MY POV
IF YOU'RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!
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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin 
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Causes & Commentary: MY POV archives: previous rants Censorship: a great evil Hemp: why aren't we growing it? ETC Group: terminator seeds Anti-Semitism: an essay 
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Satire has never served a better purpose. Go see. Before they cart us off to the camps.
"...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone...."
Benito Mussolini
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Abraham Lincoln, November 12, 1864
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man."
Martin Luther King Jr., 1963
"CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."
James Madison (1751-1836)
Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarschall Robert Scheer
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Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? "My life is my message."
Gandhi
Posted: 30 July 2004
The link will take you to a long, powerfully worded essay by Ron Reagan about Bush. It's well worth the read. The Case Against George W. Bush By Ron Reagan Excerpts: Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on. Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that's not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush. READ THE REST. Tidbits from the Center for American Progress. ENERGY – RECESS APPOINTING CHEVRON/TEXACO: Bloomberg reports President Bush will use his recess appointment power to circumvent congressional opposition and place a former ChevronTexaco representative on the powerful Federal Trade Commission. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) had put a hold on the appointment because of their concerns that nominee Deborah Majoras (who previously represented ChevronTexaco) would not aggressively prevent more of the oil industry consolidation that may be contributing to record-high gas prices. ChevronTexaco executives have given the Bush-Cheney campaign more than $23,000, and the RNC more than $1.2 million in soft money. Since he took office, Bush has "allowed an increase in oil refinery mergers to go unchecked" and rampant consolidation "may have contributed to the highest gasoline prices in 20 years." The Bush administration has approved 33 oil refinery takeovers worth $19.5 billion and hasn't tried to block any. HEALTH CARE – BUDGET WOES HIT KIDS: The Christian Science Monitor reports, "After years of little impact, budget woes are now taking a toll on kids' healthcare." Specifically, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP, which provides coverage for children of working parents with lower incomes, has seen the first decrease in enrollment since it was enacted in 1997. A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found serious decreases in enrollment in Texas, New York, and Maryland. While some of the children were moved to Medicaid, others "were simply dropped off the rolls" under new eligibility formulas designed to save money. CIVIL LIBERTIES – A CYNICAL PLOY: HYPOCRISY 101: As the president foot-drags on the 9/11 Commission report, the administration's latest tactic to slow down the implementation of reforms is to claim they will weaken civil liberties. The move is a bit ironic "in light of the rollback in civil liberties [the White House] pushed in the USA Patriot Act." Said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, "The administration has shown a great disregard for civil liberties in the wake of 9/11, and it's a cynical ploy to trot out arguments on civil liberties when they don't like the findings of the 9/11 report."
Posted: 30 July 2004
Yet another reason we must get rid of the anti-environmental adminstration of the Bushites. Disaster at sea: global warming hits UK birds By Michael McCarthy Environment Editor 30 July 2004 Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming. The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain. In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions. In Orkney and Shetland, the sandeel stocks have been shrinking for several years, and this summer they have disappeared: the result for seabirds has been mass starvation. The figures for breeding failure, for Shetland in particular, almost defy belief. More than 172,000 breeding pairs of guillemots were recorded in the islands in the last national census, Seabird 2000, whose results were published this year; this summer the birds have produced almost no young, according to Peter Ellis, Shetland area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has monitored Shetland seabirds for 30 years, said: "The breeding failure of the guillemots is unprecedented in Europe." More than 6,800 pairs of great skuas were recorded in Shetland in the same census; this year they have produced a handful of chicks - perhaps fewer than 10 - while the arctic skuas (1,120 pairs in the census) have failed to produce any surviving young. The 24,000 pairs of arctic terns, and the 16,700 pairs of Shetland kittiwakes - small gulls - have "probably suffered complete failure", said Mr Ellis. In Orkney the picture is very similar, although detailed figures are not yet available. "It looks very bad," said the RSPB's warden on Orkney mainland, Andy Knight. "Very few of the birds have raised any chicks at all." The counting and monitoring is still going on and the figures are by no means complete: it is likely that puffins, for example, will also have suffered massive breeding failure but because they nest deep in burrows, this is not immediately obvious. But the astonishing scale of what has taken place is already clear - and the link to climate change is being openly made by scientists. It is believed that the microscopic plankton on which tiny sandeel larvae feed are moving northwards as the sea water warms, leaving the baby fish with nothing to feed on. This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where the water temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years, and where the whole ecosystem is thought to be undergoing a "regime shift", or a fundamental alteration in the interaction of its component species. "Think of the North Sea as an engine, and plankton as the fuel driving it," said Euan Dunn of the RSPB, one of the world's leading experts on the interaction of fish and seabirds. "The fuel mix has changed so radically in the past 20 years, as a result of climate change, that the whole engine is now spluttering and starting to malfunction. All of the animals in the food web above the plankton, first the sandeels, then the larger fish like cod, and ultimately the seabirds, are starting to be affected." Research last year clearly showed that the higher the temperature, the less sandeels could maintain their population level, said Dr Dunn. "The young sandeels are simply not surviving." Although over-fishing of sandeels has caused breeding failures in the past, the present situation could not be blamed on fishing, he said. The Shetland sandeel fishery was catching so few fish that it was closed as a precautionary measure earlier this year. "Climate change is a far more likely explanation." The spectacular seabird populations of the Northern Isles have a double importance. They are of great value scientifically, holding, for example, the world's biggest populations of great skuas. And they are of enormous value to Orkney and Shetland tourism, being the principal draw for many visitors. The national and international significance of what has happened is only just beginning to dawn on the wider political and scientific community, but some leading figures are already taking it on board. "This is an incredible event," said Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth. "The catastrophe [of these] seabirds is just a foretaste of what lies ahead. "It shows that climate change is happening now, [with] devastating consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing the pollution causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the global number one political priority."
