boistering

Russian Roulette with the World

2005-12-09T06:30:00.000-06:00

A dark cloud hangs over proceedings here in Montreal at the start of the last day of the UN climate change summit. The mood could not have changed more violently, writes Simon Retallack.

Just 24 hours ago, under a crystal clear blue sky, the atmosphere here was one of unexpected optimism – epitomised by the cheerfulness of the UK environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, in her meetings and interviews. The talks seemed to have reached an early breakthrough, with agreement said to be very close on a package that would see the launch of negotiations to deliver a second phase of the Kyoto protocol (with new emission cuts by industrialised countries) and the start of a process to engage a broader group of countries including developing ones in discussions on future action.

The mood improved still further with news that Bill Clinton would be gracing the summit, with a surprise appearance later today at the invitation of Canada’s prime minister, Paul Martin. There was even a report that a group of US students had moved members of the US negotiating team here in Montreal to tears following a plea for them to act on climate change. If that could happen, surely anything was possible. People even began contemplating an early exit home.

Then as temperatures were plunging outside, phones began ringing with news that the US delegation had destabilised the talks in dramatic fashion. The Canadian hosts were reported to have confirmed that the US had rejected a deal to start talks outside the Kyoto track between developed and developing countries to discuss future action on climate change, even though the already anodyne text sanctioning these talks had just been weakened further, now stating that whatever emerged would be entirely non-binding.

It’s possible that the result could be disastrous for the Montreal summit, preventing a green light being given to any new negotiations starting on global action to address climate change when the first phase of the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012. If the US insists on rejecting even the discussion of future action by all countries, it could stop Japan and others from agreeing to develop a new round of emission cuts by industrialised countries, potentially killing off the prospects of Kyoto mark II.

Rumours have been circulating that any change in the US approach is the result of a direct intervention in the talks by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, and that this was precisely the result he sought.

But with a day and possibly long night of negotiations still to go, much could yet change. In fact it could be that this apparent US tactic backfires, provoking other countries to move ahead without the US and agree a unified and probably more effective set of talks under the Kyoto protocol involving both industrialised and developing countries.

However, let’s face it, the overall implications are not good. When scientists tell us on a weekly basis that the problem of climate change is worse than we thought, when the damage that will be caused from inaction is so huge, and when the scale and urgency of the challenge ahead is so large, taking pot shots at the proposals on the table here in Montreal is tantamount to playing Russian roulette on a global scale. It’s a game that only the criminally insane could think we can afford to play and win.

Simon Retallack is senior research fellow on climate change policy at the Institute for Public Policy Research, Britain’s largest thinktank.

--Guardian UK.com

TR Knew

2005-11-24T07:02:00.000-06:00

TR could be a tyrant like the rest of 'em...but I like this quote and think it's highly apropos.

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else."

-- Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States of America

Military Knew About Atta a Year Before 9/11

2005-09-22T06:39:00.000-05:00

By BART JANSEN Washington D.C. Correspondent,

WASHINGTON — Pentagon researchers linked Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta to a New York group of al-Qaida terrorists a year before the 2001 attacks, but the military destroyed the evidence after the hijackings, witnesses testified Wednesday. The Defense Department has refused to discuss the intelligence program called "Able Danger" and prohibited those who were involved from testifying at Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The refusal has fueled talk about whether the military could have prevented the attacks.

A Pentagon official acknowledged at the hearing that officials should have shared the information with the FBI if it was gathered in an acceptable manner.

Committee members called the destruction of paperwork a cover-up of missed opportunities. More urgently, lawmakers questioned what other information was destroyed that could have helped prevent future terrorist attacks.

"Terrorism remains the No. 1 problem in the United States today," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. and committee chairman. "It is not a matter of attaching blame, it is a matter of correcting any errors so that we don't have a repetition of 9/11. If there is intelligence available, it ought to be shared."

Atta was the apparent leader of 19 hijackers aboard four planes Sept. 11 that crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing about 3,000 people. Atta is of great interest in Maine because he and another hijacker passed through Portland International Jetport the morning of the attacks, flying to connections in Boston.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., and vice chairman of the Armed Services Committee, sparked the investigation of Able Danger after learning about the secret program through his congressional work. He lost a neighbor and military colleagues in the attacks.

"There's something wrong with the system, and we should be able to discuss that," he said.

Weldon has found five military officials who described seeing Atta among Able Danger records.

One was Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a civilian at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Army reserve officer who tried to pass along warnings to the FBI three times and was rebuffed.

Another was James Smith, a defense contractor who kept a chart on his office wall that linked pictures of suspected terrorists including Atta with text about them.

Both men attended the hearing, but the Pentagon ordered Shaffer not to testify. His security clearance, which was suspended after he spoke to the Sept. 11 Commission about Able Danger, was fully revoked Monday.

His lawyer, Mark Zaid, also urged Smith not to testify for fear of losing his own security clearance.

But Zaid described what they would have said. He compared Able Danger to the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," where players name actors or movies connected to the prolific actor.

At Able Danger, researchers started with links to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Atta, who wasn't known to be in the United States, was linked to Abel-Rahman's Brooklyn group of al-Qaida, placing his picture on Smith's giant chart, Zaid said.

"It was grainy photograph," Zaid said. "He remembered it vividly because of the potentially evil, death look in Mohamed Atta's eyes, and his narrow, drawn face."

The Pentagon has refused to discuss Able Danger for fear of revealing classified secrets. But Specter said he would continue pressing for answers.

"This looks to me like it may be obstruction of the committee's activities," Specter said.

Able Danger operated primarily in 1999 and 2000, although briefings based on the program's research continued in early 2001, according to witnesses. When the program ended, the military destroyed 2.5 terabytes of documentation, which Weldon said equals one-quarter of the books at the Library of Congress.

Erik Kleinsmith, who trains others in intelligence gathering for Lockheed Martin Information Technology, was an Army major in intelligence who worked on Able Danger. He said the data "allowed us to map al-Qaida as a worldwide threat with a surprisingly significant presence within the United States."

But he told the committee that he ordered the destruction of the program's documents based on military regulations calling for routine elimination. "This destruction was dictated by and conducted in accordance with intelligence oversight procedures that we lived by," Kleinsmith said.

In another twist, witnesses at the hearing said the documents could be destroyed easily because they were not secret. Weldon said military officials acknowledged to Armed Services Committee members two weeks ago at an informal meeting that Able Danger had used voting records that were publicly available.

Lawmakers voiced frustration with the destruction of the intelligence. "I don't get the purpose of the cover-up," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del.

After highlighting the public nature of the information, Specter asked William Dugan, acting assistant to the defense secretary for intelligence oversight, whether it was a mistake for the Pentagon not to share the information with the FBI. Dugan said he wasn't sure whether it was properly collected.

But Specter pressed, asking what should happen if information was properly collected.

"If it's properly collected, yes," Dugan said.

--Mainetoday.com

Washington Correspondent Bart Jansen can be contacted at 202-488-1119 or at:
bjansen@pressherald.com

Beyond Infuriating

2005-09-15T20:40:00.000-05:00

How pathetic is it really that Bush has to ask Condaleeza to go to the bathroom. I couldn't bear to listen to him speak tonight about the woeful state of the preparedness of this great nation. It is beyond infuriating that Neo-Cons will now block any investigation into the New Orleans "rescue" operation. They will no doubt set up their own investigation and parrot whatever dubious information they're told to by Karl Rove. Plausible deniability is their game and they have no shame, no heart, and no conscience whatsoever. It's nauseating that these fascists claim to be Christians. As Bill O'Reilly recently said, "the poor of New Orleans are all thugs and drug addicts anyway." Why spend money that could go into the pockets of Halliburton stockholders after they win a huge reconstruction contract? There's a pattern here and those who cannot see it are beyond help.

NEW YORK In what seems destined to become one of the most joked about photos of the month, a well-known Reuters photographer on Wednesday captured President George W. Bush scribbling a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a session at the United Nations. On the note is a message revolving around the need to take a "bathroom break."

The photo, which appeared on Reuters' official photo site, was quickly published all over the Web, though dismissed by some as a likely photoshop special. Others suggested that surely someone must have hacked the Reuters site. But a Reuters spokesman on Thursday told E&P the photo was legit.

"The photographer and editors on this story were looking for other angles in their coverage of this event, something that went beyond the stock pictures of talking heads that these kind of forums usually offer," explained Reuters' Stephen Naru. "This picture certainly does that."

--Reuters, 9/15

Profiting Off a Tragedy: Again

2005-09-03T09:45:00.000-05:00

This is really sickening, but it's vital that people know.

___________________________________

The very first thing our fearless leader did in response to Hurricane Katrina was to offer a helping hand—not to the people stranded on rooftops in New Orleans, but to his friends in the oil industry. These were the same people who gave him $52 million in his last campaign. Bush released millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve so the oil companies would have enough fuel to make gas and keep the country going. But the companies don't need this oil. They're already swimming in it.

Pouring more oil into the marketplace didn't reduce gasoline prices, which kept on going up, hitting $4 a gallon in some places.

While crude oil production doubtless was curtailed by the storm, the companies face a surplus, not a shortage, of crude oil. So why dump more on the market?

“Despite growing inventories, U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) increased by nearly 5 million barrels over the past 3 weeks,” wrote the federal Energy Information Administration. Continuing in the clipped industry jargon, the agency added, “While this may not appear to be a substantial build, it comes at a time when crude oil inventories typically decline, as refiners use more crude to make gasoline needed for current demand and heating oil as they stock up for the winter.”

Thus, any crude oil inventory increase during the month of August, much less one of five million barrels over a three-week period, might lead one to expect prices to drop. Yet the price for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil has risen by $5 per barrel! If prices don't fall under these conditions, what will make them fall?

All over the world this summer, oilmen raced to dump surplus into the U.S. market, where the rigged prices made them a killing. Oil traders in China, the second biggest world market next to the U.S., were shoving oil into the high-priced U.S. market to make more money. (The U.S. consumes 25 percent of the world market; China 7 percent.)

Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Ed Wallace wrote last week that “there's actually weakening demand in Asia over the past two months, so oil is being diverted to the U.S., where it'll bring higher profits.” He quoted Reuters as noting that “Chinese oil trader Unipec resold at least 3 million barrels of August-arriving crude due to reduced refinery demand and was offering more, traders said last week.” Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for Valero in San Antonio, was quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying, “There is no reason for crude oil to be at $65 a barrel other than hype in the market.”

To be sure, some oil companies face shortages because of the storm, but the release of oil from the strategic reserve may not help them much. “The Capline, a major crude oil pipeline that feeds many Midwest refineries with crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico, is currently shut down due to lack of electricity at many of its pumping stations,” the EIA reported Wednesday. “As a result, one refinery in the Midwest has already reported that it has reduced its production due to a loss in crude oil supply. With the recent Government decision that crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) will be made available to those affected by the hurricane, there may be some relief for refiners that have reduced their production due to loss of crude supply,” the government service dryly continues. “However, they will need to find a way to get the crude oil from the SPR to their refineries.”

What is going on here? The story goes like this: Refineries are increasing their stocks of crude, yet not increasing production of gasoline. This may help explain the high prices. It is an odd situation, since usually, in the summer, refineries are operating full tilt to lay in supplies of gasoline and home heating oil.

The slowing of gasoline production might be due to some unrecognized problems within the refineries. But the industry says it's because of market conditions, with officials noting that while today's crude prices are over $70, in 1999 crude oil was selling at around $12 a barrel. “Refineries lost a lot of money. In fact they lost money for most of the 1990s,” Jeff Morris, president of Alon USA, owner of the Big Spring Refinery, told The Wall Street Journal last week. “People chose not to spend on refineries. So what's affecting us now is that we're behind the investment curve and it will take us five to 10 years to catch up.”

If the companies can't increase their refined products, they could end up turning not to the petroleum reserve but to the European Union. While the U.S. keeps a supply of crude oil in its strategic reserve, the Europeans maintain a stock of gasoline as well as crude. There has been speculation that in a really tight situation, the EU might be called on to export some of that supply to the U.S.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile, the high gas prices are adding to the profits of the big companies. Says the watchdog group Public Citizen: “Since George Bush became president in 2001, the top five oil companies [selling gas] in the United States have recorded profits of $254 billion: ExxonMobil: $89 billion, Shell: $60.7 billion, BP: $53 billion, ChevronTexaco: $31 billion, ConocoPhillips: $20 billion.” The group adds: “As Americans shell out more dollars at the pump, the profit margin by U.S. oil refiners has shot up 79% from 1999 (the year Exxon and Mobil merged) to 2004.”

Bush refuses to increase the energy efficiency standards for motor vehicles, which use 70 percent of total oil production, and he recently signed the energy bill that hands out billions in new subsidies to the industry. Even he seems to recognize what a shuck this is: In April, with prices moving ever higher and the Congress debating the energy bill, Bush said, “With $55 oil, we don't need incentives to oil and gas companies.”

But this summer, Congress, with the president's enthusiastic support, adopted a series of new subsidies for the oil and gas industry. “Officially, the energy bill's giveaways are supposed to cost $14.6 billion over the next 10 years, offset in part by $3.1 billion in higher gasoline taxes on consumers,” says Robert S. McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. “But that doesn't include the bill's $70 billion in authorized but unfunded subsidies, for which cash will have to be appropriated later.”

Now they get another handout in the form of the strategic oil reserve. This is a complicated setup whereby rather than paying the federal government (i.e., the general public) for the right to drill oil on public lands, the industry puts some of this oil into the reserve. When times get bad, it then extracts some of the 750 million barrels stored in salt domes under the Texas and Louisiana coasts-with the promise to return it later on. It can therefore get cost-free oil, turn it into gasoline and sell it at high prices, hoping to buy back crude oil later on at lower prices and return it to the reserve.

In addition, the petroleum reserve will buy oil to fill its reservoirs on the market to jack up crude prices. So the industry makes a killing both ways. The public is left shelling out $4 a gallon at the pump.

--Village Voice, Sept. 3

Where Is the National Guard?

2005-09-02T06:37:00.000-05:00

At least seven bodies were scattered outside the convention center, a makeshift staging area for those rescued from rooftops, attics and highways. The sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.

A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.

“There’s a lot of very sick people — elderly ones, infirm ones — who can’t stand this heat, and there’s a lot of children who don’t have water and basic necessities to survive on,” said Daniel Edwards outside the center. “We need to eat, or drink water at the very least.”

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

“I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “You can do everything for other countries, but you can’t do nothing for your own people.”

The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.

People chanted, “Help, help!” as reporters and photographers walked through. The crowd got angry when journalists tried to photograph one of the bodies and covered it with a blanket. A woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm.

“It’s like they’re punishing us,” said John Murray, 52.

--MSNBC, 9/2

Bush Fiddles While Rome Drowns

2005-09-01T20:37:00.000-05:00

President Bush faced not only the fallout of Hurricane Katrina but also an intense political storm yesterday as relief experts, government officials and newspaper editorials criticised everything from his administration's disaster preparedness policies to the manner in which he made his public entry into the growing crisis on the Gulf coast.

The New York Times said of a speech he made on Tuesday: "Nothing about the President's demeanour yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."
No less trenchant - and more heartfelt - was the Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi which surveyed the disaster around its editorial offices and asked: "Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in south Mississippi been pressed into service?"

As when the Asian tsunami hit last year, Mr Bush found himself on holiday at his Texas ranch when disaster struck. As with the tsunami, he was soon in the firing line for reacting slowly - he spent Monday on a fundraising tour of the American West - and failing to provide adequate leadership. As survivors complained of a lack of water, food and medical supplies yesterday, fingers from across the political spectrum were pointed at the White House.
Experts on the Mississippi Delta pointed out that a plan to shore up the levees around New Orleans was abandoned last year for lack of government funding. They noted that flood-control spending for south-eastern Louisiana had been chopped every year that Mr Bush has been in office, that hurricane protection funds have also fallen, and that the local army corps of engineers has also had its budget cut. The emergency management chief for Jefferson parish told the Times-Picayune newspaper:"It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."

The torrent of criticism contrasted sharply to the reaction to the 11 September attacks, when political sniping was put on hold and dissenters were told their complaints were both unwelcome and unpatriotic. The change in tone partly suggests a growing disenchantment with Mr Bush.

The usually restrained New York Times said: "Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?"

--The Indepent (UK), 10/1

2005-09-01T07:02:00.001-05:00

This guy is my hero.

Bush's Dissolving Approval Rating

2005-08-15T06:53:00.000-05:00

Bush's standing with an American public anxious about Iraq and the nation's direction is lower than that of the last two men who won re-election to the White House — Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — at this point in their second terms.

But solid backing from his base supporters has kept Bush from sinking to the depths reached by former presidents Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bush's father. Truman decided not to run for re-election. Nixon resigned. Carter and the first President Bush were defeated in re-election campaigns.

"This president should be glad he's not running for re-election," said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst from the American Enterprise Institute. "But the president is clearly holding his base. It's very important for him to keep the base support in terms of getting things done."

Indeed, Republicans in Congress already are starting to fret about the 2006 election. If Bush's approval ratings sink lower, more of them may be unwilling to go along with his major initiatives for fear it could cause backlash for them with voters.

Bush's job approval in recent polls ranges from the low- to mid-40s. It was 42 percent in the latest AP-Ipsos poll. His ratings on everything from handling Iraq to the economy to Social Security and other domestic issues are at their lowest levels so far.

Reagan was at 57 percent at this stage of his presidency and Clinton was at 61 percent, according to Gallup polling at the time.

The partisan divide for Bush is stark — 80 percent of Democrats disapprove of his overall performance while nearly 90 percent of Republicans approve.

Charles Black, a veteran GOP strategist and close Bush ally, said Republicans are sticking with Bush for two reasons: personal affection and loyalty.

"I haven't seen anything like it since Reagan," he said. "Bush follows through on issues that are largely popular with the base, even when it's not popular with the general public to do so."

Bush may have a hard time pushing up his numbers because issues like the violence in Iraq and gas prices are largely out of his control.

But Bush's efforts to put conservatives on the Supreme Court and overhaul the federal tax code are likely to please his conservative base.

Other presidents have seen their political bases dissolve, in Gallup poll figures:

_Truman's approval dipped to 24 percent in the late spring of 1951 after he removed popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur from command in Korea.

_Nixon's approval dropped to 31 percent in August 1973 as the war dragged on in Vietnam and revelations of administration misdeeds kept spilling out of the Senate Watergate hearings.

_Carter's approval plunged to 29 percent in the early summer of 1979 amid economic troubles and news of increasing problems with new Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

_The first Bush's approval sank to 32 percent in July 1992 as his presidential rivals Clinton and Ross Perot gained momentum in the campaign and the jobless rate rose.

For the current president to fall to those levels, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents would have to abandon him in large numbers. So far there's no indication that is happening, though there are some rumblings of discontent.

"I voted for Bush," said Jerry Fleming a GOP-leaning independent from Athens, Ala. "I feel like he's pretty much a straight-shooter as far as his religious background. I respect that part of him.

"But if the situation in Iraq keeps dragging out for a long period of time with no hope for peace, I would eventually get fed up with it," Fleming said.

For Trisha McAllister, a Republican from Grenada, Miss., Bush's willingness to ignore public opinion wins her over.

"I may not approve of every single thing he does," McAllister said, "but he's a true leader because he's not leading by the polls."

Presidential scholar Charles Jones cautioned against reading too much into low poll ratings for a president at a given point of his term.

"Truman got some of the lowest poll numbers any president ever got," said Jones, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Now when we look back on Truman, he's the highest ranked of the post-World War II presidents."

SF Gate, Aug 15

We Have to Start Thinking Again

2005-08-14T21:41:00.000-05:00

LENOX, MASS. – Johnny Damon and Nomar Garciaparra are not the only boys of summer. For vacationing theatergoers at Shakespeare festivals around the United States, the lineup includes Romeo and Petruchio, Benedick and Othello.

Shakespeare may not attract the stadium-size throngs that visit ballparks, but the Elizabethan playwright's work continues to be celebrated in an ever-growing number of theaters, and audiences are on the rise.

Despite hand-wringing by educators over a lack of interest in the spoken word among a generation raised on electronic entertainment, Shakespeare's influence with young people is being strengthened by companies that offer workshops in schools.

Another important factor is that performance styles have changed, as have teaching methods, with the aim of presenting Shakespeare's language as everyday speech and reclaiming the playwright's innate humanity and sense of humor.

"There's a real appetite for Shakespeare," says Tina Packer, founder and artistic director of Shakespeare & Company here. "I think that old thing about the United States being afraid of Shakespeare is over."

Friday night, Shakespeare plays will be performed on stages from Ashland, Ore., to Chicago to Lenox, Mass., not to mention in Stratford, Ontario, where the largest of the North American festivals takes place. The number of companies belonging to the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America has increased from 37 in 1991 when the association was formed to nearly 90 members today.

This rise in the playwright's stock has occurred partly because of what Libby Appel, director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), calls the vacation factor. "We've made Shakespeare into a summer delight," she says. "People bring picnics; they can come for five days and see nine plays. It engenders a good time."

Popular films such as those by Kenneth Branagh ("Henry V" and "Much Ado About Nothing) and Baz Lurhman ("Romeo and Juliet"), and the fictionalized "Shakespeare in Love" have brought a broader sweep of audiences to the live performances, according to Barbara Gaines, director and founder of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST).

Shakespeare & Company, like OSF, benefits from its location in a vacation spot, in the midst of the Berkshire hills. Visitors can stay in one of the charming bed-and-breakfast inns, take in a concert at Tanglewood (the summer home of Boston Symphony Orchestra), and attend the plays there and at other theaters in the area, not to mention hike and shop for antiques.

Ashland, Lenox, and Chicago have much in common, despite their geographic differences. Each festival is headed by a gifted, feisty woman who also directs several productions a year. OSF presents 11 productions during its 10-month season; Shakespeare & Company mounts five from May to October; while CST presents 620 year-around performances of seven productions, two by visiting companies. In the spring, CST will produce "Henry IV, Parts I and II" in Chicago, then take the plays to Stratford, England, as part of a marathon by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

The RSC's recently announced plans to present the entire canon - dramas, comedies, histories, and even the sonnets - in one seven-month period beginning April 2006, signal that the playwright continues to be celebrated in his own land.

Americans, however, have come to Shakespeare more gradually, starting on a smaller scale.

The OSF traces its roots to 1935 when the town of Ashland contributed $400 to produce three plays. Although the population of Ashland still numbers only about 21,000, OSF sells nearly 400,000 tickets a year and draws steady audiences from Oregon, California, and Washington, adding visitors from across the country.

Ms. Gaines, who began Chicago Shakespeare Theater 19 years ago with $3,000, recalls, "When I said I was starting a theater for Shakespeare's plays, I was laughed up and down Michigan Avenue. 'Never in Chicago,' they said. Now we regularly sell out." Today, CST is housed in a seven-story building on Chicago's busy Navy Pier, and runs on an annual budget of $13 million.

In 1978, Ms. Packer directed her first production in Lenox, in the overgrown gardens at Edith Wharton's abandoned ruin of a country mansion. The actors had to clean out the debris to make room for their sleeping bags. The company moved from The Mount in 1999 after buying a 63-acre campus down the road for $3.5 million, but recently sold half the property for $3.9 million, to allow it to pay off debts and enhance its building fund.

As a group, these theaters run extensive education programs that have revolutionized the teaching of Shakespeare and primed the next generation to treat the plays as familiar, beloved experiences. Students and teachers in New England, up and down the West Coast, and in the Chicago public schools and others in the greater Midwest are prepared by teams of actors who turn classrooms into stages for vigorous, on-your-feet explorations of the plays. The students then come to the theaters by the busloads to see the professional shows. "Fifty-five thousand kids of the greater Chicago area are served each year, with their teachers. The students say that our theater is their favorite field trip," Gaines says.

Crowd-pleasing productions, vacation-time destinations, and year-round school programs are obvious reasons for the expansion of these theaters, but the final account lies in the plays themselves.

According to Appel, "A work of Shakespeare is something different from any old play. His plays continue to reach to every level of society." Gaines believes, "With the pain and suffering going on in the world, Shakespeare is the only playwright who steps up to the issues. Shakespeare lets the listener into the soul of his characters, and it's the same as your soul. It's basically about you."

Packer says, "As we become more media-driven, Shakespeare will become the counterculture for people who believe in the word. There will come a time when we have to start thinking again. The complexity of thought lies in language."

Christian Science Monitor, Aug 14

Cindy Sheehan Has Heart

2005-08-14T16:50:00.000-05:00

ASHLAND, ORE., AND CRAWFORD, TEXAS – In her high-profile vigil outside President Bush's Texas ranch, Cindy Sheehan has brought the face and the heart of the antiwar movement to the world.

The plain-spoken words and image of a mother carrying a wooden cross to commemorate the son she lost in Iraq have suddenly brought focus to what has been largely an unseen and ineffective protest movement in the US.

To be sure, this is still not Kent State in 1970. For a variety of political and practical reasons, today's antiwar movement may never approach the ardor of a generation ago. Moreover, many conservatives criticize Ms. Sheehan for being co-opted by the broader political left - itself a reflection of the crosscurrents of the time.

Yet the mother, hoisting her plaintive signs and vowing to stay in Crawford until she gets a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush, has become a potent personal symbol of opposition to a war now stretching into its third year. More important, her crusade comes at a time when doubts about US engagement there are clearly growing.

"One keeps hearing that the number of queries coming into conscientious objector advisory groups are on the upswing," says retired US Army Colonel Dan Smith, a Vietnam veteran now working for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobbying group. "College campuses are stirring. Facts suggest a rising antiwar sentiment is in the making."

The depth of America's ambivalence is reflected in the polls. A CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll this month, echoing other surveys, shows that Americans by a 55-44 majority now believe the US "made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq." Some 56 percent say some or all US troops should be withdrawn now.

The hardening sentiment hasn't gone unnoticed in Washington. Many Democrats have become more vocal about the need for a definitive timetable for the withdrawal of troops, and they have been joined of late by some Republicans. The recent special congressional election in Ohio - where the Democrat was an Iraq war vet who nearly won in a heavily Republican district - has added to concerns about the war in some GOP circles.

Within the military, some senior commanders have talked about a timeframe for starting to bring home troops. But late last week, Bush tamped down any expectations of a quick withdrawal, saying it was too soon to say when the number of troops might be reduced.

Still, for all the concern about Iraq, the antiwar movement today isn't likely to reach the levels of Vietnam. For one thing, there are fundamental reasons why this war is distinctly different: the lack of military conscription, a relatively low level of American casualties (at least compared to Vietnam, where more than 30 times as many US soldiers were killed), and the absence of a self-conscious youth culture.

"What made the antiwar movement so powerful during the Vietnam War was its close connection to the movement of millions of baby-boomers through college," says national security analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "Away from home for the first time and insulated from military service by student deferments, many of these adolescents were acutely aware of their susceptibility to the draft once they completed college. Opposition to the war became part of a generational identity, particularly among middle-class students in universities."

Today, some of the not-so-silent minority worried about the war includes military veterans and their families. Jan Barry, a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, says that when his group posted a statement of opposition to the Iraq war on a website shortly before the conflict started, it was signed by some 4,000 vets and family members, many of whom were retired. What surprised him, though, was the number of second and third generation military who signed up - including many World War II vets.

Activists say the grumbling about the war extends to some in the active-duty ranks. Even though there is no draft today, they note that the war has stretched on long enough, and has involved enough multiple deployments of many older National Guard and Reserve troops with family and work responsibilities back home, that misgivings are surfacing.

"We don't have a 'conscription draft,' as we say, but we have an economic draft [recruiters increasingly targeting poorer high school students], a backdoor draft with the National Guard and Reserves [who now make up more than 40 percent of US troops in Iraq], with the stop-loss program and the calling up of the Individual Ready Reserves," says Steve Morse of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, which offers counseling on a "GI Hotline" at 13 locations around the country.

The group Iraq Veterans Against the War was launched a year ago. Yet like its Vietnam counterpart in the 1960s and 70s, it remains a minority voice.

