simple truths

Arab Apartheid

2010-07-10T08:10:00.001-08:00

Why is it that Jews living in the ancient Jewish cities of Hebron or Jerusalem on Jewish-owned land are constantly called an obstacle to peace, while the Arabs of Jaffa or Haifa are not?

Why is it that the term “apartheid” is applied to Israel, where Arabs and Jews live together, while it is assumed that ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank must precede the establishment of a Palestinian state?

To the Editor:

Some questions:

Why should it be controversial for tax-exempt charities to aid people who live in disputed territory?

Why is it that Jews living in the ancient Jewish cities of Hebron or Jerusalem on Jewish-owned land are constantly called an obstacle to peace, while the Arabs of Jaffa or Haifa are not?

Why is it that the term “apartheid” is applied to Israel, where Arabs and Jews live together, while it is assumed that ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank must precede the establishment of a Palestinian state?

The hypocrisy is blatant.

I repeatedly see in your newspaper the phrase “a two-state solution.” The solution under discussion is not a two-state solution at all. It is a state and a half for the Palestinians, and half a state for the Jews. In other words, it is just a subtle plan for the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty.

If the creation of a Palestinian state necessitates transfer of Jews from Har Bracha in the West Bank, then the creation of the redefined Israel ought to necessitate the transfer of its Arab minority as well.

Richard Gertler
Teaneck, N.J., July 6, 2010

Have Fun & Play Your Own Political Games -- Online!

2010-06-05T11:36:00.000-08:00

From @truemajority:

Play Operation

“Play fun games and learn about political malfeasance from America's most nefarious political operatives!”

Israel, vindicated

2009-02-19T19:59:00.004-09:00

This fine quote came to me in email today, had to do a little searching to authenticate it. found a lot of blog posts, going back a few years to the alleged interview [aug 2006], including a a dead video link. good news is i found an audio broadcast (mp3) here

http://blog.honestreporting.ca/my_weblog/2006/08/bibi_on_bbc.html

and a few other blogs with good discussions/links to boot:

http://www.barder.com/ephems/537

http://www.seraphicpress.com/archives/2006/08/bibi_bests_the.php

http://www.topix.com/forum/ps/gaza/T3DUKJ7TQK7MDAVO2

audio interview

Interviewer: "How come so many more Lebanese have been killed in this conflict than Israelis?"

Netanyahu: "Are you sure that you want to start asking in that direction?"

Interviewer: "Why not?"

Netanyahu: "Because in World War II more Germans were killed than British and Americans combined, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the war was caused by Germany's aggression. And in response to the German blitz on London, the British wiped out the entire city of Dresden, burning to death more German civilians than the number of people killed in Hiroshima. Moreover, I could remind you that in 1944, when the R.A.F. tried to bomb the Gestapo Headquarters in Copenhagen, some of the bombs missed their target and fell on a Danish children's hospital, killing 83 little children. Perhaps you have another question?"

"... in World War II more Germans were killed than British and Americans combined, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the war was caused by Germany's aggression."

Yee-Ha!

2008-10-13T09:48:00.001-08:00

Donkey Kicks Elephant

Just stumbled onto a little internet whimsy:

donkey kicks elephant complete with sound effects

A simple animation of a Democratic Donkey kicking a Republican Elephant. Complete with sound effects!

Comparisons to 1992 and 1996

2008-10-13T07:28:00.008-08:00

Obama Projected Winner

As of today, polls showing Obama ahead with 333 electoral votes; leading my curiosity to compare to 1992 and 1996 elections respectively, in which, of course the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton won.

What appears is a strikingly similar map, with only the south in play as having "flip-flopped" (*smirk*) including fickle Florida, which of course voted for Gore but still went to Bush-it in the OJ-ing of the American Electoral College.

Of course this is comparing current polls to electoral outcome and the election is still weeks away, still trends are emerging that are consistent and indicative of regional zeitgeist. For example, Arizona is backing McCain but went for Clinton in 1996.

On a lighter note...

2007-09-01T07:24:00.000-08:00

Official Gmail Blog: Watch the final Gmail collaborative video

The 14 Identifying Characteristics of Fascism

2006-09-15T06:08:00.000-08:00

The 14 Identifying Characteristics of Fascism

David Loehr at Austin Unitarian Church gave a sermon a couple of years
ago on fascism, where he quoted the following from Dr. Lawrence Britt's identifying traits of fascism. Here is what he said:

In an essay coyly titled "Fascism Anyone?," Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, identifies social and political agendas common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 "identifying characteristics of fascism." (The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2. Read it at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm) See how familiar they sound.

1 Powerful and Continuing Nationalism

Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2 Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights

Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3 Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause

The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4 Supremacy of the Military

Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5 Rampant Sexism

The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively
male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6 Controlled Mass Media

Sometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7 Obsession with National Security

Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8 Religion and Government are Intertwined

Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9 Corporate Power is Protected

The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10 Labor Power is Suppressed

Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11 Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts

Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher
education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other
academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12 Obsession with Crime and Punishment

Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to
enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13 Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and
associates who appoint each other to government positions and use
governmental power and authority to protect their friends from
accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14 Fraudulent Elections

Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

Anti-Semitism for Dummies

2006-08-14T11:01:00.001-08:00

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

Anti-Semitism for dummies
By Suzanne Fields
Published August 14, 2006

In the larger scheme of things, Mel Gibson's drunken outburst against the Jews is very small potatoes. But it underlines an important element of anti-Semitism often overlooked. Contempt for the Jews is nearly always self-destructive, not necessarily in the short run but over time, not simply person-to-person, but for nations, too. Anti-Semitism is for dummies.

Paul Johnson, the British historian, documents how this works: Anti-Semitism clouds a person's judgment, forcing him to look for validation of his hatred and this inevitably narrows his ability to reason. He's like the Marxist ever in search of "evidence" to confirm his economic theory, and voila, it's there. The anti-Semite can't accept what doesn't fit into his narrow worldview and his hatred prevents him from enjoying the creativity of Jews, no matter that this creativity would pay him great dividends.

Anti-Semitism dilutes the rewards of Jewish financial, scientific, artistic and intellectual strengths. When Spain expelled the Jews (along with the Moors) at the end of the 15th century, for example, Spain lost the intellectual gifts it needed as the New World flowered with unprecedented opportunities for economic development. "The effect of official anti-Semitism was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance," Paul Johnson writes in Commentary magazine. "As a consequence, the project of enlarging the new World's silver mines and [bringing] huge amounts of silver into Spain, far from leading to rational investment in a proto-industrial revolution or to the creation of modern financial services, had a profoundly deleterious impact, plunging the hitherto vigorous Spanish economy into inflation and long-term decline, and the government into repeated bankruptcy."

It's ironic that when Jews become financiers, they are often loathed for their abilities to manage money and those in authority do not draw on their gifts. Spain never recovered from sending Jews into exile, and the Netherlands inherited good fortune when the Jewish refugees settled and contributed to the eventual mercantile and financial supremacy of that time. Amsterdam and Rotterdam became cities that endure as great trade centers to this day.

England expelled the Jews in the 13th century, but invited them back 300 years later, using money from the Rothschild's international banking establishment to defeat Napoleon. Jews have flourished in England without religious restrictions, though Shakespeare tapped into the residue of official anti-Semitism in his portrait of Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice." (It's another irony that he probably never met a Jew.)

Laws that control and restrict Jews become models for control and restrictions of other religious and ethnic groups. Catherine the Great limited where Jews could live. Prejudice expanded to officially sanctioned pogroms that sent many Jews emigrating to the West. The Soviet Union enforced brutal legal restrictions on Jews and ruthlessly expanded them to other minorities. The Dreyfus case in France at the end of the 19th century provoked international condemnation and severely weakened the French military; its effects are felt today. Germany has yet to recover the talents of the Jews it killed or expelled under The Third Reich, including 20 Nobel Prize scientists.

The impact of anti-Semitism on the Arabs in the Middle East is only now getting the attention it deserves. Jews under the Ottoman Turks in the 15th and 16th century were welcomed for their advanced knowledge of spinning, weaving and dying of textiles. Their knowledge of European languages enabled Muslims to employ them as diplomats. Modern Islam merely blames them for everything they imagine going wrong.

Paul Johnson notes that Arabs have not only wasted trillions of dollars of oil revenues, blowing much of the money on armaments, but they have neither consolidated nor modernized their law nor copied any of the techniques of land management the Jews have used to make the desert bloom. Playing the victim and blaming the Jews for everything that goes wrong galvanizes hatred, but it doesn't do anything to make Arab life livable.

"The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," the crude Czarist forgery that blames Jewish conspiracies for everything bad, is a perennial best seller in the Arab world and is taught as fact in the schools. The book, laughed at in the West, became a Cairo television series widely popular in the Islamic world.

Imagine how different things could have been if the Arabs had cooperated with Jews early in the 20th century. Imagine a Jewish-Arab collaboration to build real schools, teaching hospitals and great universities. Imagine what might have been if they had worked the land together, exchanging techniques of cultivation. Imagine what might have been if they had cooperated to develop joint social services for the needy of both peoples. Imagine.

Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.>

Dr. Wafa Sultan

2006-07-31T05:19:00.001-08:00

"The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

-- Arab-American Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan

Transcript of Dr. Wafa Sultan

Don't Get Me Started!

2006-07-31T05:16:00.000-08:00

I'm glad the post has the guts to say what so many other media outlets are not. Hopefully others will follow.

'Disproportionate' in What Moral Universe?

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 28, 2006; A25

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the Blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest air campaign and land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London Blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.

But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.

On Wednesday CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?

Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead it attacked dual-use infrastructure -- bridges, roads, airport runways -- and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.

Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.

Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

How Else Would You Spend $320 Billion?

2006-07-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

How Else Would You Spend $320 Billion?

By Gene Sperling
Sunday, June 25, 2006; B02

Most policy wonks like me have had the disconcerting experience of mistakenly writing $200 million when we meant $200 billion. What a difference a "b" can make ($199,800,000,000, to be exact). Unfortunately, when it comes to the most expensive choices our nation faces -- highlighted most recently by the growing cost of the war in Iraq, but also by tax cuts and the new prescription drug benefit -- we have made many spending decisions where the b's seem to be there by accident, with little regard for the possible tradeoffs.

For all the talk of how much government spending has increased, the reality is that for many policies that should top our agenda -- such as health insurance and preschool for low-income kids; funding for science and basic research; and port security -- we have decided that the money simply isn't there. We fiercely debate how we can scrimp and save and cut in these areas while ignoring commitments that cost 10, 25 or 100 times more. The new prescription drug initiative, for instance, will cost $110 billion in 2012 alone. The tax cuts will cost $330 billion that same year. And, as we have recently learned, the war in Iraq has cost $320 billion so far and is projected to reach $800 billion by 2016. Even if one solidly supports each of these policies, the lack of national debate over what even a fraction of the costs might mean for deficit reduction or other programs we have squeezed, or neglected, is striking.

War and security: The decision to go to war is not primarily a fiscal one. We should go to war when we have to, go it alone if we must, and pay whatever costs are necessary to protect ourselves. But that does not excuse us from understanding the tradeoffs that we have made by spending $320 billion on the war in Iraq. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a strong coalition meant the United States paid 10 percent of the costs; in the current war, we are paying 90 percent. By carrying such a large fiscal burden in Iraq, what are the tradeoffs we are making in our efforts to protect the homeland, fight terrorism abroad and win hearts and minds throughout the world?

For $7 billion a year we could reverse the recent controversial homeland security cuts for cities such as New York, Washington and Boston, and create a $6 billion initiative to safeguard our public transportation systems. For $15 billion a year we could double the size of our Special Forces to 50,000, reset the Army's essential field equipment and fund 30,000 more peacekeepers to promote democracy and deny sanctuary to al-Qaeda in key fragile states. And for $3 billion a year, we could be the unquestioned champions of universal education for the 100 million children in poor nations who are not in school. This would show the developing world that we care about the health and economic well-being of all children -- and not just about ensuring that their children do not grow up to bomb our children.

Drug-bill costs and health care: When it became clear, belatedly, that the projected costs of the prescription drug bill had ballooned to $100 billion a year, shouldn't that have provoked questions about what even a small fraction of that money could have done if used elsewhere? For $5 billion we could create a system of refundable health insurance tax credits for small businesses, reducing health insurance costs for 13.3 million Americans. With an additional $15 billion a year, we could offer health insurance to nearly all of the 9 million American children who lack it.

Tax cuts and competitiveness: There is no question that the right type of tax cuts can help the economy. But with recent tax cuts scheduled to cost more than $300 billion a year -- with $100 billion of them going to the wealthy -- shouldn't we at least ponder what some of that money could do if put elsewhere? For instance, without altering the size of the tax cut one penny, but by just shifting a small portion of it, we could create tax incentives to encourage Americans with no pensions or meager resources in the bank to save more. Shifting $25 billion a year could cover the cost of creating portable 401(k) accounts for 50 million Americans in which they could receive as much as $1,000 in federal matching money every year.

Consider four other areas where, with less than 10 percent of the eventual tax cut -- meaning about $30 billion -- we could help our economic competitiveness.

Science : There's no shortage of speeches these days about our failure to train enough new scientists. Yet funding for the National Institutes of Health -- the lifeblood for U.S. scientific research -- is scheduled to be cut in inflation-adjusted terms for the third consecutive year. Such cuts have led to reductions in grants, layoffs in research labs and declining morale. For an average of $7.5 billion a year, we could gradually increase NIH funding by 40 percent over the next four years, expand available grant money proportionately and keep scientists on the cutting edge.

Quality preschool: A recent poll found that 80 percent of senior executives at Fortune 1000 and other large American companies believe investing more in quality pre-K education is necessary for future economic growth. Yet federal cutbacks mean that there are fewer children enrolled in Head Start now than there were in 2002. For about $10 billion a year, we could offer quality preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds from low-income families and expand what we do for those even younger.

Research and technology: Having helped spur the development of such U.S. technological achievements as the Internet, the personal computer, GPS technology and the algorithms that helped spawn Google, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a true success story. Yet we spend only $3 billion a year on it and its open-ended research, and there's some pressure now to de-emphasize basic research in favor of short-term projects. With an additional $5 billion a year we could double DARPA's budget and create an Energy DARPA to get us beyond our oil dependency.

Assistance for displaced workers: Virtually everyone agrees that we need to do more to help displaced workers. Yet recent initiatives have imposed such narrow, outdated restrictions that only 1,400 workers received help from a new wage insurance program in its first 15 months. There are no easy solutions for worker anxiety, but for $8 billion a year we could at least offer all displaced workers temporary health insurance and modest wage insurance.

The annual costs for all such programs are well below the costs to date of the Iraq war, or the projected cost of the drug plan or the tax cuts. But to paraphrase the late senator Everett Dirksen, $5 billion here, $5 billion there, and soon you are talking about real money. Let's examine the tradeoffs and make sure we fund our greatest priorities.

gsperling@cfr.org

Gene Sperling, who served as national economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Stolen Elections

2006-07-03T05:51:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

The following article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. was published in this month's Rolling Stone. This is a story I have been following for over a year and now that it has 'gone public,' I hope it is the final nail in the coffin of this administration.

I've reprinted only the first part of the article, but I think it says all you'll need to know. I know that I am preaching to the choir here, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. But the enormity of this story makes it required reading.

As I've seen our country glide eerily towards fascism in the last five years, I've often been concerned that I'm being paranoid or obsessed about politics. But the more I read and learn, the more it becomes clear that I'm not the former and that the latter is warranted. If you only watch the evening news or read the daily paper, you don't know half of what is being done to you.

My hope is that the following story will anger you. I hope that it outrages anyone who reads it. I hope that it shakes us free from the resignation we've been feeling and revitalizes our efforts and plans to do what is necessary to take our country back. And we can do it. There are candidates out there who have a new vision and we need to support them. It doesn't matter whether they are from your district or even your state. Only by taking back the House and/or the Senate in November can we begin to turn the tide. By donating to a Democratic candidate in California or Kentucky, you are supporting that effort. If you'd like more information, I'd be happy to direct you.

In closing, I regret sounding like a nutcase. If you know me well, you know that I am very pragmatic and analytical and that I don't say anything unless I not only believe it, but can back it up with facts and sensible analysis. You also know that in my endless striving to reduce drama in my life, that I'm not the type to run around saying the sky is falling unless I have a piece of cloud in my hand to justify my claim. Thus, I humbly ask you to consider the gravity of what is going on in our country and to consider action. Thank you.

Keith

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

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Page 1 2 3 4

The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. For more, see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.

III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)

--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html

2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC404482&n
=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElection%20Results

3) United States Department of Defense, ''Defense Department Special Briefing on Federal Voting Assistance Program,'' August 6, 2004. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040806-1502.html

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11. http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/downloads/surveys/ovf_survey_01jun2005_
v1.0_usletter.pdf

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004. http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0921/local/stories/02local.htm

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2. http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/files/
NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport-v2.pdf

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission,'' September 2005, pg. 10. http://www.eac.gov/election_survey_2004/pdf/EDS%20exec.%20summary.pdf

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.

12) See ''Ohio?s Missing Votes.''

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 5 http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/fullreport.pdf

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3 http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.

18) Dick Morris, "Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage," The Hill, November 4, 2004. http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx

19) Martin Plissner, "Exit Polls to Protect the Vote," The New York Times, October 17, 2004.

20) Matt Kelley, "U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine," Associated Press, December 11, 2004. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html

Daniel Williams, "Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election," The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.

21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count," Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.

22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3. http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

23) Mitofsky International Web site. http://www.mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm

24) Tim Golden, "Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners," The New York Times, August 10, 1994.

25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.

26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., "The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data." FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9 http://freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf

27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.

28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.

30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3. http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf

32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.

33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102

34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.

36) Interview with John Zogby

37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.

39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.

40) "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount," U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006. http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf

41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.

42) The Washington Post, "Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States," November 2, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/elections/2004/charting.html

43) John McCarthy, "Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On," Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.

44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/oh/lpExt.dll?f=templates&fn=main-h.htm&cp=PORC

45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP?s Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.

46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.

47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/

48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006. http://www.dispatch.com/extra/extra.php?story=dispatch/2006/04/30/20060430-B1-02.html

49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.

50) Raw Story, "Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush." http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaign_letter2_105.php

51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf

52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf

53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.

54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.

55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.

57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005. http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334&SearchID
=73195662517954

58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections

60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.

61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html?ex=1254024000&en=
cd9ae70cb6e69619&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go ?Under the Radar? in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004. http://washtimes.com/national/20041027-115211-1609r.htm

63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html

64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.

65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2. http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf

66) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

67) Daniel Tokaji, "Early Returns on Election Reform," George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235

68) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.

70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).

72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041027/
NEWS09/410270361/-1/NEWS

73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4. http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf

74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.

Exposing the Myth of Cut and Run

2006-06-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

It's Time to Cut and Run From 'Cut and Run'

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, June 21, 2006; A02

Policy wonks of the left and right held a panel discussion at the National Press Club yesterday to ask the question: "Is Politics Brain-Dead?" Up on Capitol Hill, Congress was providing some clues.

Confronted with the tough issues -- Iraq, immigration, the minimum wage -- lawmakers weighed their options and then went with their default position: exchange taunts.

Not quite six minutes after the Senate chaplain prayed yesterday for God to use senators "as agents of your grace," Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) started the sloganeering. "If we break our promise and cut and run, as some would have us do, the implications could be catastrophic," he said. In case anybody missed that, he also said "we can't cut and run" twice on CBS News and issued a follow-up press release titled: "FRIST DENOUNCES DEMOCRATS' PLAN TO CUT AND RUN."

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) added: "If we cut and run in Iraq, what we will have done is prove what Osama bin Laden said."

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), an expert windsurfer, had heard quite enough of this nautical term. "Cut and run, cut and run, cut and run, cut and run -- that's their phrase," he told Don Imus. "My plan is not cut and run. Their plan is lie and die."

Fox News was on the story. "John Kerry calls it 'lie and die,' " anchor Bill Hemmer told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). "What do you say to that?"

"I think the sound-bite war is not going to be an effective way to fight the war," the sensible senator said.

But Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman had a different view. "There's a debate going on within the Democratic Party," he said on CNN. "Some are saying we need to cut and run, others are saying we need to cut and jog, and still others are saying we need to cut and walk."

