[RED/GLARE]

Go to dKos!

2007-07-15T03:02:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been posting only on Daily Kos. Try http://redglare.dailykos.com

What's YOUR Terror Score?!?

2006-12-03T10:02:00.000-05:00

We all have credit ratings that follow us around like digital shadows. Now, starting this Monday, Dec. 4, every time you leave or enter the United States by air, land, or sea, your own government’s computers will officially judge the probability that you are a terrorist, make that judgement widely available, and keep your terror score on file for 40 years. By assigning you a computer-generated risk assessment based upon your travel pattern, your companions, your method of payment and even the kind of food you eat -- among other, as yet unknown tidbits of data -- the U.S. Department of Homeland security thinks it can make you safer.

“When some unknown government computer, using unknown sources of information, tags you as a ‘security risk’ and begins circulating that label around the government, you will have no meaningful way of finding out why you were given that label, let alone challenging its validity,” says Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project. ”

Feel safer?

Never heard of the Automated Tracking System? That is by design. The information was just published in the Federal Register last week. Care to comment to the government about this new system? It’s too late! The system officially goes into effect Monday, although they’ve unofficially been doing it since 2002. By the way, they’ve attempted this Big Brother tracking sh*t before...

“The government tried to institute the CAPPS II program of ‘risk assessments’ on passengers several years ago, and a huge uproar rightly followed, and the Congress was forced to intervene,” says Steinhardt. “We are stunned to learn that DHS is now implementing an even more far-reaching program with virtually no opportunity for the public to evaluate or comment on it.”

Or, remember Total Information Awareness? It’s baaaack -- and it goes into effect tomorrow!

To some privacy advocates, the ATS project seemed a resurrection of the Defense Department program known as Total Information Awareness. In that program, federal officials sought to data mine the consumer and banking records of millions of Americans to discern patterns that might point to certain individuals as possible terrorists.

This freshly uncovered travesty has barely been mentioned in the press or blogosphere. It is because this is a Pearl Harbor style sneak attack on our civil liberties by the Orwellian Bu$hCo cabal. Now, aren’t you glad we have those Democrats in charge of Congress? What are they doing about it? So far, nothing! It’s time to hit the phones, friends...

Did Russia Commit Act of War on UK?

2006-11-30T17:42:00.000-05:00

When the secret intelligence service of a foreign nation contaminates several aircraft of your national, flag-carrying airline with a radioactive particle, it could be construed as an act of war. Further, it looks like agents of Russia, acting on Vlad “The Poisoner” Putin’s behalf, put the lives of thousands of British nationals at risk, all in the effort to assassinate Alexander Litvinenko, a naturalized British citizen and ex-KGB agent. Furthermore, there are 12 locations where polonium is being detected around London. It is a lot like a low-level dirty bomb attack.
Now, we in the USA can’t say a LOT here. We can’t moralize too much, since we routinely kidnap foreign nationals abroad, transport them to secret prisons, torture them, and hold them indefinitely with no access to lawyers. But at least we don’t contaminate and dent the economics of those countries in the process. We’re in, we’re out.

But the Russians caused “collateral damage” on this one...

The British Airways planes involved made an estimated 221 flights to 10 locations from Oct. 25 to Nov. 29, carrying some 33,000 passengers.

Here, it looks like you have some numbskull KGB agent pulling a James Bond-like whack on Litvenenko. You know, the overly elaborate kind of killing that ultimately allows the victim to escape (e.g., the death laser that takes a half hour to actually reach your crotch).

What ever happened to just popping a cap in somebody’s ass?

In this case, Litvenenko had time level a deathbed “J’Accuse!” at Putin. And increasingly it looks like the polonium trail leads back to Moscow. If I were Scotland Yard, I’d be interested in testing the Russian embassy in London, since radioactive polonium there would be a smoking (glow-in-the-dark?) gun.

Now it looks as though perhaps the Ruskies poisoned Former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar in Ireland as well.

I know our dear leader Dubya looked into Pootie Poot’s soul and all and saw he was a man of Jesus, or whatever, and I think it’s true that they are birds of a feather. But Vlad the Poisoner better be much more careful about what he does. I mean, this really could be read as an act of war. What if the anthrax attacks here had been traced to a foreign country?

Remember, Mother Russia, the British have nuclear materials as well.

Rummy on Torture: "Get-R-Done!"

2006-11-26T08:25:00.000-05:00

It's no surprise that Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, approved the inhuman torture techniques employed by U.S. Intelligence operatives at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. For any American who loves this country and the human rights it has represented for more than two hundred years, our dark hours under the Bush regime have brought a litany of such disheartening shocks to the conscience – torture, spying without warrant, the end of habeas corpus, etc. What is a surprise is that Rumsfeld was willing to put pen to paper to approve methods that prima facie violate the Geneva Convention. Today, Reuters reports Rummy OK'd prisoner treatment which broke the law and ignored most basic human morality.

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain's El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

"The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: "Make sure this is accomplished"," she told Saturday's El Pais.

It's really saddening that we must turn to Germany to prosecute Rumsfeld for war crimes. Is there no forum in the United States where Rummy can be charged with breaking the laws of the land? In Gen. Karpinski, we have a witness, in the Abu Ghraib photos, we have documentary evidence of war crimes. Now, it appears there is also a smoking gun memo, complete with Rummy’s John Hancock and “Get-R-Done” notation, which should convince any jury or deliberative body (Yo Democrats!) that Bush’s SecDef should rot in the brig.

According to Karpinski, who ran Abu Ghraib...

"The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably ... Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques."

The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer "no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion" to secure information.

"Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind," the document states.

If we Americans cannot deal with our own war criminal, but must look to Germany for justice, then all is lost. What jurisdiction in the United States, what court, what laws, are most appropriate to bring war criminal Rumsfeld to justice? This is an American problem and it requires an American solution.

I'm With Feingold: U.S. Out by July 1!

2006-11-20T16:31:00.000-05:00

I’m still in mourning over Senator Russ Feingold’s decision not to run for the White House in 2008. The Unites States sorely needs a person of Feingold’s integrity and sense of principle in the Oval Office to make amends to the world and begin the cleanup of the disastrous mess left behind by the Toxic Texan, whom I expect to promptly flee to exile in Paraguay when his term ends.

Nonetheless, Senator Feingold remains a beacon of reason and hope for progressives everywhere, and I don’t think enough has been made of his simple, intelligent proposal to extract our country from the morass that is the Iraq War. The plan can be summed up in two words: let’s leave.

U.S. Senator Russ Feingold today introduced legislation requiring U.S. forces to redeploy from Iraq by July 1, 2007.

Is Feingold’s plan tantamount to “Cut ‘n’ Run?” Nope. It’s the only way to get the Iraqi government to stand on its own two feet. And we’ll continue to train Iraqi forces.

The legislation, which builds on an amendment Feingold authored earlier this year, would allow for a minimal number of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq for targeted counter-terrorism activities, training of Iraqi security forces, and the protection of U.S. infrastructure and personnel.

"Redeploying our troops will pressure the Iraqi government to get its political house in order while allowing us to re-focus on global terrorist organizations and trouble spots that threaten our national security,” Feingold said. “It simply doesn't make sense to continue devoting so much of our resources to one country while ignoring the growing threats we face around the world.”

Meantime, the United States can focus on what should have been job #1 all along: capturing or killing Usama bin Laden, the guy who attacked us on 9/11/01.

In September, Feingold also introduced a resolution addressing the need to strengthen our efforts in Afghanistan so as to prevent that country from again becoming a key staging ground for terrorists.

Presidential candidate or not, Senator Feingold’s plan deserves our attention, consideration and support. The troops deserve to be released from the impossible mission they’ve been asked to carry out, and directed to a more important one: fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And the Iraqis deserve the reduction in violence and increase in self-sufficiency and independence a US withdrawal would bring about. The only losers would be the neocon GOP war agenda and the military industrial complex...and for them we’ll shed no tears.

The bill is S.4049
Title: A bill to provide for the redeployment of United States forces from Iraq by July 1, 2007.
Sponsor: Sen Feingold, Russell D. [WI] (introduced 11/14/2006) Cosponsors (1) Sen. Barbara Boxer [Calif.]
Latest Major Action: 11/14/2006 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations.

Thanks S.R. Sidarth!

2006-11-08T16:28:00.000-05:00

You are a great American, S.R. Sidarth! I believe it may be your deed in videotaping the "macaca moment" of that vile clown, George Allen, that won the Senate for the Democratic Party in 2006. Thanks for your volunteerism, political involvement and willingness to subject yourself to the hateful abuse of a has-been racist politician. Your deeds tipped the scale, your little video had the political impact of a sledgehammer. I hope you remain active in politics and consider running for office yourself one day -- judging by your patience and tolerant demeanor you would make an excellent politician, perhaps a Virginia Senator one day. (Maybe loose the faux hawk haircut prior to campaigning!)

Your country will be better off for years to come due to your work in bringing down Allen and winning the Senate. You may have even helped to shorten a war! Sincerely, thank you!

Sidarth is a senior at the University of Virginia. Send e-mail to sr.sidarth@ gmail.com.

The Piscopo Push Call

2006-11-06T16:20:00.000-05:00

Well Kean, Jr. has finally brought out the BIG guns (i.e., a guy with arms 62-inches around)! According to Northern NJ-based web site Baristanet robocalls are now featuring lame-brained comic/bodybuilder Joe Piscopo in New Jersey...

Hi, It's Joe Piscopo. Yes, it's really me Joe Piscopo...[as if there are people who want to impersonate him...]
I'm reaching out to all my Italian-American friends to ask them to vote for a good friend of the Italian-American comunity, Tom Kean.

At the end of the call...

Paid for by the Filangieri Society for Justice and Good Government.

Additionally, the site says that mailers are being sent out accusing Menendez of "betraying" Garden State right-wing justice Sam Alito.

Here's what it said (feel free to read in your best Tony Soprano)...

New Jerseyans Are Supposed To Take Care of Their Own
Bob Menendez Betrayed Sam Alito

The mailer, from a Monmouth Beach-organization called the Filangieri Society for Justice and Good Government, states that 20% of New Jerseyans are Italian-American and that Menendez opposed every major Italian-American organization in New Jersey.

All this Italian-American rah-rah stuff from a campaign that insulted the entire Italian American community here recently by exploiting an Italian American stereotype in a TV adM, portraying a mafioso somehow connected to Menedez. What a joke.

Kean, Jr.? Fuggedaboutit.

Screwing the Troops

2006-11-02T16:14:00.000-05:00

That's what the Bush Administration is doing on a daily basis - screwing our servicemen and servicewomen by marooning them in Iraq, saddling them with an impossible mission, and under-equipping them at the same time. It's a total f*cking outrage! Below, see the email that proves it.

While evil neocons and their MSM minions make a big stink over John Kerry and his verbal slip -- cynically hoping to get the troops and the wingnuts riled at Democrats over nothing in the week before an election -- the real insult to our troops is this: parents and coworkers of soldiers must donate clothes, food and items as basic as soap and Advil so that our forces will be adequately equipped. Recently, at my workplace, the following e-mail was circulated...

As some of you may be aware, [redacted]'s son, Pvt. [redacted], has just been deployed to Kuwait and is due to leave for Iraq within the next couple of weeks. At a recent meeting, second tour soldiers in [redacted]'s unit discussed how certain items are greatly needed for our troops in Iraq. [redacted] is proud to assist in coordinating this Holiday collection drive. If you would like to donate a much needed item, please see the attached spreadsheet.

Let's put a smile on those faces that are bravely serving our country. Please bring your donations to [redacted] in Human Resources by Thursday, November 30th. The care package will be sent to our soldiers on Friday, December 1st. Thanks for your help.

Here are the contents of the spreadsheet of items needed by our troops...

Support for the Global War on Terrorism

List of Items Needed in Iraq

Ciprocol Lozenges
Flannel Pajamas (Bottoms Only-various sizes)
Car Fresheners
Hard Candy (Any kind)
Cough Drops
Flannel Sheets
Scented Candles
Food: Anything (no Pork)
Tylenol
Shower Curtains
Hand Warmers
Koolade (Powder)
Advil
T-shirts (plain)
Newspapers (artilces from the states)
Gatorade (Powder)
Hand Sanitizer
Any type of Civilian Clothes
Ice Tea (Powder)
Sun Block (Highest SPF)
Comics
Coffee (instant)
Shampoo
Phone Cards
Cookies
Hand Cream
Any kind of Snack
Eye Wash
Chap stick
Wet Wipes (anything w/100% Aloe)
Deodorant
Febreze (Any style)
100% Aloe (Anything)
Soap

It's a straight up crime that our tax money is not providing these basics to those serving our country. It's also an argument against those huge tax cuts for millionaries. Meantime, we're supposed to get hot and bothered over John Kerry insulting our troops? Yeah, right. The real insult is here, friends, in this list.

Those wishing to donate stuff may check out a web site like this.

Botched Kerry

2006-11-01T16:06:00.000-05:00

John Kerry's apology today was the right thing to do politically, since the right wing noise machine had successfully goosed the MSM into making a stupid gaffe the story of the century, just a week prior to a national election. Like it was the goddamned October Surprise or something.

But this whole thing about Kerry has got me pissed. I was protesting in the streets in the lead up to the Iraq War, before the invasion. I remember watching Colin Powell at the UN and laughing out loud at the trumped up charges. Especially those cartoon-y renderings of mobile chemical weapon labs. So were you, probably. How is it that you and I KNEW IT WAS ALL B*LLSHIT, and yet Senators like John Kerry say they were duped. Did they not have access to the Internet, to newspapers, to the TV news? As mawkishly patriotic as all of our national media was, we could see through the BS to perceive a war of naked aggression. And our Senators could NOT?

Sure Kerry now says he made a mistake in voting to Bushwhack Iraq. I believe the truth is that Kerry's mistakes were political in nature ... in that he thought Bush's war on Iraq would go well. Not poorly. It was not a matter of being duped by faulty intelligence. It was a matter of having too much faith in BushCo's capacity to run a competent invasion.

So I accept John Kerry's apology. He's being unfairly pilloried, like Howard Dean was, for nothing really. An awkward moment, a little mistake. It's not like it cost 3,000 troops their lives and sullied our national reputation, like Bush's mistake. It's not like he lost New Orleans, like Bush did.

It's not even like he shot a man in the face, like Cheney did. But you'd think Kerry's gaffe was far worse than these examples from the coverage it's getting.

I liked Kerry's fire-breathing response to the chickenhawks who have been lambasting him. Doughy Limbaugh. That's good.

Yet, I think if we're going to revive a failed presidential candidate and ask him to speak for the party, to act as a standard bearer, and possibly to run for the Oval Office again, let's make it Al Gore.

Or let's look for new blood...like Obama.

Or let's get behind a real progressive with a conscience and honest compassion...like my favorite Senator...Russ Feingold.

Kerry is a decent man who served his country. But he didn't fight back against the Swift Boaters, didn't challenge the Ohio vote. I think he is among the richest men in government. And he makes ...gaffes. Kerry is not worthy of a second chance. Let's move on.

Screw the Cardinals!

2006-10-25T15:08:00.000-04:00

One of the things I enjoy most deeply about popular American culture is baseball. Now, I hate it when politics gets injected needlessly into the national pastime, like when the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown banned Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon from speaking because they opposed the ruinous invasion of Iraq. (By the way, baseball was NOT invented in Cooperstown so screw the hall of fame too, which is pretty lame anyway if you've ever been there). Or, like when the Red Sox' idiot pitcher Curt Schilling was a shill for Bush after the Sox won it all in 2004 in the lead up to the presidential election. By the way, the Red Sox were redeemed because the team owners and GM came out for Kerry in that same election, which wouldn't have been necessary were it not for the right wing Sox pitcher.

Now, the Cardinals' millionaire starting pitcher for game four of the World Series, a fool with a fastball named Jeff Suppan, is in a new advertisement against stem cell research in Missouri.

The ad also features the football Cardinals' dumbass quarterback Kurt Warner. The ad is intended to counter the great ad by Parkinson's Disease-afflicted actor Michael J. Fox in support of Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill. So basically, the Card's ace Suppon is siding with the Repug Senator Talent, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh and the other assorted characters of death and blight whose ideology opposes curing disease.

So, I say: Screw the Cardinals! I hope that they lose big time, tonight and in the series. I hope Suppan gets shelled. My beloved Royals whipped the Cards in 1985, and it was great. Another team I root for, the Red Sox, made them look bad in 2004, and I enjoyed that a lot too.

Now it is time for the Detroit Tigers to get their asses in gear and send this right-wing baseball team home with no trophy. All in their right minds, with the exception of those near St. Louis and voting for McCaskill, should be rooting against cure-hater Suppan and the Cardinals. Through bad Karma shall they lose.

A note: the Cardinals were the vehicle by which steroids-addled cheater Mark McGwire hit 70 homers in 1998, and then had the temerity to embrace the family of Roger Maris, who'd set the record fair and square in 1961. As I said: screw the Cardinals!

Googlebombing GOP Losers

2006-10-24T16:05:00.000-04:00

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Cole Dead Just Fodder for GOP Slime Cannon

2006-10-18T11:47:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, The Washington Post's Dan Foomkin provided excellent insight into the deep cynicism of the Bush/Repug party's use of sailors who died in service to America.

The White House issued a solemn statement Thursday commemorating the sixth anniversary of the al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole.

The White House has been citing the Cole a lot lately, as part of its narrative that President Clinton, who was in charge back then, was asleep at the switch when it came to terrorism.

I went back to see what the White House statement was like on the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Cole. But there wasn't one!

And there wasn't one on the fourth, the third, the second or the first, either.

This is nothing new. In fact, military genius Bush was using the Cole dead for his own political cockamamy back in 2000, as a candidate. On Oct. 12, 2000, hours after the attack on the USS Cole, Bush was asked about the bombing. His response?

"Today, we lost sailors because of what looks like to be a terrorist attack. Terror is the enemy. Uncertainty is what the world is going to be about, and the next president must be able to address uncertainty. And that's why I want our nation to develop an antiballistic missile system that will have the capacity to bring certainty into this uncertain world."

Wow, that missile shield would have really helped a lot on 9/11! Oh, and by the way, what did the Bush junta do about those evil al Qeda-types after is was defitnitively determined that they had carried out the murderous attack upon the Cole? As this article in The Washington Post explains, they didn't do much...

But after concluding that bin Laden's group had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole - a conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice President Cheney - the new administration did not choose to order armed forces into action.

But neocon GOP cynics don't allow their own inaction to stop them from issuing a faux solemn press release commemorating the SIXTH anniversary of the attack, in hopes that the people you can fool "all of the time," as Lincoln put it, will buy into their uber-selling point that Repugs are strong and Dems are weak on terror.

That such BS passes for leadership shames our great nation.

WashTimes: Out with the Liar, In with the Adulterer!

2006-10-03T23:27:00.000-04:00

About those Republican family values: Today, the Moonie-owned archconservative Washington Times calls for the ouster of Dennis Hastert as the Speaker of the House. The paper blames Hastert for looking the other way while a child predator preyed on vulnerable underage pages in the halls of Congress. Then, the Speaker lied about it.

On Friday, Mr. Hastert dissembled, to put it charitably, before conceding that he, too, learned about the e-mail messages sometime earlier this year.

But what is amazing is with whom they want to replace Hastert the Liar...
While I applaud the Washington Times for standing against the GOP's leaders, who are hell-bent on protecting Hastert et al, despite the growing pile of evidence showing they enabled a pedophile, I can't help but laugh at this...

A special, one-day congressional session should elect a successor. We nominate Rep. Henry Hyde, also of Illinois, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee whose approaching retirement ensures that he has no dog in this fight. He has a long and principled career, and is respected on both sides of the aisle.

It is just me, or does anybody else remember that Henry Hyde is an adulterer? I find it simply breathtaking that the party of so-called family values cannot look within its own ranks to find one solitary soul capable of leadership who does not suffer the taint of corruption, pedophilia, addiction, criminal indictment or adultery.

But then again, in this sense, perhaps Hyde would make the perfect Republican leader.

Card Wanted Lieberman to Run Iraq Fiasco

2006-10-02T11:48:00.000-04:00

Joementum is such a loyal supporter of Bush's Iraq War that former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card considered him as a replacement for Donald Rumsfeld after the 2004 election, according to Bob Woodward's new book.

Now, Lieberman has zero military experience.

He has never even run a large organization, aside from a few crappy political campaigns.

My question for Connecticut voters: except for blindly unwavering loyalty to a failed Iraq/Middle East policy (U.S. deaths confirmed by DoD as of 10/2: 2708), and personal fealty to a failed U.S. president (see "The Kiss"), why would BushCo consider putting Joe Lieberman (a.k.a. to Rethugs as "Loserman") in charge of the U.S. military?

Introducing Thai-Coup Poetry!

2006-09-19T11:40:00.000-04:00

Thai-coup poetry follows a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern, is recorded in less than seventeen syllables in three lines, and usually has a middle line longer than the others, sometimes with a reference to the death of democracy.

Prime minister gone

Now freedom can be undone

Tanks rolled on Bangkok

It’s the anthrax, stupid

2006-09-14T10:02:00.000-04:00

It seems a big campaign theme on the part of the neocon/Bush/GOP cabal going into the November elections will be something along the lines of “we have not had another terrorist attack since 9/11, so our policies in Iraq and at home are working.” It was most recently uncorked by Dick Cheney himself on Meet the Press last weekend:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of securing the nation against terrorists. You know, we’re here on the fifth anniversary, and there has not been another attack on the United States. And that’s not an accident, because we’ve done a hell of a job here at home, in terms of homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking program we put in place, and because of our detainee policy, where we, in fact, were able to interrogate captured terrorists to get the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to disrupt...

This assertion, however, is hogwash. Democrats should not be afraid to call it a lie, in fact. Although Bush & Co. would love to sweep it under the rug of history, most Americans do in fact remember the series of anthrax attacks upon the Congress, the media and the postal service employees who delivered the poison letters. Mr. Cheney forgets — but we shouldn’t — that these attacks upon America occurred after 9/11.

Despite the ad nauseam lies of this radical Administration, the anthrax attacks did happen. Today, they remain unsolved. Like with Usama bin Laden, the trail has gone stone cold. And, friends, this is not a record of strength combating terrorism or protecting the American people. Indeed, it is a record of weakness and incompetence.

My 9/11

2006-09-11T09:19:00.000-04:00

I was temping as the assistant (basically a secretary) to a professor at Harvard Law School, when another secretary got a call from her sister about WTC. The only TV set was in the office of Lawrence Tribe, who, coincidentally, had been Al Gore's lawyer before the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Professor Tribe wasn't there, however.

We watched the coverage from Tribe's office -- a few assistants, students and professors. What I remember best is that Tribe had an inflatable punching-bag style novelty doll of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" right behind the TV set, where the towers were burning. It was something like this...

And although it was meant as a novelty, It was very haunting and to this day I'll always associate Munch's "The Scream" with the burning towers.

I left HLS about an hour later and went home and made my wife come home from work. We gassed up the car, and were basically ready to head out of Boston for a few days. We stayed put, however, and simply got back into the flow of life with the rest of the country.

I wonder: would 9/11 have happened if Professor Tribe had WON the case of Bush v. Gore in 2000?

What I Did On Summer Vacation

2006-07-16T12:39:00.000-04:00

As World War III broke out I was on vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Del., a beach resort with a mile-long boardwalk, putt-putt golf, and dozens of stores specializing in bad-taste tee shirts, henna tattoos, salt water taffy and $100 sunglasses. I go every year with my wife's family.

Last year was the year of bad changes down in Rehoboth Beach. For instance, they tore down the Hobo Beach Motel. This was a big deal.

My wife's grandfather, now in his mid 90s, began taking my wife's family to the Hobo Beach Motel in the early 1950s. It was a 50-room beachfront property with private decks in back, looking out onto the Atlantic. There were no in-room phones, but the breakfast buffet was decent and each room was supplied with a flyswatter.

However, due to the real estate bubble, the latest owner of the Hobo Beach Motel sold the land off in small segments that each commanded about half a million dollars. They took the wrecking ball to the old beach hotel to make way for multimillionaires and McMansions.
So last year, following the demolition, my wife's grandfather booked the family for the next-closest hotel, about 40 yards down the beach. But when we pulled up to the parking lot of the new place for our 2005 vacation, the empty lot that used to be the Hobo Beach Hotel bummed us all out.

Worse, the city had re-engineered the beach itself, dredging up tons of sand from the seafloor and spraying it upon the oceanfront beach to compensate for storm erosion. The result was a lousy beach, with sharp rocks everywhere and a vast no-man's land between the seaside hotels and the water itself. Riding waves on a boogie board, rafting, or swimming, one risked being raked over the artificially dredged shell fragments that seemed to collect where the water met the land.

But the blue crabs were as delicious as ever, the Sunrise Café's coffee was still made fresh at 6a.m., and the newest members of the family -- my one-year-old and a cousin's four-year-old -- needed indoctrination in the family ritual. Lead by our nonagenarian sponsor of the annual vacation, we planned to keep coming back to Rehoboth Beach in spite of the unwelcome changes.
For this year's trip, my wife and I rented a car here in Brooklyn, but on the way to the beach, as we merged onto I-95 in Philadelphia, the rental car stalled. A light reading "OIL PRESSURE LOW" started flashing. I made it to an off ramp and hit the hazard lights. The first guy to pass, a white dude in a pickup truck, stopped to offer help, and told me, "This is a really bad place to break down, man."