In a survey of service members earlier this year, readers of Military Times publications agreed that the US should have gone to war in Iraq by a 60-21 percent margin. The University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey last fall found that 64 percent of military personnel sampled (compared to 45 percent of the general population) said the situation in Iraq had been worth going to war over. Among those who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan, however, that dropped to 55 percent.

In any case, GI's seem to take a realistically sober view of the war. The Military Times survey found that about half thought it would take 5-10 years for the US to achieve its goals in Iraq. A plurality (47 percent) thought the media should publish or broadcast news stories "that suggest the war is not going well," and 65 percent said "it should be OK to publish photographs of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base from Iraq."

'Camp Casey'

On the road outside Bush's ranch, the view is even more sober - and the anger more prevalent.

"I have a feeling that a lot of people have found their voice in her [Cindy Sheehan]," says Hadi Jawad, an activist in Dallas who helped found "Peace House" in Crawford near the Bush ranch. "She is articulating what is in their hearts."

About a dozen military families have arrived to lend a hand in the Sheehan protest. They come from Alabama, California, Georgia, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas - and most have lost a loved one.

"We are here for all the soldiers who don't have a voice anymore," says Sergio Torres, whose son Army Sgt. Daniel Torres was killed in February when a roadside bomb hit his unarmored Humvee.

At what's called "Camp Casey," after her son who was killed, Sheehan is shepherded from interview to interview, sometimes using a protester's van to take media calls on a cell phone. Outside her tent, supporters have placed flowers and signs.

Since arriving Aug. 6, she has endured Texas thunderstorms, jalapeño heat, and unfriendly stares from some local people. "Last night I had fire ants crawling all over me," Sheehan says. "Physically it's very uncomfortable, but I think of all the soldiers in Iraq who, when it's too hot or too stormy, can't go into town for refuge. As bad as we have it here, it's nothing compared to how bad they have it over there."

The president's motorcade passed by for the first time on Friday, on its way to a Republican fundraiser down Prairie Chapel Road. But even if she doesn't get to meet with him, Sheehan says, "I've accomplished a lot by putting this war back on the front page where it should be."

At that moment, a counter-protester appeared with a sign that read, "Your son is a hero, not a victim!" Sheehan was whisked away before the two could meet.

Christian Science Monitor, Aug 14

The Vampire Awakens

2005-08-09T19:53:00.000-05:00

Katherine Harris (remember the vote-count stopper responsible for Bush's first judicially decided pseudo-win?) is now resurfacing and ready to collect the spoils for being the stooge responsible for this entire Bush debacle. The vampire awakens to make the move to Washington and wield her schizoid power to cause even more destruction. Keep a close watch on this one...she's poised for infamy.

_______________________________________________

SARASOTA, Florida (AP) -- Rep. Katherine Harris began her campaign for Senate on Tuesday, saying among the issues she plans to address are homeland security and health care.

The Republican, best known for her role as Florida's then-secretary of state during the 2000 presidential recount, is trying to unseat Democrat Bill Nelson, who will be seeking his second Senate term in November 2006.

In her formal announcement, Harris offered a glance at several issues she said she will target, including taxes, homeland security, health care and hurricane assistance.

"After an extended listening tour which begins today, I will fully outline my agenda for Florida -- a road map for change that remains heavy on security and light on taxes; strong on defense but even stronger for those who man our defense; for health care not limited by cost or availability; and relief for those in trouble that bridges every storm while harboring no excuse for delay," Harris said.

Elected to the House in 2002, she declined to run for an open Senate seat while President Bush was on the 2004 ballot because some Republican strategists feared she might cost him votes in Florida. Instead, she was elected to her second House term.

Harris, 48, may have a clear shot at Nelson. No other Republicans have expressed a strong interest in running.

Florida House Speaker Allan Bense said last week he won't challenge her for the GOP nod, saying he believes a campaign would take away from his commitment to the House. The White House and other top Republicans had encouraged Bense to get into the race.

Even with an opponent, Harris would be considered a favorite to win the nomination because of her high name recognition and ability to raise money.

CNN, Aug 9

O'Connor Blasts Neo-Cons

2005-07-25T22:43:00.000-05:00

Sandra Day O'Connor is blasting the Neo-Cons for their hatchet job against an independent judiciary. She was
appointed by Reagan, remember. It's good to see someone with clout speaking their mind instead of goose-
stepping behind the bullies. This is one tough woman and she is sounding the alarm.

__________________________________________

O'Connor Speaks Out Against Neo-Con BS

United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor refuses to go gently into the night. Late last week, while her political friends were rallying around her heir apparent, she said something as important as anything she had said while sitting on the High Court for nearly a quarter of a century. She loudly and passionately called out the Republican leadership in Congress for its cynical, sinister, and relentless assault upon the independence of the federal judiciary.

In some of the frankest tones you will ever hear from a sitting Justice, O'Connor, the Reagan appointee, gray-haired grandmother, and symbol of middle-American courtliness, blasted the very people on Capitol Hill who are cheering the loudest these days for John G. Roberts, Jr., the man who will almost certainly take over her consistently conservative vote from the bench on the first Monday in October. Speaking in Spokane, Wash., to a group of lawyers and judges, O'Connor warned that "the present climate is such that I worry about the future of the federal judiciary ... In our country today, we're seeing efforts to prevent an independent judiciary."

The "climate" and "efforts" she mentioned are actually the concerted, focused, and malevolent political campaign by conservative leaders to try to diminish the authority — and ultimately the power — of judges across the country. O'Connor gets it. From her lofty perch, she saw that the current wave of nasty criticism of judges is different in scope and substance from previous complaints about the judiciary we've seen crop up in this country over the years. She sees how dangerous that is — how manipulative and antithetical to the healthy separation of power upon which our government is based. This isn't some hack commentator like me decrying the blatant legislative power grab — this comes from one of the most revered Supreme Court justices of her generation — and a staunchly loyal Republican to boot.

The whole story:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/25/opinion/courtwatch/main711414.shtml

from CBS News.com, July 25

The Assault, by Clayton Eshleman

2005-07-24T09:51:00.000-05:00

The Assault

I

Mid-July 2001: The US government—having decided that the Taliban regime was too unstable and too hostile to serve as a vehicle for US entry into Central Asia—had planned on an Afghanistan invasion for October.

National support for such an invasion depended upon a widely-perceived direct threat. Now known “enemy attacks” used to whip up and mobilize people for war included: the US Battleship Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, Tonkin Bay. Our atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the beginning of the Cold War.

September 10: Bin Laden was in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, courtesy of the ISI, for kidney dialysis (in July he met with the local CIA agent in Dubai; no attempt was made to arrest him).

September 6-10: United and American Airlines stock shares were massively sold short, as were shares at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (occupying 22 WTC floors) and Merrill Lynch (headquarters near the WTC). Insiders with advance knowledge of an approaching national catastrophe are believed to have made over 15 million. If they knew, would you tell me that Bush, The Secret Service, The Air Force, and the Pentagon did not know?

(The alleged lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, with an expired 2000 tourist visa, re-entered 3 times in 2001 for flying lessons—for which he lacked the required M-1 work visa—while under FBI surveillance for stockpiling bomb making materials)

August 2001: The FBI was informed that Zacarias Moussaoui was linked by French intelligence to bin Laden (top FBI officials blocked field agents’ requests to search Zacarias’s computer).

August 2001: Attorney David Schippers was approached by FBI agents and given the names of the hijackers, their targets, proposed dates, and the sources of their funding. He tried to contact Ashcroft who did not return any of his calls. Schippers’ informants were pulled off their investigation and threatened with prosecution if they went public (Schippers is now representing one FBI agent in a suit against the US government in an attempt to subpoena its testimony, so he can legally speak about the blocked investigation on public record).

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) requires fighter jets to scramble and intercept under emergency conditions. No approval from the White House is required (when Payne Stuart’s Learjet pilot failed to respond to the air controller at 9:33, 21 minutes later, an F-16 traveling at 1500 mph reached the Learjet at 46,000 feet).

On September 11, Flight #11 was clearly way off course by 8:20. SOP called for immediate notification and response. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was not informed of an emergency by Boston air traffic control until 8:38. Initially, according to former NORAD Commander Gen. Richard Myers, no jets were scrambled until after Flight #77 struck the Pentagon at 9:40 (1 hour and 20 minutes after #11 was suspected of being hijacked). Within days, this story changed: at 8:44, we are told, 2 F-15s were scrambled at Otis (Cape Cod), 190 miles from Manhattan. If these jets flew at top speed (1850 mph), they would have reached the Towers in 6 minutes. But at 9:03, when Flight #175 struck the South Tower, the Otis jets were unexplainably still 70 miles from Manhattan (and why sent from Otis? McGuire, a major, active facility in New Jersey, is 71 miles from the WTC. Arrival time: 3 minutes. No planes were scrambled from McGuire).

The apparent shut down of SOP on Flight #77 is even more sinister: known to be hijacked by 8:50 (at which time it was also known #11 and #175 were hijacked, meaning a national emergency was at hand), NORAD was not notified until 9:24—
and, after NORAD was notified, jets were scrambled from Langley (130 miles from Wash DC) instead of from Andrews (10 miles away), with 2 combat-ready squadrons (the Langley jets arrived 15 minutes after the Pentagon was plowed into).

9:16: NORAD was informed that Flight #93 had been hijacked (at which time it was known that 3 other flights had been hijacked and that 2 had already blown up their targets). No jets were scrambled to intercept #93.

No one has been charged with incompetence.

After both Towers had been struck, President Bush, in Sarasota, visiting a grade school, was informed. He continued to listen to children read to him for 25 minutes before informing Americans of what they already knew.

Myers, at the Capitol, was chatting (about “terrorism”) with Senator Max Cleland. They saw a TV report that a plane had hit the WTC. “We thought it was a small plane or something like that,” Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call. Meanwhile, the 2nd Tower was hit. “Nobody informed us of that,” Myers said.

After the Pentagon was struck (3/4 of the assault now successfully completed), a cellphone was handed to him; finally, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs is informed!

According to Assistant Secretary of Defense Victoria Clarke: “Rumsfeld stayed in his office until the Pentagon was hit, with the excuse that he had some phone calls to make.”

II

A composite vision: our callow, illiterate, Supreme Court-
appointed Fool, drifting in photo-op with school children,
Myers discussing “terrorism” with Cleland,
Rumsfeld, in effect, hiding in his office,
while flames
drink debris-blocked staircased bodies.

My head shudders with
the mortification of finding Bush in my own eyes,
yes, for I do not see myself outside the male coagulate.
Part of me is a lazar born of mass guilt,
funhouse horticulture, where the decency facets
I’ve struggled to file ripple with
“Full Spectrum Dominance”

Out the window, in autumnal weak green:
tent caterpillar encampments, opaque, milky,
creating as if under camouflage deadly screens—
elected American presidents in the democracy-subverted
host tree:
Bush Junior entangled with pa
crawling Nixon’s raging animus, the Nobel Carter
mottled with Khmer Rouge horror,
Johnson cloaked in “We seek no wider war,”
whipping out his big dick to reporters, declaring
“This is why we’re in Vietnam!”
Reagan as a goggle-wearing grub, chirping: “Contras are
the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.:
These nest camps where
baby Pinochets bud (Nobel Kissinger
on his knees gripping the altar-bowl
vomiting up a stomach hash of millions—
suddenly his ghost stands up through him, called
to lead the 911 investigation.

The nests enweb electronically through the American mind.
Whitman’s visionary eternal present has become
the language of TV, tending always to transfix
the audience in an eternal now.
I’m taken in, as are you, fellow citizens,
failing to instantly recall background particularities.
A week later, I come to, recalling, while reading,
details I should have brought to bear.
The mainstream media cartel
beams its needles out of the screens,
who is not injected, anesthetized by conversion-
spiked
patriotic aura?

Like a depth charge dropped into 911: 50 years of Cold War
mobilization against the Soviet Union has left the country with
“a boiling residue of paranoid anxiety.”

Greed become a crazed intoxication to redetermine history,
if the Bush family becomes trillionaires, might they,
led by angels, slip through eternity,
skipping over death?

Jackknifed bodies plummeting against
the photo-serenity of a Tower,
not Crane’s “bedlamite,” but a secretary
exploding in blue September sky

Living in America now is like being on a revised Flight #11.
The nave of this self-righteous citadel extends for miles—
section after section of our cluster-bombed Yugoslavians,
our jerking nerve-gassed Laotians, our napalmed Vietnamese girls,
our chopped- apart Guatemalans, our mowed-down East Timorese
and there’s our Sharon, in high heels, tightening
the thumbscrews on Palestinian immiseration
--and below? Right here? Bush is in my gas,
Cheney’s in my steering-wheel, Ashcroft’s under our bed!

Should 911 be seen as a 3000 body count down payment on
a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistani UNOCAL oil pipeline?

3000 dead? More like 8000—
for this figure must include the Afghanistan dead
bombed in retribution—for what?
Nothing they did but inhabit land we
--and here “we” partitions my heart—
seek to exploit.
The unutterable humiliation of 911!
Holocaust of firemen to make millionaires billionaires!
Workers, executives, of the capitalist epi-center,
but much more importantly, beloved citizens
who went to work that day
(overhearing me, bored Bush turns aside:
“Adolf, let’s go fishin.”)

In our hearts we know
In our hearts we do not know

Baby Bush now spectre-entangled in the entrails of the nation.

[November-December, 2002, Ypsilanti]

[NOTE: the compressed time-line data is mainly taken from Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's The War On Freedom, Tree of Life Publications, Joshua Tree, CA., 2002. I was alerted to Ahmed's book by Gore Vidal's "The Enemy Within," which appeared in the UK Observer, 27 October 2002. I also drew upon material from Mark Crispin Miller's The Bush Dyslexicon, Norton, NYC, 2002, and William Blum's Rogue State, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000. The lyric outrage is all my own (other than when factual), and participates in the tradition of the sirvente; Robert Duncan's "Uprising," which blasts Johnson for the bombing of Vietnam and which may be found in Bending the Bow, New Directions, NYC, 1968, hovers over "The Assault," a predecessor ghost.]

Neo-Con Republicans Endanger America

2005-07-24T09:04:00.000-05:00

The terrorists are still out there and Bush Co. is worried about stacking the Supreme Court with anti-abortion judges. Does this tell you how these people think? What could be more important than our national security? Does the issue of abortion even rate right now? It does to the Neo-Cons. Bush is thinking about his legacy, not about protecting America?

Why did Bush try to stop recent efforts to send more federal agents to secure our border with Mexico? Is this a man who's trying to protect America? Where is Osama Bin Laden? Have we forgotten about the man who attacked New York killing thousands?

The Neo-Cons claim they are the party that can protect the people and wage the most effective war on "terror," but these people leak the name of a CIA agent and think nothing of it. When did Bush know about this? (He's been promising to prosecute the guilty party for years.) What did Bush know?

___________________________________________

Washington -- His former secretary of state, most of his closest aides and a parade of other senior officials have testified to a grand jury. His political strategist has emerged as a central figure in the case, as has his vice president's chief of staff. His spokesman has taken a pounding for making statements about the matter that now appear not to be accurate.

For all that, it is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president. Yet Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely.

For starters, did Bush know in the fall of 2003, when he was telling the public that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the case more than he did, that Rove, his longtime strategist, senior adviser and alter ego; and Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had touched on the CIA officer's identity in conversations with journalists before the officer's name became public? If not, when did they tell him, and what would the delay say in particular about his relationship with Rove, whose career and Bush's have been intertwined for decades?

Then there is the broader issue of whether Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the CIA officer's identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.

For the last several weeks, Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, have declined to address the leak in any substantive way, citing the continuing federal criminal investigation.

But Democrats increasingly see an opportunity to raise questions about Bush's credibility, and to reopen a debate about whether the White House leveled with the nation about the urgency of going to war with Iraq. And even some Republicans say Bush cannot assume that he will escape from the investigation politically unscathed.

"Until all the facts come out, no one is really going to know who the fickle finger of fate points at," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster.

The case centers on how the name of a CIA operative came to appear two years ago in a syndicated column by Robert Novak, who identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. The operative, who is more usually known as Valerie Wilson, is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration eight days before Novak's column of twisting some of the intelligence used to justify going to war with Iraq. Under some conditions, the disclosure of a covert intelligence agent's name can be a federal crime.

The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, has kept a tight curtain of secrecy around his investigation. But he spent more than an hour in the Oval Office on June 24, 2004, interviewing Bush about the case. Bush was not under oath, but he had his lawyer for the case, James Sharp, with him.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department has said what Bush was asked about, but prosecutors do not lightly seek to put questions directly to any president, suggesting that there was some information that Fitzgerald felt he could get only from Bush.

Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in Washington, said the lesson of recent history, for example in the Iran-Contra case under President Ronald Reagan, is that presidents tend to know more than it might first appear about what is going on within the White House.

"My presumption in presidential politics is that the president always knows," Lichtman said. "But there are degrees of knowing. Reagan said, keep the contras together body and soul. Did he know exactly what Oliver North was doing? No, it doesn't mean he knew what every subordinate is doing."

Although it is possible that other officials will turn out to have played leading roles in the leak case, the subordinates whose actions would appear to be of most interest to Bush right now are Rove and Libby, who as Cheney's chief of staff had a particular interest in protecting the vice president's interests.

According to accounts by people involved in the case, Rove spoke in the days after Wilson went public with his criticism in July 2003 to both Novak and Matthew Cooper of Time, the first two reporters to disclose that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Cooper has said he also spoke about the case with Libby.

By September 2003, as a criminal investigation was getting under way, McClellan was telling reporters that Rove had nothing to do with the leak, saying he had checked with Rove about the topic.

Around the same time, the president was saying he had no idea who might have been responsible. Asked by a reporter on Oct. 6, 2003, whether the leak was retaliation for Wilson's criticism, Bush replied: "I don't know who leaked the information, for starters. So it's hard for me to answer that question until I find out the truth."

Asked the next day if he was confident that the leakers would be found, Bush, alluding to the "two senior administration officials" cited by Novak as his sources, replied: "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth."

Republicans said the relationship between Bush and Rove was so deep and complex that it was hard to imagine the president cutting ties with him barring an indictment.

"Can you survive being involved in something you probably shouldn't have been involved in where you didn't break any laws?" Fabrizio said. "Well, you probably can, especially if you are Karl."

Fabrizio said that even if Rove left the White House, he would continue to consult with Bush "unless they put him in a tunnel."

McClellan and other White House officials have repeatedly declined to answer when asked if Rove or Libby had told the president by October 2003 that they had alluded to Wilson's identity months earlier in their conversations with the journalists.

But Bush's political opponents say the president is in a box. In their view, either Rove and Libby kept the president in the dark about their actions, making them appear evasive at a time when Bush was demanding that his staff cooperate fully with the investigation, or Rove and Libby had told the president and he was not forthcoming in his public statements about his knowledge of their roles.

"We know that Karl Rove, through Scott McClellan, did not tell Americans the truth," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., and a former top aide in the Clinton White House. "What's important now is what Karl Rove told the president. Was it the truth, or was it what he told Scott McClellan?"

Bush has also yet to answer any questions publicly about what he learned from aides about Joseph and Valerie Wilson in the days after the former ambassador leveled his criticism of the administration in an op-ed article in the New York Times on July 6, 2003.

Richard W. Stevenson, New York Times
Sunday, July 24, 2005

Bush Is Watching You

2005-07-21T22:23:00.000-05:00

Within hours of a second attack on the London transit system, lawmakers in the House and Senate pushed ahead yesterday with starkly different bills to extend the controversial USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law.

Votes by the House and a Senate committee set the stage for sharp debate on Capitol Hill over how far Congress should go in limiting the powers given the government by the law, which was passed six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but has since come under fire from civil liberties advocates and some elected officials.

After a day-long debate, the House voted 257 to 171 last night to extend or make permanent the most controversial provisions of the law while adding a handful of new restrictions on the FBI. Other proposals for sharper limits were rejected.

Earlier in the day, however, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that goes significantly further in modifying the Patriot Act. It would require greater oversight of the Justice Department and would place new restrictions on secret searches and surveillance in terrorism probes.

The dueling proposals are part of a long debate over the act, which includes 16 provisions set to expire at the end of this year unless renewed by Congress. President Bush and his aides have repeatedly urged lawmakers to make the law permanent, arguing that its provisions have helped deter terrorist strikes.

The Senate Judiciary Committee measure, sponsored by Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), was a setback for the administration and was portrayed by Senate aides as the version likely to pass muster on the floor.

A separate bill approved by the Senate intelligence committee in June would make all provisions of the law permanent and give the FBI additional power to issue subpoenas without approval of a judge. Whatever the Senate passes will have to be reconciled with the House version approved yesterday.

Although 16 provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire, most of the congressional debate law in recent weeks has focused on a few controversial sections. They include one allowing the FBI to seize records from financial companies, libraries, doctors' offices and other businesses in terrorism investigations, and another that permits "roving wiretaps" that apply to a person rather than a particular telephone.

House Republicans pointed to the attacks in London yesterday and on July 7 as evidence of the need to reauthorize the Patriot Act with relatively few modifications. While the law has "helped avert additional attacks on our soil, the threat has not abated," said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the bill's sponsor.

Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said in a statement issued before last night's vote: "We can never forget -- and indeed, the news never lets us forget -- the threats we face in this dangerous world. . . . With this vote, all members, from both sides of the aisle, will have an opportunity to show the American people how seriously they take the ongoing threat of terrorism and how they intend combat it."

The comments from GOP leaders, combined with rejection of amendments sponsored by Democrats, provoked howls from Democrats who said they supported most of the law but were concerned about the civil liberties implications of a few provisions.

"We have a duty to protect the American people from terrorism, but also to protect law-abiding American citizens from unaccountable and unchallengeable government power over their personal lives, their personal records and their thoughts," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said she hoped "an improved bill" would come back to the House after negotiations with the Senate.

The House bill includes a requirement that the FBI director approve any request for records from a library or bookstore. It would make 14 of the expiring provisions permanent and extend two others -- pertaining to records seizures and roving wiretaps -- for a decade.

The Senate Judiciary Committee bill, by contrast, would extend the same two provisions for four years and includes tighter requirements for seizing records. It would allow people to challenge warrants approved by a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and would require that subjects of secret searches be notified within seven days unless an extension is approved by a judge.

"In retaining the expanded powers of the Patriot Act, this bill also maintains and improves the constitutional safeguards that are indispensable to our democracy," said Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a committee member.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has led criticism of the Patriot Act, called the bill "a step in the right direction" but said that "it still fails to protect the Bill of Rights."

ACLU officials said the revised Senate committee bill still would give the government too much leeway in obtaining warrants from the secret intelligence court and would allow the FBI to avoid notifying targets of secret searches indefinitely.
________________________________________
Washington Post, July 20

The New Recruiting Tool for Al Qaeda

2005-07-20T21:27:00.001-05:00

LONDON - Scientists are questioning the safety of a "Star Wars"-style ray gun due to be deployed in Iraq for riot control next year.

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as “less lethal” by the Pentagon, fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The idea is that people caught in the beam will rapidly try to move out of it and therefore break up the crowd.

But New Scientist magazine reported Wednesday that during tests carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their eyes.

In another test, they were also told to remove metal objects like coins from their clothing to avoid local hot spots developing on their skin.

“What happens if someone in a crowd is unable for whatever reason to move away from the beam,” asked Neil Davison, coordinator of the non-lethal weapons research project at Britain’s Bradford University. “How do you ensure that the dose doesn’t cross the threshold for permanent damage? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?”

The magazine said a vehicle-mounted version of the weapon named Sheriff was scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006, and that U.S. Marines and police were both working on portable versions.

Reuters, July 20

Rove's Wiggin'

2005-07-19T06:31:00.000-05:00

On Friday Rep Waxman published a Fact Sheet titled Karl Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement. This paper covers the Executive Order and agreement that everyone who works in the Administration is required to sign in order to obtain a security clearance.

Executive Order 12958, [which] governs how federal employees are awarded security clearances, applies to any entity within the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information, including the White House.

Notice the term "entity." This would definitely cover the Presidents senior advisor, which was Rove's position in 2003, and anyone else in the White House who could possibly come into contact with classified material (just about everyone there).

An official who has signed a nondisclosure agreement cannot confirm classified information obtained by a reporter. In fact, this obligation is highlighted in the "briefing booklet" that new security clearance recipients receive when they sign their nondisclosure agreements:

Everyone who gets a security clearance signs an SF-312 agreement and receives training in handling classified material. When Rove stated "I heard that, too" in his conversation with Bob Novak he was admitting that he was aware that Mrs. Wilson may have worked for the CIA. When Rove told Novak "Oh, you know about it" he was confirming that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA.

Before ... confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, ... confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.

Since Rove was aware of the reports that Wilson was a CIA operative it was his responsibility to determine if her status was covert before confirming what Novak told him. Counter the "I heard that, too" quote with the fact, from the same source, that Rove said "Oh, you know about it" and add that since he had heard about that he became responsible for determining the classification of the information before saying "Oh, you know about it."

Mr. Rove was not at liberty to repeat classified information he may have learned from a reporter. Instead, he had an affirmative obligation to determine whether the information had been declassified before repeating it. The briefing booklet is explicit on this point: "before disseminating the information elsewhere ... the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified."

Now what should happen. Since currently Karl Rove's only superiors are Andrew Card and George W. Bush they become responsible for taking action in response to Rove's action.

The White House has an affirmative obligation to investigate and take remedial action separate and apart from any ongoing criminal investigation. The executive order specifically provides that when a breach occurs, each agency must "take appropriate and prompt corrective action." This includes a determination of whether individual employees improperly disseminated or obtained access to classified information.

The executive order further provides that sanctions for violations are not optional. The executive order expressly provides: "Officers and employees of the United States Government ... shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently ... disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified."

At the very least the White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, should revoke Rove's security clearance and suspend him since he cannot fulfill his duties as Deputy Chief of Staff without a security clearance. Once the independent council has finished his investigation the White House should have an internal investigation. Actually the White House should have started that investigation the day Novak's column appeared and suspended Rove as soon as the fact that he talked to Novak, Cooper, Miller, Scarborough, or any other reporter was uncovered as long as the prior to the time when the CIA officially lifted Mrs. Plame's covert status after Novak's column appeared.

Rove's lawyer admitted that Rove was aware that the press had information concerning Mrs. Plame's employment with the CIA.

Since Mrs. Plame was not an overt CIA employee Karl Rove was responsible for determining her covert status since he now had knowledge of her employment.

When Karl Rove stated "oh, you know about it." he confirmed that if was a fact.

When Karl Rove told Matt Cooper that "Wilson's wife" is a CIA employee working on WMD issues he blatantly disclosed classified information that he was responsible for knowing the classification of.

The White House was responsible for commencing an internal investigation as soon as the CIA informed them that Mrs. Wilson had been covert and "senior administration officials were cited as Novak's source.

The White House failed to determine the source of a leak of classified information and therefore placed national security at risk.

Now that Rove and Libby's involvement has been disclosed the White House is continuing to place national security at risk by not suspending them untill an investigation is complete.

The President has no control of his administration. It should not have taken two years and press leaks to determine who leaked this.

Possible national security risks must be minimized in a time of war. National security cannot take play second fiddle to politics.

Now that Scooter Libby has been implicated all these points apply to him also.

President Bush has violated his oath of office in that "for the purpose of evasion" he has failed to place the interest of national security over political cronyism by his failure to remove Karl Rove and Scooter Libby from their positions which continue to allow them access to classified data.

--Daily Kos, July 19

Bush Flip-Flops on Leak

2005-07-18T22:03:00.000-05:00

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Bush shouldn't wait for charges to be filed to take action.

"I am disappointed that the president seems to have changed his standard," Schumer said. "The standard for holding a high position in the White House should not simply be that you didn't break the law. It should be a lot higher and if Mr. Rove or anyone else aided and abetted the leaking of the name of an agent, even if they don't meet the narrow criminal standard, the president should ask for their resignation."

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said Bush needs to fire whoever leaked Plame's name and expects Bush to stick by his original statements of intent on how to deal with the leaker.

"This is no longer an issue for Karl Rove ... it deals with, I believe, the integrity of the president's office of this administration," said the Nevada senator. "He has said if somebody's found to be leaking this that they would be fired --- now to come back and say it has to be a crime is stretching the length of the field."