Posted: 29 July 2004
I do not accept that we have any right to kill intelligent living creatures in this manner. It's appalling. Dead whales after NATO exercises FUERTEVENTURA COAST, Spain (Reuters) -- Two dead whales have landed in Spain's Canary Islands, raising fears they may have been hurt by NATO military exercises off Morocco and that more could have died, officials said on Friday. The two whales arrived in the area within 24 hours and were dead for several days before their bodies drifted ashore, said Tony Gallardo, environmental expert with the local government of the island of Fuerteventura, one of the Canaries, which lies only about 100 km (60 miles) off the southern Moroccan coast. "There is a strong suspicion that their deaths were related to the NATO exercises that finished a few days ago," Gallardo told Reuters. Naval and air force units from 10 countries involving 20,000 troops and more than 20 warships took part in U.S.-led NATO military exercises off Morocco from July 11 to 16. NATO officials had no comment. The Canary Islands regional government dispatched a helicopter to search remote stretches of coastline after fishermen reported seeing something that looked like a third dead whale floating a few miles from the shore. Fourteen whales beached in the Canaries in 2002 during multinational military exercises there. It was one of several mass strandings of whales that scientists have linked to the use of naval sonar systems. A year later, researchers published a study in the science journal Nature that found sonar may cause a type of decompression sickness in whales and dolphins. Scientists suspect sonar signals disorientate the mammals, forcing them to come up to the surface too quickly, which could cause the formation of damaging nitrogen bubbles in their tissue. Military sonar systems blast areas of ocean with sound waves to detect submarines. Copyright 2004 Reuters. All rights reserved.
Posted: 28 July 2004
This should worry the bejeezus out of you. Lost Record '02 Florida Vote Raises '04 Concern By ABBY GOODNOUGH MIAMI, July 27 - Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election. A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times. "This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the coalition. After the disputed 2000 presidential election eroded confidence in voting machines nationwide, and in South Florida in particular, the state moved quickly to adopt new technology, and in many places touch-screen machines. Voters in 15 Florida counties - covering more than half the state's electorate - will use the machines in November, but reports of mishaps and lost votes in smaller elections over the last two years have cast doubt on their reliability. Like "black boxes" on airplanes, the electronic voting records on touch-screen machines list everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast. The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. Elections officials have said that using this data for recounts is unnecessary because touch-screen machines do not allow human error. But several studies have suggested the machines themselves might err - for instance, by failing to record some votes. After the 2002 primary, between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County. The group considered that rate of what it called "lost votes" unusually high. Voting problems plagued Miami-Dade and Broward Counties on that day, when touch-screen machines took much longer than expected to boot up, dozens of polling places opened late and poorly trained poll workers turned on and shut down the machines incorrectly. A final vote tally - which narrowed the margin first reported between the two candidates by more than 3,000 votes - was delayed for a week. Ms. Reno, who ultimately lost to Mr. McBride by just 4,794 votes statewide, considered requesting a recount at the time but decided against it. Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections division, said on Tuesday that the office had put in place a daily backup procedure so that computer crashes would not wipe out audit records in the future. The news of the lost data comes two months after Miami-Dade elections officials acknowledged a malfunction in the audit logs of touch-screen machines. The elections office first noticed the problem in spring 2003, but did not publicly discuss it until this past May. The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines. One flaw occurred when the machines' batteries ran low and an error in the program that reported the problem caused corruption in the machine's event log, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa whom Miami-Dade County hired to help solve the problem. In a second flaw, the county's election system software was misreading the serial numbers of the voting machines whose batteries had run low, he said. READ THE REST. Here is additional info to make you aware. This comes from the Center for American Progress. GOP Calls for Voter Suppression A string of recent declarations from top government officials and Republican party leaders are raising questions about whether the Bush administration is quietly attempting to manipulate voting in the 2004 presidential election. Last week, a GOP lawmaker and co-chair of the Bush-Cheney '04 Michigan Veterans Leadership Team called recently for his party to "suppress the Detroit vote," making a mockery of President Bush's belated attempt to reach out to African-Americans in that city last week. Speaking at the National Urban League, Bush said, "I believe you've got to earn the vote and seek it," but State Rep. John Pappageorge (R) revealed a backup plan in the swing state of Michigan: "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election," he said. It is little secret what Pappageorge meant by the "Detroit vote" – while Michigan state is majority white (78 percent), Detroit boasts an overwhelmingly minority population (88 percent). State Sen. Buzz Thomas (D) told reporters, "I'm extremely disappointed in my colleague…That's quite clearly 'code' that they don't want black people to vote in this election." SAME OLD STORY: The idea the GOP might try to "suppress" votes is nothing new to minority voters. A BET/CBS poll shows "more than four in five blacks believe Bush did not legitimately win the [2000] election, and two-thirds think deliberate attempts were made to prevent black voters' ballots from being counted." BACK TO MESSING WITH FLORIDA: Earlier this month in Florida, where President Bush's brother Jeb is governor, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced it would ask the Department of Justice to investigate whether the state's aborted effort to "use of a flawed database to remove felons from the voter rolls was a deliberate attempt to block some voters from casting ballots." The Miami Herald reported that this year's list "included people – many of them black Democrats – who have had their right to vote restored." E-MACHINES MEAN NO RECORD: Efforts to suppress votes could only be aided by the proliferation of touch screen voting machines. The machines, despite coming under fire for technical glitches and a lack of transparency, "are poised for use in the November elections in more than 675 counties, comprising more than 30 percent of the nation's registered voters." Because many of the machines provide no paper record of votes, they could make a manual recount of a contested vote impossible. RIGGING THE SYSTEM: The CEO of the company which will provide many of the new voting machines is Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser (Pioneer) who wrote in a fundraising letter last August that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Federal Election Commission data shows "at least eight million people will cast their ballots using Diebold machines next November," meaning 8 percent of the number of voters in 2000 will have their 2004 votes calculated on a machine created by a self-described Bush partisan. STILL STICKING WITH PUNCH CARDS?: Meanwhile, the ACLU is taking aim at problems with antiquated punch card ballots, which were the source of controversy during the 2000 election in Florida. AP reports an ACLU lawyer in Ohio is "arguing that even isolated malfunctions in Ohio could change the November election results in this swing state." Arguing for the machines to be judged unconstitutional, the ACLU maintains "that punch cards are more likely to go uncounted than votes cast with other systems, and that use of the ballots violates the rights of black voters, who mostly live in punch-card counties." CONTEMPLATING POSTPONEMENT: The Bush administration has reviewed "a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election" in the event of a terrorist attack. The Justice Department was going to move forward with an inquiry to "determine what the legal mechanism for calling a halt to a national election would be," despite the fact that "Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge…and other counterterrorism officials concede they have no intel about any specific plots." But because of public outcry, the White House has backed off. SCIENCE Reagan Speaks Out For Stem Cells A day after researchers at Stanford published findings indicating stem cells "could potentially be used to repair the damage to brain tissue caused by a stroke," former president Ronald Reagan's son, Ronald Reagan Jr., made a persuasive case for embryonic stem cell research at the Democratic National Convention. Reagan reiterated that stem cell research is both good science and the right thing to do – he denounced cynical policies that don't trust Americans to make distinctions between "these undifferentiated cells multiplying in a tissue culture and a living, breathing person — a parent, a spouse, a child." As Reagan pointed out, stem cells could lead to cures for "a wide range of fatal and debilitating illnesses: Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, lymphoma, spinal cord injuries and much more." Taking on pro-life opponents of stem cell research, who mistakenly compare the process to abortion, Reagan asked, "How can we affirm life if we abandon those whose own lives are so desperately at risk?" THE BUSH POLICY: In August 2001, President Bush established rules banning federal funding for research on human embryos not already destroyed by that date. "As a result, federally funded researchers do not have access to more recently derived colonies that they say show more potential to be developed into cures," stifling innovative approaches to treating a range of degenerative diseases. At the time, Bush justified his position partly by claiming there were already "more than 60" stem cell lines for researchers to work with, but this turned out not to be true. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) admitted in March that just 23 lines are open under Bush's policy, only 17 of which are widely available. James Battey, chairman of NIH's Stem Cell Task Force, admitted, "it is difficult to argue a greater number (of available lines), with more potential functional diversity would be detrimental to the research effort." CALIFORNIA FIGHTING BACK: In California, where the Stanford researchers made their breakthrough on potential stroke treatment, the use of stem cells in research is the subject of Proposition 71 on the November ballot, "which would make more stem cells available for research and ease a federally mandated limitation on their availability in California." The stem cells used in the Stanford research were isolated by Stanford's Dr. Irving Weissman in December 2000, ten months before the president banned research on new cells. A STEM CELL IS NOT A PERSON: Reagan took on the ideological opponents of stem cell research, who maintain an embryonic stem cell somehow represents a human life. "Yes, these cells could theoretically have the potential, under very different circumstances, to develop into human beings," Reagan said, "But they are not, in and of themselves, human beings. They have no fingers and toes, no brain or spinal cord. They have no thoughts, no fears. They feel no pain." "Reason" science correspondent Ronald Bailey backs Reagan up: "Each skin cell, each neuron, each liver cell is potentially a person," he writes. "All that's lacking is the will and the application of the appropriate technology." These include "skin and liver cells that are destined to be sloughed off during your next shower or die of alcohol poisoning at your next cocktail party." PRESIDENT STIFLES DEBATE: Despite Reagan's appeal, it is unlikely President Bush will be moved to debate the issue any time soon. The president has stifled argument within his administration by stacking the council he created to advise him on bioethics issues with members sympathetic to his right-wing views. In February, Bush "dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics…who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells." He replaced them with three pro-life doctors; one had spoken out against stem cell research and another had "called for more religion in public life." The council's director, ethicist Leon Kass, is known for his prolific writings about "biotechnology's toll on human dignity." ADMINISTRATION ADMITS RESEARCH IS GOOD SCIENCE: A letter from National Institutes of Health director Elias A. Zerhouni to 206 members of the House – including 36 Republicans – who called for President Bush to relax federal restrictions on stem cell research in the wake of President Reagan's death, essentially conceded the administration would continue to prioritize its ideological agenda over good science. In the past, the Bush administration has questioned whether "science could benefit from added lines, or colonies, of cells," but Zerhouni's letter admitted, "it is fair to say that from a purely scientific perspective more cell lines may well speed some areas of human embryonic stem cell research." Nevertheless, the letter reiterated the president's stubborn refusal to reconsider his position on the issue. Here is an extremely enlightening article about the drug companies. I strongly recommend reading the entire thing. Here are just a few small excerpts: The Truth About the Drug Companies By Marcia Angell In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story. But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D. Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ As their profits skyrocketed during the 1980s and 1990s, so did the political power of drug companies. By 1990, the industry had assumed its present contours as a business with unprecedented control over its own fortunes. For example, if it didn't like something about the FDA, the federal agency that is supposed to regulate the industry, it could change it through direct pressure or through its friends in Congress. The top ten drug companies (which included European companies) had profits of nearly 25 percent of sales in 1990, and except for a dip at the time of President Bill Clinton's health care reform proposal, profits as a percentage of sales remained about the same for the next decade. (Of course, in absolute terms, as sales mounted, so did profits.) In 2001, the ten American drug companies in the Fortune 500 list (not quite the same as the top ten worldwide, but their profit margins are much the same) ranked far above all other American industries in average net return, whether as a percentage of sales (18.5 percent), of assets (16.3 percent), or of shareholders' equity (33.2 percent). These are astonishing margins. For comparison, the median net return for all other industries in the Fortune 500 was only 3.3 percent of sales. Commercial banking, itself no slouch as an aggressive industry with many friends in high places, was a distant second, at 13.5 percent of sales.[11] In 2002, as the economic downturn continued, big pharma showed only a slight drop in profits—from 18.5 to 17.0 percent of sales. The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion).[12] In 2003 profits of the Fortune 500 drug companies dropped to 14.3 percent of sales, still well above the median for all industries of 4.6 percent for that year. When I say this is a profitable industry, I mean really profitable. It is difficult to conceive of how awash in money big pharma is. Drug industry expenditures for research and development, while large, were consistently far less than profits. For the top ten companies, they amounted to only 11 percent of sales in 1990, rising slightly to 14 percent in 2000. The biggest single item in the budget is neither R&D nor even profits but something usually called "marketing and administration"—a name that varies slightly from company to company. In 1990, a staggering 36 percent of sales revenues went into this category, and that proportion remained about the same for over a decade.[13] Note that this is two and a half times the expenditures for R&D. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The me-too market would collapse virtually overnight if the FDA made approval of new drugs contingent on their being better in some important way than older drugs already on the market. Probably very few new drugs could meet that test. By default, then, drug companies would have to concentrate on finding truly innovative drugs, and we would finally find out whether this much-vaunted industry is turning out better drugs. A welcome by-product of this reform is that it would also reduce the incessant and enormously expensive marketing necessary to jockey for position in the me-too market. Genuinely important new drugs do not need much promotion (imagine having to advertise a cure for cancer). A second important reform would be to require drug companies to open their books. Drug companies reveal very little about the most crucial aspects of their business. We know next to nothing about how much they spend to bring each drug to market or what they spend it on. (We know that it is not $802 million, as some industry apologists have recently claimed.) Nor do we know what their gigantic "marketing and administration" budgets cover. We don't even know the prices they charge their various customers. Perhaps most important, we do not know the results of the clinical trials they sponsor—only those they choose to make public, which tend to be the most favorable findings. (The FDA is not allowed to reveal the results it has.) The industry claims all of this is "proprietary" information. Yet, unlike other businesses, drug companies are dependent on the public for a host of special favors—including the rights to NIH-funded research, long periods of market monopoly, and multiple tax breaks that almost guarantee a profit. Because of these special favors and the importance of its products to public health, as well as the fact that the government is a major purchaser of its products, the pharmaceutical industry should be regarded much as a public utility. READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE.