Mehlman's metaphor may have been muddled -- "cut and run" involves anchor cable and sail lashings, not the human leg -- but he had lawmakers' sentiments right. If Democrats were cutting and running from Iraq, Republicans were cutting and running from a minimum-wage increase and immigration legislation.

First thing yesterday morning, reporters were summoned to House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office, where GOP leaders were huddling. When the lawmakers emerged, they announced that, rather than having a conference with the Senate to negotiate compromise immigration legislation, they would hold another round of hearings.

Reporters pointed out that the delay meant that immigration legislation, so recently a priority for Congress, would probably not happen this year. And the GOP leaders did little to discourage that view. "We're not foreclosing the possibility," was all Rep. Deborah Pryce (Ohio) would promise, adding that this would postpone the issue at least until fall.

Rep. Roy Blunt (Mo.), the majority whip, concurred: "I don't know how likely it is."

Cut and run! "The Republican House wants to defeat the immigration bill," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (Nev.) crowed in front of the cameras. "Is this part of the Orwellian message we continually get out of this administration?"

Republicans quickly tried to change the subject from their immigration cut and run to the Democrats' cut and run on Iraq. House Majority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) held a news conference and declared that Democrats have "no plan at all to confront the real threat of terrorism and to achieve victory in a global war on terror."

But David Rogers, a Wall Street Journal reporter and Vietnam veteran, had prepared an ambush for Boehner. "In Vietnam, they used to put us out in these fire support bases and hope we would get attacked," he said. "Is that what you are doing? You are putting people in Iraq and hoping they get attacked so you can bring out the terrorists?"

"No, no," Boehner protested.

Over on the Senate floor, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) was trying to insulate the party from the Republicans' cut-and-run charges on Iraq. He proposed a resolution "to express the sense of Congress that the government of Iraq should not grant amnesty to persons known to have attacked, killed or wounded members of the armed forces of the United States."

It was purely symbolic: The Iraqi government says it will not grant amnesty, and the minister who suggested it to The Washington Post last week resigned the next day. But the Iraq debate was all about symbolism, and Nelson's proposal was adopted, 79 to 19.

Next, when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) introduced a proposal to increase the minimum wage, and Republicans introduced an alternative, Democrats didn't even pretend that legislation might be produced. "Both will fail," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said with confidence. So why bring them up? "It allows both sides to proclaim a modicum of victory."

As evening approached, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) visited the Senate press gallery to talk about their proposal, to be introduced today, calling for the beginning of a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

The inevitable question arose: Won't this immediately be branded "cut and run"?

"The wording is very clear: It's not a cut-and-run strategy," Levin protested. "Our amendment is not in any sense a cut-and-run amendment."

Added Reed: "Throughout this whole endeavor, there's been more sloganizing than planning." He suggested that Democrats come up with a taunt of their own for Republicans: "I guess their position is 'we're there forever.' "

Before nightfall, Democrats had drafted a new press release. Title: "Bush Republicans Plan to be in Iraq Forever."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Their plan is lie and die. &mdash Senator John Kerry

Buying American Democracy - Rigged Elections

2006-06-07T07:58:00.000-08:00

Scary shit folks..

First we have computer programmer Clinton Curtis testifying that Congressman Tom Feeney hired him to prepare vote-rigging software. 12 Minutes

Also, there is the infamous statement by the owner of Diebold, as was reported by some as early as August 2003!!

Voting Machine Controversy

From the article:

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

And now there is the brand new article in Rolling Stone written by Robert Kennedy, Jr. about the 2004 election.

Was the 2004 election stolen?

These images illustrate some of the discrepencies:
Nationwide:

In Ohio, the deciding state:

Here is a segment from the article:

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)

In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.

In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)

The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it's determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results -- one of the last counties in the state to do so (192) -- the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice. (193) As the Conyers report concluded, ''It is impossible to rule out the possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred on election night in the locked-down facility.'' (194)

Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to these dozen counties. Ohio, like several other states, had an initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the twelve suspect counties -- as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio -- Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage. (195)

So how many elections has George W. Bush won?

How much longer is the Republican cartel going to get away with this?

Repost this and help spread the truth.

Jonah Goldberg: It's Iraq, stupid

2006-05-20T06:56:00.000-08:00

A response to his article on LATimes.com

It IS Iraq stupid.

The federal government, or rather the Bush theocratic autocracy, is burning $1B a week to occupy Iraq, or New Halliburtonstan as it may well be called.

Meantime gas prices hurl well above $3/gallon.

And you want to wave your little party hat and horn over whose economy? Not ours — we've shipped it off to China, along with all of those jobs you seem to
think we still have here.

Iran and North Korea are ready to hurl a lot more our way, more than Iraq ever could have.

Maybe it's time we hold November elections now. Before it's too late.

The federal government, or rather the Bush theocratic autocracy, is burning $1B a week to occupy Iraq, or New Halliburtonstan as it may well be called.

Incestuous Amplification

2006-05-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

"To oppose the invasion vocally was to be outside the media mainstream and to invite scorn. Like some nervous Democratic members of Congress right before the war, MSM (mainstream media) journalists and pundits seemed to scramble for political cover so as to not subject themselves to conservative catcalls. One year later, a pro-war writer for Slate conceded he was "embarrassed" by his support for the ill-fated invasion but he insisted, "you've got to take risks." But supporting the war posed no professional risk. The only MSM risks taken at the time of the invasion were by pundits who staked out an unambiguous position in opposing the war. Bush's rationale for war -- Saddam Hussein, sitting on a swelling stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, posing a grave and imminent threat to America -- turned out to be untrue. And for that, the press must shoulder some blame. Because the MSM not only failed to ask pressing questions, or raise serious doubts about the White House's controversial WMD assertion, but in some high-profile instances, such as with Judith Miller's reporting for the New York Times, the MSM were responsible for spreading the White House deceptions about Saddam's alleged stockpile; they were guilty of "incestuous amplification," as former Florida senator Senator Bob Graham called it. Being meek and timid and dictating administration spin amidst a wartime culture is one thing. But to be actively engaged in the spin, to give it a louder and more hysterical voice, is something else all together. In fact, the compliant press repeated almost every administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam. The fact that virtually every one of those claims turned out to be false only added to the media's malpractice."

Lapdogs

Cowardly and clueless, the U.S. media abandoned its post as Bush led the country into a disastrous war. A look inside one of the great journalistic collapses of our time.

By Eric Boehlert, Salon.com

Of John Hancock & "John Hancocks"

2006-05-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

"Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence was bold and prominent,and while he did not say the things about it often attributed to him, it is certainly the case that he was signing his own death warrant if he lost. It wasn't his signing in large script that was significant, but that he was the first to sign. We all have at least once in our lives to sign a John Hancock-- to take a principled stance that could get us, if not killed, at least in serious trouble. Otherwise, we'll have led the life of a timid slave and betrayed our own ethical beings, and we won't even have anything interesting to put on our tombstones."

Juan Cole,
Informed Comment

Subservience Or Citizenship

2006-04-20T10:41:00.000-08:00

"How many Americans have read the Constitution and know the Constitution, live the Constitution, breathe the Constitution, define their existence as Americans by the Constitution? Very few. And so what happens is, Americans have no concept of what citizenship is, what it is they're supposed to serve. Many Americans have become so addicted to a lifestyle that I say they're better consumers than they are citizens. .... And they will go out and attack those who do rock the boat--those who challenge authority.

"If you read the Constitution, you'll be struck by the first words: We the people of the United States. And yet ... Americans will say, in the name of security, they will give up their constitutional rights. Warrantless wiretapping--it's against the law! This is the sort of issue that should bring Americans streaming into the streets, saying, "Not on my watch." If your definition of patriotism is blind subservience to governmental authority, then you've just defined those Germans who supported Hitler, the Italians who supported Mussolini."

Scott Ritter,
Interview by David Rolland
Read complete interview here.

Thoughts from Beneath the Rubble

2006-04-19T11:27:00.000-08:00

"What makes the last few years so strange is that this administration has essentially been losing its campaigns, at home and abroad, to nobody. What comes to mind is the famous phrase of cartoonist Walt Kelly's character, Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Perhaps it's simply the case that -- in Rumsfeldian terms -- it's hard for people with the mentality of looters to create a permanent edifice, even when they set their minds to it.

"And yet, it wasn't so long ago that every step the Bush people took on either "front" came up dazzling code orange, brilliantly staving off rising political problems. As a result, it took just short of five miserable years, which seemed a lifetime, to reach this moment -- years which, historically, added up to no time at all. Is there another example of the rulers of a dominant global power -- who fancied themselves the leaders of a New Rome -- crashing and burning quite so quickly? In less than five years, Bush and his top officials ran their project into the ground. In the process, they took a great imperial power over a cliff and down the falls, without safety vests, rubber dinghies, or anyone at the bottom to fish us all out. "

In the Rubble
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

Cheney Enjoys Torture

2006-03-29T13:12:00.000-09:00

Cheney Enjoys Torture

Sent to me today:

"You might want to check out the entire piece. It is from a short interview you can find here: http://www.dailynews.com/ontv/ci_3641046

"The enitre quote comes about, it seems, when the subject of Dick Cheney comes up. Apparently, he 'enjoys' torture.

"I love the quote: 'The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers.' Something our boy president and the boys around him seem to have forgotten, if they ever knew it."

"The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does.

"...I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He's an employee of yours. It's worse than ridiculous. It's criminal; it's utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I'm saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don't do it. It's an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, "Well, they do it to us." Which is a ludicrous argument. ... The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what's legal and what we believed in. Now we're going to throw it away."

Eric Haney,
retired command sergeant major of the U.S. Army and a founding member of Delta Force, the military's elite covert counter-terrorist unit.

"The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it."

Taste the Irony...

2005-11-14T13:05:00.000-09:00

You can TASTE the irony - GOP Quotes from Kosovo

Well, Clinton sent us to war where we won and did not lose a single soldier. Here are some Republican quotes from the time:

"You can support the troops but not the president."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."
--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

Quote of the Day

2005-10-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

"I've searched my conscience, and I cannot accept that there are two equivalent sides to every story."

— Edward R. Murrow to CBS chairman William Paley, as he decides to take on the then ubiquitous right-wing nut Joe McCarthy. From a review of the movie, "Good Night".

"I've searched my conscience, and I cannot accept that there are two equivalent sides to every story."

A Moral Dilemma

2005-10-04T04:06:00.000-08:00

THE MORAL DILEMMA

This test has only one question, but it's a very important one. By giving an honest answer, you'll discover where you stand morally. It's a completely fictitious situation but you'll need to make a decision that's honest yet spontaneous.

You are in Miami, Florida. There's chaos all around you due to a hurricane with severe flooding. This is a flood of biblical proportions. You are a photojournalist for a major newspaper, and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster. The situation is nearly hopeless. You're attempting to shoot career-making photos. There are houses and people swirling around you, some disappearing under the water. Nature is unleashing all of its

Suddenly you see a man floundering in the water. He is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down with the debris. You move closer..somehow, he looks familiar. You suddenly realize who it is.

It's George W. Bush!

At the same time, you notice that the raging waters are about to take him under.....forever. You have two options: you can save the life of G.W. Bush

or

you can shoot a dramatic, Pulitzer Prize winning photo, documenting the death of one of the world's most powerful men.

So, here's the question, and please give an honest answer:

Would you select high contrast color film or would you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?

Plame As Day

2005-09-23T14:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.whateveralready.blogspot.com/

While You Were Watching Katrina
House Republicans derail probes of Plame affair
by Murray Waas
September 16th, 2005 3:10 PM

Republicans on three separate congressional committees this week derailed three formal "resolutions of inquiry" by Democrats that would have required the Bush administration to turn over sensitive information and records relating to the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Had the resolutions of inquiry been adopted, they would have led to the first independent congressional inquiries of the Plame affair, and perhaps even the public testimony of senior Bush administration aides such as Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, about their personal roles.

As things currently stand, a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, continues to conduct a grand jury investigation of Rove, Libby, and other White House officials, but the public has gained scant insight into what, if anything, that inquiry has uncovered.

Votes on all three House committees this week were along strictly partisan lines. The House Select Committee on Intelligence voted 11-9 on Thursday to adversely report H. Res. 418, which would have opened a formal inquiry by Congress of the Plame affair. The House International Relations Committee voted 26-21 against the same resolution one day earlier. And the House Judiciary Committee voted 15-11 on Wednesday as well against launching an inquiry.

Republicans argued that any vote in favor of the resolution might impair Fitzgerald’s ongoing probe. In the case of the House Intelligence Committee, they were aided when, at the very last minute, the Justice Department informed the committee that Fitzgerald himself opposed any independent inquiry by Congress at this point.

In a letter to the committee, dated September 14, William E. Moschella, an assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote: "Mr. Fitzgerald has advised that production at this time of the documents responsive to H. Res.418 and the other resolutions, and any attendant hearings, would interfere with his investigation. Accordingly, we request that the committee report adversely H. Res. 418."

Democrats, however, pointed out that Congress engaged in its own extensive formal investigations of Watergate and Whitewater even while special prosecutors conducted criminal inquiries.

Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, made just that point during the debate, telling his colleagues:

"Let us not forget the endless hearings in this committee and others on alleged Clinton-Gore campaign finance violations, the Whitewater claims, and Clinton White House Travel Office firings. These were matters all under Justice Department review at the time of our hearings.

"Finally, I must remind my colleagues of the numerous House and Senate hearings on Watergate that were simultaneous with the Justice Department's own investigation."

In making the case for the resolutions, Conyers also cited a recent Voice story about the rationale for appointing a special prosecutor. The article disclosed that Justice Department officials made that crucial move because investigators had serious concerns that then attorney general John Ashcroft continued to receive regular briefings about the inquiry despite the fact that Karl Rove—a close personal and political friend of Ashcroft—had become a subject of the probe. The story quoted senior law enforcement sources as saying that Ashcroft continued the briefings even after he was told investigators firmly believed that Rove had withheld important information from them during an FBI interview.

Conyers questioned the Justice Department's handling of the Plame investigation prior to Fitzgerald's appointment virtually since its inception, alleging that Bush administration officials botched the initial stages of the inquiry, or perhaps even purposely stymied the efforts of investigators:

"The purpose of this resolution is to get to the bottom of what happened and why the Justice Department slow-walked the investigation at the beginning. We know that, despite [initial] urgent pleas from the CIA for a criminal investigation into the leaker, the Justice Department and White House dragged their feet. The Department then waited three days before notifying the White House of the breach and subsequent investigation. The White House then waited an additional 11 hours before telling staff to preserve evidence."

Conyers wasn’t done there:

"We now know that then attorney general John Ashcroft insisted on being briefed on Department interviews of Mr. Rove that were conducted in connection with the leak. He did so despite his own long-standing ties to Mr. Rove; Mr. Ashcroft had paid Mr. Rove almost $750,000 for work on several campaigns. That Mr. Ashcroft eventually recused himself demonstrates there were conflicts of interest with his continued involvement."

A Justice Department spokesman did not return telephone calls for comment either on Wednesday or Thursday. Ashcroft also declined to comment.

The House Armed Services Committee will be soon the fourth congressional committee to consider the matter. Their vote is scheduled for September 20. But it's similarly unlikely that any Republicans will break ranks and vote in favor an inquiry.

Murray Waas will continue covering the Plame affair on his blog, www.whateveralready.blogspot.com.

Disappointed in Court Nominee Process

2005-09-23T08:47:00.000-08:00

Whoever is confirmed will have that seat for life. Young Roberts at 50 will be one of the youngest Chief Justices in U.S. Supreme Court history. That alone is precendence-breaking enough to revoke his nomination.

Disappointed in Court Nominee Process

I'm very disappointed in the current nominee and the process in which he's ascended to heir-apparent to lead the Supreme Court.

Not only does Roberts have limited experience as a jurist, he is not yet on the court and yet is being handed the keys to the Constitution, with absolutely no experience on the court he is now destined to lead.

It would well serve the nation to have selected one of the court moderates to lead this fragmented nation, as well as for two candidates to be floated in the confirmation process such that a filibuster war will not break out after Roberts nomination is over.

It behooves me that a lifetime appointment to the most important office in our government can be handled with such light disregard for scrutiny. It would be well worth our time to take a few more months of investigation into any nominees past and release all documents currently being withheld by the White House.

Surely as a corporate lawyer, Roberts has taken many actions that would greatly color his personal bias on the court. It is incumbent on the White House to stop their hide and deny tactics and show their true colors in the form of the documents accounting for Roberts past.

Whoever is confirmed will have that seat for life. Young Roberts at 50 will be one of the youngest Chief Justices in U.S. Supreme Court history. That alone is precendence-breaking enough to revoke his nomination.

New Postage Stamp

2005-09-21T19:09:00.000-08:00

The Postal Service created a stamp with a picture of President
Bush. The stamp was not sticking to envelopes. This enraged the
President, who demanded a full investigation.

After a month of testing, a special Presidential commission
presented the following findings:

1) The stamp is in perfect order.

2) There is nothing wrong with the applied adhesive.

3) People are spitting on the wrong side

Making bad dreams into nightmares

2005-09-20T16:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5273306-103677,00.html

Creating Islamist phantoms
We dreamed up 'al-Qaida'. Let's not do it again with 'evil ideology'

Adam Curtis
Tuesday August 30, 2005
Guardian

Rules that would guide the deportation of alleged terrorist sympathisers were published by the government last week. It is a key part of their attempt to deal with the "evil ideology" of Islamism and its role in inspiring terrorist attacks on our country. But there is growing unease about whether this response is right or will be effective in stopping future attacks. There is an even more serious fear that we might be making the situation worse.
This is exactly what happened in the reaction to the attacks on America in 2001. For years after 9/11 we were told that we faced a powerful, well-organised enemy, who had established a centrally coordinated command structure that needed to be sought out and crushed. We went storming into Iraq to prevent a rogue state from supplying WMD to this organisation. This would make the world a safer place. But the enemy was not an organised network, and going into Iraq has done the opposite of what we intended. Our actions have inspired resentment throughout the Middle East and Iraq is now the world centre of terrorist activity.

Last year I made a series of documentaries for the BBC, The Power of Nightmares, which showed how a fantasy image of the "al-Qaida" organisation was created. The films told how the response to the shocking events of September 11 2001 swung out of control, and the threat became exaggerated to a dangerous level. Although there was a serious terrorist threat, the films criticised the apocalyptic vision of what lay behind it - the "nightmare" of a uniquely powerful network, unlike any previous terrorist danger and capable of overwhelming our society and our democracy.

The Power of Nightmares said bluntly that this was a fantasy. The real threat came not from a network, but from individuals and groups linked only by an idea. Our energies were going into fighting a phantom enemy. We were looking for a network that didn't exist when we should have been dealing with an idea that does.

The evidence we have of what lies behind the London bombings confirms that this was the real nature of the threat. It is fascinating to see how suddenly all the terror "experts" have changed their tune. For three years they told us breathlessly about a terrifying global network. Now, suddenly, it has gone away and been replaced by "an evil ideology" that inspires young, angry Muslim males in our own society.

It is good that we now all agree on the nature of the threat, but there remains a danger that the "idea" will be simplified, exaggerated and distorted just as the "network" was, and that in this mood of fear the government will bring in policies that will alienate young Muslims further and drive them towards dangerous extremism.

Modern Islamism is a complex political movement with a history that goes back more than 50 years. Its most influential ideologist was an Egyptian school inspector, Sayyid Qutb. In the 50s he wrote a series of books that put forward a powerful critique of modern western culture and democracy, and called for a new type of utopian society in Muslim lands in which Islam would play a central political role.

Out of this has come a movement for revolutionary change in the Islamic world that includes an extraordinary range of groupings and variations on Qutb's original arguments. It is only a tiny minority in the Islamist movement who have developed these ideas into a politics that advocates terrorism against the west. Historians of Islamism have shown that this minority, grouped initially around Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri in the late 90s, turned to attacking the west only because of the failure of the wider movement to achieve its revolutionary aims in the Muslim world.

We must be aware of this distinction so as to avoid a witch-hunt against the whole Islamist movement. We may not agree with its reactionary vision of the political use of Islam and the pessimistic, anti-progressive beliefs that lie at the heart of Qutb's teachings, but it is essential to realise that there is no inherent link between these ideas and terrorism. There are worrying signs that journalists are confusing the murderous beliefs of a genuinely destructive minority with the political ideas of a much wider movement. By lumping Islamism into a frightening, violent, anti-western movement led by the "preachers of hate", they risk exaggerating and distorting the threat yet again.