CNN, July 18

FBI Targets Bush Critics

2005-07-18T06:28:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The FBI has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the past several years on a handful of civil rights and anti-war groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.

The FBI has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing this month in Washington.

The filing came as part of a lawsuit brought by groups that claim the FBI has engaged in a pattern of surveillance against critics of the administration.

--Chicago Tribune, July 18

Bush: "I WILL FIRE ANY LEAKER"

2005-07-17T14:06:00.003-05:00

Novak is apparently above the law as reward for being a Neo-Con propagandist while those who had yet to write any story sit in jail. This is pure evil and par for the course for the Bush administration and business as usual. Leaking national security secrets and putting CIA lives in danger means nothing to these unscrupulous charlatans.

********

"Many of us in journalism are upset that the public seems largely indifferent to the jailing of one reporter and the prosecutor's pursuit of several others in the leaking of CIA employee Valerie Plame's identity.

But we should be smart enough to figure out why the anger and alarm this development has caused in our ranks is apparently not shared by those outside the news business.

The relationship between reporters and anonymous sources is built on mutual trust - the journalist's belief that the source will be candid, even while disclaiming personal responsibility for the information, and the source's belief that the reporter will honor her or his commitment to protect the identity of the informant.

But the reader is excluded from that circle. Rather, each member of the audience is told implicitly by the reporter, "I won't share something important with you that I know - namely, the identity of the person who is my source." The rationale for this withholding of information is, ideally, that the substance of what the source has provided is so valuable to the public that it justifies the damage done each time the public is asked to accept the "gift" without knowing its origins.

This makes the equation a lot more complicated than many of us in journalism want to acknowledge when we speak of the simple principle that "when you promise to protect your source, you have to keep the promise." The current case shows just how difficult the trade-offs may be.
The first publication of Plame's name came in a column by Robert Novak, who said he had been given her identity and occupation by two Bush administration officials. The obvious intent of the leak - and of the column - was to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had just published an op-ed article in The New York Times challenging a presidential claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase nuclear material in Niger.

Wilson had been sent to Niger to see if that had been attempted. He concluded it hadn't - knocking one more hole in the administration's contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. By exposing his wife's supposed role in sending Wilson on that mission, the White House was trying to link his finding to a well-publicized bureaucratic war in which elements of the CIA were doing all they could to undercut the case for going to war with Iraq.

Novak, who has a well-earned reputation for carrying water for his favorite conservatives, has not been prosecuted for publishing Plame's name and has refused to discuss his role in the case or his dealings, if any, with the grand jury investigating the leak.

But in the course of the investigation, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has gone after half a dozen other journalists who apparently were working on the Plame-Wilson story. One of them, the Times' Judith Miller, adamantly refused to go before the grand jury and was jailed on July 6 for contempt of court after losing all her legal claims to be allowed to protect her source.

Other journalists have made her a heroine - someone who went to jail rather than break her promise - and they have castigated the prosecutor and judge for the harshness of the penalty, especially since Miller never wrote a story using whatever information she had gained.

But no one, not even Miller, is wholly praiseworthy. She is the same reporter who, in a series of influential articles before the war, vividly portrayed the threat that Saddam Hussein's weapons supposedly posed. Only afterward was it learned that many of her "scoops" came from Ahmed Chalabi, then a controversial Iraqi exile who had dreams of supplanting Saddam Hussein as Iraq's new ruler - with the support of a conquering American army. Her use of an unnamed source in that case was a distinct disservice to the country; had we known Chalabi's identity and motivation, much less credibility would have been attached to her reports.

Now, thanks to another reporter, Matt Cooper of Time magazine, we know that one White House official who was spreading the word about Plame and Wilson (but apparently describing their relationship without giving her name) was Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove. Despite earlier White House denials that he had anything to do with the case and a promise from the president to fire any leaker, Rove remains on the job as this is written.

The only lesson I can draw is that reporters ought to be very careful about accepting unattributed information. For every "Deep Throat," there are multiple Chalabis and Roves. "

--Newsweek, July 17

Rove Endangers America

2005-07-15T18:56:00.000-05:00

The line of bull becomes even more unbelievable, as if that were possible. Rove now says he was trying to "warn" reporters away from reporting on Wilson's statements to the effect that Iraq had not indeed sought uranium from Niger--statements that proved to be true. Are we supposed to believe that Karl Rove is the good samaritan simply looking out for reporters, acting in their best interest. The same people who believe all this (if they have bothered to follow this story at all) are the same group of people who still think that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the demonic events of Sept. 11.

Now Rove says he "turned over the e-mail as soon as prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's covert work for the CIA.

He later told a grand jury the e-mail was consistent with his recollection that his intention in talking with Cooper that Friday in July 2003 wasn't to divulge Plame's identity but to caution Cooper against certain allegations Plame's husband was making, according to legal professionals familiar with Rove's testimony.

They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury investigation.

Rove sent the e-mail shortly before leaving the White House early for a family vacation that weekend, already aware that another journalist he had talked with, syndicated columnist Robert Novak, was planning an article about Plame and Wilson.

Rove also knew that then-CIA Director George Tenet planned later that same day to issue a dramatic statement that took responsibility for some bad Iraq intelligence but that also called into question some of Wilson's assertions, the legal sources said.

The AP reported Thursday that Rove acknowledged to the grand jury that he talked about Plame with both Cooper and Novak before they published their stories but that he originally learned about the operative's identity from the news media, not government sources." (SF Gate)

Whether Rove learned about Plame's identity from the news media matters not a whit. This makes no sense regardless, because Novak was the first to reveal Plame's identity. How could Rove have found out Plame's identity from the news media if the story by Novak had yet to be written. It's plain to anyone paying attention that Rove revealed her identity as payback for Wilson's comments against the rationale that was used to declare war on Iraq.

If Rove revealed her identity in any way, even if he did not speak her name, even if only by a confirmation, he has committed a huge crime given our nation's efforts in the worldwide fight against terrorist activity. Thus, the same people who profess they are protecting us, flagrently violate the laws that preserve our national security. If a common citizen had done the same he or she would probably face life imprisonment and lifelong public infamy.

Bush Stops Efforts to Curb Global Warming

2005-07-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

GLENEAGLES, Scotland (AP) --

The Group of Eight summit bowed to U.S. pressure on Friday by approving a declaration on climate change that avoided taking any concrete steps to fight global warming, such as setting targets or timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The summit declined to embrace Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal for promises of sharp reductions of pollutants that scientists say cause global warming.

It also failed to resolve a long-standing impasse over the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush administration has rejected but which the other G-8 members have ratified, binding them to reduction targets that are now in effect.

President Bush has questioned the existence of global warming, saying the protocol would have "wrecked" the U.S. economy. He objects to the fact that large developing nations such as China and India are exempt from it.

Blair, however, won a compromise at the G-8 summit by getting its members to agree to a new round of international talks on climate change — to be held in Britain in November — that will include wealthy nations and emerging economies.

French President Jacques Chirac, who has called global warming "a terribly menacing reality," said Friday that the G-8 leaders had achieved substantial results and that the agreement on climate change would ensure "indispensable dialogue" among nations.

But many environmental groups called the summit a failure on global warming and blamed it on the Bush administration.

"The G-8 leaders did not agree on a single concrete action to address climate change," said Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust. "President Bush did not budge one inch from the intransigent position he has taken on global warming ... and the White House staff worked nonstop for months to water any possible deal down."

What Goes Up Must Come Down

2005-07-06T22:17:00.000-05:00

Certain Republicans are surfing above the truth right now, but even that long glassy wave that never seems to end stops at solid ground. And what goes up must come down.

Ask Who Profits from This

2005-07-06T22:08:00.000-05:00

Will the coward orchestrating events to create fear among the press come forward? Will the person within the Bush White House speak?

Who threatens to destroy news reporting in America? No one will speak with a reporter if they fear incarceration. Who is deceitful enough to further dismantle the credibility of the news media for political ends?

Ask yourself who profits from this...it's not the American people.

___________

BBC News, July 6, 05

A US court has jailed New York Times journalist Judith Miller for refusing to testify in an investigation into the unmasking of a CIA agent in 2003. Miller has argued journalists must be allowed to keep sources confidential in order to preserve freedom of the press.

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, who had also refused to give evidence, said he had received a "dramatic" message, freeing him to testify.

The disclosure of a CIA agent's name can be a federal offence.

If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating who in the Bush administration told the press Valerie Plame - the wife of a former US ambassador who had criticised the president - was a CIA agent.

Ms Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, had earlier attacked President George W Bush over evidence he had presented to justify the assault on Iraq.

Mr Wilson later alleged that his wife's name was deliberately leaked in revenge.

DRAMATIC MESSAGE

Mr Fitzgerald had argued last week that both Miller and Cooper, who had looked into the leak, should be jailed for their refusal to reveal their sources.

Miller was ordered on Wednesday to remain in jail until the end of the court investigation in October - or until she decided to testify.

Miller said: "If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press."

US journalists have rallied in support of Miller and Cooper

The publisher of the New York Times has said Miller had acted for the "greater good of our democracy" by "honouring her promise of confidentiality to her sources". Cooper revealed to the court on Wednesday that he had changed his mind at the last minute.

"I went to bed ready to accept the sanctions" for not testifying, he said.

But, he told the judge, he had then received a "somewhat dramatic" message from his source telling him he was free to testify. Time magazine turned over Cooper's notes and other documents last week, after the Supreme Court refused to consider the case.

Cooper's lawyers had said that this move made his testimony unnecessary - an argument rejected by the prosecutor.

MEDIA CONCERN

Correspondents say the case is one of the most serious legal clashes between the media and government for decades. Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality - no-one in America is

Prosecutor Fitzgerald said "special treatment" for the journalists such as home detention -- rather than imprisonment - -would "enable, rather than deter, defiance of the court's authority".

"Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality -- no-one in America is," he said.

The leak of Ms Plame's name was not made to Cooper or Miller, but they came to the attention of the prosecutor because of their inquiries.

The reporters refused to co-operate with the investigation, claiming they should not have to reveal their sources because of press freedoms guaranteed in the US Constitution.

That defence was over-ruled by a court in Washington. The case has sparked concern in the US media about press freedoms and prompted calls for federal shield laws. A number of states have legislation to protect reporters from having to identify their confidential sources.

Ignorance Wins II

2005-07-06T19:39:00.000-05:00

I'm reposting this from October of last year, because I really would like to know.

________ _________ _________

Ignorance Wins

It seems frightening to most that the Republican watchdogs who have been reminding us ad nauseum that they are defending our security are also the very same people responsible for the inept failure that has prolonged this nation's battle with Muslim extremists like Osama Bin Laden. How Republicans can point to Bin Laden's latest video as proof we need another four years of George W. Bush is mystifying at best. The Bush Administration failed to find Bin Laden then declared war on a country that had nothing to do with the horror of September 11. That this last statement is still debatable to some points to the greater problem that may put Bush right back in the White House. No one anywhere is relying on facts to make the decisions that threaten all our lives. The Bush coterie based their decisions on faulty intelligence (remember Colin Powell holding up satellite images when he spoke before the UN?), the American people are picking and choosing information without bothering to do the research necessary to making an informed decision, and Muslim extremist leaders are spewing their own skewed mantras of hate in an attempt to gain the future following that will perpetuate their war against the West. Nowhere is rational discourse to be found and few are interested in any information that doesn't support their preconceived notions. In fact most seem to harbor a real fear of discovering the truth and therefore make a conscious effort to avoid it. The bipartisan unity that resulted from the attack on the WTC has long disappeared and has been replaced by pathetic trickery and deception.

November 2 will be the day America decides whether democracy is worthwhile. Ignorance wins.

Just admit it already...

2005-07-06T19:30:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush finally admits in a speech that "greenhouse" gasses produced by humans are causing a warming of the earth.

How can anyone take this man seriously when he's such a liar? He's been denying this possibility for years. Are we supposed to believe that he's suddenly seen some scientific evidence that finally convinced him?

Hagel: Democrats Are More Honest

2005-07-03T23:28:00.000-05:00

Q: You're one of a growing number of Republicans who have lately accused President Bush of botching the war in Iraq.

If someone says I am a disloyal Republican because I am not supporting my party, let them say it. War is bigger than politics.

Q: You, John McCain and John Kerry are the only current U.S. senators who served in Vietnam.

I got to Vietnam in December of 1967, and I was wounded twice with my brother Tom, who was with me. I still have some shrapnel in my chest that the doctors never took out. The second time my face was burned pretty bad, and I had both eardrums blown out.

Q: Are you saying you are deaf?

Eardrums heal, but I did lose some hearing.

Q: Did you kill anyone in the war?

Well, I am sure I did.

Q: How would you compare the situation in Iraq with the one in Vietnam?

Congress was absent during the Vietnam War, and they didn't ask the tough questions, and consequently we lost 58,000 Americans and lost a war and humiliated this nation. It took a generation to get over it. As long as I am here as a U.S. senator, I am going to do whatever I can to make sure that isn't going to happen.

Q: What do you suggest that the president do?

For starters, we don't have enough troops. But I don't think the answer to increasing manpower is to pursue some of the things the Pentagon is doing, such as doubling and tripling bonuses for those in the military. Kids do not serve their country because they are in it to make money.

Many serve to help pay for school and because they see it as a career.

Of course. But you aren't going to attract the kind of people we have been able to attract just by incentives. When you try to project military recruitment through bonuses, you are going to get people signing up for the wrong reasons.

On the other hand, with our deficit now exceeding $400 billion, aren't we sort of out of money?

In terms of the deficit, we have blown the top right off. We're a bunch of Democrats.

Q: I've never heard anyone call President Bush a Democrat.

That's my point. We're less honest about it. We built the biggest government history has ever seen under a Republican government. The Democrats are better because they are honest about it. They don't pretend. I admire that. They'll say: ''We want more money. We need more money.''

--NY Times, July 4, '05

Rove Spoke with Reporter Before Leak

2005-07-03T23:00:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Newsweek magazine is reporting that e-mails between Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper and his editors show that Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, spoke to Cooper in the days before a CIA operative's identity was revealed in the media, but it wasn't clear what Cooper and Rove discussed.

Rove's attorney told CNN his client did not disclose any confidential information.

Attorney Robert Luskin confirmed that Cooper called Rove in July 2003 but said he's "not characterizing the subject matter of that conversation."

A special prosecutor is investigating whether senior Bush administration officials leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media in retaliation after her husband wrote an opinion piece critical of the administration.

Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller face jail on civil contempt charges for refusing to reveal their sources to a federal grand jury. Judge Thomas Hogan has set a final hearing on Wednesday and will make a decision after that.

Time Inc. announced Thursday that it would hand over subpoenaed documents, including Cooper's notes, after the Supreme Court refused to hear the reporters' appeals in the case.

Cooper's attorneys argued that Time's decision "should obviate" the contempt citation against him because the material gives the grand jury the information and makes his testimony "duplicative and unnecessary."

Time Inc. is a unit of Time Warner, which is also CNN's parent company.

Luskin said prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "has confirmed repeatedly, most recently last week, that he (Rove) is not a target of the investigation."

Added Luskin, "Karl did nothing wrong. Karl didn't disclose Valerie Plame's identity to Mr. Cooper or anybody else ... Who outed this woman? ... It wasn't Karl."

Luskin said Rove "certainly did not disclose to Matt Cooper or anybody else any confidential information."

Rove has testified at least twice as part of the inquiry, but sources involved previously told CNN that while Rove acknowledged talking to reporters about the issue, he said he never knowingly disclosed classified information.

Luskin stressed that his client has cooperated fully with the government.

"I've been assured by the prosecutor they have no reason to doubt the honesty of anything he's said," he said.

The case stems from a July 14, 2003, column by Robert Novak in which he revealed Plame's identity as a CIA operative. Novak, who also is a CNN contributor, attributed the information to two senior administration officials.

Plame's husband is Joe Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Wilson charged that his wife's name was leaked to retaliate against him after he disputed Bush administration statements that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium in Africa.

Federal law makes it a crime to deliberately reveal the identity of a CIA operative.

The subpoena issued to Time sought documents relating to "conversations between Cooper and official source(s) prior to July 14, 2003, concerning in any way" Wilson, Wilson's 2002 trip to Niger, Plame, and any affiliation between Plame and the CIA.

Under federal law, civil contempt can carry up to 18 months in jail or the length of the grand jury's term, whichever is shorter. Hogan said the term of the grand jury in this case expires in October, so Miller and Cooper only face up to four months in jail.

As part of his probe, Fitzgerald subpoenaed a number of journalists to testify about their sources. Miller and Cooper and their news organizations decided to fight the subpoenas, although Cooper did reveal one unnamed source who released him from a confidentiality pledge.

Miller faces jail time for refusing to reveal sources she developed during her reporting, even though she never actually wrote a story on Plame or Wilson. But Novak -- who has refused to discuss the case on the advice of his attorney -- has not been held in contempt.

Let's Hear a Denial from Karl Rove

2005-07-03T14:00:00.000-05:00

Washington, July 3, UPI--Saturday, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin told The Washington Post Rove had not disclosed the name of Valerie Plame to Newsweek in a 2003 interview.

Sunday, Charles Schumer (D), who led the push for a Congressional inquiry into the leak, issued a challenge for Rove to speak for himself.

"We've heard it from his lawyer, but IT WOULD BE NICE TO HEAR IT DIRECTLY FROM ROVE that he didn't leak the identity of Valerie Plame, and that he didn't direct anyone else to do such a dastardly thing," Schumer said in a statement. "I have said from the first day ... whoever leaked the classified information should be punished to the full extent of the law."

The panel is investigating the leak of Plame's name to various news outlets in 2003. It is a federal crime for a government employee to reveal the name of an undercover operative after the employee learns it from classified material.

China Is America's Biggest Threat

2005-06-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON - The threat of a trade war with China diminished Thursday when two U.S. senators agreed to postpone a pending vote on legislation that would impose a 27.5 percent tax on all Chinese-made products unless the Asian power revalued its currency.

Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., announced their decision after a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John Snow.

"They have convinced us that the likelihood of real progress with China on currency revaluation is very real and could occur in a very short while, the next few months," Schumer told reporters. "We have agreed in delaying a vote on our bill."

Added Graham, "We're showing flexibility to create a win-win situation."

The senators' decision to postpone the expected July vote until late fall provides some breathing room for the Bush administration, which has tried quiet diplomacy to encourage China's move to an openly traded currency. So far that approach has been fruitless. On Sunday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reiterated that China is in no hurry to revalue its currency and will do so, if at all, only after careful study on its own timetable.

In a written statement after the meeting, Snow said that Chinese leaders "have agreed that it is in their best interest to adopt greater exchange rate flexibility."

The issue of China's currency and what, if anything, Washington should do about it is one of many arguments raging in the nation's capital over how to respond to the Chinese challenge. With China's economy growing by almost 10 percent a year, it's increasingly perceived not as America's next great rival on the world stage, but as America's rival today.

Already China competes with the United States for scarce commodities such as crude oil. Along with the United States, it's responsible for growth in an otherwise moribund global economy. As Washington debated whether China will be friend or foe, last week China's state oil company bid to acquire California oil giant Unocal.

In that context, the Graham-Schumer legislation drew wide support in Congress, where 67 senators endorsed it. House members led by Reps. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., back a similar effort. Most lawmakers do so recognizing, as Schumer concedes, that the measure is largely symbolic, intended more to send a message to Beijing about playing fair than to become U.S. law.

Schumer and Graham are trying to prod China to play by the same free-market rules as other trading powers. For a decade, China's government has fixed the exchange rate of its currency, the yuan, at about 8.3 to the dollar. All other major currency values are set by markets. China's fixed exchange rate makes its exports cheaper overseas, giving it what U.S. analysts believe is an unfair trade advantage.

After hearing testimony from experts that the Chinese yuan was undervalued vis-a-vis the dollar by 15 percent to 40 percent, the two senators settled on a middle figure of 27.5 percent to levy on each Chinese import until China revalues.

But imposing trade sanctions on China wouldn't bring back U.S. jobs that have been lost to low-wage competition in this era of economic globalization, Greenspan warned in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on June 23.

"At only slightly higher prices than prevail at present, U.S. imports of textiles, light manufactures, assembled computers, toys and similar products would in part shift from China as the final assembler to other emerging-market economies in Asia, and, perhaps, in Latin America as well," he said. "Few, if any, American jobs would be protected."

Moreover, China had threatened to respond in kind to any U.S. trade sanctions, heightening fears of a damaging trade war between the world's largest economy and its fastest-growing one. That could hurt Americans in many ways - perhaps even curbing the housing boom that's powering the U.S. economy.

Here's how. China, along with other Asian governments, has financed America's mammoth trade deficit by buying U.S. Treasury bonds. Through the end of June, China held $338 billion of them.

This has become problematic for the Fed. On Thursday, it raised short-term interest rates by another quarter-point to 3.25 percent, the ninth consecutive time it's done so in an effort to slow U.S. consumption and contain inflation.

Traditionally, long-term lending rates rise with hikes in short-term rates, but not in the current cycle, in part because the foreign purchases of Treasuries are pumping enough capital into the U.S. economy to keep long-term borrowing rates low. Those low long-term rates are fueling the housing boom that many analysts fear is an overheated bubble.

If China stopped or cut back sharply in purchases of Treasuries, long rates would rise, housing prices might fall, and some borrowers could have trouble paying their bills, slowing the economy or even tipping it into recession.

Fearing such consequences, Greenspan and Snow have visited the two senators privately several times in recent weeks, urging them not to provoke Beijing so rudely, even as the two U.S. financial leaders have pressed China diplomatically for similar currency reforms.

On Thursday the foursome invited cameras to record the start of their closed-door meeting in the Capitol - another way to send a message to Beijing that everyone in Washington takes this issue seriously, though they disagree on what to do about it. The message: China should act on its own, before Washington does.

--Knight Ridder Newspapers, June 30, '05

The Iraq War Started Before the War "Started"

2005-06-30T21:42:00.000-05:00

Most American media have focused on the allegations from the Downing Street memo that the Bush administration was going to "fix" the intelligence in order to justify the war against Iraq. Now the reporter who broke the original story says they have missed a more substantial allegation to arise from the same set of leaked documents.

Michael Smith, defense writer for the Sunday Times of London wrote this past Sunday that "The American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began." (This bombing capaign is referred to in the Downing Street memo.)

Addressing a briefing on lessons learned from the Iraq war Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley said that in 2002 and early 2003 allied aircraft flew 21,736 sorties, dropping more than 600 bombs on 391 "carefully selected targets" before the war officially started. The nine months of allied raids "laid the foundations" for the allied victory, Moseley said. They ensured that allied forces did not have to start the war with a protracted bombardment of Iraqi positions.

If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W. Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted illegally.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times last week on how he received the series of documents from two sources in the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Smith (who originally strongly supported the war in Iraq) wrote that at first he did not consider the now famous "Downing Street Memo" the most important of the documents he received. Instead, he felt it was a separate briefing paper which showed that the Blair government would support military action, but they had to find way to do that legally.

The Downing Street plan, according to the leaked briefing paper, was to use the United Nations to trap Saddam Hussein into giving them a reason to attack. The US and the British would do this by prodding "the UN Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors." It was hoped that Hussein would find this unacceptable, giving them a "legal justification for war."

But if that didn't work, the US was already working on "Plan B," and the information on that was in the Downing Street memo.

It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B [and apparently confirmed by Gen. Moseley's comments mentioned above]. Put simply, US aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.
The number of bombs dropped on Iraq in March and April of 2002 was almost zero. But from May to August, that increased to 10 tons a month.

But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war. The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.
And in another story on June 19th for the Times, Smith reported that another of the leaked documents, a paper on British Foreign Office legal advice, showed that the increased bombing campaign was "illegal" under international law, despite US claims to the contrary.

" ... the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July [2002] meeting [where the contents of the Downing Street memo wer recorded], made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.

The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.
Smith also writes that since Congress did not authorize military action against Iraq until Oct. 11, 2002, "the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally."

In an interview with RawStory.com (an alternative news source that covers stories under-reported by the mainstream media), John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a military defense analysis group, said his organization had raised questions about the increase in bombing in August of 2002. "The group saw the strikes as a means by which the US could degrade Iraqi defensive capabilities, and as a precursor to a declared war."

"It was no big secret at the time," [said Mr. Pike]. "It was apparent to us at the time that they were doing it and why they were doing it, and that was part of the reason why we were convinced that a decision to go to war had already been made, because the war had already started." Pike says the allied forces used their position in the 'No-Fly- Zone' to engage in pre-emptive action long before war was formally declared.

"They, I think, had decided to take advantage of Southern Watch and Northern Watch to go ahead and take the air defense system apart and attack any other targets that they felt needed to be preemptively destroyed," Pike asserted. "They explicitly altered the rules of engagement, because initially the rules of engagement had been that they would shoot back if [someone] shot at them. Then they said that if they were shot at, they would shoot at whatever they wanted to."
The conservative commentary blog, RedState.org, however, offers another explanation for the increased bombing – that the US and Britain were trying to force Hussein into complying with coalition requests for him to readmit weapons inspectors. And besides, the site argues, "what if Blair and Bush were trying to goad Hussein into putting a noose around his neck?"

Do you consider that, perhaps, Bush and Blair had determined that Hussein needed to go, once and for all? Perhaps they had good reason to believe that this leopard was not going to change his spots, and wasn't going to stop menacing the neighborhood. Then, maybe Blair and Bush looked around, saw the irresoluteness of the UN, saw the military weakness and political spinelessness of the other major nations on Earth (the nations of "Old Europe", for instance), and determined that, if someone is going to have to fight Hussein – that someone is US! Best fight him now, as opposed to fighting him a few years from now, after UN sanctions have collapsed and he's had a chance to upgun.
The Wall Street Journal reports on how the blogosphere has kept the story of the Downing Street Memo alive despite efforts by Blair and Bush, who have not denied the authenticity of the original document, to put it to rest. On Thursday, Blair admitted that he has been "astonished" by the coverage that the memo had received in the US and Britain.

Finally, in an ironic footnote to the incident, RawStory.com reported that the number of bombs dropped on Iraq actually declined after the start of the war in March, 2003.

--Christian Science Monitor, June 30

Reagan Was

2005-06-30T21:22:00.000-05:00

We have to ask ourselves now, not what would Jesus do, but what would Reagan do. Yes, I remember when Ronnie was president for that loooonnng period of time and what it felt like and what he did, yes, what he personally did. Not what Nancy did or TOLD him to do, or what the Ayatollah did or what Gorby did but what Reagan did. Like him or not he was a force to be reckoned with and with Margaret Thatcher by his side they exerted the pressure of two big old fat bulls in the china shop and I don't think you can even compare George W. to Ronnie because there is no comparison and I'm no Republican. Reagan was.

Who to Trust?

2005-06-30T21:15:00.000-05:00

Does it boil your bowels that the liberals on the Supreme Court made it possible for a corporation like Wal-Mart to buy your property, whether you like it or not, and determine what a fair price is so that they can then build their Wal-Mart that's so important to society? So important to society that they think that's more important than the pursuit of happiness, I guess. Which means that the American dream of the little house with white picket fence as modern man's castle against the world, a cave to retire to isn't even safe from the Federal government. This Republican government, which is supposed to be so concerned about state's rights. I guess we live in an oligarchy, and the people in charge fail us no matter where they stand according to the political continuum. Who to trust?

A Little Humility Would Go a Long Way

2005-06-29T15:10:00.000-05:00

By JOHN F. KERRY
Published: June 28, 2005

The reality is that the Bush administration's choices have made Iraq into what it wasn't before the war - a breeding ground for jihadists. Today there are 16,000 to 20,000 jihadists and the number is growing. The administration has put itself - and, tragically, our troops, who pay the price every day - in a box of its own making. Getting out of this box won't be easy, but we owe it to our soldiers to make our best effort.

Our mission in Iraq is harder because the administration ignored the advice of others, went in largely alone, underestimated the likelihood and power of the insurgency, sent in too few troops to secure the country, destroyed the Iraqi army through de-Baathification, failed to secure ammunition dumps, refused to recognize the urgency of training Iraqi security forces and did no postwar planning. A little humility would go a long way - coupled with a strategy to succeed.