Posted: 20 July 2004
From GRIST e-magazine. TRAIN HAS LEFT THE STATION Republican Ex-EPA Chief Criticizes Bush "It's almost as if the motto of the administration in power today in Washington is not environmental protection, but polluter protection." Why, what sort of pinko environmental extremist would say such a thing? Meet Russell Train, a Republican, chief of the U.S. EPA under Nixon and Ford, co-chair of Conservationists for Bush during the 1988 presidential campaign, and one fed-up dude. Claiming Bush II has betrayed a legacy of eco-friendly conservatives that stretched from Theodore Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush, Train yesterday vowed to vote for John Kerry in November. He was joined at a news conference -- organized by Environment2004, a group campaigning to oust Bush -- by two New Hampshire Republicans, state Rep. Jim Pilliod and former state Sen. Rick Russman, who stopped short of endorsing Kerry but stressed the importance of environmental issues. straight to the source: The Boston Globe, Associated Press, Erik Stetson, 19 Jul 2004 straight to the source: ABC News, Associated Press, Liz Sidoti and Aparna H. Kumar, 19 Jul 2004
Posted: 19 July 2004
I am so disgusted with this administration. THE DAILY MIS-LEAD =============================== POLITICS PUT OVER WOMEN AND CHILDREN'S HEALTH For the third consecutive year the Bush administration has decided not to release $34 million appropriated by Congress to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The administration claims that the funds are being withheld because "the fund indirectly supports Chinese government programs that force women to have abortions."[1] Although this explanation is popular with Bush's conservative base, it is wholly unsupported by the facts. In 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell dispatched a team to China to investigate whether the UNFPA was assisting the Chinese government's coercive practices. The investigators reported that there was "no evidence that the UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization."[2] The investigative team recommended "that funds allocated by Congress be released to UNFPA."[3] The 2003 State Department Report on Human Rights Practices found that, in the 32 Chinese counties where they operated, the UNFPA "emphasized education, improved reproductive health services, and economic development, and they eliminated the target and quota systems for limiting births."[4] The success of the UNFPA's effort prompted 800 other Chinese counties to remove "the target and quota system and...[attempt] to replicate the UNFPA project by emphasizing quality of care and informed choice of birth control methods." According to U.N. estimates, the $34 million in funds being withheld by the Bush administration this year could have helped prevent as many as 2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths and over 77,000 infant and child deaths.[5] Sources: 1. "Citing Chinese Abortions, U.S. Refuses to Fund U.N. Program," Los Angeles Times, 7/17/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1169359&l=46477. 2. "US again denies money to population fund," Boston Globe, 7/17/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1169359&l=46478. 3. "UNFPA Regrets U. S. Administration's Decision Not to Restore Funding," UNFPA, 7/16/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1169359&l=46479. 4. 2003 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, State Department, 2/25/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1169359&l=46480. 5. "UNFPA Regrets U. S. Administration's Decision Not to Restore Funding," UNFPA, 7/16/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1169359&l=46479.
