MY POV

IF YOU'RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin

How Bush really feels about you.

"If there were such a thing as Intelligent Design, we wouldn't have George W. Bush."

Christy Marx

The Mars Society

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
34th President of the USA
a Republican, in a letter written to his brother on November 8, 1954

"...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)
4th President of the United States

"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."

Heinrich Heine
Almansor, 1823

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarschall

"Authoritarian societies inevitably crumble because they silence the critics who could save them from errors of blind hubris. Dissent is not a luxury to be indulged in the best of times, but rather an obligation of free people, particularly when the very notion of dissent is unpopular."

Robert Scheer

"FASCISM: a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism."

American Heritage Dictionary

Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
But conscience asks the question - is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is
neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it
because it is right.

Dr. Martin Luther King

"My life is my message."

Gandhi

Posted: 30 Nov. 2005

Talk about blatant. From Grist on-line magazine.

Idaho senator axes funding for agency that studies endangered salmon

Well, that's one way to deal with scientific findings you don't like! Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) has wiped out funding for the Fish Passage Center, a 12-person, $1.3 million agency widely respected by salmon-conservation experts. The center has documented shrinking fish numbers in the Columbia River system, and last summer a federal judge, citing the center's data and analysis, ordered water spilled over Snake River dams to help salmon survive. That didn't sit well with the region's electric utilities, which happen to be major donors to Craig's election campaigns. Soon after, Craig -- the National Hydropower Association's "legislator of the year" -- maligned the center's work as "false science" and inserted language into an appropriations bill that zeroed out its funding. "We are biologists and computer scientists, and what we do is just math," said center manager and fish biologist Michele DeHart. "Math can't hurt you." Apparently, however, it can get you hurt.

ANIMAL ANTIBIOTICS DISCOVERED IN COMMON VEGETABLES
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have found residues from animal antibiotics in common produce, says a new study. Spreading raw manure on fields from animals treated with antibiotics is a common practice on conventional farms. Unfortunately scientists have now discovered that vegetables like corn, cabbage and green onions absorb those antibiotics, which are then ingested by consumers. "Vegetarians may think the huge overuse of antibiotics in livestock and poultry will not affect them, but that's not true," stated Margaret Mellon, the director of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Consumers eating vegetables grown on soil fertilized with manure may be unknowingly ingesting antibiotics." Regular consumption of these antibiotics can then cause bacteria in the body to become resistant. http://www.organicconsumers.org/foodsafety/antibiotics112305.cfm

Here's a little reminder of just how far back CIA involvement goes with Saddam Hussein.

http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html

Posted: 19 Nov. 2005

Fascinating material. Scroll a fair ways down the webpage to get to this section.

November 18, 2005 -- More on Al Qaeda -- the database. Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."

More corporate cover-up of potentiatlly dangerous chemicals.

Hidden Risks of Teflon-Like Chemical Raised by Documents, Says Company Insider

November 17, 2005 — By John Heilprin, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — DuPont Co. hid studies showing the risks of a Teflon-related chemical used to line candy wrappers, pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags and hundreds of other food containers, according to internal company documents and a former employee.

The chemical Zonyl can rub off the liner and get into food. Once in a person's body, it can break down into perfluorooctanoic acid and its salts, known as PFOA, a related chemical used in the making of Teflon-coated cookware.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to decide whether to classify PFOA as a "likely" human carcinogen. The Food and Drug Administration, in a letter released Wednesday evening by DuPont, said it was continuing to monitor the safety of PFOA chemicals in food.

The DuPont documents were made public Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization.

At the same time, a former DuPont chemical engineer, Glenn Evers, told reporters at a news conference at EWG's office that the company long suppressed its studies on the chemical.

"They are toxic," Evers said of the PFOA chemicals. "They get into human blood. And they are also in every one of you. Your loved ones, your fellow citizens."

The environmental group on Wednesday gave the FDA and the EPA copies of DuPont-sponsored internal studies indicating higher dangers from Zonyl than the government knew, including its ability to migrate into the food.

One of the documents, a 1987 memo, cites laboratory tests showing the chemical came off paper coating and leached into foods at levels three times higher than the FDA limit set in 1967. Another document, a 1973 Dupont study in which rats and dogs were fed Zonyl for 90 days, said both types of animals had anemia and damage to their kidneys and livers; the dogs had higher cholesterol levels.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.

Posted: 18 Nov. 2005

It sure looks like a case of stifling dissenting speech.

LA Times Dumps Liberal Columnist
Scheer out as Bush attacks Iraq War critics

11/17/05

Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer was fired on November 11 after nearly 30 years at the paper, the last 13 as one of its most progressive political columnists.

In a published statement announcing op-ed page changes (11/10/05), the Times insisted that it is dedicated to "provid[ing] readers with a wide range of voices and perspectives," but in dumping Scheer, the paper has gotten rid of one of the few prominent progressive columnists in the country.

Scheer's forceful and independent commentary has often placed him in the middle of national debates. He has been one of the strongest critics of the White House over the Iraq War. For instance, in a pre-war column (8/6/02) that undercuts the current notion that everyone got the WMD story wrong, Scheer wrote that “a consensus of experts” told the Senate that Iraq’s chemical and biological arsenals were “almost totally destroyed during eight years of inspections.” Shortly after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, and well ahead of the pack, Scheer (6/3/03) called White House pretexts for war a “big lie.”

Scheer was also one of the first columnists to call for withdrawal from Iraq, in a November 4, 2003 column that presaged shifting public opinion on the issue--though his position is still hard to find among his fellow pundits. More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since Scheer’s call for withdrawal was published.

In 1999, with a Democrat in the White House, Scheer used his column to expose the racism and unfairness driving the government's (and media's) case against Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American scientist wrongly accused of spying. And when a federal court struck the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance in 2002, Scheer was one of the rare media figures who bucked the Republican/Democratic consensus by strongly defending the court's decision (See Extra! Update, 8/02.)

The Times has suggested that Scheer's firing was simply part of a larger revamping of its opinion pages, but Scheer says he was fired for ideological reasons and because the Times' corporate parent, Tribune Company of Chicago, was caving in to outside pressure from conservatives. As Scheer told Democracy Now! (11/14/05), "What happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh…. I was a punching bag for those guys. I'm still standing, and the people who run the paper collapsed."