So what should the president say tonight? The first thing he should do is tell the truth to the American people. Happy talk about the insurgency being in "the last throes" leads to frustrated expectations at home. It also encourages reluctant, sidelined nations that know better to turn their backs on their common interest in keeping Iraq from becoming a failed state.

The president must also announce immediately that the United States will not have a permanent military presence in Iraq. Erasing suspicions that the occupation is indefinite is critical to eroding support for the insurgency.

He should also say that the United States will insist that the Iraqis establish a truly inclusive political process and meet the deadlines for finishing the Constitution and holding elections in December. We're doing our part: our huge military presence stands between the Iraqi people and chaos, and our special forces protect Iraqi leaders. The Iraqis must now do theirs.

He also needs to put the training of Iraqi troops on a true six-month wartime footing and ensure that the Iraqi government has the budget needed to deploy them. The administration and the Iraqi government must stop using the requirement that troops be trained in-country as an excuse for refusing offers made by Egypt, Jordan, France and Germany to do more.

The administration must immediately draw up a detailed plan with clear milestones and deadlines for the transfer of military and police responsibilities to Iraqis after the December elections. The plan should be shared with Congress. The guideposts should take into account political and security needs and objectives and be linked to specific tasks and accomplishments. If Iraqis adopt a constitution and hold elections as planned, support for the insurgency should fall and Iraqi security forces should be able to take on more responsibility. It will also set the stage for American forces to begin to come home.

Iraq, of course, badly needs a unified national army, but until it has one - something that our generals now say could take two more years - it should make use of its tribal, religious and ethnic militias like the Kurdish pesh merga and the Shiite Badr Brigade to provide protection and help with reconstruction. Instead of single-mindedly focusing on training a national army, the administration should prod the Iraqi government to fill the current security gap by integrating these militias into a National Guard-type force that can provide security in their own areas.

The administration must work with the Iraqi government to establish a multinational force to help protect its borders. Such a force, if sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, could attract participation by Iraq's neighbors and countries like India.

The deployment of capable security forces is critical, but it alone will not end the insurgency, as the administration would have us believe. Hamstrung by its earlier lack of planning and overly optimistic predictions for rebuilding Iraq, the administration has failed to devote equal attention to working with the Iraqi government on the economic and political fronts. Consequently, reconstruction is lagging even in the relatively secure Shiite south and Kurdish north. If Iraqis, particularly Sunnis who fear being disenfranchised, see electricity flowing, jobs being created, roads and sewers being rebuilt and a democratic government being formed, the allure of the insurgency will decrease.

Iraq's Sunni neighbors, who complain they are left out, could do more to help. Even short-term improvements, like providing electricity and supplying diesel fuel - an offer that the Saudis have made but have yet to fulfill - will go a long way. But we need to give these nations a strategic plan for regional security, acknowledging their fears of an Iran-dominated crescent and their concerns about our fitful mediation between Israel and the Palestinians in return for their help in rebuilding Iraq, protecting its borders, and bringing its Sunnis into the political process.

The next months are critical to Iraq's future and our security. If Mr. Bush fails to take these steps, we will stumble along, our troops at greater risk, casualties rising, costs rising, the patience of the American people wearing thin, and the specter of quagmire staring us in the face. Our troops deserve better: they deserve leadership equal to their sacrifice.

There Are So Many Things Right About This Photograph

2005-06-26T11:41:00.002-05:00

This is a pirated photo of Larry "Wildman" Fischer, a Frank Zappa protege from the 1960s and I'm not posting this because I like Frank Zappa or Fischer; I think this photo could serve as a metaphor for our times. Here you have a man, nearly schizophrenic by all accounts, who was used by Frank Zappa (as Zappa and others like Andy Warhol used their acolytes even as they provided them with their "fame"), and ended up making television appearances on TV shows like "Laugh-In" where in the tumultous 60s anybody that "way-out" was "way-in." It's a fucked-up commentary on the Sixties that indeed a man with genuine mental problems fit right in with the countculture, right? Schizophrenics and acid-heads making excellent bedfellows, until the acid wears off, I assume. Most would agree that schizophrenia doesn't "wear-off." Ok, tangent here, acid being to the white middle-class kids who mainly used it some sort of bizarre act of "slumming." Turn on and then one could experience almost like a temporary schizophrenia.

If you look at this photo with your most honest eye, you'll see that it sums up the rebellious nature of the United States nearly perfectly -- and that along with the black and white of the image there are many shades of grey. This photo appears to be of a disheveled man holding a U.S. flag in front of a staircase. Drop out those shades of grey and you would have an incomplete picture. The shades of grey are necessary to make a complete picture. Those who see the world in only black and white have been fooled by charlatans.

Charlatan, n. -- a person who makes elaborate, fraudulent, and often voluble claims to skill or knowledge; a quack or fraud. [French, from Italian ciarlatano, probably an alteration of cerretano, inhabitant of Cerreto, a city of Italy once famous for its quacks] source. www.answers.com

Who would want an imperfect or false picture of the world? More importantly who would *choose* to accept a false picture of the world *knowing* it false? The case could be made that life's complexities in this Age of Information have become too daunting for most.

Ernest Hemingway once said that the key to becoming a great writer was possession of a foolproof "bullshit detector." It seems that many people these days not only are minus their "bullshit detector" but their very will to discover the truth has eroded. I've commented much recently that the "well," meaning the news media, has been poisoned and that many now no longer trust any news source as objective. Objective news is the lifeblood of a democracy. Subjective news pieces, which are merely opinions based on fact and not factual reporting per se, are always used as examples by those who cannot find any facts to support their views. Be very wary of those who use mere opinion to support their views. Opinions are statements which cannot be supported by empirical evidence.

Their goal is to lead you up those stairs and off the roof of the that building. Schizophrenics always smile.

Now They Can Seize Your Property

2005-06-26T11:39:00.000-05:00

from Counterpunch, June 26, 05

___________________

So much for the right to die in your own home, smoking a joint to take your mind off the pain. Thanks to the liberals on the U.S. Supreme Court, the feds can haul you to prison from from your death bed for smoking medical marijuana and any local authority RAZE YOUR HOUSE AND GIVE THE LAND TO WAL-MART for a parking lot.

On June 6, by a vote of 6-3, the Court ruled that Federal authorities may prosecute sick people who smoke pot on doctors' orders. The court’s apex liberal, Stevens, wrote the majority decision. The conservative Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the dissent, saying that the court was overreaching to endorse "making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own home for one's own medicinal use”.

Ranged with Stevens in the majority were Ginsburg and Breyer, along with Kennedy (regarded as more conservative than this first trio), plus the supposed libertarian, Souter and Scalia, the most conceited judge in America. Of course Scalia had to file his own opinion proffering a "more nuanced" analysis, to the general effect that Congress had the right to pass “necessary and proper laws”.

Then, on June 23, the Court’s liberals, plus Souter and Kennedy decreed that between private property rights on the one side, and big-time developers with the city council in their pockets on the other, the latter wins every time.

The issue was one of eminent domain. Stevens wrote the majority opinion, declaring blandly that promoting economic development [translation, a Walmart in every neighborhood] is a traditional and long-accepted function of government," and that if the underpinning of a public authority wielding the bludgeon of eminent domain is “public purpose”, then "Clearly, there is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose."

“Traditionally broad” just about sums it up. In the case of General Motors, as George Corsetti recalled on this site a while ago the “public purpose” invoked by GM’s gofer, Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit, was to destroy a Polish community to turn the land over to GM for a new plant.

Stevens said that state legislatures and courts were best at "discerning local public needs". *(After you’re done with this Diary, you can find Corsetti’s comments on the decision, here on our site this weekend.) And, once again, O’Connor wrote the dissent, a fine one, in which she stated that "The government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more” and “Who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive use of her property?"

O’Connor added: "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

Thomas also wrote an excellent dissent which I’m sure had Jane Jacobs nodding approval. He called the decision "far-reaching and dangerous," and noting correctly that those displaced by urban renewal and "slum clearance" over the years have tended to be lower-income members of minority groups. "The court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution".

Liberals love eminent domain, as much as conservatives love the death penalty, and like many liberal passions it destroys far more lives than the gas chamber or the lethal needle.

The case on which the Court ruled was known as Kelo v. City of New London. In the decorous prose of Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times, it concerned “a large-scale plan to replace a faded residential neighborhood with office space for research and development, a conference hotel, new residences and a pedestrian "riverwalk" along the Thames River. The project, to be leased and built by private developers, is designed to derive maximum benefit for the city from a $350 million research center built nearby by Pfizer Inc., the big pharmaceutical company.”

I assume every CounterPuncher can figure out what this really means. God help all “faded residential neighborhoods”. Well, if the poor folks work really hard maybe they’ll be able to go live in the Grand Hyatt or Towne Plaza raised on the rubble of their homes.
That GM plant in Detroit? The city said it would clear 465 acres of land in the center of Detroit, 1,500 homes, 144 businesses, 16 churches, a school and a hospital. Some 3,500 were forced out--and turn it over to GM which would build a new Cadillac factory that would employ 6,500 workers.

As Corsetti wrote,

“Ultimately, all 465 acres of Poletown was cleared and GM built the plant. The auto plant opening was delayed a year and employed less than half the promised 6,500 workers. By one account more jobs were lost from the destruction of Poletown than were created by the factory. The city also believed that the new plant would attract other, feeder plants, nearby. They never materialized, and with tax abatements and other incentives, it was a fiscal disaster for the city.”

"Quagmire...Could Force a Draft"

2005-06-26T09:35:00.000-05:00

Wisconsin senator says Americans are getting frustrated

By Patty Brandl
Fond Du Lac Reporter, Wisconsin, June 26, 05
______________________________________________________

U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold has introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate calling on President Bush to create a timetable for achieving goals and withdrawing American troops from Iraq.

“Disappointment about Iraq is deepening. The majority of Wisconsinites are very skeptical of the way the war is going,” Feingold, D-Wis., said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning. “We didn’t sign up for an indefinite occupation of Iraq.”

The Wisconsin senator said there are three important questions the administration must answer:

-- What is our mission?

-- What is our time frame in which our mission can be accomplished?

-- And over what period of time can our exit happen?

It’s not a cut-and-run strategy, he said. Troops would have to remain, particularly to provide training for the Iraqi military. And the United States will have to concentrate on making resources available to help the Iraqi people rebuild their government and their country.

According to an Associated Press story, President Bush continues to press his argument that U.S. troops cannot specify a timetable for withdrawal until Iraq is assured of victory over the insurgents.

Bush to address troops

The president will make a direct appeal to the American public in an address to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., on Tuesday night with a call “to complete a mission” the United States has started in Iraq. The White House is asking television news networks to make live air time available.

Feingold said a clear plan would help in budgeting more responsibly for current and future military needs.

The resolution does not set up a time frame for troop withdrawal. Feingold said that’s something for the military commanders to decide. It does, however, call for a commitment by Bush to set a tentative schedule for withdrawal within 30 days of its passage.

The senator said he returns to Wisconsin almost every weekend. When he meets with his constituents, he has noticed the number of people who approach him asking when the U.S. government can bring their sons and daughters home has been on the rise.

“Soldiers are dying, the pace is increasing, and the people of Iraq are dying daily,” Feingold said. “Our defense is being weakened.”

With five more Wisconsin soldiers killed in Iraq in recent months, he said it’s time to give people a vision of a plan for U.S. troops coming home.

Volunteer army tested

“About 7,000 of our 10,000 people in the National Guard have had to go over there,” he said. “Our volunteer army concept is great. But some in the army are saying the military is in desperate straits.”

Bush, speaking at a press conference Friday with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, urged support for the U.S. effort in Iraq.

“They (terrorists) know that ... the carnage that they wreak will be on TV,” Bush said. “They know that it bothers people to see death. And it does. It bothers me. It bothers American citizens. It bothers Iraqis. They’re trying to shake our will. ... And so, of course, we understand the nature of that enemy.

“We also understand that there is reason to be optimistic about what’s taking place,” said Bush, pointing to the development of a new, democratic government in Iraq and training of Iraqi security forces that ultimately must defend the nation.

Feingold said he’s concerned that if the military operations extend indefinitely, it could require more troops than would be available under the current volunteer military structure.

“If it becomes a quagmire, it could force a draft,” he said. “I oppose a draft, but I do understand why they might need it if things go on as they are.”

Rage, rage against the lying of the right!

2005-06-25T07:31:00.000-05:00

(Actually, I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH EVERYONE on the right. My apologies to the author for the hatchet job.)
___________________

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

Dick Cheney, Meet Reality

2005-06-25T07:22:00.000-05:00

The Roanoke Times, June 25, 05

The vice president's long-overdue introduction to reality came courtesy of Gen. John P. Abizaid's testimony Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee that directly contradicted Cheney's rosy assessment of an Iraq insurgency in its "last throes." Abizaid made it clear that the insurgency was every bit as strong as it was six months ago and that foreign fighters were still joining the battle. A few days before, Abizaid told the Houston Chronicle that the United States was in for an indefinite fight that would "cost in blood and treasure."

Cheney remained as resistant to such assessments as he was to giving any consideration prior to the war that his belief that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq might be wrong. "If you look at what the dictionary says about 'throes,' it can be a, you know, a violent period, the throes of a revolution," Cheney said on CNN after Abizaid's testimony.

As American confidence in President Bush's adventure in Iraq erodes, such persistent disdain for confronting reality will not offer much comfort.
Nor will the kind of partisan rhetoric exercised by White House adviser Karl Rove, who said the liberal response to the 9/11 attacks was to offer "therapy and understanding to our attackers," while conservatives "prepared for war."

Unfortunately, they mostly prepared for the wrong war. From the beginning, the real focus of the Bush administration was on Iraq, not Afghanistan, whose ruling Taliban had provided a safe harbor and training ground for al-Qaida.

Once the Taliban fell, resources were quickly diverted from the fight to wipe out al-Qaida and bring Osama bin Laden to justice to preparing for the invasion of Iraq - which had no connection to the terrorist attacks.

That invasion, according to a report by the CIA, turned Iraq into a training ground that will produce more proficient terrorists than Afghanistan. The report says that Iraqi and foreign fighters are developing a broad range of skills in Iraq's urban environments. Once the insurgency is over, the

CIA fears the terrorists will disperse and take those skills around the globe.

Calls for Rove to apologize for his remarks miss the broader point. Though his comments inexcusably ignored the shared outrage and national unity that marked the months after 9/11, the real apology should come from Cheney, President Bush and the other architects of the disastrous Iraq war.

What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and ....

2005-06-24T19:27:00.000-05:00

Across the board we have people in charge who do stupid things like this. It's unbelievable.

**********************************************

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a victory for cities, a divided Supreme Court concluded Thursday that local governments have the authority to seize private land and turn the property over to private developers for economic development.

Government's authority to condemn land for public use traditionally has been used to eliminate slums or build highways, schools and other public works.

But Tuesday's 5-4 ruling found that local officials can use their "eminent domain" power to condemn homes in a working-class neighborhood for private development in hopes of boosting tax revenue and improving the local economy.

Connecticut case

The case pitted the city of New London, Connecticut, against homeowner Susette Kelo and six other families who were trying to keep the municipality from condemning their homes for use as part of a redevelopment project, centered around a $270 million global research facility built by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

Kelo and her neighbors filed suit, arguing their property rights were being violated by well-connected developers. But the Supreme Court found the city could go forward with the project and condemn the homes.

"Promoting economic development is a traditional and long-accepted function of government," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

O'Connor: Court overstepped

But writing for the dissenters, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the court overstepped its authority.

"The court today significantly expands the meaning of public use," O'Connor wrote. "It holds that the sovereign may take private property currently put to ordinary private use, and give it over for new, ordinary private use."

Scott Bullock, the homeowners' lawyer, said, "Every home, church or corner store" would be vulnerable to being replaced by commercial development under the ruling, "since they produce more tax revenue." He said a very high standard should be used when applying eminent domain since "every city has problems and wants more tax revenues."

Stevens concluded that the city's plan "unquestionably serves a public purpose" and the majority appeared to defer to the judgment of local officials over the courts to navigate that standard.

"The city has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including -- but by no means limited to -- new jobs and increased tax revenue," he wrote.

Cities hail the decision

The National League of Cities hailed the decision, saying it would allow cities to keep "one of their most effective tools for ensuring economic development."

"Eminent domain is not a power to be used lightly," Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, the group's president, said in a written statement. "We must be sensitive to those who may be displaced. However, as part of a legislative process, with citizen input and discussion, it is one of the most powerful tools city officials have to rejuvenate their neighborhoods."

The case stems from New London's 2000 plan to redevelop 90 acres of the Fort Trumball neighborhood. The city council transferred eminent domain power to the New London Development Corporation, a private, non-profit group of citizens, business owners and community leaders.

The company wants to build a conference center, hotel complex, offices, condominiums and, eventually, an aquarium in New London, located about 125 miles east of New York.

Residents were ordered out of their homes in 2000, but several rejected the city's compensation package and fought the move in court.

"There's no amount of money that can compensate for what the other side of that coin would be," said Matt Dery, who said his family has lived in Fort Trumball for a century. "Truly, my parents don't want to wake up rich ... they just want to wake up tomorrow where they live."

'Blow to homeowners'

The libertarian Cato Institute, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Kelo's behalf, called the decision a "blow to homeowners and small business people."

"With today's decision, no one's property is safe, since any time a government official thinks someone else can make better use of your property than you're doing, he can order it condemned and transferred," Roger Pilon, the group's director of constitutional studies, said in a written statement.

Wesley Horton, an attorney for New London, said the city understands the situation the homeowners face, "but you have to remember that can happen if there was a road going in, or a school. It doesn't make any difference what type of condemnation there is.

"Obviously that's a sad situation, there's no question about it," he said. "But you can't have one rule for roads and another rule for blight and a third rule for economic development. It's all the same thing."

Joining Stevens in the majority were justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined O'Connor's dissent.

In a concurring opinion, Thomas predicted the ruling would cause long-term problems.

"The consequence of today's decision are not difficult to predict, and promise to be harmful," he wrote. "So-called 'urban renewal' programs provide some compensation for the properties they take, but no compensation is possible for the subjective value of these lands to the individuals displaced and the indignity inflicted by uprooting them from their homes."

The case is Kelo v. City of New London (04-0108).

CNN, June 24, 05

White House Doctors Environmental Reports Again and Again

2005-06-19T17:47:00.000-05:00

By Julie Cart
LA Times Staff Writer

June 18, 2005

The Bush administration altered critical portions of a scientific analysis of the environmental impact of cattle grazing on public lands before announcing Thursday that it would relax regulations limiting grazing on those lands, according to scientists involved in the study.

A government biologist and a hydrologist, who both retired this year from the Bureau of Land Management, said their conclusions that the proposed new rules might adversely affect water quality and wildlife, including endangered species, were excised and replaced with language justifying less stringent regulations favored by cattle ranchers.

Grazing regulations, which affect 160 million acres of public land in the Western U.S., set the conditions under which ranchers may use that land, and guide government managers in determining how many cattle may graze, where and for how long without harming natural resources.

The original draft of the environmental analysis warned that the new rules would have a "significant adverse impact" on wildlife, but that phrase was removed. The bureau now concludes that the grazing regulations are "beneficial to animals."

Eliminated from the final draft was another conclusion that read: "The Proposed Action will have a slow, long-term adverse impact on wildlife and biological diversity in general."

Also removed was language saying how a number of the rule changes could adversely affect endangered species.

"This is a whitewash. They took all of our science and reversed it 180 degrees," said Erick Campbell, a former BLM state biologist in Nevada and a 30-year bureau employee who retired this year. He was the author of sections of the report pertaining to the effect on wildlife and threatened and endangered species.

"They rewrote everything," Campbell said in an interview this week. "It's a crime."

Campbell and the other retired bureau scientist who criticized the rules were among more than a dozen BLM specialists who contributed to the environmental impact statement. Others who worked on the original draft could not be reached or did not return calls seeking comment.

A bureau official acknowledged that changes were made in the analysis and said they were part of a standard editing and review process. Ranchers hailed the regulations as a signal of new openness from the administration.

"We're hopeful that some of the provisions will strengthen the public lands grazing industry and give our members certainty in their business," said Jenni Beck of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. "We are encouraged that this [environmental impact statement] demonstrates the benefits of grazing on public lands."

Livestock graze on public land in 11 Western states, including 8 million acres in California. The vast acreage is needed to support a comparatively small number of livestock because in the arid region topsoil is thin and grass is generally sparse.

About 2% of the nation's beef is produced from cattle on public lands.

The new rules, published Friday by the BLM, a division of the Department of Interior, ensures ranchers expanded access to public land and requires federal land managers to conduct protracted studies before taking action to limit that access.

The rules reverse a long-standing agency policy that gave BLM experts the authority to quickly determine whether livestock grazing was inflicting damage.

The regulations also eliminate the agency's obligation to seek public input on some grazing decisions. Public comment will be allowed but not required.

In recent years, concerns about the condition of much Western grazing land has been heightened by drought, which has denuded pastures in the most arid areas, causing bureau managers to close some pastures and prompting ranchers to sell their herds.

The new rules mark a departure from grazing regulations adopted in 1995 under President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Those regulations reflected the view of range scientists that a legacy of overgrazing in the West had degraded scarce water resources, damaged native plant communities and imperiled wildlife.

Babbitt ordered the bureau to establish standards that spelled out when public lands were open for grazing, and for the first time required range specialists to assess each pasture to ensure it held enough vegetation to support wildlife and livestock. It was the first time in about 50 years that the federal government had tried sweeping overhauls of how Western ranchers operated on public lands.

By 1994, studies from scientists at the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture convinced government land managers that livestock grazing was the most pervasive threat to plant and animals in the arid West.

Some conservation groups seized on the studies to mount a campaign to eliminate grazing on public land altogether, prompting a backlash that accused environmentalists of engaging in "rural cleansing" that would drive families off the land, some of whom had been there since the 19th century.

This week, environmentalists were sharply critical of the new rules.

"It's an explicit rollback," said Thomas Lustig, staff lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation in Boulder, Colo. "What [Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton] did was take Babbitt's regs and found parts where they could put a hurdle in to undermine the reforms."

Bureau officials said the new rules represented a step forward in improving its management of livestock grazing on federal land.

Bud Cribley, the agency's manager for rangeland resources, said the report was written by a number of specialists from different offices within the BLM. When it was finished, in November 2003, the agency believed it "needed a lot of work," Cribley said.

"We disagreed with the impact analysis that was originally put forward. There were definitely changes made in the area of impact analysis. We adjusted it.

"The draft that we published we felt adequately addressed the impacts. We felt the changes we did make were based on good science."

Most of the changes came in sections analyzing projected impact of the rules on fisheries, plant and animal health as well as water quality and quantity.

Bill Brookes, a former hydrologist with the bureau who assessed the regulations' effect on water resources, said in the original draft the proposed rule change was "an abrogation of [the agency's] responsibility under the Clean Water Act."

"Everything I wrote was totally rewritten and watered down," Brookes said in an interview Thursday.

"Everything in the report that was purported to be negative was watered down. Instead of saying, in the long term, this will create problems, it now says, in the long term, grazing is the best thing since sliced bread."

Brookes said work that the bureau's original specialists required more than a year and a half to finish was changed in a matter of weeks. He and Campbell said officials in Washington said the document did not support the new rules so they called in a new team to redo it.

According to the agency officials, the new grazing regulations were meant to give land managers and ranchers more flexibility in making decisions about whether to allow grazing on a particular parcel.

Though an array of conservation and environmental groups decried the new rules, Cribley said changes were minor but necessary.

"We don't look at this as a significant change from the current regulations," he said. "This is fine-tuning and making adjustment in existing rules. We came out with some significant changes in the grazing rule in '95, and we have been implementing changes since that time. We needed to make corrections after almost 10 years of experience."

Downing Minutes Prove Bush Lied About WMD

2005-06-19T14:48:00.000-05:00

LONDON (AP) — President Bush’s government has been accused of exaggerating the risks of Saddam Hussein’s weapons and Iraq’s ties to al-Qaida before the war to justify the invasion.

That’s one reason the most quoted section of the eight secret Downing Street memos that have been leaked to the British and American media are the minutes of a meeting that Prime Minister Tony Blair held with his top officials on July 23, 2002.

During it, Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, discussed his recent visit to Washington.

“There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable,” said Dearlove, who’s identified as “C” in the secret minutes of the meeting.

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

“The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” The NSC is the U.S. National Security Council, which advises the president.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he would discuss the timing of a possible war with then Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing has not yet decided,” the minutes said. “But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

June 19. 2005

Barfing Through History, or Let 'Em Eat Cake

2005-06-19T11:08:00.000-05:00

I'm hungover. When I'm hungover, I get philosophical. I'll drink my V-8 and try to wake up a little bit here, but meanwhile let's take a march through recent history. Yesterday I'm sitting in a doctor's office reading their copy of U.S. News & World Report. Two good op-eds. The first about the Republican effort to eliminate the middle class. Part of the NWO plan? Nothing but workers working round the clock. Paying toll to the trolls who run it. Approximately 2% of the population. Thirty percent more millionaires now than there were before the start of the Iraq war. War profiteers then. Get rid of the Estate Tax forever. Make the tax cuts permanent. Oink, oink, oink. Pigs looking out for their pig friends. So only those making less than $100,000 a year really ever pay any taxes. Meanwhile do away with Medicare and Social Security. All expenses there come from out of pocket. Drive the middle class directly into the ground. Let 'em eat cake.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is producing more opium than ever before. In fact, opium production has doubled in the past year with Hamid at the helm. Who's profiting? Who profits? More opium, thus more heroin. Heroin killing millions worldwide yearly. Stories of black planes, drones, spraying crops. Taliban back in charge, running the show.

Things aren't looking good but no one would know from a Bush press conference. Nothing but platitudes, and good ole boy rosy assessments. Does Bush ever get briefed on anything? Doesn't seem so. Meanwhile...from Kos:

"Sen. Chuck Hagel is angry. He's upset about the more than 1,700 U.S. soldiers killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Iraq. He's also aggravated by the continued string of sunny assessments from the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's recent remark that the insurgency is in its 'last throes.' 'Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality,' Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq.' "

Who's steering the ship? Shadow government?

William F. Buckley: Let's Get Out of Iraq

2005-06-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

William F. Buckley of all people is coming to his senses...why does it take so long for the Kool-Aide to wear off?

"The moment comes in every military venture, short of national self-defense, when responsible thought is given to the correlation of ends and means. One reason given for venturing into Iraq was the need to impress upon the nations of the world the decisive nature of U.S. intercessions. We effected this by going into Afghanistan.and Iraq. But we have dulled the example we set out to make by tolerating costs without corresponding advances on the strategic goal."

Cheney Profits Off Gitmo: No Wonder He Wants to Keep It Running!

2005-06-17T22:56:00.000-05:00

It's no wonder Dick Cheney speaks well of the efforts at Gitmo. His cronies at Halliburton, fat from profits from the "reconstruction" of Iraq, are set to score big off a planned Gitmo redesign.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Halliburton Co. unit will build a new $30 million detention facility and security fence at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 520 foreign terrorism suspects, the Defense Department announced on Thursday.

The announcement comes the same week that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the jail after U.S. lawmakers said it had created an image problem for the United States.

Critics have decried the indefinite detention of Guantanamo detainees, whom the United States has denied rights accorded under the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war. The prison was called "the gulag of our times" in a recent Amnesty International report.

An air-conditioned two-story prison, known as Detention Camp #6, will be built at Guantanamo to house 220 men. It will include exercise areas, medical and dental spaces as well as a security control room, the contract announcement said.

The contract announcement did not specify whether the new prison would also hold foreign terror suspects.

Under the deal with the Norfolk, Virginia-based U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic, the work is to be wrapped up by July 2006. It is part of a larger contract that could be worth up to $500 million if all options are exercised, the Defense Department said.

The project is to be carried out by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root Services of Arlington, Virginia. It includes site work, heating ventilation and air conditioning, plumbing and electrical work, the Pentagon said.

The first prisoners arrived at the prison camp in January 2002 after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked airliner attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The Pentagon has said about 520 detainees from more than 40 countries are being held at the prison, without giving a precise figure.