He gestured at my two-year-old in her car seat and my pregnant wife, who was on the cell phone outside the car calling for assistance from family members in another car on I-95. "I'd keep my family locked in that car, it's a bad neighborhood," he warned, then drove off.
It kind of freaked me out, so I got my wife back in the car and nervously locked us in. But as we looked around we saw that where we were stranded was your basic working class African American neighborhood. In fact, the next dozen or so cars that drove up the off ramp had black drivers, all of whom stopped to offer us help. I realized that the neighborhood was perfectly safe for us, but that the car was in a dangerous spot traffic-wise.

Our help arrived and we pushed the crappy Mercury Sable (that we rented at Speedy, by the way) to a parking lot, rented another car (a nice Toyota Camry) and had the first car towed away, where I hope it gets crushed and remade into soda cans.

Finally we arrived in Rehoboth Beach. The good news: The rocks out on the beach from 2005 have settled due to wind and the pounding waves (and mechanical grooming), and this year the beach is as sandy as it was before the dredging. We've decided that the new hotel, the Atlantic View, is better than the Hobo Beach ever was. There are phones in the rooms and a big, enclosed deck where our two-year-old could play safely.

But I was surprised to see that nobody has built anything on those half-million dollar lots where the Hobo Beach hotel used to be. Maybe they can't get flood insurance for coastal McMansions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. After all, look what happened to Trent Lott's place.

We kept CNN on in our room as much as we could stand it, watching conflict widen between Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians. Slathered in sunblock, we'd come in from the beach, where we were digging big holes near the water, to "Breaking News" about kidnappings, Katuysha rocket strikes upon Israel and Israel's overreaction. It's really obvious that Israel was looking for an excuse to fight. And the quick involvement of Iran in this thing is scary - a clear result of our stupid Iraq invasion and the subsequent expansion of Iranian influences in the whole region.

Back on the beach there was another family that set up nearby to our family several days in a row, since they were also staying at the hotel. It was a father, mother and two sons. The father and boys all had matching mullet/rattail-like hair that they'd braided in the same way. They were like a little tribe. And the first day at the beach they built this ambitious sandcastle barrier around their towels and beach chairs. They had ramparts and moats and towers and turrets, as well as an American flag planted in the highest tower. Their sand defenses eventually ringed their place on the beach, and attracted lots of attention from everyone strolling on the beach.
I was kind of jealous of their sand fortress. But I realized their effort was futile.

It made me think about how defenseless we really are from danger and change -- like the Hobo Beach Motel, their castle would be knocked down in due time. The new Rehoboth beach will erode again. And wars will destroy everything eventually. So what's the point of locking doors in fear?

Independence Day

2006-07-04T13:36:00.000-04:00

Whew! I’m relieved to have this blog, as most of my posts over at DailyKos were recently wiped out. Whether it was on purpose due to a change in policy at dKos, or a mistake, I do not know. But this is now the one place to get all of my blog posts. I delcare my independence!

I will start putting more exclusive stuff here, too, so as not to make this a clone of my dKos page. I think I should establish a “best of …” list of my favorite blog entries, so newcomers don’t have to read through the whole blog history to find highlights.

Anyway, thanks for coming here! Happy Fourth of July! Let’s keep America clean!

Anthropomorphic America

2006-06-16T11:35:00.000-04:00

I've been pondering the power of that term "heartland." Since I was raised in Kansas -- a.k.a "The Heart of America" -- I like to agree that the national spirit resides in the middle of the map. But I detest the way the GOP and Fox News use this term "heartland" to infer that the conservative and backwards values of many of that State's residents somehow reflect the true national soul. Kansas has long been home to radicals and rebels too (think John Brown). And, besides, I believe if we are truly to discern the inner life of America, we need to look beyond simply the Heart of America. For a national self-inventory, we need a more complete approach to our national anatomy.

So let's consider the map of the REST of United States as if it were a human body.

Did you know our country is a dude? Clearly, this is not difficult to imagine, since we have a natural point of anatomical reference in the peninsula of Florida - it acts and looks like the national d*ck. And both the humid climate and libidinous culture there verify this phallic assignation. Why, within this concept, the Florida Keys could even be droplets of pee. Take that Cuba!

Moving up along the Eastern Coast, past the pubes of Georgia and the treasure trail of the Carolinas, we arrive at Washington, D.C., the belly button of America. Yes, the capitol is the national omphalos that we ponder and worry about. It's also the place where lint and other schmutz collects in the form of politicians. It needs to be cleaned out periodically or it becomes infected. Hopefully we will clean out our national navel in 2006, with that giant Q-Tip known as the election.

Pennsylvania - you're the nation's brawny chest -- the proud home of the Declaration of Independence. Philly and Pittsburg are the nipples.

Further on up the American torso, we arrive at New York. Did you know that the "Big Apple" is also the nation's Adam's Apple, throat and mouth? It is from here that our national voice is projected -- where the nation's media outlets are headquartered and where, with all that talking, our business deals are struck. Naturally, all New Yorkers are Big Mouths.

On 9/11, our two front teeth were knocked out.

Farther north, we have Boston and New England. With the concentration of colleges here, including most of the Ivy League, it's simple to see that this region is the nation's brain. This is also the site of the Pilgrims and first American colonies, and therefore the origin of our national consciousness, or ego. Notice how the brains behind the American experiment always vote Democratic?

Let's go west now. Since Chicago bills itself as "The City of Big Shoulders" it's not a stretch to call this city, along with the surrounding rust belt of Midwestern states like Ohio and Michigan, the broad back of the nation. Once the proud home to American manufacturing, our shoulders slump now, a bit defeated.

More westerly still, we have the Dakotas and Montana - our national lungs where windy wide-open plains and open spaces allow us to breathe deeply and relax.

As was stated, Kansas is the Heart of America.

Then we hit the Rocky Mountain region - the spine of the United States, where rugged individualism rules the culture. High peaks, like so many vertebrae, line up vertically, north to south. Without this mountain chain, the nation would have appalling posture! We'd look like some hunched-over country prone to invasion and takeover, like Somalia, but way, way bigger.

Out West -Look! America has a huge fat ass, of course - and it's called California. It's warm and cushy and full of mudslides. San Francisco can be the tailbone.

That makes Los Angeles the national anus. It is from L.A. after all that American culture is digested and expelled out in the form of crappy television and movies and music. It is our national assh*le that produced Gigli, Ace Venutra II: When Nature Calls and Judge Dredd. Need I say more?

In fact, assholes are everywhere in L.A., looking to make it big in the motion picture industry, so that they can produce yet more crap.

Let's continue our tour of the nation's nether regions -- Arizona and New Mexico being the national taint. Of course, with the presence here of the vagina-like Grand Canyon, there is an argument to be made that the United States is some sort of freaky hermaphrodite. Eeewww!

That makes Texas and Louisiana the American balls. I feel this is so because it is from Texas, the left ball, that we derive that disastrous machismo, like so much testosterone, that has led us into wars and overconfidence. This is where Bush comes from, after all. But also LBJ, who started Vietnam.

Louisiana, and New Orleans specifically, is the other family jewel. It is the libidinous, humid source of our national sex drive - and the red-light source of jazz music and good times rolling. It is our better ball.

Let's face it: by this important anatomical analysis, Hurricane Katrina was a kick to the national nuts.

Lastly, let me assert that Canada is America's hat and Mexico is some kind of prosthetic leg - I haven't quite figured it out. South America is a clubbed foot of enormous proportion. We should see a doctor about it.

So, fellow progressive Americans, whether you live in the American headland, heartland, spineland, mouthland or taintland, let's not let the Republicans monopolize the rhetorical possibilities of Anthropomorphic America.

He/she/it is ours to claim and promote as well!

The Incredible Shrinking Freedom Tower

2006-06-15T09:33:00.000-04:00

Democrats should be on this like white on rice ...

The head of the Port Authority hinted yesterday that the planned 1,776-foot Freedom Tower will be scaled back if enough government tenants don't commit to moving in.

[...]
"If those resources are not sufficient to build it, then obviously our commitment to build it has to be modified," Coscia said.

He added, "The only thing the Port Authority has not committed to doing is spending whatever it takes to build the Freedom Tower."

In response to the attacks of 9/11/01 the Republican leadership has launched two wars and stripped away Americans' civil liberties such as due process, probable cause, habeas corpus, whistleblower protection, freedom to assemble, freedom of the press and freedom of speech.

But there's still just a gaping hole in the ground at the World Trade Center site, almost five years after the attack that brought down those massive towers.

Plans for a 1,776-foot-tall "Freedom Tower" have been drawn up and redrawn many times. The reasons for the redesigns first centered on architectural and political rivalries.

When a butt ugly compromise of a tower was finally unveiled, the NYPD took one look at the plans, which involved situating the tower mere yards from the heavily trafficked West St., and declared the tower would be a perilous security risk.

That's right, the Republican powers that be in New York (Pataki/Bloomberg) came up with a dainty, unprotected building with glass facades and hoped to build it within 10 feet of a busy road - a truck bomber's dream. This, for a structure that will surely top the al Qaeda's target list if it is ever built.

A tougher tower was designed. It was even slightly less heinous looking. On Monday, at last blasting began at Ground Zero as workers prepared the foundation of that tower.

But on Tuesday came word from Coscia that nobody, not even the United States government, wanted to lease space there. Therefore, the project could be scaled back into something smaller, something less symbolic, something less than was promised ....

It seems almost as if the Freedom Tower is shrinking at the same rate as our Freedom as Americans.

I really hope Democrats can summon the gumption to hold press conferences in front of the hole in the ground that Ground Zero will of course still be later this year and in 2008. What a symbol of the GOP's failure!

Same goes for unprotected chemical plants, unsafe ports and nuclear facilities and wide open borders to the north and south. Let's have photo-ops at those places. The GOP is weak on security and strong on starting needless wars waged on falsehood. Let's make it clear.

As a resident of New York, where the GOP/Feds refuse to spend the equivalent of one day's cost of the Iraq War for our annual security budget, I think it's time for real security. In the subway, you cannot understand the PA announcements. On the streets, you cannot find a cop.

And at Ground Zero, you cannot find a Freedom Tower.

Marine Pens "Funny" Song About Killing Iraqi Family

2006-06-15T05:31:00.000-04:00

We're creating monsters in Iraq. Or, perhaps we raised them here and sent them there. According to Stars and Stripes ...

A Marine Corps corporal seen in a video singing about killing members of an Iraqi family says the song was only a joke and not tied in any way to allegations that Marines killed as many as two dozen unarmed civilians in Haditha last year.

This Marine's song is called "Hadji Girl." First off, my brother served in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division, so I'm aware that the term "Hadji," used by U.S. military personnel in-theater to describe any Muslim, is totally racist. It's the equivalent of the term "gook" used in Vietnam.

The song tells the story of a Marine who falls in love with an Iraqi girl and is taken to meet her family. The girl's family shoots her and then attacks the Marine, who uses her younger sister as a shield and watches blood spray from her head.

He then sings about blowing the father and brother "to eternity."

After Haditha and Abu Ghraib and that recent re-education on morals and values given to our troops in Iraq, one would hope that our soldiers could refrain from taking such celebratory pleasure in killing and humiliating Iraqis.

But not only did this Marine think that the killing of an Iraqi family was a great topic for commemoration in song, his Marine buddies loved the tune and "pushed him on stage with his guitar. Someone taped the performance and posted it on the Internet."

Great! So rather than shaming this Marine or telling him to get counseling, the songwriter is celebrated and encouraged by his fellow Marines. Can you imagine a high school senior performing such a song in a music class or a talent show? He would be suspended or expelled and the police would be called in fear of a Columbine-style attack! But in the U.S. military, such song craft is hailed and promoted. That's the way to win Iraqi hearts and minds, guys!

The one cosolation may be that the Marine seems contrite, now that he is under investigation, or under the glare of the media, or outed as someone who celebrates the death of "Hadjis."

"I will never perform this song again, and I will remove all video and text in relation to this that I have control of," said Belile, 23, who is assigned to the Marine Light/Attack Helicopter Squadron 167 based at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point.

He's only 23, so maybe this was a byproduct of immaturity under stress and exposed to questionable American military values.

Let's hope we never have to hear this song. Let's hope there men and women of goodwill left in our military after this Iraq War ends in, what ... ten years, fifteen years? And let's hope Iraqis can forgive us someday, for our invasion and "Shock and Awe," for allowing the looting, for our torturing, for our indiscriminate killing, for the white phosphorous, for Haditha and for this Marine's song and the mindset in our military that found it enjoyable.

Notes on Protective Headgear

2006-06-13T20:41:00.000-04:00

Pennsylvania's stupid law that does not require motorcycle riders to wear helmets very likely today cost the Super Bowl-champion Pittsburg Steelers their star quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, who was riding his hog without head protection and was involved in a wreck. What a dumb way to loose your career, if not your life. In fact, Ben Roethlisberger had been warned about the dangers ...

Asked why he doesn't wear a helmet -- something he wouldn't think about doing on a football field -- Roethlisberger pointed out Pennsylvania's 35-year-old state law requiring helmets to be worn was amended two years ago.

"Obviously Pennsylvania doesn't think people need to (wear a helmet)," he said. "There's a law you've got to wear it in football."

I've always been on the fence about motorcycles. On the one hand, they're obnoxiously loud and the people who ride them often have a Cowboy Complex whereby they don't feel good unless they are ripping by you at 100+ m.p.h. or revving their hog in the middle of the night outside your house.

On the other hand, motorcycles get pretty great mileage, so they're much less evil than, say, cars or SUVs despite their annoying quality.

But common sense dictates you should wear a helmet at a minimum when out riding, just as you should wear your seatbelt in a car. Now, I realize bikers are busy lobbying state legislatures to revoke helmet laws in the name of personal freedom. After all, who wants Big Government (unless you live in New Orleans)? But often laws are on the books for good reason: You should wear your helmet on motorcycle; you should not drink and drive; you should not possess fully automatic weaponry; you should not possess heroin; you should have to support your kids financially.

Maybe, now, Pennsylvania will reevaluate the price of so-called personal freedom. Or at least maybe the Steelers will reevaluate how they structure their contracts...

Many NFL contracts prohibit engaging in dangerous activities, but Roethlisberger's deal apparently doesn't specifically ban motorcycle riding.

[Steelers coach] Cowher didn't criticize Roethlisberger's riding, but is visibly uneasy with it.

"I certainly don't condone that," Cowher said. "It (playing pro football) is a very small time in your life and you've got to be very careful -- you can see it documented with Kellen Winslow in Cleveland. There are choices and consequences ... not just in riding motorcycles, but where you go and who you associate with. You have control over them but once you make your decision, they control you."

What I Learned from Tank Man and the Heroes of Tiananmen

2006-06-04T08:11:00.000-04:00

It was 17 years ago today, June 4, that armed forces of the People's Republic of China rolled into Tiananmen Square and opened fire upon thousands of student protestors, who had audaciously constructed a paper-mache replica of the Statue of Liberty in the center of square.

It was the formative political moment of my life - I was 19 years old, living in Massachusetts, taking summer classes. I remember the pride I felt as an American when the committed young college students - most of whom were my age then - put up Lady Liberty as their symbol of democratic unity, and to honor our Ideals (the ones enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution).

I remember more vividly the horror I felt seeing those tanks roll into the nighttime square on video, the crackle of gunfire everywhere, the shaky images of student running while holding lifeless bodies, the grotesquerie of dead kids on the ground, reminiscent of a large scale Kent State (which I had learned about as a kid from my mother, who was once a hippie anti-Vietnam protestor).

Most clearly from that June 4 summer I remember, with his shopping bags full of courage, facing down a menacing column of Chinese tanks. Refusing Death's intimidation, unaware his resolve was to be broadcast around the world - a symbol of Democracy as inextinguishable as the Statue of Liberty's torch.

According to Wikipedia the attack by the Government upon these students and intellectuals left "between 400 and 800 civilians dead, and between 7,000 and 10,000 injured. An initial report from local hospitals put the number at around 2,000 dead."

I remember the shock I felt watching a government oppress its own citizenry like that, and the gratitude I felt to be and American where, even though George H.W. Bush was president, our leadership would never intimidate or attack its own people to preserve its own power.

Then, after early condemnations of the attack from the Bush I administration, I recall that Brent Scowcroft was sent to secretly deal with Deng and open diplomatic channels for the normalization of trade relations between the U.S. and China. I remember hearing the argument that we could affect democracy in China through trade and business contact.

But I was shocked we would want to do business with dictators whose actions went against their peoples' best interest. If we the United States, the planet's richest and freest country, could not afford to boycott killers and repressors of Democracy, what country in the world could?

Next, as the Chinese Democracy Movement, or "June 4 Movement," was squelched, with its leaders and participants either executed, put into prisons or deported, and their supporters purged from government and the media, I remember Bill Clinton campaigning against Bush I and his business-as-usual policy towards the Chinese Communist Leadership.

I supported Bill Clinton as a volunteer, worked at Madison Square Garden during the 1992 Democratic National Convention, and then voted for the man. I even attended his Inauguration and stood with the crowds in the freezing cold.

It must have been just weeks after taking office that Clinton reversed himself, in a total betrayal of his campaign rhetoric, and announced he supported Most Favored Nation (MFN) status for the People's Republic of China. Right then and there, I knew Clinton had sold me out, since China was my most important issue.

Clinton offered the same reasoning: our business ties to China would enable more Democracy in China. We'd influence them to be more like us.

But those dead Chinese kids in the Square were my age!

Next, I remember a decade of U.S. manufacturing jobs going to China. Jobs that here offered high salary, vacations, health care, a pension, went to China and became subsistence wage jobs carried out in sweatshops and conditions that would make the most callus Gilded Age Robber Barron blush.

U.S. companies lead by the Gap and Nike and today by Wal-Mart were only too happy to exploit the advantages of Chinese Police State. (I would only learn later that Hillary Clinton had been on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors for an extended time during that evil company's most spectacular growth period).

Meantime, our manufacturing base was depleted while our political fortunes -- and our Democratic heritage -- went into steep decline as the tech-obsessed, sex-scandal ridden Clinton Years ended and, in 2001 We the People were saddled with George W. Bush.

Next came September 11, 2001.

Under Bush, we've abandoned whole sections of the U.S. Constitution, like those regarding checks and balances, due process and the rule of law, and ignored the Rights given to the People under the First and Fourth Amendments. We've invaded countries without an honest cause; established a worldwide archipelago of secret prisons; tortured and kidnapped so-called "Enemy Combatants;" declared U.S. citizens "Enemy Combatants;" wiretapped the American citizenry; and have accepted the niceties of the "Free Speech Zone" and an elitist government that conducts the People's business in secret. Oh yeah, and we quietly accepted fixed elections in 2000 and 2004.

In China, our Internet corporations actively work with the authorities to censor and suppress dissident thought. They will do the same here, I bet. In China, they have a press that is indistinguishable from state propaganda. Here, in the United States, the mainstream press reads more and more like it was scrubbed by Karl Rove.

It seems to me that through trade and through acceptance of our political differences, we've become more like China that China has become like the U.S.

We're more like the repressive police state that killed it's own people on June 4, 1989, than China is like the democracy we were on that same date. It's not hard at all to imagine this Government or its successor killing American democracy protestors in some great city square.

Who knows what Bush and Bloomberg and the NYPD would have done if thousands of protestors at the 2004 GOP convention had defied them and gathered upon Central Park's Great Lawn?

What's worse: we have a lack of Tank Men in the United States.

There was Cindy Sheehan down in Crawford. There's Russ Feingold in the Senate (the only one to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001). There was that "Go F**k yourself, Mr. Cheney!" guy on the Gulf Coast. There was Steven Colbert at the White House Correspondent's dinner.

But we need more. We need many, many more Tank Men. How dow we find them? From where do they come? New Orleans? Iraq's killing fields? From among the 9/11 families? I don't know.

Let's all mourn for those killed and maimed this day Seventeen Years ago. Let's mourn for the dead and fight for the living in China, in the United States, and everywhere. Friends, we have common cause.

And let's pray for more Tank Men.

They Know Where You Surfed the 'Net Last Summer!

2006-06-02T11:06:00.000-04:00

This N.Y. Times story blew me away this morning, and I've seen no mention online, so here goes...

The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on the Web-surfing activities of their customers to aid law enforcement, and may propose legislation to force them to do so.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a meeting in Washington last Friday where they offered a general proposal on record-keeping to a group of senior executives ... from America Online, Microsoft, Google, Verizon and Comcast.

Apparently, Gonzales kicked off this confab by showing a bunch of child porn to the assembled Internet execs! Only in Bush's America!

Yes, indeed, to set the mood, the man behind the torture memo wanted to show these corporate reps that if they were anti-spying, they were pro-child-porn. What better way to make this captive audience squirm than by a display of illegal child porn? ("A Clockwork Orange" comes to mind, doesn't it?):

An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller's reply was, "We want this for terrorism."

Hmmm...a shifting rationale for spying on Americans, whom the Justice Dept. seemingly thinks of as a collection of pedophile terrorists. Maybe that's why they don't count our votes in national elections, at least not the ones cast for Democrats.

Anyway, what records do Gonzales and Mueller want to keep on Americans?

While initial proposals were vague, executives from companies that attended the meeting said they gathered that the department was interested in records that would allow them to identify which individuals visited certain Web sites and possibly conducted searches using certain terms.

It also wants the Internet companies to retain records about whom their users exchange e-mail with, but not the contents of e-mail messages, the executives said. The executives spoke on the condition that they not be identified because they did not want to offend the Justice Department.

Get that? They want a record of your surfing history (don't bother clearing it on your browser), terms you've searched on search engines and your e-mails. I wonder if Microsoft has a way of recording what you write in MS Word docs, or on Excel spreadsheets, because I'm sure that stuff must not fall under the Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted searches.

One civil libertarian attended the meeting, incredible as it may sound. His take on this sh*t?

They also talked of their value in investigating other crimes like intellectual property theft and fraud, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who attended the session.

"It was clear that they would go beyond kiddie porn and terrorism and use it for general law enforcement," Mr. Rotenberg said.

[...]

"This is a sharp departure from current practice," he said. "Data retention is an open-ended obligation to retain all information on all customers for all purposes, and from a traditional Fourth Amendment perspective, that really turns things upside down."

Friends, Rotenberg's group EPIC has a web page full of good tools for maintaining your electronic privacy. If you haven't considered the need for surfing with a cloak or some privacy protection (ditto for e-mails) this diary should be your wake up call.

Here's the EPIC page of privacy tools.

To bad we need to worry about this stuff. The U.S. Constitution is dead! Long live the Constitution!

POLL: Bush is the worst president ever! Mission Accomplished!

2006-06-01T15:03:00.000-04:00

Spying, lying Bush kicked Nixon's lying, bigoted ass in this ranking. Bravo, King George!

Strong Democratic sentiment pushes President George W. Bush to the top of the list when American voters pick the worst U.S. President in the last 61 years. Bush is named by 34 percent of voters, followed by Richard Nixon at 17 percent and Bill Clinton at 16 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. Leading the list for best President since 1945 is Ronald Reagan with 28 percent, and Clinton with 25 percent.

President Bush is ranked worst by 56 percent of Democrats, 35 percent of independent voters and 7 percent of Republicans, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. Best ranking for Reagan comes from 56 percent of Republicans, 7 percent of Democrats and 25 percent of independent voters. Among American voters 18 - 29 years old, Clinton leads the "best" list with 40 percent.

Okay, it's settled. Here is the poll.

It's sort of interesting that Reagan tops Kennedy and, gosh, I suppose Truman too. (Truman should have never dopped the Big One on the Japanese without at least showing them an A-bomb test).

But "worst prez ever" Bush is the logical extention of "best prez" Ronnie's trickle down Reganomics and cultural values. I guess the big dif between them is that Reagan was "The Great Communicator" while Bush is A BIG LIAR. Personally, I'd give my props to FDR, but he's beyong the 61 year limit.

And, by the way, look at how pathetic Dubya's support is:

The main reasons cited by American voters who approve of Bush are that he is a strong leader who does what he thinks is right - 18 percent; and that he is doing a good job handling terrorism - 15 percent.

All in all, I'd say we don't have to wait for history to judge the Bush Admin. (although historians will surely tear him to smithereens) -- the American people have already spoken! And, for my part, I agree.

15

2006-05-26T10:50:00.000-04:00

Here is the honor roll of Senators who voted against confirmation of Gen. Hayden to run the CIA. If your Senator ain't on this list, s/he voted for this man who spys on all of us, or abstained (hello, Boxer!).

Bayh (D-IN)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Clinton (D-NY)
Dayton (D-MN)
Dodd (D-CT)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Harkin (D-IA)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Obama (D-IL)
Specter (R-PA)
Wyden (D-OR)

Ahoy! The Coast Guard has been Bushified!

2006-05-20T10:33:00.000-04:00

The latest example of corrupt, inept Bush-style security (a.k.a., putting corporate profit over Americans’ safety): the U.S. Coast Guard has been giving ships bound for the United States advance notice of up to a day before mounting supposedly “surprise” inspections… “Hide your nukes, drugs and al Qeada operatives, matey, we’re raiding you tomorrow!”

Under intense pressure from shipping companies concerned about costly delays, the Coast Guard is tipping off some large commercial ships about security searches that had been a surprise, according to high-ranking Coast Guard officials.

The searches began after the Sept. 11 attacks as part of a major revamping of the Coast Guard and its new antiterrorism mission. But shipping companies say the surprise boardings at sea cause unnecessary delays, costing up to $40,000 an hour.