In the same appearance, Scheer also blamed Times publisher Jeff Johnson: "The big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column."

In an email to supporters on the day he was fired, Scheer suggested that Johnson disliked his views: "The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Whether or not ideology was behind Scheer’s dismissal, the timing is peculiar. The action removed one of the strongest critics of the Iraq War in a week when the White House lashed out at detractors, following months of public opinion drawing closer to the views of critics like Scheer.

It’s not as if the Los Angeles Times has a surplus of progressive columnists. Of the ten columnists in the Times’ new line-up, three are conservative movement favorites--National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg will soon join the Weekly Standard's Max Boot and the Hoover Institution's Niall Ferguson--and two are relatively less known progressives, Rosa Brooks and Erin Aubrey Kaplan. While the Times should be applauded for bringing new diversity to its op-ed page by hiring the two progressive women—Brooks, a law professor, was hired last June and Kaplan, an African-American writer formerly at LA Weekly, was added in the recent shake-up--it's puzzling that the paper would fire its most prominent progressive columnist at such a crucial time.

ACTION: If you are a reader of Robert Scheer's column and would like to comment on his dismissal, please contact Los Angeles Times Publisher Jeff Johnson.

CONTACT:
Jeff Johnson, Publisher
Los Angeles Times
jeff.johnson@latimes.com
Phone: 213-237-500 0

I'm being tortured. The entire Bush regime is unbearable torture.

'Cheney is vice president for torture'

A former CIA director has claimed that torture is condoned and even approved by the Bush government.

The devastating accusations have been made by Admiral Stansfield Turner who labelled Dick Cheney "a vice president for torture".

He said: "We have crossed the line into dangerous territory".

The American Senate says torture should be banned - whatever the justification. But President Bush has threatened to veto their ruling.

The former spymaster claims President Bush is not telling the truth when he says that torture is not a method used by the US.

Speaking of Bush's claims that the US does not use torture, Admiral Turner, who ran the CIA from 1977 to 1981, said: "I do not believe him".

On Dick Cheney he said "I'm embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture. He condones torture, what else is he?".

Admiral Turner claims the secret CIA prisons used for torture are known as 'black sites', terror suspects are picked up in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They are flown by CIA-controlled private aircraft to countries where there are secret interrogation centres, operating outside any country's jurisdiction.

No one will confirm their locations, but there are several possibilities: The Mihail-Kogalniceanu military airbase in Romania is believed by many to be one such facility.

Admiral Turner's remarks were echoed by Republican Senator John McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam.

He said torturing to get information was immoral, was not effective and encouraged potential enemies to do the same to Americans.

Both Mr Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have repeatedly stated that torture by US forces is not condoned.

The more Barbara Bush opens her mouth, the more I understand where Dubya inherited his arrogance.

Open Letter to George's Mama
by Cindy Sheehan

Dear Barbara,

On April 04, 2004, your oldest child killed my oldest child, Casey Austin Sheehan.

Unlike your oldest child, my son was a marvelous person who joined the military to serve his country and to try and make the world a better place. Casey didn't want to go to Iraq, but he knew his duty. Your son went AWOL from a glamour unit. George couldn't even handle the Alabama Air National Guard. Casey joined the Army before your son became commander in chief. We all know that your son was thinking of invading Iraq as early as 1999. Casey was a dead man before George even became president and before he even joined the Army in May of 2000.

I raised Casey and my other children to use their words to solve problems and conflicts. I told my four children from the time that they were small that it is ALWAYS wrong to kick, bite, hit, scratch, pull hair, etc. If the smaller children couldn't find the words to solve their conflicts without violence, I always encouraged them to find a mediator like a parent, older sibling, or teacher to help them find the words.

Did you teach George to use his words and not his violence to solve problems? It doesn't appear so. Did you teach him that killing other people for profits and oil is ALWAYS wrong? Obviously you did not. I also used to wash my children's mouth out with soap on the rare occasion that they lied…did you do that to George? Can you do it now? He has lied and he is still lying. Saddam did not have WMDs or ties with al-Qaeda and the Downing Street Memos prove that your son knew this before he invaded Iraq.

On August 3rd, 2005, your son said that he killed my son and the other brave and honorable Americans for a "noble cause." Well, Barbara, mother to mother, that angered me. I don't consider invading and occupying another country that was proven not to be a threat to the USA is a noble cause. I don't think invading a country, killing its innocent citizens, and ruining the infrastructure to make your family and your family-friendly war profiteers rich is a noble cause.

READ THE REST.

From The Center for American Progress.

A Patriot's Call For Redeployment

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) is "a defense hawk, decorated Vietnam War veteran and retired Marine colonel" who has worked on military issues in Congress for more than three decades. Describing the President's course of action as "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion," Murtha yesterday choked back tears and called for the redeployment of U.S troops from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date," which he said could be six months. Murtha argued that the presence of U.S. troops has now become "a catalyst for the violence," citing a recent poll that found "over 80 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45 percent of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified." Moreover, the extended deployment of more that 150,000 troops in Iraq has put the "future of our military...at risk." Murtha noted that "our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say that the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment." He added, "The main reason for going to war" -- to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- "has been discredited." Murtha's proposal, while on a slightly more accelerated timetable, echoes the themes of the American Progress plan: a steady drawdown of troops out of Iraq, the redeployment of some U.S. troops to better combat terrorist networks, and a strong commitment to diplomatic and other non-military assistance.

WHITE HOUSE RESORTS TO CAMPAIGN-STYLE ATTACKS: The White House responded to Murtha's thoughtful proposal with clumsy, campaign-style attacks. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said "it is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing..." They just don't get it. Now that Murtha has called for withdrawal, the White House can no longer claim it's a position only advocated by extremists. Murtha is a conservative Democrat who "has earned bipartisan respect for his work on military issues over three decades in Congress." Rep. John M. McHugh (R-NY), who serves on the on the House Armed Services Committee, said, "When he talks, I listen." Murtha isn't going to take it lying down. Referring to Vice President Cheney's attacks on critics of the administration Iraq policy, Murtha said, "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."