The real danger is that, by suppressing Islamism, we will make its ideas more attractive to already marginalised young men. In the process we may inadvertently drive them further towards the extreme militant wings of the movement, and prove yet again the old adage that the real threat to democracy from terrorism is not the action but the reaction.

· Adam Curtis wrote and produced The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear, which was broadcast on BBC2 last October

Sadness

2005-09-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
September 14, 2005
A Fatal Incuriosity
By MAUREEN DOWD

I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth.

Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.

You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government.

At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.

Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."

At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.

As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."

President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.

He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.

How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?

Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.

Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.

Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.

The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.

The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father's term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew. And W.'s chief of staff, Andy Card, was the White House transportation secretary the senior President Bush sent to the rescue after FEMA bungled that one.

W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.

The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Chief Justice Bigot

2005-09-06T04:54:00.000-08:00

Chief Bigot

Alan Dershowitz: Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history. So here's the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won't hear on Fox News or from politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.

Let's begin at the beginning. Rehnquist bragged about being first in his class at Stanford Law School. Today Stanford is a great law school with a diverse student body, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it discriminated against Jews and other minorities, both in the admission of students and in the selection of faculty. Justice Stephen Breyer recalled an earlier period of Stanford's history: "When my father was at Stanford, he could not join any of the social organizations because he was Jewish, and those organizations, at that time, did not accept Jews." Rehnquist not only benefited in his class ranking from this discrimination; he was also part of that bigotry. When he was nominated to be an associate justice in 1971, I learned from several sources who had known him as a student that he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school's few Jewish students. He also was infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes.

As a law clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson while the court was considering several school desegregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist's memo, entitled "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases," defended the separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy "was right and should be reaffirmed." When questioned about the memos by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986, Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice, stating — under oath — that his memo was meant to reflect the views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation. According to historian Mark Tushnet, Justice Jackson's longtime legal secretary called Rehnquist's Senate testimony an attempt to "smear[] the reputation of a great justice." Rehnquist later admitted to defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks. He did not acknowledge that he committed perjury in front of the Judiciary Committee to get his job.

The young Rehnquist began his legal career as a Republican functionary by obstructing African-American and Hispanic voting at Phoenix polling locations ("Operation Eagle Eye"). As Richard Cohen of The Washington Post wrote, "[H]e helped challenge the voting qualifications of Arizona blacks and Hispanics. He was entitled to do so. But even if he did not personally harass potential voters, as witnesses allege, he clearly was a brass-knuckle partisan, someone who would deny the ballot to fellow citizens for trivial political reasons -- and who made his selection on the basis of race or ethnicity." In a word, he started out his political career as a Republican thug.

Rehnquist later bought a home in Vermont with a restrictive covenant that barred sale of the property to "any member of the Hebrew race."

Rehnquist's judicial philosophy was result-oriented, activist, and authoritarian. He sometimes moderated his views for prudential or pragmatic reasons, but his vote could almost always be predicted based on who the parties were, not what the legal issues happened to be. He generally opposed the rights of gays, women, blacks, aliens, and religious minorities. He was a friend of corporations, polluters, right wing Republicans, religious fundamentalists, homophobes, and other bigots.

Rehnquist served on the Supreme Court for thirty-three years and as chief justice for nineteen. Yet no opinion comes to mind which will be remembered as brilliant, innovative, or memorable. He will be remembered not for the quality of his opinions but rather for the outcomes decided by his votes, especially Bush v. Gore, in which he accepted an Equal Protection claim that was totally inconsistent with his prior views on that clause. He will also be remembered as a Chief Justice who fought for the independence and authority of the judiciary. This is his only positive contribution to an otherwise regressive career.

Within moments of Rehnquist's death, Fox News called and asked for my comments, presumably aware that I was a longtime critic of the late Chief Justice. After making several of these points to Alan Colmes (who was supposed to be interviewing me), Sean Hannity intruded, and when he didn't like my answers, he cut me off and terminated the interview. Only after I was off the air and could not respond did the attack against me begin, which is typical of Hannity's bullying ambush style. He is afraid to attack when there's someone there to respond. Since the interview, I've received dozens of e-mail hate messages, some of which are overtly anti-Semitic. One writer called me "a jew prick that takes it in the a** from ruth ginzburg [sic]." Another said I am "an ignorant socialist left-wing political hack …. You're like a little Heinrich Himmler! (even the resemblance is uncanny!)." Yet another informed me that I "personally make us all lament the defeat of the Nazis!" A more restrained viewer found me to be "a disgrace to the Law, to Harvard, and to humanity."

All this, for refusing to put a deceptive gloss on a man who made his career undermining the rights and liberties of American citizens.

My mother would want me to remain silent, but I think my father would have wanted me to tell the truth. My father was right.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His latest book is The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved (Wiley, 2005).

Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved. The information contained in Huffington Post commentary may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without prior written authority of huffingtonpost.com.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Rehnquist concluded the Plessy "was right and should be reaffirmed."

* Pay Attention *

2005-09-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

Lord knows Bush isn't --

September 3, 2005
United States of Shame By MAUREEN DOWD

Stuff happens.

And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.

America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.

Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.

Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "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. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives.

Bush and New Orleans

2005-09-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

Please read this, it is very indicative of how Bush policy is directly harming the country.

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Bush and New Orleans

SPIEGEL ONLINE - August 31, 2005, 11:22 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,372455,00.html

Former Clinton Advisor:

"No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"

By Sidney Blumenthal

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

REUTERS
(caption:An aerial view of the New Orleans airport underwater.)

Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

Chag Sameach

2005-04-26T05:26:00.000-08:00

I find this article still to be the most concise and comprehensive record on Israel:

Four Points for Israel

An excerpt, in time for Passover:

The 3,000-year Jewish connection

The only independent sovereign nations to ever exist in the Land of Israel were the two ancient Jewish commonwealths, the second of which was destroyed in 70 of the common era.

For 3,000 years, Jews have expressed the desire to return to their ancestral homeland: at the Passover Seder, the Yom Kippur service, in daily prayer, in the blessing after meals, under the wedding canopy, on the yearly day of national mourning Tisha B'Av, and by placing Israeli soil in the coffin of their deceased.

Centuries before the inception of Islam, Jews were yearning to return to Israel, and the Koran itself records this in many suras (chapters), such as 17:7, 17:104, and 5:21 that tells the Jews to "enter into the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you."

Centuries before the inception of Islam, Jews were yearning to return to Israel, and the Koran itself ... tells the Jews to "enter into the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you."

Hybrid Car Sales Soar in U.S. in 2004

2005-04-26T04:56:00.000-08:00

By DEE-ANN DURBIN, Associated Press Writer
Mon Apr 25, 7:30 AM ET

The lure of the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars helped drive healthy sales of electric and alternative-powered vehicles last year, according to new data that shows the hybrid market has grown by 960 percent since 2000.

New hybrid vehicle registrations totaled 83,153 in 2004, an 81 percent increase over the year before, according to data released Monday by R.L. Polk & Co., a Southfield-based firm that collects and interprets automotive data.

Even though hybrids still represent less than 1 percent of the 17 million new vehicles sold in 2004, major automakers are planning to introduce about a dozen new hybrids during the next three years.

Lonnie Miller, director of analytical solutions for Polk, said federal and state tax credits for fuel-efficient vehicles have helped spur hybrid sales. More people also are buying into the idea that driving a hybrid is socially responsible.

"What's different about this than other types of vehicles is that hybrids are about what people want to give back and what they want to feel they're doing with their vehicles," Miller said.

Despite the arrival of Ford Motor Co.'s Ford Escape hybrid in showrooms last year, Japanese automakers continued to control the vast majority of the U.S. market, Polk said. Japanese brands accounted for more than 96 percent of the hybrid vehicles registered.

Toyota Motor Corp., which was the first automaker to commercially mass-produce and sell hybrid cars, continues to dominate the market. The Toyota Prius, which went on sale in the United States in 2000, occupied 64 percent of the U.S. hybrid market last year, with 53,761 new Prius cars registered, Polk said.

Toyota is on track to double Prius sales again this year. The company sold 22,880 Prius cars in the first three months of the year, more than double the number it sold in the first three months of 2004, according to Autodata Corp. Toyota has said it plans to produce 100,000 Prius cars for the North American market this year.

The Honda Civic hybrid was second with 31 percent market share. Honda Motor Co. also sold several hundred Accord and Insight hybrids, which each commanded 1 percent of the market.

Ford sold 2,566 Escape hybrid sport utility vehicles, or about 3 percent of the market, Polk said.

Automakers are introducing hybrid versions of several models this year, including the Lexus RX400h, Mercury Mariner and Toyota Highlander SUVs. General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler AG already sell hybrid pickups, but the system they use is less fuel efficient.

Hybrid vehicles are powered by internal combustion engines but also are equipped with batteries that are recharged while driving and an electric motor to assist with power. They typically cost $3,000 to $4,000 more than traditional models.

Miller said hybrids could make up 30 to 35 percent of the U.S. market by 2015 as long as automakers remain committed to producing them and market to people who are passionate about driving them. While some analysts believe there's a limit to the number of consumers who will pay more for a hybrid, Miller said the cost of hybrids eventually will come down.

"Some people are thinking there's absolutely no reason that all vehicles shouldn't be hybrid. The technology is there," Miller said.

Polk said California was once again the top state for growth in hybrid vehicle registrations. More than 25,000 new hybrids were registered in California, a 102 percent increase over 2003. Virginia, Washington, Florida and Maryland rounded out the top five states for hybrid registrations, the same as in 2003.

Also, from Green Car Congress:

Pre-Orders for Lexus 400h Hybrid Soar

Living Will is Best Revenge

2005-04-06T04:40:00.000-08:00

Living Will is Best Revenge

-by ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
Published March 27, 2005

Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here's what mine says:

In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.

I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.

I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.

I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.

I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.

I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.

I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.

I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks of politically calculate bloviation.

I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz friars and all other hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they had known me since childhood.

I'm not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if Congress passed a "Bobby's Law" that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of tens of millions of other Americans without adequate health coverage.

Even if the "Bobby's Law" idea doesn't work out, I want Congress - especially all those self-described conservatives who claim to believe in "less government and more freedom" - to trample on the decisions of doctors, judges an other experts who actually know something about my case. And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate that gives them another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the economy.

In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an opportunity to divert the country's attention from the mounting political and legal troubles stemming from his slimy misbehavior.

And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his Harvard medical degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a boost to his 2008 presidential campaign.

I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on the basis of a snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.

Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent vegetative state, I'd want President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker when signing off on her death warrant as governor of Texas - to claim he was intervening in my case because it is always best "to err on the side of life."

I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the last moment to take responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen to anyone under DCF's care.

And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being on the face of the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be disregarded if the governor happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what's best for me, I won't be in any position to argue.

Read on

2005-04-05T13:06:00.000-08:00

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country -- if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country ... or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are disabled-minority-feminist-atheist-dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. None of these are read by the guy who is running the country into the ground

ProtectingCreation.org

2005-03-17T04:11:00.000-09:00

Permanent destruction of a nature preserve for 6 mos of oil ten years from now.

* Our Jewish tradition says, "When God created the first human beings, God led them around the Garden of Eden and said: "Look at my works! See how beautiful they are-how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it." (Midrash Kohelet Rabbah, 1 on Ecclesiastes 7:13)

COEJL Action wrote:
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 12:02:59 -0800 (PST)
From: COEJL Action
Subject: ARCTIC ALERT!

To Protect the Arctic, Our Voices Must Be Heard Today!

The U.S. Senate may vote as early as today (tomorrow at the latest) on the future of one of America's last great wild places, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Please take a moment to call your Senators (phone #'s at www.senate.gov) and ask them to support the Cantwell amendment to the Federal budget resolution. This amendment would continue to protect the Arctic Refuge from oil drilling.

Talking Points to Protect the Arctic Refuge

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's 19 million acres comprise one of the last places on earth where an intact expanse of arctic and sub-arctic lands remains protected.

* Drilling in the Arctic Refuge won't make a significant dent in meeting America's energy needs. U.S. Geological Survey scientists estimate that the refuge contains only enough oil to supply the U.S. for six months. And oil companies concede that the oil won't be available for at least 10 years.

* An irreplaceable natural treasure, the Arctic Refuge is home to caribou, polar bears, grizzly bears, wolves, golden eagles, snow geese and more. Millions of other birds use the Arctic Refuge to nest and as a critical staging area on their migratory journeys.

* The Arctic Refuge supports more than wildlife. For a thousand generations, the Gwich'in people of Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada have lived in harmony with these lands. To the Gwich'in, the Arctic coastal plain is sacred ground.

* Our Jewish tradition says, "When God created the first human beings, God led them around the Garden of Eden and said: "Look at my works! See how beautiful they are-how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it." (Midrash Kohelet Rabbah, 1 on Ecclesiastes 7:13)

Seven senators hold the swing votes that may decide this issue:

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)
Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR)
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA)
Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL)
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN)
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Sen. John Sununu (R-NH)

Now is the time to make sure that your Senators are listening. Let them know that as a constituent and an active member of the Jewish community, you care about protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Thanks in advance for your help.

Environmentalists contended that while new technologies have reduced the drilling footprint, ANWRs coastal plain still would contain a spider web of pipelines that would disrupt calving caribou and disturb polar bears, musk oxen and the annual influx of millions of migratory birds.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said even at peak production the refuge would account for less than 2.5 percent of U.S. oil needs.

"How in the world can this be the centerpiece of our energy policy?" asked Durbin, arguing that "more conservation and more fuel efficient automobiles would save more oil than the Alaska refuge would produce."

Senate Prepares to Vote on Arctic Drilling

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050316/ap_on_go_co/arctic_drilling_6

Belatedly

2005-03-05T10:52:00.000-09:00

I just read this on a friend's blog. Worth a second look (recount) if you ask me..

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Is the election final
Current mood: hopeful

My friend just sent me this....spread the word!

I compiled these excerpts to send to main stream news media. Take a look and draw your own conclusions. Then, if you are so moved, contact your representatives, copy and send it in to other journalists, and spread the word. The vote is not final until the Electoral College votes next month!

The implications are momentous. Kerry may have had a landslide victory hacked away from him at the central computers where the optically scanned ballots were counted. Is this an hysterical conspiracy theory? Go read these complete texts at the links. Does anyone know somebody in the law or media who might know what can be done on a grassroots or other level? Maybe contact Michigan Representative John Conyers, who is referenced below.

Dear respected journalists;

What story could be more important than a compromise to the legitimacy of the presidential election? The numbers from the election are very fishy. There is more than a sufficient mount of factual information easily available on the Florida and Ohio government web sites to warrant a main stream news story. Even if you do not jump to conclusions, please write a story that breaks the ice for further investigation and the important questions that the numbers beg to ask. The following excerpt if from a November 9, 2004 story entitled "Bush's Incredible vote tallies,." from the website:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111004W.shtml

"George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction - because of non-voters - Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans."

And here is an excerpt from a November 6 story called, "Evidence Mounts That the Vote May Have Been Hacked" from the website:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

"While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush."

MSNBC reporter, Keith Olbermann (KOlbermann@msnbc.com) reported the story on the air. He wrote the following blog on November 9th:

"We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Mondayís Countdown. There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who had personally encountered the "lockdown" during the vote count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who've written the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we should gently call the Electronic Voting Angst...

" the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.

I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters...

"all the data we used tonight on Countdown was on official government web sites in Cleveland and Florida."

" the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters."

Letter from California

2005-03-02T05:37:00.000-09:00

Dear President Bush:

Congratulations on your victory over all us non-evangelicals.

Actually, we're a bit ticked off here in California, so we're leaving.

California will now be its own country. And we're taking all the Blue States with us. In case you are not aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and all of the North East.

We spoke to God, and she agrees that this split will be beneficial to almost everybody, and especially to us in the new country of California. In fact, God is so excited about it, she's going to shift the whole country at 4:30 pm EST next Friday.

Therefore, please let everyone know they need to be back in their states by then.

So you get Texas and all the former slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches.

We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay. (Okay, we have to keep the Governator; we can live with that.)

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.

We get Harvard. You get Ole Miss.

We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get all the technological innovation in Alabama.

We get about two-thirds of the tax revenue, and you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms to support, and we know how much you like that.

Did I mention we produce about 70% of the nation's veggies? But, heck, the only greens the Bible thumpers eat are the pickles on their Big Macs.

Oh yeah, another thing, don't plan on serving California wine at your state dinners. From now on it's imported French wine for you. Ouch, bet that hurts.

Just so we're clear, the country of California will be pro-choice and anti-war.

Speaking of war, we're going to want all Blue States citizens back from Iraq.

If you need people to fight, just ask your evangelicals. They have tons of kids they're willing to send to their deaths for absolutely no purpose. And they don't care if you don't show pictures of their kids' caskets coming home.

Anyway, we wish you all the best in the next four years and we hope, really hope, you find those missing weapons of mass destruction. Seriously. Soon.

Sincerely,

California

Explaining Social Security

2005-02-23T12:43:00.000-09:00

This quote should help you understand the proposal to fix Social Security.

"Because the-all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those-changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be-or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the-like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate-the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those-if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."

George Bush
Explaining his plan to save Social Security,
Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

Support Our Troops

2005-02-16T04:31:00.000-09:00

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/whitehouseturnstablesonformeramericanpows

White House Turns Tables on Former American POWs

Tue Feb 15, 7:55 AM ET

By David G. Savage Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The latest chapter in the legal history of torture is being written by American pilots who were beaten and abused by Iraqis during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And it has taken a strange twist.

The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The rationale: Today's Iraqis are good guys, and they need the money.

The case abounds with ironies. It pits the U.S. government squarely against its own war heroes and the Geneva Convention.

Many of the pilots were tortured in the same Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers abused Iraqis 15 months ago. Those Iraqi victims, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, deserve compensation from the United States.

But the American victims of Iraqi torturers are not entitled to similar payments from Iraq, the U.S. government says.

"It seems so strange to have our own country fighting us on this," said retired Air Force Col. David W. Eberly, the senior officer among the former POWs.

The case, now being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, tests whether "state sponsors of terrorism" can be sued in the U.S. courts for torture, murder or hostage-taking. The court is expected to decide in the next two months whether to hear the appeal.

Congress opened the door to such claims in 1996, when it lifted the shield of sovereign immunity — which basically prohibits lawsuits against foreign governments — for any nation that supports terrorism. At that time, Iraq was one of seven nations identified by the State Department as sponsoring terrorist activity. The 17 Gulf War POWs looked to have a very strong case when they first filed suit in 2002. They had been undeniably tortured by a tyrannical regime, one that had $1.7 billion of its assets frozen by the U.S. government.

The picture changed, however, when the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Hussein from power nearly two years ago. On July 21, 2003, two weeks after the Gulf War POWs won their court case in U.S. District Court, the Bush administration intervened to argue that their claims should be dismissed.

"No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of this very brutal regime and at the hands of Saddam Hussein," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters when asked about the case in November 2003.

Government lawyers have insisted, literally, on "no amount of money" going to the Gulf War POWs. "These resources are required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq," McClellan said.

The case also tests a key provision of the Geneva Convention, the international law that governs the treatment of prisoners of war. The United States and other signers pledged never to "absolve" a state of "any liability" for the torture of POWs.

Former military lawyers and a bipartisan group of lawmakers have been among those who have urged the Supreme Court to take up the case and to strengthen the law against torturers and tyrannical regimes.

"Our government is on the wrong side of this issue," said Jeffrey F. Addicott, a former Army lawyer and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. "A lot of Americans would scratch their heads and ask why is our government taking the side of Iraq against our POWs."

The POWs' journey through the court system began with the events of Jan. 17, 1991 — the first day of the Gulf War. In response to Hussein's invasion of Kuwait five months earlier, the United States, as head of a United Nations coalition, launched an air attack on Iraq, determined to drive Iraqi forces from the oil-rich Gulf state. On the first day of the fighting, a jet piloted by Marine Corps Lt. Col. Clifford Acree was downed over Iraq by a surface-to-air missile. He suffered a neck injury ejecting from the plane and was soon taken prisoner by the Iraqis. Blindfolded and handcuffed, he was beaten until he lost consciousness. His nose was broken, his skull was fractured, and he was threatened with having his fingers cut off. He lost 30 pounds during his 47 days of captivity.

