Samizdat

Condi Chuckles; Children Die

2006-04-04T15:49:00.000-05:00

The deadly duo of Condi and Jack Straw have a little laugh while cuddled in the Green Zone of Bahgdad with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

...meanwhile, the streets of Bahgdad literally run with blood ...

...and children keep dying...

It's been a good war …

2006-03-21T14:23:00.000-06:00

… for Big Oil

“I love the smell of burning crude in the morning. It smells like record profits!” With this slight alteration to Robert Duvall’s famous speech from the movie “Apocalypse Now!”, it is easy to imagine Dick Cheney making this speech. Of course, the movie would have to be called “Iraq – Apocalypse Now II!”

This is a subject I have written about many times before. When Bush said “Mission Accomplished” he spoke the truth. He just wasn’t talking about liberating Iraq. What he was talking about was liberating Big Oil to make Big Profits.

Ari Fleisher summed it up in the original announcement, three years ago, at the beginning of the illegal invasion in Iraq. He called it “Operation Iraqi Liberation.” That’s O.I.L. for short, but when Karl Rove about had a stroke over that, it was quickly changed to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” O.I.L. was never heard of again and neither was the guy who thought it up.

So, is there a correlation between happenings in Iraq and Big Oil Profits? Here are two sets of numbers:

Set One: In 2002, before the Iraq invasion, the top five oil companies made $34 billion profit.

Set Two: Just three short years later, after disaster followed disaster in Iraq, and the situation went from bad to absolutely horrible; with oil production in Iraq almost at a stand-still, a funny thing happened. The top five oil companies increased their profits by 332% to a world shattering record for any industry ever in history of $113 billion for the year.

What do you do if you want a company to fail? That’s right. You take a man with a proven track record of failure who has never seen any reason in his entire life to change his course. Then, you put that man in charge of the company. You surround him with a bunch of “yes” men who will tell him everything is going great when it is actually going to hell in a hand basket. Then, you just sit back and wait.

Why would you want to do that? When that company goes down the drain, whatever product that company makes will soon be in short supply. so if you’ve got a company that makes the same product you are going to see your profits rise.

This would be especially profitable if you could get someone else to bankroll the takeover of the company plus furnish the labor to do the really dirty dangerous work, and, in addition, outsource on no-bid, cost-plus 25% contracts to you and your friends all the other stuff without any oversight and without any accountability!

Just something I was thinking about today when I paid my last thirty-five dollars for a tank of gas.

IRAQ IS ALL BUT WON; NOW WHAT?

2006-03-20T08:45:00.000-06:00

Today, as I’m sure everyone knows, is the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. I offer the following quotes from early 2003 without comment from myself as I feel they speak for themselves and the varicosity of the sources quoted.
Declaring Victory
"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)
"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it."
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)
"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention."
(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)
"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/27/03)
"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)
"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)
"We're all neo-cons now"...
... (MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)
"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."
(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)
"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation [stunt]--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)
Mission Accomplished?
"The war winds down, politics heats up....Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific."
(PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)
"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)
"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)
Neutralizing the Opposition
"Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)
"What's he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose their--Isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?"
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean--4/9/03)
"If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a president fresh from a war victory?"
(CNN's Judy Woodruff, 5/5/03)
"It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context..... And the silence, I think, is that it's clear that nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him. The Democrats can't oppose--cannot oppose him politically."
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum-- Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)
Nagging the "Naysayers"
"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)
"I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)
"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.... I just wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war....
"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, "The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated." Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail, again.
"Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)
"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
(Fox News Channel's Dick Morris, 4/9/03)
"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right."
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)
"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."
(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)
"Some journalists, in my judgment, just can't stand success, especially a few liberal columnists and newspapers and a few Arab reporters."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, 4/14/03)
"Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn't figured out we won the war."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)
Cakewalk?
"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate-- cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)
"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?"
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)
"It won't take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there's no question that it will."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)
"There's no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and Britain unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold like that."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)
"He [Saddam Hussein] actually thought that he could stop us and win the debate worldwide. But he didn't--he didn't bargain on a two- or three week war. I actually thought it would be less than two weeks."
(NBC reporter Fred Francis, Chris Matthews Show, 4/13/03)
Weapons of Mass Destruction
NPR's Mara Liasson: Where there was a debate about whether or not Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction and whether we can find it...
Brit Hume: No, there wasn't. Nobody seriously argued that he didn't have them beforehand. Nobody.
(Fox News Channel, April 6, 2003)
"Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it."
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)
"Saddam could decide to take Baghdad with him. One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of "the green mushroom" over Baghdad--the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time."
(Newsweek, 3/17/03)
"Chris, more than anything else, real vindication for the administration. One, credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Two, you know what? There were a lot of terrorists here, really bad guys. I saw them."
(MSNBC reporter Bob Arnot, 4/9/03)
"Even in the flush of triumph, doubts will be raised. Where are the supplies of germs and poison gas and plans for nukes to justify pre-emption? (Freed scientists will lead us to caches no inspectors could find.) What about remaining danger from Baathist torturers and war criminals forming pockets of resistance and plotting vengeance? (Their death wish is our command.)"

10,000 Comedians Starving To Death And ...

2006-03-14T09:31:00.000-06:00

"Dick, I've got an approval rating of 38 percent and you shoot the only trial lawyer in the country who likes me." --- George Bush

"You know there are all these conspiracy theories that Dick runs the country . . . or Karl [Rove] runs the country. Why aren't there any conspiracy theories that I run the country? Really ticks me off. The truth is that I do run the country . . . but Dick runs me and Lynne runs Dick. So actually Lynne runs the country. And Lynne, I think you're doin' a heckuva job. Although I have to say you dropped the ball big time on that Dubai deal." --- George Bush

"By the way, when Dick first heard my approval rating was 38 percent, he said, 'What's your secret?' " --- George Bush

And if you thank that is funny (or not) read this piece I swiped from Buzzflash written by The Walrus:

A guy walks into a talent agent's office and says "Have I got an act for you!"

The agent asks "Yeah? What sort of act?" and the guy says, "It's a political act. There's me, my running mate, our aides and media chums and their aides, plus a few non-union extras who work for less than minimum wage."

"First I walk on stage with a baby seal. I start feeding the baby seal endangered fish that I pull from a 55-gallon drum labeled 'Clean Water.' The fish have been soaking in mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls and crude oil. While the baby seal oinks and pukes and turns green, my running mate starts clubbing it with a 6-foot crucifix."

"Our media chums narrate this whole thing, explaining how we're making the environment safer for fish and baby seals. Then my running mate starts stuffing illegal campaign contributions into the seal's body cavity while slicing off layers of fat and passing the fat to the audience, while our aides pass out press releases explaining that the baby seal fat is actually safer than it was before I fed it mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls."

"Next, one of the non-union extras drives a huge HumVee onto the stage. We've modified it so it gets half a mile per gallon. It's belching out carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons like crazy. We've sealed all the ventilation ducts so the audience gets the full dose. This makes them light-headed, and more likely to find this entertaining. The HumVee has a banner on the side that says 'Blue Skies.' We start singing Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World,' in black-face and pickaninny voices. Al Jolson would be proud of this part."

"We then truck in a bunch of crippled kids and tell them how compassionate we are, but then we rip up their Medicare checks, dump them out of their wheel chairs and order them off stage. They drag their disfigured bodies from the stage while we call them a drain on society and we sell their wheel chairs to GM for scrap metal."

"While this is going on, one of our media chums is having phone sex with his aide, describing unspeakable acts involving a falafel and a loofah, and he's masturbating the whole time. We patch into the call using an illegal wiretap and broadcast it over the PA system in the theater, and blame the mainstream liberal press for the repulsive content."

"A guy dressed as Jesus walks onstage and kicks a guy dressed as Mohammed in the crotch. Jesus tells the audience that they need to give all their money to him or go to Hell. Then Jesus picks up the crucifix we used to club the baby seal, and attaches strings to it. The strings are connected to the hands and feet of a woman in a persistent vegetative state. Jesus makes her dance around the stage like a marionette, and preaches about the Kingdom of Heaven."

"After that, Rush Limbaugh comes on stage and bloviates about the sanctity of marriage, the importance of personal responsibility, and how drug users should be locked up in prison. As he's delivering this monologue, we trot out an underage girl my running mate has knocked up the day before. We dangle a morning-after pill just out of her reach and lecture her on sexual abstinence. All her jumping up and down causes her to spontaneously abort her 1-day-old embryo."

"We then carve Ronald Reagan's face onto a life-sized mock-up of the Statue of Liberty. Manwhile, one of my aides is cleaning an assault rifle, which accidentally goes off and blows the head off a lady in the front row. He then gives a long-winded lecture on the 2nd Amendment, and again, personal responsibility."

"All this time, a giant screen at the back of the stage is playing an endless loop of news coverage of a privileged white girl who went missing in Aruba followed by another clip of an yet another privileged white girl who got cold feet the day before her wedding and took a powder."

"While this is going on, I start firing missiles at the studio next door, saying that the act over there is against family values and God, and they have weapons of mass destruction aimed at our studio. Then I do a pantomime of looking for the WMD under sofas and behind the curtains, laughing my ass off. I never find the WMD, but I keep insisting that the other studio was a dire threat to our studio."

"I explain how morally superior we are, and how we're the only ones who really understand personal responsibility and Christian values and abstinence and the sanctity of marriage and the evils of drug abuse."

"We all dance and slide around in the baby seal blood and fat and the dead lady's blood, and the PCBs and oil and the tears from the underage pregnant girl (Did I mention that she's homeless? She's homeless.). We're rubbing the blood and oil all over each other, slapping each other on the backs, congratulating ourselves on a job well done, and laughing at the homeless pregnant girl and waterboarding the guy dressed as Mohammed as he issues a fatwah against us and the entire audience. Then for the finale, we all join in a rousing chorus of 'Nearer My God To Thee.' "

"Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that the audience will walk out in droves and demand refunds. But that's the beauty of it. My running mate and I have cooked the books so that even after you hand out all the refunds, you still make more money than they originally paid and, to get in, the audience has to pay for their tickets with their credit cards. That way, we steal the credit card numbers and max them out to pay for the lavish party we throw after the show. Halliburton does the catering, so it costs about twice what it should."

"Now get this: We tape the whole show and broadcast it on Fox. Nobody watches it, but we pay Diebold to make the ratings-counters, so it will have the highest ratings in television history."

The agent says "Wow. That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?"

And the guy says "The Republicans!"

Let America Be America Again

2006-02-27T13:18:00.000-06:00

By Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed
--Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek
--And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean
--Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.

O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home
--For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay
--Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again
--The land that never has been yet
--And yet must be
--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine
--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME
--Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose
--The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath
--America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain
--All, all the stretch of these great green states
--And make America again!

Citgo and Anonymous Email

2006-02-22T08:16:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I received an anonymous email. I am going to reproduce the email and interpose my responses. I'll put the email text in italics.

Me: The first thing I notice about the email the “From” field is blank. So the first question I ask myself is “Why would a person or group spreading a valid message wish to remain anonymous?” Could it be because the message is not valid? Just asking.

Email: Is this true.

Me: Is what true?

Email: Venezuela Dictator Vows To Bring Down U.S. Government
Email: Venezuela government is sole owner of Citgo gasoline company

Me: Another thing that strikes me about this message is the sender’s ignorance. The fact that Citgo is owned by Venezuela is a well known fact. It was discussed over and over again last year when Chavez cut that deal with those Northern states to provide their low income families with low cost heating oil. The writer has apparently just become aware of the ownership. He/she is either ignorant of the heating oil deal or just ignoring it – more likely the latter. In any case, to deal with the actual text of the message:

Email: Venezuela Dictator Hugo Chavez has vowed to bring down the U.S. government. Chavez, president of Venezuela, told a TV audience: "Enough of imperialist aggression; we must tell the world: down with the U.S. empire. We have to bury imperialism this century."

Me: First, Chavaz is not a dictator; he is a democratically elected president – which is more than can be said for the head of our government.

Me: Second, Chavaz has never vowed to “bring down the US government.” He did say "Enough of imperialist aggression; we must tell the world: down with the U.S. empire. We have to bury imperialism this century." Since I am with Chavaz 100% on that, I am still wondering what point the writer of the email was trying to make.

Email: The guest on his television program, beamed across Venezuela, was Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist.

Me: And ... ?

Email: Chavez recently had as his guest Harry Belafonte, who called President Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world."

Me: Harry Belafonte did recently speak in Venezuela and he did call Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world." I guess the truth hurts some people when it hits home.

Email: Chavez is pushing a socialist revolution and has a close alliance with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Me: Chavez believes in a type of democracy that this country hasn’t practiced, even in theory, since Thomas Jefferson was president two hundred years ago. That is, Chavez believes that national resources belong to the people and should benefit the people directly by using the derived income to finance schools, medical care, and sanitation. He does not believe in the philosophy that has been so prevalent in the US for at least 150 years; that philosophy seems to be: once in power, sell all natural resources to your cronies. The peons will then benefit through economic “trickle-down.”

Me: As for Chavez’s alliance with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, he gives them oil. They give Venezuela sugar, but more importantly, they give Venezuela trained doctors and nurses who have set up clinics in areas of Venezuela where people have never known formal healthcare. Were we even half the country we claim to be, we would have been down there helping with that project. Instead, we wasted our Venezuelan resources paying for the CIA to overthrow Chavez because his “socialist programs” were cutting into the profits of Exxon.

Me: Anyway, who are we to quibble about such an alliance? Our largest trading partner is China which is not only governed by a rigid dictatorship; it has one of the worst records for human rights violations in the world.

Email: Regardless of your feelings about the war in Iraq, the issue here is that we have a socialist dictator vowing to bring down the government of the U.S. And he is using our money to achieve his goal! The Venezuela government, run by dictator Chavez, is the sole owner of Citgo gas company. Sales of products at Citgo stations send money back to Chavez to help him in his vow to bring down our government.

Email: Take Action Please decide that you will not be shopping at a Citgo station. Why should U.S. citizens who love freedom be financing a dictator who has vowed to take down our government? Very important. Please forward this to your friends and family. Most of them don't know that Citgo is owned by the Venezuela government.

Me: To me, the issue is not “that we have a socialist dictator vowing to bring down the government of the U.S. And he is using our money to achieve his goal!” The issue is that we have some moronic imbecile who is so cowardly as to email people a bunch of ignorant right-winged bullshit anonymously. I just wish I knew who sent it so I could respond personally. Since I can't, let me urge you to go get in your car, drive to the nearest Citgo station and top off your tank. The people who would be freezing up north if it wasn't for Chavez will thank you. The people in Venezuela who are getting medical care for the first time will thank you.

Me: And the head of the SSO IRBS (Society to Stamp Out Ignorant Rightwing Bullshit Slangers - that would be me) will thank you.

Bush Owns Halliburton?

2006-02-13T08:58:00.000-06:00

"Nothing happens in politics by accident. If it happens, it was planned that way."
-- Franklin Roosevelt

Most of the rebuttals I read or hear concerning something Cheney or Bush has said starts out with the assumption that they are deluded or "live in a fantasy." Let's assume for the sake of argument that they are not deluded and that they are as in touch with "reality" as anyone else. Lets just assume that they are deliberately telling bald-faced lies for their own nefarious reasons.

Let's say, for instance, that they have no interest whatever in "national security" or "spreading democracy" or "fighting terrorists." Let's say they just took over the US to deliberately start a war to make money through companies that are now reaping huge profits from the conflict in Iraq; companies such as Halliburton and various other oil related industries.

The facts so far seem to support this argument. Cheney, who still receives a yearly paycheck of $145,000 from Halliburton, has a huge amount of Halliburton stock and an undisclosed number of options. Since 2001, Halliburton stock has gone from $10 per share to $60 per share.

Bush, on the other hand doesn't seem to profit much until one knows a bit about the history of Halliburton. In the 1930's, the Bush family bought the Dresser Company, a very successful company making oil drilling equipment. In the late 70's, Dresser, still owned by the Bush family, merged with Halliburton.

At the time, Dresser was in a much better financial position than Halliburton so the Bush family did not receive much money from the deal. Obviously then, they were paid in Halliburton stock. Right now, there are about 1500 "owners of record" of Halliburton, most of them are institutions, investment companies, and holding companies, so it is beyond my ability to prove that the Bush family owns a controlling interest in Halliburton but, unless they gave away their holdings from the Dresser deal, they do.

So, what am I saying? I am saying that this country is run of, by and for Halliburton and a few other oil and pharmacological companies the Bush family has financial interests in. We have to pull our heads out of our behinds and recognize that these people are not just misguided right-wing patriots living in a fantasy. They are hard-headed business men. They have a plan and that plan is to concentrate as much wealth and power in theirs hands as possible. Any frame or argument that doesn't recognize this is just whistling in the dark.

January Unemployment - The Measure of Despair

2006-02-10T09:08:00.000-06:00

There were a reported 193,000 new jobs in January according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), but note that in the pass few years this number is usually revised downwards after a couple of months when they think no one is looking.

In any case, even if the number is good, it still leaves the labor market with a lot of catching up to do since 2001. It takes about 160,000 new jobs a month just to break even with population growth. The average job growth reported by the BLS over the past six months was 158,000 per month.

The government reported the unemployment rate at 4.7% in January. What they neglect to report is the share of the adult population that had a job, that is, the employment to population ratio. This could be termed the "measure of despair" because it gives a way to count the number of people who are unemployed but no longer looking for a job because they have despaired of finding one.

In January 2006 this number was 62.9%, a small gain from August 2005, when it was 62.8%. In March 2001, this number was 64.1%. The non-difference between August 2005 and January 2006 tells us that the level of human despair is holding steady. What the difference between the January 2006 ratio of 62.9% and the March 2001 ratio of 64.1% means is that despair has greatly increased since March 2001.

If the ratio had held steady from March 2001 until January 2006 there would be 3.2 million more Americans with jobs in January. Hence, 3.2 million Americans have despaired of ever finding a decent job and have dropped out of the job market since March 2001 and are now living with that despair. If they are counted as unemployed, the US unemployment rate would actually be 6.7%, not the reported 4.7%.

Its all in how, and whether, you measure despair.

Complete Transcript of the Bin Laden Tape

2006-02-07T10:55:00.000-06:00

First, let me say there is no definitive proof that this audiotape is actually the voice of bin Laden. The CIA says it is a "genuine message" from bin Laden. Independant experts who have examined other "bin Laden" tapes have reached the conclusion that they are fake. So, you pays your money and you takes your chances.

January 21, 2006

The following is the full text of the recent Osama bin Laden audiotape. The text was translated from the Arabic by The Associated Press. Bin Laden appears to be addressing the American people:

My message to you is about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to end them. I did not intend to speak to you about this because this issue has already been decided. Only metal breaks metal, and our situation, thank God, is only getting better and better, while your situation is the opposite of that. But I plan to speak about the repeated errors your President Bush has committed in comments on the results of your polls that show an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But he (Bush) has opposed this wish and said that withdrawing troops sends the wrong message to opponents, that it is better to fight them (bin Laden's followers) on their land than their fighting us (Americans) on our land.

I can reply to these errors by saying that war in Iraq is raging with no let-up, and operations in Afghanistan are escalating in our favor, thank God, and Pentagon figures show the number of your dead and wounded is increasing not to mention the massive material losses, the destruction of the soldiers' morale there and the rise in cases of suicide among them. So you can imagine the state of psychological breakdown that afflicts a soldier as he gathers the remains of his colleagues after they stepped on land mines that tore them apart. After this situation the soldier is caught between two hard options.

He either refuses to leave his military camp on patrols and is therefore dogged by ruthless punishments enacted by the Vietnam Butcher (U.S. army) or he gets destroyed by the mines. This puts him under psychological pressure, fear and humiliation while his nation is ignorant of that (what is going on). The soldier has no solution except to commit suicide. That is a strong message to you, written by his soul, blood and pain, to save what can be saved from this hell. The solution is in your hands if you care about them (the soldiers).

The news of our brother mujahideen (holy warriors) is different from what the Pentagon publishes. They (the news of mujahideen) and what the media report is the truth of what is happening on the ground. And what deepens the doubt over the White House's information is the fact that it targets the media reporting the truth from the ground. And it has appeared lately, supported by documents, that the butcher of freedom in the world (Bush) had decided to bomb the headquarters of the Al-Jazeera in Qatar after bombing its offices in Kabul and Baghdad.

On another issue, jihad (holy war) is ongoing, thank God, despite all the oppressive measures adopted by the U.S Army and its agents (which is) to a point where there is no difference between this criminality and Saddam's criminality, as it has reached the degree of raping women and taking them as hostages instead of their husbands. As for torturing men, they have used burning chemical acids and drills on their joints. And when they give up on (interrogating) them, they sometimes use the drills on their heads until they die. Read, if you will, the reports of the horrors in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons. And I say that, despite all the barbaric methods, they have not broken the fierceness of the resistance.

The mujahideen, thank God, are increasing in number and strength - so much so that reports point to the ultimate failure and defeat of the unlucky quartet of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Declaring this defeat is just a matter of time, depending partly on how much the American people know of the size of this tragedy. The sensible people realize that Bush does not have a plan to make his alleged victory in Iraq come true. And if you compare the small number of dead on the day that Bush announced the end of major operations in that fake, ridiculous show aboard the aircraft carrier with the tenfold number of dead and wounded who were killed in the smaller operations, you would know the truth of what I say. This is that Bush and his administration do not have the will or the ability to get out of Iraq for their own private, suspect reasons.

And so to return to the issue, I say that results of polls please those who are sensible, and Bush's opposition to them is a mistake. The reality shows that the war against America and its allies has not been limited to Iraq as he (Bush) claims. Iraq has become a point of attraction and restorer of (our) energies. At the same time, the mujahideen (holy warriors), with God's grace, have managed repeatedly to penetrate all security measures adopted by the unjust allied countries. The proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of the European nations who are in this aggressive coalition. The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your homes the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission.

Based on what has been said, this shows the errors of Bush's statement - the one that slipped from him - which is at the heart of polls calling for withdrawing the troops. It is better that we (Americans) don't fight Muslims on their lands and that they don't fight us on ours. We don't mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to. We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war. There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America who have supported Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars - which lets us understand the insistence by Bush and his gang to carry on with war. If you (Americans) are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you.

And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book "Rogue State," which states in its introduction: "If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all."

Finally, I say that war will go either in our favor or yours. If it is the former, it means your loss and your shame forever, and it is headed in this course. If it is the latter, read history! We are people who do not stand for injustice and we will seek revenge all our lives. The nights and days will not pass without us taking vengeance like on Sept. 11, God permitting. Your minds will be troubled and your lives embittered. As for us, we have nothing to lose. A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain. You have occupied our lands, offended our honor and dignity and let out our blood and stolen our money and destroyed our houses and played with our security and we will give you the same treatment. You have tried to prevent us from leading a dignified life, but you will not be able to prevent us from a dignified death. Failing to carry out jihad, which is called for in our religion, is a sin. The best death to us is under the shadows of swords. Don't let your strength and modern arms fool you. They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better. We were patient in fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years and we bled their economy and now they are nothing.

In that there is a lesson for you.

Irony - I Just Love That Word

2006-02-07T07:25:00.000-06:00

"How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men."

-- Joe McCarthy
US Senator 1951

Halliburton - Bringing Auschwitz to Your Town

2006-02-05T21:01:00.000-06:00

Customs `camps' cause for concern

By Tom Hennessy, Columnist
Long Beach Press Telegram

Maybe a lifetime in the news business makes one paranoid. Or maybe it was just a matter of timing.

The story showed up in Tuesday's Press-Telegram, as I was reading "Night," Elie Wiesel's horrifying autobiography of a teenager in Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Appearing on page A5, the story said the federal government had awarded a $385 million contract for the construction of "temporary detention facilities." These would be used, the story said, in the event of an "immigration emergency."

Jamie Zuieback, an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), explained such an emergency like this: "If, for example, there were some sort of upheaval in another country that would cause mass migration, that's the type of situation that the contract would address."

That sounds a tad fuzzy, but let's concede that the camps do have something to do with immigration, illegal or not. In fact, there already are thousands of beds in place at various U.S. locations for the purpose of housing illegal immigrants.

But for anyone familiar with history U.S. or European the construction of detention camps for whatever purpose should prompt a chilling scenario.

Same folks

The new detention camps will be built by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. The latter, as you likely know, is the defense-related corporate giant with fists full of contracts involving the war in Iraq.

Halliburton was led by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000. Democrats in Congress have accused the administration of favoring the company via no-bid contracts. But KBR says the detention contract was competitive.

Tuesday's story also said the contract was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers. However, Halliburton says it was awarded by the Department of Homeland Security in support of ICE.

The contract is for a year, but includes four one-year options. It is a renewal of an existing ICE contract, notes Halliburton.

KBR, in fact, had the $9.7 million contract to build the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. This facility, popularly dubbed "Gitmo," holds 660 prisoners classified by the government as "enemy combatants."

Anyone care?

This column is written with the distinct feeling that not many people will give a hoot about any or all of this. But as already noted, a news story about construction of government detention centers should give us all pause.

Considering what took place in Nazi Germany, as well as the shameful incarceration of Japanese-Americans in 1942, no detention camp should be built without the widest possible public scrutiny.

Bottom line: The contract cries out for greater attention. So far, the government's expressed reason for building them is insufficient and ill-defined. And even if the camps do relate to illegal immigration, their purpose could be changed overnight.

This is an instance in which we could be well served by our representatives in Congress. They need to look at this and give constituents a better picture of what is going on.

Let's not have it said, years from now, that no one ever questioned this.

Bush Explains the New Pharmacy Plan

2006-01-18T07:52:00.000-06:00

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE:
'I don't really understand. How is the new plan going to fix the problem?'

PRESIDENT BUSH:
'Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, 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 that 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, supposed [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.'

Now, I don't know about you, but after that explanation everything is crystal clear to me. If you still have questions, I suggest you email President Bush. I know he will be only to happy to go through his talking points in greater detail.

Declaration of Independence

2006-01-12T15:10:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away there was an evil tyrant by the name of King George who sorely oppressed the people of a young and peaceful land. The people did rise up and declare that they were mad as hell and they weren't going to take it any more.

To be sure that King George got the message, they wrote it down in a little work called "The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies." Oddly enough, what goes around, comes around which means that when people forget history, they are doomed to repeat it. Thus, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation as the one that inspired that great Declaration and lead to the American War for Independence. If you don't believe it, just read the following lists of complaints against King George contained in the original Declaration of Independence and compare it to the last five years under our King George.

The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The signers of the Declaration represented the new states as follows:

New Hampshire
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts
John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

For additional information about the Declaration of Independence, see these sites:
National Archives and Records Administration: Declaration of Independence
Library of Congress: About the Declaration of Independence

Bees and Illegal Aliens

2006-01-04T08:07:00.000-06:00

If you don’t want to attract bees, keep the lid on the honey jar. Professor Bill Hing, in his January 2, 2006 editorial in the Chicago Tribune linked to by Buzzflash, states "If anti-immigrant forces in Congress had their way, illegal immigration would be a crime punishable by death."

This is a harsh statement about a body that has so far shown no real guts for actually stopping or controlling the flow of illegal aliens that cross our southern border. The bill he refers to sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), that was passed in the House will be watered down in the Senate - as usual - to make ineffective the so-called increased enforcement against employers who hire undocumented workers - and there is the real problem.

Professor Hing blames "anti-immigration laws" for causing the deaths of people trying to enter this country illegally because "their entry choices were shifted to treacherous terrain--the deserts and mountains."