HUMAN RIGHTS -- FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: CHENEY IS 'VICE PRESIDENT FOR TORTURE': Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former director of the CIA, has echoed the Washington Post in dubbing Dick Cheney a "vice president for torture." Turner told Great Britain's ITV News, "I am embarrassed that the U.S.A. has a vice president for torture. I think it is just reprehensible." Vice President Cheney has waged an "intense and largely unpublicized campaign" to prevent further restrictions on the treatment of detainees at U.S. prisons. "He advocates torture, what else is it? I just don't understand how a man in that position can take such a stance," Turner said. "We have crossed the line into dangerous territory." To counter the vice president's efforts, American Progress this week launched TortureIsNotUS.org, a campaign that calls on members of Congress to support the McCain anti-torture amendment. The campaign has also released a TV ad it hopes to air soon.

SUPREME COURT -- ALITO MEMBER OF RIGHT-WING GROUP OPPOSED TO CO-EDUCATION: President Bush opposed Yale's integration of women undergraduates: Yale "went downhill since they admitted women." John Roberts didn't want boys in Catholic schools to be distracted by "giggling and blushing blondes." So it comes as no major surprise that Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, joined his alma mater's Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a "far-right organization funded by conservative alumni committed to turning back the clock on coeducation." The group published a magazine "in which students wrote nostalgically about the days before coeducation." Not only were members of the group opposed to women at Princeton, but "they were opposed to any form of diversity on campus" according to Marsha Levy-Warren '73.

ETHICS -- 'GENEROUS' JACK ABRAMOFF USED CLIENT MONEY TO GAIN GOVERNMENT ACCESS: Another friend of embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been outed for her close ties and illegal activities with the former powerhouse. Italia Federici, president of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, yesterday appeared before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee to respond to Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) subpoena about her relationship with Abramoff. Federici's e-mail exchanges with the lobbyist indicate "an unspoken deal with Abramoff, who is accused of stealing millions of dollars from his Native American clients." Abramoff funneled nearly $500,000 in client money to CREA, and in return, Federici offered him access "to at least two of her close friends, [Secretary of the Interior Gale] Norton and Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles." Abramoff personally offered Federici luxury items, including expensive dinners skybox seats at Washington Redskins football games because "Abramoff believed he was buying access to the Interior Department through Federici." Federici dismissed the committee's investigation, calling it a "witch hunt."

Posted: 15 Nov. 2005

I don't know how credible this Roberts person is (credentials aside), but I agree with much of what is said here. I do believe our government has been hijacked by sociopaths.

Prominent Conservative Leader: Government in Hands of Psychopaths
May stage terror attacks
Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson | November 15 2005

Former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Dr. Paul Craig Roberts expressed his dire warning that the US government has fallen into the hands of psychopaths and that the Neo-Cons in the Bush administration may be set to stage another terror attack in the US as part of a black operation to demolish growing dissent and coerce the public to rally behind the government once again.

During an interview with the Alex Jones Show, Roberts cited a Capitol Hill Blue article concerning a leaked memo circulating between top Republican leaders.

The memo outlines potential strategies to bring their agenda back online, including the capture of Osama bin Laden, a drastic turnaround in the economy or a resolution of the war in Iraq.

The most alarming option includes a terrorist attack that would validate the President's war on terror and "restore his image as leader of he American people."

This document adds to the mountainous pile of smoking gun evidence of government complicity in staged terror attacks and other false flag operations. It has now been declassified, as we already knew, that the Gulf of Tonkin never happened. It was staged to get us into Vietnam. Operation Northwoods was the official US government plan to carry out 9/11 style attacks against the American people and blame it on foreign enemies as a pretext for war.

Publicly published PNAC documents before 9/11 had saliva stains all over them as Dick Cheney and others talked about helpful Pearl Harbor attacks.

READ THE REST.

Charles M. Madigan
Bush should try honesty with critics, not spin

Word came last week from "a senior administration official" that President Bush would be opening a new campaign to offset declining support for the war in Iraq, his own slumping poll numbers and a weakening position for Republicans.

The apparent assumption is that all this troubled presidency needs is a good public-relations campaign to address its perceived weaknesses and failures. Team Republicans in Congress and elsewhere will play supporting roles.

One of the effort's objectives is to reverse the collapse in Bush's honesty ratings, which were great a couple of years ago but are dismal now. About 40 percent describe him as "honest and trustworthy" these days. That number was 70 percent in 2002.

Another objective will be to try to turn back the tide of Democrats who are becoming bolder about criticizing the war and pressing for a full explanation of exactly why the administration used "weapons of mass destruction" as one of its reasons for the Iraq invasion.

Maybe Bush can turn this around, but I don't think a PR effort will do it.

Bush unveiled the new campaign in an address at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania. He accused his critics of trying to rewrite history and said many Democrats were on board when they, too, thought Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

No one has found weapons of mass destruction yet, as everyone from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the Congress, to the voters (at least the voters who are paying attention) to the soldiers fighting the war and the rest of the world now knows.

We weren't welcomed as liberators, either, and everyone now knows that too.

With every car bomb or improvised explosive device that slaughters a few more valiant American troops, the volume rises on the question, "Is this worth it?"

In the face of that question, the White House argues that, well, Democrats thought there were weapons of mass destruction, too, and supported the war with their appropriations votes and their rhetoric.

You can see where this leads.

"How can you be giving the White House so much trouble over weapons of mass destruction when, you, too, supported the war back when you thought Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?"

But that raises another uncomfortable question.

"Who told the Democrats that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?"

The answer to that one is, "The Bush administration."

READ THE REST.

From Grist on-line magazine.

Electric-car driver was not an eco-terrorist, FBI admits

The FBI will issue a rare "letter of regret" and pay environmentalist Josh Connole $100,000 after mistakenly arresting him for domestic terrorism. Agents followed Connole for several days in 2003, after arson-vandalism attacks at four Southern California car dealerships in which gas-guzzlers were spray-painted with phrases like "Fat, Lazy Americans." His suspicious activities included living communally with fellow vegans, installing solar panels, protesting the Iraq war, and (horrors!) driving an electric car. When Connole caught on to the surveillance and approached local law enforcement for help, FBI agents arrested him, held him for four days -- often chained to a floor -- and prodded him to confess to the arsons. But oopsie! Another guy did it, and even wrote to the Los Angeles Times mocking the FBI for arresting the wrong man. Asks Bill Paparian, Connole's lawyer, "How does advocacy of electric cars become the basis for suspicion?" Now please excuse us while we check the office for bugs ...

From The Center for American Progress.