Eberly was shot down two days later and lost 45 pounds during his ordeal. He and several other U.S. service members were near starvation when they were freed. Other POWs had their eardrums ruptured and were urinated on during their captivity at Abu Ghraib.

All the while, their families thought they were dead because the Iraqis did not notify the U.S. government of their capture.

In April 2002, the Washington law firm of Steptoe & Johnson filed suit on behalf of the 17 former POWs and 37 of their family members. The suit, Acree vs. Republic of Iraq, sought monetary damages for the "acts of torture committed against them and for pain, suffering and severe mental distress of their families."

Usually, foreign states have a sovereign immunity that shields them from being sued. But in the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, Congress authorized U.S. courts to award "money damages … against a foreign state for personal injury or death that was caused by an act of torture, extrajudicial killing, aircraft sabotage [or] hostage taking."

This provision was "designed to hold terrorist nations accountable for the torture of Americans and to deter rogue nations from engaging in such actions in the future," Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and George Allen (R-Va.) said last year in a letter to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft that urged him to support the POWs' claim.

The case came before U.S. District Judge Richard W. Roberts. There was no trial; Hussein's regime ignored the suit, and the U.S. State Department chose to take no part in the case.

On July 7, 2003, the judge handed down a long opinion that described the abuse suffered by the Gulf War POWs, and he awarded them $653 million in compensatory damages. He also assessed $306 million in punitive damages against Iraq. Lawyers for the POWs asked him to put a hold on some of Iraq's frozen assets.

No sooner had the POWs celebrated their victory than they came up against a new roadblock: Bush administration lawyers argued that the case should be thrown out of court on the grounds that Bush had voided any such claims against Iraq, which was now under U.S. occupation. The administration lawyers based their argument on language in an emergency bill, passed shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, approving the expenditure of $80 billion for military operations and reconstruction efforts. One clause in the legislation authorized the president to suspend the sanctions against Iraq that had been imposed as punishment for the invasion of Kuwait more than a decade earlier.

The president's lawyers said this clause also allowed Bush to remove Iraq from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism and to set aside pending monetary judgments against Iraq.

When the POWs' case went before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,, the three-judge panel ruled unanimously for the Bush administration and threw out the lawsuit.

"The United States possesses weighty foreign policy interests that are clearly threatened by the entry of judgment for [the POWs] in this case," the appeals court said.

The administration also succeeding in killing a congressional resolution supporting the POWs' suit. "U.S. courts no longer have jurisdiction to hear cases such as those filed by the Gulf War POWs," then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in a letter to lawmakers. "Moreover, the president has ordered the vesting of blocked Iraqi assets for use by the Iraqi people and for reconstruction."

Already frustrated by the turn of events, the former POWs were startled when Rumsfeld said he favored awarding compensation to the Iraqi prisoners who were abused by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib.

"I am seeking a way to provide appropriate compensation to those detainees who suffered grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty at the hands of a few members of the U.S. military. It is the right thing to do," Rumsfeld told a Senate committee last year.

By contrast, the government's lawyers have refused to even discuss a settlement in the POWs' case, say lawyers for the Gulf War veterans. "They were willing to settle this for pennies on the dollar," said Addicott, the former Army lawyer.

The last hope for the POWs rests with the Supreme Court. Their lawyers petitioned the high court last month to hear the case. Significantly, it has been renamed Acree vs. Iraq and the United States.

The POWs say the justices should decide the "important and recurring question [of] whether U.S. citizens who are victims of state-sponsored terrorism [may] seek redress against terrorist states in federal court."

This week, Justice Department lawyers are expected to file a brief urging the court to turn away the appeal.

Bill was right even 10 years ago

2005-02-11T06:57:00.000-09:00

Email sent to me by someone:

i thought the excerpt below, from clinton's autobio, is very interesting given what's happening today. yet another example of how organized the republicans have been in strategy, messaging, communications...never doubt the power of language.

Clinton is writing about the time just before the 1994 midterm elections when the republicans came out with the contract on america:

"Besides giving the Repubs...a nat'l platform for the 1994 campaign, Gingrich provided them with a list of words to use in defining their Democratic opponents. His political action committee, GOPAC, published a pamphlet entitled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Among the "contrasting words" Newt suggested for labeling Democrats were: betray, cheat, collapse, corruption, crisis, decay,destruction, failure, hypocrisy, incompetent, insecure, liberal, lie, pathetic, permissive, shallow, sick, traitors. Gingrich was convinced that if he could institutionalize that kind of name-calling, he could define the Democrats into a minority party for a long time."

Humour from John Cleese

2005-02-07T15:49:00.000-09:00

Source unknown? Please send me attribution if you have it. Thanks

From John Cleese:
NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE
by Basil Fawlty
Fawlty Towers, Torquay, Devon, England

To the citizens of the United States of America,

In the light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. (Except Utah, which she does not fancy.)

Your new prime minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed. To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour', skipping the letter 'U' is nothing more than laziness on your part. Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters. You will end your love affair with the letter 'Z' (pronounced 'zed' not 'zee') and the suffix "ize" will be replaced by the suffix "ise". You will learn that the suffix 'burgh is pronounced 'burra' e.g. Edinburgh. You are welcome to respell Pittsburgh as 'Pittsberg' if you can't cope with correct pronunciation. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary". Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed". There will be no more 'bleeps' in the Jerry Springer show. If you're not old enough to cope with bad language then you shouldn't have chat shows. When you learn to develop your vocabulary then you won't have to use bad language as often.

2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of "-ize".

3. You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard. English accents are not limited to cockney, upper-class twit or Mancunian (Daphne in Frasier). You will also have to learn how to understand regional accents - Scottish dramas such as "Taggart" will no longer be broadcast with subtitles. While we're talking about regions, you must learn that there is no such place as Devonshire in England. The name of the county is "Devon". If you persist in calling it Devonshire, all American States will become "shires" e.g. Texasshire, Floridashire, Louisianashire.

4. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as the good guys. Hollywood will be required to cast English actors to play English characters. British sit-coms such as "Men Behaving Badly" or "Red Dwarf" will not be re-cast and watered down for a wishy-washy American audience who can't cope with the humour of occasional political incorrectness.

5. You should relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen", but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way through.

6. You should stop playing American "football". There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American "football" is not a very good game. The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US Rugby sevens side by 2005. You should stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the 'World Series' for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.15% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. Instead of baseball, you will be allowed to play a girls' game called "rounders" which is baseball without fancy team strip, oversized gloves, collector cards or hotdogs.

7. You will no longer be allowed to own or carry guns. You will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous in public than a vegetable peeler. Because we don't believe you are sensible enough to handle potentially dangerous items, you will require a permit if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

8. July 4th is no longer a public holiday. November 2nd will be a new national holiday, but only in England. It will be called "Indecisive Day".

9. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean. All road intersections will be replaced with roundabouts. You will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips. Fries aren't even French, they are Belgian though 97.85% of you (including the guy who discovered fries while in Europe) are not aware of a country called Belgium. Those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called "crisps". Real chips are thick cut and fried in animal fat. The traditional accompaniment to chips is beer which should be served warm and flat. Waitresses will be trained to be more aggressive with customers.

11. As a sign of penance 5 grams of sea salt per cup will be added to all tea made within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this quantity to be doubled for tea made within the city of Boston itself.

12. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all, it is lager. From November 1st only proper British Bitter will be referred to as "beer", and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as "Lager". The substances formerly known as "American Beer" will henceforth be referred to as "Near-Frozen Knat's Urine", with the exception of the product of the American Budweiser company whose product will be referred to as "Weak Near-Frozen Knat's Urine". This will allow true Budweiser (as manufactured for the last >1000 years in Pilsen, Czech Republic) to be sold without risk of confusion.

13. From November 10th the UK will harmonise petrol (or "Gasoline" as you will be permitted to keep calling it until April 1st 2005) prices with the former USA. The UK will harmonise its prices to those of the former USA and the Former USA will, in return, adopt UK petrol prices (roughly $6/US gallon - get used to it).

14. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

15. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy. Tax collectors from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).

16. Last but not the least, and for heaven's sake ... it's Nuclear as in "clear" NOT Nucular.

Thank you for your co-operation and have a great day.

Abstinence Makes the Hard-on Fonder

2005-01-31T15:37:00.000-09:00

Texas Teens Increased Sex After Abstinence Program

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Abstinence-only sex education programs, a major plank in President Bush's education plan, have had no impact on teenagers' behavior in his home state of Texas, according to a new study.

Despite taking courses emphasizing abstinence-only themes, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active, mirroring the overall state trends, according to the study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University.

"We didn't see any strong indications that these programs were having an impact in the direction desired," said Dr. Buzz Pruitt, who directed the study.

The study was delivered to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which commissioned it.

The federal government is expected to spend about $130 million to fund programs advocating abstinence in 2005, despite a lack of evidence that they work, Pruitt said.

"The jury is still out, but most of what we've discovered shows there's no evidence the large amount of money spent is having an effect," he said.

The study showed about 23 percent of ninth-grade girls, typically 13 to 14 years old, had sex before receiving abstinence education. After taking the course, 29 percent of the girls in the same group said they had had sex.

Boys in the tenth grade, about 14 to 15 years old, showed a more marked increase, from 24 percent to 39 percent, after receiving abstinence education.

Abstinence-only programs, which have sprouted up in schools across the nation, cannot offer information about birth control and must promote the social and health benefits of abstaining from sex.

Pruitt said he hoped the study would bring about changes in the content of abstinence-promoting programs.

"These programs seem to be much more concerned about politics than kids, and we need to get over that," he said.

One program technique has been to try to bolster students' self-esteem, based on the theory that self-confident teenagers would not have sex. Those programs, which sometimes do not even mention sex, have shown no effect, Pruitt said.

Other programs that focus on the social norms and expectations appear to be more successful, he said.

The federal government is expected to spend about $130 million to fund programs advocating abstinence in 2005, despite a lack of evidence that they work

Which America hating Minority Are You?

2005-01-28T13:52:00.000-09:00

Just a little more humor today :)

I am a Hippy

Which America Hating Minority Are You?

Take More Robert & Tim Quizzes
Watch Robert & Tim Cartoons

Knock, knock

2005-01-28T06:11:00.000-09:00

Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its condition is improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are illusional spin from the liberal media. Illuminating rooms is hard work. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effort. Why do you hate freedom?

GOP TV

2005-01-26T11:37:00.000-09:00

Full article at http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2281&e=5&u=/thenation/132147

GOP TV

Tue Jan 25,10:15 AM ET
Op/Ed - The Nation
Ari Berman

These two charts (here and here) by Media Matters deserve more attention, for they overwhelmingly refute the ridiculous notion of "liberal media" dominance on cable TV news. Here are the explosive findings: During inauguration day coverage, Republicans and conservatives outnumbered progressives nineteen to seven on Fox, ten to one on CNN and thirteen to two on MSNBC. On prime-time, the trend continued. Conservatives outnumbered liberals twenty-five to four on Fox News, seven to one on CNN and nine to five on MSNBC. When the occasional Democrat did actually appear, he or she was usually paired against a rival Republican, whereas most conservatives appeared solo or with fellow ideologues. Even a panel discussion with CNN's Carlos Watson included four Republicans, and only one Democrat and one swing voter.

If John Kerry had been inaugurated, would Democrats have outnumbered conservatives by 10-1 margins? We think not. It says something very troubling about the state of the mainstream media when Fox News has a fairer guest ratio than CNN or MSNBC. Though the inauguration coverage ratcheted the partiality meter to unforeseen proportions, this type of skewed presentation has existed on the television news for years.

During the presidential debates, MSNBC's pre and post-debate panels consistently skewed right, featuring all-Republican panels and GOP guests who spoke before, and more often, than their fellow Democrats. Even the respected Sunday talk shows suffer from conservative coddling. Since the election, CBS's Face the Nation has featured eleven current or former Republican officials, compared to seven Democrats. Host Bob Schieffer even admitted his imbalance in an interview with, tellingly, Sean Hannity. "I had Senator Frist on for the entire show. We had Secretary of State Powell on for the entire broadcast. In one broadcast, we had three Republicans on and didn't have a Democrat."

Sad, but true. Schieffer's counterpart, the idolized Tim Russert, also stacks his Meet the Press panels, regularly pitting unabashed conservatives like The New York Times' William Safire and National Review's Kate O'Beirne against carefully non-aligned establishment journalists such as Newsweek's Evan Thomas or the Washington Post's David Broder, who refuses to even vote, lest it corrupt his non-partisan credentials.

As Bush bombs his way to freedom abroad, our own domestic institutions require closer inspection. With Republicans already controlling Washington, a one-party media is the last thing US democracy needs.

Textbook Case on Why You Must Always Vote

2004-11-22T07:27:00.000-09:00

Texas Textbook Crisis

The political ascendance of Christian conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s was fueled by their coordinated effort to win seats on school boards, city councils and other local bodies. A leader of the Christian Coalition said at the time that he would be willing to train an evangelical to run for dogcatcher.

Conservative forces began targeting the Texas Board of Education in the 1990s. Some, including Leo, ran for election unopposed.

Revision Marches to Social Agenda

By Scott Gold Times Staff Writer

SPRING, Texas � Outside the Spring Church of Christ, a large roadside sign says a lot about the prevailing sensibility in this cordial town. It reads: "Support New Testament Morality."

This is the home and powerbase of Terri Leo, a state Board of Education member representing 2.5 million people in East Texas.

At the urging of Leo and several other members � who describe themselves as Christian conservatives � the board this month approved new health textbooks for high school and middle school students after publishers said they would tweak references to marriage and sexuality.

One agreed to define marriage as a "lifelong union between a husband and a wife." Another deleted words that were attacked by conservatives as "stealth" references to gay relationships; "partners," for example, was changed to "husbands and wives." A passage explaining that adolescence brings the onset of "attraction to others" became "attraction to the opposite sex."

Leo said she pushed for the changes to combat the influence of "liberal New York publishers" who by "censoring" the definition of marriage were legitimizing same-sex unions.

Some education advocates have criticized the board's decision.

"This was never about defining marriage," said Samantha Smoot, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based nonprofit that opposes what it calls religious "extremism." "It was an effort to get anti-gay propaganda in the books."

Gilbert Sewall, director of the New York-based American Textbook Council � an independent organization that reviews textbooks � also criticized the Texas-approved books' promotion of abstinence-only sex education.

Such programs are "naive and confused," said Sewall, who described himself as an "educational conservative."

Research, much of it conducted by the federal government, has raised a host of questions about the effectiveness of abstinence programs in preventing disease and pregnancy. Teenage girls who are taught in the programs do wait longer before having sex, many experts believe, but are less likely to use protection when they do � causing them to contract sexually transmitted diseases at the same rates as those who have sex earlier.

"I have very little use for this religion-driven curriculum," Sewall said. "This confuses sex and moral education."

Texas is the second-largest buyer of textbooks in the nation, after California. Books purchased here wind up in classrooms across the nation, because publishers are loath to create new editions for smaller states.

As a result, five social conservatives on the 15-member Texas board, frequently joined by five more moderate Republicans, have enormous clout � and often control the content used to teach millions of children.

Publishers have no choice but to heed many of the group's wishes, said Don McLeroy, a dentist, Sunday school teacher and Texas Board of Education member.

"They've got to sell books," he said. "It's business."

Conservatives' efforts over the years to edit textbooks are legendary here. In a nod to those who believe God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, a sentence saying the ice age took place "millions of years ago" was changed to "in the distant past." Descriptions of environmentalism have been attacked as antithetical to free-enterprise ideals; a passage describing the cruelty of slavery was derided as "overkill."

The pace of such efforts to alter curriculum is expected to increase because Christian conservatives are "emboldened" by the Republican gains on election day, Leo said.

The board's stance on the health texts, some observers said, speaks to a critical factor in the GOP's recent success: a recognition by evangelical conservatives that all politics is local.

The political ascendance of Christian conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s was fueled by their coordinated effort to win seats on school boards, city councils and other local bodies. A leader of the Christian Coalition said at the time that he would be willing to train an evangelical to run for dogcatcher.

Conservative forces began targeting the Texas Board of Education in the 1990s. Some, including Leo, ran for election unopposed.

Success at the local level has been used as a springboard to national power, said Robert Simonds, president of California-based Citizens for Excellence in Education; the group, which helped train the first wave of Christian conservative candidates, recently has lobbied for the withdrawal of Christians from the "secularist" public school system.

"It's like an athlete," Simonds said. "If you want to be a top-level baseball or football player, first you have to learn to run. So we ran.

"The secular world has jumped on it, but only after seeing so much success in Christian education and the like."

But Evan Wolfson, director of Freedom to Marry � a New York group that seeks marriage rights for gays and lesbians � said that the conservatives' drive to control local and state political boards might not look smart in the long run if their agendas were seen as mean-spirited.

"It does not help our kids to use them as pawns for divisive social agendas," he said. "It might be astute in the short term, but not in any meaningful sense for our kids or our country."

Sorry Everybody

2004-11-17T19:10:00.000-09:00

Please visit this site.

http://www.sorryeverybody.com/

Reality check--bounced

2004-11-04T13:21:00.001-09:00

The Red Zone
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

With the Democratic Party splattered at his feet in little blue puddles, John Kerry told the crushed crowd at Faneuil Hall in Boston about his concession call to President Bush.

"We had a good conversation," the senator said. "And we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need, the desperate need, for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today I hope that we can begin the healing."

Democrat: Heal thyself.

W. doesn't see division as a danger. He sees it as a wingman.

The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.

W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

Mr. Bush, whose administration drummed up fake evidence to trick us into war with Iraq, sticking our troops in an immoral position with no exit strategy, won on "moral issues."

The president says he's "humbled" and wants to reach out to the whole country. What humbug. The Bushes are always gracious until they don't get their way. If W. didn't reach out after the last election, which he barely grabbed, why would he reach out now that he has what Dick Cheney calls a "broad, nationwide victory"?

While Mr. Bush was making his little speech about reaching out, Republicans said they had "the green light" to pursue their conservative agenda, like drilling in Alaska's wilderness and rewriting the tax code.

"He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now," one Bush insider predicts. "He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war." Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create.

Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow. And "confident" is not the first word that comes to mind for the foreign policy of a country that has alienated everyone except Fiji.

Vice continued, "Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love." Only Dick Cheney can make "to serve and to guard" sound like "to rape and to pillage."

He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq.

Just as Zell Miller was so over the top at the G.O.P. convention that he made Mr. Cheney seem reasonable, so several new members of Congress will make W. seem moderate.

Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and warned that "the gay agenda" would undermine the country. He also characterized his race as a choice between "good and evil" and said he had heard there was "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools.

Jim DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, said during his campaign that he supported a state G.O.P. platform plank banning gays from teaching in public schools. He explained, "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."

John Thune, who toppled Tom Daschle, is an anti-abortion Christian conservative - or "servant leader," as he was hailed in a campaign ad - who supports constitutional amendments banning flag burning and gay marriage.

Seeing the exit polls, the Democrats immediately started talking about values and religion. Their sudden passion for wooing Southern white Christian soldiers may put a crimp in Hillary's 2008 campaign (nothing but a wooden stake would stop it). Meanwhile, the blue puddle is comforting itself with the expectation that this loony bunch will fatally overreach, just as Newt Gingrich did in the 90's.

But with this crowd, it's hard to imagine what would constitute overreaching.

Invading France?

Arlen's Intentions

2004-11-04T10:03:00.000-09:00

Let's hope this actually holds.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041104/ap_on_go_su_co/eln_specter_supreme_court

Bush Is Warned About Anti-Abortion Judges

Thu Nov 4,10:16 AM ET

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA - The Republican expected to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee (news - web sites) next year bluntly warned newly re-elected President Bush (news - web sites) on Wednesday against putting forth Supreme Court nominees who would seek to overturn abortion rights or are otherwise too conservative to win confirmation.

Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), fresh from winning a fifth term in Pennsylvania, also said the current Supreme Court now lacks legal "giants" on the bench.

"When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade (news - web sites), I think that is unlikely," Specter said, referring to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

"The president is well aware of what happened, when a number of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster," Specter added, referring to Senate Democrats' success over the past four years in blocking the confirmation of many of Bush's conservative judicial picks. "... And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning."

With at least three Supreme Court justices rumored to be eyeing retirement, including ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist (news - web sites), Specter, 74, would have broad authority to reshape the nation's highest court. He would have wide latitude to schedule hearings, call for votes and make the process as easy or as hard as he wants.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., expressed confidence Wednesday that Bush will have more success his second term in winning the confirmation of his judicial nominees.