Rumsfeld said on Tuesday U.S. taxpayers had spend more than $100 million on construction costs and no other facility could replace it.

June 17, 2005

Politics of Hypocrisy: DeLay Took His Own Father Off Life Support

2005-03-27T10:23:00.000-06:00

'L.A. Times': Rep. Tom DeLay Took His Own Father Off Life Support in 1988

Published: March 26, 2005 11:00 PM ET

NEW YORK Exposing a previously unknown episode, the Los Angeles Times reported late Saturday that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who this week championed political intervention in the Terry Schaivo case, agreed to his own family’s decision in 1988 to take his own father off life support and allow him to die.

The man, 65-year-old drilling contractor Charles DeLay, was badly injured in a freak accident at his home. Tom DeLay was a junior congressman from Texas at the time. The patient was being kept alive by intravenous lines and a ventilator.

“DeLay has denounced Schiavo's husband, as well as judges, for committing what he calls ‘an act of barbarism,’ in removing the tube,” the L.A. Times reported. “In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die."

This account was assembled from court files, medical records and interviews with family members, the paper said.

Doctors advised that DeLay’s father would "basically be a vegetable," the congressman's aunt, JoAnne DeLay, told the newspaper.

When his kidneys failed, the family decided against connecting him to a dialysis machine. "Extraordinary measures to prolong life were not initiated," said his medical report, citing "agreement with the family's wishes."

His bedside chart carried the instruction: "Do Not Resuscitate." On Dec. 14, 1988, the senior DeLay died.

The Times noted similarities between the DeLay and Schiavo cases: “Both stricken patients were severely brain damaged. Both were incapable of surviving without continuing medical assistance. Both were said to have expressed a desire to be spared life sustained by machine. And neither left a living will.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------
E&P Staff

U.S. Expansionism: Recipe for Disaster

2005-03-27T09:42:00.000-06:00

Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s poor-man’s-equivalent of a Bill O’Reilly, starts off a recent piece with the statement “war leads to peace.”

By now most will quickly recognize the Orwellian context of such a statement.

But this is a sign that Bush’s apologists are becoming less ingenious in their methods as they continue to bludgeon the American people with a nervous PR campaign defending the war in Iraq (and what they hail as its results in the region). As they become even less sure about any “exit strategy” they are simultaneously conditioning the American people that there is no exit strategy because the United States has no plans of making an exit. The people of the Middle East have been suspicious of this all along, yet no one (at least on the record) wants to admit that U.S. forces in the region are facing a guerrilla insurgency of unflagging resolve. Years from now it will be much harder to convince anyone that our interest in the region is about anything except oil.

That this war was (and is) an illegal one based on treaties signed by the United States seems to matter very little to the Bush cheerleaders. My main concern is that when the dust settles we are not going to be living in the same America that I know and love. We’ll be living in an America that has finally concluded that the expansion of our economic interests is all that ultimately matters—those who get in the way of this process will be crushed. It will be easier to crush those who oppose the U.S. expansionism living outside the United States but a little more difficult to silence war critics living in the United States, i.e., U.S. citizens.

All this reminds me of the record left by Tacitus of the latter days of the Roman Empire—Rome toward the end was surrounded on all sides by an increasingly hostile world. Expansionism breeds discontent among neighbors. Some expansionism of course is necessary to the health of the state. Populations grow, jobs are created, territory is explored, lands conquered. Many would argue that the United States has some responsibility to somehow enlighten the peoples of the world and teach them the democratic/capitalist processes to create some business interest that would lead to more cooperation and less disparity among the nations of the world. Underlying any effort in this direction would be an effort to gain the upper hand. Thus, by outward appearances, attempts made by the United States to lend a helping hand to developing nations only leads to further resentment. Therefore, the United States is stuck between a rock and a hard place in a world where, increasingly, the efforts of the European Union and China are undercutting American gains. This situation will only become worse as America’s self-reliance wanes. Jobs are being outsourced at an alarming rate. China is becoming the leading economic and military force in the world. The U.S. military is the most technologically advanced in the world, true, but with sheer force of numbers the Chinese military is a force that would prove almost insurmountable.

Saddam Hussein is locked up and that’s a good thing; this goes without saying.

What we are left with is the glaring fact that military might is only part of the equation. Whether or not the middle east is moving toward democracy and whether or not freedom is “on the march” is only a small part of the equation. We, since the invasion of Iraq, are on a collision course with some destiny that none can really reckon. The United States has moved into uncharted waters with the Bush administration at the helm. They would do well to realize that history provides many examples for those who would forgo liberty for the sake of empire. The Romans toward the end of their period of reckless expansionism realized to late that it is better to be loved than feared.

Mr. Bush, tyrants have few friends on this earth and their legacies are quickly forgotten. The United States, no longer separated by geographic distance or oceans, is in lock-step with a quickly changing world. Unless our foreign policy starts spreading some real prosperity around the world very soon, we will realize too late that our imperialist tendencies are only ensuring our downfall. Spreading real prosperity doesn’t happen at gunpoint.

Joe Scarborough at MSNBC is myopic to the point of absurdity making the claim that our foreign interests are best served by waging some perpetual war against all the nations of the world. Show some sincerity and intelligence, Joe. The propaganda is wearing thin. Of course it’s in the best interest of the United States if a wave of democracy spreads throughout the Middle East. But is that what’s really happening? The United States has neither the resources nor the will to become the world’s perpetual police force. Have you seen the size of the current budget deficit? You don’t seem too worried about it, Joe. Y’know Emerson wrote an interesting piece called "Self-Reliance" perhaps you should read it. Reading it may help you. Or maybe not.

The powers that be don’t "read too good" do they?

We need real, charismatic leadership to restore faith in America among our allies. Why is it that the United States has to fight tooth and nail to forge alliances with our traditional allies to fend off groups of bloodthirsty terrorists? Gaining support for this should not be difficult. Why is it?

It’s because it’s all too obvious to the informed observer that the Neo-Cons are not so worried about America’s safety they’re merely worried about their own bank accounts.

Connect the Dots

2005-03-27T09:41:00.000-06:00

Item: Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora, the mountain hideaway of the Al Qaida leader. Item: Both Bush and Cheney both lied about it, flatly denying the military knew of bin Laden’s presence there. Item: John Kerry blamed Bush and Cheney for allowing bin Laden’s escape in the run-up to the 2004 election and Kerry was castigated as a scoundrel.

We can all remember as kids playing the game called connect the dots. So today we learn, from a declassified government document obtained by the Associated Press via a Freedom of Information Act request, that Osama bin Laden was indeed cornered at Tora Bora in Afghanistan and surrounded by the world’s finest military fighting force on all sides (that’s what surrounded means) and still he escaped. The U.S. military also revealed today that they’re holding an unidentified man who helped bin Laden escape. This proves again that the President is and has been lying about his knowledge of what’s going on in the hunt for bin Laden. This time there is a key difference, however. It can no longer be said that Bush and his handlers are lying about bin Laden for the sake of national security. At this point knowledge of bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora wouldn’t affect national security in the slightest—Bush’s people simply won’t admit to any of this because of sheer embarrassment. It’s understandable that they’d be embarrassed by such a huge blunder. The Commander in Chief, after all his gleeful cowboy image mongering, has the perpetrator behind the horrific events of Sept. 11 completely surrounded and bin Laden escapes. To top that off, Bush and Cheney lie about it and then attempt to cover it up with the help of a news media that seems to think that quite a few other events are more important than national security. Namely, by bringing the tragedy of Terry Schiavo into the headlights of America the Bush people (you can thank Karl Rove) are leaving America’s front door wide open while we’re still vulnerable to another terrorist attack. Oh, and also so that the judges can be called activists for merely doing their job. If Terry Schiavo’s parents bring their case before every court in the land 1,000 times the outcome will still be the same. No matter how much neo-conservatives may try to deny it, in this instance they are the ones being disrespectful of the sanctity of marriage and the family by bringing their political circus into Terry Schiavo’s hospice room for their own sordid political gain. With the added irony that Bush, as governor of Texas, signed legislation that gave Texas doctors the right to pull the plug on patients who can’t pay (yep, that’s as hypocritical as it gets), we’re set for a long ride with these neo-cons who claim to be conservative but would like nothing better than to have the authority to meddle into every aspect of our personal lives. The sooner that the American people connect the dots and see the pattern of irresponsible and selfish behavior disguised as compassion that Bush is practicing the better. I just hope we'll still have some of our civil rights left when that finally happens.

Bush Jokes While Bin Laden Still At Large

2005-01-16T20:40:00.000-06:00

When asked why the administration had so far failed to locate Osama Bin Laden, more than three years after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US, the president responded, "Because he's hiding."

--BBC News, Jan 16

White House Pays for Propaganda

2005-01-11T21:42:00.000-06:00

SECAUCUS — The head of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy said it best. Alex Jones, on Countdown Monday night, insisted that the worst part about the CBS "Killian Memos" disaster was that it had overshadowed the Armstrong Williams "Pay For Praise" disaster.

Oh, no, it hasn't.

Mr. Williams has been fired — again — and he’s been quoted as saying there are others on the official Government Information Dole, and he is — in spirit at least — being copy-catted as far away as the nascent democracy trying to emerge in Iraq.

There, the political party of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi held a news conference in Baghdad to announce some of its candidates for the elections. It had a little surprise for the reporters who attended: One hundred dollars. The newspaper The Financial Timesreporting that after their statements, Allawi's colleagues invited each journalist to an upstairs room, and handed them each a hundred-dollar bill. American. A Ben Franklin for everybody in the house.

The newspaper reported that giving gifts to journalists was common in many authoritarian states of the Middle East, but the reporters at the news conference in question said it was not common practice in the post-Saddam Iraq. On the other hand, most of them also said they kept the cash.

Which is what Armstrong Williams continues to insist he's going to do — keep the $241,000 paid him by the Education Department to hype its "No Child Left Behind" program. It turns out he may need it.

"America's Black Forum," the long-running public affairs telecast co-anchored by NPR’s Juan Williams and the Fox sportscaster James Brown, says today it has terminated its relationship with Armstrong Williams. He had appeared as a commentator on the program, but its executive producer says that Williams’ "failure to disclose the potential conflict of interest" has led to his dismissal.

Then there is Sinclair Broadcast Group. The 39-station conglomerate — still infamous over its transformation of some Swift Boat Veterans’ malarkey into “news” — is now investigating Williams. Its counsel telling the industry newspaper The Hollywood Reporter that it too had a contract with Williams — as a consultant, and contributor to a Sinclair produced news broadcast called "News Central."

The lawyer says it is believed Williams interviewed Secretary of Education Rod Paige — from whose department Williams received the contract — on the Sinclair broadcast. Since its deal with Williams has already expired, Sinclair doesn’t expect to be able to do much even if the wool was pulled over its eyes. But what does it say when you’re being investigated for insufficient ethics by Sinclair?

Since USA Today broke the Williams story last Friday, one of the many questions asked has been: was that contract the only one? White House spokesman Scott McClellan says he doesn't know of any others, but a Fox News Channel commentator says he does — because Armstrong Williams told him about them.

Writing on the website of the magazine The Nation, David Corn says he encountered Williams in a Fox Green Room after the story broke and Williams told him, "This happens all the time. There are others."

Corn says he then asked Williams for the names of other conservative commentators who had accepted money from the Bush Administration... to which Williams replied, "I'm not going to defend myself that way."

Corn writes that even he could not tell if Williams was just covering his own butt, or if he really knew of other cases like his own. But apparently there's going to be a Congressional investigation. A spokesman for Ohio Congressman John Boehner, who chairs the House Education and The Work-force Committee, says on the Republican's behalf, "if what has been reported is accurate it is certainly indefensible — it is an inappropriate use of taxpayer money."

--MXNBC, Jan 11

Bush Uses Taxpayer Dollars to Pay for Propaganda

2005-01-08T07:57:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration paid a prominent commentator to promote the No Child Left Behind schools law to fellow blacks and to give the education secretary media time, records show.

A company run by Armstrong Williams, the syndicated commentator, was paid $240,000 by the Education Department. The goal was to deliver positive messages about Bush's education overhaul, using Williams' broad reach with minorities.

The deal, which drew a fast rebuke from Democrats on Capitol Hill, is the latest to put the department on the defensive for the way it has promoted Bush's signature domestic policy.

The contract required Williams' company, the Graham Williams Group, to produce radio and TV ads that feature one-minute "reads" by Education Secretary Rod Paige. The deal also allowed Paige and other department officials to appear as studio guests with Williams.

Williams, one of the leading black conservative voices in the country, was also to use his influence with other black journalists to get them to talk about No Child Left Behind.

The law, a centerpiece of President Bush's domestic agenda, aims to raise achievement among poor and minority children, with penalties for many schools that don't make progress.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday that the decisions on the practice were made by the Education Department. He did not directly answer when asked whether the White House approved of the practice, saying it was a department matter.

The Education Department defended its decision as a "permissible use of taxpayer funds under legal government contracting procedures." The point was to help parents, particularly in poor and minority communities, understand the benefits of the law, the department said.

Williams called criticism of his relationship with the department "legitimate."

"It's a fine line," he told The Associated Press on Friday. "Even though I'm not a journalist -- I'm a commentator -- I feel I should be held to the media ethics standard. My judgment was not the best. I wouldn't do it again, and I learned from it."

Three Democratic senators -- Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Harry Reid of Nevada -- wrote Bush Friday to demand he recover the money paid to Armstrong. The lawmakers contended that "the act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy."

Rep. George Miller of California, the top Democrat on the House education committee, asked for an inspector general investigation into whether the deal with legal and ethical. He and other Democrats also wrote Bush to call for an end to "covert propaganda."

The department's contract with Williams, through the public relations firm Ketchum, dates to 2003 and 2004. It follows another recent flap about the agency's publicity efforts.

The Bush administration has promoted No Child Left Behind with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money. It has also paid for rankings of newspaper coverage of the law, with points awarded for stories that say Bush and the Republican Party are strong on education. The Government Accountability Office, Congress' auditing arm, is investigating those spending decisions.

The GAO has twice ruled that the Bush administration's use of prepackaged videos -- to promote federal drug policy and a new Medicare law -- is "covert propaganda" because the videos do not make clear to the public that the government produced the promotional news.

"There is no defense for using taxpayer dollars to pay journalists for 'fake news' and favorable coverage of a federal program," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group that has tracked the department's spending.

--CNN, 1/8

Conservative Rehnquist Criticizes Neo-Cons!

2005-01-02T21:59:00.000-06:00

Ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist (news - web sites) said in a report released Saturday that judges must be protected from political threats, including from conservative Republicans who maintain that "judicial activists" should be impeached and removed from office.

"The Constitution protects judicial independence not to benefit judges, but to promote the rule of law: Judges are expected to administer the law fairly, without regard to public reaction," the chief justice, whose future on the bench is subject to wide speculation, said in his year-end report on the federal courts.

The public, the news media and politicians certainly are free to criticize judges, Rehnquist said, but politicians cross the line when they try to punish or impeach those making rulings they do not agree with.

His comments come as the new Congress faces what many predict will be a contentious battle over President Bush (news - web sites)'s nominees to the federal bench. And if his health forces Rehnquist to retire, there would be more partisan wrangling over his successor.

The 80-year-old chief justice has been absent from the Supreme Court since he disclosed in late October that he was being treated for thyroid cancer.

Since 2000, when Republicans took control of the White House and both houses of Congress, many conservative critics have focused their ire on "judicial activists" on the bench.

In his report, the chief justice did not name names but instead spoke of his concern for the "mounting criticism of judges for engaging in what is often referred to as `judicial activism."'

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), for example, has repeatedly threatened to impeach liberal-leaning federal judges for their rulings, such as the ban on school-sponsored prayers.

"A judge's judicial acts may not serve as a basis for impeachment. Any other rule would destroy judicial independence," Rehnquist said. "Instead of trying to apply the law fairly, regardless of public opinion, judges would be concerned about inflaming any group that might be able to muster the votes in Congress to impeach and convict them."

As the chief justice of the United States, Rehnquist leads the federal judicial system as well as the Supreme Court. Since taking office in 1986, he often has used his year-end report to set forth his views on controversies affecting the judiciary system. The controversy over political leanings of judges and their rulings is one of them.

Yet despite Rehnquist's reputation for conservatism, he has been just as willing to fault Republicans as Democrats when their actions and ideas threaten the courts.

In the late 1990s, for example, he faulted Senate Republicans for blocking votes on the judicial nominees of President Bill Clinton (news - web sites). More recently he faulted Senate Democrats for blocking votes on Bush's nominees.

In both instances, he said the nominees deserved a hearing and an up-or-down vote.

DeLay often has criticized judges when he thinks they have overstepped their authority.

"Many of these judges begin to grow drunk on their own power," " DeLay said in 1997. "Why shouldn't the people have a right to impeach these out-of-control judges?"

Last year DeLay called for Congress to enact legislation that would remove certain issues, such as the Pledge of Allegiance, from the jurisdiction of the federal courts.

DeLay was reacting to the ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) that held that Congress' inclusion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance used daily in many of the nation's schools amounted to an unconstitutional official endorsement of religion. The Supreme Court, though divided on its reasons, later set aside that ruling.

Although Rehnquist and DeLay may agree on the preferred outcome on these issues, the chief justice said the proper way to challenge a misguided ruling is to appeal it to a higher court.

"The appellate process provides a remedy" for those who believe a judge has erred, he said.

And over time, the public can change the courts, he said, by electing presidents and senators who reflect their views.

Rehnquist is fond of citing the example of President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. In his first term, a conservative Supreme Court struck down many of the president's New Deal laws.

After his landslide re-election in 1936, Roosevelt struck back and proposed to change and expand the membership of the court. Although his "court packing" plan failed, president, who was elected to an unprecedented four terms, succeeded nonetheless, Rehnquist noted.

"President Roosevelt lost this battle in Congress, but he eventually won the war to change the judicial philosophy of the Supreme Court. He won it the way our Constitution envisions such wars being won--by the gradual process of changing the federal judiciary through the appointment process," he wrote.

During his second term, Roosevelt replaced five retiring conservative justices with New Deal liberals and transformed the high court for the next generation.

In the 18-page report issued Saturday, Rehnquist, whom court officials say has been working from home, made only a brief reference to his illness.

"On a personal note, I also want to thank all of those who have sent their good wishes on my speedy recovery," he wrote.

--AP News, Jan 2

Republicans to Weaken House Ethics Rules

2004-12-31T17:09:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republican leaders are considering a change in House ethics rules that could make it harder to discipline lawmakers.

The proposal being circulated among House Republicans would end a general rule against any behavior that might bring "discredit" on the chamber, according to House Republican and Democratic leadership aides.

House members would be held to a narrower standard of behavior in keeping with the law, the House's rules and its ethics guidelines.

Other proposed changes to the ethics committee's rules being circulated in a "Dear Colleague" letter from House Rules Chairman David Dreier, R-California, would let House members respond to any admonishment before a letter goes out from the committee, and would end an investigation if there is a tie vote.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, plans to bring the proposal before a meeting of all House Republicans next week "and see what they think," said Hastert spokesman John Feehery.

The broader ethics rule in question was used this year to admonish Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, though the committee said he did not break House rules.

Democrats and government watchdog groups denounced the proposed change.

"It would lower the standard of official conduct, and if that's the case, it would be the first time that it has been done since 1968, and it would be done on a completely partisan basis," said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, on Friday.

Pelosi, D-California, also plans to huddle with Democrats next week to discuss a strategy for defeating the proposal.

"Members of the House should be kept to the highest ethical standard, not the lowest," Crider said. "Now, the code is higher than the law. This would say you've only violated the code of ethics if you've violated the law."

The committee has a long history, dating to the first recorded disciplinary action in 1798, when a Vermont lawmaker spat on a Connecticut colleague during a vote. Despite an apology letter, the committee nearly expelled the Vermonter, but fell two votes shy.

In the DeLay case, the committee said he had created the appearance of linking political donations to a legislative favor and improperly gained intervention of the Federal Aviation Administration in a Texas political dispute. It also said DeLay had improperly offered support for the House candidacy of Michigan Republican Rep. Nick Smith's son in return for the lawmaker's vote for a Medicare prescription drug benefit. Smith voted against it.

After helping craft that admonishment, the committee's chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colorado, may be replaced with another chairman by Hastert.

Feehery said that is being considered because Hastert believes rules limit Hefley's tenure on the commission, not because of his leadership on the DeLay case.

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a watchdog group, said the House Republican leaders' proposal "would fundamentally undermine and damage the House ethics rules, and would constitute the biggest backtracking we have ever seen on ethics standards in the House."

"If House Republican leaders are allowed to prevail, they will have gutted the single most important ethics standard in the House and turned House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's multiple ethics transgressions into acceptable conduct for all House members," Wertheimer said.

--CNN, Dec31

Army National Guardsman Sue Defense Dept Over Stop-Loss Policy

2004-12-14T15:44:00.000-06:00

Army National Guard Specialist David Qualls and seven of his comrades filed suit against the Defense Department over what they charge is the unfair extension of their active duty obligation beyond the term they agreed to. Qualls signed up with the Arkansas National Guard under the "Try-One" enlistment option which, according to the recruiting pitch, "lets you try the Guard for one year without additional commitment." His year was up in June but his commitment was extended into next year under the Pentagon's stop-loss program, which allows the extension of enlistments during war or national emergencies as a way to promote continuity and cohesiveness. This policy, invoked in June, will keep tens of thousands of personnel in the military beyond their expected departure. The case raises questions of legality, military effectiveness, and basic fairness.

Qualls is not the first to sue over this issue, but no one has won yet. The Defense Department has won round one of this, with U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruling that, whatever their recruiters might have told them, their enlistment contract allows the government to do this. The dirty little secret of military recruiters is that, regardless of the length of the initial active duty contract, everyone who joins the military incurs an eight-year obligation under Section 10145 of 10 USC. This fact is buried in the long enlistment contract and certainly not emphasized by recruiters, who are under heavy pressure to meet monthly quotas.

Olbermann: Patriotic Duty to Question OH Vote Tally

2004-12-13T09:03:00.000-06:00

NEW YORK - For all the testimony, for all the verification provided that the names on the internet(s) belong to real people with real hairstyles, the key moment in Wednesday’s voting irregularities forum on Capitol Hill probably came during a colloquy between two of the Congressmen.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., of Illinois, turned to the chair of the ad hoc committee, John Conyers, of Michigan, and said “if the votes are not tallied in the state of Ohio by the appropriate time, is there any thought being given that the committee might consider an objection to the proceeding of the Ohio Electors until such time (as they are tallied)?”

Conyers replied, extending each word to about eleven syllables: “We are now.”
These were deep waters, and in an interview with Countdown’s Monica Novotny right after the forum closed, Conyers backed quite a bit away from the river’s edge. He said “We will wait for someone else,” in preference to drawing congress into a legal battle.
And a battle it would be, because the congressionalese Jackson and Conyers were using, translates roughly as this:

Jackson (translated): The Constitution says the states have to tally the votes of their citizens before they can send their electors to the Electoral College. If Ohio doesn’t finish its recount before the College votes, or before the vote is unsealed before Congress on January 6th, shouldn’t one of us raise a formal objection to those Ohio electors’ votes?

Conyers (translated): After what I heard today, we ought to talk about it.

You may recall that on the November 9th Countdown, law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, a constitutional expert, told us that though the Electoral College votes next Monday, there is a subsequent window, and a process, for challenging whether voters from a state, pledged to one candidate and not the other, should be allowed to vote.

“If there are controversies,” Professor Turley reminded me, “such as some disclosure that a state actually went for Kerry (instead of Bush), there is the ability of members of Congress to challenge. It requires a written objection from one House member and one senator.”

Once that objection is raised, the joint meeting of the two houses, convened to formally count the Electoral College votes and certify the winner of the presidential election, would be immediately discontinued. “Then both Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes from that state.”

What Jackson was asking Conyers was whether or not the Congressmen who were at the voting forum should consider invoking that challenge. The threat was raised in 2000, but Al Gore insisted no Democratic representative or senator should wield the cudgel. It last came up in the 1876 mess and it is not a pleasant thing - the wackier of the politically active of the day started to wonder aloud about rebellion.

But despite Conyers’ back-pedaling in the subsequent interview, Congressman Jackson’s question raises an essential point. If the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who convened the forum seriously believe something went astray in Ohio - even something entirely attributable to static cling in the computers - they should put some of their political capital where their mouths are.

These minority members, who now say they are headed to Ohio to conduct field hearings to listen directly to the grievances of voters there, have provided an invaluable service in forcing at least part of the mainstream to provide a platform for the 20% or more of the citizenry who suspect error or subterfuge.

But to stop there is to subject themselves to accusations of political cowardice and grandstanding. If, in Ohio, or in the calculations of the academics, or in subsequent developments, they conclude there is reasonable evidence that the vote there was rotten - merely accidentally so - one of them in the House and one of them in the Senate should stand up and produce that written challenge to the Ohio electors’ credibility.

As Jonathan Turley suggested - and logic confirms - for the formal challenge to get anything but token
support in the Senate and the House, there would have to be overpowering, dramatic, conclusive, evidence to suggest not merely a sour vote but one so screwed up that it could produce a different outcome. And the likelihood of such evidence turning up in the next month is infinitesimally small.

But the challenge itself, even if it garnered exactly one vote each from the Senate and House, would be a powerful protest, and an earnest signal that a full investigation of what happened in Ohio should take place, even after the inauguration. It could even be relevant, legally, in terms of the impounding of voting machines and records, to serve as the basis for some later examination to determine what, if anything, failed - and how it could be prevented from failing again.

There is no question it would be a short-term political liability - even a fatality - to the Representative and Senator who signed it. But, especially with that realization, it would not be an act of partisanship, but of patriotism.

--Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Dec 9

Pentagon Releases Report Extremely Critical of Bush's Leadership Ability

2004-12-06T22:10:00.000-06:00

the full file is available at www.dailykos.com

this is p. 22 of the PDF file:

Opinion surveys conducted by Zogby International, the Pew Research Center, Gallup (CNN/USA Today), and the Department of State (INR) reveal widespread animosity toward the United States and its policies. A year and a half after going to war in Iraq, Arab/Muslim anger has intensified. Data from Zogby International in July 2004, for example, show that the U.S. is viewed unfavorably by overwhelming majorities in Egypt (98 percent), Saudi Arabia (94 percent), Morocco (88 percent), and Jordan (78 percent). The war has increased mistrust of America in Europe, weakened support for the war on terrorism, and undermined U.S. credibility worldwide. Media commentary is consistent with polling data. In a State Department (INR) survey of editorials and op-eds in 72 countries, 82.5% of commentaries were negative, 17.5% positive.

Negative attitudes and the conditions that create them are the underlying sources of threats to America's national security and reduced ability to leverage diplomatic opportunities. Terrorism, thin coalitions, harmful effects on business, restrictions on travel, declines in cross border tourism and education flows, and damaging consequences for other elements of U.S. soft power are tactical manifestations of a pervasive atmosphere of hostility.

Although many observers correlate anti-Americanism with deficiencies in U.S. public diplomacy (its content, tone, and competence), the effectiveness of the means used to influence public opinion is only one metric. Policies, conflicts of interest, cultural differences, memories, time, dependence on mediated information, and other factors shape perceptions and limit the effectiveness of strategic communication [...]

There is consensus in these reports that U.S. public diplomacy is in crisis. Missing are strong leadership, strategic direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a culture of measurement and evaluation. America's image problem, many suggest, is linked to perceptions of the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, and self-indulgent. There is agreement too that public diplomacy could be a powerful asset with stronger Presidential leadership, Congressional support, inter-agency coordination, partnership with the private sector, and resources (people, tools, structures, programs, funding). Solutions lie not in short term, manipulative public relations. Results will depend on fundamental transformation of strategic communication instruments and a sustained long term, approach at the level of ideas, cultures, and values.

The number and depth of these reports indicate widespread concern among influential observers that something must be done about public diplomacy. But so far these concerns have produced no real change. The White House has paid little attention.