IRAQ -- U.S. ADMITS TO USING CHEMICAL WEAPONS: Reversing numerous prior denials, Pentagon officials said yesterday that white phosphorous was in fact "used as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah last November." After first categorically denying any use of phosphorous, the Pentagon said months ago that the chemical was "fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night," but "not at enemy fighters." But in the March 2005 edition of the Army's official Field Artillery Magazine, three Army artillerymen describe using phosphorous in Fallujah "for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosives]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP [white phosphorous] to flush them out and HE to take them out." The use of phosphorous was uncovered in part by a new Italian documentary which depicts "a series of photographs from Fallujah of corpses with the flesh burnt off but clothes still intact," which is reportedly "consistent with the effects of white phosphorus on humans." Washington Post defense analyst William Arkin said yesterday, "What I'm sure of is that the use of white phosphorous is not just some insensitive act. It is not just bad P.R. It is the ill thought out and panicked use of a weapon in an illegitimate way. It is a representation of a losing strategy."

CORPORATE POWER -- OIL CHIEFS MET WITH CHENEY, LIED TO CONGRESS: For years, Vice President Dick Cheney has fought to keep secret the identities of oil executives who helped the administration develop its energy policy in 2001. But the Washington Post has obtained a Secret Service document showing that executives from Exxon Mobile Corp., Conoco, Shell Oil Co., and BP America Inc. all met with Cheney's energy task force. Chevron was not named in the document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the group. As recently as last week, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips told the Senate Energy and Commerce committees that their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force meetings. The "president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate 'to my knowledge,' and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know." Cheney's kinship with the oil industry clearly has not waned since 2001; he knew the oil industry was lying to Congress last week, but remained silent.

SUPREME COURT -- ALITO BACKS AWAY FROM 'PERSONAL VIEWS' ON ABORTION: In a meeting yesterday with Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito backed away from a 1985 document in which he said he "personally believed" that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." According to Feinstein, Alito explained that he was just saying what he needed to say to ingratiate himself with his potential bosses in the Reagan administration. "It was different then. I was an advocate seeking a job. It was a political job." Translation: those weren't my personal views; I was just lying to get a job.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS -- ASIAN BUSINESS EXECS EXPRESS DEEP CONCERN OVER BUSH AGENDA: While the media has cast President Bush's Asia trip as a voyage to "friendly turf," a more thorough analysis suggests there is deep-seated opposition to President Bush's agenda. A poll of foreign business executives working in Asia revealed that two-thirds of them believed Bush's policies are not helping the region. Only 10 percent held a positive view. The Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) said, "One of the first concerns of people in other countries, including some of the closest allies of the US, was that Washington was becoming too much of a bully in a unipolar world." PERC reported many analysts were worried that the world's only superpower would be "handicapped by its involvement in the Iraq war." The list of concerns also included the administration's response to Katrina, which did not "impress anyone with US efficiency or competence," and the administration's "flip-flopping of policy," which has does more harm than "if the original system was left untouched."

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS -- PENTAGON WAGES EXPENSIVE, SECRETIVE WAR OF WORDS AND IMAGES: Evidently, Karen Hughes just isn't enough to improve the U.S. image abroad. The Chicago Tribune reports, "In an effort to fight what it sees as an insidious propaganda war waged by terrorists...the Pentagon has been quietly waging its own information battle throughout the Middle East and Central Asia." The Pentagon has paid The Rendon Group, "a controversial, secretive firm that has been criticized as ineffective and too expensive," more than $56 million since the 9/11 attacks. While Rendon's work for the Pentagon includes activities such as studying media publications and reporters, it also pushes news and plants segments favorable to the United States. Rendon charged high prices for its earlier work with the CIA, receiving a $20 million - $40 million contract to advise the Iraqi National Congress and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi.

Posted: 13 Nov. 2005

Check out news and information about alternative energy sources at the Open Source Energy Network

Ever wonder whether W. just keeps giving the same speech over and over again. Well, HE IS. Here's a direct comparison from the blog, Sadly, No.

This is another serious threat to our civil rights, so pay careful attention and protest to your Congress person.

The FBI's Secret Scrutiny
In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer

EXCERPTS: The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.

Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.

Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

"The beef with the NSLs is that they don't have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny," said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. "There's no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat's decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it."

Two years ago, Ashcroft rescinded a 1995 guideline directing that information obtained through a national security letter about a U.S. citizen or resident "shall be destroyed by the FBI and not further disseminated" if it proves "not relevant to the purposes for which it was collected." Ashcroft's new order was that "the FBI shall retain" all records it collects and "may disseminate" them freely among federal agencies.

Ashcroft's new guidelines allowed the FBI for the first time to add to government files consumer data from commercial providers such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint Inc. Previous attorneys general had decided that such a move would violate the Privacy Act. In many field offices, agents said, they now have access to ChoicePoint in their squad rooms.

READ THE REST.

Bush lies and lies and lies.

A betrayal of our most precious values
By LEONARD PITTS

Well, I guess that settles that.

"We do not torture," President Bush said on Monday. Never mind all those torture pictures from Abu Ghraib. Never mind all those torture stories from Guantanamo Bay. Never mind the 2002 Justice Department memo that sought to justify torture. Never mind reports of U.S. officials sending detainees to other countries for torture. Never mind Dick Cheney lobbying to exempt the CIA from rules prohibiting torture.

"We do not torture," said the president. And that's that, right? I mean, if you can't believe the Bush administration, who can you believe? No torture. Period, end of sentence.

But . . . What does it say to you that the claim even has to be made?

Bush spoke in Panama on the last day of a five-day swing through Latin America to promote free trade. He was addressing controversy over secret CIA prisons in foreign countries. America, Bush reminded us in case it had slipped our minds in the 20 minutes since he last reminded us, is at war.

Guess that would explain all the dead people. And yes, war is not a nice business under the best of circumstances. It is less so when you fight a stateless enemy that strikes from shadows.

But we've been at war before, nasty, brutish wars, one war with civilization itself on the line, yet somehow we always managed to be the good guy. That is not to say our soldiers and sailors and fliers were always good, immune from committing atrocities. It is not to say our officials were always good, untouched by dirty deeds done in clandestine ways. Finally, it is not to say our cause was always good, free from the taint of imperialism or expedience.