He goes on to site numbers that seemly back his argument; "In 1994, fewer than 30 migrants died along the border; by 1998, the number was 147; in 2001, 387 deaths were counted; and in the last fiscal year, 451 died." What he leaves out of these numbers is the corresponding increase in the number of people illegally crossing the southern border since 1994. He says of the people who cross the border illegally "In a sense, they do not have a choice." This is his prelude to the often heard jobs-are-going-begging argument.

He says "... jobs are plentiful here [in the US] because a variety of industries rely on low-wage migrant workers." At this point, I would ask Professor Hing to first get his nomenclature straight; we are not talking about "migrant workers." A migrant is someone with legal standing. What we are talking about is "illegal aliens"; people who have openly broken the law to gain entry into our country and now resides here illegally.

Secondly, industries in the United States who have become addicted to exploiting the labor of illegal aliens paying low wages and furnishing poor and dangerous work conditions should not be rewarded by giving these industries greater access to a larger work force ripe for exploitation. These industries should be made to answer to the letter of the law. It is illegal to hire illegal aliens in this country. Any company found guilty of doing so should be heavily fined and the executive officers should face prison time.

Professor Hing and others may argue that if some industries had to bring up working conditions and wages to attract American workers, they would go out of business. My response to that is, "Too bad."

If I am a merchant in this country selling any type of merchandise and I find that I can no longer make a profit by buying my product wholesale, adding value and then reselling it, I have some choices to make. I can a.) go out of business; b.) change my business to increase efficiency; c.) take my business to another country; d.) pass the increased cost to the consumer, or, finally; e.) I can charge it off against the bottom-line. Traditionally, with the exception of "c", American companies have chosen a combination of all the above.

What they don't do is smuggle in raw product across the border from another country to keep up the bottom-line. Other producers of the same product would cry “foul” and there are numerous laws in place with harsh penalties to prevent such unfair advantages.

Recently, Delphi CEO Steve Miller callously pointed out that labor is just another raw material. Every working person in this country is a merchant of that material. Why should we stand by while our stock-in-trade is cheapened by goods smuggled into this country illegally?

Yes, I recognize that the world is just one huge market place now but I also recognize that the world is not one huge level playing field. If it were, the United States would have universal health care like all other major industrialized nations, Chinese currency wouldn't be pegged to the US Dollar to insure that the trade deficient remains in their favor and US farmers wouldn’t be getting farm subsidies, 80% of which go to three corporations, so they can undercut prices on the world market and force local farmers out of business – including Mexican farmers - since the signing of NAFTA. Now these farmers swell the ranks of Mexico's unemployed because they can no longer compete with our giant government-subsidized farming industries.

So, Professor Hing, if you really want to stop the deaths of people who have chosen of their own freewill to break our laws and cross into our country illegally, put the lid on the honey jar and the bees will stay away. Stiffen the penalties and fines for hiring illegal aliens until it becomes unprofitable. It is already illegal, immoral and just plain un-American.

Oh, and if you really need something to bitch about, consider starting with NAFTA.

Saving this Presidency… Why Bother?

2006-01-03T12:26:00.000-06:00

by Nathan J. Muller

Co-founder - www.forthecause.us

Political analysts and news media have opened a new line of inquiry - assessing the state of the presidency and pondering the question, "Can it be saved?" This begs a more fundamental question, "Why bother?" After all, George Bush has done more to damage our security, to destroy the middle class, and to deepen divisions in society than any other President within living memory. Saving this presidency merely promises more of the same. And if you think you've seen everything this man is really capable of, you're in for a big surprise…

In recent weeks, political analysts and news media have opened a new line of inquiry - assessing the state of the presidency and pondering the question, "Can it be saved?"

This begs a more fundamental question, "Why bother?" After all, this Administration has done more to damage our security, to destroy the middle class, and to deepen divisions in society than any other President within living memory. Saving this presidency merely promises more of the same.

The track record of this President is more than abysmal; it is an unrelenting assault on the middle class as if it were a pandemic needing swift eradication by any means necessary. But the beltway babble is all about saving the President's legacy, not in stopping the damage to done to countless Americans.

Middle class carnage

Topping the list of treasonous acts committed by this President is his stubborn insistence on leaving our southern border open to the invasion of 3 million illegal aliens annually, along with terrorists, human traffickers, drug smugglers, cold-blooded killers, gangs, and child predators. Saving this presidency would merely invite more of the same, but under the guise of a "guest worker" program that looks too much like amnesty.

Saving this presidency means more callous disregard for the plight of the working poor, elderly and disadvantaged. While this President approved a $6 billion subsidy to the nation's largest oil companies at a time when those companies posted record profits, the legislation did not offer help to the poorest consumers whose heating oil bills this winter will skyrocket by 28.5%.
George Bush continues to lead the assault on the middle class by scaling back college tuition assistance programs, cutting back on Medicare, and changing the rules for declaring bankruptcy to make it impossible for people hit with catastrophic health care costs to rebound. Next in the crosshairs: elimination of the tax deduction on home ownership.

And if you want the true measure of the man, it was Bush who callously suspended the Davis-Bacon Act during cleanup efforts along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. This encouraged contractors to hire cheap foreign labor, which deprived residents of a decent wage when they desperately needed work to rebuild their lives.

The Bush Administration's trade policies are responsible for sending American jobs to cheap labor markets overseas and for importing more foreign workers into this country who take away jobs Americans already have. It is this Administration that sees the United States of America as a mere market, with its citizens subject to the whims of Big Business. The result: pension plans, health insurance, job training - all are being phased out.

Mindless globalization

In this President's mindless pursuit of globalization, entire industries are being lost forever, along with the good paying jobs of middle class Americans that once provided a stable tax base for schools, law enforcement and social welfare programs.

The textile and steel industries are pretty much gone, while technical and professional work is routinely shipped off to India. Now we see blue chip manufacturing jobs being lost to cheap labor markets like China, illustrated recently by the huge layoffs at General Motors and auto parts maker Delphi.

Next in line to be exported are emerging technologies as well as scientific and medical research. And for the first time, the United States is now a net importer of food products, making Americans increasingly dependent on other countries for agricultural products.

With the President's job performance ratings continuing to plummet, it is clear that most Americans -- 65% at this writing -- think George Bush is out of step with their concerns and priorities. Most Americans do not like the direction in which our country is headed. The weakness of this President is appreciated by other governments, which have demonstrated eagerness to exploit the situation.

During Bush's recent two-day trip to China, it was plain even to the Communist regime that he is so weak that there was no need to concede anything during hours of high-level negotiations. The result: Bush once again failed to win concessions from Communist China that could have saved U.S. jobs, eased a lopsided trade imbalance, and strengthened national security. The Chinese outmaneuvered Bush on the issues of currency revaluation, religious freedom and human rights. On Taiwan, China did not budge from its long-held opposition to autonomy for the rogue "province."

About the only thing Communist China agreed to do was put greater effort into clamping down on copyright infringement, like it has so many times before. The Administration can then parade this achievement as a foreign policy success. The Chinese know all they have to do is say the right words on intellectual property protection and we will go away. Meanwhile, it operates over 3,000 sham companies in this country whose primary mission is to steal technology innovations.
The new "community"

If you think you've seen everything Bush is really capable of, you're in for a big surprise…
Bush now wants to meld the U.S., Canada and Mexico into a "community," the boundaries of which would be defined by a common outer security perimeter. As described by the Council for Foreign Affairs in a 70-page paper entitled, Building a North American Community, within this new unified North America there would be the free movement of people and products. In other words, the free market would decide where people live and work.

The goal of this new arrangement is to "guarantee a free, safe, just, and prosperous North America." When you peel away all the glad-wrap, however, we're left with the stark reality that more Americans will have to work for paltry wages because big corporations will enjoy unfettered access to all the cheap labor they could ever want. Assuming all parties agree, this plan is supposed to go into effect as soon as 2010.

Clear and present danger

In his reasoning, posture, gestures, attitude and character, President Bush has revealed himself as a total fraud. The best Congress can do to serve all Americans is to keep this man bottled up for the next three years - stopping new initiatives at every turn. Only through political isolation can this man be rendered powerless to do more harm.

Then again, we can't really trust Congress to do the right thing anymore either. It seems neither party will be totally satisfied until they have reduced this nation to a squalid third-world existence, dependent on other nations for manufacturing, textiles, agriculture, technology and critical pharmaceuticals.

Only impeachment could create the possibility for corrective action, but neither the Democrats nor Republicans in Congress want to offend the Hispanic community or staunch the campaign contribution spigot of corporations that thrive on cheap labor.

Saving this presidency would mean the worst assaults on America's middle class are yet to come.

Nathan Muller is co-founder of For the Cause and the author of 26 books and numerous articles on political, regulatory, legal, management and technology issues. He is a frequent speaker at seminars and a guest on radio talk shows. He can be reached at this
email address email address.

This article is reproduced by permission of the author and For the Cause - www.forthecause.us

Why Did Bush Wiretap Without Court Approval?

2005-12-27T14:56:00.000-06:00

Because The Court Refused to Give Him Approval - So, being King, he did it any way.

"The constitution - don't talk to me about the constitution. It's just a f**king piece of paper."
-- George W. Bush

Here are the facts derived from a story printed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. These people deserve an award. It may well be one of the last real free presses left in the US.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps has approved at least 18,740 applications for electronic surveillance or physical searches from five presidential administrations since 1979.

The judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. In 20 of the first 21 annual reports on the court's activities up to 1999, the Justice Department told Congress that "no orders were entered (by the FISA court) which modified or denied the requested authority" submitted by the government.

However, since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004 -- the most recent years for which public records are available.

The judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejections in the court's history.

For the full story, go here to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/253334_nsaspying24.html?source=mypi

Professor Cheney to teach Economics 101

2005-12-21T12:19:00.000-06:00

"Woe to you legislators of infamous laws . . . who refuse justice to the unfortunate, who cheat the poor among my people of their rights, who make widows their prey and rob the orphan."
-- Isaiah 10:1

Now, that the repuglicans have "saved" $40 billion this morning by slicing off more aide to foodstamp recipients, benefactors of student loans and Medicaid, they will have to do something to restore the delicate monetary balance. Since they have, in essense, taken $40 billion out of circulation they will be anticipating a small downward blip in earnings of their base - that is, the richest 1% of America. It was a close vote. So close, that VP Cheney was called in to exercise his constitutional duty to cast the deciding, tie-breaking vote. He voted to cut off the aide.

Since this money was taken from the poor who recklessly squandered it on healthcare, food and education at the bottom of the economic pile, it actually turned over in the economy several times before reaching the coffers of the elite. Each time it turned over, it generated taxes and created jobs which it will no longer do.

To make up for that, it is obvious that it is now necessary to give the richest 1% at least an $80 billion dollar tax break. This will stimulate the economy and create an untold number jobs and taxes as it trickles downward to the poor and downtrodden who will now be able to find a job for $5.15 an hour.

That is, it will trickle down if the rich spent it or invest it, but the rich have this nasty habit of just taking excess funds above a certain point and sticking it in the bank. Worse yet, they have been taking all their extra tax breaks and investing in foreign manufacturing plants which don't help the poor here in the US at all.

Surely, Mr. Cheney will explain it all to them. I know he understands how it all works and I just know he wouldn't deliberately cast the deciding vote to take the food out of children's mouths unless he had an alternate plan. I'll just bet he's setting up an Economics 101 class for the super-Rich right now.

Bush: His Talent is Raping and Pillaging

2005-12-20T11:07:00.000-06:00

I keep reading on the net that "Bush is incompetent." "Bush is an idiot." Folks, never underestimate the duplicity of the enemy.

I have tried to make the point several times that Bush and company ARE NOT a bunch of incompetents. Over and over though, I find that most people in our Matrix prefer to take the blue pill, wake up the next morning and go on with their life as if nothing were happening.

Don't take anymore blue pills. Take the red pill instead. If you do, you will see that Bush and company are doing exactly what they set out to do. Their goal is to rape this country and to use the proceeds as a springboard to rule the world.

Most people can not come to grips with the reality of this situation. They just can not wrap their minds around the fact that a President of the United States does not hold the well-being of the nation and the people of the nation as his first loyalty. Other presidents have been crooked. Other presidents have been thieves, but I believe that even Nixon would have laid his life down for this country if it had come right down to it and in some kind of warped way, I believe that Nixon justified the means by convincing himself that the end would be a better and stronger USA.This is not true of Bush and company and this is what throws people for a loop.

The Bush group has no allegiance to country, people, nor (dare I say it) to God. Their allegiance is to money and power. If they have to kill a billion or so to get money and power, well, I'm sure they think the world is too crowded anyway.

Bush said it himself (slightly periphrased.) "Some people call them the elite. I call them my base." Now there in a nutshell is reality looking us in the face. This man is not stupid despite his former failures. This time, he has found something he can do well - raping and pillaging the United States.

Nope - No Intelligence There.

2005-12-19T10:33:00.000-06:00

Memorandum
December 14, 2005

TO: Sen. Dianne Feinstein
FROM: Alfred CummingSpecialist in Intelligence and National SecurityForeign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division

SUBJECT: Congress as a Consumer of Intelligence Information

This responds to your request for a discussion of Congress and its role as a consumer of national intelligence, and for a listing and a description of some of the U.S. Intelligence Community's principal intelligence products, including an identification of those which the executive branch routinely shares with Congress, and those which it does not.

Limitations on Congressional Access to Certain National Intelligence
By virtue of his constitutional role as commander-and-in-chief and head of the executive branch, the President has access to all national intelligence collected, analyzed and produced by the Intelligence Community. The President's position also affords him the authority - which, at certain times, has been aggressively asserted (1) - to restrict the flow of intelligence information to Congress and its two intelligence committees, which are charged with providing legislative oversight of the Intelligence Community. (2) As a result, the President, and a small number of presidentially-designated Cabinet-level officials, including the Vice President (3) - in contrast to Members of Congress (4) - have access to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods. They, unlike Members of Congress, also have the authority to more extensively task the Intelligence Community, and its extensive cadre of analysts, for follow-up information. As a result, the President and his most senior advisors arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of the Community's intelligence more accurately than is Congress. (5)

In addition to their greater access to intelligence, the President and his senior advisors also are better equipped than is Congress to assess intelligence information by virtue of the primacy of their roles in formulating U.S. foreign policy. Their foreign policy responsibilities often require active, sustained, and often personal interaction, with senior officials of many of the same countries targeted for intelligence collection by the Intelligence Community. Thus the President and his senior advisors are uniquely positioned to glean additional information and impressions - information that, like certain sensitive intelligence information, is generally unavailable to Congress - that can provide them with an important additional perspective with which to judge the quality of intelligence.

1. Reportedly "furious" about what he apparently believed to be unauthorized disclosures of classified information by Congress, President Bush on Oct. 5, 2001, ordered that the provision of classified information and sensitive law enforcement information be restricted to the Republican and Democratic leaders of both the Senate and House, and to the chairmen and ranking members of the two congressional intelligence committees. Until the President issued his order, and in keeping with prior practice, all Members of the intelligence committees had access to most such information. Bush agreed to rescind his order after several days, following a personal telephone conversation between the President and Sen. Bob Graham, then-chairman of the Senate's intelligence committee, and after negotiations between White House staff and Graham. See Bob Woodward, Bush at War, pp. 198-199. (Simon and Schuster).
2. The Senate established its intelligence oversight committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), in May 1976. The House of Representatives followed suit in July 1977, creating the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).
3. Central Intelligence Agency website [http://www.cia.gov/cia/di/analytica_products_section.html].
4. To the extent that Members of Congress are entitled access to intelligence information, it is by virtue of their elected positions. Members are not subject to background checks, nor are they issued security clearances, as are congressional staff who are provided access to classified information.
5. This memorandum does not directly address the quality of Intelligence Community (IC) collection and analysis, but rather limits its focus to the degree of access to intelligence information enjoyed by federal government policymakers - including Members of Congress - and the degree to which that access enables them to assess its quality.
There exists extensive commentary which does address the quality of the Intelligence Community's collection and analytic capabilities, including more recently that contained in a report issued by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. See WMD Commission, Report to the President of the United States, March 31, 2005 [Hereafter, cited as the WMD Commission Report].

This is an excerpt from the complete memo. To see the complete memo go here: http://feinstein.senate.gov/crs-intel.htm.

Fun With Numbers

2005-12-16T11:04:00.000-06:00

Some poor misguided soul on Alternet made a statement a couple of days ago that "the lowest paid employee of Wal-Mart makes twice the federal minimum wage." That would be $10.30 an hour or $21,424 annually. I immediately contradicted his statement but then I began to wonder, what does Wal-Mart actually pay? I didn't really know. Maybe I owed the guy an apology - very doubtful but it never hurts to do a reality check so here are some numbers I got from www.drummajorinstitute.org/injusticeindex.php. They have well documented sources that I won't repeat here but feel free to check it out.

Income level at which a family of three qualifies for food stamps: $20,376
Average annual wage of Wal-Mart sales associates: $14,787
Number of Wal-Mart employees in the United States: 1.2 million
Net worth of five Walton family heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune: $77.9 billion

Now, here is where we start having fun. It is easy to see that the average Wal-Mart sales associate with two dependents qualifies for food stamps. (Let's leave the issue of public housing and public healthcare out of this for now.) In fact, on average, they are $5,589 below the cutoff point. These are hard working people with fulltime jobs. So, these people not only qualify for foodstamps, they have to have them to survive at all even though they are working fulltime.

OK, test time: Where do foodstamps come from? Yes! Taxes! We have our thinking caps on today boys and girls.

Second question: Where do taxes come from? Right again! Out of your paycheck and my paycheck - we're on a roll.

So, let's roughly recap the situation. There are 1.2 million people working for Wal-Mart. On the average, Wal-Mart is paying these people $5,589 less per year than what they actually need to barely scrap by at poverty level. We, the taxpayers of this country, are making up the difference. That comes to 1,200,000 employees X $5,589 = $6,706,800,000. That's 6.7 billion dollars. (I just love word problems - don't you.)

It makes one wonder if there isn't some alternative. Isn't it possible that this $6.7 billion could come from somewhere other than the public trough. We start looking around and what do we see? Why, up in Bentonville, Arkansas there are five people with a net worth of $77.9 billion.

(An aside: To even think of this makes me sick. Here is true obscenity and true evil. Five blotted blood-fattened vampires sitting in their lair sucking the life from 1.2 million people and the children of those 1.2 million. Are we batteries in a Matrix? Here have a blue pill. Go back to sleep.)

What is $6.7 billion to five people who have $77.9 billion? Its just a blip on a financial chart. $6.7 billion is just as meaningless as $77.9 billion. Its just as meaningless as $71.2 billion which is what they would have left if they were to do the right thing and pay those people enough to bring them up to poverty level. Somebody tell me please, what is it you can buy with $77.9 billion that you can't buy with $71.2 billion.

Dear Politicians

2005-12-05T11:39:00.000-06:00

I have been following your voting record and that of many others in government for a long time now. Most of the time, I am not happy with the votes nor with the Democratic stance – or non-stance – on the issues so I want to be sure that you, my representative, are clear on what is important to me:

Voting reform: all votes must be counted and there must be a paper trail
End the war in Iraq – now.
Campaign financing: political campaigns must be financed by eligible voters through taxes and/or voluntary contributions.
Corporate responsibility: must pay at least a living wage (as opposed to a minimum wage) and pensions must be fully funded and non-revocable.
Health care: a universal single payer health plan for every United States citizen.
Income tax reform: a more progressive income tax, a tax on unearned income at the earned income rate and no repeal of the estate tax.
Exportation of jobs: taxes that encourage off-shoring must be repealed; the hardship on displaced U.S. workers must be alleviated.
Reproductive rights of women: this is a personal issue, not a governmental issue; get the government out of the equation.
“War on Drugs”: if consumers are eliminated, the supply chain will disappear; this can only be done through drug treatment programs and addressing the root causes of human misery that leads to drug use in the first place; putting more Americans in jail for non-violent crimes and giving more money to corrupt governments in Columbia and other countries is like pouring gasoline onto a fire.
Balance the budget: not by cutting social programs for poor people, by raising taxes on the rich.

These issues matter to me. From this day forward, I will not vote for, nor support any candidate or party who does not make public their support for these issues and their plan to accomplish these reforms. Party affiliation is of no concern – only issues and my grandchildren’s future.

God is on Our Side

2005-12-02T11:48:00.000-06:00

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. . . As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people."1

"If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbor, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians."2

"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." 3

All of the above are quoted directly from Adolf Hitler.
1. Speech, Munich, April 12, 1922
2. Speech, Berlin Feb. 24, 1939
3. Speech, Berlin, Oct. 24, 1933

F**k the Apocalypse

2005-12-01T11:24:00.000-06:00

By Lakshmi Chaudhry
Posted on November 28, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lakshmi/28805/

My good friend Chris Scheer -- author of "Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq" -- has something to say about the Chicken Littles of this world. Whether you agree with him or not, it asks us to think more seriously about the apocalyptic rhetoric that we sneer at when it comes from the Christian right, but eagerly embrace when touting our cause:

Fuck the Apocalypse. Seriously, it's bullshit. Fuck the one where God is coming to smite most of us, and fuck the one where the polar ice-caps melt and Nature is coming to smite most of us. It's all just morality-based negative wish-fulfillment.

If you want to say things are going to Hell in a hand-basket, fine. But it has always been thus. This is no school play, folks, it's a bunch of fragile survivors making life on a hot rock. Stop your grandiosity, stop believing you're at the absolute center of time and space. Believing the Apocalypse is upon us is just one gigantic ego trip.

In 10,000 years, whatever "intelligent" bunch of abstract thinkers still walks the planet will be mentioning the melting of the ice caps (which is real) with as much passion as my 6th graders recite the dates of the last Ice Age.

Rolling Stone, in an article subtly entitled "The End of the World, Part III," writes this month that:
The age of the International War on Terror seems to have turned itself into an unusually grim time in world history, an era of awesome and unforeseeable catastrophes, giant steps backward in the journey of civilization, ruinous and far-reaching political blunders and violently disillusioning confrontations with man's limitations. Even the most godless among us has to tremble before the biblical scale of the past twelve months' headlines: the tsunami that swallowed south Asia, the deadly lady named Katrina (also known as America Not Immune) and now this. We do not seem to be going forward very much, but every few months we lose, somewhere, a big piece of the world map, a mysterious and enervating process that is becoming like an ominously steady drip that can be heard all over the planet.

OK, first of all, south Asia was not "swallowed." It's outermost fringe was hit with a devastating wave. There are still a billion people living in India alone, and they would like you to know that not only were they not swallowed by a wave or a dragon or anything else, but they are still singing songs, making love and riding the bus to work today. And while it is surely awful that three million people are sleeping under tents after the earthquake in Pakistan, it is not the end of the world, in literal terms. After all, three million people is only five-ten-thousandths (.0005) of the Earth's population! A couple hundreds years ago, 3 million people would have been a lot. Now, as the Jewish kids say on TV say, not so much.

What is astonishing is not that the earth shakes and makes big waves and storms -- that's what it does, people -- but that 3 million people are managing to live at all in a barren land only the most highly adapted creatures would even attempt to make home, one famous for its horrific earthquakes, droughts and religious extremism. The whole story of human expansion is like an expedition to the South Pole: If one party gets wiped out along the way, another one is still going to try insanely the next season, as soon as we can trick some dogs into dragging us there.

Believe it: God is NOT coming and boy is he NOT pissed. Nature is NOT seeking revenge, and it is NOT broken. If the whole world turns into a giant, bubbling-hot ocean whirlpool, there will be bacteria that will be happily living off the thermal energy and waiting for the next wave of evolution. Nature will survive, even if we are not there to see it.

Things are the same as they ever were, and always changing. You say there was a tsunami that wiped out the flimsy villages of poor people and a hurricane that flooded an impoverished city people had been predicting would be flooded for 150 years. It turns out people are sometimes venal and lazy and that leads to tragedy, and not everybody acts well during a crisis, and being poor is hazardous to your health. You think?

No, but really, there's a grinding war whose point has been lost, and somebody cheated during an election, and people are starving somewhere, and the rich are getting richer and ... what year was this? Any fucking year whatsoever in the history of man. Oh, that's right.

Yes, things are faster now. Yes, we have become the ants on the globe's crust, multiplying to such effect that a billion of us could be vaporized by aliens tomorrow and the story would fade off the front pages after a few months. Yes, there are too damn many of us and we are too damn stupid to handle it. Yes, technological innovation has outstripped intellectual evolution with disastrous results. Yes, if you're not outraged you're not paying attention. Yes, yes, yes.

But it is PERSONAL Apocalypse that is real, not all this End Times, neat-bow-on-everything, Judgment Day, Doomsday crap everybody is selling. All my life in California I've been hearing about The Big One, and you know what? That earthquake is going to suck, hard. I could lose my life, loved ones -- even a child. But five years later, for society, it's just going to be an excuse for anniversary journalism. For me, I may never recover, but the earth will go on, unmoved, and humans, for better or worse, will continue to surge over the shifting sands.

Here's what is personally Apocalyptic: Watching your family die of starvation. Combing the wreckage of your life after the hurricane. Digging out the dead bodies of your neighbors after the earthquake. Tragedy is personal, or it inevitably becomes tainted with voyeurism.

Please don't misunderstand: Empathy, whether for those in our bed or those on the other side of the border, is perhaps the must wonderful mammalian skill there is, especially when teamed with helping actions. When we aid the Pakistanis and Louisianans and the Indonesians in their time of personal and communal crisis, we are all the richer for it. Seriously.

Just don't call it an Apocalypse. The world is not ending. To think so or say so or make jokes about it being so is simply to cop out on the fact that this is all really happening right now and we are not going to be rescued by God or nature or anybody else. Nobody is going to 'get theirs" and the mountain lions are not going to take back California to the swelling sounds of choral singing and the tipping point or the hundredth monkey is not going to turn us all into Buddhas full of empathy and grace. Nanotechnology is not going to rebuild the ozone layer, although your Prius might slow its dissolution. Steve Jobs is a huckster, not a Messiah, and Dick Cheney is an asshole, not a devil.

We either do the best we can, knowing that doing good is its own reward, or we fade into miserable fatalism. Suck it up.

Lakshmi Chaudhry is a senior editor at In These Times, and the former senior editor of AlterNet. You can write to her at lakshmi@alternet.org.

... well Duh!

2005-11-22T15:49:00.000-06:00

"But there must be a time limit. Mr. Bush and his crew have to understand that American blood and treasure are not unlimited. It is not undermining the war to suggest giving the Iraqis a realistic private timetable to defend themselves. Basic training for a U.S. soldier is six weeks. We've been training the Iraqi army for almost two years now. Even Gomer Pyle would be up to speed."

-- Bill O'Reilly Fox News host.

Power Über Alles

2005-11-21T10:54:00.000-06:00

by Paul Craig Roberts

Perfidy loves company. George W. Bush instructed his British puppet, Prime Minister Tony Blair, to get moving on the detention issue so that he, Bush, would have company when he attacked the Constitution's guarantee of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus prevents authorities from detaining a person indefinitely without charges; the guarantee of habeas corpus ensures that no one can imprison you without a trial. The Bush administration wants the power to detain indefinitely anyone it declares to be an enemy combatant or a terrorist without presenting the detainee in court with charges. In England the power to arrest people and to hold them indefinitely without charges was taken away from kings centuries ago. Bush apparently thinks he is the reincarnation of an absolute monarch.