"I'm very confident that now we've gone from 51 seats to 55 seats, we will be able to overturn this what has become customary filibuster of judicial nominees," Frist said in Orlando, Fla.

Legal scholar Dennis Hutchinson said Specter's message to the White House appears to be "a way of asserting his authority" as he prepares to chair the Judiciary Committee when Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, is term-limited from keeping the post next year.

"What he may be trying to do is say, 'Don't just think that I'm going to process what you send through. I have standards, I'm going to take an independent look, you have to deal with me,'" said Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

When asked Wednesday about Specter's impending chairmanship, another Republican on the panel, Sen. John Cornyn (news, bio, voting record) of Texas, did not offer a ringing endorsement.

"We'll have to see where he stands," said Cornyn, a close friend of Bush who worked to get all of the president's nominees through the Senate. "I'm hoping that he will stand behind the president's nominees. I'm intending to sit down and discuss with him how things are going to work. We want to know what he's going do and how things are going to work."

While Specter is a loyal Republican — Bush endorsed him in a tight Pennsylvania GOP primary — he routinely crosses party lines to pass legislation and counts a Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record) of Delaware, as one of his closest friends.

A self-proclaimed moderate, he helped kill President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. Specter called both nominees too extreme on civil rights issues. Sessions later became a Republican senator from Alabama and now sits on the Judiciary Committee with Specter.

Despite a bruising challenge from conservatives this year in Pennsylvania's GOP primary, Specter won re-election Tuesday by an 11-point margin by appealing to moderate Republicans and ticket-splitting Democrats, even as Pennsylvania chose Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) over Bush.

A former district attorney, Specter also bemoaned what he called the lack of any current justices comparable to legal heavyweights like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and Thurgood Marshall, "who were giants of the Supreme Court."

"With all due respect to the (current) U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites), we don't have one," he said.

Though he refused to describe the political leanings of the high court, Specter said he "would characterize myself as moderate; I'm in the political swim. I would look for justices who would interpret the Constitution, as Cardozo has said, reflecting the values of the people."
___

Eds: Associated Press writer Jesse J. Holland in Washington contributed to this report.

(SUBS graf 4, "The president, to correct quote to 'number of his nominees' sted 'bunch')

Progress

2004-11-03T07:06:00.000-09:00

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass, 1857

NO STOLEN ELECTIONS! www.Nov3.US

The Election is not over yet. Ohio has days ahead.

2004-11-03T06:15:00.000-09:00

Crucial Ohio Hinges on Absentee Ballots

"Under Ohio law, the counting of provisional ballots begins 10 days after the election."

By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS, Associated Press Writer

COLUMBUS, Ohio - For John Kerry (news - web sites) to win Ohio, he must look to a yet-to-be calculated number of uncounted votes and hope he can win enough to overcome President Bush (news - web sites)'s lead in the state.

As dawn broke Wednesday, Bush led Kerry by about 135,000 votes after an Election Day of high turnout and long lines that had some voters casting ballots long after midnight.

But the heavy voting also delayed a final count of crucial ballots: At least 54 counties still had some uncounted absentee votes.

In addition, an Associated Press survey of election boards found about 140,000 provisional ballots in Ohio, cast by people whose names don't show up on regular poll lists. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell estimated the number could be as high as 175,000.

Still unknown was the number of provisional ballots in Lucas, Mahoning and Summit counties — large urban centers that lean Democratic.

A new canvass was taking place Wednesday.

Kerry could win if he did extremely well among provisional voters, but it would mean taking more than the 48.5 percent of regularly cast ballots he finished the night with.

Under Ohio law, the counting of provisional ballots begins 10 days after the election.

With all precincts reporting, unofficial results found Bush had 2,794,346 votes, or 51 percent, while Kerry had 2,658,125, or 48.5 percent.

Four years ago in Ohio, Bush defeated Al Gore (news - web sites) by 3.6 percentage points in an election that saw a total of 4.7 million votes in the presidential race.

The margin was 165,000 votes, larger than the 107,000 provisional ballots counted in the election.

Differences between Democrats and Republicans

2004-10-31T03:49:00.000-09:00

This was sent to me by a Nader supporter who is trying to galvanize support for Kerry and to defeat Bush.

http://www.americanvoice2004.org/askdave/01askdave.html

Q. I'm thinking of not voting in the next election except maybe for a third-party candidate. After all, there's not a dime's worth of difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. Is there?

A. Your opinion is shared by millions and is reinforced daily by David Letterman, Jay Leno, patronizing political ads and banal 20 second news bites from candidates. Politicians do themselves no favors by chanting empty slogans like a mantra: "lower taxes", "more jobs", "a strong defense", "a safer environment".

But for those willing to look behind the trite catchphrases of politicians and the shockingly shallow way in which the media reports on politics a considerable difference emerges. This is best demonstrated not by looking at what politicians say, but how they vote.

Surprisingly, that's not easy to do. T.V. and newspapers rarely break down votes on legislation by party. So if the vote in the Senate, say, is 70-30 in favor of a bill the average person could conclude that the bill had gained widespread bipartisan support when a closer examination might reveal that 100 percent of one party voted in favor and 75 percent of the other party voted against.

Here are just a few of the legislative votes that illuminate the differences between the parties

See article for list and brief explanation of these key issues that divide these two parties.

http://www.americanvoice2004.org/askdave/01askdave.html

This article also links to ten major items that congressional votes would reflect strong party preferences:

http://www.americanvoice2004.org/101304charts.html

Yom Kippur Al Chait Confessional by George W. Bush

2004-10-02T07:15:00.000-08:00

This would be amusing if it weren't so true...

Yom Kippur Al Chait Confessional by George W. Bush

For the sin I have committed before you by promising
to be a compassionate conservative, but showing no compassion.

For the sin I have committed before you by waging an
unjust war in Iraq in the false name of fighting terrorism.

For the sin I have committed before you by waging a
political campaign built on fear, not hope.

For the sin I have committed before you by cynically
exploiting the horrors of 9/11 for political gain.

For the sin I have committed before you by ignoring
the plight of the poorest and weakest among our citizens.

For the sin I have committed before you by the
unnecessary deaths of 1,000 young Americans, the
injuries to thousands more, and the deaths and
injuries to untold numbers of Iraqis.

For the sin I have committed before you by lying about
my record of service in the National Guard.

For these sins, oh forgiving God, forgive me, pardon me, grant me atonement.

For the sin I have committed before you by dividing
rather than uniting our people.

For the sin I have committed before you by ignoring
the loss of over one million jobs in the U.S.

For the sin I have committed before you by doing
nothing to provide health insurance to millions of
Americans, and to stem rapidly rising prescription
medicine and other health care costs.

For the sin I have committed before you by
systematically weakening environmental and pollution
regulations, thereby endangering public health and
destroying precious wilderness resources.

For the sin I have committed before you by promising
to leave no child behind, and then failing to
adequately fund educational programs.

For the sin I have committed before you by allowing
the assault weapons ban to die, allowing these
grotesque weapons to return to our streets.

For the sin I have committed before you by bearing
false witness about the reasons for going to war in Iraq.

For the sin I have committed before you by
perpetuating the falsehood that increasing homeland
security requires a weakening of civil rights.

For the sin I have committed before you by imposing a
veil of secrecy on government decision making processes.

For these sins, oh forgiving God, forgive me, pardon me, grant me atonement.

For the sin I have committed before you by allowing
the ends to justify any means.

For the sin I have committed before you by lowering
taxes for only the very wealthiest Americans,
enriching the few at the expense of the many.

For the sin I have committed before you by running a
cynical and destructive presidential campaign,
designed to destroy rather than just defeat my opponent.

For the sin I have committed before you by fighting a
war in Iraq to divert attention from failures in the
just war on terrorists, and from failing to act
against the looming nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea.

For the sin I have committed before you by turning a
massive government surplus into a massive deficit in
less than four years, thereby burdening future
generations with untold debt.

For the sin I have committed before you by
unnecessarily damaging relations with American friends
and allies throughout the world.

For these sins, oh forgiving God, forgive me, pardon me, grant me atonement.

For the sin I have committed before you by promoting a
personal ideology rather than the interests of the people.

For the sin I have committed before you by arrogance
and swagger, speaking with a forked tongue, and for
the haughty exercise of power.

For the sin I have committed before you by appointing
arch-conservative judges to the federal judiciary.

For the sin I have committed before you by
irresponsibly damaging the reputation of the United
States throughout the world.

For the sin I have committed before you by enriching
my friends in the conduct of government and military affairs.

For the sin I have committed before you by encouraging
xenophobia on the part of the American people.

For the sin I have committed before you by attempting
to impose my extreme religious and moralistic values
on the entire nation, and weakening the separation
between church and state.

For the sin I have committed before you by
characterizing all who oppose me as evil, and all who
agree with me as good.

And for the sin I have committed before you by failing
to acknowledge my responsibility for all these sins,
for attempting to blame others for them, and for all
the injury and damage they have caused to individuals,
the Nation, and the future.

For these sins, oh forgiving God, forgive me, pardon me, grant me atonement.

MAY 5765 BE A YEAR OF PEACE, HAPPINESS AND GOOD HEALTH, AND, REGIME CHANGE!

The Unwinnable War, by James Carroll

2004-10-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

The Boston Globe
September 7, 2004

The unwinnable war, by James Carroll

GEORGE W. BUSH finally told the truth. It happened last week when he said of the war on terrorism, "I don't think you can win it."

We know it was the truth because of the way it embarrassed him, because of the way his handlers immediately required him to repudiate it ("I probably need to be more articulate"), and because the mass of Republicans were deaf to it. Just as Bush had inadvertently spoken the exact truth about the war on terrorism at its onset ("This crusade, this war on terrorism"), he had inadvertently done so again.

Six months ago, I took a leave from this column. I had been writing obsessively about the war for more than two years, and my truth had become woefully repetitive. "Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq," I wrote in March, "the main outcome of the war is clear. We have defeated ourselves."

In the time since I wrote that, I confess, even my bleak vision has come to seem like the good old days. After all, that was before Abu Ghraib, before the siege of Najaf, before the Sunnis and Shi'ites discovered that their hatred of the occupiers outweighed their hatred of each other, before the handover of Fallujah to outlaw militants, before Ahmed Chalabi's disgrace (and last week's rehabilitation), before Washington's installation in Baghdad of a blatant puppet regime, before the death toll of young Americans approached 1,000.

Citizens of the United States are a decent, fair-minded people. The only reason we tolerate what is being done in our name in Iraq is that, for us, this war exists only in the realm of metaphor. The words "war on terrorism" fall on our ears much in the way that "war on poverty" or "war on drugs" did.

War is an abstraction in the American imagination. It lives there, cloaked in glory, as an emblem of patriotism. We show our love for our country by sending our troops abroad and then "supporting" them, no matter what. When images appear that contradict the high-flown rhetoric of war -- whether of young GIs disgracefully humiliating Iraqi prisoners or of a devastated holy city where vast fields of American-created rubble surround a shrine -- we simply do not take them in as real. Thinking of ourselves as only motivated by good intentions, we cannot fathom the possibility that we have demonized an innocent people, that what we are doing is murder on a vast scale.

There is the single most troubling aspect of the war in Iraq. We launched it against the wicked Saddam Hussein, yet the majority of so-called "insurgents" against whom our forces are arrayed hated Hussein more than we did. We are killing people by the thousands who threaten absolutely nothing of ours.

The boys in the Iraqi resistance are not terrorists. They are not Ba'athists. They are not jihadists -- or they weren't until we gave them reason to be. Whatever the justifications for the invasion of Iraq were a year and a half ago, why are we in this war today? And as President Bush might ask, how in the world do we "win" it?

Obviously, something else is going on below the surface of all the stated reasons for this war. The Republican convention last week was gripped with war fever, and the fever itself was the revelation. War is answering an American need that has nothing to do with the Iraqi people.

Even though the war on terrorism is indeed, as the president said, a "crusade," it has nothing real to do with Islam either, although Islam is surely its target. Not Islam as it actually exists in dozens of different settings and cultures across the globe, but an imagined Islam that exists only in the troubled minds of a people who project "evil" outward and then attack it. Alas, it is an old Christian habit.

The war, meanwhile, answers the Bush administration's need to justify an unprecedented repressiveness in the "homeland," and simultaneously prompts widespread docile submission to the new martial law. But more deeply still, by understanding ourselves as a people at war, we Americans find exemption from the duty to face the grotesque shame of what we are doing in the world.

So the final truth about this war is that there is no real enemy (although we are creating enemies by the legion). There will be no victory. I resume this regular column by declaring, President Bush was right.

/James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe./

The war, meanwhile, answers the Bush administration's need to justify an unprecedented repressiveness in the "homeland," and simultaneously prompts widespread docile submission to the new martial law.

Keep the faith

2004-10-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

Spread the word

Monday, September 20th, 2004
Put Away Your Hankies...a message from Michael Moore

9/20/04

Dear Friends,

Enough of the handwringing! Enough of the doomsaying! Do I have to come there and personally calm you down? Stop with all the defeatism, OK? Bush IS a goner -- IF we all just quit our whining and bellyaching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, "Oh, it's all over! We are finished! Bush can't win! Waaaaaa!"

Hell no. It's never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished -- they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying.

They are relentless and that is why we secretly admire them -- they just simply never, ever give up. Only 30% of the country calls itself "Republican," yet the Republicans own it all -- the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the majority of the governorships. How do you think they've been able to pull that off considering they are a minority? It's because they eat you and me and every other liberal for breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the planet.

Look at us -- what a bunch of crybabies. Bush gets a bounce after his convention and you would have thought the Germans had run through Poland again. The Bushies are coming, the Bushies are coming! Yes, they caught Kerry asleep on the Swift Boat thing. Yes, they found the frequency in Dan Rather and ran with it. Suddenly it's like, "THE END IS NEAR! THE SKY IS FALLING!"

No, it is not. If I hear one more person tell me how lousy a candidate Kerry is and how he can't win... Dammit, of COURSE he's a lousy candidate -- he's a Democrat, for heavens sake! That party is so pathetic, they even lose the elections they win! What were you expecting, Bruce Springsteen heading up the ticket? Bruce would make a helluva president, but guys like him don't run -- and neither do you or I. People like Kerry run.

Yes, OF COURSE any of us would have run a better, smarter, kick-ass campaign. Of course we would have smacked each and every one of those phony swifty boaty bastards down. But WE are not running for president -- Kerry is. So quit complaining and work with what we have. Oprah just gave 300 women a... Pontiac! Did you see any of them frowning and moaning and screaming, "Oh God, NOT a friggin' Pontiac!" Of course not, they were happy. The Pontiacs all had four wheels, an engine and a gas pedal. You want more than that, well, I can't help you. I had a Pontiac once and it lasted a good year. And it was a VERY good year.

My friends, it is time for a reality check.

1. The polls are wrong. They are all over the map like diarrhea. On Friday, one poll had Bush 13 points ahead -- and another poll had them both tied. There are three reasons why the polls are b.s.: One, they are polling "likely voters." "Likely" means those who have consistently voted in the past few elections. So that cuts out young people who are voting for the first time and a ton of non-voters who are definitely going to vote in THIS election. Second, they are not polling people who use their cell phone as their primary phone. Again, that means they are not talking to young people. Finally, most of the polls are weighted with too many Republicans, as pollster John Zogby revealed last week. You are being snookered if you believe any of these polls.

2. Kerry has brought in the Clinton A-team. Instead of shunning Clinton (as Gore did), Kerry has decided to not make that mistake.

3. Traveling around the country, as I've been doing, I gotta tell ya, there is a hell of a lot of unrest out there. Much of it is not being captured by the mainstream press. But it is simmering and it is real. Do not let those well-produced Bush rallies of angry white people scare you. Turn off the TV! (Except Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers -- everything else is just a sugar-coated lie).

4. Conventional wisdom says if the election is decided on "9/11" (the fear of terrorism), Bush wins. But if it is decided on the job we are doing in Iraq, then Bush loses. And folks, that "job," you might have noticed, has descended into the third level of a hell we used to call Vietnam. There is no way out. It is a full-blown mess of a quagmire and the body bags will sadly only mount higher. Regardless of what Kerry meant by his original war vote, he ain't the one who sent those kids to their deaths -- and Mr. and Mrs. Middle America knows it. Had Bush bothered to show up when he was in the "service" he might have somewhat of a clue as to how to recognize an immoral war that cannot be "won." All he has delivered to Iraq was that plasticized turkey last Thanksgiving. It is this failure of monumental proportions that is going to cook his goose come this November.

So, do not despair. All is not over. Far from it. The Bush people need you to believe that it is over. They need you to slump back into your easy chair and feel that sick pain in your gut as you contemplate another four years of George W. Bush. They need you to wish we had a candidate who didn't windsurf and who was just as smart as we were when WE knew Bush was lying about WMD and Saddam planning 9/11. It's like Karl Rove is hypnotizing you -- "Kerry voted for the war...Kerry voted for the war...Kerrrrrryyy vooootted fooooor theeee warrrrrrrrrr..."

Yes...Yes...Yesssss....He did! HE DID! No sense in fighting now...what I need is sleep...sleeep...sleeeeeeppppp...

WAKE UP! The majority are with us! More than half of all Americans are pro-choice, want stronger environmental laws, are appalled that assault weapons are back on the street -- and 54% now believe the war is wrong. YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO CONVINCE THEM OF ANY OF THIS -- YOU JUST HAVE TO GIVE THEM A RAY OF HOPE AND A RIDE TO THE POLLS. CAN YOU DO THAT? WILL YOU DO THAT?

Just for me, please? Buck up. The country is almost back in our hands. Not another negative word until Nov. 3rd! Then you can bitch all you want about how you wish Kerry was still that long-haired kid who once had the courage to stand up for something. Personally, I think that kid is still inside him. Instead of the wailing and gnashing of your teeth, why not hold out a hand to him and help the inner soldier/protester come out and defeat the forces of evil we now so desperately face. Do we have any other choice?

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

Age of Reason?

2004-09-08T02:19:00.000-08:00

This is NOT a bush bashing piece. This is a reasoned essay that I think sums up exactly what I hate about the party now. I hope you will read it and appreciate what the author is saying.

By Garrison Keillor
August 26, 2004

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element.

The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day,who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned - and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics.

"Bipartisanship is another term for date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for re-election on a platform of tragedy - the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good. Our beloved land has been fogged with fear - fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public ducation to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the "end of innocence," or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this.

Bush record on women

2004-09-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

Interesting...the Bush administration and women's lives...

Body:
Thanks to my friend "Marcia" for passing this on to me. It's an interesting look at this administration's policies when it comes to women (for the most part -- there are a couple items that deal with general issues.) On a side note, women historically vote in larger numbers than men, so I would encourage sending this to all your female friends. Just another thing to throw on top of the pile of reasons why this administration must go.

--Tim, from "Get Rid of Bush"

High Jumps for the Uninsured
GOP PLATFORM: Our efforts to build healthier families must begin with women -- our mothers, our daughters, our grandmothers and grand-daughters...

Over One Million Women Lost Health Insurance Under Bush's Watch. In 2003, the number of uninsured Americans increased by 1.4 million to 45 million. Overall, 13.9 percent (20.2 million) of women in America were uninsured in 2002 -- an increase of 1.3 million under Bush. [www.census.gov, Income Poverty and Health Survey, August 2004]

Belly Flopping on Equal Rights
GOP PLATFORM: We praise President Bush for his strong record on civil rights enforcement...
Wage Gap Widens As Bush Weakens Anti-Discrimination Enforcement. 2003 Census figures show that women's wages declined for the first time since 1995, with women earning just 76 cents on the dollar to men. At the same time, the DOL has ended the equal pay matters initiative, which identified wage discrimination by federal contractors, and the Department of Justice has brought fewer employment discrimination suits than the past three administrations. [Daily Labor Report, 1/12/04; NWLC, "Slip-sliding Away: The Erosion of Hard Won Gains for Women Under the Bush Administration and an Agenda for Moving Forward." To view these striking statistics, http://www.nwlc.org

Sinking Social Security
GOP PLATFORM: Voluntary personal retirement accounts for today's workers will make Social Security more equitable, but just as importantly, will put the system on firm financial footing.