But we - the collective we, the official we, the face shown in light of day we - were the good guys.

It occurs to me that maybe I've larded that statement with so many caveats as to drain it of meaning. I'm not trying to be cute. Rather, I'm trying not to sound naive while at the same time getting at something important:

We were the nation of moral authority, the nation of moral high ground, the nation that lectured other nations about human rights. And you know what? People believed us. They rush to our shores because there is freedom here, yes; because there is opportunity here, yes; but also because we stood for something, which was more than the tin-pot tyrants who ran their countries could ever say.

What a difference a presidency makes. "We do not torture," he says.

When I heard that, my first thought was a one-liner: he's been torturing me for years. But you know, this just ain't funny.

In the name of fighting terror, we have terrorized, and in the name of defending our values, we have betrayed them. We have imprisoned Muslims in America and refused to say if we had them, why we had them, or even to provide them attorneys. We have passed laws making it easier for government to snoop into what you read, who you talk to, where you go. We have equated dissent with lack of patriotism, disagreement with treason. And we have tortured.

Yes, Bush says we don't do that kind of thing but, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, who you going to believe, him or your lying eyes?

We ignore our lying eyes, I think, because we are afraid, because we saw what happened Sept. 11 and we never want to see it again. I'd never suggest we ought not fear terrorism. But we should also fear the nation we are becoming in response. We should fear the fact that we have abrogated moral authority, retreated from moral high ground, become like those we once chastised.

"We do not torture," says the president. I can remember when that went without saying.

Miami Herald

Posted: 11 Nov. 2005

I can't tell you how much I love this.

Sign seen at recent protest march against W.

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE
GIVE HIM A BLOW JOB
SO HE CAN BE IMPEACHED?

Once again, the Bush regime proves they don't give a damn. This is on top of sending the Vice to Arlington, so that the Shrub can go give a speech that is supposed to be about honoring veterans, but using it to launch a political attack. Appalling and tacky, to say the least.

Veterans Lash Out at Loss of Voice on Capitol Hill

11/10/2005 11:09:00 AM

Contact: David E. Autry of Disabled American Veterans, 202-314-5219

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A proposal to end the long-standing practice of veterans groups addressing a joint session of the House and Senate Veterans' Affairs Committees is an insult to all who have fought, sacrificed and died to defend the Constitution, according to the Disabled American Veterans (DAV). And in a strongly worded letter to House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), the DAV has urged him to continue the joint hearings as an invaluable tool in formulating public policy toward America's veterans.

Chairman Buyer recently announced that veterans service organizations will no longer have the opportunity to present testimony before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Veterans' Affairs Committees.

"The tradition of legislative presentations by veterans service organizations dates back to at least the 1950s. And the timing of this announcement -- just before Veterans Day -- could not have been worse," said DAV National Commander Paul W. Jackson.

For several decades now, these joint hearings have been held each year to allow the elected leaders of veterans groups to discuss their organization's legislative agenda and foremost concerns with the lawmakers who have jurisdiction over federal veterans programs. Senators and Representatives who serve on those committees also get the rare opportunity to address the hundreds of constituent members from these organizations' who make the annual pilgrimage to Capitol Hill.

"The right to fully participate in the democratic process is a cornerstone of our nation," said Commander Jackson. "Eliminating these joint hearings is an insult to the men and women who have fought, sacrificed and died to protect our Constitutional rights, including the right to petition the government."

This important dialog between veterans and their elected representatives is crucial to the democratic process and a unique opportunity for the men and women who've put their lives on the line for America. Many of the veterans who take part in the hearings view it as their patriotic duty, as well as a fundamental right.

------

The 1.3 million-member Disabled American Veterans, a non- profit organization founded in 1920 and chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1932, represents this nation's disabled veterans. It is dedicated to a single purpose: building better lives for our nation's disabled veterans and their families. For more information, visit the organization's Web site http://www.dav.org

http://www.usnewswire.com/

From Grist on-line magazine.

GOP moderates derail drilling plans for Arctic Refuge and offshore areas

Opponents of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge got some shocking good news last night: 25 moderate House Republicans, led by Rep. Charles Bass (R-N.H.), defied pressure from the GOP leadership and vowed to oppose a $54 billion, filibuster-proof budget bill unless provisions allowing drilling in the refuge and in offshore areas around the country were eliminated -- and promises made they would not return. And lo, in late-night negotiations, House GOP leaders blinked; the provisions are gone. This unexpected development of moderate GOP spine is a blow to the Bush administration's plans for expanded dirty-energy production, but the struggle ain't over. Senate drilling monomaniacs Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) say they'll bottle the legislation up well into 2006 if the final version doesn't include Arctic Refuge drilling. But the House coalition avers it'll stand firm. Elephant fight! Elephant fight!

Gloomy prospects for Louisiana's wetlands, says a new report

Louisiana's coastal marshes are screwed. That's the cheery news from an expert panel convened last year by the National Academy of Sciences. In a report released yesterday, the panel assessed a 10-year wetlands-restoration plan developed by the Army Corps of Engineers, concluding that the four credible parts of the five-part plan would slow coastal wetlands loss by only 20 percent a year. The original 30-year, $13 billion Louisiana Coastal Area study was shot down after the Bush administration complained that it was too large, too costly, and looked too far into the future. But a longer-term approach is just what the panel endorses. It's time to start deciding which communities will have to relocate inland as the Gulf of Mexico's waters continue to advance, say the experts, and map a "managed retreat" from the coast. "If we don't draw this map," says geologist and study director Dan Walker, "nature will."

Oil execs defend profits, drink all the beer, leave the place trashed

The nation was treated to an exquisite piece of Kabuki theater yesterday, as Big Oil executives trudged to Congress to justify their record profits at a time when pricey gasoline and the looming threat of sky-high home-heating costs have Americans up in arms. The Republican leadership decided to give the oil chieftains a stern talking-to. But not too stern, mind you: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who chaired the hearing, refused to have them testify under oath. Despite the deference, the execs didn't do much to provide anxious senators with political cover. They said any temporary tax or fee on their profits is a bad idea. They don't particularly feel like voluntarily chipping in to defray heating costs. They want regulations governing refinery construction eased. And, most amusing, they don't even need all the tax breaks and subsidies Congress insists on lavishing on them. In short, the message was: Leave us alone. Shoo, now. Shoo.