The puppet Blair set to work. He soon discovered that at most he could try to pass a law that permitted the British government to hold a detainee for 90 days, a far cry from Bush's desire for indefinite detention. Blair took what he called his "anti-terror" legislation to Parliament and was handed his first-ever defeat as Prime Minister.

The British Parliament knew enough history to realize that Blair's "anti-terror" legislation was in fact the opposite. Parliamentarians perceived Blair's proposal as a police state trick that could be used by an unscrupulous government to terrorize Her Majesty's subjects by the use of imprisonment without charges. The British Parliament refused to put up with such injustice.

Eleven of Blair's former cabinet ministers joined in voting down the legislation. That happened on Wednesday November 9.

On Thursday November 10, the Republican controlled US Senate voted 49 to 42 to overturn the US Supreme Court's 2004 ruling that permits Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detentions. How dare the US Supreme Court defend the US Constitution and the civil liberties of Americans when we have terrorists to fight, argued the Republican senators. What are civil liberties, the Republicans asked rhetorically, but legal tricks that allow criminals and terrorists to escape.

The Labour Party-dominated British Parliament will not allow 90 days detention without charges, but the Republican-controlled US Congress favors indefinite detention without charges of whomever Bush wants to detain.

Nothing more effectively undercuts the image that Bush paints of America as the land of freedom, liberty and democracy than the Republican Party's destruction of habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus is essential to political opposition and the rise and maintenance of democracy. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply detain its opponents. Nothing is more conducive to one party rule than the suspension of habeas corpus.

It is heartbreaking to watch the Republican Party overthrow the very foundation of democracy in the name of democracy. The name of Lindsey O. Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina, the sponsor of this evil legislation, will go down in infamy in the book of tyrants.

The next time Bush declares that "they (Muslims) hate us for our freedom and democracy," someone should ask him how there can be freedom and democracy without habeas corpus.
The Bush administration has also resurrected that second great feature of tyranny – torture. "We have the right to torture," say President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Attorney General Gonzales.

What a hypocritical spectacle the Bush administration and the Republican Party have made of America. They boast of "freedom and democracy" while they destroy habeas corpus and practice torture.

Americans must recognize the Bush administration and the Republican Party for what they are. They are tyrants. They are bringing evil to the world and tyranny to America.

According to the Washington Post (Nov. 11), there are 750 detainees at Guantánamo. These people have been held for 3 or 4 years. If the Bush administration had any evidence against them, it would be a simple matter to file charges.

But the Bush administration does not have any evidence against them. Most of the detainees are innocent travelers and Arab businessmen who who captured by warlords and armed gangs and sold to the Americans who offered payments for "terrorists."

The reason so many of them have been tortured is that the Bush administration has no evidence against them and is relying on pain and the hopelessness of indefinite detention to induce self-incrimination. The Bush administration is desperate to produce some "terrorists."

What has become of the American people that they permit the despicable practices of tyrants to be practiced in their name? The Bush administration is in violation of the US Constitution, the rule of law, the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Standard, and basic humanity. It is a gang of criminals. The Republican Party is so terrified of losing power that it supports a tyrannical administration that has brought shame not just to the Republican name but to all Americans.

When a Republican next campaigns, all he can say is "vote for me because I want power to lock you up and torture you."

References
Habeas Corpus Act of 1679
Responding to abusive detention of persons without legal authority, public pressure on the English Parliament caused them to adopt this act, which established a critical right that was later written into the Constitution for the United States:

An act for the better securing the liberty of the subject, and for prevention of imprisonments beyond the seas.
WHEREAS great delays have been used by sheriffs, gaolers and other officers, to whose custody, any of the King's subjects have been committed for criminal or supposed criminal matters, in making returns of writs of habeas corpus to them directed, by standing out an alias and pluries habeas corpus, and sometimes more, and by other shifts to avoid their yielding obedience to such writs, contrary to their duty and the known laws of the land, whereby many of the King's subjects have been and hereafter may be long detained in prison, in such cases where by law they are bailable, to their great charges and vexation.

and from wikipedia:
In English Common Lawhabeas corpus is the name of several writs which may be issued by a judge ordering a prisoner to be brought before the court. More commonly, the name refers to a specific writ known in full as habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, a prerogative writ ordering that a prisoner be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not he is being imprisoned lawfully.

The right of habeas corpus has long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject. Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts "declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty."

Find this article at: http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=8006

Billions for Bombs - Crumbs for Children.

2005-11-18T12:54:00.000-06:00

The new budget bill passed in the wee hours this morning by the House of Representatives is an outrage to civilized society, a society to which this congress and this administration can no longer claim membership. The Republican supported plan ripped enormous holes in the already tattered safety-net of programs for the poor, college students, single parents, and disease control.

If you are one of the lucky ones whose job has not been out-sourced to another country yet, you can help by volunteering in your community to open some new soup kitchens. We are going to need them. This bill eliminates 74% of current food stamp recipients from the program, leaving only 80,000 people who will still qualify for assistance. This is in a country were it is now estimated that 12,000,000 people go to bed hungry every night.

Let’s see now. If we took the $6 billion a month we are spending to train terrorists in Iraq (oh, excuse me – I meant fighting insurgents) and divided it up between those 12 million hunger people, they could spent $500 a month EACH on groceries. Well, of course, we can all see how absurd that would be. People who produce food never contribute as much money to politics as people who produce weapons.

In addition to the food stamp program, the bill cut deeply into money allocated to the agency that enforces court ordered child-support. Now, dead-beat “dads” who just don’t want to pay child support can not be forced to pay it.

Well, that’s OK. A single mom can always sign up on food stamps to keep her kids from starving. Oh yeah – forgot there for a moment - no more food stamps. And money for college – that was drastically cut back too, and Medicare benefits and, you remember Duhbya saying he was “gonna protect us all from the burd flu”? Well, money for the Disease Control Center got cut back too...

Well, OK, you might be saying, “I’m really sorry but times are tough. Our country is deep in debt. We’ve got to cut somewhere.”

Guess what. At the same time the Republicans were taking food out of the mouths of children and making medical care more expensive, they gave the richest 1% in the nation another 70 billion dollar tax break.

The bill does not reduce spending. It does not reduce deficits. What it does do is give 50% of every tax dollar to the Defense Department so they can continue to drop white phosphorous on civilians in Iraq and run gulags around the world.

This bill is truly an outrage to civilized society. Strange that our government is not outraged.

Open Letter To Tucker Carlson

2005-11-17T09:36:00.000-06:00

I read your article on MSNBC website concerning your interview with Professor Stephen Jones. I did not see the interview but have read extensively on different hypotheses concerning 9/11. Obviously I wouldn't be writing if I didn't take issue with your article.

You state, "When one of my producers first told me about him, my first thought was: Stephen Jones is insane." Then, in the same paragraph you say, "In the interest of open-mindedness, we booked him." Obviously a contradiction and proof of a previously conceived notion of the "truth."

As far as Professor Jones being "totally incapable of explaining his own ideas" and "an epically bad guest" may I remind you that six minutes is a short time to explain anything in layman's terms that has to do with physics. Further, physics and astronomy professors are not known for their ability to do so. Even the great communicator and astronomer Carl Sagan needed an hour every week and a million dollars worth of computer graphics to convey some simple ideas to the American public.

Perhaps if you had truly had an open mind and done a little homework on Professor Jones' 9/11 theory, you - being the suave, debonair professional interviewer you are - could have done a better job of asking intelligent questions that would have encouraged Jones to get to the nitty-gritty of his theory.

What really encouraged me to write this letter though is the following part of your article:

"...a lot of people seem to think it's possible that the U.S. government had a hand in bringing down the World Trade Center buildings.

Ponder that for a second: The U.S. government killed more than 3,000 of its own citizens. For no obvious reason. Then lied about it. Then invaded two other countries, killing thousands of their citizens as punishment for a crime they didn't commit. If you really thought this - or even considered it a possibility - how could you continue to live here? You couldn't. You'd leave the United States on the next available flight and not come back. You'd have no choice. Continuing to pay taxes to a government capable of something so evil would make you complicit in the crime."

While I am not sure that I completely agree with Professor Jones, I think there is some merit in his assertions. I also believe that there has never been a thorough, unbiased attempt to determine exactly what did happen that tragic day.

Right now, it is sort of like solving a single murder. You look for motive, opportunity and weapon but the big question is, who benefits the most? The answer to me is obvious. The beneficiaries were Bush, Cheney, Big Oil, the Neo-Conservatives, Haliburton, and a host of other administration cronies.

As to leaving this country because a bunch of opportunists are using this tragedy to rob this country of its wealth and to steal the freedoms from its citizens, I say, "No thanks." This is my country. I will stay and fight for my birthright that is guaranteed me by the Constitution. One of those rights is to look at the evidence available to me and then make up my own mind. Right now, the evidence available to me tells me that the official story of 9/11 is hogwash.

Then comes the wrap up of your story, which from a logical point of view is itself hogwash:

"So of course most of the people who wrote to say they think the government might have been behind 9-11 don't really think the government might have been behind 9-11. For whatever reason, they just like to say so. Which as far as I'm concerned makes them phony and irresponsible."

All I can say to that is, I'm sure you know a lot more about being phony and irresponsible than I do.

Then you go on to say:

"Incidentally, we still have an open mind here on the Situation, even after Professor Stephen Jones. So if evidence ever does arise that the government lied substantially about what happened on September 11th, we'll be on it immediately. I promise."

One thing I will agree with; your mind is as open as it ever has been. However, I doubt if you would know evidence if it ran over you in the middle of the street and apparently logical argument also eludes you. But there are people who do understand logic and higher math. Professor Stephen Jones is one of them. I promise.

Bullshit Talks. Money Walks.

2005-11-16T10:21:00.000-06:00

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There is still a law on the books stating that any person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making “any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation” to Congress. Of course, in this Neocon world where justice stands on its head, “Bullshit talks, Money walks, and poor people go to jail.” Where, Barbara Bush would undoubtedly say, “.... you know (they) were underprivileged anyway, so this – this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

What am I talking about? In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips were asked a simple question

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.): “Did your company or any representatives of your companies participate in Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001?”

“No,” said Exxon Chief Executive Lee R. Raymond.

“No,” said Chevron Chairman David J. O’Reilly.

“We did not, no,” said ConocoPhillips chairman James Mulva.

“To be honest, I don’t know,” said BP America chief executive Ross Pillari, who came to the job in August 2001. “I wasn’t here then.”

“But your company was here,” Lautenberg replied.

“Yes,” Pillari said.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Shell Oil president John Hofmeister, who has held his job since earlier this year.

Documents released yesterday prove these masters of multi-billion dollar international oil corporations were lying. However, thanks to extraordinary maneuvering by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AL), the executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury. Committee Democrats who strongly protested this decision were over-ruled.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from all these oil companies, with the exception of Chevron, met in the White House with Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy. A great deal of those corporate written policies have now been passed into law and funded, including massive tax breaks to energy companies that are already raking in record profits.

Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that “gave detailed energy policy recommendations” to the task force. In addition, Cheney had a separate meeting with John Browne, BP’s chief executive, according to a person familiar with the task force’s work; that meeting is not noted in the document.

Environmentalists protested the task force’s secret, closed door meetings with corporate oil. They contended environmental and other public interests had no input into this important legislation. The White House refused to release a list of participants in the task force and subsequently was sued by Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club to obtain the records. And, guess what? As Gomer Pyle used to say, “Surprise, surprise, surprise,” the lawsuit was unsuccessfully.

Bullshit talks. Money walks.

Silence is Betrayal

2005-11-14T12:34:00.000-06:00

"A time comes when silence is betrayal."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Buddha said:

Hatred never ends by hatred in this world;

By love alone does hatred end.

This is an Eternal Law. (Dhammapada, Verse 5)

He explained further:

Victory breeds hatred,

The defeated live in pain.

Happily the peaceful live,

Giving up both victory and defeat.(Dhammapada, Verse 201)

Opposing the war in Iraq is absolutely necessary. Extending the American Empire only invites national destruction. How can any educated person doubt the truth of that? For proof, read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire or follow in history books as the sun finally sets on the English Hegemony.

The first of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not kill." If we allow others to kill in our names without protest, our hands are covered by the same blood and we are as guilty as if we had pulled the trigger ourselves.

"Thou shalt not kill" also implies that we are not to live at the expense of the misery, suffering and death of others. Inciting further violence in Iraq by occupying their country so that we might gain control over their oil resources will only earn us implacable enemies and deepen the cycle of violence. Disastrous fruits of war will haunt the world for generations, and will come home to us in terrible, unseen ways.

Just as the seeds of World War II were planted in World War I, the seeds of war with Iraq were planted years ago by our political leaders in a self-serving effort to further American interests. It was the American government that supplied chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein. It was the American government that stood by as Hussein used his new toys to kill thousands of his own people.

Now our leaders have changed their minds. They seem locked in a delusion that they are bringing freedom and liberty where they are actually delivering carnage and mayhem. Of the six and a half billion people on this planet, there are only a handful that still share this delusion. Unfortunately, that handful is currently running the mightiest killing machine ever built - the United States Armed Forces.

Not one of this handful of leaders has ever lived with the horrors of war. Not one of them has listened to a buddy crying for Momma and God as his blood and guts spilled on the ground. They sit in sterile rooms in Washington and plan obscenities like "Shock and Awe" which rained death and destruction day and night on innocents. They knew when they were planning that: 1.) their justifications were built on lies; and, 2.) the Iraqi leaders whom they were supposedly after were in bombproof shelters.

The Bible says "We reap what we sow." The Buddhist believe the same thing but state it a bit differently. They say our actions co-create each other’s reality, that ourselves and others external to us are never completely separate. So how we conduct ourselves in opposition to war makes a great difference to the world. Because we co-create reality in conjunction with everybody else - including Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield, we who are aware that we reap what we sow must walk a path of peace.

I know that many times I forget that we are all in this together; together we have created the reality of today's Iraq and Darfur. It is up to us, right here, right now, to help our leaders and our opponents see this.

Yes, I know. It is easier to turn away. We all get angry and at times we are all afraid. We all have our own demons. But if we indulge this anger and fear, we only create more anger and fear. We will reap what we sow. We will create more anger and fear in an endless cycle of reactive violence.

Despite their torturing and their killing and their scheming, Bush, bin Laden, Cheney, Hussein, Sharon, - to paraphrase, "If you cut them, do they not bleed? If you prick them, do they not feel pain?"

This then is our challenge: We must resist their actions and this war without placing them outside the circle of humankind. We must try to be more like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, and King every day. And, it wouldn't hurt if everyday we offered a little prayer, that no matter how far-fetched it seems, that our leaders might forsake war and take up the cause of peace.

Some kind of manly

2005-11-10T09:35:00.000-06:00

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by Molly Ivins
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11.10.05 - AUSTIN, Texas -- I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning.

Maybe I should try to get a grip -- after all, it's just this one administration that I had more cause than most to realize was full of inadequate people going in. And even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Cheney. And after all, we were badly frightened by 9-11, which was a horrible event. "Only" nine senators voted against the prohibition of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control the United States." Nine out of 100. Should we be proud? Should we cry?

"We do not torture," said our pitifully inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

I am baffled by these "arguments": But we're talking about really awful people, cries the harassed press secretary. People like X and Y and Z (after a time, one forgets all the names of the No. 2's after bin Laden we have captured). The SS and the Gestapo and the KVD weren't all that nice, either.

Then I hear the familiar tinniness of the fake machismo I know so well from George W. Bush and all the other frat boys who never went to Vietnam and never got over the guilt. "Sometimes you gotta play rough," said Dick Cheney. No shit, Dick? Now why don't you tell that to John McCain?

I have known George W. Bush since we were both in high school -- we have dozens of mutual friends. I have written two books about him and so have interviewed many dozens more who know him well in one way or another. Spare me the tough talk. He didn't play football -- he was a cheerleader. "He is really competitive," said one friend. "You wouldn't believe how tough he is on a tennis court!" Just cut the macho crap -- I don't want to hear it.

If you are dead to all sense of morality (please let me not go off on the stinking sanctimony of this crowd), let us still reason together on the famous American common ground of practicality. Torture. Does. Not. Work. Torture does not work. Ask the United States military. Ask the Israelis.

There seems to be some fantastic scenario floating around -- if Osama bin Laden had an atomic bomb hidden in a locker at Grand Central Station, and it was due to go off in 12 hours, and we had him in prison ... I seem to have missed some important television program on this theme. I am told it was fiction, but it must have been really scary -- it certainly seems to have unbalanced the minds of some of our fellow citizens.

Torture does not work. It is not productive. It does not yield important, timely information. That is in the movies. This is reality.

I grew up with all this pathetic Texas tough: Everybody here knows you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs; and this ain't beanbag; and I'll knock your jaw so far back, you'll scratch your throat with your front teeth; and I'm gonna cloud up and rain all over you; and I'm gonna open me a can of whup-ass ...

And that'll show 'em, won't it? Take some miserable human being alone and helpless in a cell, completely under your control, and torture him. Boy, that is some kind of manly, ain't it?

"The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have 'disappeared,' like the victims of some dictatorships." -- The Washington Post.

Why did we bother to beat the Soviet Union if we were just going to become it? Shame. Shame. Shame.
(c) 2005 Creators Syndicate

That's A Mighty Big Neighborhood!

2005-11-09T13:27:00.000-06:00

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Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, 4/6/05:
What we’ve seen over and over again is that over a relatively short time, people come to appreciate what we offer. … They appreciate it that we hire from the neighborhood.
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USA Today, 11/8/05:
In the affidavit, investigators said testimony and taped conversations from 2003 showed two executives at Wal-Mart headquarters knew that contractors and subcontractors cleaning its stores in several states employed illegal immigrants from eastern Europe and elsewhere.

"Come-To-Jesus-Meeting"

2005-11-08T13:52:00.000-06:00

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Its time everyone in this country had a “Come-To-Jesus-Meeting.” This is a “Southern thing” that’s not unknown in other regions of the country. It started in revival tents on hot sultry summer nights and the tradition was transported behind the woodshed when a father felt a boy needed a serious lesson in manners.

A sincere "Come To Jesus Meeting" is that moment when an individual is compelled by the weight of evidence and looming penalty to admit wrong doing, seek forgiveness and agree to avoid wrong doing again. The meeting consists of three parts.

During the first part, the errant admits their guilt and wrongdoing. If there is no admission there is no point in continuing with the proceedings. Second, the errant one has to sincerely repent and commit to stop doing wrong. Last, the errant ones must attempt to make restitution.

To participate in this meeting you don’t have to believe in Jesus. You don’t have to be a Christian. You don’t even have to believe in God or any “higher power.” All you have to believe is that this country has done wrong in the past and is doing wrong in the present. You have to believe that somehow we have lost our way and are now stumbling down the wrong path – a path strewn with injustice, cruelty and greed.

If you believe that, it doesn’t matter if you are Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, Left or Right; all that matters is that you believe there has to be a better way than the way we are going. If this is you than let’s get this meeting started.

We, the American people are guilty of a type of patriotism that makes lawless ambition into a virtue. For too long we have always assumed that God was on our side without once asking if we were on the side of God. I know the following piece of advice is trite and non-Christians might find it offensive but I think it is time we ran our country by asking ourselves, “If Jesus were running this country, what would he do?” (Feel free to substitute Buddha, Gandhi, or your favorite compassionate philosopher.)

We, the American people have allowed our political processes to be perverted by the insatiable greed of a few people at the expense of the many, especially those least able to bear the expense and least able to defend themselves. We must admit this and commit ourselves to changing the system. Regressive taxes in all forms must go if we are to stop repression of those who are already down. A social net must be provided including a living wage and national health care.

We, the American people are guilty of idolatry. We worship corporations as if they were gods. Corporations aren’t gods, they aren’t even people. They are soulless business entities setup for a single reason only – to make a profit for their owners. As a business entity, they should have no rights remotely resembling those of people and a clear distinction must be made under the law. This is a country “of the people, by the people, for the people,” not for corporations. It should be illegal for businesses and corporations to contribute to political candidates, issues, or parties. It should be illegal for such contributions to be accepted by candidates, issues, or parties. Can you think of a single reason, for the public good, that a corporation would donate to a politician? Further, to remove any temptation or hint of impropriety, revolving doors between government and corporations must be closed.

We, the American people are guilty of holding our religious beliefs (even when those beliefs are non-beliefs) with such certainty that we count it as a moral deed to jam our beliefs down other people’s throats. I know this is a touchy subject, but consider this for a moment: Most religions teach that the Supreme Being is infinite. If that is true than that Being has many sides, like a multi-faceted jewel so large we can only see one facet at a time. Perhaps one group sees one facet and calls it “God.” Another group sees another facet and calls it “Allah.” Yet another group may know the facet they see as “The Great Mam-Jube.” Whatever – the point is – just maybe it’s all a matter of semantics; where you are standing when you learn to “see” a Supreme Being. Just maybe we’re all talking about the same being. This leads to our next guilt.

We, the American people are guilty of a divisive spirit. We tend to look at all who are not like-minded as enemies rather than fellow human beings that might share common ground. This is not a guilt unique to our nation. Throughout history when conflict between nations was imminent, each government made every effort to dehumanize and demonize the people of the other nation to the populace at large. If your people see their people as “people” with faces, and wives and children, your people are more apt to sit down and talk about the weather with them than they are to maim and/or kill them. A government intent on war just cannot have that, now can they?

That’s a lot of guilt and a lot of wrongdoing. Acceptance of such a burden is not something most people will take on willingly. Before you decide, ask yourself these questions:

Does might make right?
Should the United States impose our form of government
on another country by force?
Is it right that almost 40 million people live
below the poverty level in this country while the richest 5% of our citizens
control 50% of the wealth?
Is it right that a person can work forty hours a
week in this country and be forced to live in a shelter for the homeless because
they can’t afford to eat AND pay rent?
Should corporations have the same
rights as a human being (and to add insult to injury, they get taxed at a lower
rate.)?
Is this country to be run for people or corporations?

We know these things are not “right.” They do not conform to any set of moral values taught in any church in this country. They are counter to the intent of the Constitution. No matter our political beliefs, I think we can agree there is a lot in this country that needs to be fixed. Its time we invited our politicians to a “Come-To-Jesus-Meeting.”

Crony, Phony - It's All Bologna

2005-11-04T08:01:00.000-06:00

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"The success of the Bush-Cheney administration will depend on the quality appointees we choose to join us to lead this nation in the years ahead. I will look for people who are willing to work hard to do what is best for America, who examine the facts and do what is right whether or not it is popular."
- President George W. Bush,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/appointments/

cro·ny: a political hanger-on

pho·ny: not genuine or real
bologna: soon to be the only meat Americans can afford.

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Michael Brown - CRONY
Position (still?) held: Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
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Responsibilities: In charge of a coordinated approach to national security from emergencies and disasters - both natural and man-made. Oversees 2,500 full-time employees in the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate and is responsible for preparing for, preventing, responding to and recovering from disasters.

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Resume: College friend of previous FEMA director. Michael Brown had no disaster-related experience prior to joining FEMA. His most recent job prior to joining FEMA was as the Commissioner of Judges and Stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization. Although his responsibilities as FEMA director have now been suspended due to serious public discontent in his handling of Hurricane Katrina, he is still on the payroll in an unknown capacity.
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Julie Myers - CRONY

Position nominated for: Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE)

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Responsibilities: In charge of the second largest investigative agency in the Federal Government with over 20,000 employees, including 6,000 investigators, and an annual budget of more than $4 billion. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is comprised of five integrated divisions that form a 21st century law enforcement agency with broad responsibilities for a number of key homeland security priorities, including preventing terrorists from entering the country.

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Resume: Currently a special assistant handling personnel issues for President Bush. Recently married to John Wood, Chief of Staff to Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security. Niece of General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Worked briefly for Chertoff in the criminal division of the Justice Department and former Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement at the Commerce Department, supervising a $25 million budget. Republican Senator George Voinovich told Ms. Myers at her nomination hearing: "I'd really like to have [DHS Secretary Mike Chertoff] spend some time with us, telling us personally why he thinks you're qualified for the job. Because based on your resume, I don't think you are."

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David Safavian - CRONY

Position held: Administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OMB)

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Responsibilities: In charge of a $300 billion budget and ensuring fair competition for federal contracts. Sets the procurement policies for the Office of Management and Budget, including funds for Hurricane Katrina efforts.

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Resume: Currently out on bail after being arrested and charged with obstructing the criminal investigation into indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Married to Jennifer Safavian, chief counsel for oversight and investigations to Rep. Tom Davis, Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee which among other things, oversees federal contracting for Katrina relief. David Safavian's previous experience included lobbying partnerships with Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff.

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James Fuller - CRONY
Position:Chief of Staff for the Transit Security Administration (GSA)

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Responsibilities:Top staffer in the TSA whose mission is to protect the nation's transportation systems. The agency was created in direct response to 9/11 so as to close security gaps in our air travel system.

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Resume: Only professional experience is as a campaign manager, including those of Senator Domenici's (R-NM) 2002 re-election efforts, Bush-Cheney 2000 in New Mexico, and Rep. Heather Wilson’s (R-NM) 1997 special election. Mr. Fuller also served as Chief of Staff for the Republican Senate Caucus at the New Mexico State Legislature during two legislative sessions (1999-2000).

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Jeffrey Holmstead - PHONY
Position: Assistant Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for Air and Radiation

Responsibilities: Leads the Air and Radiation division of the EPA whose main mission is to protect human health and the environment. The Air and Radiation division is responsible for monitoring, studying, and preventing ozone depletion, acid rain, pollution, radiation and climate change.

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Resume: Formerly a lawyer at the law firm Latham & Watkins where he represented a conglomerate of coal, energy, and utility companies in their fight against EPA air pollution standards. Since he joined the Administration, Holmstead has been the Administration’s chief proponent of the “Clear Skies” initiative, which allows for weaker standards for mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide emissions from power plants. Not only has Holmstead been accused of lying to Congress over the impact of some of the Administration’s rules to implement the initiative, but a report by the Washington Post found that EPA’s new mercury emissions proposals were nearly identical to a memo circulated earlier by lawyers at Latham & Walkins – Holmstead’s former employer.

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Daniel Troy - PHONY
Position held: Chief counsel of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

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Responsibilities: Led the legal team of the FDA to ensure that the public is protected from unsafe food, drugs and other medical products. The FDA regulates products that account for close to one quarter of every dollar spent by consumers in the United States.

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Resume: Formerly a lawyer who made a name for himself by going after the FDA’s right to regulate industry. Troy successfully defended the tobacco industries’ suit against the FDA’s efforts to regulate tobacco advertising while working for Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. Troy had another controversial victory when he won his fight with the FDA to allow drug companies to provide doctors with information on “off-label” uses of their drugs. US News & World Report found that Troy held dozens of private meetings with drug manufacturers after he joined the Administration, and that he had kept no minutes or notes of the meetings, despite FDA policy to do otherwise. Troy’s bias became clear over the FDA’s stalled investigation of Ephedra, a dietary supplement that has been linked to at least 100 deaths. Troy also took the side of the citrus juice industry over consumers on new rules to rid fruit juice of contaminants like E. coli. Troy also sided with lobbyists from Fashion Wear Services, a company that makes decorative contact lenses, allowing the lenses to be regulated as cosmetics instead of medical devices. After a 15-year-old girl was almost blinded in one eye from inserting a tinted lens with no professional instruction, the FDA reversed course and banned the import of the lenses citing public health concerns. There was also a falloff in overall FDA enforcement actions against drug companies under Troy’s tenure, specifically for false advertising claims. Between January 1999 and December 2001, the FDA averaged roughly 90 enforcement letters a year to drug companies for misleading advertising. That number dropped to 30 under Troy, following a change in FDA policy requiring all enforcement letters be approved by his office.