Quick Reality-Based Points to Use when Forced to Speak with Bush Supporters, Repeat as Necessary

2004-12-04T21:37:00.001-06:00

--The claim that any opposition to Bush’s policies is somehow anti-American is a viewpoint that is in itself anti-American. As citizens of a nation that elects its leaders, questioning the motives of our elected leaders is the definitive American act.

--To blindly follow the leadership of our nation, when that leadership consistently commits grave errors that jeopardize our security and freedom is not only unpatriotic but also extremely dangerous.

--Because of the United States’ two-party system, Republicans and Democrats have routinely worked together to pass bipartisan legislation. Therefore, the success and failures of American foreign policy falls of the shoulders of both parties, because neither party has been consistently more "correct" or moral. Opposition to this idea demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of the political processes of the United States.

--In relation to the Iraq war, no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found. This was the sole motive given as the reason for the US military presence in Iraq.

--It is not without logic to make the comparison between the Iraq war and America’s involvement in the Vietnam war. Both conflicts involve the use of traditional military force against a guerrilla-style insurgency of indigenous peoples.

Falluja Chemicals Story Meaningless

2004-12-04T09:27:00.001-06:00

CNN's recent regurgitation of a story that weapons labs were found in Falluja is evidence that the US will try anything to justify their attack on this rebel stronghold. What happened in Falluja? Why is the US military now so intent on repeating a story about a table full of chemicals in a basement of someone's house? Are we supposed to believe that these chemicals are the WMDs that justified that invasion of a sovereign nation?

Is CNN, along with Fox News, merely a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration?

When Colin Powell went before the UN to drum up support for the Iraq war he held up small vials and explained that certain small quantities of toxic agents if distributed properly could be responsible for thousands of deaths in a major city. Are we to believe that a table full of chemicals (cyanide mainly) could be manipulated to inflict thousands of deaths? This is not only impossible scientifically but there also was no evidence of any of the safeguards that would have to exist for handlers to manipulate these toxins without themselves being contaminated. No HazMat hooded jumpsuits, etc.

Whoever worked in that basement with those chemicals was not a chemist or a professional and therefore this is not any sign of an Iraqi weapons program. This suggests that these terrorists probably obtained these chemicals on the black market....a black market that probably barely existed until after the fall of Hussein.

______________________
Hans Blix, former UN chief weapons inspector said that he will be "surprised" if a chemical laboratory found in Iraq was capable of creating weapons.

"Let's see what the chemicals are," Mr. Blix said, after an Iraqi minister claimed on Thursday that a chemical bomb factory was found in Fallujah.

"Many of these stories evaporate when they are looked at more closely," he said.

"If there were to be found something, we would all be surprised."

--Daily Kos, Dec 4

Is This the Death of Rule of Law?

2004-12-03T22:33:00.000-06:00

There is a sense that the political atmosphere in America has become so partisan and charged, that the policies of the government have become so widely opposed and of questionable legitimacy, that the rule of law itself has broken down. What appears to matter now is not whether an action or policy is legal or ethical, but that it is simply permissible by virtue of the fact that no force exists to effectively counter it. What matters is simply raw power; the power to block investigation, oversight, scrutiny and above all accountability.

This breakdown extends not only to massive crimes like Abu Ghraib, the war in Iraq, the overthrow of the Haitian government and the theft of the Presidential election(s) in 2000 (and quite possibly in 2004), but also to pending legislation seemingly designed to facilitate and legitimize anticipated future governmental criminal activity.

In this sense, the United States' fanatical obsession with being exempted from provisions of the International Criminal Court serves as strong evidence that a culture of lawlessness has been institutionalized at the highest levels of the American government.

If in fact the United States government no longer respects the rule of law, yet ordinary American citizens remain bound by its restrictions (and in fact can be subject to strategic enforcement or disenfranchisement depending upon our level of resistance to official criminal conduct), how should we respond?

--Daily Kos, Dec 3

Bush, Please Check a Dictionary

2004-12-03T22:16:00.000-06:00

LONDON -- U.S. President George W. Bush's favorite accusation in the election campaign is reported to have been that Sen. John Kerry was a "liberal." The president seems to have used the label as a term of abuse meaning a "leftwing" radical and a supporter of the appeasement of terrorists.

There is nothing in the dictionary to justify this interpretation of the word "liberal." According to the definition in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, "liberal" in the political sense means someone who is "favorable to democratic reform and individual liberty" and "(moderately) progressive."

Bush is in favor of democratic reform in the Middle East even if his government continues to give backing to autocratic regimes in, for instance, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. The president frequently affirms his belief in democracy.

It is less clear how far the president favors "individual liberty." Through the USA Patriot Act and the establishment of a prison camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, his government has placed limits on the freedom of individuals who may be deemed a threat to U.S. security.

The basic problem lies in determining who is a potential threat and ensuring not only that justice is done but is seen to be done. Those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for three years have been denied their basic human rights including the right to a fair trial as set out in the U.S. Constitution. The treatment of prisoners there and at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is a serious illiberal blot on the U.S.' international reputation.

The president's "compassionate conservatism" could be considered as moderately progressive, although Kerry argued that many of the policies of the Republican Party favored the rich at the expense of poorer Americans.

To understand the political meaning of "liberal," we need to understand a little about the history of the term in British politics. In Britain, the Liberal Party was the successor to the Whigs, whose history goes back to the "glorious revolution" of 1688, when King James II was forced to flee and the important role of Parliament was reaffirmed.

Whigs were the main proponents of parliamentary reform that was opposed by the Tories (later the Conservative Party). The Whigs also led the movement to ban the slave trade, which was supported by the Tories and King George III until 1807. The Whigs who called themselves Liberals initiated efforts in the 19th century to improve conditions of the poor, who had suffered greatly as result of the industrial revolution. They pushed for more progressive taxation and opposed privilege.

The Liberals were the main advocates in Britain of free trade. They regarded Adam Smith as a pioneer and promoted free markets. They opposed Marxism and socialism. They sought small government and opposed unnecessary regulation.

Liberals advocate tolerance both on religious and political issues, and uphold the right to freedom of expression. Liberals believe that individuals should have freedom to do what they want or think right, except where those freedoms impinge on the freedoms of others or are a threat to the well being of others and to society in general. Liberals do not think that other people have an unimpeded right to impose their own ethical code on others, and they consider that laws should be framed so that restrictions on individual liberty are kept to a minimum.

The problem lies in the interpretation of what is meant by "minimum." The liberal upholds the criminal law and believes strongly in the importance of human rights. He accepts that there have to be rules against behavior that can damage others. Thus murder, theft and other clearly antisocial behavior must be stopped and punished in accordance with established law.

Society must also be protected against selfish and destructive behavior by individuals and groups, such as vandalism, driving under the influence of alcohol or speeding and driving carelessly or selfishly. But the liberal believes that prisons must be humanely run and cruel and inhuman punishments banned. The liberal is accordingly opposed to capital punishment and deplores the treatment of offenders in some American penal institutions.

The liberal is also opposed to restrictions on behavior that does not harm others, such as homosexual acts conducted in private, and, while accepting the sanctity of life, is against intrusive laws such as ones aimed at making stem-cell research illegal.

The British Liberal Democratic Party is an amalgam of the old Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party, which split away from the Labour Party. On most issues its policies follow liberal principles, but on social issues it sometimes veers too far toward socialist interference in the market economy. The British Labour Party and the Conservative Party contain elements that are authoritarian and illiberal.

The Japanese Liberal Democratic Party seems to many observers neither liberal in its principles nor democratic in its organization. So its name is misleading. It has favored the spread of regulatory systems and opposed deregulation. In penal issues its stance is generally illiberal.

On trade issues its policies have at least in the past favored protectionism and doubts remain about its commitment to free trade. The Democratic Party of Japan may be more liberal than the LDP, but it is hard to tell, if the party achieved power, whether it would support liberal policies in the area of penal reform or would push for free trade.

Before damning some opponent as a liberal and using the word liberal as a term of abuse, politicians would be wise to think before they speak and study not only the proper meaning of the term but also its history. Bush, if he reflected a little on history, would surely agree that many liberal policies as outlined above accord with his own views as he has expressed them to the American public.

In accusing Kerry of being a "liberal," he was either deliberately misusing the word (a not unknown phenomenon in what has been called "Bush-speak") or did not know what he was talking about.

--Hugh Cortazzi, Japan Times, Dec 2

Latino Vote: NBC Adjusts Its Numbers [Down]

2004-12-03T16:44:00.000-06:00

In a stunning admission, an elections manager for NBC News said national news organizations overestimated President George W. Bush's support among Latino voters, downwardly revising its estimated support for President Bush to 40 percent from 44 percent among Hispanics, and increasing challenger John Kerry's support among Hispanics to 58 percent from 53 percent. The revision doubles Kerry's margin of victory among Hispanic voters from 9 to 18 percent. Ana Maria Arumi, the NBC elections manager also revised NBC's estimate for Hispanic support for Bush in Texas, revising a reported 18-point lead for Bush to a 2-point win for Kerry among Hispanics, a remarkable 20-point turnaround from figures reported on election night.

The NBC announcement came during a forum with the William C. Velasquez Institute's president, Antonio Gonzalez, and other Hispanic analysts at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Hispanic Link Newsletter and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

"Latino presidential partisan preferences did not changed significantly from four years ago," said WCVI's president, Antonio Gonzalez, in his presentation before the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. "While there are still differences in the numbers between what the Velasquez Institute found and the news organizations reported on Election Day, NBC is doing the right thing by revising its estimates to reflect a more accurate percentage of support the President received from the Hispanic community."

Since the Election Day numbers came out, a controversy has existed between WCVI and exit poll officials. Competing exit polls showed a significant gap in support among Latinos for President Bush and Senator Kerry. During his presentation, Gonzalez reviewed the Institute's exit polling data, which found that President Bush received 33 percent support among Hispanic voters, roughly the same percentage he received in the 2000 presidential contest against Al Gore (35% to 64%, respectively). Two network exit surveys reported 44 and 45 percent support for Bush.

"There is no doubt that some churning of numbers has occurred, meaning Republicans appear to have made significant gains in Texas and Arizona while Democrats appear to have made significant gains in Colorado and Florida," added Gonzalez. "But the net effect among these respective gains is a canceling out of one another. Latino voter partisanship has remained consistent with roughly a 30 point democratic advantage in 2000 and 2004's presidential elections."

"But I repeat, NBC has set an example for network poll integrity by taking a giant step away from the Edison International/Mitofsky election results, and toward WCVI's findings. For example, today NBC stated that 70% of its respondents came from non-urban areas and 30% from urban areas, while acknowledging that 50% of Latino voters come from urban areas. This admission could explain the difference in their results and WCVI's. They under-represented Latino urban voters (who are more likely to vote democratic) and over-represented Latino non-urban votes (who are more likely to vote republican). We hope the other networks follow suit with more adjustments in their findings," Gonzalez concluded.

According to its exit poll survey, the Institute found that Latino voters supported democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over President George W. Bush by a margin of 65.4% to 33%. In determining the results for the presidential race, the WCVI exit survey interviewed 943 respondents in 41 precincts across 11 states on Election Day. The exit surveys were conducted in the states of Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, California, Texas, Illinois, and Connecticut. These states represent over 80 percent of the national Latino vote.

--Yahoo News, Dec 3

Discovery Will Proceed

2004-12-03T06:34:00.000-06:00

SECAUCUS - The complaint about the voting irregularities story has been that has been a little austere, a little impersonal. Part of its lack of appeal to the mainstream media has been its lack of “name players” — the aloofness of John Kerry, as an example. You wouldn’t think you’d have to sex up something as important as the integrity of the democratic process, but it turns out that in these early years of the 21st Century, you have to sex up everything — ask Monday Night Football.

But, not to worry, two players have taken to the stage, big-time. If Ohio actually gets the notice it deserves, the credit will go to Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

You will recall that in his syndicated Op-Ed column (appearing principally in The Chicago Sun-Times) earlier this week, Jackson wrote the Ohio vote count was "marred by intolerable, often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies,” and added that "U.S. citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in."

During the day Thursday, Secretary Blackwell's media secretary was firing back... calling the column blatantly inaccurate: "We expect someone writing an Op-Ed and a syndicate distributing that Op-Ed would fact-check information and have a responsibility to the facts."

Proving two can play at this game, Blackwell has wrote his own Op-Ed piece in response, and it was made available to newspapers today. Jesse in turn, actually turned up on CNN this evening on Paula Zahn's news hour, talking about the same stuff he talked about on Countdown on Tuesday, and that we've been talking about here since the week after the election. Somehow I'm thinking it was a good idea that Blackwell and Jackson appeared on consecutive nights on Countdown, and not the same one.

Blackwell, incidentally, got sued again, by the Greens and Libs again. The Badnarik and Cobb parties are already due back in court tomorrow to try to get a Federal Judge to vacate the temporary restraining order against the re-count inside Delaware County, Ohio. Today, they filed another federal action, naming Blackwell directly, accusing him of stalling the re-count and abusing his authority. The suit asks that the recount begin immediately... since the electoral college is scheduled to meet just eleven days from now — although its vote won’t be opened by congress until January 6.

Blackwell gets to wait until Monday to certify the state’s vote, even though all 88 counties in the Buckeye State have finished their own confirmations. Data is still sketchy, but it turns out election officials accepted about 77% of the provisional ballots — about 121,000 of them. No statewide count of the provisionals yet, though results reported by one county — Franklin (that's Columbus), indicated that Senator Kerry had gotten nearly 7,700 of the more-than 12,000 provisional votes counted.

But of all the developments out of Ohio, the most provocative, clearly, is still stalled under the weight of its own paperwork. The Alliance for Democracy is not quite ready with its challenge to the vote yet. Lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, with who else but Reverend Jackson by his side today on the steps of the Ohio Supreme Court, said that the group hopes to file its election challenge tomorrow — if not, Monday — but it’s not guaranteeing anything.

If and when it gets around to it, the Alliance will be asking one high court justice to set the election results aside, pending a full investigation and hearing. Arnebeck said today he believes that if all ballots were counted in what he calls a "traditional context,” the outcome would not just swing from President Bush’s 130,000 vote election night lead — it would swing all the way in the opposite direction, and give Kerry a 130,000 vote lead.

“Once we file the litigation.” Arnebeck added, “aggressive discovery will proceed, and we'll get to the truth. I want to reemphasize once again as we did at the previous press conference that the purpose here is not partisan, the purpose here is not destructive toward anyone and we invite all candidates, we invite the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign to join and cooperate in a non-partisan effort to find the truth, gather the facts, and assure the public, and assure both candidates, that this is an honest election."

Arnebeck sounded a little like a protestor in Kiev: "Our presidential election affects not just this country but all the citizens of the world. And therefore it's absolutely essential that the person who assumes the mantle of that office has the full confidence of our public and the world community that it was an honest election.”

Amen.

--MSNBC, DEC 2

CNN: Military Credibility at Stake

2004-12-01T06:27:00.000-06:00

On the evening of Oct. 14, a young Marine spokesman near Fallouja appeared on CNN and made a dramatic announcement.

"Troops crossed the line of departure," 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. "It's going to be a long night." CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun.

In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert's carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation — or "psy-op" — intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials.

In the hours after the initial report, CNN's Pentagon reporters were able to determine that the Fallouja operation had not, in fact, begun.

"As the story developed, we quickly made it clear to our viewers exactly what was going on in and around Fallouja," CNN spokesman Matthew Furman said.

Officials at the Pentagon and other U.S. national security agencies said the CNN incident was not an isolated feint — the type used throughout history by armies to deceive their enemies — but part of a broad effort underway within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism.

The Pentagon in 2002 was forced to shutter its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which was opened shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, after reports that the office intended to plant false news stories in the international media. But officials say that much of OSI's mission — using information as a tool of war — has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government.

Although most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq (news - web sites), as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States.

Other specific examples were not known, although U.S. national security officials said an emphasis had been placed on influencing how foreign media depict the United States.

These efforts have set off a fight inside the Pentagon over the proper use of information in wartime. Several top officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs — disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public — and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.

Several of those officials who oppose the use of misleading information spoke out against the practice on the condition of anonymity.

"The movement of information has gone from the public affairs world to the psychological operations world," one senior defense official said. "What's at stake is the credibility of people in uniform."

--Dec 1

Blackwell: Recount Is "A Parade on the March" but Where's the Media?

2004-11-30T09:42:00.000-06:00

NEW YORK - We have been inviting Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to appear on Countdown since we began to cover the voting irregularities story on November 8th.

It struck me as not quite coincidental that he finally joined us the same day the Ohio GOP issued what might be the first Republican recognition of any kind that there are questions about the vote - a news release with the gaudy headline “Democrats Struggle to Justify Unnecessary Recount / (Jesse) Jackson swoops in to fuel conspiracy theories even Kerry lawyers admit are baseless.”

While it was the Greens and Libertarians filing for the recount, the Republicans seemed to prefer silence. But after Jackson spoke in Columbus Sunday and Cincinnati Monday, suddenly Mr. Blackwell was available. “I think what happened,” he said, “is that Jesse Jackson ran around the block and tried to get out in front of a parade that was already on the march.”

That’s an odd phrase. Show of hands, please! Who out of the 20% who believe the election is illegitimate would have believed that a Republican state official would ever compare an Ohio recount to “a parade that was already on the march”? Sounds like a campaign phrase - for Democrats.

Suddenly the recount itself seems like an old pal to Ohio’s top election official. Last week, the incoming president of the association of county election officials mused out loud about a suit to stop the Glibs, so I asked Blackwell if he was saying that his office would take no step to try to prevent the recount. “Once they ask for a recount, we will provide them with a recount… we will regard this as yet another audit of the voting process.”

As to the audit of the perception of conflict of interest in Blackwell’s other role as Honorary Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Ohio Campaign, he seemed less definitive. “We have a bi-partisan system in Ohio where the Hamilton County Chairman of the board of elections, Tim Burke, is also the Democrat chairman of the Democrat party in that county.” I’ll pause the quote here to note that said party does business as the Democratic Party and the Republicans’ obsession with that little ‘ic’ has always seemed peevish to me, even when it’s coming out of John McCain’s mouth. Blackwell continued: “The same for Dayton. The Democrat Chairman is the Chairman of the Board of Elections in Montgomery County.”

This is interesting, and this is troubling (why should you be able to be both Chairman of the Montgomery County Democratic Party and Chairman of the Montgomery County Board of Elections?). But it also seemed to be self-evidently irrelevant - something akin to the political version of “They started it,” whether the ‘they’ are Republicans or Democrats.

The Democrats, of course, didn’t start the recount push in Ohio, the Glibs did, and the distinction seems vitally important to Blackwell. Messrs. Badnarik and Cobb “have a standing, not Jesse Jackson, and because Senator Kerry has conceded and has not asked for a recount he has no standing, and so I would anticipate that the Electoral College will be held on the 13th of December and 20 votes will go to the certified winner.”

We had already gone way past our scheduled length of the interview, and were throwing out other political stories, when I had to choose between two last questions to which I wanted Secretary Blackwell’s official answers. Judging by email response to the show, a lot of people would have asked the one I didn’t - about the still inexplicable “terrorist threat” lockdown of vote-counting in Warren County.

Not to get too Inside Baseball on you, but my thinking in the heat of the moment was that Mr. Blackwell would respond to questions about Warren County much in the way he veered off from my earlier question about what the Ohio GOP news release termed “a costly $1.5 million dollar recount…” He quickly agreed that the Recount Gap between actual costs and the $10 per precinct charge was the fault of nobody but Ohio’s legislature, which hasn’t updated the rate card since 1956. Then came what I expected we’d have heard again if I’d asked about Warren: “Ohio has a delicately balanced bi-partisan system that counts votes at the local level. I have nothing to do with counting the votes.”

For answers, we need the Warren County election authorities and - here’s a surprise - they haven’t commented since the FBI denied issuing them any kind of ‘terrorism warning.’

So, instead, I went for a straight yes-or-no on the latest ‘sources say’ story from the many and varied internets: did he, or did he not, meet with President Bush, in Ohio, on election day. “That’s just hogwash, absolutely zero, not true. And it’s the sort of mythology that grows out of, you know, a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands and the imaginations of Jonathan Swift.” While earning points for referencing the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Secretary Blackwell also threw a gauntlet down at the feet of the net’s Baker Streets Irregulars: there darn well better not be anybody willing to swear an oath they saw such a meeting take place.

--Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Nov 30

Was Orwell Right? Is War Now Peace?

2004-11-29T22:15:00.000-06:00

With these slogans, George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR burst upon the literary world as the definitive anti-utopian novel for the second half of the 20th Century.

Published in 1949, this darkly cautionary and prescient vision of the near future was a warning against the dangers of a totalitarian government fueled by high technology. Orwell envisions a world devastated by nuclear war and poverty, where the West has fallen under the spell of a totalitarian socialist dictator, Big Brother. A political demagogue and religious cult leader all rolled into one, Big Brother's power and mystery are so immense that one may wonder if he even exists at all.

Big Brother's Ingsoc Party (English Socialism) has perfected the uses of high technology to monitor the lives of its populace, and to insure unswerving loyalty through surveillance, propaganda and brainwashing. The government's most brilliant and most appalling project is the actual deconstruction of the English language into Newspeak, the language of the Party. Each successive edition of the Newspeak Dictionary has fewer words than its predecessor. By removing meaning and nuance from the vocabulary, the government hopes to eradicate seditious and anti-social thinking before it even has the chance to enter a person's mind. Without the vocabulary for revolution, there can be no revolution. For those who persist in thinking for themselves, so-called Thought Criminals, Ingsoc's stormtroopers, the Thought Police, are there to intervene, incarcerating the free-thinkers in the Ministry of Love, where they will be re-educated, or worse.

The most intrusive daily aspect of life in Oceania (as Orwell calls the European/American mega-State) are the omnipresent telescreens, two-way interactive televisions that cannot be turned off, and which give the government a faceless surveillance window into everyone's life. Who is on the other side of the telescreens? Are people watching? Is all the monitoring done by machine? All we learn is that members of the Inner Party, the elite, are allowed to turn off their telescreens, if only for a brief period.

Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell's novel, becomes a Thought Criminal. A minor bureaucrat (an "Outer Party" member) his job is to actually rewrite the archives of the London Times so that they are consistent with current Ingsoc policy. When Ingsoc changes its political alliance with another superpower and begins waging war on a former ally, Winston's job is to rewrite all the prior information to show that the old alliance never existed. So addled are the minds of the people he meets that they don't even realize that these changes have been made. A sad, lonely man, Winston is also smart enough to understand the insidious manipulation being perpetrated on the society.

And so he becomes a willing victim of the government's most ingenious ruse: Winston obtains a copy of a banned revolutionary tract by the famous enemy of the State, Goldstein. Galvanized and inspired by what he reads, he pursues an illicit love affair with a co-worker,Julia, and seems to find an ally in the person of Inner Party official O'Brien. Longing for an escape from this terrible world to a better life, he does not realize that everything has been a set-up. Kindly O'Brien is actually the head of the Thought Police, and it is he who has actually written Goldstein's book for the very purpose of luring potential revolutionaries out of the closet and into the dreaded Room 101 - a torture chamber where one's worst fears are made real. Totally broken, brainwashed and reprogrammed (so suggestible that he is even made to agree that 2+2=5), Winston is returned to society as another harmless devoté of Big Brother. In the chilling final pages of the book, Winston, tears of fear and joy streaming down his face, proclaims his love of Big Brother, all thoughts, hopes or dreams of escape and freedom permanently eradicated from his consciousness.

Reuters: Disasterous Effects of Climate Change Will Hit in 2050

2004-11-29T10:49:00.000-06:00

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The weather predictions for Asia in 2050 read like a script from a doomsday movie.

Except many climatologists and green groups fear they will come true unless there is a concerted global effort to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

In the decades to come, Asia -- home to more than half the world's 6.3 billion people -- will lurch from one climate extreme to another, with impoverished farmers battling droughts, floods, disease, food shortages and rising sea levels.

"It's not a pretty picture," said Steve Sawyer, climate policy adviser with Greenpeace in Amsterdam. Global warming (news - web sites) and changes to weather patterns are already occurring and there is enough excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to drive climate change for decades to come.

Already, changes are being felt in Asia but worse is likely to come, Sawyer and top climate bodies say, and could lead to mass migration and widespread humanitarian crises.

According to predictions, glaciers will melt faster, some Pacific and Indian Ocean islands will have to evacuate or build sea defenses, storms will become more intense and insect and water-borne diseases will move into new areas as the world warms.

All this comes on top of rising populations and spiraling demand for food, water and other resources. Experts say environmental degradation such as deforestation and pollution will likely magnify the impacts of climate change.

In what could be a foretaste of the future, Japan was hit by a record 10 typhoons and tropical storms this year, while two-thirds of Bangladesh, parts of Nepal and large areas of northeastern India were flooded, affecting 50 million people, destroying livelihoods and making tens of thousands ill.

The year before, a winter cold snap and a summer heat wave killed more than 2,000 people in India.

INDIA AT RISK
Sawyer said India, with a population of just over 1 billion people, is one of the areas most threatened by climate change.

Rising sea levels will also bring misery to millions in Asia, he said, causing sea water to inundate fertile rice-growing areas and fresh-water aquifers, making some areas uninhabitable.
Sawyer said India and Bangladesh will have to draw up permanent relocation plans for millions of people. "I'm afraid that's almost inevitable."

By 2050, China will have built sea defenses along part of its low-lying, storm-prone southeastern coast, while the North of the country faced increasing desertification, he said.

According to the U.N.'s World Food Program, the Gobi Desert in China expanded by 20,230 square miles between 1994 and 1999, creeping closer to the capital Beijing.

Anwar Ali, a leading climatologist in Bangladesh, says about 15 percent of the country would be under water if sea levels rose by a yard in the next century.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Asia in the future will be the shortage of clean water. The WFP says Asia accounts for 60 percent of the world's population but has only 36 percent of the globe's fresh water.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), rapid melting of glaciers poses a major threat to the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of China.
Seven major rivers, including the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra and the Mekong, begin in the Himalayas and the glacial meltwater during summer months is crucial to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people downstream.

RICH VERSUS POOR

But many of these glaciers are melting quickly and will be unable to act as reservoirs that moderate river flows. This means less water in the dry season and the chance for more extreme floods during the wet season.

Sawyer thinks rich countries, by far the biggest polluters, should look after the millions at risk from climate change or suffer the consequences that could include mass migration or trying to feed millions made homeless by droughts and floods in a world struggling to grow enough food.
Fears of mass migration have already prompted the Pentagon (news - web sites) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, among others, to study the risk from climate-induced mass migration.

The Pentagon in its 2003 report looked at what might happen if the climate changed abruptly. The result was near anarchy.

"As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world," it said. This could lead some wealthier nations becoming virtual fortresses to preserve their resources.

"Less fortunate nations, especially those with ancient enmities with their neighbors, may initiate struggles for access to food, clean water, or energy," the report said.

Few places are more exposed to climate change than the low-lying Maldives islands, to the west of Sri Lanka, where the highest natural point is under 8 feet.

Republicans Refuse to Pass New 9/11 Legislation

2004-11-28T20:57:00.000-06:00

Hastert's position, which is drawing fire from Democrats and some outside groups, is the latest step in a decade-long process of limiting Democrats' influence and running the House virtually as a one-party institution. Republicans earlier barred House Democrats from helping to draft major bills such as the 2003 Medicare revision and this year's intelligence package. Hastert (R-Ill.) now says such bills will reach the House floor, after negotiations with the Senate, only if "the majority of the majority" supports them.

Senators from both parties, leaders of the Sept. 11 commission and others have sharply criticized the policy. The long-debated intelligence bill would now be law, they say, if Hastert and his lieutenants had been humble enough to let a high-profile measure pass with most votes coming from the minority party.

That is what Democrats did in 1993, when most House Democrats opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement. President Bill Clinton backed NAFTA, and leaders of the Democratic-controlled House allowed it to come to a vote. The trade pact passed because of heavy GOP support, with 102 Democrats voting for it and 156 voting against. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the House GOP leader at the time, declared: "This is a vote for history, larger than politics . . . larger than personal ego."

Such bipartisan spirit in the Capitol now seems a faint echo. Citing the increased marginalization of Democrats as House bills are drafted and brought to the floor, Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.) said, "It's a set of rules and practices which the Republicans have taken to new extremes."