Thousands of sites in Iraq contaminated with chemicals, uranium, more

Donald Rumsfeld wasn't kidding when he said freedom is messy. More than 20 years of war and neglect have left Iraq with serious chemical spills, heavy-metals contamination, and widespread pollution from depleted uranium -- and the cleaning bill could run up to $40 million. The U.N. Environment Program examined five sites near Baghdad for environmental hazards, part of a program training Iraqis in toxic cleanups, the agency reported on Thursday. Among the grim results: At the Al-Qadyissa metal-plating plant, demolished in 2003 after being bombed and looted, UNEP found several tons of cyanide pellets scattered about the unsecured site -- now used by children as a playground. It's not clear how remediation will be funded. "There are hundreds, probably thousands of other sites with the need of assessment," said Mural Thummarukudy, UNEP's manager in Iraq, who asked for donations to help with cleanup efforts.

Fashioning Deadly Fiascos
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Men are simply not biologically suited to hold higher office. The Bush administration has proved that once and for all.

These guys can't be bothered to run the country. They are too obsessed with frivolous stuff, like fashion and whether they look fat. They are catty, sometimes even sabotaging their closest friends. They are deceitful minxes and malicious gossips.

And heaven knows they're bad at math. Otherwise, W. would realize that a 60 percent disapproval rating, or worse, means that most Americans would like some fresh blood in the administration. It's appalling to see ringleaders of the incompetent, mendacious crew who rushed into Iraq but not New Orleans getting big promotions and posh consulting jobs.

Let's first consider the astonishing new cache of Brownie e-mail released by the Congressional panel investigating the heartbreaking Katrina non-response.

Batting away the frantic warnings of death and doom in New Orleans, bubble-headed Brownie boasted of his style sense, replying to a staffer who told him his outfit looked "fabulous" on TV: "I got it at Nordstrom."

In another e-mail to staffers, he preened: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god."

Brownie had other things on his mind besides managing the most expensive natural disaster in US history: restaurants and dog sitters, and marshaling spin for stories about his past management gaffes at the International Arabian Horse Association.

By Sept. 4, with disaster apartheid in full view, Brownie was getting e-mail advice from his press secretary: "You just need to look more hardworking," Sharon Worthy wrote the FEMA Fashionista. "ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!"

It may seem unfathomable that W. has kept Brownie, one of the biggest boobs in US history, on the federal payroll as a $148,000-a-year consultant.

But President Bush may be empathetic to Brownie's concerns about looking good. Obsessed with losing the seven pounds he'd gained around his waist, W. was so focused on getting back his hourglass figure that his staff had to compile an emergency DVD of Katrina news stories before he could be dragged away from biking.

Unless it's some catty attempt to undermine someone you're pretending to like, how to explain the Mean Girls cabal headed by Dick Cheney, Rummy and the Rummy aide Douglas Feith? These hawkish Heathers lured W. into war with hyped intelligence and then clawed out Colin Powell's eyes to take charge of the occupation, only to bollix up the whole thing beyond belief and send the president's ratings cratering.

READ THE REST.

From The Center for American Progress. OPPOSE THE UN-PATRIOT ACT.

HOMELAND SECURITY -- CONGRESS MAY LIMIT ADMINISTRATION'S PATRIOT ACT POWERS: Amidst reports of the FBI pushing Patriot Act provisions "to get access to private phone and financial records of ordinary people," Congress is moving to curb some of the administration's police powers in the Patriot Act, "including imposing new restrictions on the FBI's access to private phone and financial records." The law, set to expire on December 31, rejects the "Bush administration's request to grant the FBI authority to get administrative subpoenas for wiretaps and other covert devices without a judge's approval." Lawmakers expect most of the provisions in the act to be approved and made permanent.

Posted: 6 Nov. 2005

Where is the public outrage?

One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

To believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took "responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."

In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of the story. That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.

After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective the administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two separate official investigations into the failure of prewar intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong. But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate lingo, "the big enchilada."

The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a "sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.

READ THE REST.

Report: US Relied on False Information Linking Iraq, Al-Qaida
By Voice Of America News
06 November 2005

A published report says a top al-Qaida operative in U.S. custody gave false information later used by the Bush administration to support its contention that Iraq trained al-Qaida militants to use illegal weapons.

The New York Times reports Sunday that newly declassified portions of a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency document says Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi misled debriefers in his claims about Iraq's work with al-Qaida members.

Mr. Libi, captured in Pakistan in 2001, told investigators Iraq trained the terrorist organization's militants to use biological and chemical weapons.

The newspaper says intelligence experts realized his claims about al-Qaida's ties to Iraq were lies months before the Bush administration used the information as part of its justification to topple Saddam Hussein.

The Times was given the report by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the leading Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He is strongly critical of the Bush administration for what he calls its misuse of prewar intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.

20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA
by Angry Girl
Nightweed.com

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

http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold

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

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

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

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

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

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886

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

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

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

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

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

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

11. Diebold is based in Ohio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml

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

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.rise4news.net/extravotes.html
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

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

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10544-2004Oct29.html

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

http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html
http://uscountvotes.org/

This reminds me that I need to renew my membership at Costco.

The Costco Challenge: An Alternative to Wal-Martization?
by Moira Herbst

Critics believe that Wal-Mart should play the role General Motors played after World War II… [and] establish the post-world-war middle class that the country is so proud of. The facts are that retailing doesn’t perform that role in the economy. Retailing doesn’t perform that role in any country. —Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, April 2005

To workers and union leaders, it is a familiar refrain. These days, the story goes, consumers demand low prices, meaning goods must be produced and sold cheaply — and retail wages must be kept as low as possible. Companies like Wal-Mart insist they’re feeling the squeeze and must pay workers poverty wages — even while netting $10.5 billion in annual profits and awarding millions to top executives.

But there’s another company that is breaking the Wal-Mart mold: Costco Wholesale Corp., now the fifth-largest retailer in the U.S. While Wal-Mart pays an average of $9.68 an hour, the average hourly wage of employees of the Issaquah, Wash.-based warehouse club operator is $16. After three years a typical full-time Costco worker makes about $42,000, and the company foots 92% of its workers’ health insurance tab.

How does Costco pull it off? How can a discount retail chain pay middle-class wages and still bring in over $880 million in net revenues? And, a cynic may ask, with Wal-Mart wages becoming the norm, why does it bother?