It would be interesting to follow the lobbying, campaign contribution cash flow on this one. I cut my right hand and recently had surgery on it, so this will be a short diary. But Dems’ plan for ”Real Security” should encompass a Coast Guard that works to protect the lives of American citizens, not just the bottom line of international shipping conglomerates whose cargo represents one of the major tactical threats to our country.

The HUMMER is Dead: Sunset on the SUV! Yay!

2006-05-12T18:34:00.000-04:00

Someone at GM must have read my last entry. They’ve just announced a discontinuation of the most reprehensible, selfish, ugly and symbolic vehicle ever produced: the evil, massive HUMMER H-1.

General Motors Corp. announced plans Friday for the H1, which is the foundation for the automaker’s Hummer brand. Based on the military’s Humvee, the about 12,000 put on the road since 1992 defined the Hummer name.

To anyone who ever bought this gas sucking behemoth, I declare that your bad taste rivals your stupidity. Now, you can only get a used one – if you enjoy the thought of copping 10 m.p.h. on your way from Exxon station to Exxon station.

To anyone who has never heard of the “Sunset Effect” theory, it goes like this: things on our culture grow more and more garish, coming to the point of ridiculous overkill, and then utterly disappear. Think how Afro haircuts, or those trucker wallets with big chains, or sideburns, or bell bottoms, all grew larger and larger and then, poof, you never saw ‘em again.

Thus, the death of the HUMMER H-1 surely heralds the beginning of the end of the SUV. Friends, this is good news indeed. For our selves, our planet, our kids and our country. Yay!

The S.U.V. Song

2006-05-02T19:23:00.000-04:00

I've been around this great big world
And there's one thing I can see
U.R.N.F.N.A.-HOLE
If you drive an S.U.V.!
I don't care if you've got one kid
Or you've got thirty-three
Yes, U.R.N.F.N.A.-HOLE
If you drive an S.U.V.!

Some say, "don't criticize
`Till through others' eyes you see"
With people everywhere driving in tanks
Baby, I don't agree!
Always in front and so high up
Kareem Abdul-Jabar can't see
It's just another sad sucker
Who drives an S.U.V.!

Does love of gasoline and spewing smog
Make you better than me?
Oh, you're just N.F.N.A-Hole
Dying for his S.U.V.!
You must hate Mother Earth and your kids too
To harm them with such glee
Yes, you`re rolling in the devil's ride
When you drive your S.U.V.!

A tattered Old Glory doesn't belong
On top of your bright red Humvee
Just send yer cash straight to Usama
So he can lay waste to our city
Really we're only killing ourselves
Our planet and fine coun-t-ry
Yes, U.R.N.F.N.A-Hole
If you drive an S.U.V.!

Neil Young's LIVING WITH WAR

2006-04-29T11:01:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Neil Young released a devastatingly beautiful piece of musical and political pop art - a gospel/folk/metal cry from America's musical heartland called LIVING WITH WAR - that streams free now at a server near you. I'm ashamed to say that it was not my own GenX nor the younger kids to make the penultimate antiwar, anti-Bush rock opus. I would've thought Radiohead or The Strokes could have done it. But, bands like these abandoned this low hanging fruit to an old-timer like Neil Young, a proven maestro of enduring protest song-craft (e.g., CSN&Y's "Ohio") to put out this soulful and indignantly righteous kick to Bush's lyin' solar plexus. Heck, maybe it took a Canadian to do it right!

The album's opener, "After The Garden Is Gone," centers upon death, like all great lyric poetry. Here, the topic is the death of our environment.

Won't need no shadow man running the government
Won't need no stinking war!
Won't need no haircut
Won't need no shoe-shine
After the Garden Is Gone
After the Garden Is Gone
What Will people Do?
After The Garden Is Gone
What Will People Say
After The Garden Is Gone?

In case it's not self-evident, Young means our Planet Earth by the Garden that will be gone, and this could easily serve as the first Peak Oil Anthem or maybe the musical companion piece to Gore's new flick, "An Inconvenient Truth." Anyway, people can read all about the death of our planet in Jared Diamond's Collapse, or Time magazine.

Musically, Young is rocking out in high style, with shimmering guitar leads running through gorgeous, crashing chords backed by loosely rocking bass and drums. The musical kicker to this album is the 100-voice gospel choir - something that could have come across gimmicky, but doesn't - which makes all this Ragged Glory noise so transcendent. But on this first track, the 100 voices are more muted, simply doubling Neil's melody like Gregorian chanters.

Next, the title track, "Living With War," opens with trumpets echoing the distorto-Spanish guitar lead, to haunting effect. The choir becomes more present now, sining this heartrending lullaby along with Young, which adds a full, rich dimension to the recording's traditional power trio sound.

"Living With War" is a lingering beauty of a tune, full of shame and a glint of hope, or resolve at least. If you've ever read Chris Hedges' "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", this could be it's musical equivalent.

"Restless Consumer" and "Shock and Awe" are pissed off rockers - the first about excessive consumption of lies and products and the latter about being duped by politicians into a no-good war and looking back with cynicism. The best line in the song is ...

History was the cruel judge of overconfidence

"Flags of Freedom" is pure Bob Dylan, whom Young name checks in the lyrics. A song of sons sent to war in the name of false ideals. There's even a harmonica solo!

Of course, the album's piece de resistance is the incomparable "Let's Impeach The President," which has the stadium sing-along-ability of Queen's "We Will Rock You," but propped up mightily by a 100-voice choir that may as well be the millions of voices of the majority of Americans who want Bush out. It should be the temporary National Anthem, and Young should release a Spanish language version.

By now, the lyrics are becoming well known:

Let's impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

The outro of "Let's Impeach the President" brilliantly employs an audio montage of Bush's contradictory bravado and nonchalance about catching Usama bin Laden; Bush's prewar lies about WMD in Iraq, and subsequent lying about ever telling lies in the first place. All the while, Mr. Young and his mighty gospel choir chant "Flip" then "Flop" to punctuate Bush's self-contradicting bullsh*t.

"Looking for a Leader" is about the nation's forthcoming search for a decent man to occupy the oval office, a man "with the great spirit on his side." Young name even checks Barak Obama and Colin Powell, whom Young thinks may still become a leader "to right what he's done wrong." (Personally, I think Colin Powell should never be any position of power again, but here Young betrays his Republican sympathies a little. It's hard to mind it in the midst of such a grandiose, accurate denunciation of the Bush regime. A musical "J'accuse!" that covers the waterfront of Bush's high crimes).

That this album ends with an a cappella version of "America the Beautiful," faithfully sung by Neil Young's 100-voice choir, sort of speaks for itself. Perhaps Young was trying to inoculate himself from those FOX NEWS "Canadian Rocker Attacks America" headlines. But the album is so downright patriotic anyway, with a romantic's love for America underlying nearly every track, that America the Beautiful probably was an unnecessary addition to this record. But it is indeed beautiful.

Talking Heads are On The Take!

2006-04-28T12:31:00.000-04:00

Alas, it really comes as no huge surprise that corporations are bribing TV pundits to promote pro business opinions. After all, in Bush’s America we’ve seen our own government bribing columnists such as Armstrong Williams, and even planting the likes of Jeff Gannon / James Guckhert in the White House Press Corps to lob canned softballs at Scotty McClellan. Oh yeah, and there are those video news releases produced by the government that star fake journalists. Now, the daily FOXNews/White House “Snow Job” has further rubbed the line between news and shilling. Is anyone shocked that corporations are now paying pundits to toe their party line on all the talk shows? Today’s Gray Lady has the sordid details:

A public relations firm has apologized to General Motors after acknowledging that it may have offered money to former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich in exchange for public comments supporting the automaker's employee buyout program.

Luckily, there are still a few public officials with integrity around. Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor is among them, and he’s blown the whistle on Punditry Payola.

Mr. Reich, who was labor secretary under President Bill Clinton and is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, had complained publicly about the incident, which he said occurred three weeks ago. He described the offer of payment as a new instance of how "corporate America is paying pundits to shill for them."

Neither Mr. Strauss nor Mr. Reich would respond to questions about how much money might have been offered. A spokesman for General Motors said the company had a strict policy barring payment to outside commentators to promote its interests.

So who among the small coterie of usual suspects on the Sunday and cable opinion shows is on the take? I recently wrote a diary about Andrea Mitchell misinforming America about energy policy on the Chris Matthew Show, which is sponsored by ConocoPhillips. I mean, where does the line between sponsorship, paid travel, speaking fees and downright bribery get drawn? Well, in this case it seems pretty clear that THIS …

In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Strauss said, "I may have mentioned the possibility of an honorarium" to Mr. Reich "out of deference and respect to him and his position."

…constitutes bribery.

On his personal blog on April 7 and in a subsequent article for The American Prospect magazine, Mr. Reich said, "A public relations firm working for General Motors phoned to ask if I'd say on the media that the buyback G.M. was offering its employees was a good deal for them."

"G.M.'s public relations firm said they'd offer me money if I did this, as a show of respect," he wrote. "I told them I'd look at the deal and make up my own mind, and I told them to keep the money."

He described the offer of payment as "an integrity buyout" and said that "if we've got to the point in this country when big corporations feel free to offer what are essentially bribes to columnists and commentators, we're really in trouble."

Amen, Mr. Reich. I fear that we’re really in trouble.

King George 43 will be MOST DANGEROUS in his last 1,000 days!

2006-04-26T15:38:00.000-04:00

Watergate veteran John Dean has penned a frightening essay explaining why the ever-more-loathed Smirker-in-Chief will be in ideological/reality-denying overdrive during his last 1,000 days in power, and should be counted on to take big, stupid risks that will damage the American prospect. That means bad things for you, me and our kids...

If there is no "October Surprise," I would be shocked. And if it is not a high-risk undertaking, it would be a first. Without such a gambit, and the public always falls for them, Bush is going to lose control of Congress. Should that happen, his presidency will have effectively ended, and he will spend the last two years of it defending all the mistakes he has made during the first six, and covering up the errors of his ways.

But that is a best case scenario! According to Dean, the only true "October Surprise" in the run up to the 2006 elections would be no October Surprise.

Possibilities include a Cheney resignation (to be replaced by Condi, Rudi or McCain - whoever the necons crown as their next king or queen), a unilateral attack upon Iran ... or ... catching Usama. (That John Dean thinks this last feat can be done on schedule for political effect speaks a million volumes - maybe we have UBL already! - yet I seem to remember this same speculation before Nov. 2004).

Anyhow, the whole point is that we are being screwed royally and should expect more, much more! Personally, I'm scared, very scared. After all, JFK only had about 1,000 days -- all told -- and he took us through the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, he was a good guy ...

"Hi, I'm Evil!"

2006-04-25T22:35:00.000-04:00

Charles Dickens himself might have named one of his characters "Tony Snow" - as the "front" for a deceptive, secretive and dishonest endeavor, such as being press secretary for the Bush Administration. After all, the man who created characters with comically apropos names such as Mrs. Leo Hunter, Mr. Nupkins, Dodson and Fog, Gradgrind, M'Choakumchild, Bounderby would have appreciated a spokesman whose very name evokes cold white haze. Indeed, Merriam-Webster offers only this for "snow job:"

Main Entry: snow job

Function: noun

: an intensive effort at persuasion or deception

But, then again, Republicans have always promoted leaderhip with appropriate-enough names. I still miss having their House leader actually be called "Dick Armey." I mean, to paraphrase the late, great Joseph Brodsky, so rarely does evil cross your threshold and announce, "Hi, I'm evil!"

Where did Newt Gingrich spring from to kick people off welfare but the pages of Dr. Suess? Where did that exterminator cum legislative hitman named DeLay crawl from but the purple prose of a bad western dime novel? My Microsoft Word spell check suggests "scalier" when I type the name Scalia! Do we really have a vice president and president named Dick and Bush?

I tell you: the dark overlords of Republican politics and power have a downright Dickensian sense of humor. Tony Snow fits right in!

So, Tony, Snowman!, dude, settle in to your new office, make sure to get all those IRS forms signed and turned back into the personnel office, and make sure that the briefing room microphone is set at the correct height and adjusted perfectly to the level of your speaking voice, because we want the press corps, the American people and the whole world to be able to hear you well when you introduce yourself.

Let's Talk About Rural Bllsht!

2006-04-24T22:30:00.000-04:00

Such as ...

We are born of an agrarian society filled with little farmers, and despite the industrial revolution, those Norman Rockwell images of the heartland in large part resonate as our national persona even among those who have never been through Kansas' never-ending flats of corn or have ever had to drive ten miles to a grocery store.

(This is a rebuttal diary to the hugely popular Daily Kos dairy, "Let's Talk About Rural Poverty and Long Commutes.")

Look, I'd like a new FDR too, but this paint-by-numbers feel-good summary of rural America belongs on Joe Scarborogh's Heartland Hoe-Down. For instance, I'm a fourth generation Kansan. There are no "neverending flats of corn" there! It's a wheat-growing state! Another fallacy, Kansas ain't flat folks, it starts out around 800 feet at the Eastern border and rises at is goes west, to something like 4,000 feet at the Colorado border on the High Plains.

The High Plains were overbuilt in the 1880's by speculators and real estate sharks who convinced Easterners that the Plains offered much more rainfall and excitement than was indeed the case. Many of these little towns - which are comparable to failed nineties dotcoms - are now ghost towns, and largely because the area is too arid and remote for large scale habitation. The agriculture that exists depends on the Ogallala reservoir, which in another example of the "Tragedy of the Commons," is just about tapped out by the farmers and industrial farming operation. Think: Peak Ogallala.

Anyhoo, the long and short of it is that we kicked the original inhabitants off much of this Norman Rockwell-esque Grotesquerie called rural America. We did that so that we could exploit the land. Who among us can trace our ancestry beyond the 1630s? If so, you're a Native American and I WOULD LOVE your opinion about all these commuters complaining about the long drive to the Gap or wherever they slave away to make the SUV payments.

Look, if communities aren't sustainable, we shouldn't sustain `em. That goes double for the 'burbs! If the kids are leaving, maybe it's for a damn good reason. What agrarian society are you hoping to sustain? The one in Kansas with all the corn? Well, sorry to break it to you, but that's a lie that never existed.

Miss Information

2006-04-23T15:13:00.000-04:00

One of the problems with public discourse in this country is how few different voices are amplified through the media. There seems to be a coterie of about fifty Beltway/media insiders who play musical chairs on all the cable news analysis shows, and they act as an echo chamber for one another. You know these people: the loathsome Tucker Carlson, Joe Klein, James Carville, Presidential plagiarist … I mean historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pat Buchanan, and the rest of the talking head set. Surely, the most ubiquitous of these mainstream media analysts is the near omnipresent Andrea Mitchell of NBC News.

Today the Chris Mathews Show, sponsored by ConocoPhillips, among others, was an ugly farce of a news analysis show. they spend the whole first segment on this pressing topic:

“Perfect Failures? Why do Democratic candidates campaign like robots? Will Hillary Clinton make the same mistake?”

Okay, yeah, right, all Democrats are like robots … and if they don’t act like robots the media, including you Chris Matthews, savage them as you did Howard Dean or Theresa Heinz Kerry; oh yeah, and Bill Clinton was no robot, but why let facts get in the way of trashing Democrats?

After five minutes of condescendingly tearing at Hillary Clinton (including a video montage edited to show that “she is trying to play it safe on immigration, Iraq and abortion”), John Kerry and even Michael Dukakis (I’m not making this up!), the topic turns to something that actually matters: the high cost of oil and gasoline.

First they show oilman Bush in the Rose Garden taking his usual incompetent, grammatically-challenged B.S.:

BUSH: I’m concerned about higher gasoline prices, I’m concerned about what it means to the working families and small business and I’m mindful that the government has the responsibility to make sure that we watch very carefully.

Chris Matthews throws the discussion to Mitchell, saying, "Well, Andrea, he’s concerned and he’s watching, but he’s not promising to cut those prices."

Andrea Mitchell, dressed in a bright orange Mao tunic like she waited tables at Chinese restaurant on Venus, proceeds to totally misinform the American public about the causes of and possible solutions to high gas prices.

ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC NEWS: He can’t. He has no control over this. This is completely outside of his control.

Yeah, right. The President of the United States can do nothing, Andrea. He can’t release oil stocks from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, right? Or he couldn’t, say, impose a $2/gallon tax on gasoline to stanch demand here in the oil consuming capitol of the world? What about sitting down for diplomatic talks with Iran, what would that do to the price of crude? What about slapping a tariff on Chinese imports, to slow their oil-sucking economy? What about demanding fuel efficiency from Detroit, especially for those f*cking SUVs? But wait, Mitchell is just talking the ConocoPhillips corporate line.

MITCHELL (Cont’d):First of all china and India, China in particular. Huge growth, soaking up energy, buying energy contracts anywhere they can get it. And very thin margins, thin supplies, because countries like Nigeria and Iran and Venezuela are not really motivated to overproduce the way the Saudis have been, frankly.

So far, this is all true, and it's interesting that Mitchell acknowledges the special relationship between the Saudis and the USA, whereby we keep them in power and buy their oil, and, in exchange, the Saudis invest their enormous profits in U.S. Treasury bills and manages the world price of oil in keeping with U.S. interests. But now Mitchell reveals her ignorance… a strange gap in knowledge for the wife of the former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank.

MITCHELL (Cont’d): Their nationalized countries their oil companies don’t have any real incentive to produce the way some of the other countries and American companies, Armamco in Saudi Arabia in particular. So you’re not going to see a change in this.

Uh, “Aramco” is not an American company, Andrea. Aramco was nationalized by Saudi Arabia which had 100 percent control as of 1980, and the company’s US managers were replaced by Saudi management in 1990. By the way, it’s called “Saudi Aramco” now. Furthermore, Nigeria has plenty of American companies working there like Texaco and ExxonMobil.

MITCHELL (Cont'd):As long as the Iran crisis continues and as long as these thin margins continues. And all of this was exacerbated by something we put on our own selves. Congress passed a new ethanol blend for gasoline, and refineries weren’t ready, geared up to produce it.

I’m surprised she blames Congress here, instead of environmentalists. Also, that we have an “Iran Crisis” that Bush can’t affect is laughable. Where do these people find such nonsense, and how do they get to be thought leaders? Andrea Mitchell is truly Miss Information.

Bt wait, here comes Chris Matthews, echoing the talking points.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The situation of a low production and high demand worldwide, that’s a reality that the president can’t change. He can’t get these countries like Venezuela and Nigeria to pump more and can’t get these big countries like India and China to buy less.

Yeah, right.

We need more, better voices on TV. Until then, thank goodness for the Internet. At least there you can read about the reality of Peak Oil.

Who's the Decider?

2006-04-21T10:58:00.000-04:00

Bush’s “I’m the Decider” tirade has been stuck in my mind, and for a while I couldn’t figure out why it was so bothersome. Then I realized it was because Dubya in his shrill declaration reminded me of my two-year-old daughter, throwing a fit if she can’t have more grapes, or doesn’t want to go to bed.

"I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

Bush was being a crybaby because the press was abuzz over the sweeping power handed to Josh Bolton, the new chief of staff. Check out David Gergen, presidential advisor and talking head, on Anderson Cooper’s CNN broadcast on the 17th of April:

COOPER: So, David, what do you make of this, Josh Bolten saying there are -- there are probably going to be changes to -- to refresh the Bush administration?

DAVID GERGEN, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER: I find the story that has emerged from the White House today absolutely extraordinary, even bizarre.

The -- Scott McClellan, the press secretary, has come in front of the press today to say that Josh Bolten, at a senior staff meeting, said that he was going to refresh and reenergize the White House. That's entirely understandable.

But Scott McClellan is quoted by "The New York Times" as going beyond that, to say that the president has given his new chief of staff wide latitude to not only shake up the White House staff, but to even choose new Cabinet members.

The last time I looked, Josh Bolten was not President Bolten. Now, if the -- the -- under our system, it's the president who chooses his Cabinet, sends the names up to Congress, up to the Senate, and they're confirmed. So, to have a situation -- Scott McClellan went on to say that Josh -- Josh Bolten might start by naming his own successor at OMB. That's a Cabinet-level position.

Is the president really surrendering his appointment capacity to his chief of staff? That would be the first time in my memory...

COOPER: Do you think it's -- it's a...

GERGEN: ... it has ever happened.

Indeed, I think Bolton does have “decider” power, since the new rumor is that they’re looking to dump Harriet “You’re the best governor ever” Miers, longtime confidant/suck up to King George 43.

Bush is not the Decider. He’s the Strawman for the Deciders – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rove and the rest of the military industrial complex. Look for yourself! Here the “Decider” asks Condi Rice if he can go potty at the United Nations ….

Furthermore, was it not Cheney who decided to name himself the Vice President?

Some see Cheney as perfect choice

By Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY, 7/24/00

WASHINGTON — He's said to be unassuming and quietly humorous, with a tendency to low-ball his own abilities. So could Dick Cheney's effort to find a Republican vice-presidential candidate lead to none other than...himself?

With GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush preparing to announce his running mate this week, Cheney's name suddenly surged to the fore of the speculation game Friday. The former congressman, who served as secretary of Defense for Bush's father, made a quick trip to Wyoming to switch his voter registration back to the state he represented for more than a decade.

The change of voting address, made just a few hours before Wyoming election officials closed their books before next month's primary, would avoid an Electoral College snafu if Cheney, who heads the Halliburton Co. in Dallas, were on the same ticket with Bush, the Texas governor.

Of course, it could all be an elaborate ruse: The Cheney rumors surfaced just in time to take a late-breaking veep boomlet for Bush's former rival, John McCain, out of the headlines. And Cheney, who has been heading Bush's vice-presidential search since April, assured Halliburton shareholders at their annual meeting in May that he had no intention of leaving to join another Bush administration.

Was it not Cheney who gave the shoot down orders on 9/11? Here’s Sec. of Transportation Norm Minetta’s testimony to the 9/11 Commission:

Mineta: “During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President…the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!??”

See what I mean? Here’s Bush “deciding” to go forward in a Segway ….

I just don’t believe he’s really the day-to-day decider, the cool man of judgment in a crisis, except in the sense that that’s his job description in the Constitution. Really, he’s the face man, the puppet, the guy with the famous last name, the monkey, the boy king, the … oh, you know what I mean.

The Neocons Knew

2006-04-20T05:24:00.000-04:00

An extra-insightful letter to the editor in today’s New York Times deserves attention ...

To the Editor:

Re "The Decider Sticks With the Derider" (column, April 19):

There's a conundrum hidden within Maureen Dowd's column about the failure of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. It's one I've been puzzling over since the Bush administration began its drumbeat for war in Iraq.

There is now considerable evidence — from Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism adviser, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and other former members of the administration — to support Ms. Dowd's statement that Mr. Rumsfeld "wanted to invade Iraq because he thought it would be easy."

But if Mr. Rumsfeld and his colleagues truly believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, how easy could the invasion be?

Common sense suggests only one answer: We invaded Iraq not because we thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but because we thought he didn't.

The administration would like us to think that it was simply mistaken about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; but that's yet another lie, and perhaps the biggest one of all.

Jack Lechner

New York, April 19, 2006

The writer was an executive producer of "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara."

Common sense. I’ll leave it at that.

A Collapsible Spring

2006-04-19T18:49:00.000-04:00

It’s impossible to enjoy a spring day like today in my America unless you love the whiff of cigarette smoke and the chirp of cell phone walkie-talkies. The place where I work, a mall cum office park across the polluted Hudson from NYC, is bound in every direction by interstates, onramps, parkways and roads, none of which have sidewalks for pedestrians. So, there is really no escape to exercise, or getting away for a minute of quiet, unless you think you can somehow slip through the constant stream of SUVs chugging past at 65 m.p.h. with grimacing grilles shining.

I take the bus to this office complex from New York City every day. Basically, if you work here without a car, you’re stuck here.

The denizens of this corporate park are, on the main, portly and sorrowful-looking working men and women with bad haircuts – Americans who pay taxes and play by the rules. Some of the guys walk with clenched fists or jaws, with cell phones strapped to their hips like guns. Jersey Girls teeter around in giggling gaggles, puffing smokes and snapping gum, leaving behind perfumed benzene. Restaurants in the outdoor plaza ‑ the Hoolihans, and the Unos and the Red Lobster ‑ blare 1980s music from bullhorn-like speakers fixed to their facades. Sometimes the songs are loud enough that they “smoosh” together, creating a cacophony that can feel like butterflies in your brain. Want to sit and read a book? Fuhgedaboudit!

Yes, please come along on a noontime stroll around this American corporate oasis! Security guards are everywhere, staring sullenly from their station near the Dunkin’ Donuts or riding around the multi-deck car garages in small red pickups with flashing lights, guarding the SUVs from … what? Usama and Saddam? Environmentalists? Meantime, the grounds crew operate howling leaf blowers to rid walkways of the tender blooms of budding trees, lest the plaza look blighted.

There is a construction crew here as well, converting the failed Sizzler into a soon-to-fail Chili’s. They have set up a pitch cooker for the roof work, which belches tar smoke and makes the air stink. In fact, there has been much construction around here as of late. Recently, a Wal-Mart box was erected just across the highway from my office park, and it’s bigger than a convention center. It replaced a field that was … well, a wetland.