Posted: 19 July 2004
A conservative speaks out and good for him. Vote for a Man, Not a Puppet by Charley Reese Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers. I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory. It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint press conference recently. John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts. But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be. People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me once, but he won't fool me twice. It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian. It's no wonder that the Justice Department has convicted a few Arab-Americans of supporting terrorism. What would you do if you found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration? This election really is important, not only for domestic reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America is not only hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration. Don't forget, a scientific poll of Europeans found us, Israel, North Korea and Iran as the greatest threats to world peace. I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with Kerry to get a man in the White House with brains enough not to blow up the world and us with it. Go to Kerry's Web site and read some of the magazine profiles on him. You'll find that there is a great deal more to Kerry than the GOP attack dogs would have you believe. Besides, it would be fun to have a president who plays hockey, windsurfs, ride motorcycles, plays the guitar, writes poetry and speaks French. It would be good to have a man in the White House who has killed people face to face. Killing people has a sobering effect on a man and dispels all illusions about war. Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969–71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column which is carried on LewRockwell.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner. Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802. © 2004 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Posted: 14 July 2004
Prohibition of alcohol didn't work and created gangs and gangsters that continue to plague us. Prohibition of drugs has the same negative effects. We would be far better served with regulation and treatment, as these sensible law enforcement people recommend. LAW ENFORCEMENT AGAINST PROHIBITION Current and former members of law enforcement who support drug regulation rather than prohibition. About LEAP After three decades of fueling the U.S. war on drugs with over half a trillion tax dollars and increasingly punitive policies, our court system is choked with ever-increasing prosecutions of nonviolent drug violations and our quadrupled prison population has made building prisons this nation's fastest growing industry. We have imprisoned more than 2.2 million of our citizens and every year we arrest an additional 1.6 million for nonviolent drug offenses - more per capita than any country in the world. The United States has 5 percent of the population of the world but 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Despite all that, illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and easier to get than they were 30 years ago. Meanwhile people are still dying in our streets and drug barons continue to grow richer than ever before. This scenario must be the very definition of a failed policy. Current and former members of law enforcement have recently created a new and important drug-policy reform group called LEAP. The membership of LEAP believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime and addiction, as well as to conserve tax dollars, we must end drug prohibition. The stated U.S. drug policy goals of lessening the incidents of crime, drug addiction, juvenile drug use and stemming the flow of illegal drugs into this country have not been achieved. The failed policy of fighting a war on drugs has only magnified our problems but the U.S. still insists on continuing this war and also pressuring governments of other countries to perpetuate these unworkable policies. LEAP believes a system of regulation and control is more effective than one of prohibition. LEAP is a tax exempt, international, nonprofit, educational entity based in the United States. The mission of LEAP is (1) To educate the public, the media, and policy makers, to the failure of current drug policy by presenting a true picture of the history, causes and effects of drug abuse and the crimes related to drug prohibition; (2) To create a speakers bureau staffed with knowledgeable and articulate former drug-warriors who describe the impact of current drug policies on: police/community relations; the safety of law enforcement officers and suspects; police corruption and misconduct; and the financial and human costs associated with current drug policies; (3) To restore the public's respect for law enforcement, which has been greatly diminished by its involvement in imposing drug prohibition; (4) To reduce the multitude of harms resulting from fighting the war on drugs and to lessen the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition. READ THE REST.
Posted: 14 July 2004
More paranoid stupidity courtesy of Homeland inSecurity. I write badly, therefore I am a would-be terrorist By CHARLES C. GREEN I don't think of myself as a dangerous character. Neither, I think, do the lively old ladies who routinely trample me on the escalators at Neiman Marcus. Nor the other software salesmen who race past me into early retirement. Nor, above all, the publishers and agents who seem to take unabashed pleasure in routinely shredding my dream of hanging up my salesman's shoes and becoming an author. But it turns out we're all wrong about me. Just ask John Ashcroft. Frankly, I didn't think I had the stuff — neither compelling dialogue for my probably-never-to-be-published novel-in-progress, nor the aura of a cold-blooded killer — until a few weeks ago, when my flight from New Orleans landed at Dallas' Love Field. "How are you?" asked the airport security person who popped up beside me on my way to baggage claim. "Uh, fine — thanks," I replied, wondering, why are you asking? As if she'd read my thoughts, she told me there had been complaints about me on the airplane. Then she asked to see the crossword puzzle I'd been working on during the flight. Huh? I thought. Talk about being puzzled! Still, my grin was smug as I handed it over. I'd just completed the Friday New York Times puzzle, for the first time ever. But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I'd scribbled in the margin: "I know this is kind of a bomb." She pointed to the sentence, her finger resting on the word "bomb." "What does this mean?" she demanded. Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he'd clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I'd assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn't used the bathroom. He'd spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was. "I know this is kind of a bomb" is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to opera tries to put words in the mouth of a fictional 19-year-old. I opened my laptop and showed her shining example after shining example of similarly awful dialogue. She understood that that word, b-o-m-b, was no reference to ordnance or terrorist weapons of any kind. But my explanation wasn't good enough for the three Dallas police officers who meanwhile had surrounded me — summoned, I supposed, for backup in case the dangerous character tried to write something even worse. One took my driver's license to run a fruitless background check (the closest I ever came to being in trouble with the law was accepting a beer at age 17 from the teen-age daughter of the Nantucket Island police chief). A particularly hostile cop asked me a strangely menacing question: "So, how many books have you gotten made?" I started my usual backpedaling answer to that query, honed to perfection in the Dallas bar scene, but he cut me off: "That's not what I asked." I told him I must have misunderstood. He responded, "You're a writer and you don't understand my words?" Without further explanation, they took me to the onsite police station, where I waited for an "interview" with the Transportation Security Administration. By then I was being accused of writing "bomb" on a piece of paper and waving it around for people in the back of the plane to see. While two policemen guarded the door, the honcho behind the desk informed me that my choice of dialogue was unfortunate, that life was not a stage play and that the tiniest thing can ignite fear in American travelers these days. He wanted a summary of my novel's plot to get the context for why I'd written what I had. I panicked. If five years of working on this narrative couldn't liberate me from software sales, how was a five-minute pitch going to keep me out of jail? I barely got three sentences out when the guy's lids started to droop. Convinced I was headed for the gulag, I prattled faster. Despite my stuttering, the inquisitor must have liked my story, because he let me off the hook. Or at least that's how he made sure I felt: that he was letting me skip ... this time. Maybe he sensed that I white-knuckle on airplanes unless I have three shots of vodka. Perhaps my background check told him that I'm a secular Jew or that ex-girlfriends contend that my fear of commitment surpasses that of any Hugh Grant movie character. In other words, I don't exactly fit the profile of someone who would align with a radical cause to bring down an airplane he's already afraid he'll crash in. Even so, the honcho gravely warned me that while I hadn't crossed the line, I had walked right up to it. And for that I would be on Homeland Security's watch list. That set me back. Why would I be put on a watch list even after Homeland Security had satisfied itself that I had no intention of blowing anything up, that my privacy had been violated by a nosy person who made an error and that I'd been the victim of a crazy misunderstanding? Why would I end up forever marked as a potentially dangerous character, subject to interrogations and body searches? Admittedly, some mornings, pre-shower, I do give Sheikh Mohammed a run for his money in the bed-head department; so if I ever venture to Starbucks this way, will I be straying across the line into never-to-be-heard-from-again-land? If I could give myself practical advice and take it, this is what I'd say: Forget the things you read in history class about America, Charlie. Forget all the stuff about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Just keep your head down and your eyes peeled for that "line." The coach of my old-man baseball team, for which I occasionally hit a bomb — though now I would never describe it that way in public — thinks I should start taking Greyhound. I should listen to him; he's a Vietnam vet. But I have a feeling that I'll keep flying. It's scarier down here than it is up there. Green is a free-lance writer in Dallas, when he isn't trying to sell database marketing software.