A number of factors explain Costco’s success at building a retail chain both profitable and fair to its workers. But the basic formula is one the labor movement has been advocating for decades: a loyal, well-compensated workforce means a more efficient and productive one.

READ THE REST.

Posted: 5 Nov. 2005

There is no logic to allowing a dangerous and destructive substance like hard liquor to be legal while not allowing something as spiriutal as peyote to be legal.

Study: Religious use of peyote not harmful to American Indians
By Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press Writer | November 4, 2005

BOSTON --For John Halpern to study the effects of peyote on American Indians who use the hallucinogenic cactus in religious ceremonies, observing from a distance was not an option.

Halpern lived on the Navajo Nation reservation for months at a time and participated in prayer ceremonies. Earning their trust and cooperation would have been impossible if he refused to ingest peyote, he said.

"It never would have happened if I hadn't done that. It's one of the ways they take the measure of a man," said Halpern, a psychiatrist at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, just outside of Boston.

A 1994 federal law allows roughly 300,000 members of the Native American Church to use peyote as a religious sacrament, but Halpern set out to find scientific proof for the Navajos' belief that the substance is not hazardous to their health.

After five years of research, Halpern and other McLean researchers did not find any evidence of brain damage or psychological problems in church members who frequently use peyote, which contains the hallucinogen mescaline.

READ THE REST.

Cheney should resign.

Former Powell aide links Cheney's office to abuse directives
Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.

"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.

READ THE REST.

Posted: 4 Nov. 2005

Yes!!! This is good news, for a change, taken from cynopsis.com. Of course, there are other neocons that still need to be removed before the CPB can be restored to an independent state.

In what is beginning to feel a little like a Ken Burns documentary series, Ken Tomlinson the former head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, resigned his post on the CPB board of directors last evening. The announcement of Tomlinson's departure comes just as the CPB board got its first look at the report from the CPB's Inspector General, resulting from an inquiry into Tomlinson's alleged partisan agenda concerning both the editorial balance of public broadcasting's programming as well as misuse of CPB funds to push forward conservative programming and decisions. Tomlinson's egress still leaves several other board members whose partisan agenda has been - and continues to be - scrutinized.

And this is a combo of good news and bad news. Good, because the truth might finally come out. Bad because the Bush regime will do everything in its power to make sure it doesn't change anything.

GAO report upholds Ohio vote fraud claims

As if the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby wasn’t enough to give the White House some heavy concerns, a report from the Government Accounting Office takes a big bite out of the Bush clique’s pretense of legitimacy.

This powerful and probing report takes a hard look at the election of 2004 and supports the contention that the election was stolen. The report has received almost no coverage in the national media.

The GAO is the government’s lead investigative agency, and is known for rock-solid integrity and its penetrating and thorough analysis. The agency’s agreement with what have been brushed aside as “conspiracy theories” adds even more weight to the conclusion that the Bush regime has no business in the White House whatever.

Almost a year ago, Rep. John Conyers, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the GAO to investigate the use of electronic voting machines in the Nov. 2, 2004, presidential election. That request was made as a flood of protests from Ohio and elsewhere deluged Washington with claims that shocking irregularities were common in that vote and were linked to the machines.

CNN said the Judiciary Committee got more than 57,000 complaints after Bush’s claimed re-election. Many were made under oath in a series of statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations carried out in Ohio by the Free Press and other groups seeking to maintain transparent elections.

Online Journal.com reported that the GAO report stated that “some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”

This is the only democratic nation that permits private partisan companies to count and tabulate the vote in secret, using privately-held software. The public is excluded from the process. Rev. Jesse Jackson and others have declared that “public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines.” The makers of nearly all electronic voting machines are owned by conservative Republicans.

The chief executive of Diebold, one of the major suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren “Wally” O’Dell, went on record in the 2004 campaign vowing to deliver Ohio and the presidency to George W. Bush.

In Ohio, Bush won by only 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Honest election advocates contend that O’Dell’s statement to hand Ohio’s vote to Bush still stands as a clear indictment of an apparently successful effort to steal the White House.

Some of the GAO’s findings are: 1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In short, the machines; provided a way to manipulate the outcome of the election. In Ohio, more than 800,000 votes were cast on electronic voting machines, some registered seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.

2: the report further stated that: “it was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works, so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Very many sworn statements and affidavits claim that did happen in Ohio in 2004.

Next, the report says, “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” The GAO found that falsifying election results without leaving evidence of doing so by using altered memory cards could easily be done.

The GAO additionally found that access to the voting network was very easy to compromise because not all electronic voting systems had supervisory functions protected by password. That meant access to one machine gave access to the whole network. That critical finding showed that rigging the election did not take a “widespread conspiracy” but simply the cooperation of a small number of operators with the power to tap into the networked machines. They could thus alter the vote totals at will. It therefore was no big task for a single programmer to flip vote numbers to give Bush the 118,775 votes.

Another factor in the Ohio election was that access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user ID, coupled with easy-to-guess passwords. Even amateur hackers could have gotten into the network and changed the vote.

System locks were easily picked, and keys were easy to copy, so gaining access to the system was a snap.

One digital machine model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary manner that if one machine experienced a power failure, the entire network would go down. That is too fragile a system to decide the presidency of the United States.

Problems obviously exist with security protocols and screening methods for vendor personnel.

The GAO study clearly shows that no responsible business would operate with a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one used in the 2004 election.

These findings are even more damning when we understand the election in Ohio was run by a secretary of state who also was co-chairman of Bush’s Ohio campaign. Far from the conclusion of anti-fraud skeptics, the GAO’s findings confirm that the network, which handled 800,000 Ohio votes, was vulnerable enough to permit a handful of purposeful operatives to turn the entire election by means of personal computers using comparatively simple software.

One Ohio campaign operative, Tom Noe, a coin dealer, was indicted Oct. 27 for illegally funneling $45,400 to Bush by writing checks to others, who then wrote checks to Bush’s re-election campaign, allegedly dodging the $2,000 limit on contributions by an individual.

“It’s one of the most blatant and excessive finance schemes we have encountered,” said Noel Hillman, section chief of the U.S. Department of Justice’s public integrity section, as quoted in the Kansas City Star.

In the 2000 election, Florida was the key; in the 2004 election, Ohio was the key.