I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which everybody should read. At the end of the book, Diamond presents the twelve most serious dilemmas facing humanity which we must solve in the coming years or decades. Each is as daunting and deadly as the next, but the first on his list was …

At an accelerating rate, we are destroying natural habitats or else converting them to human-made habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands and pastures, roads, and golf courses. The natural habitats whose losses have provoked the most discussion are forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and the ocean bottom. …More than half of the world’s original areas of forest have already been converted to other uses and at present conversion rates one quarter of the forests that remain will become converted within the next half-century.
[…]
An even larger fraction of the world’s original wetlands than of its forests have been destroyed, damaged, or converted. Consequences for us arise from wetlands’ importance in maintaining the quality of our water supplies and the existence of commercially important freshwater fisheries, while even ocean fisheries depend on mangrove wetlands to provide habitat for the juvenile phase of many fish species.
[…]
About one-third of the world’s coral reefs‑ the oceanic equivalent of tropical rainforests, because they are home to a disproportionate fraction of the ocean’s species ‑ have already been severely damaged. If current trends continue, about half the remaining reefs will be lost by 2030.

There was a deal whereby the Wal-Mart near my office park had to set aside some wetlands as an offset for destroying some wetlands, and basically protect it as a habitat and a park. I’m proably woring on the specifics. But if you can make it through the 60 m.p.h. parade of SUVs, and walk over an overpass, and down to the enormous parking lot of the other mall across the highway, there is a wetlands park. I go there for my lunch hour when the sun is out on a warm day.

There are some beautiful birds, large and small, that I see there but not anywhere else. The park is bordered on one side by an Interstate; on the other side by housing and a complex of petrochemical storage tanks; and on the last side a mall and the mall’s extensive parking lot. So, no matter how deep into the park you walk, there’s a woosh of traffic and horns and lots of construction noise since something new is always going up around here. A Petco, a Bed, Bath and Beyond. Some shit like that.

Beyond the noise and pollution all around, the park is absolutely full of trash. Plastics, metal push carts, a hardhat, bottles of laundry detergent, clothing, you-name-it. It’s like a dumping ground now, or was before and they never cleaned it up. I can’t figure out which.

In case you don’t know, Al Gore is about to come out with the rockin’est movie on the environment ever, entitled “An Inconvenient Truth.” The trailer gives you goosebumps.

Spring Break Madness

2006-04-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

While young men and women of the United States military fight, kill and die in the Iraq war sparked by the outright lies of his administration, the leaker-in-chief himself slipped away to Cancun for Spring Break and some bodacious waves. The place that lavishly hosted him has put out a press release detailing the splendid comfort provided to Dubya as he contemplated skimpy bikinis and nuking the bejesus out of Iran.

President George W. Bush Guest

of Le Blanc Spa Resort

Cancun Resort Hosts U.S. President During Recent

Mexico Summit

April 11, 2006, Miami, FL – Le Blanc Spa Resort is pleased to announce it hosted sitting United States President, George W. Bush, during his recent visit to Cancun for the two-day Mexico Summit with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

While at Le Blanc Spa Resort, President Bush stayed in the property’s palatial “Presidential Suite,” which features a plush sitting room, formal dining room, 1 1/2 well-appointed bathrooms, a full-service kitchen and a luxurious master suite that overlooks the crystal blue water of the Caribbean Sea.

“It was an honor and a privilege to host President Bush and his staff during his recent visit to Cancun,” said Roberto Chapur, President of Palace Resorts. “At Le Blanc Spa Resort we pride ourselves on the level of service we provide all of our guests and were pleased to accommodate the President while he was in Mexico.”

In addition to being the President’s home-away-from-home, Le Blanc Spa Resort also acted as the official “West Wing.” The resort’s 10,000 square foot, state-of-the-art convention center became the headquarters for the President’s staff for the duration of their stay. While at the resort, they took advantage of the elegantly appointed meeting facilities and the modern banquet rooms confirming that the facilities at Le Blanc can easily handle the demands of a Presidential staff.

During the President’s spare time, it was well noted in the U.S. media that he took advantage of the resort’s fully-equipped fitness center that offers a complete line of Life Fitness equipment. Here he used the LX1 2005 Life Fitness ecliptic machine and was given fitness advice by one of the trainers before returning to the meetings of the day.

The Le Blanc Spa Resort staff also went above-and-beyond to make the President’s stay as comfortable as possible by providing an array of special amenities like 5 different types of hand-rolled Mexican cigars and a beautiful display of Mexican candies that were delivered to his room. In addition, the staff created a unique menu that included a selection of specially prepared Mexican dishes that were known to be the President’s favorite.

In appreciation of the hospitality extended to President Bush and his staff, Le Blanc Spa Resort received a Letter of Appreciation from the White House Communication Agency as well as from the U.S. Ambassador in Mexico thanking the resort and its staff for the outstanding service provided during the President’s stay.

A Le Blanc Spa Resort vacation package ranges from $482 - $662 per room, per night, depending on time of year. It includes luxurious all-suite accommodations with double Jacuzzis, haute cuisine, premium drinks, dazzling entertainment, taxes and gratuities.

Protesting Prisons

2006-04-11T11:18:00.000-04:00

With the breathtaking immigration protests commandeering the streets in dozens of U.S. cities yesterday, it may behoove us to look back and remember how quickly the reprehensible, anti-family House Resolution 4437, introduced by GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner (just in time for Christmas) on December 6, 2005 was followed by an announcement that Halliburton would build $385 million worth of new prisons to jail immigrants.

As much as any other factor, the threat of internment has put people into the streets. On Feb. 3, the New York Times reported …

The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been criticized for overcharging the Pentagon for its work in Iraq.

KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, company executives said.

Later in the story comes this telling factoid …

In recent months, the Homeland Security Department has promised to increase bed space in its detention centers to hold thousands of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. In the first quarter of the 2006 fiscal year, nearly 60 percent of the illegal immigrants apprehended from countries other than Mexico were released on their own recognizance.

So, the United States is more likely to detain “illegal” Mexican immigrants than “illegal” immigrants from other countries. Thus, if were detaining just 40 percent of Other than Mexicans, it’s safe to assume that we’re detaining a higher percentage Mexicans before deportation – perhaps half or more. Therefore, these Halliburton detention centers are clearly meant to jail mostly Mexicans, the very people out in force on American streets yesterday with kids and grandkids, waving Old Glory.

Advocates for immigrants said they feared that the new contract was another indication that the government planned to expand the detention of illegal immigrants, including those seeking asylum.

"It's pretty obvious that the intent of the government is to detain more and more people and to expedite their removal," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami.

Hand in hand, the GOP and their corporate overlords have stupidly driven millions of hard-working family-oriented Mexicans and other Latinos and Hispanics into the streets to demand their unalienable rights as people to live free in the United States.

These newly minted Americans demand to be free people, not felons or detainees or members of a guest worker class to be exploited and barred from voting. This courageous stand for dignity and justice is played out in the shadow of looming Halliburton/GOP prisons where indefinite Guantanamo-style detention awaits “illegals” and their kids.

Progressive native-born Americans should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these new Americans, in the grille of the GOP and the xenophobes. Where are the Democratic politicians?

Is this the new wave of radical-left Latin American politics coming up from Venezuela, from Peru, from Mexico? Is the domino theory correct? Is the United States the next country to fall? The GOP sure seems to be paving the way for some radical, New Deal-type renegotiation of the social order with their threat of Halliburton prisons for these Mexican-American families.

Who Will Stop Them?

2006-04-10T06:41:00.000-04:00

I must admit, after reading Seymore Hersh's latest story in the New Yorker magazine, I fear my country is going to use nuclear weapons against another country in another “pre-emptive” war. That country? Iran.

Hersh writes ….

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

Hmmm, reminds me of Sept. 2002, before the stupid Iraq invasion, when our top officials were busy comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler. Maybe these losers running our government should start a “Hitler of the Month” club.

Naturally, Israel plays a huge part in our Middle East policy and our relationship with the entire Islamic world. And, in the case of attacking Iran, it seems that one justification will be that we’re defending Israel from destruction via the Iranian bomb. Hersh continues …

I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”

This is a confusing rationale for attacking Iran to me, I must admit. The United States says it fears the angry Islamic backlash an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuke program would provoke. Yet our confused leaders shows no worry over the fallout of an American bombing of Iran: like a potential terror campaign against us at home and abroad, boosted Iranian backing of insurgents in Iraq, an oil cutoff and another spike in worldwide revulsion over American cowboy-ism.

Also: we’ve armed Israel to the teeth, at great expense to the American image in many parts of the world and at great expense to the American taxpayer. If Israel sees Iran as a bona fide threat, let the Israelis take out the mullahs’ enrichment program. The Israeli Air Force is more than capable!

But perhaps protection of Israel is not the main rationale for our attack on Iran. Nor are fears of a nuclear Iran becoming more of a regional power. The primary issue may be, oh yeah, our “addiction to oil.”

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

Isn’t it amazing that rather than undertaking a national crash diet on oil consumption and funding a Apollo Program/Manhattan Project–type endeavor to develop alternative energies, we’ve decided it’s better policy to invade and occupy countries possessing the last plentiful oil reserves on Earth? It’s high-octane madness. And who will stand up to the retardo-cons in charge of the U.S. military? Nobody!

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat.

If this isn’t Joe Lieberman, I’ll eat my blog.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

[…]

“The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Here’s the kicker: because the Iranian nuke program is spread over many fortified and dug-in locations, our genius planners (who brought you the wonderfully well thought out Iraq War) hope to utilize nuclear weapons in Iran!

The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

According to Hersh, the self-evident insanity of a preemptive nuclear war on Iran has prompted at least a few uniformed leaders to consider stepping down, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s nice to know the yahoos in the military are somewhat saner than the Cult of Bush’s nuclear warmongers.

Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.”

One thing Hirsch doesn’t mention in the piece is U.S. domestic politics. Note to the Democrats in Congress: wake up. Iran is next, and it could happen in the lead-up to the 2006 mid-terms. What could wash away the low Bush poll numbers, the bitter memories of Katrina, revulsion over Abramoff, DeLay and Cunningham, as well as the pitiful quagmire in Iraq, better than a new war? Imagine the screaming graphics on TV, the headlines, the excitement, the war footage, the sickly sweet thrill of being on the march.

The GOP, Bush, the military, the oil companies all need a war with Iran. Who will stop them?

People's General

2006-04-04T06:29:00.000-04:00

Retired U.S. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni’s appearance on Meet the Press last weekend is worth another look. The 35-year veteran was the Commander-in-Chief of CENTCOM, meaning he ran America’s military in the entire Middle East from 1997-2000. Before U.S. tanks rolled on Baghdad, Zinni predicted the U.S. invasion of Iraq would be a “Bay of Goats.” He is worth listening to now.

Zinni is promoting a new book, "The Battle for Peace". Here are a few selected quotes from the transcript at the Meet the Press web site.

On the battle for Iraqi “hearts and minds:”

If, like General Casey said a week or so ago, 99.9 percent of the people are opposed to the violence and the perpetrators of these violence. Well, all those people have to do is call up on the phone and tell you where the insurgents are, tell you in the two to four provinces that everybody said this is concentrated in where the issues are, where the problems are, where the people that are doing this are, and you wouldn’t need much more than you have right now. And the security forces and the Iraqis would be able to handle it. We’re not fighting the Waffen SS here. You know, we’re fighting a bunch of ragtag people with AK-47s and IEDs and RPGs. They can be policed up if the people turn against them. We haven’t won the hearts and minds yet.

On the job of the U.S. media (think Jill Carroll):

I think the American media’s being made a scapegoat for what’s going on out there. At last count, I think something like 80 journalists have been killed in Iraq. It’s hard to get outside the green zone and not risk your life, or risk kidnapping, at a minimum, to get the story. And it’s hard to blame the media for no good stories when the security situation is such that they can’t even go out and get the good stories without risking their lives. And you have to remember that it’s hard to dwell on the good things when the bad things are so overwhelmingly traumatic and catastrophic, you know? So I think that’s an unfair blame that’s put on the media.

Lastly, here’s Zinni on Bush regime lies that took us to war:

Well, I—first of all, I saw it in the way the intelligence was being portrayed. I knew the intelligence; I saw it right up to the day of the war. I was asked at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing a month before the war if I thought the threat was imminent. I didn’t. Many of the people I know that were involved in the intelligence side of this, or, or in the military felt the same way. I saw the—what this town is known for: spin, cherry-picking facts, using metaphors to evoke certain emotional responses, or, or shading the, the context. We, we know the mushroom clouds and, and the other things that were all described that the media’s covered well. I saw on the ground, though, a sort of walking away from 10 years worth of planning.

You know, ever since the end of the first Gulf War, there have been—there’s been planning by serious officers and planners and others, and policies put in place. Ten years worth of planning, you know, were thrown away; troop levels dismissed out of hand; General Shinseki basically insulted for speaking the truth and giving a, an honest opinion; the lack of cohesive approach to how we deal with the aftermath; the political, economic, social reconstruction of a nation, which is no small task; a belief in these exiles that anyone in the region, anyone that had any knowledge would tell you were not credible on the ground; and on and on and on. Decisions to disband the army that were not in the initial plans. I mean there’s a series of disastrous mistakes. We just heard the secretary of state say these were tactical mistakes. These were not tactical mistakes. These were strategic mistakes, mistakes of policy made back here. Don’t blame the troops. They’re the ones that perform the tactics on the ground. They’ve been magnificent. If anything saves this, it will be them.

We shouldn’t ask troops to put themselves in this situation. Let’s get the f*ck out of Iraq now. Bush lied, Rumsfeld trashed the good war plans and ruined the Army -- and they want to do it all again in Iran! Let’s declare victory and leave already.

Attacking a Victim

2006-04-02T10:14:00.000-04:00

It’s sad to say: right wing boosters of the disastrous Iraq War couldn’t help themselves. They all but accused journalist kidnap victim Jill Carroll of treason based on her obviously forced interview – given at the point of a gun to her captors – and released to the media last week as Carroll herself was let go.

Leading the Carroll witchhunt was Charles Osgood on New York’s WCBS 880 this past Friday.

Osgood couldn’t wait until Carroll was out of Iraq, or even free of her captors, before accusing her of being a mouthpiece of the terrorists, i.e., “telling their story” because of the interview she was forced into. He even implies they let her go so she could be their spokesperson!

Here’s Osgood in his own shameful words (emphasis is mine) ...

Posted: Friday, 31 March 2006 1:48PM Charles Osgood Reporting
Why did they let her go?

Why did the terrorist kidnappers of Jill Carroll who shot her Iraqi interpreter not kill her too as they threatened to? Richard Bergenheim, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, says no ransom was paid. And that pressure from Muslim leaders might be one reason they let her go.

"The chorus of Muslim leaders condemning this kidnapping has been larger and louder than has been heard for some time," said Bergenheim.

Jill's family did all they could. Sister Katie was on Iraqi radio as recently as this Wednesday. "I hope that someone listening to me now has information that could help Jill," said Katie Carroll.

Some other relatives directed their pleas to the kidnappers themselves.

"Jill started to tell your story, so please let her finish it," said a relative.

And in that regard Jill has wasted no time, telling their story.

"I feel guilty, honestly. I've been here, treated very well, like a guest. Given good food, never, never hurt. All those women are in Abu Ghraib, terrible things are happening to them," said Jill Carroll.

Telling their story that the Mujahadeen are winning.

"Everyday there are soldiers killed. Everyday Humvees are blown up. Helicopters are shot down, everyday. It's very clear the Mujahadeen have the skills and the ability and the desire and the good reasons to fight and they'll ensure they will win," said Jill Carroll.

A freed Jill Carroll on President Bush:

"Hopefully somehow he'll get the message and that this war was wrong, and the continuing occupation is wrong, and that he could change his policies," said Jill Carroll.

President Bush on the freeing of Jill Carroll:

"Just really grateful she's released and I want to thank those who worked hard to release her," said Bush.

I suppose Carroll became a target for right wingers like Osgood because 1) she was a journalist 2) she was seen in photos before and during her kidnapping dressed in a burqa and 3) they're too dense to know propaganda from the truth, which is why they're Bush supporters in the first place.

Carroll must have been a terrorist sympathizer in the us-against-them mentality of the Cult of Bush. They were probably excited about it! These Repugs are always more hateful of their fellow Americans who dissent, like Michael Moore or the Dixie Chicks, then they are of the terrorists themselves.

In Carroll’s gunpoint interview and burqa-wearing, they sensed a traitor in their midst and went after her with their media plants, like you-know-who at CBS Radio.

But if Osgood and other salespeople for the Iraq disaster had only waited until Carroll was at liberty to express herself, this is what they would have heard ...

"During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me I would be released if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. So I agreed," she said in a statement read by her editor in Boston.

"Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not."

Charles Osgood owes Jill Carroll an apology! So does every other blogger, commenter and “journalist” who attacked her based on the terrorists’ propaganda. You all were suckered by the enemy into attacking a woman and a good American.

If the brainwashed goons who attacked Carroll had any understanding of the kind of professional journalistic integrity she has, they would have understood she would never have given such a partisan opinion in the context of an interview.

UPDATE 4/4/06: Osgood dedicated his Monday braodcast on WCBS to Carroll, taking pains to point out she was under duress during her earlier statement. But he didn't mention his attack on Carroll, nor did he apologize.

My New Word

2006-03-29T06:59:00.000-05:00

“Dubairaqatrinationaldebtortureplamissionaccomplished”

I invented a new word today. I was thinking of the myriad crises, scandals, tragedies and outrages that George W. Bush has wrought upon this nation and this planet. Many agree, it’s been hard to catalogue all of this woe, to have shorthand for the mess we’ve been put in. Here’s a crude attempt:

“Dubairaqatrinationaldebtortureplamissionaccomplished”

It should be pronounceable, like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” except within the word is a nice catalogue of Bush’s failures.

The GOP’s Catch-22 on Immigration

2006-03-27T08:54:00.000-05:00

The GOP’s self-inflicted immigration policy fiasco forces the Rupugs to choose between two of their most cherished values: xenophobia and corporate greed. Today, behind the evil firewall at the New York Times, Krugman is typically insightful. While Progressives should emphasize limits on the influx of undocumented workers and enforcement of existing law ...

The harsh anti-immigration legislation passed the House, which has led to huge protests -- legislation that would, among other things, make it a criminal act to provide an illegal immigrant with medical care -- is simply immoral.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush’s plan for a “guest worker” program is clearly desinged by and for corporate interests, who’d love to have a low-wage workforce that couldn’t vote.

Democrats and progressives should approach the Republican’s policy on immigration the same way a kid approaches a piñata. Whack it hard, amigos, and votes will fall down like rain!

Three suggestions: 1) Emphasize strict enforcement of current law and better funding for border security programs that would limit the number of illegal immigrants. 2) Stress the importance of compassion and charity as a bedrock American values and 3) Marry this issue to the dire need to raise the minimum wage in the United States.

Folks, it is downright insulting to United States citizens to hear King George whine about “jobs that Americans will not do.” Americans are among the hardest working, most productive people in the world. Americans have never shied away from hard, dangerous, boring or disgusting work, Mr. Bush!

Rather, they have shunned work that does not provide a living wage. As Krugman points out today, “The willingness of American to do a job depends on how much that job pays -- and the reason some jobs pay to little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly-paid immigrants.”

Lastly, I think Democrats, progressives, netroots denizens, dKossers, and everyone else on the side of light and goodness should get out there and take a Spanish language class! We need to engage and enroll these new Americans that have been marching in the streets for their basic rights.

Neanderthal Wanted

2006-03-25T10:19:00.000-05:00

Dear Jim Brady:

I hear you’re looking for a new conservative blogger for Wasingtonpost.com. Well, look no further, sir: I am your man.

I will write you the most knuckle-dragging, lib-hating, thick skulled blog in the world, and we can call it Redder State.

Now, look, I was raised in Kansas. I mean, how much redder and flippin’ American can you get than Kansas? It’s in the heart-most of the heartland, the middle of the map. I simply feel the soul of Red State America in my bones, sir.

Things I like include Bush, war, torture, beer, hot chicks, the flag, bear meat, Fox News, crossbow hunting, Jesus, SUVs, the NSA and both readin’ and writin’.

Things I hate and like to complain about are the Martin Luther King, Jr. family, the Clintons, pacifists, civil rights pushers, the French, gun grabbers, Katrina victims and those bloggers who drug down that fine young plagiarist, Domenech, and who now want you to resign for some reason.

Can’t you see how I’d be the perfect voice to balance out all those pantywaist “journalists” at your paper, with their B.S. degrees or whatever? I eat bear meat, man.

While I don’t have an extensive writing sample, I realize that the quality of my writing isn’t really what you’re interested in. Sh*t, everybody knows liberals are way better writers than conservatives! No, what you want is a presence at the Post that will make all my racist, warmongering, gay-hating compatriots pick up the Washington Post and say to themselves, “Hey, this is my kind of paper!”

Mr. Brady, I am available for an interview and await your call. You don’t care about references, right?

Counter-RNC, Pro-Feingold Ad w/ Voice Over

2006-03-21T20:25:00.000-05:00

Adapted from the new GOP attack ad on Feingold.

Voice Over:

September eleventh changed our country.

The terrorists hated our freedoms.

Senator Russel Feingold is working to keep American families free. Fighting against the PATRIOT Act which has dissolved Americans’ civil liberties and made secret FBI snooping into citizens’ library records legal and routine. But Republicans are working against these efforts to secure our freedom, pushing for the PATRIOT Act and warrentless wiretapping of Americans in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA laws passed by Congress.

Their leader is George W. Bush.

Now Bush and other Republicans want to attack Russ Feingold. Publicly reprimanding Senator Feingold for fighting to protect our civil rights.

Some Republicans are even saying Senator Feingold is something less than an honorable American patriot.

Is this how Republicans plan to win their "Long War?"

Who are they fighting anyway?

Call the White House and ask them why they’re more interested in secret illegal spying on Americans than on protecting our ports and winning in Iraq.

My Missed Connection: Senator Charles Schumer

2006-03-20T14:50:00.000-05:00

My toddler daughter was sick with a viral eye infection of some kind, so our little family was apartment-bound for the weekend, which didn’t matter much because it was so cold and windy here in NYC. But yesterday, I managed to sneak out because I really needed a haircut.

As I walked to my regular hair cutting joint on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, I noticed barriers blocking cross streets from the Avenue, and a bunch of cops standing on the corners. Obviously, something was afoot.

I asked an NYPD cop, “What’s going on today?”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s the Irish,” she said. “St. Patrick’s Day parade or something.”

Although I’m, half-Irish (and proud of it), the thought of taking in a parade alone wasn’t so appealing. So I continued on my way to the barber.

When I got to the shop, which is right on Seventh Ave. with plate glass windows facing the street, I had to wait for my regular hair stylist. By this time, the parade was beginning to get underway just outside.

I watched some police cars, a few fire engines, and some bag pipers go by. A few school bands clanged past. Then, I saw mayor Bloomberg, with his retinue.

This is some parade, I thought. At this moment, the girl who washes hair at the shop came and told me to follow her back to the sinks. I rose from my chair.

But then, outside, suddenly, came Senator Charles Schumer. Unlike the other pols in the Brooklyn St. Patrick’s Day Parade, he was alone in the parade, with an aide traipsing behind. Smiling, walking, smiling. Here was a man I wanted to talk to.

Just that morning, I had heard Schumer on TV explaining that (American hero) Russ Feingold’s resolution to censure George Bush for illegally wiretapping Americans without court warrants was “premature” or something. Basically, Schumer is scared to tell King George “no” when he does illegal things.

But, now, here was Schumer. Waving to the Park Slope moms and dads, giving thumbs up to everyone. Basically, acting like a mensch pol from Brooklyn. But he’s no mensch – he’s selling out our rights to a creeping dictatorship!

Anyway, he was gone before I could say a word, or somehow emerge from the barbershop to come onto the Avenue and confront him.

“Senator, as your constituent, I want you to know that your failure to support Russ Feingold’s censure resolution makes you impossible to vote for ever again. I’ll put it up there with your support of this Iraq War and your vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act as indelible black marks against you, your party, and your office itself. Please never again come into my neighborhood and wave at me, while back in Washington you’re stabbing my neighbors and me in the back by playing footsie with Bush and his anti-American agenda. Now, please get on board with Feingold!”

That is what I wanted him to know. That is what I wanted to tell Schumer as he went by grinning, sucking, losing, doing nothing, failing utterly.

But I didn’t have the chance.

Open Letter to Senator Clinton

2006-03-17T06:00:00.000-05:00

Senator Clinton:

On March 13, 2006, your colleague and fellow Democrat, Senator Russ Feingold, introduced a measure to formally censure President Bush for his blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the FISA laws enacted to prevent illegal spying upon Americans.

In explaining the censure resolution, Senator Feingold said, “This issue is not about whether the government should be wiretapping terrorists – of course it should, and it can under current law. But this President and this Administration decided to break the law and they have yet to give a convincing explanation of why their actions were necessary, appropriate, or legal. Passing more laws will not change the fact that the President broke the ones already in place and for that, Congress must hold him accountable.”

Senator Clinton, as a Democrat and a New Yorker, I find it very difficult to understand why you have failed to support Senator Feingold’s censure resolution.

Millions of Americans want a leader with enough confidence of character to thwart the monarchical arrogance emanating from the Bush White House. Senator Feingold has provided such leadership. Unfortunately, the Democratic caucus has been too slow and too unenthusiastic in its response. That needs to change, Senator!

On Jan. 25, speaking of Bush’s NSA eavesdropping program, you were quoted in N.Y. Newsday as saying, ”Their argument that it's rooted in the Constitution inherently is kind of strange because we have FISA and FISA operated very effectively.”