Bush Pension Plans Only Benefit The Wealthiest Americans. Bush's push for individual retirement accounts and tax-free pension savings plans aid wealthy individuals who can afford to save for social security, while leaving middle- and lower-income individuals at a disadvantage. Wage earners in the top tenth percentile would enjoy two-thirds of the benefits from the tax subsidies. The loss of tax revenue would drain government coffers and threaten Medicare and Social Security when baby boomers can begin to take advantage of it. [New Republic Online, 2/4/04; CBO, 3/04; Leonard Burman, William G. Gale, and Peter R. Orszag, "The Administration's Savings Proposals: Preliminary Analysis," Tax Notes, 3/303; Tax Policy Center, 2/4/03]

Fouling Female Entrepreneurs
GOP PLATFORM: Small businesses are the most potent forces of economic growth and job creation in America...And they have been the primary vehicles of economic advance for American women.

Bush Blocked Federal Program to Assist Female-Owned Companies in Obtaining Government Contracts. The Women's Procurement Program was passed into law in 2000, but the Bush Administration blocked its implementation. Bush's new budget FY 2005 budget still fails to implement the program. In 2002, the federal government failed to meet its own women-owned business goal of 5 percent of contracting, a loss of an estimated $4.95 billion in opportunities for female entrepreneurs! [Business Courier, 8/15/03; Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones Press Release, 3/17/04; House Small Business Committee Democratic Staff, Federal Agencies: Closed to Small Business, 6/25/03]

Back-peddling for Flex/Comp-Time
GOP PLATFORM: More flexibility in the workplace will help Americans to better manage the demands of work and family... Comp-time and flex-time enable employees to choose paid time off as an alternative to overtime pay.

The Family-Time Flexibility Act: A Stealth Attempt to Make Americans Work More for Less Pay. The Republican-sponsored Family-Time Flexibility Act allows employers to compensate overtime work with time off in lieu of the standard time-and-a-half pay required for overtime. In reality, it allows employers to schedule workers for more hours worked per week, while avoiding paying for them. The new law provides less flexibility for workers, who will lack discretion in using their compensation time. The bill also lacks safeguards that will protect workers from employers who coerce workers to take flex time instead of overtime pay or from employers who discriminate against workers who choose overtime pay by allocating them fewer hours of overtime work. [Column, St. Louis Dispatch, 7/28/03; EPI Briefing Paper, 4/03; AFL-CIO, www.afl-cio.org]

"Poll" Vaulting with Votes
GOP PLATFORM: Our national commitment to a voting process that has integrity was underscored in 2002 when the Congress passed and the President signed the Help America Vote Act. We will continue to do all we can to ensure that every vote counts for all Americans.

Bush's Delay In Implementing HAVA Prevents Voting Reforms for Presidential Election. In October 2002, President Bush signed the "Help America Vote Act," in an effort to provide states with enough time to correct election irregularities by the 2004 elections. Bush delayed appointing commissioners to enact HAVA for over a year, and he limited the commission's funding. As a result, HAVA will not be able to create uniform federal guidelines for the November elections. [Chicago Tribune, 10/30/03, White House Bulletin, 10/29/03; New York Times, 10/17/02]

Landing The Perfect Zero In Support of Female Athletes
GOP PLATFORM: We support a reasonable approach to Title IX that seeks to expand opportunities for women without adversely affecting men's athletics.

Bush Guts Title IX. For every year Bush has been in office, his administration has tried to eliminate funding for the Women's Education Equity Act, which helps schools comply with Title IX and sponsors programs to promote gender equity in schools. Although Congress has restored funding for the act each year, the Women's Education Equity Resource Center, which coordinated the Act's programs, has been eliminated. [NWLC, "Slip-sliding Away: The Erosion of Hard Won Gains for Women Under the Bush Administration and an Agenda for Moving Forward,"]

Lost among all the swift boat rhetoric...

2004-08-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

Sent to me from Tim:

This was posted in one of my blogs by my myspace friend, Sarah. I just read it and thought it was worth sharing with all of you. Thanks to Sarah for posting it.

--Tim, from "Get Rid of Bush"

Your Children are Burning
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 24 August 2004

Ladybug! Ladybug!
Fly away home.
Your house is on fire,
And your children all gone.

- Children's nursery rhyme, author unknown

The presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John Kerry are at each other's throats like dogs in a fighting pit over a war that ended 29 years ago. The mainstream news media, along with the alternative news media, have enjoyed watching the show, dutifully reporting every detail and nuance of the fiery exchanges between the camps.

Somewhere in these last 24 days of August, however, while arguing over a three-decades-old war, we managed to forget that another war is happening. Here are some details that have been missed:

Army Spc. Armando Hernandez, age 22; Army Spc. Anthony J. Dixon, age 20;Marine Cpl. Dean P. Pratt, age 22; Army Spc. Justin B. Onwordi, age 28; Marine Sgt. Juan Calderon Jr., age 26; Army Pfc. Harry N. Shondee, Jr., age 19; Marine Capt. Gregory A Ratzlaff, age 36; Army Sgt. Tommy L. Gray, age 34; Marine Lance Cpl. Joseph L. Nice, age 19; Marine Gunnery Sgt. Elia P. Fontecchio, age 30; Army Spc. Donald R. McCune, age 20; Marine Sgt. Moses D. Rocha, age 33; Army Pfc. Raymond J. Faulstich Jr., age 24; Marine Sgt. Yadir G. Reynoso, age 27; Marine Lance Cpl. Larry L. Wells, age 22; Army Spc. Joshua I. Bunch, age 23; Marine Cpl. Roberto Abad, age 22; Army Pfc. David L. Potter, age 22; Marine Lance Cpl. Jonathan W. Collins, age 19; Army Capt. Andrew R. Houghton, age 25; Marine Lance Cpl. Tavon L. Hubbard, age 24; Marine Staff Sgt. John R. Howard, age 26; Army Capt. Michael Yury Tarlavsky, age 30; Marine Lance Cpl. Kane M. Funke, age 20; Marine Lance Cpl. Nicholas B. Morrison, age 23; Army 1st Lt. Neil Anthony Santoriello, age 24; Marine Corps Pfc. Geoffrey Perez, age 24; Marine Corps Pfc. Fernando B. Hannon, age 19; Army Spc. Mark Anthony Zapata, age 27; Army 2nd Lt. James Michael Goins, age 23; Army Sgt. Daniel Michael Shepherd, age 23; Army Pfc. Brandon R. Sapp, age 21; Army Sgt. David M. Heath, age 30; Army Spc. Brandon T. Titus, age 20; Marine Lance Cpl. Caleb J. Powers, age 21; Army Spc. Jacob D. Martir, age 21; Marine Sgt. Harvey E. Parkerson III, age 27; Marine Lance Cpl. Dustin R. Fitzgerald, age 22; Army Pfc. Henry C. Risner, age 26; Pfc. Kevin A. Cuming, age 22; 1st Lt. Charles L. Wilkins III, age 38; Pfc. Ryan A. Martin, age 22.

That is the list of dead American soldiers in Iraq from the last 24 days. That is August, so far. Two other American soldiers - Army Sgt. Bobby E. Beasley, age 36, and Army Staff Sgt. Craig W. Cherry, age 39 - were killed in Afghanistan by an improvised explosive device on August 7th. We don't talk about that war anymore, either. 964 dead American soldiers, 52 since August 1st.

522 days ago, the administration of George W. Bush began the 'Shock and Awe' bombing campaign in Iraq, an opening salvo that has broadened into a conflict which has left well over ten thousand innocent Iraqi civilians dead. According to the rhetoric that loosed those bombs 74 weeks ago, we went into Iraq because:

Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, unmanned aerial drones to deliver these agents, mobile biological weapons labs, and uranium 'yellowcake' from Niger for use in the development of nuclear bombs.

The Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein enjoyed operational relationships with Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists, and were involved in the attacks of September 11. Because of this relationship, Hussein would happily hand over the aforementioned weapons of mass destruction for bin Laden to use against the United States.

The Iraqi people desperately want a democratic government, and will welcome the United States as liberators.

Saddam Hussein was a bad man.

Let's take these one at a time.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found. The few 'unmanned aerial drones' were pathetic model-airplane specimens apparently made from tongue depressors and Q-tips, none of which had a prayer off getting off the ground. The 'mobile biological weapons labs' were in fact helium weather balloon launching platforms sold to Iraq by the British in the 1980s. The 'yellowcake' story was based upon fabricated evidence, and has led to a political scandal involving the exposure of a deep-cover CIA agent whose husband had the gall to call Bush a liar in the public prints.

No relationship whatsoever has been established between Hussein and bin Laden. In fact, bin Laden despised Hussein because Hussein was a self-styled Socialist, Godless to the core, who killed every Islamic fundamentalist he could get his hands on. The U.S. has, in fact, done bin Laden a great service by disposing of his Iraqi enemy. Now, the stage is set for an Islamic fundamentalist takeover of Iraq, something bin Laden would very much like to see. As for Hussein giving bin Laden weapons of mass destruction, well...you can't give what you don't have.

It is entirely possible the Iraqi people would have embraced democracy, if that is what Bush's plan actually had in mind. Unfortunately for them, the whole push for democracy was a farce to begin with; Bush wanted to establish a government-by-remote-control in Iraq, so as to maintain control of the oil fields and the development of military bases. In a nation where the Shia enjoy a 60% majority, a democratic vote would have elected a Shia government, which would have then had the temerity to act as it pleased, regardless of American desires. It was never going to happen, and it never will happen, so long as Bush's people man the stick.

Saddam Hussein was indeed a bad man, whose fortunes were created and augmented by the U.S. government over a period of 20 years. We knew he was developing and using chemical weapons. We helped him do it. We didn't care, so long as he was gassing Iranians. Beyond that, the math is pretty straightforward. If the U.S. is going to adopt an Invade Every Country Run By A Bad Man foreign policy doctrine, everyone reading these words who approves of the notion better haul ass down to their local military recruiting office. We're going to need every warm body we can get. How about you, and right now. Go.

These guys went:

Army Spc. Armando Hernandez, age 22; Army Spc. Anthony J. Dixon, age 20;Marine Cpl. Dean P. Pratt, age 22; Army Spc. Justin B. Onwordi, age 28; Marine Sgt. Juan Calderon Jr., age 26; Army Pfc. Harry N. Shondee, Jr., age 19; Marine Capt. Gregory A Ratzlaff, age 36; Army Sgt. Tommy L. Gray, age 34; Marine Lance Cpl. Joseph L. Nice, age 19; Marine Gunnery Sgt. Elia P. Fontecchio, age 30; Army Spc. Donald R. McCune, age 20; Marine Sgt. Moses D. Rocha, age 33; Army Pfc. Raymond J. Faulstich Jr., age 24; Marine Sgt. Yadir G. Reynoso, age 27; Marine Lance Cpl. Larry L. Wells, age 22; Army Spc. Joshua I. Bunch, age 23; Marine Cpl. Roberto Abad, age 22; Army Pfc. David L. Potter, age 22; Marine Lance Cpl. Jonathan W. Collins, age 19; Army Capt. Andrew R. Houghton, age 25; Marine Lance Cpl. Tavon L. Hubbard, age 24; Marine Staff Sgt. John R. Howard, age 26; Army Capt. Michael Yury Tarlavsky, age 30; Marine Lance Cpl. Kane M. Funke, age 20; Marine Lance Cpl. Nicholas B. Morrison, age 23; Army 1st Lt. Neil Anthony Santoriello, age 24; Marine Corps Pfc. Geoffrey Perez, age 24; Marine Corps Pfc. Fernando B. Hannon, age 19; Army Spc. Mark Anthony Zapata, age 27; Army 2nd Lt. James Michael Goins, age 23; Army Sgt. Daniel Michael Shepherd, age 23; Army Pfc. Brandon R. Sapp, age 21; Army Sgt. David M. Heath, age 30; Army Spc. Brandon T. Titus, age 20; Marine Lance Cpl. Caleb J. Powers, age 21; Army Spc. Jacob D. Martir, age 21; Marine Sgt. Harvey E. Parkerson III, age 27; Marine Lance Cpl. Dustin R. Fitzgerald, age 22; Army Pfc. Henry C. Risner, age 26; Pfc. Kevin A. Cuming, age 22; 1st Lt. Charles L. Wilkins III, age 38; Pfc. Ryan A. Martin, age 22.

Now they are dead. They never found weapons of mass destruction, they never found a connection between Saddam and 9/11, they never got the chance to create a democracy, and they were never fully informed that part of their mission was the removal from power of a former employee of the United States government.

In Iraq today, 780,000 cubic yards of human and industrial waste is dumped into the Diyala River every day by one sewage plant. The Diyala joins the Tigris seven miles downstream. There isn't anything the plant can do about it; it is shattered from the war. Power, water, road, health care and educational infrastructures are completely wrecked. The World Bank estimates that it will cost $55 billion to repair all of this damage, and it will take over four years to do it.

$24 billion in U.S. tax money has been allocated to 'rebuild' Iraq. According to Christian Parenti, who has reported from Iraq on the reconstruction process for The Nation magazine, "Only $5.3 billion had been allocated to specific reconstruction contracts as of late June 2004. According to a report from the White House Office of Management and Budget, of the $18.4 billion reconstruction honey-pot approved last fall only $366 million had been spent by late June - that is, invested in Iraq. Instead of creating 250,000 jobs for Iraqis, as was the original goal, at most 24,000 local workers have been hired."

"Most amazing of all," writes Parenti, "the OMB report showed that not a single cent of US tax money had been spent on Iraqi healthcare, water treatment or sanitation projects - though $9 million was dithered away on administrative costs of the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority. Most of the little that has been invested in healthcare, water treatment and sanitation has come from Iraqi oil revenues, managed for most of last year by the Development Fund for Iraq, a US controlled successor to the UN-run Oil for Food program. In all, the CPA spent roughly $19 billion of Iraqi oil money - on what exactly is not quite clear."

And we wonder why there is an 'insurgency.' We wonder why a nobody named Moqtada al-Sadr has emerged as an Iraqi version of Thomas Jefferson, fighting the good fight against imperial usurpers. We wonder why so many Iraqis flock to his banner, pick up a weapon, and shoot Americans.

Sit in the dark for a year, be unemployed because all the jobs have gone to non-Iraqis, have no place to see your children schooled, have no place to bring your children if they get sick, drink water that tastes like something you squeezed into your toilet, and stand a good chance whenever you step outside of being shot by a sniper, blown up by a laser-guided bomb, or run down by a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and you might think about picking up a weapon, too.

This is how terrorists and suicide bombers are created. Desperation is the seed, time is the fertilizer, and rage is the crop reaped by American soldiers sent far from home to die because they were lied to, as were we all.

This is, perhaps, the most galling aspect of the whole Swift Boat Veterans nonsense. It has distracted us from realizing that our children still burn in Iraq, while simultaneously insulting every veteran who was given a medal for service in action. It implies that medals awarded for service in Vietnam somehow do not count, which when taken to the end of the argument, implies that medals awarded for service anywhere do not count.

In a recent and eloquent truthout essay, Vietnam veteran John Cory wrote the following words: "There are veterans of all conflicts, who fall in love with the terrible sweet beauty of war. Men who polish their armor long after the parades have faded. Their glory is not in duty, honor, and country; but in the carnival mirrors of their own warped reflections. These are veterans who march with swagger and blaring brass, like small boys struggling to be seen and heard. There are veterans who have paid passage through the heart of darkness; who dedicate their lives to eliminating the horrors that hide behind their eyes at night, when they dream. These veterans testify to the unreal and repulsive acts of war that forever wound the soul. And there are veterans who let it go and never look back again. Not that they forget, they simply choose not to dwell in those memories. They seek peace of mind and hope."

The men who have foisted this rending open of old wounds upon us are the ones who polish their armor, who revel in their own warped reflections. They insult fellow veterans everywhere. My father earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam. Should he give it back? The men and women serving and dying in Iraq have earned thousands of medals, many of them Purple Hearts to replace missing legs or faces. Should they give theirs back?

How many medals did George W. Bush earn to allow him to make this frontal assault upon those who served in his stead a generation ago, and those who serve now in the free-fire zone he placed them in with his deceptions?

When a person puts on the uniform of the United States military and swears an oath, that person is promising to sacrifice their life for their country. The only promise they expect in return is that their life not be spent for no good reason. That promise was broken.

Do not forget your dying children. They wear the uniform of your country, they live and die for all of us. Some lie still, wrapped in your flag. Some walk the land trying to remember, or trying to forget, how they got their scars so long ago. Some yet fight, in a war of choice that was not their doing. Do not forget them. Do not insult them. They are your children.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

More GOP lies and deception

2004-08-19T02:55:00.000-08:00

latest info on kerry bronze star. seems the main critic is just being a patsy for the gop. surprise surprise

Kerry Bronze star legitimate, Bush still a war pussy

Now if only we can find someone who remembers W even being in the girl scouts during Nam.

A Vietnam veteran who claims Sen. John Kerry lied about being under fire during a Mekong Delta engagement that won Kerry a Bronze Star was under constant fire himself during the same skirmish, according to the man's own medal citation, a newspaper reported.

The newly obtained records of Larry Thurlow show that he, like Kerry, won a Bronze Star in the engagement and that Thurlow's citation said he also was under attack, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Thurlow, also like Kerry, commanded a Navy Swift boat during the Vietnam War. Thurlow swore in an affidavit last month that Kerry was "not under fire" when he rescued Lt. James Rassmann from the Bay Hap River.

Thurlow's records, obtained by the Post under the Freedom of Information Act, include references to "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at all five boats in the flotilla that day. In his Bronze Star citation, Thurlow is praised for helping a damaged Swift boat "despite enemy bullets flying about him."

Cold Turkey, by Kurt Vonnegut

2004-08-17T07:52:00.000-08:00

"For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? 'Blessed are the peacemakers in the Pentagon? Give me a break!"

----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------

A couple people asked about the first Vonnegut article I posted a couple months ago, so here it is for those that missed it the first time around.

--Tim, from "Get Rid of Bush"

Cold Turkey
by Kurt Vonnegut

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America's becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

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

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that's a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who've said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. ...

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

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

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does "A.D." signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That's entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson's next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

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

And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

The same can be said about this morning's edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."

So there's another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls' basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it's comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.
Which one are you in this country? It's practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren't one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven't decided, I'll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you're for the poor, you're a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative.

What could be simpler?

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

My government's got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We're spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call "Native Americans."

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven't noticed, they've already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you'll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I've been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn't seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I'll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver's license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won't be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't like TV news, is it?

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

[n.b. Zero was invented by the Indians not Arabs. It reached the west via trade routes.]

Act now to protect our national forests

2004-08-17T07:23:00.000-08:00

The country you save may be your own.

----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------

Thanks to my friend Amit for sending this one over. This message hits close to home for me, as I worked briefly last year with PENNPIRG on behalf of the Sierra Club to stop this awful legislation. Please pass this along.

--Tim, from "Get Rid of Bush"

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

They've finally done it. For the past three and a half years, I've been writing to you about the Bush administration's efforts to undermine the Roadless Area Conservation Rule that protects 58.5 million acres of America's wild forests. But last month, the Bush administration proposed to repeal the roadless rule in its entirety - and allow timber, oil, and mining interests to tear a spider web of roads through America's last wild forests.

Please take a moment right now to submit an official comment to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth and let the Bush administration know that you oppose the wholesale destruction of America's last wild forests. Then - even if you've never done so before - ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this along; there is no more important time to act.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser:

http://wildforests.com/wildforests.asp?id=11&id4=ES

Background

Last month, the Bush administration proposed to repeal protections for 58.5 million acres of America's pristine national forests. The Bush administration proposal would allow many of President Bush's top campaign contributors in the timber, mining and oil industries to log, mine, and drill in pristine areas that provide 60 million Americans with clean drinking water and provide habitat for over 1600 endangered species. Even for an administration that has weakened so many environmental and public health protections, this proposal is extreme.

The Bush administration proposal would repeal the Roadless Rule that was enacted in January 2001 to protect 58.5 million acres of our last wild forests from logging and road-building. The Roadless Rule ensures that forests will continue to provide clean drinking water, habitat for wildlife, and endless opportunities for recreation and solitude. It was finalized after decades of scientific study, 600 public hearings, and 1.6 million comments in support of the rule. It is the most popular conservation initiative in our nation's history; more than 2.5 million Americans have submitted comment supporting the rule.