Price, a former Duke University political scientist and the author of "The Congressional Experience," acknowledged that past congressional leaders, including Democrats, had sometimes scuttled measures opposed by most of their party's colleagues. But he said the practice should not apply to far-reaching, high-stakes legislation such as NAFTA and the intelligence package, which were backed by the White House and most of Congress's 535 members.

Other House Democrats agree. Republicans "like to talk about bipartisanship," said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "But when the opportunity came to pass a truly bipartisan bill -- one that would have passed both the House and Senate overwhelmingly and would have made the American people safer -- they failed to do it."

--washington post, Nov 28

Media Barely Touching Voter Fraud Scandal

2004-11-24T15:47:00.000-06:00

In South Florida, voters in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties reported that they attempted to select John Kerry but George Bush appeared on the screen. CNN has reported that a dozen voters in six states reported similar problems. See "Touchscreen Voting Problems Reported," --Associated Press, November 5.

In Columbus, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave President Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes. ---"Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," Associated Press, November 5.

In Youngstown, Ohio voters who attempted to cast a vote for John Kerry on electronic voting machines said they saw that their votes were instead recorded as votes for George W. Bush.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that officials in Warren County, Ohio, had “locked down” its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there. Warren County Commissioners confirmed that they were acting on the advice of their Emergency Services Director, Frank Young. Mr. Young said he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for Homeland Security. The State of Ohio has said that of all of its 88 Counties, Warren alone decided the Homeland Security measures were necessary. The FBI's official statement was that no such warning was given to Warren County officials.

--Cincinnati Enquirer, http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/10/loc_warrenvote10.html

League of Women Voters Requests RECOUNT

2004-11-24T15:31:00.000-06:00

This is the recent statement from the League of Women Voters, a reputable mainstream group, demanding recounts for Ohio and Florida where documented irregularities meant more votes for George W. Bush EACH AND EVERY TIME they occurred.

Also, keep up with the ever growing election story with Keith O. here at MSNBC. He's the only major news media reporter that has given the story steady, objective coverage.

E-mail him to say you appreciate his efforts and demand that your rights as a voter are respected. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

_____________________________________________

“The League of Women Voters is deeply concerned about voting irregularities in the 2004 election. The appropriate officials must fully investigate these concerns through open and public processes. Election officials should look into problems quickly and thoroughly and fix what proves to be wrong. Transparency and a willingness to look into potential problems will strengthen voter confidence and ultimately improve our electoral system.

“It is important to ensure that every properly cast ballot is counted and to make improvements for future elections. Attention must be given to inadequate polling place procedures, problematic voting machines, voter registration system failures, casting and counting of provisional ballots, and absentee voting issues.

“This was far from a perfect election. Although voter turnout reached record levels, the election system showed signs of stress and voters faced real problems. Two key areas deserve special inquiry. First, voter registration problems plague the system. These problems – from failures to fully process registration applications in time to bureaucratic requirements that blocked voter registration – must still be resolved by election officials. Second, the reasons for the very long lines that voters faced in too many states and localities must be thoroughly examined. Having to wait several hours to vote is an unacceptable barrier to citizen participation. What were the reasons? Were there not enough voting machines? Were these polling places poorly organized? Were long lines a greater problem in minority or student precincts than in rural or suburban precincts? Changes clearly need to be made in polling place operations to address these concerns.

“Finally, the League calls on every voter who cast a provisional ballot to find out whether their ballot was counted. The provisional ballot counting process is still ongoing and must be monitored. But every voter who cast a provisional ballot has the right, under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), to know whether it is counted, and, if it is not counted, why it is not counted. States are required to have a toll-free hotline or Internet system so voters can get this information about their ballot.

“The League’s nationwide network of state and local Leagues will continue to work closely with election officials to identify and correct all voting problems.”

***
The League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan political organization, encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy

Bev Harris: Screen Shots of Network Show Hackers At Work in Voting Process

2004-11-24T15:17:00.000-06:00

Bev Harris vents about Kerry's inept handling of fraud allegations.

"Completely irresponsible. A $52 million litigation war chest accumulated from citizen donations for that purpose.

If they [i.e., the Kerry campaign] were the slightest bit interested in either voting system integrity or actually winning, they would have litigated the BBV records requests to apply some real muscle into prompt disclosure of audit materials, at least in Ohio and Florida. Failure to comply with sunshine laws is against the law, yet a citizens group like Black Box Voting cannot claim legal urgency, forcing immediate compliance, in the same way that a campaign can. There is no question that if the campaign had enforced the sunshine laws, analyzing the audit data, two things would have happened: records would have been produced auditing would have been enabled, and we all know that would have produced hard evidence of irregularities.

The screen shots of the NETWORKED Volusia County GEMS server alone, along with the logs showing attempts to access it remotely, should have hit the national press. (I showed them to CNN cameramen yesterday, along with 59 orange-tagged poll tapes that were missing signatures, zero tapes, sometimes missing results altogether! No interest in getting a shot of that smoking gun at all.)

Oh yeah, and we intereviewed poll workers. On camera. Showed them the poll tapes we were given by Volusia County. To a person, they said, with great concern, "That is NOT what we submitted to the county." One remembered the results on his poll tape. What he remembered, before ever seeing the results tape or hearing what was on our copy, was not the same. His memory for a precinct with a tad over 400 voters had 60 more votes for Kerry. Of course, that's not legally binding, since he hadn't written it down.

You have to wonder. The purpose of our audits is to get some real answers, so we don't have to wonder any more. "

--Daily Kos, Nov 24

Intel Reform Bill Would Allow Snooping into Tax Returns

2004-11-24T13:24:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON Nov 21, 2004 — Unwilling to concede defeat, congressional leaders expressed hope Sunday that lawmakers could return next month to resolve a turf battle that has blocked passage of an overhaul of the nation's intelligence agencies. Much depends on whether President Bush is more active in bringing his own troops in line, they said.

"For us to do the bill in early December it will take significant involvement by the president and the vice president," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. "It will take real focus on their part."
During a chaotic Saturday that was intended as the final meeting of the 108th Congress, negotiators announced a compromise on the intelligence bill. Hours later, opposition from the Republican chairmen of two committees stymied the legislation, which would create a national intelligence director.

Reflecting Pentagon concerns about the legislation, California Rep. Duncan Hunter of the House Armed Services warned that the bill could interfere with the military chain of command and endanger troops in the field. Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner of the House Judiciary Committee demanded that the bill deal with illegal immigration.

Congress did manage to pass a 3,000-page, $388 billion spending bill that covers most nondefense and non-security programs for the budget year that began Oct. 1.

But there will be a delay in getting President Bush's signature. The hang-up is because of a single line in the bill that would have given two committee chairmen and their assistants access to people's income tax returns.
The Senate approved a resolution nullifying the idea; House leaders promised to pass it on Wednesday. Then, the spending bill will head to the White House.

"I have no earthly idea how it got in there," Frist said on "Fox News Sunday." "But, obviously, somebody is going to know, and accountability will be carried out."

Frist referred to the bill Saturday night as the "Istook amendment," and congressional aides said it was inserted at the request of Rep. Ernest Istook Jr., R-Okla.

Istook, chairman of the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee, said in a statement Sunday that the Internal Revenue Service drafted the language, which would not have allowed any inspections of tax returns. "Nobody's privacy was ever jeopardized," the statement said.

--CNN

Berkeley Study Finds Proof of Fraud: MIT Study Confirms It!

2004-11-22T06:57:00.000-06:00

Meantime, The Oakland Tribune not only devoted seventeen paragraphs Friday to the UC Berkeley study on the voting curiosities in Florida, but actually expended considerable energy towards what we used to call ‘advancing the story’: “The UC Berkeley report has not been peer reviewed, but a reputable MIT political scientist succeeded in replicating the analysis Thursday at the request of the Oakland Tribune and The Associated Press. He said an investigation is warranted.”

--MSNBC, Nov 22

Congress to Buy Yacht for Bush, Even though US Is Trillions in Debt

2004-11-20T18:35:00.000-06:00

This was awfully nice of them:

Republicans whisked a $388 billion spending bill through the House on Saturday, a mammoth measure that underscores the dominance of deficit politics by curbing dollars for everything from education to environmental cleanups.(...)

Also enacted during the postelection session was an $800 billion increase in the government's borrowing limit. The measure was yet another testament to record annual deficits, which reached $413 billion last year and are expected to climb indefinitely.(...)

[The bill included] a potential present for Bush himself, $2 million for the government to buy back the presidential yacht Sequoia. The boat was sold three decades ago.

Fiscal conservatism at its best.

--Daily Kos, Nov 20

Will Moderate Republicans Find the Nerve to Fight Back Against the Neo-Con Republicans?

2004-11-20T10:43:00.000-06:00

Out-organized by neo-conservative groups like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and the Club for Growth, moderates are no longer viewed as respected members of a philosophically broad-based party. They have, instead, become targets for a group of cannibalistic vigilantes bent on establishing ideological purity.

Drunk with power from their recent electoral victory, these ideologues make no pretense about their intentions. Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, says his organization's goal is to punish moderate Republicans and make them an endangered species. “The problem with the moderates in Congress is that they basically water down the Republican message and what you get is something that infuriates the Republican base,” Moore says.

“They will learn to conform to our agenda or they will be driven from our party,” he says simply. …

[There] must be a willingness on the part of Republican moderates to step forward on a regular basis and align themselves with Democrats on issues where they agree, such as: a responsible stewardship of the environment, protection of a woman’s right to choose, meaningful reform of the nation’s health care and educational systems, or federal support for critical stem cell research. This would send a powerful message to President Bush that he has drawn an ideological line they are unwilling to cross.
Such a demonstration will prove to millions of Americans that they are no longer moderates but are, instead, radical centrists capable of, and determined to, the retaking of political ground that is legitimately theirs.

Ironically, after the last election, this small group of Republican moderates may be all that stands between the country and the total domination of its political agenda by neo-conservatives like Moore — radicals who have spent a decade and a half planning for this moment of ascendancy in American political history.

Rage, rage against the lying of the Right

2004-11-19T15:54:00.000-06:00

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

AP News: Afghanistan Producing More Opium Than Ever Before

2004-11-18T21:58:00.000-06:00

Afghanistan's opium cultivation jumped 64 percent to a record 324,000 acres this year and drug exports now account for more than 60 percent of the economy, the United Nations (news - web sites) drugs office said Thursday.

"This year Afghanistan has established a double record -- the highest drug cultivation in the country's history, and the largest in the world," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told a news briefing.

Opium, the raw material for heroin, was grown in all Afghanistan's 32 provinces this year. Ten percent of the population, or 2.3 million people, helped farm it because grinding poverty made it more attractive than other crops.

"Cultivation has spread ... making narcotics the main engine of economic growth and the strongest bond among previously quarrelsome peoples," Costa said. "Valued at $2.8 billion, the opium economy is now equivalent to over 60 percent of Afghanistan's 2003 gross domestic product."

"The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is slowly becoming a reality as corruption in the public sector, the die-hard ambition of local warlords, and the complicity of local investors are becoming a factor in Afghan life," he said.

While the area under cultivation soared, it was still less than three percent of the country's arable land, the U.N. said in a report posted on its Web Site, www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crop_monitoring.html.

But heroin production rose just 17 percent to 4,200 tons, below the 1999 record of 4,600 tons under the radical Islamic Taliban regime, due to bad weather and an insect infestation.

The massive 1999 crop and another large harvest in 2000 led to a stock-build which forced prices down, leading the Taliban to all but eliminate opium production in 2001.

Prices leapt from $28 per kilo at the farm gate in Afghanistan in 2000 to $301 a year later.

The U.N put the 2004 price in Afghanistan at $92 per kilo.

NARCO-ECONOMY, NARCO-SOCIETY

Three-quarters of production is exported as heroin, meaning Afghanistan must import some 10,000 tons of chemicals to refine the raw opium every year, underlining the scale of the corruption involved in the trade, Costa said.

He said Iranian intelligence had recently shown him pictures of a drug convoy of 62 vehicles with military protection.

"We can't hope that the Afghan police or army could possibly take on a convoy of 62 vehicles," he said.

As well as being a narco-economy, Afghanistan was largely a narco-society, he said, with so many people benefiting from the business: farmers pay a "tax" of around 10 percent of their earnings to local warlords; laboratories pay 12 to 15 percent; and export convoys pay 15 to 18 percent.

But he said the government of President Hamid Karzai's commitment to eradicate the business meant it was not yet possible to say Afghanistan was a narco-state.

The major export route is through Iran and Turkey, with a hub in Istanbul and another in the Albanian capital, Tirana, before the heroin reaches the Netherlands, Europe's main distribution center.

Other routes are through Pakistan; across the ex-Soviet central Asian state of Tajikistan then Kyrgyzstan and Russia to Europe; and through Turkmenistan.

Afghanistan now accounts for 87 percent of global heroin production, which has a worldwide market value of $30 billion.

Bye Bye Health Insurance, Not to Mention Social Security

2004-11-18T15:30:00.000-06:00

The administration plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capitals gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended to simplify the system and encourage economic growth, according to several people who are advising the White House or are familiar with the deliberations. The changes are meant to be revenue-neutral.

To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said. bye bye health insurance for a hell of a lot of people.

--Digby, Nov 18

Bill O'Reilly Is Simply a Liar

2004-11-18T06:31:00.000-06:00

Bill O'Reilly should subject himself to the scrutiny he applies to others. He routinely disparages others in his heavy-handed attempts to lump all those who disagree with him and his near fascist leanings as dreaded "liberals." It is completely ludicrous that this group oftentimes includes career Republicans. Essentially, if you question a Bush policy you are the new target of O'Reilly's deceitful line of pseudo-logic.

This makes O'Reilly anti-American. Not only does he foment discord in a time of war which is downright dangerous, he laughs all the way to the bank. Capitalizing on the misfortunes of others, O'Reilly and company are mere parrots for the political beliefs of Rupert Murdoch, their puppetmaster.

It is pathetic that these folks at Fox News are cast as newspeople and reporters when they are in fact merely entertainers. The sad fact is that the American public are often left without access to the resources necessary to fact-check what these liars are really saying and therefore rely on their warped version of current events.

Most disturbing of all is the fact that new revelations have discovered that Fox News is using a mind programming technique called neurolinguistic programming in its broadcasts. This technique uses short repeated phrases and flashing and moving lights (studies have actually been conducted to determine that moving lights at a certain speed actually creates a hypnotic state and affects the cardiovascular system to condition a person more effectively). After a daily barrage of this, it's no wonder people who consistently watch Fox News have some trouble with the facts.

Big Media Wants This to Go Away: Election Was Rigged

2004-11-18T06:29:00.000-06:00

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Election officials in one Ohio county found that about 2,600 ballots were double-counted, and two other counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election.

--Fox News, Nov 18

Media Tries to Cast VoteScam 2004 as 'Conspiracy' Theory to Discredit Legitimacy

2004-11-18T06:23:00.000-06:00

CARSON CITY, Nev. — A businessman has filed a challenge to the Nov. 2 election, saying thousands of Nevadans may have been denied the right to vote.

The challenge filed Tuesday in Washoe County District Court alleges there were "massive irregularities and malfunctions in the registration process."

--Fox News, Nov 18

Criminal in the House: DeLay Mocks Republican Party

2004-11-17T22:16:00.000-06:00

After hours of spirited debate, House Republicans passed a rule change yesterday that would allow Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) to retain his leadership post if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury.

The rule — introduced by Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) but amended by other members — allows the Republican Conference to vote on the leadership status of anyone who faces a state or federal indictment, following a recommendation by the 30-member Republican Steering Committee.

According to the final rule, the Steering Committee must issue its recommendation within 30 legislative days, during which time the member in question must suspend his or her leadership duties.

The conference met for two and a half hours before passing a compromise measure by voice vote just after 1 p.m.

GOP leaders remained silent during the debate, which was carried out by rank-and-file members, and DeLay himself did not vote on the rule change; instead, he stood at the back of the room, counseling members who asked his advice.

“It was not leader-led, which is why it took two hours to do,” DeLay joked afterward.

House Republicans adopted the rule in 1993 in an effort to create a distinction between them and the House Democrats, whom they portrayed as corrupt.

After passage of the Bonilla rule, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) was the most outspoken critic of the new measure. Shays told reporters immediately after the voice vote that he believed it violated the principles of 1994’s Contract with America.

“I have a tremendous concern that you are seeing the erosion of those laws,” Shays said. “Too many of our members are slipping into business as usual.”

Shays said there was a growing sense among Hill Republicans that if members do not “play ball,” they will not receive chairmanships or plum committee assignments.

Bonilla’s initial rule was immediately challenged by a number of amendments, the first coming from Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), and the caucus spent most of the morning debating the measure, before moving on to other business around 11:30 while a smaller group of members moved to a separate room to decide a compromise.

In that meeting, Bonilla and Brady met with Reps. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), John Carter (R-Texas) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) while the other members discussed other measures on the table.

After the vote, DeLay took the occasion to take a shot at Democrats in Washington and in Texas.

“The Democrats have decided they are going to use the politics of personal destruction to gain power,” DeLay told reporters at an impromptu press conference after the vote. Because of that, DeLay said, the Republican Conference would not “let Democrats or political hacks decide our leadership.”

DeLay also dismissed any notion that this vote signaled an ethical lapse for the Republican Party. In a indirect challenge to Shays, DeLay rhetorically asked any member who disagreed with the vote to “name one instance we have lowered standards.”

Austin’s district attorney, Ronnie Earle, has indicted two DeLay fundraisers for their role in the controversial redrawing of Texas’s congressional boundaries, and DeLay himself is considered a possible target for indictment. Republicans charge that the effort is politically motivated.

“The Republicans’ hypocrisy is staggering,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement yesterday. “To change their own rules to allow someone indicted for a felony to serve as a top Republican leader is completely unacceptable.”

--TheHill.com, Nov 17

Why the Big Media Hesitates to Touch VoterGate

2004-11-17T20:11:00.000-06:00

The New York Times, Washington Post and other RWCM outlets are misleading when they assert that "the blogs" have been flaming "conspiracy theories" about possible fraud in this election. In fact, and with minor exception, the top left-leaning blogs have all but avoided this issue like the plague.

While open discussion forums such as the Daily Kos diaries and the Democratic Underground forums have pursued this story relentlessly, the actual bloggers such as Kos, Atrios, Josh Marshall and Calpundit to name a few, have put this topic in a lockdown that CNN would admire.
Diaries :: TocqueDeville's diary ::

Why? One can only speculate. Perhaps they don't want to be branded "conspiracy theorist". Or perhaps they want to just move on and focus on the next election. Or, and I find this implausible, they really don't think it's possible that a group of Republicans would actually try to steal an election, much less pull it off. But after the proven malfeasance in 2000 [see THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME ] and the clear indications that dirty tricks were at play in the run-up to this election, you would think that any abnormality or suspicious elements in this election would have drawn a spotlight from the "leaders" of our internet community.

So let me address the three possible motives aforementioned for this veritable blackout: cowardice, disbelief, and apathy. [Note: I am not presuming that our bloggers are cowards or apathetic, just that these are possible explanations and therefore should be addressed.]

First, fear of labeling is not a valid reason for ignoring this story, nor is it an acceptable one. TV personality Keith Olberman has demonstrated clearly that one can cover this issue and bring to light credible concerns while happily leaving the tinfoil hat at home. There is a difference between running around claiming proof of fraud when you have none and recognizing and reporting credible claims of irregularities.

Second, if you find it hard to believe the possibility that this election may have been rigged, then you are sadly uninformed. I won't even bother to cite the plethora of research and testimony from computer security experts as to the susceptibility of our voting and vote-counting technology. I can't believe that you could have missed it. Nor can I believe that you could have blogged this administration for the last few years and doubt that they are above such malfeasance. This is why I find this excuse implausible.

And last but not least, apathy. I'm probably most sympathetic with this excuse because it is an emotional response to a hard reality: that we will probably never prove fraud even if it occurred and even if we do, it probably won't change the outcome of the election. I also understand how exhausting it is to stay immersed in this story day after day and only find bits and pieces of the puzzle. But this is an excuse that we can accept the least.

Recently my wife had her purse stolen. This event began a process of bureaucratic entanglement that lasted over a month. First the police, then credit card companies and the justice system. It was an exhausting nightmare. But we had to go through it. Money was involved.

What if it was your money?

So let me ask you this. What if I told you that these central tabulating computers, the ones that are so concerning because they are connected by modem to thousands of other computers and accessed by thousands of people --election officials, Diebold personel, poll volunteers--, also housed your checking account? And anyone with access could add and delete money from your balance with a few mouse clicks? How would you feel about that?

And what if your balance continued to be off by about 5% and coincidentally, it was always off by a lesser amount than the balance shown by your records? Never more.

What would you do?

And how would you feel if your bank told you could no longer get a receipt on your deposits and regardless of your records, you need to simply trust the bank?

And how would you feel if, upon finding discrepancies between their records and your own, you were told to move on and live for another payday?

Now, does anyone believe that their vote is any less valuable than ALL the money in their checking account? This is how important the integrity of this election is. And moving on and planning for 2006 or 2008 is utterly futile if all our opponents have to do is rig some machines every two years.

Priorities

Currently, there is a front-page story on the Daily Kos showing Bush and some woman almost kissing on the lips. Now, I have zero problem with posting amusing things. In fact I find humor essential to my well being. But juxtaposed to the glaring absence of any mention of still outstanding anomalies and the historical aberration in the exit-poll/vote tabulation discrepancies, this appears to reflect a degree of out-of-touch-ness that parallels the French nobility immediately prior to the revolution.

We cannot let this slide. If fraud occurred we have to do everything in our power to uncover it. Only the fate of democracy is at stake. And I'll repeat, if all they have to do is rig an election every two years, all the Goerge Lakoffs in the world won't help us.

We need leadership

Let me be clear about what I do not expect. I don't expect the blogs to post every single story that bubbles to the surface of the forums. Nor do I expect Kos to feed a frenzy of speculation and false hopes. But I do expect leadership on this issue. And I expect support for all the folks who are vigorously pursuing all leads.

I believe this leadership and support should come in the form of using the bully-pulpit of the blog format to openly acknowledge this issue is critically important, that there are real causes for concern, and that there should be a full investigation into the anomalies and so-called glitches that have surfaced. All of which should be framed in the context of an absolute truth: that no election that is conducted by private corporations using closed, proprietary source code and tabulated in secrecy can ever be truly valid.

Release the exit-poll data

There should also be a loud, unified demand for release of the final Edison/Mitofsky exit-polling data in the raw form before it was corrupted by an infusion of the tabulation returns. Regardless of what you think about Dick Morris, he knows elections. And he was absolutely right that exit-polls are "almost never wrong." He was the first MSM figure I know of to use the term fraud. Of course he suspects that the exit-polls were rigged (someone send him a gift certificate for Tin Foil Hats Are Us).

With a sampling that exceeded 13,000 voters, the margin of error was less than 1%. What happened?

And of course leadership also includes the reigning in of unsubstantiated allegations and premature conclusions. Now, one could argue that the diary/forum crowd is doing a pretty good job of policing themselves. Generally, I would agree. And no one expects Kos et al to go through and debunk every frivolous assertion. But the diaries are like the wild west of blogworld and we desperately need a high-profile (read: not the kosopedia) repository of information that has been credibly vetted and/or debunked.

In sum, I implore the leaders of the blog community to rejoin the blog community in calling for a close examination of this election in an objective, responsible manner that serves not the false hopes of disheartened Democrats, but the confidence in the most important process in American democracy: the self-governance of our people through an honest vote.

--TocqueDeVille, Daily Kos, Nov 17

Louisiana Drivers Now Have to Register for the Draft?

2004-11-17T18:58:00.000-06:00

ALEXANDRIA (AP) - When Larry Chevalier took his son to get his first driver's license, he was floored to discover that to get it, the boy had to preregister for a nonexistent military draft.

''I just can't believe it,'' said Chevalier, whose 16-year-old son, Nathan, did fill out the form to register with the Selective Service so he could get his license.

''They wouldn't let him get it otherwise,'' Chevalier said Saturday.

Even a 15-year-old boy who wants a learner's permit in Louisiana must provide information to be forwarded, when he turns 18, to the Selective Service System, which would run a military draft if one is set up again.

The same goes for any 16- 17- or 18-year-old who wants his - the law applies only to males - first driver's license or state ID card.
''They can't even be a conscientious objector to signing up,'' said Chevalier, of Glenmora.

The state forwards the information to a federal center which holds it until the boy's 18th birthday, when he is old enough to enter military service. It is used to automatically register him with Selective Service.

Nobody much noticed the law when the Legislature passed it in 2003. What got people's attention that year was a law to suspend the licenses of some students expelled or suspended from high school.

Rudy Sanchez, general counsel for the federal Selective Service System, was also floored to learn that 15-year-olds were being asked to preregister. ''Louisiana shouldn't be registering 15-year-olds. We don't even register 16-year-olds,'' he said last week.

Federal law only provides for ''early submission'' of information by a young man who is at least 17 years and three months old, he noted. When he turns 18, it is forwarded to the proper database.

The law requires only that young men register within 30 days before or after their 18th birthdays.

Other states have passed laws requiring young men to register with Selective Service when they get a driver's license, but none requires it of 15-year-olds, he said.

Everett Bonner, state director of Selective Service, said information collected by the Office of Motor Vehicles is forwarded to a federal data management center in Chicago.

''They do accept it. I can promise you. They do not process it until the young man turns 18,'' he said.

He said registering young men when they get their drivers' licenses is a convenience and a way to help those who don't know they must register. Anyone failing to register is ''considered a felon without conviction,'' he said, and may lose opportunities and benefits. Chevalier questioned how the state can force a minor child to ''sign on the dotted line'' without his parents' consent.

Bonner said parents must sign for a minor to get a driver's license and that should suffice for draft registration as well.
''What I don't like is somebody having all this information about kids and somebody sitting up there in some private meeting discussing how many young people they have available for the draft in two years,'' Chevalier said.

There is no national military draft, and the major presidential candidates all said repeatedly that they don't plan to reinstate one.
Chevalier said he himself was ''too young for Vietnam and too old for anything afterward,'' but his family has a tradition of military service. ''Somebody in my family has served in every war since the Revolutionary War,'' he said.

It doesn't bother him that his son would have to sign up with Selective Service when he turns 18. ''But to be signing up kids at 15 and 16 years old, I do have a problem with that,'' he said.

''All this is to where the government can get a closer eye on the kids. I really believe it's going against their civil liberties.''
The bill's sponsor was Hunt Downer, an assistant adjutant general in the National Guard and former House speaker whom Gov. Kathleen Blanco appointed in August to head the new Department of Veterans Affairs.

Young men at a recent YMCA-sponsored driver's education course shrugged when they learned of the requirement.

''I don't care,'' said Mark Fontenot, a 16-year-old student at Apostolic Christian Academy.
Pineville High School student Josh Stokes, 15, said, ''I think it's good.'

Neither would elaborate.

''I think it's all right. I can't do anything about it anyway,'' said Stephen White, 16 and a student at Alexandria Senior High School.

Chevalier said he plans to do something, or at least try. He plans to submit a report to the American Civil Liberties Union, and is putting together information packets to send to all state legislators.

''They said it was to make it easier on an 18-year-old. How can they say it makes it easier on an 18-year-old when it's putting more pressure on a 15-year-old?'' he said.

--Beauregard Daily News, DeRidder, LA, Nov 17

Bush Whitehouse Now Purged of All Who Dare Question

2004-11-17T16:39:00.000-06:00

I'm not referring to the latest attempt to reconquer Iraq, but rather the wholesale political revenge campaign being waged by the hard-liners in the Bush Administration against anybody and everybody inside the government who challenged the way the second Persian Gulf war in a decade was marketed and run. Out: Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose political epitaph should now read, "You break it, you own it" for his prescient but unwanted warning to the President on the danger of imperial overreach in Iraq. Out: Top CIA officials who dared challenge, behind the scenes, the White House's unprecedented exploitation of raw intelligence data in order to sell a war to a Congress and a public hungry for revenge after 9/11. Out: Veteran CIA counterterrorism expert and Osama bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer, better known as the best-selling author "Anonymous," whose balanced and devastating critiques of the Iraq war, the CIA and the way President Bush is handling the war on terror have been a welcome counterpoint to the "it's true if we say it's true" idiocy of the White House PR machine.