Obviously, from the above statement, you have misgivings about the program. Indeed, anyone familiar with the Constitution or the laws of this country should have such doubts. But actions speak louder than words, Senator. And in the case of an elected official, it is their votes that matter before their rhetoric. So, will you use your vote to defend your constituents’ civil rights? You should support censure.

Continuing to sit on the sidelines on censure is a disservice to your constituency and your nation and, after your votes go to war with Iraq and make permanent the USA Patriot Act, reinforces the growing perception that you’re out of touch with the real concerns of the majority of Democrats, the majority of New Yorkers and the majority of Americans.

Especially as a Senator from New York, the national bastion of free speech and democracy, I hope you come around to support Senator Feingold’s censure resolution. And quick.

Sincerely,
RED/GLARE

One Word for Bush: "Incompetent"

2006-03-16T09:04:00.000-05:00

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press yesterday released a poll showing America’s growing distain for the Bush administration. What I thought was most interesting was a question where respondants could choose just one word to describe their view of the President. The most popular? "Incompetent." From the results, you can see the country turning on Bush as his domestic and foreign policies prove more ruinous every day.

Wake up the Democrats in Congress. Tell them Bush is toast and it’s time to get behind a patriotic American, Russ Feingold, and the righteousness of his censure resolution. Such a move would force Repugs up for a 2006 reelection deeper into Bush’s deeply unpopular corner. It’s good politics and good for democracy.

Open Letter to Senator Feingold

2006-03-15T06:10:00.000-05:00

Senator Feingold:

I want to express my thanks to you for introducing a censure resolution against President Bush for illegally wiretapping American citizens without court warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment and FISA laws. Alone among Senators, you have proven that your respect for the U.S. Constitution outweighs political calculations, and I heartily applaud you for it.

In a time of great fear and media manipulation, when simple political dissent is painted as treason, it is essential for the health of our democratic form of government that public servants act with the courage of their conventions, as you have.

Senator, you could not be more right when you say ...

This issue is not about whether the government should be wiretapping terrorists – of course it should, and it can under current law. But this President and this Administration decided to break the law and they have yet to give a convincing explanation of why their actions were necessary, appropriate, or legal. Passing more laws will not change the fact that the President broke the ones already in place and for that, Congress must hold him accountable.

Your fight could not be more important or timely. Just today, the American Civil Liberties Union has released documents showing that the FBI has investigated gatherings of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice in Pennsylvania just because the organization opposed the war in Iraq.

The Bush Administration, apparently, is equating pacifism with terrorism. Such violations of the Constitutional rights of ordinary Americans to 1) peaceably assemble and 2) exercise their freedom to speak should cast into serious doubt this Administration’s most basic respect for the rights of United States citizens.

Of course, the deafening silence of your Democratic counterparts in the Senate is very disappointing to all who care about civil liberties. Such political cowardice, which you rightly criticize, only makes your censure resolution more extraordinary. Should you decide to run for the presidency in 2008, you would have the support of millions of Americans who are hungry for a real fighter for their freedom, liberty, rights and security. Many of these Americans will be energized by your brave stance in this fight. I encourage you to run!

Along with millions of other Americans, I thank you Senator Feingold!

Sincerely,
redglare

Springtime in Chile

2006-03-11T17:04:00.000-05:00

Another election, another left leaning government takes power in South America, as the repugnance of the Bush junta gives our nation a bad name even in our old, dependable spheres of influence. From the N.Y. Times:

SANTIAGO, Chile, March 11 — Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist, pediatrician and former political prisoner and exile, was sworn in on Saturday as the first woman to be president of Chile, the culmination of its long and painful journey from repression and dictatorship to democracy.
[….]
Ms. Bachelet is the daughter of an air force general who was jailed for treason and died in prison after Gen. Augusto Pinochet took power in an American-supported coup in 1973.

Bachelet’s father was killed by our proxy dictator, Pinochet, who took power in a CIA-backed Sept. 11 coup. I’m sure she’s a real big fan of our country.

The United States’ moral authority, which was full of holes from actions like the Pinochet coup, has been exploded by the Bush regime. No longer do we even pretend to aspire to high ideals, like valuing universal human dignity or unassailable individual rights. Now, we invade your country, torture you, steal your resources, and blow up your temples.

No apologies folks, because, you know, 9/11 happened and stuff. Gotta stay safe at home.

As a result, with the strange exception of Canada, the nations of our own hemisphere are rushing to elect leaders who will refuse to do business as usual with the USA and our straw horses like the IMF and World Bank, or our voracious, rapacious oil companies and other exploiters of resources and labor. I say, hurray!

We barely have laws in the United States any more, much less a functional government, and the Katrina victims starving on television showed the world the horrors of our selfish culture in collapse.

Alas, we have no viable socialist party here. Just a two-headed Repuli-crat party, engorged by corporate pelf, that offers us the illusion, should we be stupid enough to buy it, that we live in some sort of democracy.

Ambien Nation: Asleep at the Wheel

2006-03-08T06:21:00.000-05:00

Today’s N.Y. Times focuses on a spike in traffic accidents caused by the prescription sleeping medication Ambien, whose trade name sounds vaguely like the French for “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!”

Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug.

In some state toxicology laboratories Ambien makes the top 10 list of drugs found in impaired drivers. Wisconsin officials identified Ambien in the bloodstreams of 187 arrested drivers from 1999 to 2004.

With doctors writing Americans 26.5 million prescriptions for Ambien last year, it’s hard to think of a better metaphor for a citizenry that’s asleep at the wheel while the SUV of state careens from the road of democracy into the ditch of despotism.

"Doctors are handing out these drugs like Pez," said William C. Head, an Atlanta lawyer who is one of the nation's leading defense lawyers specializing in impaired-driving cases.

Americans have slept like drugged-up babies while the current regime has outrageously stripped them of rights guaranteed by U.S. Constitution; indefinitely imprisoned citizens without habeas corpus or access to a lawyer; wiretapped Americans without court warrants; jailed journalists and conducted whistleblower witch hunts; lied about WMD to invade and occupy foreign lands; planted propaganda and fake journalists in the media; tortured detainees in violation of our treaty obligations and military laws; broken the wall between church and state; trashed the separation of powers that was supposed to protect us from tyranny; and through either sheer ineptitude or purposeful negligence lost the World Trade Center buildings and the wonderful City of New Orleans.

If the United States were a person, the last five years would be like this …

A registered nurse who lives outside Denver took Ambien before going to sleep one night in January 2003. Sometime later — she says she remembers none of the episode — she got into her car wearing only a thin nightshirt in 20-degree weather, had a fender bender, urinated in the middle of an intersection, then became violent with police officers, according to her lawyer.

Are we medicating ourselves to sleep because we’re kept up at night due to worries about our kids’ futures? Long wars? Peak oil? Or, do we want escape from the incessant ads, the traffic jams, the mortgage, the rent and the reality of post-9/11 USA.

What will it take to snap us out of our Ambien-induced national snooze? The Congress made the despicable USA Patriot Act a permanent law today. They also gonna OK Bush’s illegal wiretapping after the fact. We’re watching Iraq come apart like gossamer in our hands. The there’s the housing bubble, crushing debt, loose nukes and Dubai Ports World.

Hello America! It’s time to wake up now!

Anybody awake out there?

Hello?

Corrupt, but Righteous!

2006-03-06T17:46:00.000-05:00

I am a hypocrite with a double standard – I admit it! But George Ryan, in my book, has a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I recently bemoaned an American justice system that lets dirty politicians, like bribe-taking former Connecticut governor John Rowland (1 yr., 1 day) or greed-master Duke Cunningham (8 yrs.), get off with too-light prison sentences.

But now, former Illinois Governor George Ryan is on trial for similar graft:

Ryan, 72, and longtime friend Larry Warner, 67, a lobbyist, were charged in a 22-count federal indictment with racketeering, mail fraud and other offenses.

The indictment says that as secretary of state for eight years in the 1990s and as governor for one term, Ryan steered state leases and contracts to Warner and other friends. In return, he was rewarded with free vacations, loans for his brother's business and even money to pay the band at his daughter's wedding reception, prosecutors say.

Ryan and Warner say nothing they did was illegal.

This time, however, I hope Ryan is found innocent and, if found guilty, I beg he does not spend one single second in jail. Why? What about George Ryan that entitles him to our mercy and leniency?

On Jan. 11, 2003, outgoing Gov. George Ryan emptied Illinois’ death row, citing statistics that show the death penalty in America is racist …

CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) -- Outgoing Illinois Gov. George Ryan announced Saturday that he had commuted the sentences of all of the state's death row inmates and said he would "sleep well knowing I made the right decision."

He delivered his unprecedented speech at Northwestern University.

"Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?

"Because of all these reasons, today I am commuting the sentences of all death row inmates," Ryan said.

Ryan's decision affects 156 inmates on death row in Illinois and 11 others who have been sentenced to death but who were not in the custody of the Department of Corrections because they are awaiting re-sentencing or trials in other cases.

And when it comes down to it, on the scales of justice, what has more weight: A little corruption, or ending state killing that’s stacked against African Americans and the economically disadvantaged?

According to the Campaign to End the Death Penalty:

- African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, but are 43% of prisoners on death row. Although Blacks constitute 50% of all murder victims, 83% of the victims in death penalty cases are white.

- Since 1976 only ten executions involved a white defendant who had killed a Black victim.

- In all, only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person.

- A comprehensive Georgia study found that killers of whites are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of Blacks.

- More than 75% of those on federal death row are non-white. Of the 156 federal death penalty prosecutions approved by the Attorney General since 1988, 74% of the defendants were non-white.

So lets stack up Ryan’s good and bad deeds, folks. The good outweighs the bad by a ton. (By contrast, Duke Cunningham’s lawyers argued he should get leniency because he bombed people in Vietnam as an Air Force jet jock!)

I say: Free George Ryan!

Patriot Act = Gleichschaltung

2006-03-03T06:46:00.000-05:00

On a dark day for this land, when the Spineless Senate has OK’d a raft of legislation known as the USA Patriot Act that has taken away the rights and liberties of American citizens, it may behoove us to note the term “Gleichschaltung,” since it applies to our plight in the USA in 2006.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The German word Gleichschaltung (literally "synchronising", synchronization) is used in a political sense to describe the process by which the Nazi regime successively established a system of totalitarian control over the individual, and tight coordination over all aspects of society and commerce. Another possible translation is "making equal". One goal of this politics was to enforce a specific way of doctrine and thinking to everybody, eliminating individualism.

The Nazi party's desire for total control required the elimination of all other forms of influence. The period from 1933 to around 1937 was characterized by the systematic elimination of non-Nazi organizations that could potentially influence people, such as trade unions and political parties. Those critical of Hitler's agenda, especially his close ties with the industry were suppressed or intimidated. The regime also assailed the influence of the churches, for example by instituting the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs under Hanns Kerrl. Organizations that the administration could not eliminate, such as schools, came under its direct control.

[snip]

One day after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, the increasingly senile President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg, acting at Hitler's request, issued the Reichstag Fire Decree. This decree suspended most human rights provided for by the 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic and thus allowed for the arrest of political adversaries, mostly Communists, and for general terrorizing by the SA to intimidate the voters before the upcoming election.
In this atmosphere the Reichstag general election of March 5, 1933 took place. These yielded only a slim majority for Hitler's coalition government and no majority for Hitler's own Nazi party.

When the newly-elected Reichstag first convened on March 23, 1933, (not including the Communist delegates, since their party had already been banned by that time) it passed the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz), transferring all legislative powers to the Nazi government and, in effect, abolishing the remainder of the Weimar constitution as a whole. Soon afterwards the government banned the Social Democratic party, which had voted against the Act, while the other parties chose to dissolve themselves to avoid arrests and concentration camp imprisonment.

Media F*cking

2006-03-02T09:06:00.000-05:00

I stole this list from a DailyKos diary, but I wanted to add it to this blog ....

Set 1: Primarily National Television News media

countdown@msnbc.com, KOlbermann@msnbc.com, CJ@MSNBC.com, JTrippi@MSNBC.com, hardball@msnbc.com, abramsreport@msnbc.com, dshuster@msnbc.com, dennis.sullivan@msnbc.com, norville@msnbc.com, joe@msnbc.com, msnbcinvestigates@msnbc.com, feedback@msnbc.com, rreagan@msnbc.com, viewerservices@msnbc.com, brian.williams@msnbc.com, imus@msnbc.com, chris.matthews@msnbc.com, msnbcreports@msnbc.com, today@nbc.com, info@cnbc.com, dateline@nbc.com, nightly@nbc.com, MTP@nbc.com, tom.lea@nbc.com, steve.majors@nbc.com, susan.dutcher@nbc.com, rod.prince@nbc.com, jonathan.wald@nbc.com, lisa.hsia@nbc.com, betsy.fischer@nbc.com, mtp@nbc.com, NETAUDR@abc.com, 2020@abc.com, nightline@abcnews.com, wnn@abcnews.com, support@abcnews.go.com, niteline@abc.com, abc.news.magazines@abc.com, phil.boyce@abc.com, thisweek@abc.com, mimi.gurbst@abc.com, mark.nelson@abc.com, virginia.moseley@abc.com, penny.britell@abc.com, muriel.pearson@abc.com, sharon.newman@abc.com, meredith.white@abc.com, gil.pimentel@abc.com, stu.schutzman@abc.com, evening@cbsnews.com, earlyshow@cbs.com, 48hours@cbsnews.com, ftn@cbsnews.com, 60m@cbsnews.com, thismorning@cbsnews.com, bpc@cbsnews.com, dij@cbsnews.com, efm@cbsnews.com, mkx@cbsnews.com, pma@cbsnews.com, rbc@cbsnews.com, sundays@cbsnews.com, grain@cbsnews.com, realitycheck@cbsnews.com, pls@cbsnews.com, pjh@cbsnews.com, wolf@cnn.com, 360@cnn.com, aaron.brown@turner.com, Paula.Zahn2@cnn.com, crossfire@cnn.com, daybreak@cnn.com, jeff.greenfield@cnn.com, livefrom@cnn.com, loudobbs@cnn.com, newsnight@cnn.com, tom.hannon@cnn.com, wam@cnn.com, livetoday@cnn.com, am@cnn.com, andrea.koppel@turner.com, bill.schneider@turner.com, bruce.morton@turner.com, carol.lin@turner.com, daryn.kagan@turner.com, david.ensor@turner.com, jeanne.meserve@turner.com, jim.walton@turner.com, deirdre.walsh@turner.com, kelly.wallace@turner.com, kyra.phillips@turner.com, lou.dobbs@turner.com, miles.obrien@turner.com, paula.zahn@turner.com, candy.crowley@turner.com

Set 2: New York Times, WaPo, LA Times and other National Print media

krugman@nytimes.com, vannatta@nytimes.com, tiwein@nytimes.com, miwein@nytimes.com, weisman@nytimes.com, liptaka@nytimes.com, bobherb@nytimes.com, reissc@nytimes.com, public@nytimes.com, dabrooks@nytimes.com, dakirk@nytimes.com, dasang@nytimes.com, editorial@nytimes.com, erschm@nytimes.com, executiveeditor@nytimes.com, febarr@nytimes.com, foreign@nytimes.com, justice@nytimes.com, burns@nytimes.com, cushman@nytimes.com, markoff@nytimes.com, judym@nytimes.com, letters@nytimes.com, ligree@nytimes.com, nytnews@nytimes.com, managing-editor@nytimes.com, liberties@nytimes.com, mossm@nytimes.com, national@nytimes.com, news-tips@nytimes.com, nicholas@nytimes.com, pekilb@nytimes.com, ropear@nytimes.com, rotone@nytimes.com, stolberg@nytimes.com, slabaton@nytimes.com, weisman@nytimes.com, lewin@nytimes.com, tiwein@nytimes.com, topurd@nytimes.com, washington@nytimes.com, safire@nytimes.com, executive-editor@nytimes.com, managing-editor@nytimes.com, bduffy@usnews.com, letters@usnews.com, gborger@usnews.com, jallen@usnews.com, kwalsh@usnews.com, mzuckerman@usnews.com, vpope@usnews.com, whispers@usnews.com, alevin@usatoday.com, astone@usatoday.com, bslavin@usatoday.com, bnichols@usatoday.com, bwelch@usatoday.com, editor@usatoday.com, dmoniz@usatoday.com, ghager@usatoday.com, gflanders@usatoday.com, jlawrence@usatoday.com, jdrinkard@usatoday.com, jbiskupic@usatoday.com, editor@usatoday.com, jkeen@usatoday.com, kkiely@usatoday.com, kjohnson@usatoday.com, mhall@usatoday.com, rbenedetto@usatoday.com, rwolf@usatoday.com, spage@usatoday.com, tsquitieri@usatoday.com, tlocy@usatoday.com, theforum@usatoday.com, wshapiro@usatoday.com, letters@economist.com, amity.shlaes@ft.com, letters.editor@ft.com, philip.stephens@ft.com, greg.hitt@wsj.com, wsj.ltrs@wsj.com, wsjcontact@dowjones.com, jeanne.cummings@wsj.com, jane_mayer@newyorker.com, themail@newyorker.com, deborah.barfield@newsday.com, ken.fireman@newsday.com, Editors@newsweek.com, WebEditors@newsweek.com, Letters@newsweek.com, letters@time.com, lettersbwol@businessweek.com, letters@washingtontimes.com, gpierce@washingtontimes.com, jmccaslin@washingtontimes.com, dkeil@bloomberg.net, wroberts@bloomberg.net, ghall@bloomberg.net, hprzybyla@bloomberg.net, jcohen@bloomberg.net, NewsAlert@letters.washingtonpost.com, letters@washpost.com, webnews@washingtonpost.com, georgewill@washpost.com, jimhoagland@washpost.com, ombudsman@washpost.com, powellm@washpost.com, kurtzh@washpost.com, abramowitz@washpost.com, achenbachj@washpost.com, allenh@washpost.com, allenm@washpost.com, aranam@washpost.com, argetsinger@washpost.com, asherm@washpost.com, chuck.babbington@washingtonpost.com, bakerp@washpost.com, balzd@washpost.com, barbashf@washpost.com, barkerk@washpost.com, barkinr@washpost.com, barrj@washpost.com, barrs@washpost.com, beckerj@washpost.com, behrp@washpost.com, belmanf@washpost.com, bennettp@washpost.com, benningv@washpost.com, bersellie@washpost.com, beyersd@washpost.com, blumj@washpost.com, bonesteelm@washpost.com, boustanyn@washpost.com, religion@washpost.com, bredemeier@washpost.com, brennanp@washpost.com, brooksd@washpost.com, brownw@washpost.com, browar57@aol.com, carlsonp@washpost.com, castanedar@washpost.com, cavendishs@washpost.com, chans@washpost.com, chandlerc@washpost.com, rajiv@washpost.com, cheaterry@washpost.com, chod@washpost.com, claiborneb@washpost.com, clarkp@washpost.com, cohensh@washpost.com, cohnd@washpost.com, coopermana@washpost.com, copelandl@washpost.com, davenportc@washpost.com, davisp@washpost.com, dawsone@washpost.com, dayk@washpost.com, deanec@washpost.com, deaned@washpost.com, deinerj@washpost.com, deyoungk@washpost.com, dirdam@washpost.com, dobbsm@washpost.com, drezenr@washpost.com, duttj@washpost.com, dvorakp@washpost.com, edsallt@washpost.com, eggend@washpost.com, ahrensf@washpost.com, aizenmann@washpost.com, nightwatch@washpost.com, donovanc@washpost.com, newsonline@bbc.co.uk, editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk, politics.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk, foreign@guardian.co.uk, letters@guardian.co.uk, politics@guardian.co.uk, online@guardian.co.uk, foreigneditor@independent.co.uk, newseditor@independent.co.uk, letters@iht.com, ellengoodman@globe.com, ombud@globe.com, kcooper@globe.com, letter@globe.com, johnson@globe.com, brelis@globe.com, oliphant@globe.com, editor@scoop.co.nz, alastair@scoop.co.nz, selwyn@scoop.co.nz, jhoward@minidata.co.nz, andrew@scoop.co.nz, wade@scoop.co.nz, jgreenburg@tribune.com, jzeleny@tribune.com, jzuckman@tribune.com, jcrewdson@tribune.com, MPossley@tribune.com, rkemper@tribune.com, bjapsen@tribune.com, csimpson@tribune.com, fjames@tribune.com, GWashburn@tribune.com, gdelama@tribune.com, mdorning@tribune.com, JPeres@tribune.com, cgarrett@tribune.com, oped@csps.com, vanslambrouckp@csps.com, ingwersonm@csps.com, cookd@csps.com, dillinj@csps.com, jonesc@csps.com, armstrongs@csps.com, sullivanc@csps.com, grierp@csps.com, axtmank@csps.com, chinnid@csps.com, kieferf@csps.com, marksa@csps.com, mclaughlina@csps.com, ron@csmonitor.com, richeyw@csps.com, grays@csps.com, letters@latimes.com, readers.rep@latimes.com, aaron.zitner@latimes.com, barbara.serrano@latimes.com, barry.siegel@latimes.com, James.Rainey@latimes.com, bill.rempel@latimes.com, bob.drogin@latimes.com, chuck.neubauer@latimes.com, davan.maharaj@latimes.com, david.kelly@latimes.com, david.savage@latimes.com, david.willman@latimes.com, david.zucchino@latimes.com, deborah.nelson@latimes.com, don.frederick@latimes.com, don.woutat@latimes.com, doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com, ellen.barry@latimes.com, esther.schrader@latimes.com, faye.fiore@latimes.com, glenn.bunting@latimes.com, greg.miller@latimes.com, janet.hook@latimes.com, joan.springhetti@latimes.com, joel.havemann@latimes.com, johanna.neuman@latimes.com, john.glionna@latimes.com, john.hendren@latimes.com, john.stewart@latimes.com, jonathan.peterson@latimes.com, josh.getlin@latimes.com, josh.meyer@latimes.com, judy.pasternak@latimes.com, julie.bowles@latimes.com, ken.silverstein@latimes.com, kevin.sack@latimes.com, leslie.hoffecker@latimes.com, letters@latimes.com, linda.finestone@latimes.com, lisa.getter@latimes.com, maggie.farley@latimes.com, maria.laganga@latimes.com, marjorie.miller@latimes.com, mark.barabak@latimes.com, mark.mazzetti@latimes.com, mark.porubcansky@latimes.com, maryann.meek@latimes.com, mary.braswell@latimes.com, mary.curtius@latimes.com, matea.gold@latimes.com, maura.reynolds@latimes.com, michael.finnegan@latimes.com, michael.kinsley@latimes.com, michael.muskal@latimes.com, millie.quan@latimes.com, nick.anderson@latimes.com, patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com, patt.morrison@latimes.com, paul.feldman@latimes.com, peter.wallsten@latimes.com, readers.rep@latimes.com, richard.cooper@latimes.com, richard.simon@latimes.com, robin.abcarian@latimes.com, roger.ainsley@latimes.com, scott.gold@latimes.com, scott.kraft@latimes.com, stephanie.simon@latimes.com, steve.braun@latimes.com, tom.furlong@latimes.com, tom.hamburger@latimes.com, tom.mccarthy@latimes.com, elizabeth.mehren@latimes.com, alan.miller@latimes.com

Set 3: Misc. National media including Newswires Radio Magazines and Internet

feedback@ap.org, jloven@ap.org, lmargasak@ap.org, msilverman@ap.org, npickler@ap.org, rfournier@ap.org, sjohnson@ap.org, pr@ap.org, thunt@ap.org, traum@ap.org, info@ap.org, pr@ap.org, cochs@ap.org, pressreleases@upi.com, tips@upi.com, investigations_desk@upi.com, politics_desk@upi.com, info@ap.org, editor@reuters.com, patricia.wilson.reuters.com@reuters.net, todd.eastham@reuters.com, stella.dawson@reuters.com, arshad.mohammed@reuters.com, randall.mikkelsen@reuters.com, steve.holland@reuters.com, john.whitesides@reuters.com, news@capitolhillbureau.org, sheberer@pbs.org, charlierose@pbs.org, newshour@pbs.org, danschiedel@kozk.pbs.org, theworld@pri.org, newshour@pbs.org, ombudsman@npr.org, atc@npr.org, morning@npr.org, totn@npr.org, morning@npr.org, rsiegel@npr.org, ombudsman@npr.org, sstamberg@npr.org, totn@npr.org, freshair@whyy.org, watc@npr.org, wesat@npr.org, wesun@npr.org, npronsirius@npr.org, worldwide@npr.org, wesat@npr.org, atc@npr.org, ataylor@npr.org, bwilson@npr.org, bnaylor@npr.org, ombudsman@npr.org, cflintoff@npr.org, emcdonnell@npr.org, corrections@npr.org, cwindham@npr.org, dschorr@npr.org, dardalan@npr.org, dgonyea@npr.org, jlyden@npr.org, jcochran@npr.org, jwilliams@npr.org, krudin@npr.org, lhansen@npr.org, ombudsman@npr.org, mliasson@npr.org, lusa@npr.org, mblock@npr.org, atc@npr.org, morning@npr.org, nconan@npr.org, ntotenberg@npr.org, atc@npr.org, pfessler@npr.org, ombudsman@npr.org, pbreslow@npr.org, newstips@wdtn.com, drobinson@wdtn.com, ddmarko@wdtn.com, jason.pheister@wbns10tv.com, jason.pheister@wbns10tv.com, gramshaw@newshour.org, stephanie@stephaniemiller.com, brian_hill@metronetworks.com, mcurtis@njn.org, mail@uttm.com, maureensm@ffww.com, tgrieve@salon.com, talbotd@salon.com, kberger@salon.com, gsealey@salon.com, michelle@salon.com, mjacoby@salon.com, kaufman@salon.com, mfollman@salon.com, mkeeley@salon.com, modonnell@salon.com, kamiya@salon.com, scottr@salon.com, lauram@salon.com, ruth@salon.com, kaufman@salon.com, bwyman@salon.com, jmillman@salon.com, boehlert@salon.com, szacharek@salon.com, jsweeney@salon.com, abenfer@salon.com, ayork@salon.com, fmorgan@salon.com, klauerman@salon.com, jtapper@salon.com, daryl@salon.com, amontgomery@salon.com, cchocano@salon.com, ccolin@salon.com, areiter@salon.com, dawn@salon.com, dcruickshank@salon.com, boehlert@salon.com, stark@salon.com, letters@slate.com, ekelly@gns.gannett.com, fbremner@gns.gannett.com, jcarroll@gns.gannett.com, kscott@gns.gannett.com, lbivins@gns.gannett.com, mgroppe@gns.gannett.com, mmadden@gns.gannett.com, pbrogan@gns.gannett.com, rchebium@gns.gannett.com, aradelat@gns.gannett.com, cweiser@gns.gannett.com, dabrahms@gns.gannett.com, rrhodes@airamericaradio.com, tawalker@airamericaradio.com, geoff@radioleft.com, contact@pacifica.org, jonsintown@airamericaradio.com, me@glennbeck.com, nealznunze@cox.com, brinkerbob@aol.com, howie@wnir.com, colmes@foxnews.com, johncorby@clearchannel.com, bsteigerwald@tribweb.com, mitch@albom.com, sternshow@howardstern.com, buzzflash@buzzflash.com, kos@dailykos.com, mail@democracynow.org, imusshow@yahoo.com, info@jimhightower.com, billy.house@arizonarepublic.com, oped@thestar.ca, rob@opednews.com, jsmyth@plaind.com, mnaymik@plaind.com, feedback@necn.com, alan@alan.com, jnorman@dmreg.com, jconason@observer.com, editorial@progressive.org, news@michaelmoore.com, maillist@michaelmoore.com, MMFlint@aol.com, media@michaelmoore.com, info@michaelmoore.com, mike@mikemalloy.com, fair@fair.org, phart@fair.org, shohauser@fair.org, galbraith@mail.utexas.edu, dcorn@thenation.com, info@thenation.com, drshow@wamu.org, online@tnr.com, connectionweb@wbur.bu.edu, email@wrn.org, justicetalking@asc.upenn.edu, dastor@editorandpublisher.com, Lionel@LionelOnline.com, onthemedia@wnyc.org, editorial@flashpoints.net, now@thirteen.org, jridgeway@villagevoice.com, plorris@univision.net, dmedrano@telemundo.com, abenitez@univision.net, evaldez@univision.net, rvizcon@telemundo.com

Sweatshop Skyscraper: The Empire State Building

2006-03-01T06:04:00.000-05:00

It’s truly a wonder that we pay so little to security workers at the Empire State Building – surely among the topmost terrorist targets in the country – they’ve become yet another symbol of worker exploitation in America.