Posted: 12 July 2004
The radical right has some truly nasty sob's in it. Machine at Work By PAUL KRUGMAN From a business point of view, Enron is a smoking ruin. But there's important evidence in the rubble. If Enron hadn't collapsed, we might still have only circumstantial evidence that energy companies artificially drove up prices during California's electricity crisis. Because of that collapse, we have direct evidence in the form of the now-infamous Enron tapes — although the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Justice Department tried to prevent their release. Now, e-mail and other Enron documents are revealing why Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is one of the most powerful men in America. A little background: at the Republican convention, most featured speakers will be social moderates like Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A moderate facade is necessary to win elections in a generally tolerant nation. But real power in the party rests with hard-line social conservatives like Mr. DeLay, who, in the debate over gun control after the Columbine shootings, insisted that juvenile violence is the result of day care, birth control and the teaching of evolution. Here's the puzzle: if Mr. DeLay's brand of conservatism is so unpopular that it must be kept in the closet during the convention, how can people like him really run the party? In Mr. DeLay's case, a large part of the answer is his control over corporate cash. As far back as 1996, one analyst described Mr. DeLay as the "chief enforcer of company contributions to Republicans." Some of that cash has flowed through Americans for a Republican Majority, called Armpac, a political action committee Mr. DeLay founded in 1994. By dispensing that money to other legislators, he gains their allegiance; this, in turn, allows him to deliver favors to his corporate contributors. Four of the five Republicans on the House ethics committee, where a complaint has been filed against Mr. DeLay, are past recipients of Armpac money. The complaint, filed by Representative Chris Bell of Texas, contends, among other things, that Mr. DeLay laundered illegal corporate contributions for use in Texas elections. And that's where Enron enters the picture. In May 2001, according to yesterday's Washington Post, Enron lobbyists in Washington informed Ken Lay via e-mail that Mr. DeLay was seeking $100,000 in additional donations to his political action committee, with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas." The Post says it has "at least a dozen" documents showing that Mr. DeLay and his associates directed money from corporate donors and lobbyists to an effort to win control of the Texas Legislature so the Republican Party could redraw the state's political districts. Enron, which helped launch Armpac, was happy to oblige, especially because Mr. DeLay was helping the firm's effort to secure energy deregulation legislation, even as its traders boasted to one another about how they were rigging California's deregulated market and stealing millions each day from "Grandma Millie." The Texas redistricting, like many of Mr. DeLay's actions, broke all the usual rules of political fair play. But when you believe, as Mr. DeLay does, that God is using you to promote a "biblical worldview" in politics, the usual rules don't apply. And the redistricting worked — it is a major reason why anything short of a Democratic tidal wave in November is likely to leave the House in Republican hands. There is, however, one problem: a 100-year-old Texas law bars corporate financing of State Legislature campaigns. An inquiry is under way, and Mr. DeLay has hired two criminal defense lawyers. Stay tuned. But you shouldn't conclude that the system is working. Mr. DeLay's current predicament is an accident. The party machine that he has done so much to create has eliminated most of the checks and balances in our government. Again and again, Republicans in Congress have closed ranks to block or emasculate politically inconvenient investigations. If Enron hadn't collapsed, and if Texas didn't still have a campaign finance law that is a relic of its populist past, Mr. DeLay would be in no danger at all. The larger picture is this: Mr. DeLay and his fellow hard-liners, whose values are far from the American mainstream, have forged an immensely effective alliance with corporate interests. And they may be just one election away from achieving a long-term lock on power.
Posted: 12 July 2004
Let's keep this election honest. Electronic voting critics sue Diebold under whistle-blower law SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Critics of electronic voting are suing Diebold Inc. under a whistle-blower law, alleging that the company's shoddy balloting equipment exposed California elections to hackers and software bugs. California's attorney general unsealed the lawsuit Friday. It was filed in November but sealed under a provision that keeps such actions secret until the government decides whether to join the plaintiffs. Lawmakers from Maryland to California are expressing doubts about the integrity of paperless voting terminals made by several large manufacturers, which up to 50 million Americans will use in November. The California lawsuit was filed in state court by computer programmer Jim March and activist Bev Harris, who are seeking full reimbursement for Diebold equipment purchased in California. Issues cited by the case include Diebold's use of uncertified hardware and software, and modems that may have allowed election results to be published online before polls closed. They are asking California to join the lawsuit against Diebold. The state has not yet made a decision. State election officials have spent at least $8 million on paperless touchscreen machines. Alameda County, for one, has spent at least $11 million. Under the whistle-blower statute, March and Harris could collect up to 30 percent of any reimbursement. "This is about money now -- a case of the capitalist system at work," said March, of Sacramento. "The laws on voting products and processes are unfortunately unclear. But the law on defrauding the government is really, really clear. Going after the money trail is cleaner than going after proper procedures." Diebold spokesman David Bear said Saturday the North Canton, Ohio-based company has not been served with the lawsuit and would not comment until it reviewed the case. Election officials have until September 7 to decide whether to join the lawsuit, said Tom Dresslar, spokesman for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Alameda County also has not yet decided whether to participate, said Elaine Ginnold of the county's registrar of voters office. She said Diebold has been "extremely responsive" in addressing problems with its system used in the March primary, which forced at least 6,000 of 316,000 voters to use backup paper ballots. "I think we avoided a major crisis -- it would have been much, much worse had we not had those paper ballot backups," Ginnold said. Earlier this year, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned one Diebold voting system unless counties met a host of conditions, including precautions to prevent tampering and giving paper ballots to voters who prefer them. In the March primary, 573 of 1,038 polling places in San Diego County failed to open on time because of computer malfunctions. A software bug in North Carolina's 2002 general election deleted 436 electronic ballots from six paperless machines in two counties. Some people are critical of the use of the whistle-blower statute with its reward system for plaintiffs. "I would like to see people support a real solution rather than just try to cash in," said Alan Dechert, founder of Open Voting Consortium Inc., whose voting system relies on nonproprietary software. "There are a lot of people who could be a tremendous asset, but they're grandstanding and reveling in the expose." More from the Center for American Progress. CLEAR CHANNEL SQUELCHES OPPOSITION TO BUSH/WAR: The New York Times reports that Clear Channel, which is run by a major Bush fundraiser and has "close ties to national Republicans," is refusing to allow an anti-war group to buy ad space on one of its public billboards during the Republican