Meanwhile, incompetence begat by ideological blindness has been rewarded. The neoconservatives who created the ongoing Iraq mess have more than survived the failure of their impossibly rosy scenarios for a peaceful and democratic Iraq under US rule. In fact, despite calls for their resignations -- from the former head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, among others -- the neocon gang is thriving. They have not been held responsible for the "sixteen words" about yellowcake, the rise and fall of Ahmad Chalabi, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the post-invasion looting of Iraq's munitions stores and the disastrous elimination of the Iraqi armed forces. As of today, the neocons on Zinni's list of losers -- Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz; the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- are all still employed even as Bush's new director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, is eviscerating the CIA's leadership. This is the culmination of a three-year campaign by the President's men to scapegoat the CIA for the fact that 9/11 occurred on Bush's watch. So far, half a dozen of the nation's top spymasters have been forced out abruptly -- a strange way to handle things at a time when bin Laden and al Qaeda are still seeking to attack the United States. Ironically, this all comes as Goss is suppressing a lengthy study, prepared for Congress by the CIA's inspector general, that, according to an intelligence official who has read it, names individuals in the government responsible for failures that paved the way for the 9/11 attacks. Thus Bush, with Goss as his hatchet man, is having it both ways: He can be seen to be cleaning house at the CIA -- when he is simply punishing independent voices -- while denying Congress access to an independent audit of actual intelligence failures. We should remember that as flawed as its performance was under former Director George J. Tenet, the CIA at least sometimes tried to be a counterweight to the fraudulent claims of Rumsfeld's and Dick Cheney's neoconservative staffs. All of the nation's traditional intelligence centers were bypassed by a rogue operation based in Feith's Office of Special Plans.

Feith was given broad access to raw intelligence streams -- the better to cherry-pick factoids and fabrications that found their way into even the president's crucial prewar State of the Union address. Now, by successfully discarding those who won't buy into the Administration's ideological fantasies of remaking the world in our image, the neoconservatives have consolidated control of the United States' vast military power. With the ravaging of the CIA and the ousting of Powell -- instead of the more-deserving Rumsfeld -- the coup of the neoconservatives is complete. They have achieved a remarkable political victory by failing upward. Robert Scheer, a Nation contributing editor, is also a contributing editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

--The Nation, Nov 17

Even More Fraud Evidence

2004-11-17T15:38:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON - As they ricochet around the country on the Internet, the details seem aligned to raise the eyebrows of suspicious Democrats. President Bush recorded 4,258 votes to Senator John F. Kerry's 260 in one suburb of Columbus, Ohio where only 638 ballots were cast. Across Ohio, some 76,000 punch-card ballots did not register votes for president, and officials have only begun to comb through 155,428 provisional ballots.In Holmes County, Florida, though nearly three-quarters of registered voters are Democrats, Bush wiped out Kerry, 6,410 to 1,810, in results that mirrored those in several other counties where optical-scan paper ballots were used. And in Florida's Broward County, after the first 32,000 absentee ballots were fed into the computer system, a software glitch caused additional ballots to be subtracted from vote totals, rather than added.

A week after Kerry conceded and Bush declared victory, those assertions and scores of others from New Mexico to North Carolina have kept alive speculation that Bush's victory either wasn't real or wasn't nearly as decisive as it seemed. With memories fresh from the 2000 irregularities, e-mails and Web postings accuse Republicans of stealing an election. Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush." No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," said Jack Corrigan, a veteran Kerry adviser who led the Democrats' team of 3,600 attorneys who fanned out across the country on Election Day to address voting irregularities."I get why people are frustrated, but they did not steal this election," Corrigan said. Still, with reports swirling on the Internet, six Democratic members of Congress have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. Leading academics have joined the fray as well, saying that the integrity and future of the nation's voting system demand a vetting of all claims." The kind of thing that has to happen is a full-scale investigation," said Troy Duster, a New York University professor who is president of the American Sociological Association. "It sounds like a paranoid fantasy, but I think the data suggests that even if Bush won, he didn't win by the kind of margins that are out there. We have a crisis here of potential legitimacy with all the stuff going on on the Web, and the way to deal with this is to do the research." Most of the focus has been on results in Ohio and Florida, since if either of those states had gone for Kerry instead of Bush, the Massachusetts senator would be president-elect. Early exit polls in both states showed Kerry on track to win, and in each state voting and counting irregularities in numerous places have been reported."Fraud took place in the 2004 election," declares the team at BlackBoxVoting.org, one popular Web site that is compiling reports of election problems.

--Rick Klein, Boston Globe, Nov 10

Got Voice? Now You Do!

2004-11-17T13:07:00.000-06:00

Now there is now a centralized web page that lists reasons why the 2004 presidential election was rigged and fixed.

http://got-voice.blogspot.com/

go to the site and call or e-mail major news media sources and demand that they
cover the story!

the future of America depends on the integrity of our voting process!

Walden O'Dell: Committed to Delivering Republican Victory, No Matter the Actual Results

2004-11-17T12:36:00.000-06:00

Diebold, of North Canton, Ohio, said its optical scanners have proved reliable over years of use.
"I think they're rushing to judgment," spokesman David Bear said of the recount advocates.

Diebold has suffered a storm of criticism over its newer touch-screen voting machines, however.
Last week, it settled a lawsuit by California over problems with the electronic machines, and voting rights advocates have complained the touch-screen systems lack paper back-ups.

Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chairman and chief executive, also raised thousands of dollars for the Bush campaign, and said in a fund-raising letter for the Ohio Republican Party that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to Bush.

If You're Being Indicted For Campaign Finance Irregularites That Led To More TX Republican Seats, Just Change The Rules --Seattle Post

2004-11-16T22:06:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON -- Supporters of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay proposed a Republican rules change Tuesday that would protect the Texan's leadership position if he were to be indicted by a Texas grand jury that already charged three of his associates.

House Republicans are likely to approve Wednesday the change in the rule that would force him to step aside if indicted. The show of support would be an endorsement of DeLay's position that the Travis County investigation is a partisan attack.

Currently, rules of the House Republican Conference, which comprises all House GOP members, requires leaders to step aside from the party post if they are indicted for a felony punishable by two or more years in jail. The proposed change would eliminate the step-aside requirement for nonfederal indictments.

The Texas grand jury is investigating alleged campaign finance irregularities in 2002 state legislative races. Republican victories in those contests enabled DeLay ultimately to win support for a congressional redistricting plan that resulted in the GOP's gain of five seats in this month's elections.

House Democrats have a step-aside provision that applies to chairmen or ranking members of committees who are charged with felonies. The language is silent on top party leaders, but Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California was nonetheless sharply critical of the proposal to protect DeLay.

"If they make this rules change, Republicans will confirm yet again that they simply do not care if their leaders are ethical. If Republicans believe that an indicted member should be allowed to hold a top leadership position in the House of Representatives, their arrogance is astonishing," Pelosi said.

The language was proposed by Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas, who was helped by the redistricting. Bonilla was re-elected in 2002 with less than 52 percent of the vote. After the boundaries were changed, he won this month with 69 percent of the vote.

Jessica Boulanger, spokeswoman for third-ranking House Republican Roy Blunt of Missouri, confirmed the proposal and said Blunt supported it.

The majority whip "believes the allegations are baseless, and they were political in nature. So he supports the proposed rules change by congressman Bonilla."

Bonilla spokeswoman Taryn Fritz Walpole said the proposed change is intended to "prevent political manipulation of the legislative process" and reduce the possibility of "political exploitation and intimidation of House leadership and chairmanship positions."

The Texas investigation is led by a Democrat, retiring Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle.

In September, the grand jury indicted three political operatives associated with DeLay and eight companies, alleging campaign finance violations related to corporate money spent in the 2002 legislative races. The corporate donations were made to Texans for a Republican Majority, a political action committee created with help from DeLay.

DeLay said he was not questioned or subpoenaed as part of the investigation.

The majority leader said after the indictments, "This has been a dragged-out 500-day investigation, and you do the political math. This is no different than other kinds of partisan attacks that have been leveled against me that are dropped after elections."

In October, the House ethics committee rebuked DeLay for appearing to link political donations to a legislative favor and improperly persuading U.S. aviation authorities to intervene in the Texas redistricting dispute.

More War Profiteers --from SF Gate

2004-11-16T21:56:00.000-06:00

President Bush was widely reported last week to be on the verge of nominating local boy Francis Harvey to serve as secretary of the Army.

Not only has Harvey never had a military career, but he is the former chief operating officer for a division of Westinghouse Electric, a leading defense contractor, and serves on the boards of two Carlyle-affiliated firms.

Carlyle is a high-power Washington investment firm that counts among its leaders and advisers former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of State James Baker and, until last year, former President George H.W. Bush, who happens to be the father of the current president.

Most prominently, Harvey is the vice chairman of Maryland's Duratek, which specializes in the handling and disposing of radioactive materials.

Duratek, which reported sales of $286 million last year, has contracts with both the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, which is itself one of the nation's top defense contractors.

Carlyle owns about 23 percent of the company and appointed Harvey to Duratek's board in 1998. He has been re-elected by shareholders every year since then.

Diane Brown, Duratek's vice president of investor relations, said about 3 percent of the company's revenue comes from the Army. About 10 percent is from the Department of Defense and 65 percent from the Energy Department. The rest comes from commercial contracts.

Harvey also sits on the board of Carlyle-owned Kuhlman Electric, a maker of transformers. It has no apparent defense contracts.

Chris Ullman, a spokesman for the Carlyle Group, said he's confident that Harvey, if appointed Army secretary, won't show any special favors to former business partners.

"There are government rules that dictate how people's official duties are allowed to interact with their former private-sector affiliations," he said. "There are mechanisms in place to assure that the public trust is ensured."

The secretary of the Army plays no role in combat operations. Rather, the Army secretary, who reports to the defense secretary, oversees most noncombat matters, such as recruiting and mobilizing troops, and manages a nearly $100 billion budget.

"He makes sure that soldiers have the proper training and equipment to perform their mission," said Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, an Army spokesman.

He said that if soldiers in Iraq required more weapons, say, or new vehicles, the Army secretary would be responsible for passing the request to the office of the defense secretary.

President Bill Clinton's first appointee as Army secretary was Togo West Jr., who served previously as general counsel to the Navy and general counsel to the Department of Defense. Clinton's second appointee, succeeding West in 1998, was Louis Caldera, a former Army officer and California lawmaker.

The Bush administration's first pick for the job, in May 2001, was Thomas White, a former general who left the military in 1990 for a lucrative 11-year career with Enron.

Testifying in 2002 before a Senate committee investigating Enron's shady electricity deals, White said he had no idea that the company was manipulating power prices in California while he helped run an Enron subsidiary, Enron Energy Services.

"I am responsible for the portion of that company that I ran," he said. "The deals that we put together, within the accounting structure that was the standard in the industry, I stand behind."

It's since come to light that traders at Enron Energy Services participated in market-rigging schemes with nicknames like "Get Shorty" and "Fat Boy."

White was fired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last year after sticking with the $11 billion Crusader artillery gun despite the Pentagon's decision to scrap the program. The Army has since been without a full-time secretary.

The primary contractor for the Crusader, by the way, was United Defense Industries, controlled during White's tenure by -- wait for it -- the Carlyle Group.

Carlyle sold its stake in the company in April, but United Defense is still chaired by Carlyle Managing Director William Conway. He's joined on the board by Carlyle's chairman emeritus, Carlucci, and another Carlyle managing director, Peter Clare.

Which brings us back to Harvey. Of all the people who could assume the long-vacant Army secretary post, it's striking (to say the least) that Bush is reportedly tapping someone with intimate ties to the defense industry.

If confirmed, Harvey would no doubt serve with distinction -- there's no reason to think otherwise. But he'll always have the cloud of his Carlyle connections hanging over his head.

A nation at war deserves better than that.

UnCounted Absentee Ballots "Discovered" in Florida

2004-11-16T18:57:00.000-06:00

The unmarked brown box sat unnoticed in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections office until Monday, two weeks after the election, when an employee cleaning a desk stumbled upon it.

Inside were 268 uncounted absentee ballots.

"I think this is a very serious situation," Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark said Monday, vowing to fire or discipline any employee found to be negligent.

"I assume all responsibility for everything that happened in that department, but I have to rely on other people," Clark said. "It's not a one-woman show."

The unmarked box wasn't the only problem.

Five days ago, Clark sent the state the county's final results for the Nov. 2 election. But her office had failed to perform a standard check to ensure that all ballots had been accounted for.

Clark assumed her staff had performed the check, but they had not.

Now she will ask the state for permission to change Pinellas' official results. The canvassing board will count the missing ballots Thursday.

Although it is numerically possible, officials say the missing ballots probably won't change any results. Only a few races were decided by less than 268 votes - including the presidential contest.

George W. Bush won the presidential race in Pinellas by just 226 votes. While Bush's margin in Pinellas could change, his statewide victory won't.

A city commission seat in South Pasadena and a referendum in Indian Rocks Beach were also decided by fewer than 268 votes.

"If you found a couple hundred thousand votes in Ohio, that might be exciting," said Paul Bedinghaus, chairman of the Pinellas Republican Party. "I expect that human error will continue to occur as long as human beings are involved."

This is the third time since Clark became election supervisor in 2000 that her office has had problems handling ballots.

In the presidential race in 2000, the office neglected to count 1,400 ballots - and counted more than 900 ballots twice. In 2001, her office misplaced six absentee ballots in a Tarpon Springs city election.

The uncounted absentee ballots this time came from the St. Petersburg election office.

Election workers there put absentee ballots in a box to be delivered to the election service center in Largo, where they would be counted on Election Day.

That afternoon, a staff courier delivered the box from St. Petersburg to Largo.

Clark said her office has a system to track the boxes, but she could not describe it in detail during a phone interview from her home Monday night.

The box arrived at the election office, where it sat in plain sight in the absentee ballot department for 14 days.

Office spokeswoman Lori Hudson said other boxes and papers were piled on top of the box. The ballot box was not marked in any unique way. Clark could not say Monday why the box was not specially marked.

Voters, accustomed to putting punch card ballots in locked metal boxes, had been uneasy when they saw election officials throw absentee ballots in a brown box in the St. Petersburg office, said Democratic lawyer Peter Wallace.

Even before Election Day, missing ballots had caused embarrassment for another election supervisor. Hillsborough Supervisor of Election Buddy Johnson had been criticized in October after his staff lost 245 ballots in the Aug. 31 primary.

Normally, Clark would have detected the missing ballots when her staff checked to ensure that every ballot was accounted for.

Usually, every ballot, whether filed absentee or at a polling place, is registered into a computer system. After the election, workers compare the number recorded in the computer to the number of ballots.

For some reason, the staff did not perform the procedure.

Clark learned about the missing ballots on Monday afternoon. Clark did not return to the office because she said she needed to be with her husband, who is having surgery.

Her staff, though, worked past 5 p.m. She promised a thorough investigation.

"If we determine that this is the result of negligence, then those responsible will be held accountable," Clark said. "I can assure you of that."

--St. Petersburg Times, Nov 16

US Now Owns Iraqi Seeds?

2004-11-16T15:03:00.000-06:00

When the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) celebrates biodiversity on World Food Day on October 16, Iraqi farmers will be mourning its loss.

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.

The new law in question [2] heralds the entry into Iraqi law of patents on life forms - this first one affecting plants and seeds. This law fits in neatly into the US vision of Iraqi agriculture in the future - that of an industrial agricultural system dependent on large corporations providing inputs and seeds.

In 2002, FAO estimated that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers used saved seed from their own stocks from last year's harvest or purchased from local markets. 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. The new law totally ignores all the contributions Iraqi farmers have made to development of important crops like wheat, barley, date and pulses. Its consequences are the loss of farmers' freedoms and a grave threat to food sovereignty in Iraq. In this way, the US has declared a new war against the Iraqi farmer.

"If the FAO is celebrating 'Biodiversity for Food Security' this year, it needs to demonstrate some real commitment", says Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, pointing out that the FAO has recently been cosying up with industry and offering support for genetic engineering [3]. "Most importantly, the FAO must recognise that biodiversity-rich farming and industry-led agriculture are worlds apart, and that industrial agriculture is one of the leading causes of the catastrophic decline in agricultural biodiversity that we have witnessed in recent decades. The FAO cannot hope to embrace biodiversity while holding industry's hand", he added.

--grain.org, Nov 16

Halliburton's Blood Money

2004-11-16T11:30:00.000-06:00

If you pay any attention to the yammerings of right wingers, and lord knows it's increasingly difficult to avoid them these days, you've probably run across the reductionist caricature of the left/liberal who insistently screams "Halliburton" in lieu of an actual argument. It's a nifty way of avoiding the actual argument--pretend that there is no argument, that your opponent is just incomprehensibly fixated on a single word, not unlike a toddler learning to speak.

Well, anyone who's been paying attention--which is to say, anyone who actually reads newspapers--should know that there's a bit more to the story.

(Halliburton's) SEC filing Friday disclosed more trouble related to investigations by the SEC, Justice, a French magistrate and Nigerian officials into whether a consortium including Halliburton paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials involving a gas plant from 1995 to 2002. Cheney ran the company from 1995 to 2000, and Halliburton bought the unit involved in the consortium in 1998.

That followed by little more than a week the last bad news about Halliburton: that the FBI expanded a probe into charges of contract irregularities by Halliburton in Iraq and Kuwait. Lawyers for a Pentagon official said the FBI requested an interview with her over her complaints that the Army gave a Halliburton unit preferential treatment when granting it a $7 billion contract to restore Iraq's oil fields.

Halliburton also told shareholders that the Justice Department is examining whether operations in Iran by a subsidiary violated U.S. sanctions. The company received a grand jury subpoena in July and produced documents in September.

So among the spittle-flecked lefties muttering about Halliburton, we must include the FBI, the Justice Department, and the authors of Halliburton's own SEC filing.

The Pentagon official mentioned above is, I assume, Bunnantine H. Greenhouse, who is--in addition to being a spittle-flecked leftie, obviously--the Army Corps of Engineers' contracting director. There's a profile of her today in the Times:

Things reached a climax as the Corps was thrust into the center of the Iraq war effort, given the task of distributing billions of dollars in reconstruction money. For the urgent repair of Iraqi oil fields, the Corps turned - too readily and too generously, Ms. Greenhouse charged in bruising internal debates last year - to the Houston-based Halliburton Company with one of the biggest single contracts of the war.

Now the Army Corps of Engineers is trying to demote Ms. Greenhouse, 60, or push her into retirement. To the surprise of no one who knows her, she is unbowed, charging in a much publicized letter of Oct. 21 that the Corps has shown a pattern of favoritism toward Halliburton that imperils "the integrity of the federal contracting program."

--Tom Tomorrow.com

Dictator of America

2004-11-16T06:36:00.000-06:00

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

--George W. Bush, 12/8/00

Reporting from Falluja

2004-11-15T22:00:00.001-06:00

A row of palm trees used to run along the street outside my house - now only the trunks are left.

The upper half of each tree has vanished, blown away by mortar fire.

From my window, I can also make out that the minarets of several mosques have been toppled.

There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable.

Smoke is everywhere.

A house some doors from mine was hit during the bombardment on Wednesday night. A 13-year-old boy was killed. His name was Ghazi.

I tried to flee the city last night but I could not get very far. It was too dangerous.

I am getting used to the bombardment. I have learnt to sleep through the noise - the smaller bombs no longer bother me.

US marines have been fighting Falluja rebels at close quarters.

Without water and electricity, we feel completely cut off from everyone else.

I only found out Yasser Arafat had died because the BBC rang me.

It is hard to know how much people outside Falluja are aware of what is going on here.

I want them to know about conditions inside this city -- there are dead women and children lying on the streets.

People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever.

Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens.

There has been a lot of resistance in Jolan.

The Americans have taken over several high-rise buildings overlooking the district.

But the height has not helped them control the area because the streets of Jolan are very narrow and you cannot fire into them directly.

The US military moves along the main roads and avoids the side-streets. The soldiers do not leave their armoured vehicles and tanks.

If they get fired on, they fire back from their tanks or call in air-strikes.

I saw some Iraqi government soldiers on the ground earlier.

I don't know which part of the country these soldiers are from. They are definitely not from any of the western provinces such as al-Anbar.

I have heard people say they are from Kurdistan.

They are well co-ordinated. When the US forces pull back from an area, the Iraqi soldiers will take over there.

--Fadril Badrani, BBC News, Nov 15

Now Is No Time for Compromise

2004-11-15T21:49:00.000-06:00

If anything this Sunday should send fear shooting through your bones, it is this revelation from Sen. Joe Lieberman, said on Fox News Sunday:

"I hope that in the second Bush term that President Bush will develop a kind of consultative relationship, certainly with Democratic leaders like Harry Reid.

And I think that will help avoid the kinds of filibusters that really a lot of us moderate Democrats — and we talked about this just last week when we had a phone conference — don't want to be involved in.

And we'd much prefer to give an up-or-down vote to a president's judicial nominations.

He earned that right when he got elected."

[emphasis added]

Yes that's right. The so-called moderates are already organizing and strategizing over how to avoid standing up to the GOP.

Their rallying cry? Filibusters. Eeewwww. Icky.

Making Lieberman's remarks more bizarre is that he preceded them with some understanding of what Dems are up against:

During the Clinton years, as far as I can tell, more than 60...judicial nominations were blocked not by a filibuster but because the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee never even gave those nominees a hearing.

But of course, he draws the exact wrong lesson from that:

The point of fact here is that both of these, the filibuster [by the Dems] and the blocking of even a hearing under President Clinton, are signs of a government here in Washington that has grown too partisan.

No, the point of fact is that the Right is on a ruthless mission to remake the judiciary and shred the civil rights protections that have been established over the last half-century.

And they are not interested in getting your permission for it.

Fortunately, over on ABC's This Week, Sen. Chuck Schumer showed more spunk:

"Some of nominees...the President put forward for the Court of Appeals said there should be no zoning laws [because] it's a taking of property, it's unconstitutional.

[And] THERE SHOULD BE NO LABOR LAWS-- if...an employer wanted to have A CHILD work...80 hours a week, THAT WOULD BE OK.

If that's strict constructionism, then we don't want it...

....if the president nominates an extremist who wants to roll back the clock [to the] 1930s, 1890s, of course he'll be opposed.

If he nominates a mainstream judge, he won't.

That's the kind of thing all Dems should be doing now.

Laying down the substantive groundwork for future filibusters by detailing how right-wing judges will directly harm your life, your family, and your community.

Back to Lieberman.

Here's another revealing exchange, where Fox's Chris Wallace was discussing with Lieberman the hot water Sen. Alan Specter is in with the Religious Right.

WALLACE: Let's take a comparable situation.

Let's say the Democrats — and this would be a big leap at this point — take back control of the Senate.

LIEBERMAN: Yes, lovely thought.

WALLACE: And the person who is scheduled to be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is a right-to-lifer.

You don't think liberal groups would be up in arms about that?

LIEBERMAN: They probably would.

Oh, would they?

Perhaps, Mr. Joementum, instead of taking another cheap shot at liberals, you might have noted that the incoming Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid, is pro-life.

And not only is the choice not provoking ideological civil war between liberals and moderates.

But Reid has a good working relationship with NARAL Pro-Choice America (he is pro-contraception and pro-stem cell research).

That's all for the good, if Reid is willing to aggressively filibuster right-wing judicial nominations.

His pro-life views can only help broaden the debate over judges and broaden public support for opposing Bush's picks.

Of course, we don't know that Reid will aggressively filibuster judicial nominations. (Yesterday's NY Times profile sends mixed signals on his overall approach.)

But if he is planning on it, he better get on these "Senate moderate" conference calls and bring the hammer down. Now.

--Liberal Oasis, Nov 15

Television Do the Thinking for Me

2004-11-15T21:16:00.000-06:00

"We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You even think like the tube. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion."

--Howard Beale

Video Shows US Troops Shooting Unarmed Prisoner in the Head

2004-11-15T19:17:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military has begun an investigation into possible war crimes after a television pool report by NBC showed a Marine shooting dead a wounded and unarmed Iraqi in a Falluja mosque, officials said on Monday.

The Iraqi was one of five wounded left in the mosque after Marines fought their way in on Friday and Saturday. The U.S. military has accused insurgents in Iraq of using mosques to launch attacks against American forces.

U.S. forces, along with Iraqi government troops, launched an offensive one week ago on Falluja, and have gained overall control of the formerly rebel-held city, although scattered resistance remains.

Maj. Douglas Powell, a Marine Corps spokesman at the Pentagon, said the investigation, being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, focused on "possible law of war violations" by U.S. Marines.

The pool report by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites said the mosque had been used by insurgents to attack U.S. forces, who stormed it and an adjacent building, killing 10 militants and wounding the five.

Sites said the wounded had been left in the mosque for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. No reason was given why that had not happened.

A second group of Marines entered the mosque on Saturday after reports it had been reoccupied. Footage from the embedded television crew showed the five still in the mosque, although several appeared to be already close to death, Sites said.

He said one Marine noticed one of the prisoners was still breathing.

A Marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: "He's f***ing faking he's dead. He faking he's f***ing dead."

"The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man's head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast," Sites said. No images of the shooting were shown in the footage provided to Reuters.

The report said the Marine had returned to duty after being shot in the face a day earlier.

Sites said the shot prisoner "did not appear to be armed or threatening in any way."

60% of Ohio 'Spoiled' Ballots Just So Happen to Come from Urban, Democratic Areas

2004-11-15T16:43:00.000-06:00

Election boards all across Ohio have started counting "provisional ballots" in the presidential election. These are the ballots that were given to voters who believed they were registered but whose names didn't appear on the precinct list on election day. The verification process may take up to two weeks. In most states, approximately 85 percent of all provisional ballots are eventually verified and counted in the final vote tally. And the early reports out of Ohio suggest the "count" list in some counties will be as high as 90 percent.
As it stands, there are approximately 155,000 provisional ballots. So, one can expect at least 130,000 ballots to be verified and "added to the final count."

There is another number that will eventually come into play in the Buckeye state... and that's the number of "spoiled ballots." The Green/Libertarian coalition, through recountohio.org, has already raised enough money to pay for a statewide recount. And the group is now raising even more cash so they can hire recount monitors. A statewide recount will include a visual examination of all 93,000 "spoiled ballots" that indicated "no" vote for President. (The "no vote" is usually a machine-tabulation problem because of chads, hanging chads, and etc.) A brilliant e-mailer named Matthew Fox has analyzed which counties reported "spoiled ballots." And it does appear that approximately 60 pecent of all the spoiled ballots come from heavily Democratic urban areas.

--David Schuster, MSNBC, Nov 15

Let the Audit Begin in Ohio

2004-11-15T13:38:00.000-06:00

Following many reports of error resulting in thousands of votes being cast in error for George W. Bush in the state of Ohio, a group led by Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org will be pursuing a public recount throughout certain counties within the state.

The new 527 group, Help America Recount, will be releasing further information at www.helpamericarecount.org. A recount within the state of Ohio is a public priority as the group believes that "accounting for provisional ballots has been murky, and anomalies have now surfaced in Cuyahoga County, Perry County, and Youngstown Ohio."

Bev Harris also recently expressed interest in using a state statute known as the Sunshine Law to pursue recounts within Florida.

With the exception of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, the mainstream media has failed to report the vote anomalies and errors that occurred on November 2nd. Talk radio and the individuals on the Internet have aggressively followed such stories and are demanding action.

As evidence of the growing interest developing on the Internet, in the week following the election, the number one phrase used by search engine users landing on the Washington Dispatch's website has been "vote fraud" while "ohio vote fraud" takes the number two slot. Additionally, the website popularity checker, Popdex, shows that the number two linked item on the web is the article by Thom Hartmann, Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked.

Bev Harris and the new group, Help America Recount, are pursuing a growing movement that is calling for an investigation and audit of the results of the November 2nd election.

-Washington Dispatch, Nov 15