The security workforce at the ESB, which is largely African American, luckily has a great union in the form of the SEIU Local 32BJ. They’ve just put out a press release detailing the pathetic underpayment of workers ($9/hr. without any benefits) by Copstat and real estate mogul Peter Malkin.

"Being a security officer is one of the few non-fast food jobs available in working-class African-American communities," said Hazel Dukes, President of the NAACP New York State Chapter. "Security companies like Copstat exploit this situation by paying low wages that keep our communities in poverty. These officers deserve to make sufficient, stable wages to provide for themselves and their families."

Is there a corollary to the outsourcing of our ports here in New York City? Or the lack of real security, or even understandable public announcements, on our subways? Sure, because in all these cases, small groups of wealthy insiders are profiting at the expense of the public’s safety. When will Americans wake up and demand better? With Bush garnering 34 percent approval ratings this week, I hope it a sign that Americans smell the coffee.

By the way, the Feb. 28 rally for those security officers in New York coincided with a similar action in Los Angeles led by civil rights veteran, Reverend James M. Lawson, outside the tallest building west of the Mississippi, Library Tower, which was supposedly the recent target of a terrorist plot, according to President Bush. Nonetheless, at the Library Tower we have shortchanged facility security by exploiting workers. A National Day of Action will be held in cities across the country on April 4th.

Free the Pentagon Video

2006-02-27T15:36:00.000-05:00

Is there any facility in the world that you can imagine having more closed circuit TV cameras than the Pentagon? Yet, the world has still yet to see moving images of United Airlines Flight 77 allegedly hitting the Pentagon on 9/11/01. Why is that?

Since then, about a million theories have sprung up in opposition to the official story of the U.S. Government. In books and web sites, skeptics say a missile or a smaller military plane impacted the Pentagon. And, just by looking at the hole left behind, the small amount of damage done and the lack of any identifiable Boeing 757 parts or wreckage, these claims do not seem incredible or insane.

It would be quite simple for the government to release some CCTV video clearly showing the impact of that plane. But the Bush Administration has not done so, and has resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for the footage, claiming lamely the video is part of an ongoing Moussaoui investigation.

Now, in the past few days, the conservative group Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit to get a release of the 9/11 Pentagon strike tapes:

Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense for withholding a video(s) that allegedly shows United Flight 77 striking the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The Pentagon claims it cannot release the video because it is “part of an ongoing investigation involving Zacarias Moussaoui,” but this is a specious argument. Moussaoui already pled guilty in April 2005 for conspiring with al Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings. The death penalty phase of his trial is underway with jury selection nearly complete. What’s left to investigate? Moreover, while the Freedom of Information Act does allow an exemption for ongoing law enforcement investigations, the Defense Department does not even have law enforcement authority over Moussaoui. That belongs to the Department of Justice or the FBI. One reason we’re seeking the information to help put to rest conspiracy theories that a government drone or missile hit the Pentagon rather than the hijacked United airplane. Stay tuned…

Somehow, I doubt we’ll ever see the video. But we should support Judicial Watch on this one.

A Salute to Alberto J. Mora

2006-02-24T18:00:00.000-05:00

Until the end of 2005, the Navy’s top lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, waged a behind-the-scenes battle with Pentagon brass and civilian leaders in an attempt to keep the U.S. military from committing torture and abuse.

He deserves every American’s gratitude. He was one of many uniformed lawyers in the military who objected to the highly aggressive interrogation practices and harsh, degrading prisoner treatment championed by Donald Rumsfeld.

Okay, this guy Mora is a Republican, a military guy and a supporter of the overall Bush agenda. But he stood up for what is right, dammit. In one July 2004 memo, Mora wrote:

"Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II

Mora’s a classic example of an insider who spoke truth to power at key moments, subtly trying to shame the neocons into at least giving torture in the name of freedom a second thought.

"In my view, some of the authorized interrogation techniques could rise to the level of torture, although the intent surely had not been to do so," Mr. Mora wrote.

Mora was effective enough that he briefly brought about a change in the Bush/Rummy/neocon pro-torture policy.

According to the N.Y. Times:

Mr. Mora took up the issue after Mr. Brandt came to him on Dec. 17, 2002, to relay the concerns of Navy criminal agents at Guantánamo that some detainees there were being subjected to "physical abuse and degrading treatment" by interrogators.

Acting with the support of Gordon R. England, who was then secretary of the Navy and is now Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy, Mr. Mora took his concerns to Mr. Haynes, the Defense Department's general counsel.

[snip]

After trying to rally other senior officials to his position, Mr. Mora met again with Mr. Haynes on Jan. 10, 2003. He argued his case even more forcefully, raising the possibility that senior officials could be prosecuted for authorizing abusive conduct, and asking: "Had we jettisoned our human rights policies?"

Still, Mr. Mora wrote, it was only when he warned Mr. Haynes on Jan. 15 that he was planning to issue a formal memorandum on his opposition to the methods — delivering a draft to Mr. Haynes's office — that Mr. Rumsfeld suddenly retracted the techniques.

By then, however, it was too late. The Abu Ghraib story was about to break, and the world would see the pain and degredation the U.S. was inflicting upon its detainees in its “War on Terror.”

Mr. Mora, thanks for trying to stop it.

Ports of Terror

2006-02-22T17:22:00.000-05:00

I don’t want the government of the United Arab Emirates managing ports in New York City where I live and have a baby daughter. It’s crazy. Isn’t Usama supposed to be the one who attacked us on 9/11?

This isn't racism. One reason I'm against it is this Brookings Institution poll. Only ten percent of those in the United Arab Emirates had a “favorable” impression of the United States, and that was before the catastrophe of Bush’s Iraq War. Unfavorable views of the U.S. were held by 86 percent. Can you imagine the heartfelt attitude of Dubai Port World’s owners, managers and workers today?

Furthermore, According to CIA director George “Slam Dunk” Tenant’s testimony to the 9/11 commission, the UAE’s princes like to hunt and go falconing with Usama bin Laden:

MR. FIELDING: Yeah. Well, I would appreciate that on behalf of the Commission if you could do that because it seemed that this -- when the intelligence was so good, and that by the time the camp was dismantled days and days had passed.

So I would appreciate --

MR. TENET: There's also a question, I believe, as to whether bin Ladin was inside or outside the camp --

MR. FIELDING: Of course.

MR. TENET: -- it was a complicating issue in this whole thing -- and whether he was there or not. So there's a second complicating factor here.

The third complicating factor here is, you might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I'm sure entered into everybody's calculation in all this.

But in any event, I would like -- I will try and reconstruct the data as best I can, in terms of what I had in my possession at the time.

And according to the New York Times today:

[Dubai] was also the main transshipment point for Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear engineer who ran the world's largest nuclear proliferation ring from warehouses near the port, met Iranian officials there, and shipped centrifuge equipment, which can be used to enrich uranium, from there to Libya.

So, hmmm, let’s CONNECT SOME DOTS!

The Classified Constitution

2006-02-21T12:12:00.000-05:00

We the [CLASSIFIED] of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish [CLASSIFIED], insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the [CLASSIFIED], and secure the Blessings of [CLASSIFIED] to ourselves and [CLASSIFIED], do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The lead story in today's New York Times is chilling indeed. The Bushies are trying to cleanse our history through aggressive reclassification of documents already unclassified and stored in the National Archives.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

You know the United States Constitution is likewise stored at the National Archives. What's to prevent its classification by King George Dubya?

Bill of Rights -- Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of [CLASSIFIED], or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the [CLASSIFIED], or of the [CLASSIFIED]; or the right of the [CLASSIFIED], and to petition the Government for a [CLASSIFIED].

The Bush Administration shows such monarchical destain for our founding documents. Can you imagine how Bush & Co. would rework the Fourth Amendment? Or maybe just classify its details . . .

Hey, you think this is too fantastical? Think again.

"It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world -- it may be in the United States of America -- that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important."
--Gen. Tommy Franks in Cigar Aficionado, 12/1/2003

Bird Flu Poorhouse

2006-02-18T11:29:00.000-05:00

As the H5N1 virus spreads inexorably across the planet, governments must prepare not only for a possible (probable? inevitable?) public health catastrophe but also for the economic devastation a pandemic would surely inflict. The World Health Organization has estimated the likely economic cost at $800 billion, but that may be on the conservative side.

In the United States, federal and state legislation must be enacted to protect American families from financial ruin. This will be necessary because most Americans will follow the “social distancing” advice of public health officials to stay home in order to avoid exposure to the virus. Inevitably, those weeks or even months of self-quarantine will result in massive loss of personal assets as jobs and savings disappear.

Having escaped the super flu and survived at home, most of the U.S. population could find itself at least temporarily unemployed, with mountains of unpaid bills and at risk of becoming homeless through eviction or foreclosure. There is also the possibility of civil unrest arising from shortages of food, fuel, medicine and vital services. To make matters worse, infectious disease experts say the pandemic will come in two waves over the course of a year or more.

This is the looming crisis Congress and the states must address in advance, by establishing a debt moratorium for the duration of the crisis.

Federal legislation is required now to prevent banks, credit card issuers and all other federally chartered lenders from undertaking collection or foreclosure measures once a national pandemic emergency has been declared and extending for a reasonable period of time after the emergency has passed. The same repayment hiatus should apply to income tax payments, student loans and other direct payments to the federal government.

States and localities should urgently adopt similar legislation covering lenders not subject to federal rules as well as state and local tax obligations, insurance companies, landlords, utilities, etc. Because public and private schools at all levels may be forced to close, tuitions must be refundable or creditable. States must also be vigilant in protecting citizens from unscrupulous interests who will surely seek to profit from their misery.

Government at all levels will suffer huge losses of revenue and will be hard-pressed to provide vital services, cover entitlement obligations and meet payrolls. It may be necessary to institute scrip payment schemes and consider rationing of scarce commodities.

Not unlike the consequences of a thermonuclear war, the flu pandemic many experts say is inevitable will create huge challenges to the nation’s survival and will demand strong leadership. Our political leaders must put aside partisanship and rise to this existential task. They can’t begin soon enough.

Bush's U.N. Plane Hoax

2006-02-17T10:57:00.000-05:00

When not shooting each other in the face for weekend relaxation, the Bush neocons have been doing hard work to deceive Ameicans and the world at large. According to Lawless World by Philippe Sands, Bush was so worried that the fake intelligence (like those lame cartoon chemical lab trucks) hyped by Colin Powell at the U.N. wouldn’t sufficiently rile up Americans and the U.N. Security Council for an Iraq war, he decided to paint up a U.S. spy plane as a U.N. plane and fly it over Iraq, in hopes that Saddam would shoot it down.

In fact, Democrats.com is now offering $1,000 to any reporter who will directly ask Bush this question:

"How can you claim you were trying to avoid war through the UN, when you told Prime Minister Blair on Jan. 31, 2003, that if you failed to get a resolution from the UN authorizing war, 'military action would follow anyway' - including a scheme to paint a U.S. spy plane in U.N. colors to provoke an Iraqi attack on the U.N. itself?

It’s a great idea, offering to pay the media to ask tough questions, since reporters are evidently being paid not to ask them by their “mainstream” corporate overlords at GE or Disney or Viacom.

USA PATRIOT Act & Nerve Gas Alarms

2006-02-16T12:33:00.000-05:00

Are there really just three U.S. Senators willing to stand up for our civil liberties and the Bill of Rights? Have we really come down to three?

Only Sens. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., and Robert C. Byrd, R-W.Va., supported Feingold on Thursday's vote to stop what Frist had characterized as a filibuster preventing the Senate from acting on the legislation [USA PATRIOT act renewal]. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., did not vote.

Where the heck were the remaining Democrats? Where were the GOP members concerned about big government intrusion?

I can't help but feel that this sellout of our constitutional protections is related to the Feb 8 false nerve gas attack alarm at the Senate's Russell Office Building. That must have been pretty frightening for the 200 Senators and staff members who were held in a parking garage while the nerve gas scare was checked out. Perhaps such terrifying experiences make Senators more likely to vote to strip our rights in exchange for the promise of more security.

Certainly, there was a stiffer resistance to renewing the onerous USA PATRIOT act before that false alarm than afterwards. The Capitol Police should really fix those sensors in the Senate, because those false alarms are affecting our civil rights.

Reminds one of the last time the USA PATRIOT act was up for debate in the Senate, in 2001. That's when prominant Democrats were sent letters containing anthrax later traced to U.S. government labs. Oh yeah, three of Feingold's staffers were exposed too.

Anthrax in the mail certainly influenced the debate and added to the climate of fear in the Capitol building itself. Now, at least it's just a false alarm. Or maybe it's just a warning.

Dick with Gun

2006-02-14T09:45:00.000-05:00

Dick Cheney’s shooting of a pal while hunting defenseless cage-raised quail is one of those wonderful moments that crystallize and forever set the public’s perception. It’s like when Quayle couldn’t spell “potato,” or when Bush said, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” as New Orleans drowned.

What it indeliby sets in the public mind is an image of Cheney (and by default the whole Bush syndicate) as reckless, incompetent and violent law-breakers who can’t shoot straight and blame victims. Yay!

If only there was an opposition party in this country up to the task of removing the sick Bush/Cheney GOP power structure from office, there might be a glimmer of hope for this nation. A hope to get out of Iraq with a shred of national honor. A hope of avoiding economic disaster. A hope of addressing looming environmental and energy catastrophes. And a hope of securing this country from terrorists and hostile regimes.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is incapable of endorsing or promoting agents of real change, or even capitalizing on the worst military, diplomatic and social policy blunders of the last 100 years of American history. When the Democratic Party is given the chance to field candidates that would tap the patriotic, anti-Bush passions of the majority of Americans, the party leadership instead promotes Republican-lite insiders that are safe bets to 1) lose, 2) or win and change nothing.

Case in point: Paul Hackett, candidate for Senate from Ohio. This guy served the county in Iraq, regularly calls Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld “chickenhawks” for their avoidance of military service, and basically speaks truth to power. Hackett almost won a heavily Republican district by taking straight and calling Bush’s War a failure and a disgrace, based on his own experience in combat there.

You think this guy would be the Dem’s dream candidate? Think again.

The New York Times
February 14, 2006

Popular Ohio Democrat Drops Out of Race, and Perhaps Politics
By IAN URBINA

Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and popular Democratic candidate in Ohio's closely watched Senate contest, said yesterday that he was dropping out of the race and leaving politics altogether as a result of pressure from party leaders.

Mr. Hackett said Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Harry Reid of Nevada, the same party leaders who he said persuaded him last August to enter the Senate race, had pushed him to step aside so that Representative Sherrod Brown, a longtime member of Congress, could take on Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent.

Mr. Hackett staged a surprisingly strong Congressional run last year in an overwhelmingly Republican district and gained national prominence for his scathing criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War. It was his performance in the Congressional race that led party leaders to recruit him for the Senate race.

But for the last two weeks, he said, state and national Democratic Party leaders have urged him to drop his Senate campaign and again run for Congress.

"This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me," said Mr. Hackett, whose announcement comes two days before the state's filing deadline for candidates. He said he was outraged to learn that party leaders were calling his donors and asking them to stop giving and said he would not enter the Second District Congressional race.

"For me, this is a second betrayal," Mr. Hackett said. "First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me."

Mr. Hackett was the first Iraq war veteran to seek national office, and the decision to steer him away from the Senate race has surprised those who see him as a symbol for Democrats who oppose the war but want to appear strong on national security.

"Alienating Hackett is not just a bad idea for the party, but it also sends a chill through the rest of the 56 or so veterans that we've worked to run for Congress," said Mike Lyon, executive director for the Band of Brothers, a group dedicated to electing Democratic veterans to national office. "Now is a time for Democrats to be courting, not blocking, veterans who want to run."

But Democratic leaders say Representative Brown, a seven-term incumbent from Avon, has a far better chance of toppling Senator DeWine.

"It boils down to who we think can pull the most votes in November against DeWine," said Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. "And in Ohio, Brown's name is golden. It's just that simple."

Mr. Fern added that Mr. Brown's fund-raising abilities made him the better Senate candidate. By the end of last year, Mr. Brown had already amassed $2.37 million, 10 times what Mr. Hackett had raised.

Senator Reid did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

Asked about Mr. Hackett's contention that he had been pressed to leave the Senate race, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Phil Singer, said, "We've told both Sherrod Brown and Paul Hackett that avoiding a primary will make it easier to win the Ohio Senate seat, " but he added, "Obviously, the decision to run is Mr. Hackett's and Mr. Hackett's alone."

Mr. Brown declined to comment on Mr. Hackett's candidacy, saying that he was strictly focused on building his own campaign.

Democrats wanted to avoid a drawn-out primary, especially one that could get bruising with a tough-talking outsider like Mr. Hackett.

The Ohio Senate race is regarded as critical to Democratic aspirations to take back Congress in the fall. Aside from focusing on Senator DeWine, the Democrats also hope to win as many as eight House seats in Ohio and the governorship from the Republicans.

Ohio Democrats are hoping to exploit the larger problems plaguing the Republicans. State Republicans have struggled to distance themselves from Gov. Bob Taft, a Republican who cannot run again because of term limits and who was found guilty last summer of four misdemeanor ethics violations. Representative Bob Ney's still-unfolding role in the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff also looms over the state's Republicans.

Mr. Hackett said he was unwilling to run for the Congressional seat because he had given his word to three Democratic candidates that he would not enter that race.

"The party keeps saying for me not to worry about those promises because in politics they are broken all the time," said Mr. Hackett, who plans to return to his practice as a lawyer in the Cincinnati area. "I don't work that way. My word is my bond."

Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the Cook Political Report, said that part of what made Democratic leaders nervous about Mr. Hackett was what had also made him so popular with voters.

"Hackett is seen by many as a straight talker, and he became an icon to the liberal bloggers because he says exactly what they have wished they would hear from a politician," Ms. Duffy said. "On the other hand, the Senate is still an exclusive club, and the party expects a certain level of decorum that Hackett has not always shown."

Mr. Hackett was widely criticized last year for using indecent language to describe President Bush. Last month, state Republicans attacked Mr. Hackett for saying their party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said "aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden."

Though Republicans called for an apology, Mr. Hackett repeated the mantra of his early campaign: "I said it. I meant it. I stand behind it."

Again, I think it is time for the replacement of Harry Reid as the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. They guy voted for the awful bankruptcy bill, supports renewal of the un-American USA PATRIOT Act, and apologizes for saying mean things about Republicans.

As for Chuck Schumer, he’s useless.

Notice, Hackett refuses to apologize to the Republicans. He’s my kind of Democrat. I wish he hadn’t been stabbed in the back by our Democratic losers … I mean leaders.

F*cked Justice

2006-02-10T14:37:00.000-05:00

At the same time that super-corrupt GOP wunderkind John G. Rowland is set free after serving a mere 10 months for selling favors and access as Governor of Connecticut, a man in Kansas is going to jail for life for supposedly planning to sell crack cocaine.

Now, I'm not pro-crack or anything, but this life sentence seems completely out of whack when measured against the crime. It deserves national attention.

Man caught with crack cocaine near KU faces life in prison

By Eric Weslander

For the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World

Thursday, February 9, 2006

A Leavenworth man caught with crack cocaine during a traffic stop on the Kansas University campus is facing life in prison.

Jurors in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., on Wednesday convicted Theogen E. Garner, 42, of one count of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine within 1,000 feet of a public university.

KU police stopped Garner's pickup truck about 1:12 a.m. July 21, 2005, near 15th and Iowa streets after seeing it weaving within its lane and driving at nearly half the speed limit. The officer saw Garner's eyes were bloodshot and his hands were shaking, and a computerized record check showed Garner was on parole, according to court records.

Another officer arrived and spotted what appeared to be a marijuana cigar behind Garner's ear, according to records. Garner admitted it was marijuana, and while an officer was patting him down, he pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and said: "I got some drugs in here. I'm just gonna go ahead and lay down on the ground."

Police eventually found 82 grams of crack cocaine in the truck in addition to the 13 grams in his pocket.

Garner told officers he had bought 3.25 ounces of crack cocaine in Lawrence and planned to sell it and double his money.

According to U.S. Atty. Eric Melgren, Garner faces a mandatory life sentence because of the amount of cocaine combined with his past convictions in Leavenworth County for sale of cocaine and sale of marijuana.

The case was the first one prosecuted in federal court by Douglas County Assistant Dist. Atty. Brandon Jones, who recently received a special designation allowing him to try federal cases.

Dist. Atty. Charles Branson said involving Jones with federal cases would allow more drug dealers caught in Lawrence to be charged in federal court, where penalties are stiffer.

"If you're a drug dealer, we're going to get you off the street one way or the other," Branson said. "If we've got to take you on up to federal court to do so, we're going to do that."

Call or write Douglas County (Kan.) District Attorney Charles Branson at (785) 841-0211 or districtattorney@douglas-county.com and tell him that this kind of draconian sentence is a discredit to his office and to the justice system in Kansas.

Al Gore for President 2008

2006-02-09T14:36:00.000-05:00

To follow up on yesterday's post, I encourage readers of redglare to sign the Al Gore for President Draft Petition. If I could find a Russ Feingold for Vice President petition, I would direct to that too!

Dear Vice-President Gore,

We petition you as concerned citizens.

This nation needs a leader with vision, experience and passion. Americans of every political persuasion are tired of the neglect, greed, cronyism, corruption, and gross incompetence of the current administration. Our next President faces the daunting task of putting the country back on track on many domestic and international fronts.

Our nation's economy, which stands at the brink of financial bankruptcy, requires significant course-correction to return to the strong and robust state that you helped build during your tenure as Vice-President. Special interest-driven policies of the current administration imperil the environment; your extensive knowledge and lifelong commitment are sorely needed in crafting forward-thinking, sustainable, and balanced environmental policies. The provisions of our social safety net originally designed to offer a helping hand to the neediest among us were severely undermined during the long winter of Republican Congressional domination, and they await revitalization.

On the international front, the unwarranted, ill-advised, and ill-waged war in Iraq (that you firmly opposed in unequivocal terms from the beginning) continues to burn financial resources, diminish our international credibility and, most important, take the lives of Americans, their allies and countless Iraqi citizens. And yet the outcome remains uncertain. Our next President faces the task of resolving the Iraq quagmire and mending our weakened international relationships.

