of course it's true. The media have abandoned what once was their position in America. "Laziness, willfulness"....I think it's as much that old bottom line: the dollar, to the pursuit of which Americans have abandoned themselves, something a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson predicted when this country was new.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Business profs post an open letter to The Devil's Spawn
As professors of economics and business, we are concerned that U.S. economic policy has taken a dangerous turn under your stewardship. Nearly every major economic indicator has deteriorated since you took office in January 2001. Real GDP growth during your term is the lowest of any presidential term in recent memory. Total non-farm employment has contracted and the unemployment rate has increased. Bankruptcies are up sharply, as is our dependence on foreign capital to finance an exploding current account deficit. All three major stock indexes are lower now than at the time of your inauguration. The percentage of Americans in poverty has increased, real median income has declined, and income inequality has grown.
...Sensible and farsighted economic management requires true discipline, compassion, and courage – not just slogans. Given the tenuous state of the American economy, we believe that the time for an honest assessment of the problem and for genuine corrective action is now. Ignoring the fiscal crisis that has taken hold during your presidency may seem politically appealing in the short run, but we fear it could ultimately prove disastrous... The letter...
Like he gives a shit.
I'm assuming this page is legit. The names listed as signatories appear to be professors at business schools from Harvard, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stanford, Marquette, Rutgers, MIT, and many others - mostly Harvard (only two from Yale).
Did CNN and MSNBC get hoodwinked this morning? Yesterday, the White House announced that President Bush would be delivering a "major policy address" on terrorism today. The cable news networks broadcast it live and in full. Yet the "address" turned out to be a standard campaign stump speech before a Pennsylvania crowd that seemed pumped on peyote, cheering, screaming, or whooping at every sentence.