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Ann-Marie Lynch - PHONY
Position held: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Policy, Health and Human Services (HHS)

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Responsibilities: Provides analysis and advice to the President on key consumer issues, including prescription-drug policies. HHS is the lead agency for protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to help themselves.

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Resume: Prior to her HHS job, Lynch worked as a lobbyist for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug-company trade group. As a lobbyist, she fought against congressional calls for price controls of prescription drugs. As Deputy Assistant she blocked the release of at least a dozen research reports, including ones that challenged drug company claims that price capping resulted in a lack of medical innovation and another that showed Bush's Medicare drug plan would not serve rural areas. As Congress considered the Medicare drug bill, this report was used as an argument for banning the government from negotiating drug prices. As our seniors are often forced to choose between food and medicine, Lynch is in a position to decide who profits, drug companies or Americans.

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Charles Lambert - PHONY
Position: Deputy Undersecretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs, US Department of Agriculture (USDA)

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Responsibilities: Oversees policy development and the day-to-day operations of the three agencies that comprise the Marketing and Regulatory Programs (MRP) and its $800 million budget. MRP's mission is to safeguard our animals and crops from pests and diseases, monitor the agricultural marketing system, ensure fair trade practices, and assure value and quality in agricultural products. Includes determining the safety and labeling of all food products grown and sold in the US.

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Resume:Before Lambert joined the USDA, he worked for 15 years at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the lobbying group for the cattle industry. At the USDA, his main public safety duty is to regulate the meat packing industry. Before the discovery of mad cow disease in the United States, Lambert testified in a congressional hearing that mad cow disease wasn't a threat. In fact, he agreed to bet his life and his job on it. He also fought hard for a provision in the 2004 Omnibus appropriations bill to delay for two years a requirement that supermarket meat and produce carry labels identifying them by country of origin. When mad cow disease was discovered in the US six months later, it was this very lack of labeling that made it so difficult to determine from which country the diseased meat had originated.

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Scott Gottlieb - PHONY
Position: Deputy Commissioner for Policy, Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

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Responsibilities: Coordinates medical and scientific affairs for Lester Crawford, Commissioner of the FDA. Serves as senior policy advisor to Mr. Crawford, developing agency policy which directs and coordinates the agency’s rulemaking activities and regulations.

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Resume: Before his FDA appointment, Gottlieb's was the editor of a Wall Street newsletter analyzing medical technology stocks. His connections to the pharmaceutical industry were so extensive, that he had to recuse himself for a year from any deliberations on the nine companies regulated by the FDA. These companies include Eli Lilly, Roche and Proctor & Gamble. Despite telling TIME magazine that he would not interfere with the scientific or medical experience of the FDA, he has already questioned FDA decisions to stop a drug trial on MS and the non-approval of a Pfizer drug for osteoporosis, which has a large impact on the stock value of the pharmaceutical companies.

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Timothy Flanigan - CRONY
Position nominated for: Deputy Attorney General (DOJ)

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Responsibilities: The Deputy Attorney General advises and assists Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General, in formulating and implementing departmental policies and programs and in providing overall supervision and direction to all US Attorneys. Second in command at the DOJ, the chief law enforcement office of the Federal Government, oversees legal matters and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments.

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Resume: Flanigan has already had experience advising and assisting Alberto Gonzalez. He worked as a legal advisor in the Bush Administration under Alberto Gonzalez and has been reported to have been involved in meetings discussing the controversial detainee interrogation and torture techniques. He was also part of the legal team arguing on behalf of Bush for Florida's electoral votes in the Presidential election of 2000. Flanigan is currently the Senior Vice President and general counsel of Tyco International. At Tyco, he oversaw the work of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff to block the Corporate Patriot Enforcement Act and similar bills designed to penalize American firms that incorporated outside the US to avoid taxes.

To learn about Democratic efforts to oppose these types of appointments, including the Anti-Cronyism and Public Safety Act Click here.

EXTRA! The War in Iraq is All Clinton's Fault.

2005-11-03T08:10:00.000-06:00

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WASHINGTON - The White House sought to deflect politically charged questions Wednesday about President Bush’s use of prewar intelligence in Iraq, saying Democrats, too, had concluded Saddam Hussein was a threat.

“If Democrats want to talk about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed and the intelligence, they might want to start with looking at the previous administration and their own statements that they’ve made,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
He said the Clinton administration and fellow Democrats “used the intelligence to come to the same conclusion that Saddam Hussein and his regime were a threat.”

Iraq – A Foreign Policy Misadventure?

2005-11-01T12:02:00.000-06:00

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For days now, I have been stewing over John Kerry’s latest Iraqi “exit strategy” and I think this stew has simmered long enough.

I tried to like John Kerry. I really did but somewhere deep in my stomach; listening to him during the campaign made me just slightly nauseous. Kerry was obviously more intelligent than Bush, better informed, and a better speaker. However, at the end of every speech, it seemed that he disagreed with Bush but not necessarily with Bush’s policies, especially those regarding Iraq. Finally, I voted for Kerry – because he wasn’t Bush.

Now, he’s trying to serve up leftovers from last year’s campaign disguised as a new exit strategy. He wants to pull out gradually over 12 to 18 months – with the caveat that we would have to stay longer if “necessary.”

Well John, old buddy, I didn’t like that dish the first time you passed it around. Keeping it in the refrigerator for a year didn’t improve its appearance or its odor. Furthermore, referring to the U.S. war of aggression in Iraq as “a foreign policy misadventure” gives me more than indigestion. Frankly, it makes me want to regurgitate.

Do you, Mr. Kerry, want to explain to Cindy Sheehan and the other two thousand Gold Star families that Iraq was “a foreign policy misadventure?” Explain to the 15,000 severely wounded American service men about this “foreign policy misadventure.” Tell the 100,000 families of the dead in Iraq, “Oh, we’re sorry. This was just a little foreign policy misadventure.”

This was not a frigging foreign policy misadventure. This was and is a war crime and a conspiracy on a massive scale. In the words of General Anthony Zinni, the Bush administration “cooked the books.” There were no WMDs in Iraq. There were no Al Qaeda connections. There were no 9/11 connections. There were no Osama bin Laden ties. These facts were all known by the U.S., Israeli, and British intelligence long before this little “misadventure” began.

If there is any Democrat (or Republican) in Washington D.C. with any gonads at all who voted in any way for this war, it is time they stand up, admit the war is illegal and immoral, apologize for being duped into voting for it, then insisting loud and clear that we get out of Iraq NOW! Then, we should begin the war crimes tribunal.

That, Mr. Kerry, is an exit strategy I could swallow.

Falwell Picks Next Supreme Court Nominee

2005-10-31T08:18:00.000-06:00

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Duhbya called up God to ask him who he should pick for his next nominee to the Supreme Court. God was out playing golf with Reagan and Eisenhower so Gabriel answered the phone.

“Hi. Gab here.” He listened a minute to the incoming call. It sounded awfully like mosquitoes buzzing.

“No. God is out,” Gabriel said trying to be patient – more mosquito buzzing. “Now look Junior, I’ve told you before, God doesn’t have time for your penny-ante bullsh*t. Besides, you don’t ever do what he tells you to do anyway.”

More mosquito buzzing. “Hold on there Junior. God didn’t tell you to nominate Miers. You’re not hitting the sauce again are you?”

“Buzz, buzz, buzz.”

Gabriel looked slightly amused and replied, “Yeah, well. I don’t care if Cheney did say that on the floor of the house, I’m not going to pass a message like that on to God. You do it yourself. In the meantime, why don’t you call Jerry Falwell? I think he’s in an alley just across town from you entertaining a guest.”

“Buzz, buzz, buzz.”

“Well, Junior, you know what they say. Judge not least ye be judged. And besides, Falwell will be a Born-Again Christian – again – before he goes to church tomorrow.” Gabriel gently hung up the phone.

Duhbya finally did get Falwell on the phone but there was a lot of interference. About every thirty seconds, Falwell would shout out, “Oh Lord, I’m coming.” The background noise was some kind of slurping sound, kind of like the pumps had made as they pumped the last water out of New Orleans.

Falwell was breathing hard but he finally managed to gasp out, “Alito, Alito, Alito-o-o-o, oh Lord I’m coming now.”

So that is how Alito became the next Supreme Court nominee – at least, that’s what I heard. Here is some other stuff I heard about Alito:

ALITO WOULD OVERTURN ROE V. WADE: In his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Alito concurred with the majority in supporting the restrictive abortion-related measures passed by the Pennsylvania legislature in the late 1980’s. Alito went further, however, saying the majority was wrong to strike down a requirement that women notify their spouses before having an abortion. The Supreme Court later rejected Alito’s view, voting to reaffirm Roe v. Wade. [Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 1991]

ALITO WOULD ALLOW RACE-BASED DISCRIMINATION: Alito dissented from a decision in favor of a Marriott Hotel manager who said she had been discriminated against on the basis of race. The majority explained that Alito would have protected racist employers by “immuniz[ing] an employer from the reach of Title VII if the employer’s belief that it had selected the ‘best’ candidate was the result of conscious racial bias.” [Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 1997]

ALITO WOULD ALLOW DISABILITY-BASED DISCRIMINATION: In Nathanson v. Medical College of Pennsylvania, the majority said the standard for proving disability-based discrimination articulated in Alito’s dissent was so restrictive that “few if any…cases would survive summary judgment.” [Nathanson v. Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1991]ALITO WOULD STRIKE DOWN THE FAMILY AND MEDICAL LEAVE ACT: The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) “guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one.” The 2003 Supreme Court ruling upholding FMLA [Nevada v. Hibbs, 2003] essentially reversed a 2000 decision by Alito which found that Congress exceeded its power in passing the law. [Chittister v. Department of Community and Economic Development, 2000]

ALITO SUPPORTS UNAUTHORIZED STRIP SEARCHES: In Doe v. Groody, Alito agued that police officers had not violated constitutional rights when they strip searched a mother and her ten-year-old daughter while carrying out a search warrant that authorized only the search of a man and his home. [Doe v. Groody, 2004]

ALITO HOSTILE TOWARD IMMIGRANTS: In two cases involving the deportation of immigrants, the majority twice noted Alito’s disregard of settled law. In Dia v. Ashcroft, the majority opinion states that Alito’s dissent “guts the statutory standard” and “ignores our precedent.” In Ki Se Lee v. Ashcroft, the majority stated Alito’s opinion contradicted “well-recognized rules of statutory construction.” [Dia v. Ashcroft, 2003; Ki Se Lee v. Ashcroft, 2004]

Rudeness and Bus Seats

2005-10-27T10:30:00.000-05:00

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1955, Little Rock, Arkansas: I was seven years old. I was trying very hard to be invisible because my daddy was raving again and when my daddy raved, somebody usually got hit. Usually it was me.

I huddled into myself as small as I could, listening to what he was saying. Listening and remembering was crucial. Any tidbits of information about boundaries that he wouldn’t allow to be crossed could save me from a future whipping.

“Damn uppity black bitch,” Daddy said. “And that Eisenhower – he ain’t no better ‘n one a them hisself. I wish they’d take that black bitch and a big black buck too, adder they’d been out pickin’ cotton all day and handcuff one to each side of ole Ike and make him sleep with ‘em all night long and see how he liked that.”

I didn’t figure he’d like it much. I’d seen a picture of the president in a newspaper. He was dressed in a suit and tie. He probably wasn’t used to being around people who were hot and sweaty from hard work. I know when we came in from picking cotton, we sure didn’t smell like any bouquet of roses.

The thought of that clean, neat little man sharing the same bed with two people who had been out working in the sun all day struck me as funny. I could feel a giggle welling up but I tried hard to choke it down.

Daddy heard me anyway, even above his yelling. He whirled on me as he unbuckled his belt and jerked it from his pants loops. “You laughing at me boy?” He folded the belt in half as he advanced towards me.

As he beat me with the belt, I screamed and cried and promised I wouldn’t do it again (whatever “it” was.) Finally, he got tired, put his belt back on and went to work. I didn’t know it then, but the “black bitch” was Rosa Parks. The crime she committed that so incensed my father was refusing to yield her seat on a bus to a white man in Mobile, Alabama.

My father and Eisenhower died long years ago. Rosa Parks just passed away peaceably in her sleep at the age of 92. I don’t know what happened to the rude white man on the bus.

What if ...?

2005-10-26T12:48:00.000-05:00

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What if you had been the winner of that $340 million lottory last week?

What if you had listened to all the advise that your daddy so freely handed out?

What if that hot one you tried to pick up in the bar last night had actually believed your BS?

What if - well, you get the picture. It's called the What IF Game. Here is a great one that is now going around on the web. What if Duhbya hadn't started the Iraq war and squandered over 203 billion dollars of hard-earned U.S. tax dollars over there - so far? What could we have done with that money? Well, here is some perspective on just how much of our money Duhbya has poured down that rathole. For that much money:

We could have fully funded GLOBAL anti-hunger efforts for 8 years.

We could have paid for 26,962,984 children to attend a year of Head Start.

We could have paid for health insurance for 12,189,859 children for ten years.

We could have hired 352,790 additional public school teachers for ten years.

We could have provided 9,868,665 students four-year scholarships at public universities.

We could have built 1,832,965 additional housing units.

We could have fully funded world-wide AIDS programs for 20 years.

We could have ensured that every child in the entire world was given basic immunizations for 67 years.

But no. Duhbya had rather spend our money on depleted uranium armory piercing bullets and super napalm bombs (M70). Of course, most of it he handed out to buddies in the form of no-bid contracts. Too bad there wasn't enough left over to buy body armor for the troops but, oh well. As Rumsfield said, "You fight with the army you've got, not the one you have to pay for." Maybe that's not an exact quote, but I'm sure I captured the meaning close enough for government work.

And by the way, speaking of Rumsfield, who out there really believes that Duhbya actually masterminded everything that has gone on in the last five years? I want everyone who thinks Duhbya is actually that smart to pat your head, rub your stomach, stand on your left leg, and jump two steps to your right. Just as I thought. Nobody believes that.

Steven Pizzo summed it up pretty well when he said:

"GWB – a kind of Forrest Gump from the Dark Side. A man ignorant, proud of it, and willing to take direction from those he considered friends."

A Matter of Conscience

2005-10-24T12:48:00.000-05:00

by Sgt. Kevin Benderman

Having watched and observed life from the standpoint of a soldier for 10 years of my life, I always felt there was no higher honor than to serve my country and defend the values that established this country. My family has a history of serving this country dating back to the American Revolution, and I felt that to continue on in that tradition was the honorable thing to do.

As I went through the process which led to my decision to refuse deployment to Iraq for the second time, I was torn between thoughts of abandoning the soldiers that I serve with, or following my conscience, which tells me: war is the ultimate in destruction and waste of humanity.

Thoughts that we could, and should, consider better ways to solve our differences with other people in the world have crossed my mind on numerous occasions. And this was the driving force that made me refuse deployment to Iraq a second time. Some people may say I am doing so out of fear of combat; I am not going to tell you that the thought of going back to that place isn't scary, but that is not the reason for my decision to not return.

I want people to know that the longer I thought about just how stupid the concept of war really is, the stronger I felt about not participating in war. Why do we tell our children to not solve their differences with violence, then turn around and commit the ultimate in violence against people in another country who have nothing to do with the political attitudes of their leaders?

Having read numerous books on the subject of war and having heard all the arguments for war, I have come to the conclusion that there are no valid arguments for the destructive force of war. People are destroyed, nations are destroyed, and yet we continue on with war. The young people that I went with to the combat zone looked at it like it was a video game they played back in their childhood.

When you contemplate the beauty of the world around us and the gifts we have been given, you have to ask yourself, "Is this what humanity is meant to do, wage war against one another?" Why can't we teach our children not to hate or to not be afraid of someone else just because they are different from us? Why must it be considered honorable to train young men and women to look through the sights of a high-powered rifle and to kill another human being from 300 meters away?

Consider, if you will, the positive things that could be accomplished without war in our lives: prescription medication that is affordable for seniors, college grants that are available for high school seniors - I could name a list of reasons not to waste our resources on war. The most important being to let the children of the world learn war no more.

I've received e-mails from people who said that I was a coward for not going to war, but I say to them that I have already been, so I do not have anything to prove to anyone anymore. What is there to prove anyway - that I can kill someone I do not even know and who has never done anything to me? What is in that concept that anyone could consider honorable?

I first realized that war was the wrong way to handle things in this or any other country when I went to the war zone and saw the damage that it causes. Why must we resort to violence when things do not go our way? Where is the logic of that? I have felt that there are better ways to handle our business than to bomb each other into oblivion. When you are on the water in a boat and you have a chance to see dolphins playing with each other as they go about their business, you realize that if they can live without war, then humanity should be able to as well.

Can't we teach our children to leave war behind in history where it belongs? We realized that slavery and human sacrifice were obsolete institutions, and we left them behind us. When are going to have the same enlightened attitude about war?

I look at my stepchildren and realize that war has no place with me in giving them what they need to survive the trials and tribulations of early adulthood. And if you look at all the time soldiers lose in the course of fighting wars, such as birthdays and anniversaries, their children going to the senior prom and college graduations, and other things that can never be replaced, then you have to come to the understanding that war steals more from people than just the sense of humanity - it also steals some of that humanity from their family.

I have learned from firsthand experience that war is the destroyer of everything that is good in the world; it turns our young into soulless killers, and we tell them that they are heroes when they master the "art" of killing. That is a very deranged mindset in my opinion. It destroys the environment, life, and the resources that could be used to create more life by advancing our endeavors.

War should be left behind us; we should evolve to a higher mindset even if it means going against what most people tell us in this country, such as that we can never stop fighting with other people in the world. I have made the decision to not participate in war any longer, and some people in this country cannot comprehend that concept, but to me it is simple. I have chosen not to take part in war, and it was easy to come to that decision.

I cannot tell anyone else how to live his or her life, but I have determined how I want to live mine - by not participating in war any longer, as I feel that it is stupid and against everything that is good about our world.

To read more about Kevin Benderman, or to offer support or assistance, go to Kevin Benderman Timeline, to the Kevin Benderman Defense Committee, or send an e-mail to Monica Benderman at mdawnb@coastalnow.net.

Department of Peace and Nonviolence

2005-10-21T11:44:00.000-05:00

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On Wednesday, Dennis Kucinich and 57 (now 59) cosponsors introduced H.R. 3760, a bill to establish a Department of Peace and Nonviolence. This legislation will raise prevention of domestic and international conflict, and working for nonviolent resolutions to conflict when it arises, to the same or higher level of governmental priority as violent or repressive responses.
The department will work proactively with every branch of the Federal Government. It will draw upon the intellectual and spiritual wealth of organizations and individuals who are already developing and employing nonviolent approaches and practices which resolve conflicts and advance the human condition.

Among its many domestic and educational responsibilities, the department will develop policies and create programs that promote peace in America by implementing field-tested strategies that reduce and prevent violent crime, and teach tolerance and peacemaking skills. The department will serve as an ethical guide and checkpoint for Federal law and national domestic programs administered by all agencies of the Federal Government. Some areas of domestic and educational focus include:

Peace in our homes: prevention of spousal abuse, child abuse, and mistreatment of the elderly;
Peace in our schools: prevention of youth and gang violence;
Peace in our streets: prevention of racial and ethnic violence and violence against gays and lesbians, reducing the causes of violent responses by police, and work on criminal justice reform;
Peace in the media: studying the role of the media in the escalation and de-escalation of domestic and international conflict; and
Peace in our hearts: fostering a culture of peace by actively injecting consideration of peace and nonviolence into civic life.

Internationally, more than 100,000,000 people - over one hundred million - perished in war in the 20th Century, most of them civilian non-combatants, women and children. In its international component the bill seeks not to dismantle the military, but rather to add a voice at the President's table alongside the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense whose job it is to introduce non-violent strategic alternatives. Among other charges, the Secretary of Peace will advise on all matters relating to national security and the role of the U.S. in the world including:
Prevention, amelioration and de-escalation of armed and unarmed international conflict;

Training of U.S. personnel involved in post-conflict reconstruction and demobilization in areas ravaged by war;
Training and support of civilian peacekeepers;
Protection of human rights;
Proactive development of programs to advance international understanding and address nonviolently the root causes of conflict; and
Analysis of the impact of arms sales from the U.S. on homeland and international security.

It has been suggested that our species stands at an evolutionary fork in the road. As a culture we can stay on a path which tends to respond to conflict with violence - wasting lives and destroying families, communities and countries - or we can actively choose another course. We can choose a course of actively lifting the American response to conflict at home and abroad to a level informed by the higher truths of compassion, respect, honor and integrity - which we recite, but need to practice better as a nation. One way leads toward darkness, fear and death, and the other toward light, hope and life.

This legislation, and the discussion among citizens and lawmakers that will ensue, come from that hope - and represent the germ of a new course for the human race. This bill will create a federal government structure to focus, communicate and leverage the dreams, ideas and toils of those who see a better way, a future marked by peaceful co-existence and a new era of working together. Let us draw from within every man, woman and child to build a future of peace and true security.

Contact your Member of Congress and tell them to support H.R. 3760, the bill to create a Department of Peace and Nonviolence - and if they don't, demand to know why. And while you're on a roll, call Representative Dennis Kucinich and think him for actually remembering he works for the people of this country and not a corporation.

Where does terrorism start?

2005-10-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

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by Soumaya Ghannoushi

It is interesting that while medieval Europe strove to dissociate the great achievements of the flourishing Islamic civilization from the religion of Islam, today's West insists on referring all Muslims' ills, from democratic failure to economic decadence, to the Islam religion. The terrorist plague is no exception. Its agents, we are told, are the product of an "evil ideology which must be uprooted".

Even so, this is only half of the truth. The questions we can not avoid are: why are would-be bombers driven towards this evil theology and not any other, after all it is hardly the only one on offer within the intensely diverse intellectual and political Islamic map?

What propels them to deviate from the mainstream body of Muslims and embrace a perverse interpretation that justifies the slaughter of innocent civilians? What triggers this radical ideology’s shift from the abstract realm of ideas to the concrete scenes of explosives, severed limbs and charred bodies?

If we were Hegelians we would accept Blair and Bush's explanations of historical phenomena by reference to ideology. I, however, prefer to do as Marx did and turn history from its head back on its feet. History is the generator of ideology not vice versa. Rather than explain, ideology is itself in need of explaining. We must go beyond the evil ideology to the evil reality that spawns and fosters it. Ideology can not be the starting point, but the conclusion to the search for causes and origins.

Take the four bombers who a few months ago created carnage and mayhem in London's tubes and buses. The striking picture that emerged from the media's scrutiny of every minutia of their menial lives was of four unexceptional men, with calm ordinary lives, no different from any Brit of their age. Most were born in Leeds and attended its primary and secondary schools. One was a sports fanatic who adored cricket and hockey and worked at his father's fish and chip shop, another was notorious for playing loud music in his Buckinghamshire home, and the third for hiding in back alleys to sip beer with local youths.

Those who bury their heads in the sand and insist that that terrorism arises from an evil ideology need to answer to this question: Why did these young men revert to a terrifying and deviant theology that sanctions the killing of the innocent, rather than their parents' calm traditional faith, the peaceful theology of the scholars, the spirituality of Sufism, or the moderation of mainstream revivalist Islamism?

That these men were radicalised by the stormy political events that unfolded before their eyes on TV screens and brought home to them the scenes of death, misery and destruction in Falluja, Baghdad, Jenin and Gaza is undeniable. A stream of reports by British and American intelligence services, leading think tanks like the Economic Social Research Council, and leaked foreign office memoranda, confirm the link between British and American foreign policies and the current wave of terrorist bombings.

The Chatham House organisation, a respected London based independent think tank on foreign affairs, found that a key problem for the UK in preventing terrorism is that the country is "riding as a pillion passenger with the United States in the war on terror" and that the Iraq war has given a "boost" to al-Qaida's recruiting abilities. As the former head of the Bin Ladin Unit in the CIA put it, "To deny that there is a link between our foreign policies" and terrorism "is madness itself".

Osman Hussain, one of the suspects in the 21 July failed bombings - who is said to have been a notorious womaniser in his earlier days - told his Italian interrogators that he and his friends had watched hours of footage on the war on Iraq, "of women and children killed or wiped out by British and US soldiers, of weeping widows, mothers and children".

The same message was echoed in Siddique Khan's video from the grave, all the more chilling in its flat Yorkshire accent. "Until you stop the bombing, gassing, and imprisonment, he declared ... we will not stop the fight."

In this globalised age dominated by the power of the image, the notion of geography has almost been stripped of content. Tragedies in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and other faraway lands are now part of the fabric of our daily lives. They can no longer be kept away, to rage in distant lands and devour obscure nations. They inevitably spill over our shores, cities and villages, lay bare our vulnerability and put an end to our false sense of immunity.

What happened in London is in fact, a small episode in a still unfolding global drama. Scores of families across the Islamic world, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Algeria and Tunisia, continue to watch helplessly as their sons suddenly drop out of college courses and university degrees, quit their jobs, and disappear forever to join the terrible death cult of the Iraq suicide bomber.

Such is the spectacular folly of the United States colonial adventure in Iraq that al-Qaida could be transferred from Qandahar's caves and mountains to the very heart of the Muslim world. With its occupation, Iraq turned into a hotbed of terrorism and a magnet for the disenchanted.

It turns out it was not freedom or liberation America's tanks and B52s had brought Baghdad, but death, destruction, chaos, sectarian schism and al-Qaida.What seems to single the London bombers out, however, is their evident sense of alienation and rootlessness. They belonged neither to the majority around them, nor to their ethnic and religious communities. They rejected the wider Western culture of the majority, but also the mainstream Islam of their community. They belonged neither to one nor to the other. They were a minority within the minority.

In al-Qaida's extremism they sought a medium of expressing the profound tensions that seethed deep within them. Ideology, nationalist, socialist, or Islamist is, after all, the medium through which socio-political grievances are translated.Many have been quick to attribute the phenomenon of "Islamic terrorism" to the religious educational system, embarking on a frantic search for links with the traditional Islamic madrassas. Careful examination of the evolution of the bombers in London, New York and Washington throws serious doubts over such claims, however.

None of the young men involved appears to have received a substantial religious education, to have graduated from the theology departments of Islamic universities, or even to have attended a separate faith school. The religious establishment has in fact been the object of fierce condemnation by radical factions for its alleged estrangement from politics and acquiescence to the political status quo.

What appears to be common to all the young men in question is the striking weakness of their religious culture and their profound ignorance of Islamic theology, not the reverse. Following a sudden emotional upsurge, unrestrained by sound religious understanding and adequate political experience, they slip into the bottomless abyss of violent extremism.

Islam has always been the object of divergent strategies of interpretation. The most dominant has always been the calm and dignified Islam of the Ulama (scholars). This peaceful Islam is increasingly undermined by the turbulent reality of post-colonial Muslim society, aggravated by a gamut of myopic western policies that range from the obstruction of political change in the Arab region and sanctioning of genocide and illegal settlement in Palestine, to the revival of the colonial era through the military invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The mere sight of Bush greeting Sharon as a "man of peace" days after the Jenin refugee camp massacre, as though those his bulldozers had buried alive were cockroaches not human beings, would have been enough to turn the moral universe of countless young Muslims upside down and send them on the road to nihilistic perdition. The evils of reality always metamorphose into evil ideologies. The trail of the bombers’ insanity leads back to these insane "foreign" policies, which are destabilising the world, breaking it into opposite trenches and tearing the fabric of nations, communities and families apart.