National Convention in New York City. The company claims it objected to bomb imagery, even though Clear Channel had rejected an earlier version of the ad showing just a dove. Clear Channel's CEO Paul Meyer, a Bush contributor who recently gave a speech entitled "Be Ethical, Be Successful," said with a straight face, "We have no political agenda." But a look at Clear Channel's past shows otherwise. In the lead up to the war, the company officially sponsored "some of the biggest rallies endorsing President Bush's strategy against Saddam Hussein." That effort was undoubtedly motivated by the company's strong connection to the Republican party: R. Steven Hicks, the founder of Clear Channel, is a Bush Pioneer, having raised more than $100,000 for the president, and Hicks personally "made Bush a millionaire 15 times over" in their Texas business dealings. Other company executives have contributed more than $24,000 to the president's campaign. Meanwhile, the NYT reports that in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, "the company and its officials donated slightly more than $300,000 in unregulated money, almost all of it to Republicans." Postponing the Election? In a major exclusive, Newsweek reports the Bush administration is exploring legal justifications for postponing the November 2004 election in the event of a terrorist attack close to the election. In pushing for the authority to suspend democracy for the first time in America's history, the White House is seizing on the right-wing myth that the Spanish election was won by al Qaeda, instead of being lost by a government that lied to its people. And while the administration has trumpeted the prospect that al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election, "counterterrorism officials concede they have no intelligence about any specific plots." MEET BUSTER SOARIES – THE NEXT KATHARINE HARRIS?: Newsweek reports the plan to give the president authority to postpone the election is being pushed by DeForest "Buster" Soaries Jr. – the White House's recent appointee to the newly-formed U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Soaries wants the administration "to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call." But while Soaries is using his agency to feign nonpartisanship, he is anything but. As a GOP candidate for Congress less than two years ago, he relied on major Republican big wigs to assist his campaign. In a New Jersey speech during the campaign, President Bush called out, "My friend Buster Soaries, thank you, Buster, for coming. I'm glad you're here." PLAN IMMEDIATELY PANNED: The administration's power grab effort was immediately panned by lawmakers concerned that the White House is using the fear of terrorism for its own political gain. Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said, "I think it's excessive based on what we know," pointing out that the administration's warnings about an imminent election threat have been "a bust" because they were based on old information. Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA) said postponing the election "would be the ultimate surrender to terrorism for a democracy" and noted the proposal itself "just creates more fear." JUST ANOTHER TROUBLING SIGN: The administration's effort to empower itself to postpone elections is just the latest troubling sign in the lead up to the election. Already, states have contracted Diebold to manufacture new voting machines – a company whose CEO wrote in a fundraising letter last August that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." And the voting machines themselves have severe problems. Meanwhile, the state of Florida flirted with using a "list of 48,000 ex-felons" that civil rights groups note "contains inaccuracies that could cause local election officials to wrongfully purge eligible voters." MEETING TOMORROW – TELL THEM TO PRESERVE DEMOCRACY: The U.S. Election Assistance Commission tomorrow is holding a public meeting at 1:00pm at 1225 New York Ave, N.W., Suite 1100 in Washington, D.C. Go to the meeting and tell the Bush administration to preserve American democracy and back off its plan to hijack the election for its own political gain. If you're not in Washington, e-mail them at this address: HAVAinfo@eac.gov
Posted: 9 July 2004
A timely reminder. Remember How Women Got The Vote? by humbled and voting Wednesday June 23, 2004 at 08:29 PM Vote is a verb, it does not exist without action. It is a hard won right not a candidate or party. Remember how women got the vote The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 helpless women wrongly convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic." They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women. Thus unfolded the "Night of Terror" on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press. So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining? Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie "Iron Jawed Angels." It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. There was a time when I knew these women well. I met them in college--not in my required American history courses, which barely mentioned them, but in women's history class. That's where I found the irrepressibly brave Alice Paul. Her large, brooding eyes seemed fixed on my own as she stared out from the page. Remember, she silently beckoned. Remember. I thought I always would. I registered voters throughout college and law school, worked on congressional and presidential campaigns until I started writing for newspapers. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president, I took my 9-year-old son to meet her. "My knees are shaking," he whispered after shaking her hand. "I'm never going to wash this hand again." All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes, it was even inconvenient. My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was. With herself "One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie," she said. "What would those women think of the way I use--or don't use--my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn." The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her "all over again." HBO will run the movie periodically before releasing it on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunko night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order. It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men: "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."
Posted: 9 July 2004
More from the Center for American Progress. Trampling Democracy To Protect It? In a dramatic scene on the floor of the U.S. House yesterday, the White House and Republican leadership rigged a key vote on a bill that would have reformed the Patriot Act by requiring "law enforcement to go to a regular court instead of a secret court to get permission to demand library and Internet access records of people it is investigating." The reform, sponsored by Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and broadly supported by 332 local governments, at one point was winning 219-201, and when the official voting time ran out "appeared to have been approved by a 213-206 vote." But even as House members screamed "Shame!," Republican leaders abused their power by indefinitely extending voting time, using the extra time to force nine of their colleagues to switch their votes and defeat the bill on a tie vote 210-210. Rep. Butch Otter (R-ID), a top sponsor of the bill who voted for it, said "You win some, and some get stolen." See the video of Rep. Sanders' admonishing House leaders after they rigged the process and subverted democracy. And see how lawmakers who supported yesterday's legislation are today attempting to shut down the House in protest. IGNORING THE PROTEST OF DICK CHENEY: In rigging the vote, House leaders ignored the timeless protest of Vice President Dick Cheney. In 1987, then-Rep. Dick Cheney (R-WY) criticized the practice of holding open votes to overturn bills, calling the maneuver "the most heavy-handed, arrogant abuse of power in the 10 years I've been here." READ THE REST
Posted: 8 July 2004
If you have any doubts about the bullshit that is going down in this country and the manner in which our civil rights are being destroyed, READ THIS SITE. Read it and weep.