Now for the bad news. From Grist on-line magazine.

Senate votes to keep Arctic Refuge drilling in budget bill

The campaign to keep oil drills out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has just been dealt what could be a fatal blow. Yesterday, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) introduced an amendment to drop refuge-drilling language from a filibuster-proof federal budget bill; today, the Senate voted down that amendment, 48 to 51. "This is too important a question to slide into the budget bill," Cantwell said yesterday. "We are setting a very, very dangerous precedent." But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) is psyched. "America can't afford $3-a-gallon gasoline and we can't afford to depend on sources hostile to the United States," he said today, though he failed to explain how drilling in the refuge would solve either problem. The Senate budget bill is expected to pass later this week; the House version, which also includes the drilling language, will be voted on as early as next week. The fate of the final compromise budget bill is unclear.

Bush admin plans to gut critical habitat for red-legged frog

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed slashing critical habitat for California's threatened red-legged frog by over 80 percent, from 4.1 million to 737,912 acres. Why, you ask? It seems protecting the beleaguered amphibian just costs too darn much: The agency says projected economic losses of nearly $500 million over the next 20 years outweigh benefits to the frog. But two economists who consulted with the FWS say they were instructed not to calculate the economic upsides of preserving such habitat -- cleaner drinking water, revived outdoor tourism, and higher real-estate values for homes abutting open space. Instead, they were told to insert wording from the White House's Office of Management and Budget stating that it wasn't feasible to "monetize" such benefits. The administration has voided 16.4 million acres of critical-habitat designation since 2001.

From The Center for American Progress

ETHICS -- EMBATTLED PUBLIC BROADCASTING CHAIR RESIGNS: Former Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) head Kenneth Tomlinson resigned from the board after the agency's inspector general issued a report critical of his leadership. While chairman of the board, Tomlinson worked to push a partisan agenda in public media, hiring outside consultants "to study the political leanings of guests on such programs as 'Now With Bill Moyers' and 'The Diane Rehm Show' on National Public Radio." The inspector general had also been investigating "whether Tomlinson violated agency procedures in his recruiting of former Republican National Committee co-chairman Patricia de Stacy Harrison to be CPB's chief executive, and into possible White House influence in the hiring of two in-house ombudsmen to critique news programs on NPR and PBS." But Tomlinson's resignation doesn't end the strong right-wing influence at CPB; the new chairperson and vice-chairperson, Cheryl F. Halpern and Gay Hart Gaines, are longtime conservative fundraisers.

PUBLIC OPINION -- REALITY SETS IN: A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Bush's disapproval -- 60 percent -- at the highest level ever during his presidency. Bush's disapproval numbers are confirmed by two other polls released today, showing him at 61 and 59 percent. Only 39 percent of Americans approve of Bush's job performance in the Post-ABC poll. The public indicates growing concerns about Bush's honesty and character. "The survey found that 40 percent now view him as honest and trustworthy -- a 13 percentage point drop in the past 18 months. Nearly 6 in 10 -- 58 percent -- said they have doubts about Bush's honesty, the first time in his presidency that more than half the country has questioned his personal integrity." Furthermore, 67 percent of Americans gave the administration poor ratings for its handling on ethical matters. Lastly, nearly two-thirds disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, while barely a third approve, a new low. "Six in 10 now believe the United States was wrong to invade Iraq." Bush's handling of terrorism is now opposed by a majority of Americans (51 percent).

BUDGET -- SENATE PASSES REGRESSIVE BUDGET, CLOSE HOUSE VOTE EXPECTED NEXT WEEK: Congress is now considering final passage of a sweeping five-year budget plan. (Full details on the budget here.) Among the proposals: slashing more than $14 billion in student loan funds, $5 billion from child support programs, roughly $850 million in food stamps, and a whopping $10 billion from Medicaid. The bad news: the Senate passed the budget narrowly yesterday. The good news: the House vote isn't until next week, and there's a good chance it can be stopped. According to the New York Times, conservative leaders "said they hoped the House would approve their version of the budget next week, but they appeared to remain short of the votes for passage," due to bipartisan opposition to provisions allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Act now -- send an email to your member of Congress urging them to reject the backwards priorities embodied in this budget.

POLITICS -- IN PRIVATE MEMO, DELAY ASSOCIATE REVEALS RIGHT-WING POLITICAL STRATEGY: A recent Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing revealed a startling memo that was sent from Michael Scanlon, a former aide to indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), to the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana. The memo describes "his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business," summed up by Salon.com as: "target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives." In the memo, Scanlon writes, "The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees. ... Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." (Read the full set of memos.)

ETHICS -- ABRAMOFF FUNNELS CLIENT MONEY TO TOM DELAY: Embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, formerly one of Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-TX) "closest and dearest friends," used his private foundation, at the request of DeLay, to raise $150,000 from his Indian tribe clients for the lawmaker. The New York Times notes, "The electronic messages from 2002, which refer to 'Tom' and 'Tom's requests,' appear to be the clearest evidence to date of an effort by Mr. DeLay...to pressure Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying partners to raise money for him." The Senate Indian Affairs Committee is currently investigating whether Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, DeLay's former press secretary, "funneled tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees from Indian tribes into activities that often had little connection to the interests of the tribes and their lucrative gambling operations." The House Ethics Commitee has also hired William O'Reilly as staff director and chief counsel "to investigate Rep. Tom DeLay's travel," which was also funded by Abramoff's lobbyist clients.

Posted: 1 Nov. 2005

Sony needs to be thoroughly sued.

Sony Secretly Installs Rootkit on Computers

Mark Russinovich discovered a rootkit on his system. After much analysis, he discovered that the rootkit was installed as a part of the DRM software linked with a CD he bought. The package cannot be uninstalled. Even worse, the package actively cloaks itself from process listings and the file system.

At that point I knew conclusively that the rootkit and its associated files were related to the First 4 Internet DRM software Sony ships on its CDs. Not happy having underhanded and sloppily written software on my system I looked for a way to uninstall it. However, I didn’t find any reference to it in the Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs list, nor did I find any uninstall utility or directions on the CD or on First 4 Internet’s site. I checked the EULA and saw no mention of the fact that I was agreeing to have software put on my system that I couldn't uninstall. Now I was mad.

Removing the rootkit kills Windows.

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