Unless they are rectified, there can be little hope of our world emerging out of this monstrous pit of hatred and violence.

[Soumaya Ghannoushi is a researcher in the history of ideas at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London.]

Cindy Says No To Hillary - And Why.

2005-10-18T12:02:00.000-05:00

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"I would love to support Hillary for President if she would come out against the travesty in Iraq. But I don't think she can speak out against the occupation, because she supports it."

by Cindy Sheehan

I will not make the mistake of supporting another pro-war Democrat for president again: As I won't support a pro-war Republican.This country wants this occupation to end. The world wants the occupation to end. People in Iraq want this occupation to end.

Senator Clinton: taking the peace road would not prove you are weak. Instead, it would prove that you are the strongest and wisest candidate. As a mom, as an American, as a patriot: I implore you to have the strength and courage to lead the fight for peace.

I want to support you, I want to work for you, but like many American moms, I will resist your candidacy with every bit of my power and strength unless you show us the wisdom it takes to be a truly great leader.

Prove that you are "passionate" and reflect our nations' values and refusal to support imperialism, greed and torture. Senator Clinton: come out against this occupation of Iraq. Not because it is the politically expedient thing to do but because it is the humane thing to do. If you want to make Casey's sacrifice count, bring the rest of his buddies home alive.

* * *I did meet with Sen. Clinton, along with Sen. Harry Reid, on September 22, 2005. No one has asked me how it went with Sen. Reid, but I've been asked about my meeting with Sen. Clinton many times. A few days earlier in Brooklyn, I had referred to her as waiting for a politically "expedient" moment to speak out against the war in Iraq. I, of course, think that this tactic is wrong, because politics has nothing to do with the slaughter going on in Iraq. No one asked the almost 2000 Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who have been killed what political party they were rooting for. When a mother receives the news that her son or daughter has been killed for lies she never thinks "Oh no, how could this have happened? I am a Democrat(Republican)!!!

"Playing politics with our soldiers' lives is despicable. I thought the meeting with Sen. Clinton went well. I thought she listened and heard what we had to say. I went with another Gold Star Mother, Lynn Braddach, and my sister, Dede Miller. After Sen. Reid left, Mrs. Clinton stayed for a few more moments and she told us that she had met with the other Gold Star Mothers who had a different view from ours. I said it didn't really matter, because our view is right. Lynn, Dede, and I don't want our loved ones to be used as political pawns to justify the killing spree in Iraq. I can't believe any mother who has had her heart and soul torn out would wish that on another mother. How often do the lies have to be exposed before every American (elected official, media representative, average citizen) wakes up and says, "enough killing is enough!"

I thought Mrs. Clinton listened, but apparently she didn't because immediately afterwards she said the following to Sarah Ferguson of the Village Voice: "My bottom line is that I don't want their sons to die in vain... I don't believe it's smart to set a date for withdrawal... I don't think it's the right time to withdraw."

That quote sounds exactly like what the few Republicans I talked to that week said. Making sure that our children did not die in "vain" sounds exactly like something George Bush says. A "date" for withdrawal? That sounds like Rush Limbaugh to me. That doesn't sound like an opposition party leader speaking to me. What Sen. Clinton said after our meeting sounds exactly like the Republican Party talking points I heard from Senators Dole and McCain.

Sen. Clinton was in California last week to raise money for her political campaigns. An invitation to one star-studded gala reads: "We must stand with Senator Clinton as she stands up for what we believe in. Hillary is and always has been our champion in the White House and the Senate." And she's one of the "strongest, most passionate and intelligent Democrats."

I didn't get an invitation to any of the events, but maybe it's because she doesn't stand up for what I believe in. I don't believe in continuing this occupation of Iraq and I don't believe in killing more of our soldiers because my son has already been needlessly and tragically killed. I don't believe she is passionate. I think she is a political animal who believes she has to be a war hawk to keep up with the big boys. She is intelligent, there's no doubt about that. However, I believe that the intelligent thing for Democrats to do for 2006 and 2008 would be to come out strongly and correctly against the botched, bungled, illegal, and immoral occupation of Iraq.

62% of Americans now believe that this war is based on lies and betrayals and want our troops to start coming home. 53% of Americans want our troops to come home immediately. The last time I looked, Democrats did not comprise 62% of our population. Americans oppose this war in overwhelming numbers and it crosses party lines. Because America can see that the war in Iraq has fueled terrorism and has made the world and our country less secure. America can see that the murder of innocents is not a "right and left" issue, it is a "right and wrong" issue.

Sixty-nine of our best and brightest have been sent meaninglessly and unnecessarily to their premature deaths since I met with Mrs. Clinton on September 22nd. Sixty-nine mothers and fathers and who knows how many spouses, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, and friends have been meaninglessly and unnecessarily sent into tailspins of grief and emptiness since that meeting.

We all know that Sen. Clinton, along with many other Representatives and Senators voted to give George Bush the authority to invade a sovereign nation that was no threat to the USA. We know that they spinelessly abrogated their constitutional responsibility and duty to declare war. We (and most of them) know that voting to give an irresponsible person authority to wage war was a devastating mistake. But I know that knowing all of that will not bring my son or almost 2000 other Americans back and it won't bring back that nation's war dead, either.

Learn more about Cindy at http://www.meetwithcindy.com or about Gold Star Families for Peace at http://www.gsfp.org.

...Say What?

2005-10-13T09:22:00.000-05:00

X

Stupid Quotes About Iraq

From Daniel Kurtzman

25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Official Statements About Iraq

1) "My answer is bring 'em on." —President George W. Bush, challenging militants attacking U.S. forces in Iraq, July 2, 2003 (Source)

2) "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." --Vice President Dick Cheney, on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005 (Source)

3) "As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." —Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, responding to a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq who asked him why troops had to dig through scrap metal to armor vehicles, Dec. 8, 2004 (Source)

4) "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." –Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," March 16, 2003 (Source)

5) "F**k Saddam, we're taking him out." –President Bush to three U.S. Senators in March 2002, a full year before the Iraq invasion (Source)

6) "Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries." –Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying about Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capabilities before the United Nations Security Council, Feb. 5, 2003 (Source)

7) "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." –National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, on Iraq's nuclear capabilities and the Bush administration's case for war, Sept. 8, 2002 (Source)

8) "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." –Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, adding "stuff happens," April 11, 2003 (Source)

9) "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." –President Bush, standing under a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, May 2, 2003 (Source)

10) "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." –Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Budget Committee prior to the Iraq war, Feb. 27, 2003 (Source)

11) "We found the weapons of mass destruction." –President Bush, in an interview with Polish television, May 29, 2003 (Source)

12) "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!" —President Bush, joking about his administration's failure to find WMDs in Iraq as he narrated a comic slideshow during the Radio & TV Correspondents' Association dinner, March 25, 2004 (Source)

13) "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." –Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when asked about weapons of mass destruction in an ABC News interview, March 30, 2003 (Source)

14) "British intelligence has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." –President Bush, 2003 State of the Union Address (Source)

15) "Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations." –President Bush, 2004 State of the Union Address (Source)

16) "They could still be there like the 50 tons of mustard gas hidden on a turkey farm." —President Bush, clinging to the claim that weapons of mass destruction may still be found in Iraq, April 13, 2004 (Source)

17) "U.S. officials never expected that we were going to open garages and find weapons of mass destruction." —National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, May 12, 2003 (Source)

18) "I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are." –White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, July 9, 2003 (Source)

19) "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason." --Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "Vanity Fair" interview, May 28, 2003 (Source)

20) "Had we to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day." —President Bush, telling Time magazine that he underestimated the Iraqi resistance, Aug. 2004 (Source)

21) "We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." –Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet The Press" March 16, 2003 (Source)

22) "I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons." –Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, June 24, 2003 (Source)

23) "In Iraq, a ruthless dictator cultivated weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. He gave support to terrorists, had an established relationship with al Qaeda, and his regime is no more." –Vice President Dick Cheney, Nov. 7, 2003 (Source)

24) "I am not going to give you a number for it because it's not my business to do intelligent work." --Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asked to estimate the number of Iraqi insurgents while testifying before Congress, Feb. 16, 2005 (Source)

25) "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties." —President Bush, discussing the Iraq war with Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, after Robertson told him he should prepare the American people for casualties (Source)

Chimpanzee Hacks Diebold Machine

2005-10-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

Yes, a chimp (and it wasn't Bush) actually hacked a Diebold voting machine. See number 16 below. Stuff like this can't even be found in a bad novel - unfortunately, it is all true.

Twenty Things You Should Know About Voting In America

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/04280...2804landes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/04280...2804landes.html

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/04280...2804landes.html

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/...ain632436.shtml
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886

5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/colu.../03/03_200.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/03100...04fitrakis.html

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?...=article&sid=26
http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.php

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.

http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm
http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel27.html

8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.

http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/04280...2804landes.html

9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evo...es/pfindex.html

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm

11. Diebold is based in Ohio.

http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm

12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml

13. Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

14. Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.

http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.

http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/26/loc_elexoh.html

16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie here: http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov.)
http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4874190

17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/...ain632436.shtml

18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAfterm...esBushIsOut.htm
http://www.rise4news.net/extravotes.html
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=m...article&sid=950
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother.

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee...cal/7628725.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Oct29.html

20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.

http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAfterm...esBushIsOut.htm
http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttop...1,97614,00.html
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html
http://uscountvotes.org/

NOTE: Please copy the above list and distribute freely!
LET THE FACTS BE KNOWN! Thank you!

Banana Republican

2005-10-06T00:46:00.000-05:00

For years, many critics of the Bush administration and previous administrations have warned that this country is steadily undergoing a process of “third-worldization.” There is ample evidence to support this claim: the near-complete elimination of job security for working-class and middle-class Americans, plummeting standards of living, the slashing of government services, government corruption levels unmatched since the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and an increasingly draconian police apparatus, among many other obvious examples. However, all of these negative changes to American society have been quietly incremental, their cumulative impact gradually becoming perceptible over time, that is until Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans last month.

What we have witnessed in the criminal non-response of the federal government to the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is the logical consequence of the unseen devastation that has been eroding this country for decades. America has been a Potemkin village of security, strength, prosperity, and competence for a long time now, and finally a strong wind has literally blown it all away, leaving us to face what the storm and the last twenty-five years of actively nurtured institutional disintegration has wrought. We face the results of a decades-long effort by right-wing and libertarian movements to sell the public on the dogma of small government and snake oil theories of the infallibility and superiority of the private sector, the so-called free market.

Regardless of your position on the proper size and role of the federal government, the reality is that it is the only entity with the resources and capability to have effectively handled Katrina’s aftermath, and if there is one basic service that nearly all people can agree a federal government should provide, it is the protection of its citizens. For all their talk about the ineffectiveness of “big government,” I did not notice bands of Young Republicans searching for survivors, or rescue teams spontaneously dispatched to New Orleans from the Cato Institute. For fuck’s sake, the Red Cross, a poster child for right wing notions of a charity-driven social welfare system, didn’t even make it down there until it was already days too late. While we have all seen amazing examples of voluntary acts of kindness, heroism, and compassion on the part of many individuals and groups, all of their efforts are dwarfed by the assistance the federal government could have offered if agencies like FEMA had not been utterly ransacked by the Bush regime and transformed into patronage mills where loyal party operatives, and their college roommates, could reap the rewards of prestigious high-level government jobs.

It may surprise some readers to know, after my seemingly spirited defense of the ominous FEMA and “big government” in general, that I am a leftist who is more opposed to the idea of centralized government than the most extreme libertarian. I would say that the difference with me is that I understand the world is a complex place that often obstinately refuses to fit into the parameters of my personal ideology. The size of the federal government had nothing to do with what happened in New Orleans. Blaming big government for the failure of FEMA and the white house to effectively respond to the Katrina disaster is a little like pulling the spark plugs from a car and blaming the inherent wrongness of the internal combustion engine for the fact that the car won’t run.

It doesn’t take a PhD to figure out that when you weaken an institution’s ability to perform its intended functions by defunding it and appointing unqualified people to leadership positions within it, you create a disaster waiting to happen. It takes no genius to grasp that when you cripple the ability of a government to protect its citizens from exploitation and disaster, when you eliminate the ability of government institutions to internally monitor and punish corruption, you lay the groundwork for a kleptocracy and you create the perfect conditions for a New Orleans to happen. The only thing surprising about all this is that it has been allowed to go on for so long, that we all have allowed things to descend to this level. It is something for which all Americans should share a certain level of collective responsibility and shame.

What’s worse is that the Bush administration represents a whole new paradigm in government corruption and malfeasance. Even the most corrupt politicians of the past understood that they had to maintain a reasonably functioning government apparatus to remain in power and reap the benefits that power brings. But this administration views government funds and institutions as little more than victor’s spoils, to be divvyed up and used to whatever end it pleases. The resulting disasters of all kinds are seen as mere inconveniences, which can be remedied with the proper application of public relations, political intimidation, and flat out lies. They understand something that we don’t: the public’s capacity for outrage is no match for its susceptibility to demoralization.

Far from being a failure and an embarrassment, for those who pulled the strings to make him a two-term president, George Bush’s administration is the crowning achievement of over thirty years of right-wing and libertarian activism—aided and abetted by the craven, moribund, and nearly equally corrupt Democratic party. (In the case of the libertarians, the Bush regime may be more of a “be careful what you wish for” disappointment, but that’s due more to how profoundly divorced from reality the libertarian belief system is and their lack—or denial—of even a basic understanding of the real-world consequences of their own policies.)

Don’t you get it? This is how things are supposed to work. There is nothing accidental about what has happened on the Gulf Coast. Bush and the people in his cabinet who really run the country are not incompetent or out of touch, they simply do not care. To the Bush administration, all of this is an inconvenience, nothing more, and if their past record is any guide they will get away with it. With the boldness of a daylight thief, they will wait this out. They will stymie every attempt at substantive investigation, and they will spin and lie about this until over half of the country denies what we all saw with our own eyes.

In a just world, Bush’s apologists should be a bunch of ideological dead-enders at this point, as creepy and pathetic as a serial killer groupie or a hardcore Nazi loyalist spending his last years alone in some senior citizens home in Dusseldorf still waxing romantic about der Fuhrer. In a just world, these criminals would be hooded and bound at Guantanamo Bay. But this is not a just world, not even close.

This is a time that demands of people to unabashedly take sides. If you are angry about what you’ve seen over the last few weeks then, goddamn it, you’d better stay angry, because if there is anything that Hurricane Katrina should have taught you it’s that no one is coming to save you. We can’t wait for the Democrats or anyone else; only our anger as citizens will save this country. It’s the only thing that ever has.

Bush OKs Human Trafficking.

2005-10-01T01:42:00.000-05:00

X
As many as 800,000 people are bought and sold across national borders annually or lured to other countries with false promises of work or other benefits, according to the U.S. State Department. Most are women and children.

Poverty and lack of economic opportunity make women and children potential victims of traffickers associated with international criminal organizations. They are vulnerable to false promises of job opportunities in other countries. Many of those who accept these offers from what appear to be legitimate sources find themselves in situations where their documents are destroyed, theirselves or their families threatened with harm, or they are bonded by a debt that they have no chance of repaying.

While women and children are particularly vulnerable to trafficking for the sex trade, human trafficking is not limited to sexual exploitation. It also includes persons who are trafficked into 'forced' marriages or into bonded labor markets, such as sweat shops, agricultural plantations, or domestic service. The prevention of human trafficking requires several types of interventions. Some are of low or moderate cost and can have some immediate impact, such as awareness campaigns that allow high risk individuals to make informed decisions. Strong laws that are enforced are effective deterrents. Public sanctions by the United Nations and major nations of the world have also proven to be highly successful.

Over a year ago, several countries were named by the U.S. State Department as countries that allowed human beings to be bought and sold. Near the top of the list was Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In June, the State Department reported back to President Bush that 14 or these countries had failed to adequately address this market in human misery. This allowed Bush the option of imposing a vast array of sanctions on the fourteen slave-selling nations.

After serious deliberation - it must have been serious to take from June until near the end of September - President Bush decided Wednesday, September 21 to waive any financial or other sanctions on Saudi Arabia. He also imposed the same harsh penalty on Kuwait.

So, the next time I see a story about the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers or forced laborers in sweat-shops I will think God that I had the forsight to vote for "Anybody-but-Bush" in 2000 and 2004. In 2006, I'll vote for "Anybody-but-a-Republican." Who knows? It might even get counted this time.

Just Another Compassionate Conservative

2005-09-30T09:09:00.000-05:00

One of the "moral leaders" of the Republican party, former Secretary of Education and current talk show host William Bennett, has a novel idea to reduce the crime rate:

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Diebold: When Charm and Wit Aren't Enough

2005-09-23T08:55:00.000-05:00

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team or US-CERT is a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the public and private sectors. The agency was established in 2003 with the avowed mission of protecting the nation's Internet infrastructure.

Additionally, US-CERT supposedly coordinates defense against and responses to cyber attacks across the nation.
US-CERT is responsible for analyzing and reducing cyber threats and vulnerabilities, disseminating cyber threat warning information, and coordinating incident response activities.

US-CERT interacts with federal agencies, industry, the research community, state and local governments, and others to disseminate reasoned and actionable cyber security information to the public.

In early September of 2004 (two months before the November elections) they posted Cyber Security Bulletin SB04-252 entitled Summary of Security Items from September 1 through September 7, 2004. It can be accessed at:

http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB04-252.html#diebold

The alert concerns the GEMS Central Tabulator, the machine that actually counts and tabulates the votes that are cast on electronic voting machines made by Diebold - the company who's chairman and chief executive officer, Walden W. O'Dell, personally guaranteed to deliver Ohio's electorial votes to Bush. O'Dell made that promise in an August 14, 2004 letter to Ohio GOP leaders inviting them to a $1000 a plate fund raising dinner at his mansion.

The alert says "A vulnerability [in the GEMS Central Tabulator] exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could allow local or remote authenticated malicious user to modify votes."

It ranks the problem as "Medium" risk. Medium risk to US-CERT means "one that will allow an intruder immediate access to a system with less than privileged access. Such vulnerability will allow the intruder the opportunity to continue the attempt to gain privileged access. An example of medium-risk vulnerability is a server configuration error that allows an intruder to capture the password file."

Despite that this was a known problem and that the companies political leanings were well documented, the state of Ohio guided by Secretary of State Blackwell (who just happened to also be the head of the committee to reelect George Bush,) Diebold was awarded a contract for voting and tabulation machines in Ohio. A search of US-CERT's database shows that a workaround or a patch was never made available.

What does all this mean? A "backdoor" simply means the programers either deliberately or inadvertantly left a way to go around any security in place to guard the system. Or, as an anonymous source at Diebold said, "This backdoor means that one malicious person can change the outcome of any Diebold election," The source went on to say, "Diebold's election system is one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever known."

The Freedom to Live or Die

2005-09-20T15:42:00.000-05:00

X
Being descended from Arkansas White Trash who are descended from indentured servants who fled England rather than be the honored guests at a hanging, I know a little bit about being poor and I have to tell you, being black is not a requirement for being poor in the United States.

This whole Katrina disaster is being drawn along racial lines - in fact a lot of things in the U.S. are drawn along racial lines when, in fact, they are actually class lines. The worse crime in this country is not being black, it is being poor.

Yes, most of the people in New Orleans that were hit the hardest were black - but not all of them. And yes, there is traditional racial prejudice in this country but class prejudice is by far the older of the two evils, having been brought here long before the first African was sold into slavery on these shores.

Do poor black people have it harder than poor white people? I don't know. When a person doesn't eat, they get hungry. When they don't have a warm place to live in the winter, they get cold. I know from experience that a white skin doesn't alleviate either condition.

Now that I've said that, let me hasten to add; I am aware that being black and being poor gives a person a double whammy. I’ll also admit that I can only be aware of that from a white man’s point of view but I take issue with the concept that just being black is enough to get one left to drown in New Orleans. The rich blacks in New Orleans did exactly what the rich whites did. They loaded the kids in the SUV, charged up a tank of gas on the credit card and drove north.

What I am saying is this: the ruling class wants us to make this a race issue. Race issues divide the many (the poor) into ineffectual little groups that can never stand up against the man holding the whip. If we see this as a class issue, that is if we define it as “people were left to die in New Orleans not because they were black but because they were too poor to afford to get out” then we have a chance of uniting a group large enough to actually get something done.

I assure you, despite the present outcry, this is not the first time in U.S. history poor people have been given the “freedom of choice” to live or die. Anybody who has ever read Howard Zinn can tell you that. I can also assure you that if we allow the ruling elite to split us along racial lines, the New Orleans disaster will not be the last time the poor will be given this "freedom."

Figgers in the Dirt

2005-09-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

X
Me and the boys was sittin’ down at the courthouse talkin’ ‘bout President Bush tellin’ hows we’s gonna rebuild New Awleans. Fact is, we’s gonna rebuild the hold gosh darn gulf coast. Mr. Bush says we’s not gonna jist rebuild it, we’s gonna make it betta than it ever was afore. And he says we’s gonna do the whole thang without no raise in taxes. No wonder that man is president of these here United States. He’s gotta be some kinda genius to figure out how to do that.

Course, with all the money the govmint gets ever year I know they can squeeze out a measly 200 billion dollars. One of the boys said hows he read the other day that the federal budget this year was $2.56 trillion. I mean that’s like, duh (hold on a minute. I ran outta fingers – gotta take off my shoes.) Yeah, hey, that’s like 2560 billion; gettin’ just 200 billion from that should be no problem.

Let’s see now – another one of the boys said that 20% of that came right off the top just to pay the interest on money we already owe. Beats me why we owe money, us bein’ the richest nation in the world and all. I guess its ‘cause we give it all away in aide to them backwards countries. Anyway, let’s see now, that’s a, count the little toe, carry the thumb, umm ... Great Gobs of Greasy Goose Flesh! That’s $512 billion just to pay interest on what we already owe!

Well, that still leaves 2048 billion and that’s still more lettuce than a train can haul. Then the boys said it takes another 500 to 600 billion for the military to fight all them Communist or Terrorists or whatever it is we’re fightin’ to keep our land free from enemy inversion. That still leaves about 1500 billion.

Then, Mr. Dobbins who must be at least 85, said, “Don’t forget about Social Security. That’s another 500 billion.”

So, OK. That still leaves 1000 billion. Mr. Dobbins spoke again, “Medicare and Medicaid cost another 500 billion.”

“But ... but ....” I couldn’t believe it. That meant that we paid out 12 billion more in interest to foreigners then we spent to run the rest of the govmint of the United States including Agriculture, Education, Border Security, Homeland Security ...” Great Gobs of Greasy Goose Flesh!

And then one of the boys said, “A course, the U.S. ain’t gonna take in no 2.56 trillion this year. We’s gonna come up about 450 billion short.”

“But ... but ..., that means we’ll have to borrow that 450 billion. That means we’ll owe more next year and we’ll have to pay more interest. That means that ever year the amount we borrow will have to get bigger and bigger because the amount of interest we pay will get more and more.” My head was startin’ to hurt.

Then it hit me. At first I jist couldn’t believe it. I calculated my sums over and over again using my fingers and my toes. Finally, I sharpened a stick and worked out the figgers in the dirt. My stomach got sorta sour and sick as I sat there in the dirt gapping at the numbers. Sure nuff, by the time my boy Zeke got to be my age, all the federal budget would be going to pay interest with nothing left over for anything, not even to pay the politician’s salaries. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind that. Most of ‘em are rich and jist serve out of the goodness of their heart anyway.

But the numbers in the dirt held more bad news. We’d still be coming up short. I wondered who would loan us money then.

Well, I tossed down the stick and brushed the dirt from my hands. I’s sure glad it weren’t my worry. Like I said, that Mr. Bush has gotta be some kinda genius. I’m sure he’s already got it all worked out to where his numbers come out a whole lot better than mine. After all, he’s got a pencil – I just hope he’s got all his toes.

Plant This Bush In Iraq

2005-09-18T00:50:00.000-05:00

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John Ellis Bush, 21, shown in this photo provided by the Austin, Texas Police Department, was arrested early Friday morning, Sept. 16, 2005, in Austin and charged with public intoxication and resisting arrest, a Travis County Sheriff's Department spokesman said. Bush is the youngest son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and nephew of President George Bush. (AP Photo/Austin Police Department)

This guy looks healthy to me. He looks like he would make great cannon-fodder. He looks like someone just dying to fight for a noble cause (or maybe thats fighting to die for a noble cause judging by what I heard about his fight with a couple of Travis County Deputy Sheriffs.) And just look at that mouth. You just know he'd "stay the course."

Look Up Sheep!

2005-09-15T12:18:00.000-05:00

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It is being said and written in the wake of the New Orleans disaster that the Bush Administration is just terribly inefficient. That is simply not true.

Bush's Administration is anything but inefficient. It is just not doing what we, the people, normally think of as the normal activities of government.

In the U.S. we have always been taught that the government is a protecter of the poor and downtrodden and an equalizer of justice between the mighty and the lowly. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a real discussion on this, see Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

The Bush Administration is actually the most efficient of all the power-hungry, money-motivated administrations in a line that stretches almost unbroken all the way back to pre-1776.

They became efficient in robbing the public coffers by dropping the pretense in their actions that their purpose was to serve the public good.They got an unscrupulous village idiot, who's only talent is his ability to lie with a straight face and to keep on lying no matter what the evidence to the contrary, to be their mouthpiece. Then they set about raping this country and shearing the population like a flock of sheep.

New Orleans is an exposure of this efficiency. It is also an exposure of what happens to the country and the sheep when they no longer produce wool.

A Picture is worth a thousand words ...

2005-09-12T11:43:00.000-05:00

X What more could anyone possibly add to this?
X

So you think you know everything?

2005-09-12T08:03:00.000-05:00

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Now, lets take a break from politics and saving the world. Here is some of the most trivial trivia in the world:

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th! of a second.
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until they reach 2 to 6 years of age.
Butterflies taste with their feet.
Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.
It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
Maine is the only state whose name has just one syllable.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
"Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" is the longest with your right.
The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
The sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.
The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
The words 'racecar,' 'kayak' and 'level' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
There are more chickens than people in the world.
There are only four words in the English language which end with "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous
There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
There are no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins.
Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself.

Now you know everything!!!!

Why Rehnquist Shouldn't be Buried on American Soil

2005-09-11T22:26:00.000-05:00

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The Death of a Partisan Chief Justice
By MIKE WHITNEY

"He was a man of character and dedication. His departure represents a great loss for the court and for our country."
--- George W. Bush on hearing of the death of Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist

Let's not wring out the tears for William Rehnquist. The man was the worst chief justice to ever serve on the Supreme Court; a complete failure who disgraced his office and the people he was supposed to serve. Never in the 200 year history of the nation has the high court sustained more damage under the stewardship of one man.

Rehnquist's partisan handiwork rigged the 2000 election and set the country in a downward spiral to ruin. He cobbled together the coalition of rogue-jurists who stripped the Florida Supreme Court of their constitutionally-guaranteed right to decide the outcome of state elections and overturned the fundamental principle of democratic government; the right to have one's vote counted.

Rehnquist invoked the 14th amendment; the "equal protection" clause to elevate his friend George W. Bush to president. Prior to that, the amendment had never even been used in cases other than racial discrimination. Legal scholars and attorneys alike scoffed at the shaky reasoning that held the case together. It was a complete travesty that both Republicans and Democrats disdained. Rehnquist abandoned every principle of judicial impartiality to shoehorn a derelict-Texan into the Oval Office and to uphold his standing as a charter member of the ruling class.