Mr. Gore, as a man of stature, intelligence, experience, visionary leadership, and deep, well-deserved respect at home and abroad, you are uniquely qualified to meet and master the many challenges facing the next leader of the United States of America.

The idea of your candidacy appeals to a broad cross-section of the electorate, and promises to energize scores of progressive grassroots volunteers who will stand with you every step of the way.

We ask you to take on the mantle of leadership, and accept the myriad calls for you to seek the Presidency of the United States.

Thank You.

No Flip-Flops

2006-02-08T15:01:00.000-05:00

I knew John Kerry was going to lose the 2004 presidential election. I knew because I attended the Republican convention at Madison Square Garden in New York on a press pass. It was so obvious that the GOP had Kerry’s number. It wasn’t just those “Terrorists [HEART] John Kerry” signs. It was those goddamned flip-flops.

The flip-flops, which were nowhere to be seen the first night of the Republican convention, were everywhere by the end of the festivities. People were clapping flip-flops together instead of using their hands.

And the problem wasn’t simply that Kerry had changed positions on issues, like saying he’d voted against funding the Iraq War before he’d voted for it. That was an explainable, if damaging, gaffe.

The problem was the flip-flops had a deep metaphorical power. John Kerry had not only “flip-flopped,” as the Repugs repeated mercilessly, on issues of war and peace. But John Kerry, with his elongated visage and patrician chin, had a face shaped somewhat like a flip-flop.

Kerry’s windsurfing photo-op, which was one of the worst photo-op ideas since “Mission Accomplished,” re-enforced the well-founded impression that Kerry pursued a namby-pamby, elite, flip-flop lifestyle: toes in the sand, shades on, New York Times and iced cappuccinos.

The Bushes clear brush on the ranch.

Meantime, the Bushies were scaring the bejesus out of America with terror alerts and images of mushroom clouds and dirty bombs. They were swiftboating Kerry, who looked weak when he couldn’t defend himself from GOP lies and deceit. And America thought, “Jeez, if this Kerry can’t defend himself from that nice good ol’ boy George Bush, how the hell is going to keep my family safe from Usama bin Laden?”

I was disappointed Kerry didn’t defend himself more vigorously, and that disappointment was magnified when Kerry did nothing to challenge the weird Ohio voting anomalies, leaving it to Barbara Boxer to do the fighting when it came time to challenge the election results in the Senate.

So, in 2006 and 2008, let’s get behind Democrats that will fight for themselves, their party and their country. The Democratic presidential candidates from the last two cycles, Gore and Kerry, could both be candidates in 2008.

From what I’ve seen of both, I favor Al Gore. Gore’s new fire and sense of righteous indignation makes him almost unrecognizable as that wooden, robotic candidate from 2000. Being robbed of the presidency has deepened Gore and made him seem more human. Gore has been a forceful and passionate advocate of civil liberties and a common sense foreign policy. He has the experience and the name recognition to win in primaries and, after all, we’ve already elected him vice president twice and president once.

I’m not trying to put down John Kerry. He’s served his country well and is an honorable man. But Al Gore makes a better candidate and should be our next president.

No Reason to Smile

2006-02-06T15:42:00.000-05:00

Anytime I’m feeling down or uninspired or hopeless about the affairs of our country and the state of our democracy, I find that revisiting this photo of Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) from his pre-Senate days makes me happy again. What an amazing grin!

Coleman’s dentist put this “before” shot on his web site a couple of years ago. I can’t believe this Coleman doofus beat Walter Mondale at anything! I wish a true American patriot, Paul Wellstone, were still in that Senate seat!

Anyway, with Alberto “we don’t need no stinkin’ warrants” Gonzales today defending the illegal wiretapping of Americans, refusing to tell Senators if U.S. Mail is being opened (it is), and basically laying down a fantastical argument for tyranny, I needed a lift. Thanks, Norm.

Is Jon Stewart Going Right Wing?

2006-02-04T08:11:00.000-05:00

Strange to say I am highly annoyed with my longtime favorite TV show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I am afraid Stewart may be going over to the dark side, perhaps because he has become so successful and popular.

He will host this year’s Oscars, after all. How much more establishment can you get than that?

On the Feb. 2 show, Stewart derided grieving mom Cindy Sheehan for her ejection from the State of the Union address, comparing her to King Kong in a ridiculous graphic. Next, he fixed his attention upon her support of Hugo Chavez, who he accused of jailing journalists, saying they’re “currently serving the four year prison term you get in Venezuela for criticizing Chavez in the press.”

Does this sound like Rush Limbaugh, or what?

STEWART: Cindy Sheehan. The antiwar activist was invited to attend the speech by a democratic congresswoman but was arrested just beforehand.

REPORTER (VIDEO): Can you tell us why you were arrested?

SHEEHAN (VIDEO): Because I was wearing a shirt.

STEWART: Arrested for wearing a shirt! My god, it’s the opposite of COPS! Seriously, that’s the worst thing to tell your cell mate. ‘What are you in for?’ ‘Wearing a shirt.’ Anyway the offending shirt read, ‘2,242 dead. How many more?’ Sadly she has already had to modify it.

SHEEHAN (VIDEO): I was surprised by just the overwhelming use of I think excessive force against me last night

STEWART: The arrest was shocking. I saw the footage and honestly I thought it was a little harsh.

[Graphic of Sheehan looking absurd as King Kong atop the Empire State Building]

STEWART: I knew the shackles were okay, but to bring in the planes I thought that was too much. So a grieving war mother arrested in the People’s House for a somber antiwar statement. Is there any way this poor woman could squander our sympathy?

[VIDEO OF SHEEHAN AND HUGO CHAVEZ w/ graphic underneath reading “The Antiwar Movement” that stays up under Chavez alone for about five seconds]

STEWART: Ugh! She’s hugging Hugo Chavez! Well played ma’am. Yes that’s Venezuelan pres Hugo Chavez, well known for his strong anti-U.S. rhetoric, suppression of political opposition and support for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

SHEEHAN (VIDEO): I appreciate your courage and your stance against the empire of George Bush and my government

STEWART: Great. So now Hugo Chavez has his Christmas card this year. I guess he can send it to everyone currently serving the four-year prison term you get in Venezuela for criticizing Chavez in the press.

There are problems with press freedoms in Venezuela, but not of the sort or extreme Jon Stewart alleges in his show. This is from the International Press Institute, which has places Venezuela on its watchlist:

Venezuela
Placed on the list on 29 October 2000, the original press release on Venezuela stated, “President Chávez, who swept to power in February 1999, on a left of centre platform, has alienated important sectors of society and has frequently criticised local and foreign media for ‘distorting’ his proposals for reform.”

The decision was reaffirmed on 26 January 2001, 20 October 2001, 10 May 2002 and 23 November 2002. On 13 September 2003, the Executive Board of IPI voted to keep Venezuela on the list. The decision came after the report from an IPI mission to the country that said, “[the] deterioration of press freedom was the result of President Hugo Chávez’s frequent verbal attacks on the press, which are an incitement to physical violence against the media, and the inefficiency of the authorities in investigating and punishing those responsible for crimes against journalists.” The decision to keep the country on the IPI Watch List was reaffirmed at a board meeting on 15 May 2004.

And this is from the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2004 country-by-county report “Attacks on the Press:”

Several worrying legal developments in Venezuela curtailed press freedom in 2004. In particular, a new broadcast media law could be used to restrict news coverage critical of the government.

Conflict between President Hugo Chávez Frías and the private media continued in 2004. Soon after Chávez was elected in 1998 on promises of a "democratic revolution" and radical reform, the press aligned itself with the opposition, whose vision for the future of Venezuela severely conflicted with Chávez's. Because many opposition parties were disorganized or discredited, the media helped fill the void and became one of the most powerful sources of government opposition. Chávez has often blasted the private press and accused media owners of being "coup-plotters," "fascists," and "terrorists." He has also threatened to shut down private TV channels' broadcasts, and his government has used state-owned media as a counterweight to private media. Private media, meanwhile, have often openly promoted the agenda of opposition parties.

Government intolerance of both international and domestic criticism persisted. Officials accused the Washington, D.C.–based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), its Executive Secretary Santiago A. Canton, and the IACHR's Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression Eduardo Bertoni of bias and prejudice against the Venezuelan government. In his radio and TV call-in program, "Aló, Presidente" (Hello, President), Chávez accused Venezuelan human rights organizations of receiving U.S. government funds to conspire against his government.

Journalists were attacked throughout 2004, but the most serious incidents occurred in early June, while Venezuelans waited for the Electoral National Council to verify signatures that eventually triggered a referendum on Chávez's rule, which the president won. Government supporters attacked two media outlets in Caracas.

The attackers threw stones and other objects at the offices of Radio Caracas Televisión and crashed a stolen truck into its entrance and set it on fire. When National Guard troops arrived minutes later, the attackers left. Two hours later, about 20 people threw bottles and stones at the building housing the daily El Nacional (The National) and burned a newspaper truck. They then rammed a truck into the gates of the building's parking lot and ransacked the adjacent administrative offices of the tabloid Así es la Noticia (That Is the News), which is owned by El Nacional's publishing company, damaging computers, furniture, and windows. They dispersed at around 5 p.m., when National Guard troops came and restored order.

Claiming that the Venezuelan government had failed to protect the safety and the right to freedom of expression of the two newspapers' employees, in June the IACHR requested that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights intervene. In July, the Inter-American Court issued a resolution asking Venezuelan authorities to guarantee the safety of the newspapers' staff and their right to freedom of expression.

On December 7, the National Assembly formally approved the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, which was immediately signed into law by Chávez and went into effect two days later. A controversial law drafted by the National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel), it was introduced in January 2003 before the National Assembly by pro-government legislators who said the legislation was needed to "establish the social responsibility" of TV and radio broadcasters.

Although legislators stripped the law of some of its most onerous provisions in 2003, it contains vaguely worded restrictions that could hamper freedom of expression. Under Article 29, for instance, television and radio stations that disseminate messages that "promote, defend, or incite breaches of public order" or "are contrary to the security of the Nation" may be suspended for up to 72 hours. If a media outlet repeats the infractions within the next five years, its broadcasting concession may be suspended for up to five years.

Article 7 of the law allows broadcasting "graphic descriptions or images of real
violence" from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. only if the broadcast is live and the content is "indispensable" for understanding the information or is aired as a consequence of unforeseen events. Local TV channels refrained from airing footage of violent riots that occurred in Caracas in early December for fear of violating the law.

Also in December, pro-government legislators approved reforms to more than
30 articles in the Penal Code. The amended articles broadened the categories of government officials who may invoke so-called desacato (disrespect) provisions, which criminalize expressions that are offensive to public officials and state institutions, and drastically increased criminal penalties for defamation and slander. CPJ believes that the reforms are intended to punish dissent and were approved hastily, ignoring other efforts to reform the Penal Code that were already under discussion in the National Assembly.

In early September, Mauro Marcano, a radio host and columnist, was shot dead by unidentified attackers in the city of Maturín, the capital of eastern Monagas State. At the time of his murder, he was also a municipal councilman and had long been involved in politics. According to journalists, Marcano aggressively denounced drug trafficking and police corruption, and in the past police had captured drug traffickers based on his reporting. In late September, the National Assembly established a special legislative committee to investigate Marcano's murder. CPJ continues to monitor the case to determine if Marcano was killed for his journalistic work.

In March, military prosecutors charged journalist Patricia Poleo with inciting rebellion and defaming the Venezuelan armed forces after she showed a video that allegedly revealed the presence of Cubans at a Venezuelan military base. The opposition has alleged that the Cuban government helps indoctrinate Venezuelans, which Venezuelan officials have repeatedly denied. In November, Poleo announced that prosecutors had dropped the case against her.

Also in November, military prosecutors charged columnist Manuel Isidro Molina with defaming the armed forces for writing that a retired air force colonel who disappeared had been beaten and killed at military intelligence facilities. When it turned out that the retired officer was alive, Molina acknowledged his error and published a correction. His lawyers have requested that his case be transferred to a civilian court.

And from Reporters Without Borders 2004 Press Freedom Index:

Bombings, physical attacks and threats to journalists and media hostile to President Hugo Chávez were fewer than last year in Venezuela but remained frequent and partly explain the country’s low place (90th) on the list. However tension has eased a little since Chávez won a 15 August referendum confirming him in office.

Again, serious problems but nothing like the “four-year prison term you get in Venezuela for criticizing Chavez in the press,” Jon Stewart claims.

My wife says maybe the Daily Show just got some bad information, and I hope she’s right. The reason I care is because the show has been so consistently great for so long.

Has anybody else detected right wing talking points in the Daily Show’s comedy lately?

Jimmy Carter: My Favorite President

2006-02-03T14:46:00.000-05:00

I have a nasty, evil cold right now (it’s not avian flu, right?). I’m taking it easy and getting bed rest and plenty of liquids. Until I’m 100 percent better, I plan to lay off heavy-duty redglare writing duties, and let some smarter people do the talking for once.

I saw former President Jimmy Carter on Larry King Live on Wednesday night, and thought he had a bunch of great things to say.

Of U.S. presidents in power during my lifetime (I was born in 1970) Carter is my favorite, despite the “malaise” stuff. He is the one American president who acted morally, and serves an example of what I consider to be a true Christian, as opposed to the bloodthirsty, hateful brand of “Christianity” lately on display by America’s leaders.

Here are some of Carter’s best quotes....

On Bush’s ‘illegal wiretapping....

KING: What do you make of -- what do you make of warrantless wiretapping? The president defends it almost daily. In a major speech in Nashville today he did a long defense of it as he did in the State of the Union.

CARTER: I think it's illegal and improper and unnecessary. There's no reason at all why this president, as have all presidents in history, if they want to get or wiretap American citizens then all they have to do is go to a court that's set up for that purpose and let judges agree with the president that this American citizen needs to have his or her telephone tapped because it's a matter of security. That's all that has to be done.

So, there's a legal way to do it and an illegal way to do it and I think in the last two or three years we've been seeing it done and just found out that it has been done illegally. That's not necessary.

On the government’s bungled Katrina response....

KING: What's your overall view of Katrina and the very short amount of time paid by the president to it in the State of the Union?

CARTER: Well, all of us know the extreme disaster that afflicted not only New Orleans but major parts of Alabama and Mississippi. It was one of the greatest natural catastrophes in the history of our country and there were major promises made that New Orleans would be built back the way it was.

I think now after all these months the attention being given to it has been minimal and the amount of actual reconstruction has been extremely disappointing and the degree of priority that it has at the top level of our government, that is in the White House, I think was indicated by the very casual mention of it during the president's speech.

So, I hope this is not an indication of the federal agencies, all of them, state agencies as well and private organizations abandoning many of the people who have suffered in New Orleans and now are very doubtful about whether they'll ever have a home to go back to in those regions that were damaged.

KING: Why on earth would we give minimal attention to this devastation? I mean what would be the -- how could we reason that?

CARTER: I don't know. I think it's an unreasonable aftermath of this horrible catastrophe and I don't think any American, if there was a poll done, I think it would be 99 percent of all Americans would say let's give the Katrina victims top priority.

Let's make sure that they can have their lives restored. Let's build the dike to protect them from future flooding and let's give them adequate facilities to rebuild homes even better than they were. I think that's what Americans would like to see.

And, I'm very distressed not only at the lack of attention given when the catastrophe first occurred, which brought discredit on our government and on FEMA, an organization that I established earlier, but it also now is bringing additional and sustained discredit on the attention that our government is giving to these poor people.

And, finally, on Bush’s failed Iraq War....

CARTER: No, I haven't supported it from the very beginning. In fact, I wrote a major, I thought it was a major editorial in "The New York Times" a few months before we invaded Iraq pointing out that it was an unnecessary and unjust war and the editorial was repeated on full page ads in a lot of other newspapers.

So, I've always been against the war. But once we got there, obviously we need to give our young men and women our absolute and full support, so I'm not in favor of an immediate withdrawal. I think we ought to decide as a nation that we will turn over as quickly as possible not only the military responsibilities to the Iraqi people but also let them manage their own economic affairs.

I don't think we have any idea now of turning over their oil supplies and let them handle who gets to manage the oil, like even France and Russia and I hope we'll back off and let them run their own political affairs.

But, what I believe is that there are people in Washington now, some of our top leaders, who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they're looking for ten, 20, 50 years in the future...

KING: Why?

CARTER: ...having major American military board -- well, because that was the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that ten years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.

I would like to hear that. But that's one of the things that concerns Iraqi people. And when I meet with Arab leaders around the world they all have noticed this. They're the ones that have brought it to my attention and I think it's an accurate statement.

KING: Do you believe that's the intent of the administration to keep the -- when you say high officials do you mean the Bush administration wants to keep troops in Iraq ad infinitum?

CARTER: Yes, I do and I hope I'm wrong. I don't think there's any doubt that we did not need to go into Iraq. We went in there under false pretenses, either inadvertent misunderstanding of intelligence or maybe deliberate. I'm not saying it was deliberate. I don't think President Bush was deliberately misleading us, maybe some of his subordinates.

But, I think it was a mistake to go in and I think that the United States has got to make sure that the Iraqi people know and the surrounding neighbors know we're willing to get our troops out of Iraq when and if a government is established and I hope that will be soon and the Iraqis are able to maintain order.

And, I think a lot of the violence that takes place now in the streets of Iraq are caused by the fact that American troops are still there. I think that will in itself that change will automatically reduce the terrorism considerably.

State of the Union

2006-02-01T14:07:00.000-05:00

Watching last night’s speech, I can’t understand how the Democrats sit there in the chamber, listening to King George the Incompetent spout unrepentant fantasies about America, freedom and democracy, without walking out en masse while together humming “The Star Spangled Banner.”

I mean, I know we’re supposed to have a “loyal opposition” in this country, but things have gone too far in this direction. Look, Democrat Henry Cuellar, pictured above, is in kissy-face mode!

If the Democrats dutifully sit there out of respect for the office of the Presidency, I wish they wouldn’t. Bush has showed no respect to the Congress or the Constitution, so why should Democrats in Congress play props for his SOTU propaganda?

Rather, call in sick. Don’t show up. If you do, boo the guy. Chant “Stop Spying on Us!” Leave when they arrest Cindy Sheehan for her free speech tee shirt. Walk out when Bush smirks “freedom is on the march.” Refuse to shake Rumsfeld’s hand. Stop smooching Condi Rice. Get out of there.

Bush, in his speech, actually evoked a “system of two parties” as if the Republican/Democratic monopoly on power was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution rather than a sign of our calcified, stagnant system of politics. And, watching the Dems and Repugs backslapping and chuckling over who gives standing O’s for which lines, its easy to see why Bush mistakenly thinks we have a “system of two parties.”

This week, a couple of dozen Senate Dems found enough spine to vote against cloture in the Alito confirmation process. That is, I guess, considered a victory by some progressives. But last night, there was Alito in his SCOTUS robes nonetheless. In reality, it was never even close.

Enough of the collegiality, dammit. Until the end of the Bush monarchy, all Democrats, indeed all lovers of democracy, need to be in scorched earth, bare-knuckles, take-no-prisoners fighting mode.

To the Mountaintop!

2006-01-31T09:17:00.000-05:00

Today we mourn the passing of Coretta Scott King, who by her great husband’s side righteously stood against American social injustice, endured illegal government spying and ultimately saw her husband martyred under still-sketchy circumstances. She made America a better place for all citizens, and we offer condolences to the King family.

It is both sad and ironic that Mrs. King’s passing comes as the powers-that-be again go on bloody military adventures, again arrogantly flout the law of the land to spy illegally upon peace activists and workers for social equality. The ACLU in Georgia has uncovered Pentagon spying upon vegans, “peace moms” and others.

Also, Mrs. King passes away as the legal protections for civil disobedience, privacy, free speech, freedom of association and the press, are all under sustained attack. Look no further than the mass jailing and long, harsh detention of protestors at the 2004 GOP convention here in New York City, where dissenters were banned from assembling on the Central Park lawn. (New York City is also where bicyclists participating in Critical Mass rides are routinely arrested). Look at all our jailed journalists. Look at the secret searches of our library records, mail, e-mail and homes.

Now, with the Supreme Court’s addition of Sam Alito, the scales of justice have tipped much further to the right. Expect the same, but more of it.

There is still much work to do for social justice, for peace and for equality in the United States. Let’s be motivated by the Kings’ good example and not falter or fail to speak up in the face of government intimidation. Let’s see the ascension of a neo-fascist like Alito as a moment to steel ourselves for the fights that will come on our way to Dr. King’s “mountaintop” rather than a moment to cower in defeat.

More than Alito on the Line

2006-01-30T09:31:00.000-05:00

Today we will see which Democrats in the Senate are champions of the American people and which are enablers of a police state; which truly value privacy and the lives of women and which are too chicken to gun-sling for reproductive rights when the clock strikes high noon; which senators value individual rights, environmental protection, workplace rules, consumer protection, governmental checks and balances and separation of church and state and which fear a GOP-threatened “nuclear option” more than the rollback of all of these.

Never forget how your senator votes today on ending debate on Samuel Alito. Let their vote today be seared, like the vote on the Iraq War, on your memory and let it guide you in actively supporting or opposing them in 2006, 2008 -- whenever they run for re-election or higher office.

For Bush and his arrogant, incompetent cabal will have to slink away from power someday, but Alito stays on the court for a lifetime, to do his level best to return us to the Gilded Age in terms of legal protections and individual rights. The last line of defense must stop him: Democrats in the senate who haven’t been coopted or compromised by the corporate-military-industrial complex, or otherwise turned against the interests of average Americans.

There is a possible filibuster, which may be as little as three votes away, in the works. For organizing this, Americans owe Senators Kerry and Kennedy their gratitude and active support right now, today. Call 888-355-3588 and lean on your home state senator or on mine (Clinton is in the fight, Schumer isn’t yet so call him). Others to focus energy on include Barbara Mikulski.

If Democrats aren’t willing to stand up for these most basic American values now, when it counts, how can they be trusted to stand up for anything, anytime?

Hamas Solution

2006-01-27T13:35:00.000-05:00

The surprise victory of theocratic and terrorist Hamas puts the Bush administration in a bind. It has chosen to support the exercise of democracy by the Palestinian people but reject their decision. But instead of shunning the new leaders and cutting off US and EU assistance, Washington should immediately launch a covert campaign to wield influence with key Hamas players, subverting them with potfuls of cash in numbered Zurich accounts. These guys have no idea how to run a mini-state and will need money and guidance. The Saudis and other Gulf oil states would gladly chip in to buy some stability in the region. This is what the CIA is designed to do.

Filibuster Alito

2006-01-27T11:20:00.000-05:00

I'm still offline at home (thanks Time Warner!), and swamped at work, so this will be short and sweet.

I called my senators -- Clinton and Schumer -- and told them to lead an Alito filibuster. It looks as though John Kerry and Ed Kennedy are trying to organize this, and everyone should call their senator (888-355-3588) to demand a filibuster against the RATS (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas) Court.

On another note: Today comes word that the oil reserves claimed by the government of Kuwait may be twice what were really in the ground. This should be no shock, since OPEC sets production quotas on a country-by-country basis based on stated reserves. (So, the more total oil you claim to possess, the more OPEC lets you pump out on a daily basis and the more money you generate.) Therefore, OPEC members have reason to vastly overstate their oil reserves.

Matthew Simmons details this phenomenon in his informative and scary Twilight in the Dessert, which I'm about halfway through right now.

The world may be heading for an energy disaster called Peak Oil, and this Kuwaiti revelation is yet more confirmation. Here are some links.

www.peakoil.net
www.lifeafterthecrash.com
www.fromthewilderness.com

Have a happy weekend!

Corporations Hate You

2006-01-25T09:36:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to maintain a blog when you don’t have Internet access.

Last week, our Time Warner cable and web access went out during a bad windstorm in New York City. Also, because we have Vonage, the web-based phone service, our phone was dead too.

My wife and I figured the Time Warner outage was weather-related because there were area blackouts, etc., due to the high wind. Yet two full days later, our cable, Internet and phone were still out.

We called Time Warner and they couldn’t fix our problem from headquarters. Instead, they needed to send out service personnel. But they couldn’t do that for several business days, and someone would have to skip work, stay home and wait for the Time Warner guys who would show up between noon and 4 p.m. yesterday.

So yesterday, my wife stayed home and waited … and waited. Hours ticked by. Soon enough it was 4 p.m. and Time Warner still hadn’t showed. My wife felt like calling them, but because we have a web-based phone, it was impossible without leaving the apartment.

By 4:30, with no sign of Time Warner, my wife got restless and headed out to a pay phone, three blocks away.

“I kept glancing over my shoulder to make sure Time Warner wasn’t pulling up as I walked down the street,” she told me. “There was no sign of them.”

My wife got the phone and called TW. After negotiating their voicemail system, she finally got a breathing person on the line and explained that their cable guy had never come to fix our problem.

“Let’s see,” said the Time Warner rep. “Oh, yes. They were just there, at 4:30. They rang and nobody was home.”

“Oh I just came out to call you,” my wife explained. “Can they come back, they must be in the area.”

“No, that’s impossible,” said the Time Warner rep. “You need to reschedule for another day.”

My wife was getting frustrated. “But I took the day off work,” she said. “Can’t you accommodate me since you never came between noon and four, when you told me to be home?”

“We’re sorry, it’s too late.”

So we’ve been rescheduled for next Monday, when someone again needs to take off work. When I got home and heard the Time Warner story, I was frustrated too.

“Let’s just call their competition, and have them install the same service,” I said. “They’ll probably be here tomorrow.”