Posted: 8 July 2004
More stuff from the Center for American Progress. THE KEN LAY PLAN NOW OFFICIAL ADMINISTRATION POLICY: According to Vice President Dick Cheney, Lay met privately with him in April 2001 "to talk about energy." Lay was "the only chief executive of a major player in the electric power industry to confer privately with Cheney as he formulated his national energy strategy." Lay said that he was "flattered that [Cheney] decided to meet with me, and at least hear me out as to some of the things I thought were pretty important that should be considered for his report." At the meeting, Lay handed Cheney a memo outlining "eight points spelling out Enron's case for why federal authorities should refrain from imposing price caps or other measures sought by California officials to stabilize runaway electricity prices." At the time, Enron was manipulating the market to bilk hundreds of millions of dollars from West Coast ratepayers, with company traders caught on tape "gloating over the crisis they helped create." Nonetheless, "seven out of eight recommendations were adopted in the administration's final energy plan." And the president is still pushing the Ken Layplan as the solution to the nation's energy woes. LAY AND ENRON WERE BUSH'S #1 CONTRIBUTORS: All the access Lay had to the White House didn't come cheap. Enron was the #1 all-time contributor to George W. Bush – contributing $550,025 to his campaigns by mid-1999. Lay himself donated $250,000 in soft money to Bush's political campaigns. He also was a Bush Pioneer in 2000, meaning he personally raised over $100,000 for the president. Lay and other Enron executives pitched in another $300,000 to pay for Bush's inauguration festivities. ASHCROFT'S 'HYSTERICAL' CLAIMS MISLED PUBLIC ON LIBRARY SEARCHES: When Congress first considered bipartisan legislation restricting these sections of the Patriot Act, Ashcroft "mocked" critics, accusing them of "baseless hysteria." According to the 9/21/03 Hartford Courant, in the first eight minutes of one speech during the debate about the bill, the attorney general called his critics "hysterical" six separate times. He then deployed his top spokesman, Mark Corallo, to deny that the library provisions had ever been used, even after the 11/1/03 newsletter of the American Library Association revealed that FBI agents in the summer of 2003 formally contacted at least 14 libraries "with requests for patron-record information." In fact, the Justice Department ultimately acknowedged that the provision has been used.
Posted: 7 July 2004
I wonder what the radical right has against women? Info from the Center for American Progress. The War on Women Displaying a shocking indifference to women's rights, 6 Democrats and 45 Republicans confirmed Bush nominee James Leon Holmes to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench in Arkansas. Holmes, a Little Rock attorney who supports a constitutional amendment banning abortion, once wrote that "concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) noted that "30,000 American girls and women become pregnant each year from rape or incest." But Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was unconcerned, saying Holmes's callous remark about rape victims was "a literary device called exaggeration for effect." Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), who voted to confirm Holmes, said that he "apologized for that comment [and] acknowledged it was wrong." But Holmes has never acknowledged he was wrong. In a carefully worded letter, Holmes apologized, "regardless of the merits of the issue," only for his "articulation." HOLMES BELIEVES WIVES SHOULD BE SUBORDINATE: Holmes has a history of publicly denigrating women. In 1997, Holmes wrote that a "wife is to subordinate herself to her husband." There is no indication that Holmes has apologized in any way for that comment. Rick Santorum (R-PA) went out of his way to note that he agreed with Holmes's view of marriage. Holmes has also "compared pro-choice advocates to Nazis and abortion to slavery." NOTE TO FOX – MEN CAN CARE ABOUT WOMEN'S RIGHTS: Fox News published an article on their web site headlined: "Women Senators Balk at Controversial Nominee." In fact, responsible Senators of both genders were critical of Holmes's misogynistic comments. Male senators were some of the most impassioned critics. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VA) said that Holmes has "revealed how tightly his mind is closed to seeing the realities of the world. His statements also reveal a callous disregard for the trauma of women who are raped, and a disturbing, willful ignorance of the facts." Richard Durbin (D-IL) said, "Holmes's statements...do not embody contemporary standards that should be followed by any federal judge in any state." Both Durbin and Leahy voted against Holmes's confirmation. BUSH CRIES WOLF ON JUDICIAL NOMINEES: President Bush travels to North Carolina and Michigan today to meet with other federal judges he has nominated to lifetime appointments in order to draw attention to "Senate Democrats who continue to use obstructionist tactics and delay an up or down vote on these nominees." Here are the facts: in the three and a half years since Bush took office, the Senate has confirmed 198 judges. In the eight years Bill Clinton was president, 377 of his nominees were approved. Why is Bush able to have his nominees approved at a faster rate? Just three of Bush's nominees have been blocked, compared to 20 during the Clinton presidency. In the first 1000 days Bush was President, judicial vacancies dropped from 9.9 per cent to 4.6 per cent. ASK THE WHITE HOUSE: White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales will be taking questions about judicial nominations at 3:30 today. You can submit a question now. Two suggested questions: Why is the President claiming members of the Senate are using "obstructionist tactics" to delay his judicial nominees when 98% of them have been confirmed – a rate far higher than President Clinton's nominees? Does the president agree with his most recently confirmed judge, James Leon Holmes, that a "wife is to subordinate herself to her husband" and "place herself under the authority of the man?" RIGHT-WING INSENSITIVE QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It means stupid, dirty girl." – California Education Secretary Richard Riordan, when asked by a little girl if he knew that her first name, Isis, meant "Egyptian goddess." 
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