Look at the results.

Look what happens when the will of the people is brazenly ignored to execute an elite agenda.

Iraq, the Cheney Energy papers, 9-11, Enron, Valerie Plame, Abu Ghraib, Falluja, Guantanamo; the long litany of Bush-crimes should be inscribed on Rehnquist's headstone next to the number of casualties produced by his partisan blunder.

Rehnquist was an ardent class-warrior from his earliest days on the court. He strongly opposed gay rights, abortion, gun control and affirmative action, but was a staunch proponent of the death penalty. This tells us that his sense of justice was shaped by his belief in punishment, not mercy. Although Rehnquist would zealously defend the right of the state to exterminate its own citizens, he vacillated on even most basic rights of the individual.

In case after case, the Rehnquist Court bowed to the authority of the president; allowing Bush to detain foreign nationals without formally charging them with a crime and permitting the incarceration of "enemy combatants" indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay subject to a review by hand-picked military tribunals.

Rehnquist has repeatedly dodged the Jose Padilla case to allow the president the tyrannical power of imprisoning an American citizen without honoring habeas corpus, due process, or the presumption of innocence. His evasion has upended the fundamental principle of "inalienable rights", the cornerstone of the Constitution, and condemned an innocent man to 3 and half years in solitary confinement.

Padilla has never been charged with a crime. It is a disgrace that should enrage every American.

Justice John Paul Stevens' summarized the feelings of most Americans who reject the idea that citizens can be stripped of their rights according to presidential edict. He said, the results of the Padilla case pose "a unique and unprecedented threat to the freedom of every American citizen... At stake is nothing less than the essence of a free society... For if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."

Rehnquist had every opportunity to watch Bush's dismal war on terror. He knew that the "forces of tyranny" had been greatly exaggerated to carry out a global-militaristic strategy. Never the less, he consistently chose to bolster the powers of the executive rather than defend the basic rights of the citizen.

Rehnquist fancied himself a "strict constructionist"; a judge who simply applied the constitution according to its literal meaning. As it turns out, he was entirely unwilling to defend any part of the Bill of Rights (excluding the revered 2nd amendment) and significantly eroded the institution he was supposed to preserve.

Forget the state ceremonies for the deceased Chief Justice. Just put a crease in the soil at Potter's field and kick a few leaves over the hardening carcass.

If it was up to me, Rehnquist would never be buried on American soil. The man betrayed his country and his name should be struck from the history books.
He did nothing to shore up civil liberties or to preserve the constitution. His tenure at the high court merely paved the way for the Imperial Presidency and the further savaging of the rule of law.

Let Bush and his ilk sing Rehnquist's praises. What difference does it make? The man was a miserable American and a dead-loss as a chief justice.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

Compassionate Conservative Serenades Survivors

2005-09-09T13:21:00.000-05:00

An unnamed musician calling himself the Anonymous Singer of Songs (or A.S.S. for short) and identifying himself as a compassionate conservative brought a tear to the eye of a woman left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. He explained later to this reporter that he always tried to blend his virtuoso guitar playing with simple old-time ballads that he felt would suit his audience.

When asked what he had performed for this lady that had moved her so, he strummed his slightly out of tune guitar and broke into song:

"Oh, in Dixieland where I was born
Twas early on one frosty morn
Look away, look away
Look away Dixieland ... "

When this reporter gently suggested to the A.S.S. that Dixieland might not be the most appropriate song to comfort a grieving person who had just lost everything they owned, especially when the reason for that loss might be at least partly attributable to them being poor and black, the A.S.S. replied, "Oh, I get it! She's from Northern New Orleans!"

America's Voices

2005-09-08T23:56:00.000-05:00

Now is not the time to "play" the blame game. Who the hell do they think they are? I want accountability for every person that died during and after Hurricaine Katrena. I want to know why help was not deployed BEFORE the storm when it was known for days that it was coming and the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency two days BEFORE the storm hit, on August 26. I want to know why the people who had no way to get out of the city weren't provided with transportation out of danger. There was plenty of time to get them out but Bush's regime couldn't break away from vacation long enough.

There are a lot of things I want to know. The first one is: who gave the Bush regime the right to tell American citizens when they could and could not ask for accountability from their government. Don't tell me to shut up President Buddy-Boy. Its your job to listen, not to tell American citizens when they can speak.

On that note, I'm going to turn you on to Dr. Jeffrey Feldman. If you haven't been to his site, The Frame Shop, I urge you to do so. The man juggles words like some people juggles knives and when he throws one, it goes straight to the target.

America's Voices
by Dr. Jeffery Feldman

Listening is the heart of accountability, not some fog of PR gimmicks designed to hide the President from the pain of the people.

Not now.

We're too busy.

This is not the time to talk.

These three sentences represent the logic that the White House is using to dodge any attempt by the American public to find out how the choices and actions of President Bush's government resulted in the deaths of so many people in Louisiana.

By repeating over and over again that `there will be a time' to answer questions--but not right now--the White House has all but succeeded in distracting the public into thinking that it is somehow immoral to talk about this tragedy. At yesterday's White House Press Briefing, Scott McLellan repeated these `time' phrases so many times that I lost count. And as of this morning, the news has become saturated with the `time' frame.

Meanwhile, as we have all figured out, the White House political team has launched a `when did you stop beating your wife' campaign aimed at the Mayor of New Orleans. To pin blame on Mayor Nagin, Republicans everywhere are repeating phrases that sound like this: `I'm not saying we should blame the Mayor of New Orleans.' So, in addition to using the `time' frame to dodge questions about themselves, the White House is also using it to create space for them to turn full fury of the White House against a local politician whose city was just destroyed.

In the days ahead, it is hard to know what will be more foul for Americans to endure: the death toll reported after the water is drained from New Orleans, or the wave of racist hatred that will be leveled against Mayor Nagin.Americans need to step back from the direction the White House has shoved the debate in order to return to the issues that matter to us right now. We need to understand the `time' frame and reframe the debate.

The `time' frame works by falsely defining time as a closed system or zero sum game. It follows the logic [time] is [a bag of beans]. If we put some of the beans over here, well, then we cannot possibly put them over there. This time frame works so well on Americans because most of us are overextended in our personal or professional schedules. We `ration' our time or `divide' our time or make sure we have `enough time left' to do the things we want.

Once we are convinced that time is something finite that needs to be rationed, then we are ready and willing to judge others for `wasting' time on the `wrong' things.

Before we turn to an alternative, it is important for all Americans who care about what happened in the Gulf States to stop falling into this `time' frame right away. Let's start by working out way out of it--by reminding ourselves of what `time' meant before the White House political team turned it into a PR gimmick.

`Time' was an important issue last week when the President and his entire cabinet were using their vacation `time' instead of working to save American lives.

`Time' was an important issue when it was just a matter of hours before a dozen more Americans died from dehydration and shock waiting for relief from their President.

`Time' was an important issue when reporter after reporter on American television asked `Why is it taking so long for President Bush to feed his starving and stranded people.

`Time' was an important issue when year after year, scholars and officials warned that it was just `a matter of time' before a hurricane broke the New Orleans levees, while the White House ignored these warnings and transfered money from America's `prevent national tragedy' account to George W. Bush's `start a blind war in Iraq' account. `Time' was an issue last week. But `time' is no longer the issue.

The real issue is `accountability.' And we must talk about it all the time.
We must remember that Americans do not need permission from the White House to talk about accountability. We do not need to ask if it is OK to express our grief and concern for other Americans in need.

We must remember that while the President was strumming a guitar, while the Secretary of Defense was joking with friends at a baseball game, while the Secretary of State was enjoying a musical comedy on Broadway--the American people, including the mainstream press, were pulling their hair out with fear and worry about the fate of those in the Gulf States. We must remember that it took a full solid week of grim pictures on TV, a nation that stayed awake in tears, thousands of activists and entrepreneurs stepping away from their lives to rush to the aid of the fallen--it took all that to get the White House's attention.

We must remember that it was not until the American people shamed the President of the United States for his lack of basic human kindness, that the White House political team began to flood the media with pictures of the President, and the First Lady, and the Cabinet members--posing with anyone who was not too angry or emotional to even be in the same room.

We must remember that it was the American people--not the President--the American people--not the White House--who have driven this mass effort to help the people of New Orleans.

And so we must stop asking for permission to discuss what happened--what is still happening--and just do it.But how do we do it? How do we talk about such an abstract concept as `accountability' in a way that is true to what Americans are feeling?

Ironically, the best way to focus attention on `accountability' is not to accuse the President or the White House of wrong doing, but to listen to the voices of those to whom we are most accountable. We need to listen to Americans tell us what happened and what is happening.

We must listen. As a nation, we need to listen to the victims, the exiled, the displaced, the `Astrodomed' people who lived and will continue to live this tragedy.

Accountability begins with hearing the voices of those that one has hurt.
Who is helping us to hear these voices?

The Oprah Winfrey show, yesterday (6 Sep 05), was devoted entirely to the voices of the people most hurt by the problems in our Federal government. Oprah, who rarely involves herself in politics, understands that the great tragedy--the horror to emerge from these events--is not just that the White House actions and inactions led directly to the death and suffering of Americans, but that the White House is now trying to prevent America from hearing those very voices of those who survived and witnessed.

As Oprah has done, Americans must go beyond the White House and the President to create their own forums for listening to the voices of those who are suffering.

And anyone who tells us that by listening to the voices we are impeding the rescue efforts--well, just walk away from those people. Let those people wallow in their own heartless unawareness of what is happening in American right now. Let them suffer alone until they figure out what is important to this nation. But when they are ready to listen, then we should welcome them to the conversation.

Everyday I have seen and I have heard people who want to talk about what happened. There is such an unprecedented need for Americans to talk about what happened that we are encountering something without comparison in our national history. Men and women alike--everywhere, by the thousands--are breaking down in tears in public.

Not even after the horrible events of 9/11 was there such a national need to talk about what happened. We are a nation that wants to listen to each other. We want to tell our stories, to hear the stories of others, and to ask questions.
And we do not want to be told what and when we can talk about.

The audacity of the President at this moment can be found in his willingness to tell the people of America to `shut up' and let us do our job, at the moment Americans want most to hear each other's voices.

If we have the courage to walk away from the press briefings and the photo ops and the `don't we look busy' Cabinet meetings, then we will begin what will become the greatest event in our nation's short history. We will start the conversation that will change this country.

Deep inside that conversation is our understanding of what it means to be accountable to our fellow citizens: to listen to them when they are in pain and through listening, to understand and respond to their needs.

Listening is the heart of accountability, not some fog of PR gimmicks designed to hide the President from the pain of the people.

We will need courageous leaders to help us find and hear our voices again, and I can feel--and just barely see--a few of them moving into position. Right now, the leaders of this new conversation are a small group of media figures that have been reborn by this tragedy. By tomorrow, I hope that there are dozens of leaders calling for America's voices to be heard. By next week, there could be thousands.

Last month, on a dusty road in Texas, a small revolution was started in this country when one woman turned to the President of the United States and said, `Listen to my voice.' Of course, the President seemed then, as he seems now, uniquely unable to hear the voice of any American that differs from the talking points of his political advisor. The President seems, even, to be unable to hear his own voice.

But not even the hardened heart of a President can silence America's voices. We will continue to listen and to be heard.

And the conversation will change us all.

THE FRAME SHOP

The Corpse on Union Street

2005-09-08T09:32:00.000-05:00

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By DAN BARRY
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NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird" rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.
Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.

Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.
Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.

The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On Sunday, for example, several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics store.
A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window to ask a soldier a question: "Hey, how do you get to the interstate?"

Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here - not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here - is rooted in the intensive news coverage of the hurricane's aftermath: floating bodies and obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation is numb with post-traumatic shock.

Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news conferences and search-and-rescue squads, has granted haunting glimpses of the past, present and future, with the rare comfort found in, say, the white sheet that flaps, not in surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St. Charles Avenue.

"We Shall Survive," it says, as though wishing past the battalions of bulldozers that will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and rearrange the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether different New Orleans.

Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed on these streets; where one of the many gag-inducing smells - that of rancid meat - is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed.
The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a soldier's boot print. The "take-away" signs outside restaurants taken away. The corner kiosk shouting the Aug. 28 headline of New Orleans's Times-Picayune: "Katrina Takes Aim."

Rush hour in downtown now means pickups carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses, S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters hungry for action, and the occasional tank. About the only ones commuting by bus are dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.

Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the portal to the Williams Super Market in the once-desirable Garden District. And who could blame them if all they wanted was food in those first desperate days? The interlopers took the water, beer, cigarettes and snack food. They did not take the wine or the New Orleans postcards.

On the other side of downtown across Canal Street in the French Quarter, the most raucous and most unreal of American avenues is now little more than an empty alley with balconies.
The absence of sweetly blown jazz, of someone cooing "ma chère," of men sporting convention nametags and emitting forced guffaws - the absence of us - assaults the senses more than any smell.

Past the famous Cafe du Monde, where a slight breeze twirls the overhead fans for no one, past the statue of Joan of Arc gleaming gold, a man emerges from nothing on Royal Street. He is asked, "Where's St. Bernard Avenue?"

"Where's the ice?" he asks in return, eyes narrowed in menace. "Where's the ice? St. Bernard's is that way, but where's the ice?"

In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods, the severely damaged streets bear the names of saints who could not protect them. Whatever nature spared, human nature stepped up to provide a kind of democracy in destruction.

At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass spill from the crushed door, offering a view of the complementary coffee table. A large woman named Phoebe Au - "Pronounced 'Awe,' " she says - materializes to report that men had smashed it in with a truck. She fades into the neighborhood's broken brick, and a thin woman named Toni Miller materializes to correct the record.

"They used sledgehammers," she said.

Farther down St. Claude Avenue, where tanks rumble past a smoldering building, the roads are cluttered with vandalized city buses. The city parked them on the riverbank for the hurricane, after which some hoods took them for fare-free joy rides through lawless streets, and then discarded them.

On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire continues to burn where a warehouse once stood, a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights without power or water have been tough, especially since the police took away the gun he was carrying - "They beat me and threatened to kill me," he says - but there are benefits to this new world.

"You're able to see the stars," he says. "It's wonderful."

Today, law enforcement troops began lending muscle to Mayor C. Ray Nagin's vow to evacuate by force any residents too attached to their pieces of the toxic metropolis. They searched the streets for the likes of Strangebone, and that woman whose name sounds like Awe.

Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of another evening crept like spilled black water over someone's corpse.

White House Soft Shoe Shuffle

2005-09-07T10:45:00.000-05:00

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The first real White House Press Briefing Since Junior stole the election(s.) I haven't seen such weaving, bobbing and fast foot work since Lyndell played against McEnroe. This is a real joy to read:

September 06, 2005 5:35 PM ET

Q: Scott, the reality at hand right now is that the President said that we still live in an unsettled world. This is an administration that has told us since 9/11 that it's not a matter of "if," but "when" that we could be struck by a terror attack and, obviously, other disasters that are the result of Mother Nature. So at this point, where is the accountability? Is the President prepared to say where this White House, where this administration went wrong in its response to Katrina.

McCLELLAN: You know, David, there are some that are interested in playing the blame game. The President is interested in solving problems and getting help to the people who need it. There will be a time --

Q: Wait a minute. Is it a blame game when the President, himself, says that we remain at risk for either another catastrophe of this dimension, that's not manmade, or a terrorist attack? Isn't it incumbent upon this administration to immediately have accountability to find out what went wrong, when at any time this could happen again?

McCLELLAN: This is a massive federal response effort that we have underway. We've got to stay focused on helping those who are in need right now and help them rebuild their lives and get back up on their feet. It's a time of many challenges, enormous challenges. We've got to stay focused on the task at hand. That is what the President is doing.Now, in terms of addressing threats, we've made a lot of progress since the attacks of September 11th. And one of the most important things we're doing is staying on the offensive abroad. There are important priorities that we have to continue to address and we are working to address those priorities, too. But we have a major disaster that has occurred over a 90,000 square mile [sic] here in the United States. There are people --

Q: Right. And there are people who want to know why this government couldn't respond --

McCLELLAN: Hang on. There are people who are suffering, and we've got to respond to their needs, and that's what we're going to keep our focus.

Q: So no one is prepared to say what went wrong?

McCLELLAN: We will look at back at the facts and we will get to the bottom of the facts and determine what went wrong and what went right. But right now --

Q: Will the President support an outside investigation, or does he want to do it himself?

McCLELLAN: -- but, David, right now, we've got to continue helping the people in the region.

Q: Will he support an outside investigation --

Q: But, Scott, more concretely, an officer of the Northern Command is quoted as saying that as early as the time Hurricane Katrina went through Florida and worked its way up to the Gulf, there was a massive military response ready to go, but that the President did not order it. It could have been ordered on Sunday, on Monday, on Tuesday -- the call didn't come. Why not?

McCLELLAN: Bill, let's point out a couple of things. There were a lot of assets that were deployed and pre-positioned prior to the hurricane hitting. And you have to look back --

Q: These assets were deployed, but the order to use them never came. The Bataan was sitting off behind the hurricane.

McCLELLAN: I know these are all facts that you want to look at and want to determine what went wrong and what went right. I'm not prepared to agree with your assessment just there. There is a much larger picture here that we have to take a look at, and --

Q: It's not mine, it's an officer in the Northern Command.

McCLELLAN: -- in terms of the President, the President issued disaster declarations ahead of time so that we could make sure we're fully mobilizing resources and pre-positioning them. But this was a hurricane of unprecedented magnitude.

Q: Right, but the military can't go into action without his order.

McCLELLAN: I'll be glad to talk to you about it, but I've got to have a chance to respond to --

Q: In view of the national crisis, will the President withdraw his proposal for this tax cut for the richest people in the country? And, also, my second question is, why did we turn down foreign help?

McCLELLAN: Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. We have not. We have made very clear -- I made clear last week, the State Department made clear last week that we are going to take people up on their offers of assistance from foreign countries. There are some 94 nations and international organizations that have made offers of assistance -- whether that is cash support or I think water pumps from places like Germany or other areas. We said that if this can help alleviate things on the ground, we're going to take them up on their offers of assistance and we appreciate the compassion from the international community and their offers of assistance.

Q: And how about my first question?

McCLELLAN: Your first question?

Q: Biggest tax cut, permanent tax cut for the richest people in the country -- in view of the national crisis, in view of the deficit --

McCLELLAN: The highest priority for this administration right now is the ongoing response and recovery efforts --

Q: No, no, I'm asking you a question.

McCLELLAN: And I'm responding to your question. The highest priority right now for this government is the ongoing Katrina response and recovery efforts and helping the people who need the help. There are other priorities, too, and we'll be working to address those, as well.

Q: I just want to follow up on David's questions on accountability. First, just to get you on the record, where does the buck stop in this administration?

McCLELLAN: The President.

Q: All right. So he will be held accountable as the head of the government for the federal response that he's already acknowledged was inadequate and unacceptable?

McCLELLAN: The President's most important responsibility is the safety and security of the American people. He talks about that often. That is his most important responsibility. Again, there's going to be plenty of time to look at the facts and determine what went wrong and what went right and how the coordination was between the state and federal and local authorities. Right now we've got to continue doing everything we can in support of the ongoing operational activities on the ground in the region to help people.

Q: Well, the President has said that this government can do many things at once: It can fight the war on terror, it can do operations in Iraq, and aid and comfort people in Louisiana. Can it not also find time to begin to hold people accountable? It sounds, Scott, as if the line that you're giving us -- which is, you don't want to answer questions about accountability because there's too much busy work going on --

McCLELLAN: Wrong. No, wrong.

Q: -- is a way of ducking accountability.

McCLELLAN: You don't want to take away from the efforts that are going on right now. And if you start getting into that now, you're pulling people out that are helping with the ongoing response, Terry. Not at all. The President made it very clear, I'm going to lead this effort and we're going to make sure we find out what the facts were and what went wrong and what went right. But you don't want to divert resources away from an ongoing response to a major catastrophe. And this is a major catastrophe that we -- and we must remain focused on saving lives and sustaining lives and planning for the long-term. And that's what we're doing.

Q: And there are people in Louisiana and Mississippi who are doing that job very well. Your job is to answer the questions.

McCLELLAN: And I have.

Q: By saying you won't answer.

McCLELLAN: No, by saying that there's a time to look at those issues, but now is not the time, Terry.

Q: Scott, a question about the "plenty of time" assertion that you make -- would it not behoove the efforts to, in fact, save lives and secure property if the people and procedures that are responsible for the inadequacy before are excised as quickly as possible? That is to say, should the accountability be determined immediately and that part be removed?

McCLELLAN: Look, what should be done immediately is that we get help to the people who need it, and we continue to do that. We have been doing that; we're continuing to do that. I know some just want to engage in the blame game. There will be a time to talk about all these issues. We've got problems to solve, Bob --

Q: But --

McCLELLAN: Bob, we've got problems to solve and we're going to stay focused on solving those problems and helping those who need it.

Q But don't you -- the question would be, don't you want to have your best resources available and best people in place to solve those problems?

McCLELLAN: Well, you're speculating about things at this point. I'm not going to engage it that. There will be a time to look at all those issues.

Q: But the President, himself, said that the response was not adequate. It was run by certain --

McCLELLAN: For those who were waiting on assistance and didn't have it, absolutely, it wasn't adequate. We made that clear last week. There were some people who needed help yesterday and they were still waiting on assistance. That's why we -- when we identified those problems, we made sure they were getting fixed. That's why we've moved quickly to resolve the issue at the Convention Center in New Orleans. And now you have -- a tremendous amount of progress has been made on the evacuation of people. You have some 700 shelters that have been set up -- maybe a little bit less -- with some 230,000 people who are in those shelters, and that includes states around the country. We appreciate all those who are responding and meeting those needs.

Q: One last question. The person who says that he found out about the Convention Center seeing it on the media -- that is to say the FEMA director -- is still in place. Is that satisfactory that somebody would have responded like that?

McCLELLAN: Again, this is getting into -- we're somewhat engaged in a blame game. We've got to --

Q: It's not a blame game. That's accountability --

MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, we've got to --

Q: It's accountability.

McCLELLAN: Yes.

Q: Is "Brownie" still doing a "heck of a job," according to the President?

McCLELLAN: We've got to continue to do everything we can in support of those who are involved in the operational aspects of this response effort. And that's what we're going to do. There will be plenty of time --

Q: If he fails at it, he's not going to be good at it going forward. That's what Bob is saying.

McCLELLAN: There are people working round-the-clock with FEMA. The Secretary, the FEMA Director and many others who are working round-the-clock. And we've got to do everything we can in support of their efforts to make sure people are getting what they need.

Q: Does the President really believe we could respond to a terrorist attack with any -- amount of weeks, months?

McCLELLAN: We've actually done a lot of exercises, David, to prepare for possible attacks, but -

Q: Do you think most Americans agree, based on --

McCLELLAN: But the most important thing we've got to do is focus on --

Q: You mean exercises for Hurricane Katrina.

McCLELLAN: We've got to focus on prevention, and that's what we're doing by staying on the offensive.

Q: Well, let's talk about it. Are you saying the President is -- are you saying that the President is confident that his administration is prepared to adequately, confidently secure the American people in the event of a terrorist attack of a level that we have not seen? And based on what does he have that confidence?

McCLELLAN: Yes, and that's what he made clear earlier today, that obviously we want to look and learn lessons from a major catastrophe of this nature.

Q: Yes, but you're telling us today there will be time for that somewhere down the road. Well, what if it happens tomorrow?

McCLELLAN: We can engage in this blame-gaming going on and I think that's what you're getting --

Q: No, no. That's a talking point, Scott, and I think most people who are watching this --

McCLELLAN: No, that's a fact. I mean, some are wanting to engage in that, and we're going to remain focused --

Q: I'm asking a direct question. Is he confident --

McCLELLAN: We're going to remain focused on the people.

Q: -- that he can secure the American people in the event of a major terrorist attack?

McCLELLAN: We are securing the American people by staying on the offensive abroad and working to spread freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

Q: That's a talking point. That's a talking point.

McCLELLAN: No, that's a fact.Go ahead.

Q: No, it's not. And you think people who are watching this think that's -- from what does he derive that confidence, based on the response --

McCLELLAN: David, I'm interested in the people in the region that have been affected and getting them help. We can sit here and engage in this back and forth --

Q: The whole country is watching and wondering about some --

McCLELLAN: The time for bickering and blame-gaming is later. The time for helping people in the region is now.

Q: There have been suggestions that the initial White House response was delayed somewhat because a number of key people were on vacation last week. During that critical 24-hour period after the levees were breached Monday, who in the White House was in charge of crisis management?

McCLELLAN: Andy Card is the chief of staff, and he was in close contact with everyone. And the President is the one who's in charge at the White House.

Q: Scott, the President on Saturday referred to the problems of bureaucracy. It's now Tuesday. The Vice President heads down there on Thursday to deal with it. Can you cite for us a specific bureaucratic impediment that has been identified and corrected today?

McCLELLAN: I think that in terms of the specifics, that the Secretary -- Secretary Chertoff, or FEMA Director Mike Brown can provide you the operational aspects of the specifics of what have occurred on the ground today. They'll be doing a briefing later today. But there continues to be good progress made when it comes to evacuating people.Like I said, most of the people have been evacuated. I think there's a relatively small number. All those that were sent to places where people were evacuated, I think have been evacuated out of New Orleans. The levees, those are getting repaired.

Q: Were those bureaucratic impediments that have been corrected? Or was that a --

McCLELLAN: Well, the bureaucratic impediments that the President is referring to is about getting assistance to the people who need it. Yes, there are a number of agencies that are acting, but they have issued waivers to rules and regulations. The President wants to cut through the red tape in the bureaucracy and make sure that the assistance is getting to the people. One thing that he talked about in the Cabinet meeting today at length was, look, we've got to make sure that there aren't rules in place that are preventing assistance from getting to those who have been displaced, or have been evacuated, who are no longer in a home of their own, they're in a shelter. And we've got to take that assistance to them.So, yes, that is part of -- all that is part of cutting through the bureaucracy and red tape.Go ahead.

Q: Scott, there's words that James Lee Witt had said, that -- people who had been there within three hours after everything broke loose. Why was Mr. Brown not on the ground?

McCLELLAN: He was, prior to the hurricane.

Q: Well, why didn't he bring in the troops? Why didn't he deploy all the necessary assistance that was needed?

McCLELLAN: There were -- disaster medical assistance teams were deployed. Search and rescue teams were deployed ahead of the hurricane.

Q: But why didn't he -- but why weren't teams deployed to the Convention Center? Why weren't teams deployed to the Superdome? Why were people without water, without food? Why was there looting in New Orleans for survival? And you're talking about zero tolerance. Why did these things happen over a period of days, and you start seeing Mr. Brown on the air talking about he didn't know about the Convention Center and other things. Why?

McCLELLAN: Look, you're getting into all the after-action analysis, and I can't tell you all the --

Q: And you're saying there is not a blame game, but you open the door to the response --

McCLELLAN: I can't tell you that everything you said is factually correct, and they've got -- we've got to look at all the facts. We've got to determine what worked, what didn't work, and apply --

Q: Well, what's not working? What's not working in your view right now?

McCLELLAN: -- and apply lessons from that.

Q: What do you see that's not working right now? What is not working? Because these people are dying from dysentery now --

McCLELLAN: Well, last week --

Q: -- infection now; they're displaced, homes are gone. Does anyone in this administration know anyone that's down there --

McCLELLAN: Well, I think you need to talk to people on the ground --

Q: -- beyond Trent Lott?