This support has reached into every sector of society. Even major wood products consumers like Staples, K.B. Homes and Hayward Lumber think logging America's last pristine forests makes so little sense that they've written the Bush administration to urge protection of America's roadless national forests. Now, it's only extremist elements of the timber, oil and mining industries that support logging these areas — but it's those elements that the Bush administration is listening to.

Fortunately, we now have the opportunity to stand up to these powerful industries and send a clear message to the Bush administration that Americans want to protect our last pristine forests. Please take a moment right now to submit an official comment to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. Then — even if you've never done so before — ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this along; there is no more important time to act.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser:

http://wildforests.com/wildforests.asp?id=11&id4=ES

Sincerely,

Janet S. Domenitz
MASSPIRG Executive Director
JanetD@masspirg.org
http://www.MASSPIRG.org

P.S. Thanks again for your support. Please feel free to share this
e-mail with your family and friends.

I Love You, Madame Librarian, By Kurt Vonnegut

2004-08-16T17:00:00.000-08:00

I Love You, Madame Librarian
By Kurt Vonnegut

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven't noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven't noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O'Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

-k.v.

Bush v. Bush

2004-08-13T17:08:00.000-08:00

Non-partisan debate with Bush

Bush v. Bush: Bush v. Bush:

http://www.williamkapell.com/pub/bushvbush.mov

George W Flip Flop

2004-08-11T17:17:00.000-08:00

The shocking truth the media ignores

From: (Madelin McKinnon)
Newsgroups: humanities.misc
Subject: The shocking truth the media ignores
Date: 9 Aug 2004 19:25:34 -0700
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Lines: 132
Message-ID: <8916096a.0408091825.44378ae4@posting.google.com>
NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 02:25:37 +0000 (UTC)

We need a decisive, President who doesn't read children's books when America is under attack, this flip-flopping bunk is a flop.

Bush was against campaign finance reform; now he's for it.

Bush was against a Homeland Security Department; now he's for it.

Bush was against a 9/11 commission; now he's for it.

Bush was against an Iraq WMD investigation; now he's for it.

Bush was against nation building; now he's for it.

Bush was against deficits; now he's for them.

Bush was for free trade; then he was for tariffs on steel, and now he's against them again.

Bush was against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; now he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.

Bush was for states' rights to decide on gay marriage; now he is for changing the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage.

Bush said he would provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency); then he doesn't.

Bush said that "help is on the way" to the military; then he cuts their benefits and health care.

Bush claimed to be in favor of environmental protection; then he secretly approved oil drilling on Padre Island in Texas and other places and took many more anti-environmental actions.

Bush said he is the "education president;" then he refused to fully fund key education programs and rarely does his homework, such as read position papers so he will be more knowledgeable on issues.

Bush said that him being governor of Texas for six years was enough political experience to be president of the U.S.; then he criticized Sen. John Edwards for not having enough experience after Edwards had served six years in the U.S. Senate. During the 2000 campaign, Bush said there were too many lawsuits being filed; then during the Florida recount, he was the first to file a lawsuit to stop the legal counting of votes after Gore took advantage of Florida law to ask for a recount.

On Nov. 7, 2000, the Bush campaign supported Florida county officials drawing up new copies of some 10,000 spoiled absentee votes in 26 Republican-leaning counties that the machines did not read and marking them for the candidates when they showed "clear intent;" they opposed doing the same thing after Nov. 7 when Gore asked for such recounts. Bush dominated absentee balloting in Florida by a two-to-one margin.

Bush said during the 2000 campaign that he did not have a "litmus test" for judges he appointed to be against abortion; then he mostly appointed judges who were against abortion.

In the early 1990s, Bush led a campaign to raise taxes in Arlington, Texas, to build a new baseball stadium for the team he partly owned; he later criticized politicians for supporting tax increases ñ after he got rich by selling the team with the new stadium to a wealthy campaign contributor.

Bush opposed the U.S. negotiating with North Korea; now he supports it.

Bush went to the racist and segregationist Bob Jones University in South Carolina; then he said he shouldn't have.

Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq; later Bush announced he would not call for a vote.

Bush first said the "mission accomplished" Iraqi banner was put up by the sailors; he later admitted it was done by his advance team.

Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the U.S.; after meeting with Mexican President Fox, he decided against it.

Bush was opposed to Rice testifying in front of the 9/11 commission citing "separation of powers;" then he was for it.

Bush was against Ba'ath party members holding office or government jobs in Iraq; now he's for it.

Bush said we must not appease terrorists; then he lifted trade sanctions on admitted terrorist Mohammar Quaddafi and Pakistan, which pardoned its official who sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

Bush said he would wait until after the Nov. election to ask for more money for the war effort; then he decided he needed it before the election, after all.

Bush said, "Leaving Iraq prematurely would only embolden the terrorists and increase the danger to America." His administration now says that U.S. troops will pull out of Iraq when the new provisional authority asks. Then he said they'll stay "as long as needed" again. Now he's saying that the Iraqis can ask the troops to leave, and they will. Or is he?

The Bush administration officials said that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to "enemy combatants." Now they claims they do.

Bush officials said before the Iraq invasion that Iraq posed an "imminent threat" to U.S. security and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and even nuclear weapons; after the invasion, they denied saying the word "imminent" and saying that Iraq had WMDs and nuclear weapons, even though they were caught on tape making such statements.

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama Bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." - George W. Bush, Sept. 13, 2001

"I don't know where he is. I have no idea, and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
- George W. Bush, March 13, 2002

"For us to get bogged down in the quagmire of an Iraqi civil war would be the height of foolishness."

---Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, 1991

Are you getting tired of this? Well, some in the American military are getting tired of this, too: "The (Bush) administration has an overly simplistic view of how and when to use our military. By not bringing in our friends and allies, they have created a mess in Iraq and are crippling our forces around the world."
-Retired Admiral William Crowe, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Ronald Reagan

http://www.geocities.com/jacknichols123/johnjohn.htm

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama Bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." - George W. Bush, Sept. 13, 2001

"I don't know where he is. I have no idea, and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
- George W. Bush, March 13, 2002

Please Read! Kerry/Edwards plans for the presidency

2004-08-04T18:16:00.000-08:00

You can now read Kerry/Edwards 263 page book online outlining all of their plans for their presidency!

Please view it today (1.3M PDF) file -- fits on one floppy disk.

http://www.johnkerry.com/plan/

Please let your friends know too. It is very easy to read and follow. Pass it on!

"Lies, Lies Lies, Yeah.."

2004-08-01T20:24:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, back in the UK.. Spy chief asked experts to harden Iraq weapons report: paper

LONDON (AFP) - The new head of the foreign intelligence service MI6 tried to persuade weapons inspectors in Iraq to harden up a report on their search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), a British newspaper reported.

According to the Mail on Sunday, John Scarlett sent a confidential email to the head of the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) on March 8 this year with a list of 10 claims, which had already been shown to be untrue, for possible inclusion in the report.

...

The 10 "golden nuggets" suggested by Scarlett included claims that Iraq had a secret smallpox programme, that Iraq had developed mobile chemical weapons laboratories and that the country possessed or was building a "rail gun" for use in nuclear weapons research, according to the Mail on Sunday.

The paper quoted an unnamed member of the ISG as saying: "Inclusion of Scarlett's nuggets would have been grossly manipulative of the truth. In fact, let's face it, he wanted us to include lies.

"This was a blatant attempt by the highly influential and respected British intelligence chief to insert material into our report which we knew for a hard fact was totally untrue.

"Everything Scarlett wanted in was based on very old evidence which we had painstakingly investigated and shown to be false."

According to the Mail on Sunday, Scarlett's suggestions were rejected.

But pressure from the United States and Britain led to the ISG producing only a bland 20-page document rather than a detailed 200-page analysis of the failure of their 1,400-strong team to find any trace of WMD in Iraq, it said.

Scarlett was a central figure in the row over the British government's justification for the war on Iraq.

...

Last month an official British inquiry found that Britain joined the war in Iraq based on evidence that was at times "seriously flawed" and "unreliable".

High Prices Prompt U.S. Oil 'Rush'

2004-08-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

Now I get it.

Yet another reason why Bush has encouraged OPEC to raise oil prices.

Now it all makes sense.

He's given away public land rights too. So now its open season on drilling everywhere in the US for oil.

All so his friends can continue to get richer and the rest of us continue to pay them for oil we dont need.

And people can keep on driving SUVs because rather than cut consumption and encourage energy efficiency, were just going to push even further into dependency on OIL.

For the cost of all the lives and money we've fought over Arab oil, when will this madness end.

I'd like to see us pursue Candidate Kerry's energy policy, as a saner alternative to this obsession with burning fossil fuels until we choke the air with pollutants.

High Prices Prompt U.S. Oil 'Rush'

Kerry-Edwards 2004

2004-07-30T04:37:00.000-08:00

Visit this page for examples of Bush-Cheney distortions that are being actively rebutted.

It is good for people to know the truth, and how to combat their falsehoods.

http://blog.johnkerry.com/rapidresponse/

Please pass this along to others you know. Sign up & volunteer on the site as well.

Thanks =)

Unite not Divide

2004-07-28T04:51:00.000-08:00

The text of the keynote address by Barack Obama, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois, as prepared for delivery at the Democratic National Convention in Boston:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.

But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place: America, which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before. While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor he signed up for duty, joined Patton's army and marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised their baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA, and moved west in search of opportunity.

And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream, born of two continents. My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential. They are both passed away now. Yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with pride.

I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible. Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, "We hold these truths to he self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody's son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will he counted — or at least, most of the time.

This year, in this election, we are called to reaffirm our values and commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up, to the legacy of our forbearers, and the promise of future generations. And fellow Americans — Democrats, Republicans, Independents — I say to you tonight: we have more work to do. More to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that's moving to Mexico, and now are having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour. More to do for the father I met who was losing his job and choking back tears, wondering how he would pay $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits he counted on. More to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her, who has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn't have the money to go to college.

Don't get me wrong. The people I meet in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks, they don't expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or the Pentagon. Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.

In this election, we offer that choice. Our party has chosen a man to lead us who embodies the best this country has to offer. That man is John Kerry. John Kerry understands the ideals of community, faith, and sacrifice, because they've defined his life. From his heroic service in Vietnam to his years as prosecutor and lieutenant governor, through two decades in the United States Senate, he has devoted himself to this country. Again and again, we've seen him make tough choices when easier ones were available. His values and his record affirm what is best in us.

John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded. So instead of offering tax breaks to companies shipping jobs overseas, he'll offer them to companies creating jobs here at home. John Kerry believes in an America where all Americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians in Washington have for themselves. John Kerry believes in energy independence, so we aren't held hostage to the profits of oil companies or the sabotage of foreign oil fields. John Kerry believes in the constitutional freedoms that have made our country the envy of the world, and he will never sacrifice our basic liberties nor use faith as a wedge to divide us. And John Kerry believes that in a dangerous world, war must be an option, but it should never he the first option.

A while back, I met a young man named Shamus at the VFW Hall in East Moline, Illinois. He was a good-looking kid, six-two or six-three, clear-eyed, with an easy smile. He told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq (news - web sites) the following week. As I listened to him explain why he'd enlisted, his absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all any of us might hope for in a child. But then I asked myself: Are we serving Shamus as well as he was serving us? I thought of more than 900 service men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, who will not be returning to their hometowns. I thought of families I had met who were struggling to get by without a loved one's full income, or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or with nerves shattered, but who still lacked long-term health benefits because they were reservists. When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.

Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated. John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure. John Kerry believes in America. And he knows it's not enough for just some of us to prosper. For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief — I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper — that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism here — the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!

In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!

Tonight, if you feel the same energy I do, the same urgency I do, the same passion I do, the same hopefulness I do — if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president, and John Edwards will be sworn in as vice president, and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come. Thank you and God bless you.

I Know What You Did Last Election

2004-07-21T05:56:00.000-08:00

Link: I Know What You Did Last Election

25 Reasons To Feel Bad About Bush

2004-07-21T05:50:00.000-08:00

Economic Indicators

1. The unemployment rate averaged 4.1 percent in 2000 and reached a 30 year low of 3.9 percent in October 2000. Today, the unemployment rate has increased to 5.7 percent. There are presently 8.1 million unemployed Americans, an increase of 2.5 million compared to 2000

2. The number of Americans experiencing long-term unemployment-over 27 weeks-has almost doubled in the last year.

3. Job creation has reversed. In 2000, the year before President Bush took office, the economy created 1.7 million new jobs. This trend has been reversed, and the economy has lost almost 1.5 million jobs since President Bush took office in January 2001.

4. Poverty is increasing. After decreasing for eight straight years and reaching its lowest level in 25 years, the poverty rate increased from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 11.7 percent in 2001. In the first year of the Bush administration, 1.3 million Americans slipped back into poverty, with a total of 32.9 million Americans living in poverty in 2001.

5. Incomes are falling. After increasing every year since 1991, and reaching an all time high in 2000, median household income in the United States fell 2.2 percent in 2001. Median incomes fell for households in every income group in the country except for those earning over $150,000.

6. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are filing for bankruptcy. Almost 800,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy in the first half of 2002. In the second quarter of 2002, over 400,000 bankruptcies were filed in the United States, an all-time record.

7. Mortgage foreclosures are at record highs. In the second quarter of 2002, 1.23 percent of home loans were in the foreclosure process, a record level. Over this same time period, almost 5 percent of mortgage loans were delinquent, up almost 20 percent from the average delinquency rate in 2000.

8. The federal budget deficit is increasing. In 2000, the year before President Bush took office, the federal budget, excluding Social Security, showed a surplus of $86.6 billion. The most recent figures from the Congressional Budget Office indicate that for FY 2002, the federal budget, excluding Social Security, will show a deficit of $314 billion.

9. This represents the largest budget decline in U.S. history, and it is the third-largest on-budget deficit in history, exceeded in size only by the deficits of 1991 and 1992 under the first President Bush. Health Care Indicators

10. The number of Americans without health insurance is increasing. Between 1999 and 2000, the number of uninsured Americans fell by 600,000.

11. But this trend has reversed itself and in 2001 the number of uninsured Americans increased by 1.4 million.

12. Over 41 million Americans — 14.6 percent of the population — had no health insurance coverage in 2001.

13. The percentage of small businesses offering insurance to their employees fell by 10 percent between 2000 and 2002.

14. Insurance costs increased by 12.7 percent in 2002, the second consecutive year of double-digit increases and the largest annual increase in costs since 1990.

15. Prescription drug prices increased by almost twice the rate of inflation in 2001.

16. For seniors, who use the most prescription drugs, cost increases were even higher. The cost of the 50 most popular drugs for seniors increased by 7.8 percent in 2001, over three times the rate of inflation. The price of Prilosec, the most popular drug for seniors, increased at over four times the rate of inflation.

Crime and Drug Use Indicators

17. The crime rate is increasing. In 2000, the year before President Bush took office, the crime rate reached its lowest level since 1972. This represented the culmination of a 22 percent decrease in crime during the 1990s.

18. But in 2001, the crime rate increased by 2.2 percent. The murder rate increased by 3.1 percent, the robbery rate increased by 3.9 percent, and the rate of property crimes increased by 2.2 percent.

19. Drug use is increasing. Drug use among all Americans increased by 13 percent between 2000 and 2001, including significant increases in the use of marijuana and cocaine. Among young adults, the percentage of drug users increased by over 20 percent between 2000 and 2001. The number of Americans in need of drug treatment increased from 4.7 million in 2000 to 6.1 million in 2001.

Environmental Indicators

20. Air pollution is increasing. Recently released data indicate that the number of times that air quality exceeded the health standard for ground-level ozone, or smog, almost doubled between 2000 and 2002.

21. Fuel economy is declining as global warming accelerates. Automobile and light truck fuel economy declined in 2001, reaching their lowest levels since 1980.

22. Overall, average fuel economy levels have declined by 8 percent since reaching their peak in 1998. At the same time, 2001 was the second warmest year on record

23. And areas across the country are experiencing their worst droughts in decades.

24. The stock market has crashed more since George W Bush took office than any other president in history, including the great crash of Herbert Hoover in 1929. Actually, since Bush took office the market has gone down TWICE what it did at the beginning of the Great Depression.

25. Since Jan 20, 2001 when George W Bush became president there has been $5 trillion dollars lost by investors in the stock market. (note- that figure is through Sept 30 and does not include the additional $800 billion lost during the last 10 days of the George Bush administration).

Compliments of George Streeton's BUSH Pages

No Shit

2004-07-19T07:35:00.000-08:00

NEWSWEEK reports that George W. Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida on June 17, stated: "We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all of the rights and God-given blessings of any other human being." Bush repeated his error at least a dozen times, before realizing that he had used the word "feces" when he meant to say "fetus."

Happy June

2004-06-23T04:31:00.000-08:00

I'm lovin how much web press there is out there.

But don't forget it's the election that counts!

Keep working to elect Kerry and don't stop, even after election day.

Let's bring American back to its heyday of democracy and civil action!

Good Riddance

2004-06-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

REAGAN'S SHAMEFUL LEGACY

Tue Jun 8, 8:02 PM ET

By Ted Rall

Mourn for Us, Not the Proto-Bush

NEW YORK--For a few weeks, it became routine. I heard them dragging luggage down the hall. They paused in a little lounge near the dormitory elevator to bid farewell to people they'd met during their single semester. Those I knew knocked on my door. "What are you going to do?" I asked. "Where are you going to go?" A shrug. They were eighteen years old and their bright futures had evaporated. They had worked hard in junior and senior high school, harder than most, but none of that mattered now. President Reagan, explained the form letters from the Office of Financial Aid, had slashed the federal education budget. Which is why the same grim tableau of shattered hopes and dreams was playing itself out across the country. Colleges and universities were evicting their best and brightest, straight A students, stripping them of scholarships. Some transferred to less-expensive community colleges; others dropped into the low-wage workforce. Now, nearly a quarter century later, they are still less financially secure and less educated than they should have been. Our nation is poorer for having denied them their potential.

They were by no means the hardest-hit victims of Reaganism. Reagan's quack economists trashed scholarships and turned welfare recipients into homeless people and refused to do anything about the AIDS epidemic, all so they could fund extravagant tax cuts for a tiny sliver of the ultra rich. Their supply-side sales pitch, that the rich would buy so much stuff from everybody else that the economy would boom and government coffers would fill up, never panned out. The Reagan boom lasted just three years and created only low-wage jobs. When the '80s were over, we were buried in the depths of recession and a trillion bucks in debt. Poverty grew, cities decayed, crime rose. It took over a decade to dig out.

Reagan's defenders, people who don't know the facts or choose to ignore them, claim that "everybody" admired Reagan's ebullient personality even if some disagreed with his politics. That, like the Gipper's tall tales about welfare queens and "homeless by choice" urban campers, is a lie. Millions of Americans cringed at Reagan's simplistic rhetoric, were terrified that his anti-Soviet "evil empire" posturing would provoke World War III, and thought that his appeal to selfishness and greed--a bastardized blend of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand--brought out the worst in us. We rolled our eyes when Reagan quipped "There you go again"; what the hell did that mean? Given that he made flying a living hell (by firing the air traffic controllers and regulating the airlines), I'm not the only one who refuses to call Washington National Airport by its new name. His clown-like dyed hair and rouged cheeks disgusted us. We hated him during the dark days he made so hideous, and, with all due respect, we hate him still.

Not everybody buys the myth that Reagan won the Cold War by demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this [Berlin] wall" or bankrupting the Soviet Union via the arms race--Zbigniew Brezinski's plot to "draw the Russians into the Afghan trap" by funding the mujahedeen , Chernobyl and covert U.S. schemes to destabilize the ruble had more to do with the end of the USSR. Gangsterism replaced the ossified cult of the state, millions of Russians were reduced to paupers, revived radical Islamism in Central Asia and eliminated our sole major ideological and military rival. That increased our arrogance and insularity, left us in charge of the world and to blame for everything, paving the road to 9/11. (Reagan even armed the attacks' future perpetrators.) Anyway, the Cold War isn't over. In which direction do you think those old ICBMs point today?

The lionizers are correct about one thing: Reagan was one of our most influential presidents since FDR, whose New Deal safety net he carefully disassembled. He pioneered policies now being implemented by George W. Bush: trickle down economics, corporate deregulation, radicalizing the courts, slithering around inconvenient laws and international treaties. On the domestic front, he unraveled America's century-old social contract. What the poor needed was a kick in the ass, not a handout, said a president whose wealthy patrons bought him a house and put clothes on his wife Nancy. National parks were to be exploited for timber and oil, not protected. The federal tax code, originally conceived to redistribute wealth from top to bottom, was "reformed" to eradicate social justice.