My wife explained to me what should have already been self-evident: Time Warner has no competitor in the cable market. There’s only the satellite dish company, and we live in an apartment. So Time Warner can treat you like dirt, and there’s nothing you can do about it, if you want your MTV.

Friends and Neighbors

2006-01-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia's new president marks the first time in the 500+ years since the Spanish colonized the new world that indigenous Americans have attained real political power via a democratic election anywhere in the New World.

Morales' victory is also a rebuke to the Bush regime, whose boundless obnoxiousness has rendered unpalatable long-standing policies of the U.S. government, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in South and Central America.

Evo Morales looks to be the real deal: a crusader for social justice and against the kind of rampant capitalism that has exploited Bolivia's natural (gas) resources without much benefit to ordinary Bolivians. Hopefully, Evo can accomplish progressive reforms without becoming a dictator or a victim of the CIA. For now, Redglare says Viva Evo!

It's exciting that in Latin and South America, with the rise of Morales in Bolivia, Lula da Silva in Brazil, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and top Mexican presidential contender Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a true leftist movement is underway that could influence U.S. politics eventually. Heck, even the Sandinistas are making a comeback in Nicaragua behind the renewed political strength of Daniel Ortega!

With immigration to United States from Latin American making the U.S. population more Latino everyday, perhaps the trend of progressive grassroots politics comes northward too. After all, political trends cross borders all the time -- isn't that the whole notion behind the "domino theory" that got us into Vietnam and Korea to fight communism?

And here's more proof that political winds can blow over borders: Canada is, alas, about to kick out the Liberal Party and elect a conservative pal of the Bush Regime, Stephen Harper. Harper supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, wants closer ties with Bush, opposes gay marriage and may try and dismantle Canada's nationalized healthcare program.

I am a lover of Canada and a frequent visitor. I enjoy the country's natural beauty and laid-back personality. Canada has lately seemed like the last remaining North American bastion of political sanity. I have no idea, besides the Liberal's sponsorship kickback scandal, why Canada wants to veer right now, when the rest of the hemisphere is going left.

Sorry Harry

2006-01-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

It pains me to say maybe it’s time for some new leadership blood for our feckless Senate Democrats – their current leader Harry Reid has gone all wobbly on us. Reid’s apology for a hard-hitting political memo that attacked 33 of his GOP counterparts for hypocrisy and corruption was downright pathetic. What a total wimp Reid appears to be while retreating from the memo’s assertions, none of which have been disproved.

I used to admire Reid, back when he called Dubya “a loser” or when he called Greenspan “a political hack.” The GOP plays dirty and talks tough, and Reid seemed up to the task of being an effective, hard-hitting mouthpiece for the Dems back then.

It seems this time Reid feared he’d gone too far and actually hurt the delicate feelings of his GOP Senate buddies who he must always run into at the Senate’s gym or tax-free restaurants or shops or cheap barber shop or taxpayer-financed film studios. That could be socially uncomfortable! So he’s morphed into Sorry Harry.

It’s almost as nauseating as when Dick Durbin apologized for daring to criticize our torture policies and secret prisons. Way to stand your ground, Dick!

Sorry Harry’s apology comes in the same week when his Democratic Senate caucus is utterly failing to mount any effective response/PR campaign/filibuster to stop Sam Alito from teaming up with his fellow SCOTUS Neanderthals to form the bloc of RATS (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia) that will trash civil liberties, rubberstamp the “unitary executive” dictatorship and eventually snatch away a woman’s right to control her own body.

Plus, Harry voted for the Iraq invasion, which is morally reprehensible and makes him an ineffective voice on Iraq. And Reid took at least $30,000 from Jack Abramoff's clients, making him a dubious choice to lead reform efforts or criticism of GOP corruption.

If the Democrats can get back control of the House or Senate in 2006, and get the power to investigate or impeach, the country could be well on its way to ending the long national emergency that is the Bush Administration.

But the Democrats will never get there by apologizing like Sorry Harry.

Been There, Done That

2006-01-19T15:17:00.000-05:00

It’s always the same thing. Drudge and CNN and all American media outlets light up with urgent graphics and sirens, all warning that Osama bin Laden has just released an audio tape that will soon be broadcast on Al Jazeera (because no patriotic American news gathering organization would themselves play bin Laden’s message).

Then Al Jazeera plays bin Laden’s tape – and the tape always threatens more attacks, a la the “mushroom clouds” conjured up by Cheney, Rice, et al – and it gets replayed by American media outlets (never, mind you at any length). The basic message is: FEAR, FEAR, FEAR! It’s always the same to the point where we’re sick of it.

Next, in about an hour or so, the CIA comes out and confirms that, yep, it’s really bin Laden talking on the tape. This CIA verification always happens so fast that you wonder how it happens. Does the CIA have some bin Laden voice verification machine that can instantly pick his voice out? Do they know because they had the tape way before al Jazeera did, or what? Anyway, it’s bin Laden. A slam dunk.

This time, CIA-verified bin Laden supposedly says his Qaeda cells in the States have been preparing for an attack, one that we will soon see. He also offers a “truce” without laying out any terms. Huh? What? Does anybody speak Arabic around here?

(In response, Bush says we don’t negotiate with terrorists. This despite the fact that we are releasing women prisoners today in Iraq in hopes of securing the release of reporter Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped by, uh … terrorists).

If bin Laden is really the threat to us that the Bushies say he is, then why are we allowing him access to our nation’s publicly owned airwaves to give coded messages to his cadres, spread fear and al Qaeda propaganda, etc?

After all, when the government wants to suppress news, it can do so. Look no further than the yearlong hold the N.Y. Times put on the illegal wiretapping story that confirmed Bush’s status as an American tyrant who boastfully blows off the U.S. Constitution. Bush made the Times complicit in covering-up a constitutional crisis for a year. But bin Laden gets free reign to say what he wants, with all the attendant media hype of a presidential address.

The whole choreographed routine makes one wonder if the fanatical followers of Bush and bin Laden aren’t operating from the same playbook.

Why Hillary?

2006-01-18T15:03:00.000-05:00

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s recent MLK day gaffe (telling an African-American audience the U.S. House of Representatives was akin to a plantation) got me thinking: What good is Hillary? I realize that she’s got the support of a lot of committed progressives, a great fund-raising network and all of that executive branch experience from when her husband was president, but I still can’t understand her appeal as a presidential candidate.

Plus, after years of complaining about a two-party system dominating American politics, with the election of Hillary, we’d be down to a two-family political system. I think the country would be better off with no more Clintons or Bushes anywhere near the White House.

Do we not remember the Marc Rich pardon? Travel-gate? Whitewater? Etc. Do we want more of the same thing?

I would love to see a woman as president, and it’s long overdue. I admire Hillary’s support for abortion rights, the environment and social welfare programs, but that’s about where it ends.

Otherwise, she’s downright Lieberman-esque in her endless support for Bush’s psychotic Iraq War. In a page from the Republican culture war playbook, she actually wants to criminalize burning the U.S. flag. In many ways, Hillary has morphed into a Republican Lite, or a Democrat in Name Only (DINO).

Then, there’s sex and adultery. How could the thought of Bill Clinton residing in the executive mansion sit well with anybody? Did Bubba not spend enough time around White House interns during the 1990s? Do we really need a repeat performance of Bill Clinton’s shameful carousing? The man basically lost the country and gave a bad name to the Democratic Party all for a little sexual gratification. He should have resigned and let Al Gore take on Dubya as an incumbent president in 2000, with the presidential seal, Air Force One and “Hail to the Chief” playing at every campaign stop. He would of kicked Dubya’s ass. Oh, yeah. He did anyway. I keep forgetting.

For my money, I like Russ Feingold or John Murtha in 2008. I haven't heard any talk about Murtha running, though. The GOP would try and Swiftboat him (already have), but the guy’s Marine Corps demeanor is more military, and less effete and Ivy League, than John Kerry's. I think he’s a true American patriot beyond reproach and the GOP would have a hard time beating him with anybody but McCain.

Impeach Dubya

2006-01-17T11:24:00.000-05:00

Over the long Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, my daughter caught a rotavirus or something. There was a lot of throwing up. I spent my time taking care of her and doing urgent loads of laundry. (There is something nasty going around New York City day cares – the little girl who lives two floors below us was sick with the same bug).

As a result, I missed a lot of stuff. I missed coverage of our bungled attempt to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri and collateral killing of innocent Pakistanis.

While it’s certainly a good idea to be going after al Qeada wherever they’re hiding (including Pakistan), it looks like another instance in a long series where we’ve been let down by the intelligence-gathering mistakes of the CIA. The result: more Pakistanis hate our guts. Can’t we put some eyes on the ground over there, three years after 9/11, or are we going to stay dependant on Predator drone videos and NSA spying upon Americans for our battlefield intelligence?

Speaking of illegal NSA spying, I also missed Al Gore’s speech on Bush’s illegal wiretapping of Americans without search warrants. But the transcript has great stuff:

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that "the law is king."

I wish Gore had talked like this back in 2000. He would have kicked Dubya's ass. Oh, wait a minute. He did!

Besides impeaching Bush, shouldn’t we simply do away with the entire NSA at this point? The agency proved itself useless prior to the 9/11 attacks and clearly cannot help itself from violating Americans' civil rights, whether in the 1970s or 2000s. The functions of this spying agency should be broken up and spread among other intelligence agencies more capable of operating within the limits of the law.

I was heartened to find most Americans think Bush deserves impeachment if he approved illegal wiretaps. By 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new Zogby poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org.

52% agreed with the statement: "If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment." 43% disagreed, and 6% said they didn't know or declined to answer.

I say: let’s impeach Dubya.

Losing Democracy in America

2006-01-13T09:29:00.000-05:00

Could we be the generation that loses democracy in America? What a shameful state of affairs: dumbed down by mainstream media and failed schools, numbed by violence and fear, cowed by groupthink and distracted by celebrity, sports and porn, today's Americans obediently shuffle towards despotism.

Previous generations of Americans fought and died to end English domination, to stop slavery, to form labor unions, to get the right to vote and to abolish segregation.

Yet, our current crop of citizens lounges slothfully upon overstuffed couches as their government taps their phones without warrant, searches their mail without cause, imprisons fellow citizens without bringing charges, suspends habeas corpus and due process, and carries out torture in violation of international law, numerous treaties, basic common sense and Judeo-Christian morality.

A war based on outright lies "that will not end in our lifetimes" is waged to further enrich the super-wealthy, while fearful Americans allow the banning of photography of flag-draped coffins or of killed Iraqis or Americans. Meanwhile, the Defense Secretary uses an automatic pen to "sign" letters of condolence to the parents of killed U.S. service members.

Electronic voting machines made by partisan corporations make American elections unverifiable; exit polling says one presidential candidate is the winner, while supposed election results favor the man from the regime in power. Nobody seems to care, except John Conyers.

The regime in power wages culture wars upon liberals, journalists, women, homosexuals and minorities. They hate Michael Moore and the Dixie Chicks with more venom and vitriol than they can muster up for Osama bin Laden himself, who enjoys apparent total immunity in Pakistan.

Meantime, debt-laden, bargain-addled American shoppers clobber one another to be first through Wal-Mart's doors to consume cheaply made products produced entirely in near-sweatshop conditions in Asia and Latin America. Factories and businesses throughout this country close their doors and fire their employees, undone by antique business models that incorporate workers rights, pensions and the environment into the equation. America's once mighty manufacturing base lies in smithereens, as China becomes an exporting giant, giving us mind-boggling trade deficits.

I still love my country, but these are bad times for the U.S. How will future generations of Americans, our grandchildren, view us and judge our actions? How can we redeem ourselves in the eyes of the world? Where do we go from here?

Freedom Jeans

2006-01-12T09:48:00.000-05:00

Dear Levi Strauss & Co.,

I think it’s really, really great that you’ve developed a line of denim jeans specifically for iPod users. It’s so hard carrying those little music machines around without custom made clothing. Now, I can listen to the latest Wheat album without having to stuff my cumbersome iPod into my breast pocket, which I fear makes it look like I have one boob (not good, since I’m a dude!).

Now that you’re making high tech RedWire DLX jeans, however, I have a suggestion/request for your company: civil rights dungarees. Maybe as part of your tech line, you could manufacture jeans that prevent unwanted wiretapping of the wearer, either by a metallic lining or an alarm near the fly.

Also, it would be useful to have jeans with a metallic-lined pocket to prevent unwanted RFID transmissions from a new U.S. passport, which will soon broadcast unencrypted information that will be readable to anyone with a cheap, commercially available RFID transmitter.

With Wranglers on, terrorists could pick you out at a train station in Europe. But with these newfangled Levi’s I propose, nobody would know the nationality, name or passport number of the wearer. I suggest you call them Levi’s 1776 Jeans. A workplace line could be called “Dockers Blockers.”

Perhaps Levi’s 1776 Jeans could render the wearer invisible to surveillance cameras, or data-miners, or NYC subway bag searchers, or government agents snooping though the wearer’s library records. But these functions will probably require some R&D on you part.

While a fraction of the American population is sufficiently well off to afford an iPod, no American is safe from these intrusions upon our civil rights. And with the “War on Terror” supposedly not ending in our lives, the sales growth potential of Levi’s 1776 Jeans (and Dockers Blockers) seems limitless to me.

Thanks for considering my proposal.

--Redglare

Altio Goes a Long Way

2006-01-11T09:58:00.000-05:00

It looks like Samuel Altio is sufficiently non-threatening to be confirmed by the Senate for Sandra Day O’Connor’s Supreme Court seat. He is holding his own with the windbags on the Judiciary Committee. What a strange political farce this confirmation ritual seem to be!

The N.Y. Times had an interesting piece today on the fact that most Senators spend the lion’s share of their allotted question time on their own soapbox, hamming it up for the voters back home. There is hardly time for a nominee to get in a response edgewise, although the purpose of the hearing is purportedly to shed light on the nominee’s views and temper.

Biden is the worst of the wordy, followed closely by Kennedy, Schumer and that awful Mike DeWine of Ohio.

On the part of the Dems, their strategy is to grandstand in the hearings, without throwing up any real roadblocks to Alito’s eventual passage. Like, say, a filibuster.

But Alito’s record is anything but non-threatening -- no matter his reasonable (if vaguely creepy) outward demeanor.

This website, Altio’s America, does a good job of covering the basics. On guns, strip searches, workplace safety, health care, pollution and privacy this guy is about as reactionary and right wing as you can be whilst claiming belief in the ideals of the U.S. Constitution at the same time.

I wish he could be stopped via a filibuster or some other means. But the Dem windbags are only willing to go on endlessly in the context of the hearing, not to prevent a Senate confirmation of this man with an anti-democratic agenda.

No-Fly Enemies List

2006-01-10T11:14:00.000-05:00

The Emmy-award winning author of a book critical of Karl Rove and the Bush gang has landed on the government’s terrorist watchlist used by airlines. Jim Moore, co-author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, “cannot get pre-printed boarding passes and must submit to time-consuming security checks of his identity before boarding commercial flights,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

I believe this means Moore made the “Selectee” list rather than the "No Fly” list, since he can still board a plane after extra scrutiny.

I bet Turd Blossom and Dubya are chuckling over their use of a national security instrument to exact political revenge on an author. But someday inclusion on their “No-Fly” or “Selectee” list may be viewed as a mark of high distinction, like having been on Nixon’s Enemies List.

Here is Moore’s description of the situation as posted at the Huffington Post.

There are times in which it is easy to be suspicious. We can get to that feeling fairly quickly if we even pay slight attention. I've been trying to get over this odd emotion for at least a year. I can't find any rationale for letting it go, though I want desperately not to have these thoughts.

This week last year I was preparing for a trip to Ohio to conduct interviews and research for a new book I was writing. My airline tickets had been purchased on line and the morning of departure I went to the Internet to print out my boarding pass. I got a message that said, "Not Allowed." Several subsequent tries failed. Surely, I thought, it's just a glitch within the airline's servers or software.

I made it a point to arrive very early at the airport. My reservation was confirmed before I left home. I went to the electronic kiosk and punched in my confirmation number to print out my boarding pass and luggage tags. Another error message appeared, "Please see agent."

I did. She took my Texas driver's license and punched in the relevant information to her computer system.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said. "There seems to be a problem. You've been placed on the No Fly Watch List."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm afraid there isn't much more that I can tell you," she explained. "It's just the list that's maintained by TSA to check for people who might have terrorist connections."

"You're serious?"

"I'm afraid so, sir. Here's an 800 number in Washington. You need to call them before I can clear you for the flight."

Exasperated, I dialed the number from my cell, determined to clear up what I was sure was a clerical error. The woman who answered offered me no more information than the ticket agent.

"Mam, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List."

"I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir," she explained after taking down my social security and Texas driver's license numbers.

"What can you tell me?"

"All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."

"Well, let me get this straight then," I said. "Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first two notes of the national anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me."

"I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."

"Oh, wait," I said. "One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"

I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000.

My friends tell me it is just more government incompetence. A tech buddy said there's no one in government smart enough to write a search algorithm that will find actual terrorists, so they end up with authors of books criticizing the Bush White House. I have no idea what's going on.

I suppose I should think of it as a minor sacrifice to help keep my country safe. Not being able to print out boarding passes in advance and having to get to the airport three hours early for every flight is hardly an imposition compared to what Americans are enduring in Iraq. I can force myself to get used to all that extra attention from the guy with the wand whenever I walk through the electronic arches. I'm just doing my patriotic duty.

Of course, there's always the chance that the No Fly Watch List is one of many enemies lists maintained by the Bush White House. If that's the case, I am happy to be on that list. I am in good company with people who expect more out of their president and their government.

Hell, maybe I'll start thinking of it as an honor roll.

No One Seemed to Notice

2006-01-09T09:29:00.000-05:00

Here is a little more news from Kansas – the Dept. of Homeland Security is opening the mail of Americans. Not big boxes shipped from the Middle East with wires sticking from the sides, mind you. These are private letters between law-abiding, patriotic Americans and their friends, family and associates abroad (and, who knows, maybe domestically was well).

My dad’s cousin e-mailed her friends and family an apt citation over the weekend, which I will share here:

What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no
more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will joinyou in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is
transformed.

You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

My Lai Hero

2006-01-08T08:30:00.000-05:00

Because we have such a short collective memory in the United States, we’re doomed to repeat our collective mistakes. Iraq is so much like the Vietnam era my parents described to me.

My parents met at an antiwar demonstration at Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. My mom was a marcher, and my dad was covering the protest for Army radio. He’d been drafted.

My mom was a regular protestor of the Vietnam War. She was even spat upon by Johnson/Nixon/Vietnam War-loving Americans for exercising her First Amendment rights.

Five more Americans in the service of this country have died in Iraq since my entry on Friday, from small arms fire and roadside bombs.

We’ve already regressed to Abu Ghraib, plus Nixon-esque illegal domestic wire tapping and enemies lists (now called the “no-fly list”).

Before we declare victory and leave Iraq, do we have to endure another Kent State? Another My Lai?

I read the most amazing obituary yesterday in the Times, the story of a real American hero, Hugh Thompson.

Thompson, who died too young from cancer at 62 years old, was a Chief Warrant Officer in 1968, flying his helicopter over South Vietnam, when below he witnessed war criminal U.S. Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. and his platoon/death quad carrying out the My Lai massacre. Thompson landed and risked his own and his crew’s lives to save villagers, even drawing guns on Calley’s executioners. Back at base, he reported the cold-blooded mass killings, and demanded action.

“I just wish our crew that day could have helped more than we did,” he said afterwards.

Back home in the States, predictably, this hero Thompson received death threats over the phone and mutilated animals left on his front porch.

“Don’t do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come,” said Thompson.

May he rest in peace.

Bad Days in Baghdad

2006-01-06T12:17:00.000-05:00

Alas, eleven members of our armed forces lost their lives in the Bush Administration’s Iraq War yesterday. I think the United States needs to leave Iraq. I thought it was madness to invade in the first place.

My brother was supposed to be in Iraq right now with the 10th Mountain Division, but he was discharged from the Army for health reasons (after serving this county in Afghanistan). I'm so happy about that.

Congressman Murtha is right that a “beyond the horizon” presence should suffice to fulfill our obligations to give strategic support to the Iraqi army we’ve had several years to train and equip. In fact, we should continue to train the Iraqis, support them with money and expertise and fund civil reconstruction projects.

Perhaps, with competent civilian and military leadership, it would be wise for the U.S. to “stay the course” in Iraq. However, the current administration’s record in Iraq – from the WMD lies to Abu Ghraib torture, from under-armored Humvees to no-bid crony contracts – suggests that these people will never be capable of learning from mistakes or seeing the world from outside the distorted lens of ideology.

As a result, more bloodshed and chaos (and U.S. domestic division) will be in the offing, rather than the flowering of Iraqi democracy we’ve been promised for years now. From what I’ve seen, the odds of a full-fledged Sunni versus Shiite civil war are far higher than those of a peaceful democracy.

This war has been a strategic, diplomatic and moral catastrophe for our nation. A disgrace. And hundreds upon hundreds of American families have paid the ultimate cost for this miscalculation and mismanagement. It’s time to go.

Spies Like U.S.

2006-01-05T11:25:00.000-05:00

How in the world would tapping Christiane Amanpour’s telephone enhance our country’s national security? Apparently, according to questions posed by NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell there’s some reason to believe this has happened under one of the Bush Administration's out-of-control Special Access Programs (SAPs) allowing the National Security Agency to secretly monitor Americans without court warrants.

This is all such a blatant violation of the FISA law and the U.S. Constitution that I’m amazed we’re not talking seriously on a national level about impeachment proceedings, as we should have been doing long ago.

By the way, NBC has scrubbed the transcript of the Mitchell interview with James Risen, the Times reporter who broke the warrant-less spying scandal, of any reference to Amanpour. Nice going there, NBC.

Russ Tice, a former NSA analyst, wants to come forward to tell Congress and the American people more still. Here’s the text of a letter he has sent to the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in mid December 2005:

Dear Chairman Roberts,

Under the provisions of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA) and with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These acts involve the Director of the National Security Agency, the Deputies Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

These probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAP)s. I was a technical intelligence specialist dealing almost exclusively with SAP programs and operations at both NSA and DIA.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of these programs and operations, I will require assurances from your committee that the staffers and/or congressional members to participate retain the proper security clearances, and also have the appropriate SAP cleared facilities available for these discussions.

Please inform me when you require my appearance on Capitol Hill to conduct these discussions in relation to this ICWPA report.

Very Respectfully,

Russell D. Tice
Former Intelligence Officer, NSA

Will the Republicans in charge of Congress give this man a hearing?

For further reading on our American shadow government, I highly recommend William Arkin’s Code Names, a book that should freak out any patriotic American over the extent to which crucial functions and decisions of the U.S. government are carried out in total secrecy, with disregard for the basic tenets of democracy. It has been an indispensable guide for understanding this still-unfolding NSA spying debacle.

Kansas Fossils

2006-01-04T10:48:00.000-05:00

Because my parents split when I was a little kid, I grew up like a transient, never staying in one house for more than a year or two.

I was born in northern New Jersey, where I lived until I was eight years old, moving from a Victorian house into a two-bedroom apartment when my folks separated. Then, my mom bought a 1976 Trans Am, and we moved to northeastern Kansas, where I was raised by my mom and grandmother until I was fifteen (aside from a brief spell in a Missouri military school). I moved back to live with my dad at fifteen, and then went to college in western Massachusetts.

But it is Kansas that I still consider “home.” Although my mother passed away a couple of years ago, I still have family there. And friends. In fact, my wife and I talk about moving back there all the time since NYC is so flipping expensive, and we have a little kid.

But something is the matter with Kansas. One example is that the Kansas school board has re-written the criteria for science education to include explanations that go beyond natural explainations. Basically, religious freaks have hijacked the board, hoping to ding Darwin with their inane Intelligent Design hokum.

My uncle in Lawrence, Kan., works with paleontologists on computer programs that automate taxonomy, or the scientific naming of organisms found in the fossil record. It’s all premised upon the theory of evolution. Anyway, my uncle is selling shirts and hats with beautiful illustrations of fossils that double as political statements. Basically, you’re saying, “Here’s the fossil record. Deal with it.”

Here’s a link to the Kansas Fossil Store.

New Orleans Darlings

2006-01-03T18:00:00.000-05:00

I went down to New Orleans about three weeks following Katrina, and that changed me. I stayed in the French Quarter in a hotel with power but no running water and basically walked around taking pictures, talking to people, taking notes.

I also drove through the Gulf Coast to see Slidell, Gulfport, Biloxi. Folks, it’s like a nuclear bomb went off down there, but there’s no radiation. It’s the new America, though. A future view perhaps of citizens sold out or forgotten by the government, without basic utilities, scrounging through trash bags for food and clothing in the hot, humid weather.

Here’s something you haven’t heard, however. I met volunteers who went down to help people and are planning to stay. They say New Orleans gives them meaning in that they feel genuinely needed. It’s also the new frontier in the Horace Greeley sense of opportunity and adventure. We’ve been needing a new frontier, America.
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This is a new blog for a new year! I aim for 250 words a day – a resolution. For those not in the know, I started and maintained a blog for a few months last year. But nobody came except my dad. For a number of reasons I eventually abandoned the thing. I took off all of August just like George W. Bush, except I never came back from vacation.

Really, I missed the chance to sound off. It’s still the right of every American! (Be forewarned, the NSA is probably listening … um, data-mining).

Now, I am reborn as REDGLARE! I quite like my new nom de blog.