McCLELLAN: -- people on the ground who have --

Q: Does anyone in this White House know anyone that's there, beyond Trent Lott, that's lost a home, that has lost family, that's displaced?

McCLELLAN: The President visited with a number of those who have been affected by the hurricane. We went down to Mississippi and Louisiana on Friday. The President visited with a number of people in the Biloxi area who have lost everything they had. The President saw firsthand --

Q: Does anyone in this administration know anyone personally who's been affected by the devastation?

McCLELLAN: Yes, the President has talked about those, and the President has visited with people who have lost everything they have. I know people that have been displaced, friends of mine. And it's terrible when you go and see the devastation on the ground. We've seen the devastation on the ground. We've seen the homes that are no longer there. We've seen the flooding that has covered a large portion of New Orleans and that has taken lives. There are people who continue to suffer and we need to get them help. And that's why our focus is on getting them help.

Q: But even with the -- just to be clear, though, you're saying that Katrina, if you need to spend the money on Katrina, that comes first, and tax cuts would have to wait?

McCLELLAN: No, Mark, I'm saying that there are a number of important priorities. First and foremost is helping the people who have been affected by Katrina. And there are other priorities, too, and we're going to address those priorities. And you can do -- you can do those -- all of those priorities.

Q: So they'll have to wait?

Q: So there will be --

McCLELLAN: No, in terms of the -- you're asking about the congressional timetable. Congress -- the Senate has come back into session, the House has come back into session this week. The Senate has put out what their schedule is for this week. Right now they're focused first and foremost on Hurricane Katrina, and also on addressing some of the appropriations needs. And they've already put out their schedule, and so you ought to look at that schedule.

Q: Scott, given the failure of leadership in the first days of this crisis, and given your reticence to get rid of any of the people associated with that leadership --

McCLELLAN: Those are your words, not mine.

Q: -- wouldn't it be more appropriate to follow the suggestion of appointing somebody as the coordinator, overall coordinator for the relief effort who is not associated with that failed leadership? Probably a former retired military person who could more easily coordinate the logistics and the coordination between the military...

McCLELLAN: No, we're going to continue to work in support of those who are overseeing the operational activities, and we appreciate the job that the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Chertoff and all those at FEMA are doing to address the ongoing problems.Again, this is getting into trying to finger-point and play the blame game. This is not the time for that. There are people who are really in need. Terry was down there in the region. He saw what has happened to the people on the ground and how they have lost everything --

Q: I think they might want some answers, too.

McCLELLAN: -- and how they have lost everything they had.

Q: In addition to help, they might want some answers, too.

McCLELLAN: And they're going to get them. But now is not the time, Terry.

Q: No, it is the time, Scott.

Q: Scott, a follow up.

McCLELLAN: Go ahead --

Q: Did the Mayor or the Governor turn down any requests made by the administration?

McCLELLAN: Again, I think from this podium that we want to stay focused on ways we can work together, so I don't think it helps any situation to get into all those internal discussions that are going on, on issues of that nature. This isn't a time when people are trying to look at who's to blame, or try to shift responsibility. This is a time when we're all trying to work together to get things done.

Q: But that hasn't stopped you from suggesting pretty subtly that the local and state officials bear some responsibility.

McCLELLAN: Thank you for your comment. I'm trying to get to other questions here.

America? Are You Finally Awake...

2005-09-01T13:14:00.000-05:00

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Submitted by Schroeder830 on August 31, 2005 - 4:34pm.

(Note: this was not submitted to this site but Schroeder830, whoever that person may be, speaks what a lot of people would just love to scream out. I wish I could talk to you in person Schroeder830. Thanks.)

George W. Bush had it all planned out. September the 11th was close, he was brushing up on looking demure and grim. Well, Mr. Bush, you moron, look what you have done to this country. Our America. You have ruined this country, you have spent all of the money we have, we don't have the soldiers to help us in this great time of need. Your 9/11 looks like a walk in the park compared to this devestation.

You stupid stupid man, you have left us so vulnerable because you wanted to play cowboy and go to war.

I have never hated anyone in my life. But I hate you Mr. Bush. I hate everything you stand for. Mr. Bush, the world finally understands what you have done. YOU ARE HATED AROUND THIS WORLD FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE.

You can't leave office soon enough. I fear how much damage you will do in the meantime. How long did it take for you to look worried from the airplane? HOW MUCH ARE YOU GOING TO SELL THOSE PHOTOS FOR AT YOUR NEXT FUNDRAISING. YOU SOLD THE PICTURES OF YOURSELF DURING 9/11....TO RAISE MONEY TO SUPPORT YOUR AGENDA. YOU SICKO MR. BUSH YOU HAVE DONE SO MUCH DAMAGE TO THIS COUNTRY WE MAY NOT SURVIVE.

BRING OUR TROOPS HOME, I KNOW YOU LOVE THAT OIL, I WISH YOU COULD BATHE IN THE STUFF, BUT AMERICANS NEED HELP AND ALL OF OUR GOOD MEN AND WOMEN ARE FIGHTING A WAR YOU STARTED.

CALL FOR COMPLETE AND TOTAL TROUP WITHDRAWAL, LEAVE THE TANKS AND WEAPONS AND LET THOSE IRAQI'S KILL EACH OTHER IF THEY WANT. YOU LIED ABOUT THIS WAR AND YOU GOT CAUGHT. DO THE RIGHT THING AND BRING THESE MEN AND WOMEN HOME TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE WHO PAY YOUR SALARY.

YOU WILL NEVER SUFFER A DAY IN YOUR LIFE. YOU WILL NEVER BE BROKE, HUNGRY, SICK, JOBLESS BECAUSE YOU ARE A SPOILED BRAT, A BRAT WHO HAD TO CHEAT TO WIN AN ELECTION.

BRING THE TROOPS HOME TO PROTECT OUR PEOPLE. BE A MAN, DO THE RIGHT THING. MY WORDS MEAN NOTHING TO THIS SOB.

GEORGE W. BUSH DOESN'T GIVE A FLIP ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN NEW ORLEANS. HE JUST WANTED ANOTHER PHOTO OP.

I AM SICK OF YOUR SMIRK, YOUR GUITAR PLAYING, YOUR STUPID LOOKING DANCING, LIKE YOUR A TEXAN, YOUR NOT A TEXAN, YOUR FROM MAINE, I AM SICK OF YOUR TRASHY FAMILY, YOU HAVE SPENT ALL OF OUR MONEY, WE CAN'T FUND THE GULF COAST DISASTER BECAUSE YOU HAVE SPENT IT ALL.

BUSH, YOU SHOULD BE IMPEACHED. YOU HAVE COMMITTED HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, YOU, CHENEY, RUMSFELT, AND YOUR TOKEN, CONDI.

I HOPE YOU BURN IN HELL MR. BUSH. TO WATCH THESE POOR PEOPLE CRY, PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T HAD FOOD OR WATER FOR TWO DAYS BECAUSE YOU SENT OUR MEN AND WOMEN TO IRAQ, THIS DISASTER IS YOUR FAULT MR. BUSH, YOU SPENT THE MONEY THAT WAS SET ASIDE FOR THE ENGINEERING ON THE LEVEES IN NEW ORLEANS, BUT YOUR STUPID WAR PUT THAT OFF.

YOU HAVE PROVEN WHO YOU ARE LOYAL TOO, OIL, SO WHY DON'T YOU TAKE YOUR WIFE AND TWINS AND MOVE TO BAGHDAD, I AM SURE THEY WILL WELCOME YOU WITH OPEN ARMS.

YOU ARE NOT OUR PRESIDENT, MR. BUSH THE WAR IS OVER AND SO ARE YOU.

I HOPE ALL AMERICANS FINALLY SEE WHAT THIS RELIGIOUS MAN WHO TALKS TO GOD IS REALLY ALL ABOUT. HE IS EVIL. HE IS STUPID. HE IS NOT A MAN OF GOD. HE HIDES BEHIND GOD'S SKIRTS WHEN HE TALKS TO THE COUNTRY.

AND LAST BUT NO LEAST, GO TO HELL KARL ROVE. HISTORY WILL HAVE A PLACE FOR YOU. OUTING A CIA INTELLIGENT AGENT TO DISCREDIT HER HUSBAND BECAUSE IF THE TRUTH HAD GOTTEN OUT ABOUT WEAPONS OF MASS DELUSIONS, YOUR LITTLE WAR WOULDN'T HAVE GONE FORWARD.

MR. ROVE YOU WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE, AFTER ALL, AREN'T YOU MR. BUSH'S BRAIN?

Plant Some Bushes In Iraq

2005-08-24T12:29:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. President,

Mr. President - or why don't I just call you George? Everybody knows you're just a good ole boy. OK, now here's the thing Georgie-Boy; since we can't get our men and women in Iraq decent armor AND since they are fighting for such a noble cause, here's what I was thinking:

Iraq is a pretty desolate place; not many trees or plants. So, you know, when the shootin' starts, there just ain't nothing to hide behind. So what we need over there, since we can't get our people armor, is some Bushes to hide behind.

I thought we could start out by sending the twin Bushes. You know, your daughters, Jenna and Barbara. I'm sure both of them would love a chance to serve their country for such a noble cause. Sure, they might get an arm or a leg blown off, but hey, they'll be able to take advantage of that great Veteran's Medical System you helped run more efficiently by cutting their funding. And if they get killed, it might hurt for a little while but it'll be OK because you'll know they died for a really noble cause.

Of course, two Bushes won't be nearly enough. Don't forget about your brother Jeb's kids. I'm sure the Governor of Florida's military age kids George P. Bush, Noelle Bush and John Ellis Bush Jr. would all be just tickled pink (no double meaning intended there, he he ...) to get over to Iraq and knock off a few them Insurgents for a ... ah ... you know ... one of them noble cause thingies.

Then, let's not forget Neil Bush's little darlings Lauren Bush and Pierce Bush. They're both military age and I just bet they'd look mighty nice in Marine uniforms with those fancy red strips down the sides of the legs. I can see 'em both now ridin' in one of them Humvees, sharp-eyed, on the lookout for one them there IED's (Improvised Explosive Device.) Hopefully they would have been able to get enough scrap metal out of the Baghdad garbage dump to armor the bottoms and sides where another good ole boy skimped just a little bit to squeeze up that profit margin. Tell Neil there's nothing to worry about. The odd's that they'll actually get hit by one of those IED's is not very high. Even if they do, they're tough kids. They just might live long enough to be medivac'd to Germany. And, if the worse happens, well, it was for a noble cause.

And the noble cause could still be served. To replace them, there's your nephew Marshall Bush, son of Marvin Bush. Let's not forget Dorothy Bush Koch's military age children Samuel LeBlond and Ellie LeBlond.

You know your kin better than I do Georgie-boy. What do ya think? They're not gonna mind giving up they're kids for a really, really noble cause like the one we have over there in Iraq are they?

If you think about it, that's a lot of Bushes. What amazes me is that them little whippersnappers aren't already over there showing us lesser folk how its done - just like their dad's did in the Viet Nam war. You older generation just gotta quit hoggin' all that glory from your noble service in Viet Nam and let them young 'uns go. To help nudge ya'll in the right direction, Buzzflash has started a little petition.

I've already signed it (its for a noble cause after all) and I hope everybody else who wants to see some Bushes in Iraq, hop on over to Buzzflash and sign this petition. Send some Bushes to Iraq so our soldiers will have something duck behind when the shootin' starts.

www.buzzflash.com/editorial/05/08/edi05061.html

Who Would Jesus Assassinate?

2005-08-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

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Pat Robertson - I refuse to use the term "Reverend" for this piece of gutter scum - called Monday for the assassination of the duly and legally elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," Robertson said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network's "The 700 Club." "We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator," he continued. "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
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President Chavez is a very vocal critic of President Bush and his administration's policies towards Iraq, Cuba, Central and South America. He has accused U.S. officials of backing the plot in 2002 in which Chavez was briefly overthrown. He was returned to power by popular demand only a few weeks later. His relationship with Bush and the U.S. has been strained since he demanded a higher percentage per barrel of oil taken from Venezuela. Chavez has used the additional revenue for education and increased health care for the people of Venezuela.
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Pat Robertson, a staunch supporter of George Bush, is the founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former U.S. presidential candidate. Robertson went on to say "... I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it (assassinate Chavez.) It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."
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I can just hear the prayers of the faithful now:
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"Dear Lord, help us to kill this dirty scoundrel who is so beloved by his people that he was elected by a landslide, unlike our leader who probably wasn't elected at all."
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"I say Lord, help us to rid the earth of a creature who dares ask for enough money from his poor countries only natural resource so that he can commit the un-American SIN of putting food into the mouths of his hungry people and education into the minds of their children."
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"Yes Lord, in your wisdom and mercy, let us kill just this one person. Otherwise God, we just might have to go in there and bomb the hell out of all of them and take what we want. And if you force us to do that, why, a hundred thousand men, women, children and little babies are going to get killed. But we'll do as you will Lord."
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"In Jesus name, we pray. Amen."

Open Letter to Senator Mark Pryor

2005-08-22T21:57:00.000-05:00

To The Honorable Senator Mark Pryor;
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Sir,
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Regarding your email response to me about my email to you being in an unreadable format:
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Does it really matter? It seems that trying to communicate with an elected Democrat from Arkansas is about on a par with talking to a brick wall. It has become painfully obvious that neither you nor Senator Blanche Lincoln nor Representative Vic Snyder represent my interests or the interests of any other working person in Arkansas. I, for one, am with the Steel Workers Union on the record of the three of you. Next election, I will vote for a Republican if I have to, but I won't be voting for you three.
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And don't worry about any more unreadable email from me - or readable email for that matter. My time would be better spent spitting into the wind.

Goodness Gracious

2005-08-17T14:29:00.000-05:00

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Kevin Gilbert was a very talented musician and writer. The lyrics to this song make it appear that he could also see into the future. But actually, though it is eerily accurate to our circumstances today, it was written during the first U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Goodness Gracious

by Kevin Gilbert

Born 1967 - Died 1996

Goodness Gracious is there nothing left to say?

When the ones that get to keep looking

are the ones that look away

It's pabulum for the sleepers

in the cult of brighter days

Goodness Gracious at the mercy of the crooks

We're broke and stroking vegetables

and there's way too many cooks

In every pot a pink slip, In every mouth a hook

Goodness Gracious I'm not listening anymore

Cause the spooks are in the White House

and they've justified a war

So wake me when they notify

we're gonna fight some more

Goodness Gracious not many people care

Concern is getting scarcer

true compassion really rare

I can see it on our faces. I can feel it in the air

Goodness Gracious me.

Goodness Gracious my generation's lost

They burned down all our bridges

before we had a chance to cross

Is it the winter of our discontent or just an early frost?

Goodness Gracious of apathy I sing

The baby boomers had it all and wasted everything

Now recess is almost over

and they won't get off the swing.

Goodness Gracious we came in at the end

No sex that isn't dangerous, no money left to spend

We're the cleanup crew for parties

we were too young to attend

Goodness Gracious me.

Goodness Gracious my grandma used to say

The world's a scary place now,

things were different in her day

What horrors will be commonplace

when my hair starts to grey?

The Noble Sacrifice of Kevin Benderman

2005-08-11T12:21:00.000-05:00

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I have learned from first hand experience that war is the destroyer of everything that is good in the world, it turns our young into soulless killers and we tell them that they are heroes when they master the "art" of killing. -Kevin Benderman

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle. It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men but it has one defect: it needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant but it has one defect: it needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.
-- Brecht
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Casey Sheehan, age 24, was killed on April 4, 2004. Bush told his grieving mother, Cindy Sheehan, that her son had made a noble sacrifice for freedom and for his country. Of course, Bush didn't go into any details about the exact nature of the mission Casey was on when he was killed or exactly what his platoon was doing when Casey was struck down and killed by enemy fire. Now Cindy Sheehan is camped outside Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch because she wants to ask him for those details. Just what was the nature of his job that made his death so noble? That's all she wants to know.

Even if Bush were to stoop to answer that question, odds are good that he doesn't know the answer. He stays as far removed from the actuality of war and death as he possible can. I'm sure it has never occurred to him to ask for details of the circumstances surrounding any of the thousands who have been killed and maimed in Iraq.

Bush probably doesn’t know that Casey Sheehan was killed during the Sadr Rebellion in the slums of Baghdad. Most likely Bush doesn't have a clue about what the Sadr Rebellion was, where it was, or why it happened.

It began when, in our quest for to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority decided that a great first step to that end would be to close down Baghdad's most popular newspaper, al Hawza. Bush's man there decided it was just too hard to build a coalition favoring the right "brand" of freedom when you had people freely speaking their minds all the time and getting that much front-page exposure. It wasn't that they weren't going to have a free press in Iraq. It was just that they weren't going to have a free press that disagreed with the Bush administration.

For some reason, the closing of their newspaper made those ingrate Iraqis mad, who knows why. Anyway, when demonstrators poured into the streets opposing the closing of the paper and demanding freedom of the press, American troops where ordered to open fire and, like the good British troops in Boston in 1776, the American troops followed their orders. Several unarmed people were killed.

That is the noble event that sparked the rebellion in which Casey Sheehan lost his life. That is the noble cause for which Cindy Sheehan lost her precious, priceless, irreplaceable son.

On July 29, 2005, Kevin Benderman started a fifteen month stretch in prison because he refused redeployment to Iraq - at least that is the reason given for his sentence. What he was guilty of was filing a conscientious objector application with the Army. He doesn't just object to the war in Iraq. He objects to all wars anywhere that are wars of aggression. Federal law prohibits prosecuting an individual for being a conscientious objector but every good lawyer knows there are more ways to skin a cat than there are cats, so the Army just convicted him of "intentionally missing movement" which is a federal crime. In other words, you can be a conscientious objector as long as it doesn't interfere with your job of killing people for the Army - even if that means shooting down unarmed civilians demonstrating for freedom of the press.

My heart goes out to Cindy Sheehan and her family. I, too, have lost a child the same age as Casey. I know what a chunk it tears from your soul. I know that that tear in my soul has never healed. I'm sure it is the same for most parents who have the brightest part of their lives snuffed out to serve some part of an incomprehensible machine. Especially when you know in your heart that in the grand scheme of the universe that human-grinding misery-producing machine headed up by tiny men like Bush and Rove and Rumsfield is just so unimportant.

At the same time, I salute Kevin Benderman and I salute his noble sacrifice of fifteen months of his life. Perhaps because of it, some young man or woman will really think about what they are doing before they offer themselves up to feed the machine. Perhaps because of his sacrifice, there will be one less parent grieving in the hot sweltering summer sun just so they can ask an unknowing and uncaring man one question: Why?

Spreading Ethical Standards

2005-08-08T20:38:00.000-05:00

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August 6th has come and gone and I managed not to write anything that day. I was afraid that if I got started, I wouldn't be able to control what came out. I just didn't want to put that much of myself on display.

August 6th is truly a day that should live in infamy the world over. It is a day when all earth's teaming billions should simultaneously stand still in rememberance. It is the day when the single most deadly terrorist act in modern history was committed. August 6th, 1945 is the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima.

Three days later, on August 9th, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Together, the two bombs instantly annialted over a quarter of a million men, women, and children in a firey furnace that literally melted skin and bone of the victums.

Truman, who had been president all of four months at the time, said it was regretable but necessary to save American lives. Later, General Dwight Eisenhower was critical of the use of the bomb and voiced his concerns to Secretary of War Stimson. Eisenhower later wrote, “Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of ‘face.’ It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, was even stronger in his condemnation of the use of atomic weapons on Japan. “My own feeling,” he said, “was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children….”

On August 9th, pause for just a moment where ever you may be and think a moment of the horror unleashed in those three days. Is it really Democracy the United States is spreading around the world or the ethical standard we adopted sixty years ago over Japan?

Stick Your Yellow Ribbon

2005-08-02T08:17:00.000-05:00

A friend recently asked why I hadn't posted anything recently. I think the answer is because writing and maintaining a blog like this is just too much like preaching to the choir. If anybody reads it who doesn't agree with me, they never leave a message or bother to state an opposing point of view. So I decided that maybe it is time that I abandoned any attempt at reasonable discourse and just tried to piss people off and see if I could rattle someone's cage.

So this is to all you a**holes who drive around in your gas-guzzling SUVs with a cheap yellow magnet stuck on the back that says "I support our troops." I've got a question for you. Just how in hell does sticking a yellow fake ribbon on your vehicle support our troops?

Here is how we in America support our troops. To start with, there are 300 million of us. Of that 300 million, there are maybe 500,000 that are actually in Afghanistan or Iraq (yes, there is still fighting in Afghanistan.) or at risk of being deployed to these war zones at some time in the future. That is less than two-tenths of a per cent (<0.2%). It is reasonable to assume that each soldier's deployment affects a wider family of 20 people either financially, emotionally or both. That means that the war will actually touch the lives of about 10 million Americans. That's just slightly more than 3% of the population.

But even though the war doesn't actually touch our lives in any intimate way, we pay taxes to support our troops, right? Wrong!

The money for the president's "war on terror" doesn't come from the US taxpayers (at least not yet but that's another story.) The money for the war is not even considered part of the national budget. It is a special appropriation considered separate from the budget. When that appropriation is passed, there is no real money to pay for it so the government borrows the money from foreign lenders - mainly China and Japan.

So that means that 97% of us are skating free without a care in the world. "War? What war? Oh that car bomb that went off in Iraq yesterday that killed five soldiers. Man, that's a damn shame. They should get those guys some armor or something. Hey, did you hear about the special they got on yellow "Support the Troop" magnetic ribbons at Wal-Mart? I'm a-gonna go down there and get me one for the other side of the car. We gotta support our troops. It's the least we can do." You got that right - the very least.

National resolve? Damn right we've got national resolve coming out our ying-yangs. As long as there is no war-tax and as long as only 0.2% of us are in any danger at all (and not one the son or daughter of a national decision maker) we can have all the good old fashion American resolve any war-mongering president, congress and senate could ever wish for. Editorialists (who's sons and daughters are in college where they are supposed to be - not in some crazy-assed war getting their butts shot off) all agree that a steadfast American public are resolved to stay the course. Of course, the editorialists overlook the fact that most of the American public get their news from E! TV and couldn't find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map unless it had a picture of Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson pinned on it. For some of the American public, it would have to be a picture of Big Bird or Barney.

So what is my point? My point is that we paste magnetic stickers on our cars saying "I Support Our Troops" yet at the same time, we allow the families of our troops serving in battle zones to suffer from financial distress to the point where some communities have actually held pancake dinners to raise money so they could stock a food pantry for the families of hard-pressed reservists and National Guardsmen. A community in New Jersey managed to raise $12,000 (bless them) but the real question is, why the hell are the families of our troops having to get food from charity food pantries? And $12,000 is what? Four thousand f*cking yellow car magnets.

Speaking again of yellow car magnets, the State of Illinois gave tax-payers a chance in 2004 to put their tax-returns where their magnets said their hearts were by creating a program whereby their citizens could donate their tax-return for 2004 to needy families of National Guard members serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. In all of 2004, the program raised $400,000. This is a commendable effort but in the state of Illinois, $400,000 amounts to a donation of three cents per person. You know the good citizens of Illinois spent at least ten times that on yellow car magnets.

Then, there is the ultimate insult - the scene of Congress engaged in a name-calling ego battle over a billion dollar shortfall in the yearly budget for our VA hospitals. People, we have poured over 200 billion dollars down that rat hole called Halliburton, excuse me, I mean Iraq. This country has an annual income of 15 trillion dollars. When viewed from that perspective, that is a drop in the bucket. When viewed from the perspective of the soldiers returning without arms, legs, eyes, and in need of long-term care and physical therapy because they actually believed those "I Support Our Troops" slogans we should all be hanging our heads in shame.

Better yet, go out to your car. Rip that damn magnet off. Fold it up. Stuff it in an envelope. Write a letter to your Senator demanding that the U.S. government put its money where its mouth is when they say "Support Our Troops." Stuff that in on top of the magnet and mail it to your Senator.

In closing, I would like to say: It is time we all got madder than hell. Its time we stand up and really support our troops. Its time to get them out of that quagmire the egotistical power-hungry madmen who run the government have created in Iraq. Its time we brought our troops home. Not next year but now! And it is time we got rid of the bastards who put them there in the first place.

Rove in Direct Violation of Executive Order 12958

2005-07-20T12:33:00.000-05:00

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An open letter to the president from Rep. Henry A. Waxman
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Monday 18 July 2005
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Dear Mr. President:
In June 2004, you said that you would fire anyone found to be involved in the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's identity as a covert CIA agent. [1] Today, you significantly changed your position, stating that you would remove Karl Rove or other White House officials involved in the security breach only "if someone committed a crime." [2]

Your new standard is not consistent with your obligations to enforce Executive Order 12958, which governs the protection of national security secrets. The executive order states: "Officers and employees of the United States Government ... shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently ... disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified." [3] Under the executive order, the available sanctions include "reprimand, suspension without pay, removal, termination of classification authority, loss or denial of access to classified information, or other sanctions." [4]

Under the executive order, you may not wait until criminal intent and liability are proved by a prosecutor. Instead, you have an affirmative obligation to take "appropriate and prompt corrective action." [5] And the standards of proof are much different. A criminal violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is investigating, requires a finding that Mr. Rove "intentionally disclose[d]" the identity of a covert agent. [6] In contrast, the administrative sanctions under Executive Order 12958 can be imposed without a finding of intent. Under the express terms of the executive order, you are required to impose administrative sanctions - such as removal of office or termination of security clearance - if Mr. Rove or other officials acted "negligently" in disclosing or confirming information about Ms. Wilson's identity. [7]

I have enclosed a fact sheet on Karl Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement and its legal implications, which provides additional detail about the President's national security obligations. I urge you to act in compliance with Executive Order 12958 and your responsibility to safeguard national security secrets.
Sincerely,
Henry A. Waxman Ranking Minority Member

[1] Press Conference: President Discusses Job Creation With Business Leaders (Sept. 30, 2003).
[2] Bush: CIA Leaker Would Be Fired if Crime Committed, Reuters (July 18, 2005); Bush: Any Criminals in Leak to Be Fired, Associated Press (July 18, 2005).
[3] Executive Order 12958, sec. 5.5(b)
[4] Id. at sec. 5.5(c).
[5] Id. at sec. 5.5(e).
[6] 50 USC sec. 421(a).
[7] Executive Order 12958, sec. 5.5(b).

Bush Vows to Attack Leeds

2005-07-18T16:06:00.000-05:00

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Pointing to last week's bombings in London, President George Bush vowed to keep on the offensive against international terrorism and to 'continue to take this fight to the enemy, and we will fight until this enemy is defeated'.

When told that the bombers where from Leeds, north of London, the president replied, "We absolutely must bring democracy to this outpost of insurgency. We have to save the oil in the North Sea from these terrorists madmen."

British Prime Minister Blair seemed a bit befuddled when told of President Bush's remarks but promised the support of English troops "where ever the fight on terror might lead even if it leads to Leeds," Blair said with his usual sense of dry humor.

Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti

2005-07-16T16:06:00.000-05:00

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A very good friend of mine brought this song to my attention. I am a fan of Joan Baez and have been since she gave concerts for two bucks a ticket (man, that has been a really, really long time ago) and I have never heard her sing this song proving once again that any day above ground is a good day because there is always the chance that it might bring something new and delightful.

Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti
Lyrics by Joan Baez
Music by Ennio Morricone

Father, yes, I am a prisoner
Fear not to relay my crime
The crime is loving the forsaken
Only silence is shame
And now I'll tell you what's against us
An art that's lived for centuries
Go through the years and you will find
What's blackened all of history
Against us is the law
With its immensity of strength and power
Against us is the law!

Police know how to make a man
A guilty or an innocent
Against us is the power of police!
The shameless lies that men have told
Will ever more be paid in gold
Against us is the power of the gold!
Against us is racial hatred
And the simple fact that we are poor.

My father dear, I am a prisoner
Don't be ashamed to tell my crime
The crime of love and brotherhood
And only silence is shame
With me I have my love, my innocence,
The workers, and the poor
For all of this I'm safe and strong
And hope is mine
Rebellion, revolution don't need dollars
They need this instead
Imagination, suffering, light and love.

And care for every human being
You never steal, you never kill
You are a part of hope and life
The revolution goes from man to man
And heart to heart
And I sense when I look at the stars
That we are children of life
Death is small.

THE PROGRESSIVE PROMISE

2005-07-15T14:35:00.000-05:00

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The Progressive movement is starting to solidify - at last. Fifty-seven members of Congress have formed the Congressional Progressive Caucus. If your representative is one of the founding members, let them know you are with them. We are getting it together folks. Here is The Congressional Progressive Caucus' first public statement:

THE PROGRESSIVE PROMISE: FAIRNESS FOR ALL

The Congressional Progressive Caucus offers the Progressive Promise for all. We believe in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Our fairness plan is rooted in our core principles. It also embodies national priorities that are consistent with the values, needs, and hopes of all our people, not just the powerful and the privileged. We pledge our unwavering commitment to these legislative priorities and we will not rest until they become law.

1. FIGHTING FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND SECURITY IN THE U.S. AND GLOBAL ECONOMIES.· To uphold the right to universal access to affordable, high quality healthcare for all.· To preserve guaranteed Social Security benefits for all Americans, protect private pensions, and require corporate accountability.· To invest in America and create new jobs in the U.S. by building more affordable housing, re-building America’s schools and physical infrastructure, cleaning up our environment, and improving homeland security.· To export more American products and not more American jobs and demand fair trade.· To reaffirm freedom of association and enforce the right to organize.· To ensure working families can live above the poverty line and with dignity by raising and indexing the minimum wage.

2. PROTECTING AND PRESERVING CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES.· To sunset expiring provisions of the Patriot Act and bring remaining provisions into line with the U.S. Constitution.· To protect the personal privacy of all Americans from unbridled police powers and unchecked government intrusion.· To extend the Voting Rights Act and reform our electoral processes.· To fight corporate consolidation of the media and ensure opportunity for all voices to be heard.· To ensure enforcement of all legal rights in the workplace.· To eliminate all forms of discrimination based upon color, race, religion, gender, creed, disability, or sexual orientation.

3. PROMOTING GLOBAL PEACE AND SECURITY.· To honor and help our overburdened international public servants – both military and civilian.· To bring U.S. troops home fromIraq as soon as possible.· To re-build U.S. alliances around the world, restore international respect for American power and influence, and reaffirm our nation’s constructive engagement in the UnitedNations and other multilateral organizations. · To enhance international cooperation to reduce the threats posed by nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction.· To increase efforts to combat hunger and the scourge of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infectious diseases.· To encourage debt relief for poor countries and support efforts to reach the UN’s Millennium Goals forDeveloping Countries.

They said it. They put it in writing. Lets see that they stick to it. No more compromising on poor-house bankruptcy bills, or give-aways to filthy rich energy companies or super-rich citizens. Just tell Bush to "Bring it on!"

At Least We Saved Them From Saddam ...

2005-07-12T14:43:00.000-05:00

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Iraq suspects suffocate in heat
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Nine building workers have died in Iraq after being arrested on suspicion of insurgent activity and then left in a closed metal container. Three men survived the ordeal, police sources said, despite being left for 14 hours in the metal container under the burning Iraqi summer sun.

The twelve men had apparently been caught up in a firefight between US troops and Iraqi gunmen, and were detained after taking an injured colleague to the hospital. Police sources said that the men had been arrested on Sunday after a local resident, thinking they were insurgents, called the police.

The police sent commandos who arrested the men and locked them in the metal container about mid-day. By nightfall eight of the men were dead and three were in a critical condition.
The survivors were taken to a central Baghdad hospital where staff said a ninth man died.

A doctor said one of the survivors had been given repeated electric shocks by the commandos.
The survivors themselves were kept under police guard as they were treated and were taken away without being allowed to speak to journalists.

Recently, press reports have alleged police commandos systematically torture and abuse detainees and much of the recent insurgency violence has targeted police commandos. I can't imagine why.

It's All In Where You Stand

2005-07-07T15:27:00.000-05:00

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"We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion, and while we laugh at our jokes and think we're damn funny jarheads, we know we might soon die ... squandered lives with the comedy of combat and being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House.”

-- from Jarhead by Anthony Swofford
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“I don't worry about anything here in Washington, D.C.”
-- George Bush
Press Conference 5/31/05

NeoCon = NeoNazi

2005-07-01T07:32:00.000-05:00

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My name is not Dick Durbin. I will not be apologising for the title of this article. Here is why:

In November 1944 20 Jewish children, ten boys and ten girls, were brought from Auschwitz to the concentration camp of Neuengamme, just outside Hamburg. The youngsters, aged between 5 and 12 years old, came from all over Europe. Plucked from their homes, the children had witnessed the murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. They faced starvation, illness, brutal labor and other indignities until they were consigned to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

An SS doctor, Kurt Heissmeyer, saved them from that fate. They were transferred from Auschwitz to Neuengamme. The good doctor had important research to do and guinea-pigs were scarce so he decided that children would do just as well. First, Dr. Heissmeyer removed the children's lymph glands for analysis. Then, he injected living tuberculosis bacteria in their veins and directly into their lungs to determine if they had any natural immunities to tuberculosis.They were carefully observed, examined and photographed as the disease progressed. The condition of all the children deteriorated very rapidly and they became extremely ill.

On April 20th, 1945, Adolf Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday, Heissmeyer and SS Officer Arnold Strippel knew the Allied Forces were approaching and that the end of the war was near. In an effort to hide the evidence of their work, they decided to kill the children.

The SS transported the 20 children to the former Bullenhuser Damm School, which had been used as a satellite camp since October 1944. The children were immediately taken to the basement and ordered to undress.

An SS officer later reported: "They sat down on the benches all around and were cheerful and happy that they had been for once allowed out of Neuengamme. The children were completely unsuspecting."

The children were told they had to be vaccinated against typhoid fever before their return journey. Instead of a typhoid vacccination, they were injected with morphine. The twenty children were then hanged by ropes from hooks on the wall, but the SS men found it difficult to kill the mutilated children. The first child to be strung up was so light - due to disease and malnutrition - that the rope wouldn’t strangle him. SS Officer Frahm had to use all of his own weight to tighten the noose. Then he hanged the others, two at a time, from different hooks. "Just like pictures on the wall," he would recall later. He added that none of the children cried.

At five o' clock in the morning on April 21th, 1945, the Nazis finally finished with their grissly work and took a break to drank a cup of hard-earned coffee ...

The truth is the truth especially when it is documented in a congressional vote for all the world to see. The story above is not in the congressional record. It is documented at a memorial located in the basement of Bullenhuser Damm School where the children were so sadistically murdered. The celler has been kept, complete with hooks, exactly as it was on that spring day in 1945. Despite the Nazi's efforts to obliterate all traces of these poor children, they have been identified. Their names follow this article.

Meanwhile, on June 29th, 2005 in Washington, DC the Senate voted to block the Environmental Protection Agency from using studies that intentionally expose people to pesticides when considering permits for pest killers. By a 60-37 vote, the senate approved a provision put forward by Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that would block the EPA from relying on testing that exposes people to pesticides to approve or deny pesticide applications. So far, there are 24 known instances of the pesticide industry testing their products on human beings - that is 24 known instances.

But, but ... aren't pesticides poison? You bet. Isn't intentionally poisioning people illegal? I guess not.

In 1998, the Clinton administration imposed a moratorium on using human testing for pesticide approvals. Upon seizing power - partly with the help of contributions from the pesticide industry, the Bush administration lifted that moratorium. With this encouragement, the EPA set about developing rules that permit data from human tests on children, pregnant women, newborns, infants, fetuses and newborns of "uncertain viability." [The term "uncertain viability" was recently applied to a six-month old baby that was removed from a breathing tube in Texas despite his mother's pleas for the babie's life. The tube was removed by authority of a law signed into being by then Texas Governor George W. Bush. The baby suffocated within ten minutes of removal of the tube. As you can see, with the application of the Bush Texas law and these new EPA laws, the NeoCons could put these "resources" that are currently being wasted to good use in the medical testing field.]

Boxer's proposal would block the EPA from using data taken from such tests for the budget year starting Oct. 1. It would also bar the agency from conducting such testing. "Let's use this time to throw out this rule that they're drafting which is immoral on its face because it would allow EPA itself to test pregnant women and fetuses," Boxer told reporters. "And let's go back to the basic rules of science and morality."

The pesticide industry said Boxer was deliberately inflaming the issue and manufacturers do not intentionally perform tests on children. However, just recently, Boxer and Bill Nelson, D-Fla., held up the confirmation of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson until he publically promised to cancel an EPA planned pesticide study in Florida. Over the study's two years, the EPA had planned to give $970 plus a camcorder and children's clothes to each of the families of the 60 children in Duval County, Fla. that would be used in the test. Critics of the study noted that all of the families were from low-income, minority neighborhoods. The camcorders are a nice touch. That way, the families could document the deteriation of the children's health, saving the "scientists" valuable time.

Is this the same thing as cutting out a child's lymph glands, injecting them with tuberculosis and then hanging them at the end of the "experiment"? Perhaps not in scope but the Nazi's didn't start out with such a scope either. In 1935 Germany, no one would have predicted that educated scientists would be hanging children by the neck from hooks just ten years later.

37 United States Senators voted against Boxer's provision. All 37 are Republicans. All 37 are anti-abortion. All 37 are anti-stemcell research (because it harms cells that might become fetuses, don't you know?) All 37 were the most vocal supporters of Bush's so-called "Culture of Life" during the recent Schaivo controversy. All 37 should be given a real close tour of the basement of Bullenhuser Damm School. Maybe then, they could break to drank a cup of hard-earned coffee ...

If your senator is on the following list, call them or email them today. Any representative of the People of the United States who thinks babies make fine subjects for experiments with pesticides needs to find a new occupation.

The thirty-seven who deserve a coffee-break at Bullenhuser Damm School are:

Alexander (R-TN) Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA) Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY)
Burns (R-MT) Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA) Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN) Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID) Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC) Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM) Enzi (R-WY)
Frist (R-TN) Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH) Hagel (R-NE)
Hatch (R-UT) Inhofe (R-OK)
Kyl (R-AZ) Lott (R-MS)
Martinez (R-FL) McConnell (R-KY)
Roberts (R-KS) Santorum (R-PA)
Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL)
Stevens (R-AK) Sununu (R-NH)
Thomas (R-WY) Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)

The twenty children who died at Bullenhuser Damm School are:

Alexander Hornemann, 8, the Netherlands
Eduard Hornemann, 12, the Netherlands
Marek Steinbaum, 10, Poland
Marek James, 6, Poland
W. Junglieb, 12, Yugoslavia
Roman Witonski, 7, Poland
Roman Zeller, 12, Poland
Sergio de Simone, 7, Italy
Georges Andre Kohn, 12, France
Eduard Reichenbaum, 10, Poland
Jacqueline Morgenstern, 12, France
Surcis Goldinger, 11, Poland
Lelka Birnbaum, 12, Poland
Eleonora Witonska, 5, Poland
Ruchla Zylberberg, 10, Poland
H.Wasserman, 8, Poland
Lea Klygerman, 8, Poland
Rywka Herszberg, 7, Poland
Blumel Mekler, 11, Poland
Mania Altman, 5, Poland

The World Tribunal on Iraq

2005-06-29T08:49:00.000-05:00

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The World Tribunal on Iraq is real. Although it has no officially recognized legal authority, its moral authority is beyond question. The following document was prepared after hearings held in twenty different cities around the world to gather as much first hand information and expert opinion as possible. This document is long but far from boring. -- Gar

We the Jury of Conscience, from 10 different countries, met in Istanbul. We heard 54 testimonies from a panel of advocates and witnesses who came from across the world, including from Iraq, the United States and the United Kingdom.

The World Tribunal on Iraq met in Istanbul from 24-26th of June 2005. The principal objective of the WTI is to tell the truth about the Iraq war as clearly as possible, and to draw conclusions that underscore the accountability of those responsible and underline the significance of justice for the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein’s crimes against his people are not the focus of this Tribunal. We believe it is up to the Iraqi people to investigate these crimes in an independent and free trial.

I. Overview

1. The reasons given by the US and UK governments for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 have proven to be false. The real motive was to control and dominate the Middle East. Establishing hegemony over the Middle East serves the goal of controlling the world’s largest reserves of oil and strengthening the position of the US’s strategic ally Israel.

2. Blatant falsehoods about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a link between Al Qaeda terrorism and the Saddam Hussein régime were manufactured in order to create public support for a “preemptive” assault upon a sovereign independent nation.

3. Iraq has been under siege for years. The imposition of severe inhuman economic sanctions at the end of the first Gulf war in 1991; the establishment of no-fly zones in the Northern and Southern parts of Iraq; and the concomitant bombing of the country were all aimed at degrading and weakening Iraq’s human and material resources and capacities in order to facilitate its subsequent invasion and occupation. In this enterprise the US and British leaderships had the endorsement of a complicit UN Security Council.

4. In pursuit of their agenda of empire, Bush and Blair blatantly ignored the massive opposition to the war expressed by millions of people around the world. They embarked upon one of the most unjust, immoral, and cowardly wars in history.

5. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq of the last 27 months has led to the destruction and devastation of the Iraqi state and society. Law and order have broken down completely, resulting in a pervasive lack of human security; the physical infrastructure is in shambles; the health care delivery system is a mess; the education system has ceased to function; there is massive environmental and ecological devastation; and, the cultural and archeological heritage of the Iraqi people has been desecrated.

6. The occupation has intentionally exacerbated ethnic and confessionnal divisions in Iraqi society, with the aim of undermining Iraq’s identity and integrity as a nation. This is in keeping with the familiar imperial policy of divide and rule.

7. The imposition of the UN sanctions in 1991 caused untold suffering and thousands of deaths. The situation has worsened after the occupation. At least 100,000 civilians have been killed; 60,000 are being held in US custody in inhuman conditions, without charges; thousands have disappeared; and torture has become virtually routine.

8. The privatization, deregulation, and liberalization of the Iraqi economy has transformed the country into a client economy that serves the Washington Consensus. The occupying forces have also accomplished their primary goal of acquired control over the nation’s oil.

9. Any law or institution created under the aegis of occupation is devoid of both legal and moral authority. The recently concluded election, the Constituent Assembly, the current government, and the drafting committee for the Constitution are therefore all illegitimate.

10. There is widespread opposition to the occupation. Political, social, and civil resistance through peaceful means is subjected to repression by the occupying forces. It is the brutality of the occupation that has provoked a strong armed resistance and certain acts of desperation. By the principles embodied in the UN Charter and in international law, the popular national resistance to the occupation is legitimate and justified. It deserves the support of people everywhere who care for justice and freedom.

II. Findings and Charges

On the basis of the preceding findings and recalling the Charter of the United Nations and other legal documents quoted in the appendix, the jury has established the following charges.

A. Against the Governments of the US and the UK

1. Planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles. Evidence for this can be found in the leaked Downing Street Memo of 23rd July, 2002 in which it was revealed that: “military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy.” Intelligence was manufactured to willfully deceive the people of the US, the UK, and their elected representatives.

2. Targeting the civilian population of Iraq and civilian infrastructure, by intentionally directing attacks upon civilians and hospitals, medical centers, residential neighborhoods, electricity stations, and water purification facilities in violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”), Articles 7(1)(a), 8(2)(a)(i), and 8(2)(b)(i). The complete destruction of the city of Fallujah in itself constitutes a glaring example of such crimes.

3. Using disproportionate force and indiscriminate weapon systems, such as cluster munitions, incendiary bombs, depleted uranium (DU), and chemical weapons. Detailed evidence was presented to the Tribunal by expert witnesses that leukemia had risen sharply in children under the age of five residing in those areas which had been targeted by DU weapons.

4. Failing to safeguard the lives of civilians during military activities and during the occupation period thereafter, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Articles 13 and 27, and the ICC Statute, Articles 7 (1)(a) and 8(2)(a)(i). This is evidenced, for example, by “shock and awe” bombing techniques and the conduct of occupying forces at checkpoints.

5. Using deadly violence against peaceful protestors, beginning with, among others, the April 2003 killing of more than a dozen peaceful protestors in Fallujah.

6. Imposing punishments without charge or trial, including collective punishment, on the people of Iraq, in violation of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Geneva Conventions, and customary international law requiring due process. Repeated testimonies pointed to “snatch and grab” operations, disappearances, and assassinations.

7. Subjecting Iraqi soldiers and civilians to torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the ICCPR, other treaties and covenants, and customary international law. Degrading treatment includes subjecting Iraqi soldiers and civilians to acts of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination, as well as denying Iraqi soldiers Prisoner of War status as required by the Geneva Convention. Abundant testimony was provided of unlawful arrests and detentions, without due process of law. Well known and egregious examples occurred in Abu Ghraib prison as well as in Mosul, Camp Bucca, and Basra. The employment of mercenaries and private contractors to carry out torture has served to undermine accountability.

8. Re-writing the laws of a country that has been illegally invaded and occupied, in violation of international covenants on the responsibilities of occupying powers, in order to amass illegal profits (through such measures as Order 39, signed by L. Paul Bremer III for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which allows foreign investors to buy and takeover Iraq’s state-owned enterprises and to repatriate 100 percent of their profits and assets at any point) and to control Iraq’s oil. Evidence listed a number of corporations that had profited from such transactions.

9. Willfully devastating the environment, contaminating it by depleted uranium (DU) weapons, combined with the plumes from burning oil wells, as well as huge oil spills, and destroying agricultural lands. Deliberately disrupting the water and waste removal systems, in a manner verging on biological-chemical warfare. Failing to prevent the looting and dispersal of radioactive material from nuclear sites. Extensive documentation is available on air, water pollution, land degradation, and radiological pollution.

10. Actively creating conditions under which the status of Iraqi women has seriously been degraded contrary, to the repeated claims of the leaders of the coalition forces. Women’s freedom of movement has been severely limited, restricting their access to education, livelihood, and social engagement. Testimony was provided that sexual violence and sex trafficking have increased since the occupation of Iraq began.

11. Failing to protect humanity’s rich archaeological and cultural heritage in Iraq, by allowing the looting of museums and established historical sites and positioning military bases in culturally and archeologically sensitive locations. This took place despite prior warnings from UNESCO and Iraqi museum officials.

12. Obstructing the right to information, including the censoring of Iraqi media, such as newspapers (e.g., al-Hawza, al-Mashriq, and al-Mustaqila) and radio stations (Baghdad Radio), targeting international journalists, imprisoning and killing academics, intellectuals and scientists.

13. Redefining torture in violation of international law, to allow use of torture and illegal detentions, including holding more than 500 people at Guantánamo Bay without charging them or allowing them any access to legal protection, and using “extraordinary renditions” to send people to torture in other countries known to commit human rights abuses and torture prisoners.

B. Against the Security Council of United Nations

1. Failing to protect Iraq against a crime of aggression.

2. Imposing harsh economic sanctions on Iraq, despite knowledge that sanctions were directly contributing to the massive loss of civilian lives and harming innocent civilians.

3. Allowing the United States and United Kingdom to carry out illegal bombings in the no-fly zones, using false pretense of enforcing UN resolutions, and at no point allowing discussion in the Security Council of this violation, and thereby being complicit and responsible for loss of civilian life and destruction of Iraqi infrastructure.

4. Allowing the United States to dominate the United Nations and hold itself above any accountability by other member nations.

5. Failure to stop war crimes and crimes against humanity by the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq.

6. Failure to hold the United States and its coalition partners accountable for violations of international law during the occupation, and giving official recognition to the occupation, thereby legitimizing an illegal invasion and becoming a collaborator in an illegal occupation.

C. Against the Governments of the Coalition of the Willing Collaborating in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

D. Against the Governments of Other Countries Allowing the use of military bases and air space, and providing other logistical support, for the invasion and occupation.

E. Against Private Corporations Profiting from the war with complicity in the crimes described above, of invasion and occupation.

F. Against the Major Corporate Media

1. Disseminating the deliberate falsehoods spread by the governments of the US and the UK and failing to adequately investigate this misinformation. This even in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Among the corporate media houses that bear special responsibility for promoting the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, we name the New York Times, in particular their reporter Judith Miller, whose main source was on the payroll of the CIA. We also name Fox News, CNN and the BBC.

2. Failing to report the atrocities being committed against Iraqi people by the occupying forces.

III. Recommendations

Recognising the right of the Iraqi people to resist the illegal occupation of their country and to develop independent institutions, and affirming that the right to resist the occupation is the right to wage a struggle for self-determination, freedom, and independence as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, we the Jury of Conscience declare our solidarity with the people of Iraq. We recommend:

1. The immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the coalition forces from Iraq;

2. That coalition governments make war reparations and pay compensation to Iraq for the humanitarian, economic, ecological, and cultural devastation they have caused by their illegal invasion and occupation;

3. That all laws, contracts, treaties, and institutions established under occupation which the Iraqi people deem inimical to their interests, should be considered null and void;

4. That the Guantanamo Bay prison and all other offshore US military prisons be closed immediately; that the names of the prisoners be disclosed, that they receive POW status, and receive due process;

5. That there be an exhaustive investigation of those responsible for crimes of aggression and crimes against humanity in Iraq, beginning with George W. Bush, President of the United States of America; Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; and other government officials from the coalition of the willing;

6. That we initiate a process of accountability to hold those morally and personally responsible for their participation in this illegal war, such as journalists who deliberately lied, corporate media outlets that promoted racial, ethnic and religious hatred, and CEOs of multinational corporations that profited from this war;

7. That people throughout the world launch actions against US and UK corporations that directly profit from this war. Examples of such corporations include Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle, CACI Inc., Titan Corporation, Kellog, Brown and Root (subsidiary of Halliburton), DynCorp, Boeing, ExxonMobil, Texaco, British Petroleum. The following companies have sued Iraq and received “reparation awards”: Toys R Us, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Shell, Nestlé, Pepsi, Phillip Morris, Sheraton, Mobil. Such actions may take the form of direct actions such as shutting down their offices, consumer boycotts, and pressure on shareholders to divest.

8. That soldiers exercise conscience and refuse to enlist and participate in an illegal war. Also that countries provide conscientious objectors political asylum.

9. That the international campaign for dismantling all US military bases abroad be reinforced.

10. That people around the world resist and reject any effort by any of their governments to provide material, logistical, or moral support to the occupation of Iraq. We, the Jury of Conscience, hope that the specificity of these recommendations will lay the groundwork required for a world where the international institutions will be shaped and reshaped by the will of people and not fear and self-interest, where journalists and intellectuals will not remain mute, where the will of the people of the world will be central, and human security will prevail over state security and corporate profits.

SO SAY WE ALL.

N.O.M.A.S.

2005-06-28T10:10:00.000-05:00

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A Letter From Leonard Clark, currently serving and surviving in Iraq:
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I have been talking to my fellow soldiers about this whole situation and I have told them about how the leadership in Washington is trying to get the American people to silence their criticisms of the continued lunacy we call the occupation of Iraq. I tell them that they are saying to the Congress: Well, ya know our poor soldiers wanna stay and finish the fight in Iraq, but you people in Washington D.C. are undercutting their morale by bringing up this “time table stuff” and “What the hell are we doing in Iraq? Do we have a plan?” stuff.

When I tell this to my fellow soldiers they immediately begin to laugh and then they get pissed off that such bullshit is being spouted back home, because we are the ones who are calling home and telling our families what a bunch of lies and crap they are telling the American people.

There are, to be sure, some soldiers (fewer and fewer day by day) who are naively still blindly believing the lies – in fact, if they could have been around in 1968 they would have fit in real well, you know what I mean:

“What do you mean should we stay in Vietnam? We’re gonna win this thing. Were killing 50 to a 100 of those Viet Cong and they’re only killing 3 of us.

And then the next question to them would be: “Well, what about all the American soldiers who are going to die for this so-called Police Action in Vietnam?

Their response: Well, it’s for democracy and if it takes more American sodiers to die well then so be it.

I told some fellow soldiers who still blindly eat the crap being spoon-fed to them about the Vietnam scenario, and their response was: Vietnam and Iraq are not alike, it’s like comparing apples and oranges because Vietnam’s communists were well funded and supplied by the Chinese; I then asked them about the report from the CIA that was in the press, which stated the terrorists are well funded, and they just ignored what I said.

You know what, fellow activist? Five to ten years from now we are going to be debating these same people after 5,000 to 10,000 American soldiers are killed only to see another undemocratic theocratic church state probably led by another dictator of our choosing ruling Iraq. Was it worth it? And they’ll probably say: Gee, ya know what? Maybe it wasn’t worth it, we should have kicked Saddam Hussein out and then left Iraq and let the Iraqi government we set up run their own country, but instead we just stayed on and on and on, and the American soldiers continued to die on and on and on and the funerals and the mother and fatheless children continued, on and on.

Will we have another wall for Iraq like we do for Vietnam? You see, Federal three-piece suited politicians are not really different from City politicians – they’ll wait until enough people die before they put in a stoplight at the local intersection in their city. To them one life is not worth the $100,000 for a stoplight, but ah, yes, maybe 8 to 10 lives when the voters start to notice. It doesn’t matter to them if the right thing would be to put in a stoplight, and it doesn’t matter if people beg them for the safety of their children to put in the stoplight, because decency and compassion will not get them elected – only money and votes will. We all know that these hypocrites value money more than they do human life.

Well, I’m not gonna wait for another damn wall for Iraq to be filled with the names of my fellow soldiers, and I hope you’re not either. The cause we fight for is noble and just, it is to save the lives of American soldiers who are tragically dying over here needlessly. If we can save just one more American soldier’s life who knows – we might just end up saving humanity itself. There are those who say that one life is not worth much, but I say every human life is the gift of GOD, and to destroy one of those lives for the greed and corruption of hypocrites who do not have to fight wars nor whose children do not have to fight wars is a great sin. To lie and say we are dying over here to ensure democracy in the Middle East when what we really are doing is fighting for Exxon and Halitburton is impeachable.

Remember this: not one more American soldier should die over here, for it is a needless death that didn’t have to happen but only for the occupation of Iraq.

One last note: Today, after my three-vehicle patrol passed through a certain stretch of highway, an hour to 2 hours later another patrol was hit by a bomb on that same stretch and ANOTHER AMERICAN soldier was killed and at least 3 of his comrades were wounded, hopefully they will all live.

NOT ONE MORE AMERICAN SOLDIER! N.O.M.A.S. !

Please pray for us soldiers and we will pray for you and the Peace of GOD will see us through.

Sincerely,
Leonard Clark (Damned Liberal serving in Iraq)National Guard soldier serving and patrolling the mean streets of Iraq every day.

Civilian occupation: Kindergarten teacher (inner city school) Public Schools. Candidate for United States Senate in Arizona against John Kyl