Bush also models his approach to foreign policy on that of the original Teflon President. Reagan elevated unjustifiable military action to an art. In 1983, anxious to look tough after cutting and running from Lebanon, Reagan sent marines to topple the Marxist government of Grenada. His pretext for invading this Caribbean island was the urgent plight of 500 medical students supposedly besieged by rampaging mobs. But when they arrived at the airport in the United States, the quizzical young men and women told reporters they were confused, never having felt endangered or seen any unrest.

In a bizarre 1985 effort to free a few American hostages being held in Lebanon, Reagan authorized the sale of 107 tons of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, at the time one of our staunchest enemies, with the proceeds to be used to fund rightist death squads in Nicaragua--something Congress had expressly forbidden him to do. Evidence strongly suggests that Iran-Contra was at least his second dirty deal with Islamic Iran, the first being the October Surprise, which delayed the release of the Iranian embassy hostages until after the 1980 election was over. Ronald Reagan eventually admitted to "trading arms for hostages," yet avoided prosecution for treason and the death penalty.

Reagan, like Bush 43, technically served in the military yet studiously avoided combat. Both men were physically robust, intellectually inadequate, poorly traveled former governors renowned for stabbing friends on the back--Reagan when he named names during McCarthyism. Both appointed former generals as secretaries of state and enemies of the environment to head the Department of the Interior. Both refused to read detailed briefings, worked short hours, behaved erratically in public appearances, ducked questions about sordid pasts, and relied on Christianist (the radical right equivalent of Islamist) depictions of foes as "evil" and America, invariably as embodied by himself and the Republicans, as "good." Based on intelligence as phony as that floated to justify the war against Iraq, Reagan bombed Muslim Libya.

Reagan is an Asshole

2004-06-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

Pretty cool thing. You can use Google to vent, and find others who share your views:

An unfiltered search via http://www.google.com/search?q=reagan+is+an+asshole

led me to this blog:

Just a Bump in the Beltway

from which I cite these excerpts on his "legacy"

Reagan's officials so hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua that they shredded the constitution. Congress cut off money for the rightwing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the rightwing insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the rightwing guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it, either through collusion or inattention. It is not a shining legacy, to have helped Khomeini and then used the money he gave them to support highly unsavory forces in Central America. (Some of those forces were involved after all in killing leftwing nuns).

Although Reagan's people were willing to shore up Iranian defenses during the Iran-Iraq War, so as to prevent a total Iraqi victory, they also wanted to stop Iran from taking over Iraq. They therefore winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret message that the US did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian troops, whatever it said publicly.

and

Reagan's later life was debilitated by Alzheimer's. I suppose he may already have had some symptoms while president, which might explain some of his memory lapses and odd statements, and occasional public lapses into woolly-mindedness. Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those limitations should be removed in his memory. There are 4 million Alzheimers sufferers in the US, and 50% of persons living beyond the age of 85 develop it.

Just a Bump in the Beltway — http://www.node707.com

A Little Perspective

2004-06-08T12:07:00.000-08:00

A Little Perspective
By Michael Moore

If you can't get through this list without wanting to throw up, I'll understand. But pass it around anyway. This is the nail in the Iraq War's coffin for any sane, thinking individual, regardless of their political stripe. (Thanks to Tom Paine.com and the Center for American Progress.)

To get some perspective, here are some real-life comparisons about what $87 billion means:

$87 Billion is more than the combined total of all State budget deficits in the United States. The Bush administration proposed absolutely zero funds to help states deal with these deficits, despite the fact that their tax cuts drove down state revenues.
[Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

$87 Billion is enough to pay the 3.3 million people who have lost jobs under George W. Bush $26,363.00 each! The unemployment benefits extension passed by Congress at the beginning of this year provides zero benefits to workers who exhausted their regular, state unemployment benefits and cannot find work.
[Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

$87 Billion is more than double the total amount the government spends on Homeland Security. The U.S. spends about $36 billion on homeland security. Yet, Sen. Warren Rudman (R- N.H.) wrote, America will fall approximately $98.4 billion short of meeting critical emergency responder needs for homeland security without a funding increase.
[Source: Council on Foreign Relations]

$87 Billion is 87 times the amount the Federal Government spends on After School Programs. George W. Bush proposed a budget that reduces the $1 billion for after-school programs to $600 million cutting off about 475,000 children from the program.
[Source: The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee]

$87 Billion is more that 10 times what the Government spends on all environmental Protection. The Bush administration requested just $7.6 billion for the entire Environmental Protection Agency. This included a 32 percent cut to water quality grants, a 6 percent reduction in enforcement staff, and a 50 percent cut to land acquisition and conservation.
[Source: Natural Resources Defense Council]

There you go. In black and white. A few million of you will receive this letter. Please share the above with at least a half-dozen people today and tomorrow. I, like you, do not want to see another approval rating over 50 percent.

Yours,
Michael Moore
Filmmaker

N.B. See also:

Republican States are Raising Taxes

and

Bush Handing Out Public Lands to Mining Companies

Vote For A Man, Not A Puppet

2004-06-07T05:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a column from the very conservative Charley Reese of the Orlando, FL Sentinel.

Vote For A Man, Not A Puppet

Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.

I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a front man, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in memory.

It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint press conference recently.

John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.

But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.

People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me once, but he won't fool me twice.

It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian.

It's no wonder that the Justice Department has convicted a few Arab-Americans of supporting terrorism. What would you do if you found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?

This election really is important, not only for domestic reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America is not only hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration. Don't forget, a scientific poll of Europeans found us, Israel, North Korea and Iran as the greatest threats to world peace.

I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with Kerry to get a man in the White House with brains enough not to blow up the world and us with it.

Go to Kerry's Web site ( http://www.johnkerry.com ) and read some of the magazine profiles on him. You'll find that there is a great deal more to Kerry than the GOP attack dogs would have you believe.

Besides, it would be fun to have a president who plays hockey, windsurfs, rides motorcycles, plays the guitar, writes poetry and speaks French. It would be good to have a man in the White House who has killed people face to face. Killing people has a sobering effect on a man and dispels all illusions about war.

Film: the 10-year campaign to destroy Bill Clinton

2004-06-03T04:30:00.000-08:00

"The Hunting of the President"

A film that claims to expose "the 10-year campaign to destroy Bill Clinton" is scheduled for its first public screening June 15 in Little Rock.

"The Hunting of the President," a 90-minute documentary that re-creates interviews for the New York Times best-selling book by the same name, has already played at four film festivals and will premiere by invitation only in New York on June 11. The movie's general release date is June 23.

More Humor, sort of

2004-06-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

After his death, Osama bin Laden tries to enter the gates of heaven.

There he was greeted by George Washington, who proceeded to slap him across the face and yell at him, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped conceive!"

Patrick Henry approached and punched Osama in the nose and shouted," You wanted to end our liberties but you failed."

James Madison entered, kicked Osama in the groin and said,"This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!"

Thomas Jefferson came in and proceeded to beat Osama many times with a long cane and said, "It was evil men like you that provided me the inspiration to pen the Declaration of Independence!"

These beatings and thrashings continued as John Rudolph, James Monroe and 66 other early Americans came in and unleashed their anger on the Muslim terrorist leader.

As Osama lay bleeding and writhing in unbearable pain an Angel appeared.

Bin Laden wept in pain and said to the Angel, "This is not what you promised me."

The Angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you in heaven. What did you think I said?"

n.b. Am I the only one who noticed the violence inherent in the telling of this joke? I don't think the founding fathers would have been so crass. Must have been penned by a Bushie.

On a Lighter Note...

2004-06-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

Election parody humor from The Onion

Poll: Many Americans Unsure Who to Vote Against

"We have to remember how close the 2000 election was, when we voted against Gore. Actually, to be fair, when I voted against Gore, I was voting against Clinton."

Bush Hands Million-Dollar Public Land to Mining Company for $875

2004-05-31T03:57:00.000-08:00

Bush Hands Million-Dollar Public Land to Mining Company for $875

I don't know whose math that is because 155 acres @ $5.00 per is only $775.00. Yet, we're talking about the equivalent of ONE month's rent in a basic apartment, for a priceless parcel of public land.

If that's not outrageous enough, consider that this land will now be raped. By some mining company. Which most certainly will leave its mess behind as they always do.

"Last month the Bush administration handed a multinational mining company 155 acres of federally owned, prime mountaintop real estate near a Colorado ski resort. The price? Just $5 an acre (a total of $875), in an area where 1/10 of an acre fetches as much as $100,000.

The sweetheart giveaway sailed through under a 132-year-old federal law that allows mining companies to purchase unrestricted patents on public land, and then use the land for their own profit -- by mining it for silver, gold or other minerals or even by developing it into luxury condominiums and getaway homes."

I've just learned about the League of Conservation Voters

Cheney coordinated Halliburton Iraq contract

2004-05-30T15:37:00.000-08:00

Cheney coordinated Halliburton Iraq contract

A Pentagon e-mail said Vice President Dick Cheney coordinated a huge Halliburton government contract for Iraq, despite Cheney's denial of interest in the company he ran until 2000.

The March 5, 2003 e-mail, from an Army Corps of Engineers official, said that top Pentagon official Douglas Feith got the job of shepherding the contract, according to the newsweekly Time that hits newsstands Monday.

Feith had approved the multi-billion-dollar deal "contingent on informing WH (the White House) tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w(ith) VP's (vice president's) office," said the e-mail obtained by Time.

The newsweekly said it was three days later that Halliburton won the contract, although no other bids had been submitted.

Like I just said

2004-05-28T08:19:00.000-08:00

Credibility gap in Bush intelligence

In recent years, the government has told Americans it has credible evidence of impending terror attacks, of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and of collaboration between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. But "credible" doesn't mean the same thing to every government official and even credible information can be wrong.

The warning this week from Attorney General John Ashcroft of a possible impending al-Qaida attack in this country has set off a new debate among ordinary citizens, on the presidential campaign and inside the government over the meaning of "credible."

Even some intelligence professionals were confused and suspicious of possible political motives for the announcement because there were no specifics about time, location or method of attack and no new information about the seven terror suspects. They also noted the Homeland Security Department did not raise the national alert level from yellow, midpoint on the five-color scale, to orange.

Al-Qaida's intent to launch a major attack in this country has been no secret for some time, former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro noted Thursday. "The question is their capabilities, and that we don't have."

"Nobody is telling us details of an operation except people talking openly on the Internet, who know we are reading it," Cannistraro said. "If al Qaida is planning another 9/11, do you think they'll tell us on Web sites? Give me a break."

More Election Year Hype

2004-05-28T03:41:00.000-08:00

White House Divided Over Terror Alert

If like me, you felt the current alarm bells were just more deflection tactics by the Bush admin to panic people and distract them from real issues, this is sure to give you pause. Clearly there was no basis for raising the code alert, yet they just had to make another vague and worthless pronoucement.

There's no reason to make these vague calls — alerting the proper authorities and law enforcement would make sense, but the rest of it is all to jerk everyone's chain and detract us from the national goal of restoring our economy and our nation's respect in the world.

Don't believe the hype.

The FBI and Justice Department insist that warning the public about a possibly devastating terror attack in this country was justified by intelligence and may avert a repeat of the Sept. 11 attacks. But some Bush administration officials and lawmakers aren't so sure.

These officials and members of Congress with access to the same intelligence reports said the announcement by Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller was overblown and caused unnecessary public worry.

Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Ashcroft-Mueller news conference on Wednesday mistakenly led some to believe the nation's threat level had been increased.

He called it "regrettable" that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who made a round of television appearances Wednesday, did not join Ashcroft and Mueller.

"Their separate public appearances left the impression that the broad and close interagency consultation we expect — and which the law requires — may not have taken place in this case," Cox said.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse reiterated Thursday that his agency has not seen any change in the "steady stream of threat reporting."

"We do not have any new intelligence or specific information about al-Qaida planning an attack," he said.

One way of looking at it

2004-05-27T20:53:00.000-08:00

"They (conservatives) don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America the way a four-year old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world."

—Al Franken

Get Rid of Bush!

2004-05-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

Always great to see what others are doing to get the word out. Here's another of just so many sites out there:

Get rid of Bush!

President Bush's Interests:

Leading our country into war under false pretenses.
Trashing the environment in any possible way for the benefit of big business (a.k.a. my campaign contributors.)
Erasing my citizens constitutional rights under a bill I dared to misnomer the Patriot Act.
Fumbling with the English language.
Billing myself as an education champion with my "No Child Left Behind" program, then horribly underfunding education.
Awarding billion dollar reparations contracts in Iraq to my good friend and VP Dick Cheney's favorite company, Halliburton Oil.
Discriminating against minority groups such as African Americans and Homosexuals.
Covering up my questionable past, which includes deserting the National Guard and running several companies into the ground.
Inheriting a national budget surplus and, in three years, turning it into a record $300+ billion deficit.
Scaring the American people into supporting me (You're all gonna die! The terrorists are coming!)

ReDefeat Bush!

Joy Ride to Economic Collapse

2004-05-26T17:57:00.000-08:00

Bush is burning our economy.

"Taken together, the $191 billion is more than double the $84 billion, in today's dollars, that the country spent for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. American taxpayers had to bear only $4.7 billion of that amount because of contributions and repayments by allied nations."

"The figures exclude the $25 billion Bush requested this month for next year's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Administration officials have acknowledged that ultimately, his total request for 2005 will probably top $50 billion.

So far, legislator have provided $165 billion for military action. That is in addition to the annual budget the Pentagon receives for its other costs, which have grown rapidly under Bush and this year should exceed $400 billion.

An additional $25 billion has been for reconstruction activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
...
The numbers exclude federal spending for domestic security, such as the new Department of Homeland Security. Such spending, which was $21 billion in 2001, hit $41 billion this year and Bush has requested $47 billion for 2005, according to a study last month by the Congressional Budget Office.

The White House figures also exclude anti-terrorism activities by the U.S. military in the Philippines and other countries. "

Oh, that we had someone else to represent the formerly proud Republican Party.

2004-05-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

Sent via email, from today's WSJ.com.

"Oh, that we had someone else to represent the formerly proud Republican Party.

It just gets worse, not better, as we trip along the path of this president's stay in the White House. Has there ever been a Republican that has done as much damage to the long-term prospects of the party as George Bush and the other cult members in his administration? History is my avocation, and I cannot come up with any others in a position of consequence in the past annals of the party that have done so much to smear it's reputation.

It's not just Iraq — these bumbling, incompetent, bible-quoting, dishonest people have done lasting damage to the prospects of the Republican Party going forward in so many ways — the deficit, the environment, separation of church and state, prostrate subservience to corporate interests, poor planning, etc. The short-term pleasure of having the Presidency currently is going to transition to the long-term problem of how to win elections in the future — pretty tough when the collective memory associates you with clumsy, wild-spending, internationally polarizing government supplemented by rigid ideology.

Yes, Iraq is the most visible train wreck (what a jam they got us into by assuming the best-case scenario on EVERYTHING, and listening only to people whose opinions synched up with theirs) that this administration is responsible for, but the rest of the list is hardly small potatoes. The gigantic deficit, for example, is a huge black cloud that will negatively affect our citizen's lives for many, many years. Huge tax cuts to individuals AND those poor corporations (retroactive, even!) during a time of war. That's sound and disciplined fiscal policy. McCain was right in his criticism of the Republican self-congratulatory, back-slapping machine.

And the deficit is only one of the many other train wrecks caused by Engineer George. It's a big list. And it's going to take years to dig us out of all these holes.

How did we get here? Where is our relief? Can someone else run for the Republican nomination? I want to wake up from this nightmare."

—D Moore

And the deficit is only one of the many other train wrecks caused by Engineer George. It's a big list. And it's going to take years to dig us out of all these holes.

Ownership and Responsibility

2004-05-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

Cosby calls on ownership

"I'm talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange (prison jumpsuit), he said during his speech, an audiotape portion of which I obtained. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18, and how come you dont know he had a pistol? Cosby asked, drawing nervous laughter from the largely black audience.
...
In 2002, unwed black women gave birth to nearly 70% of the black children born that year. That same year, 12% of black men in their 20s and 30s were in jail or prison. In 2001, 50% of black high school students graduated."

"In 2002, unwed black women gave birth to nearly 70% of the black children born that year. That same year, 12% of black men in their 20s and 30s were in jail or prison. In 2001, 50% of black high school students graduated."

Bush's "War On Terror" is a failure.

2004-05-25T07:43:00.000-08:00

Bush's "War On Terror" is a failure. He has totally not taken out Al Quaida. Instead he mucks around in Iraq, for nothing.

He talks the talk, but does not walk the walk.

Bush's "War On Terror" is a failure

"The IISS said al Qaeda lost its base after the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 but had since adapted to become more decentralized, "virtual" and invisible in more than 60 countries.

"The Afghanistan intervention offensively hobbled but defensively benefited al Qaeda," it said.

The institute said 2,000 al Qaeda members and more than half of the group's 30 leaders had been killed or captured.

The IISS said the 1,000 al Qaeda militants estimated to be in Iraq were a minute fraction of its potential strength.

"A rump leadership is still intact and over 18,000 potential terrorists are at large with recruitment accelerating on account of Iraq," the IISS said. It gave no source for the figure.

Purported video and audio tapes by bin Laden have appeared from time to time despite a U.S.-led manhunt since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington to capture him "dead or alive." "

Hopes vs Fears

2004-05-25T01:46:00.000-08:00

Kerry campaign news

"Re-electing President Bush will mean a loss of freedoms and create a nation that will be unrecognizable, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says in a fund-raising appeal for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. ...

"If they get their way, you and I will be living in an America governed not by our hopes, but by our fears," Clinton wrote. "We'll be living in an America where we see our freedoms diminished when they ought to be embraced, our rights restricted when they ought to be strengthened." "

simple truths

Arab Apartheid

Have Fun & Play Your Own Political Games -- Online!

Play Operation

Israel, vindicated

Yee-Ha!

Comparisons to 1992 and 1996

On a lighter note...

The 14 Identifying Characteristics of Fascism

Anti-Semitism for Dummies

Dr. Wafa Sultan

Don't Get Me Started!

How Else Would You Spend $320 Billion?

Stolen Elections

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Exposing the Myth of Cut and Run

Buying American Democracy - Rigged Elections

Jonah Goldberg: It's Iraq, stupid

Incestuous Amplification

Of John Hancock & "John Hancocks"

Subservience Or Citizenship

Thoughts from Beneath the Rubble

Cheney Enjoys Torture

Taste the Irony...

Quote of the Day

A Moral Dilemma

Plame As Day

Disappointed in Court Nominee Process

New Postage Stamp

Making bad dreams into nightmares

Sadness

Chief Justice Bigot

*** Pay Attention ***

Bush and New Orleans

Chag Sameach

Hybrid Car Sales Soar in U.S. in 2004

Living Will is Best Revenge

Read on

ProtectingCreation.org

Permanent destruction of a nature preserve for 6 mos of oil ten years from now.

Belatedly

Letter from California

Explaining Social Security

Support Our Troops

Bill was right even 10 years ago

Humour from John Cleese

Abstinence Makes the Hard-on Fonder

Which America hating Minority Are You?

Knock, knock

GOP TV

Textbook Case on Why You Must Always Vote

Sorry Everybody

Reality check--bounced

Arlen's Intentions

Progress

The Election is not over yet. Ohio has days ahead.

Differences between Democrats and Republicans

Yom Kippur Al Chait Confessional by George W. Bush

The Unwinnable War, by James Carroll

Keep the faith

Age of Reason?

Bush record on women

Lost among all the swift boat rhetoric...

More GOP lies and deception

Cold Turkey, by Kurt Vonnegut

Act now to protect our national forests

I Love You, Madame Librarian, By Kurt Vonnegut

Bush v. Bush

George W Flip Flop

Please Read! Kerry/Edwards plans for the presidency

"Lies, Lies Lies, Yeah.."

High Prices Prompt U.S. Oil 'Rush'

Kerry-Edwards 2004

Unite not Divide

I Know What You Did Last Election

25 Reasons To Feel Bad About Bush

No Shit

Happy June

Good Riddance

* Pay Attention *