Easter Lemming Liberal News

News Survey

The Neocon Movement that William Simon built. Since the 70's over 350 conservative front tax-exempt organizations have been funded. The once derided 'crazies' of the right have become the establishment.

ACLU challenges nude teen camp ban

One in three Americans say they have too much freedom

GAO report released Tuesday finds that in the areas of electricity, the judicial system and overall security, Iraq is worse off than before the war.

Gen, Sanchez tried to attack Iran but was overruled.

ABC and NBC launched remarkably unbalanced attacks against Moore film.

Bush's War on Science By Howard Dean, M.D. In George Bush's America, ignorance is strength.

Out of troops, the first large-scale use of the Individual Ready Reserve since 1991 starts.

Hundreds of Cubans émigrés protest against U.S. government at Miami airport. Latest Rove election move to appeal to Cuban voters appears to be backfiring.

Supreme Court Rejects Yet Another Online Porn Law

Fahrenheit 9/11 prospers in Bush country. (el - Will likely remain #1 until Spidey 2 knocks it over.)

Drug Prices Spike After New Medicare Law. Firms make up for discounts imposed.

Kristof - Bush 'exaggerates'.

Electronic Frontier Foundation to go after the top ten bad patents

Krugman - Iraq under Bush 'a case study of how not to run a country.' Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor.

The elephant all over the room - By describing various parts – deregulation, media consolidation, pre-emptive war – Americans fail to grasp the problem as a whole: failed conservative politics.

With Republicans in control of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952, more than ever, this election is a referendum on not only George W. Bush but on conservative policies. Without any meddling from pesky Democrats, Americans have finally gotten an opportunity to really take conservative policies for a test drive. No sharing of the spotlight, no diffusion of responsibility; at last, conservatives can finally take credit where credit is due.

Axis of Eve - Mission : Expose and Depose

"Do right and you will be conspicuous"--Mark Twain, 1901

"Let's expose the bastard, one panty at a time!"--axis of eve supporter

The Axis of Eve is a coalition of brazen women on a mission to EXPOSE and DEPOSE President Select George W. Bush and his deceitful administration. Convinced that effective political action can be irreverent and exciting, we have launched a titillating campaign of TRUTH-FLASHING coordinated around our provocative line of protest panties.

A wide selection of slogans in Mens and Womens underwear.

More evidence for long human habitation in America - find in South Carolina could push date to more than 20,000 years ago.

Judge Says CIA Contractor Stays Jailed - Detainee Begged For Death
A federal judge Friday ordered former CIA contractor David Passaro to remain jailed until his assault trial after prosecutors said witnesses would testify Passaro beat an Afghan detainee so badly he begged to be shot.

Passaro faces four counts of assault and assault with a dangerous weapon — a large flashlight. Wali, who was 28, died at a U.S. base in Afghanistan on June 21, 2003.

Afghan Official Backs Off Suggestion That Heart Attack Killed Prisoner in CIA Case

Lawyer Says Prisoner Died of Heart Attack

Gary Permalink on 6/30/2004

Texas Tuesdays

Rally and Supporting Candidates

I went Sunday afternoon to a Bay Area New Democrats rally at Armand Bayou Nature Center - "Mother Nature Son's - Kerry and Morrison Indoor Picnic." We got to wander around the nature center a bit.

Richard Morrison could not be there but the great Democratic candidate for the Texas Supreme Court, David Van Os, was. Texas now has a Supreme Court that is composed entirely of corporate judges who receive millions from large corporations and the law firms representing them. It is possible to tell how any case will be decided just by looking at the law firms on each side or just seeing the parties involved. They have yet to rule against a large corporation and always shaft the public. I hope to have more on this later.

Just remember "David Van Os is a fire-breathing populist Democrat."

Lefty Hootenanny from Galveston gave a great performance of their musical/comedy variety radio show "Brother can you Spare a Dime." Their name comes from King of the Hill - DALE: "Oh, man. What kind of lefty hootenanny is this?" Looks like over a hundred people enjoyed their show. I should also have more on them soon.

Meanwhile it is Texas Tuesdays and we are highlighting the Texas House races where there now looks to be a good chance the Democrats can take back control. Up today is Texas House 10: James "Jake" Gilbreath who at 21 is the youngest person running this year. He has an uphill battle but the incumbent has not served his majority low-income and middle-class district well at all.

A short interview with Gilbreath is here.

His opponent Rep. Jim Pitts and his subcommittee cut or considered cuts many educators opposed during the 2003 regular session including:
- cutting $15 million from state grants for expanded prekindergarten and kindergarten programs;
- cutting $17 million from funds dedicated to programs for teen parents;
- cutting $30 million from the Student Success Initiative funds for accelerated reading programs;
- cutting $50 million allocated for career and technology education;
- cutting $300 million from the compensatory-education allotment;
- cutting the entire discretionary budget for the commissioner of education;
- cutting funding for both educational service centers and the Windham schools in Texas prisons;
- eliminating funds for outside fund managers for the Permanent School Fund;
- eliminating dedicated funds for extended-year, after-school, and Communities in Schools programs;
- and cutting the staff of the Texas Education Agency.

Pitts also introduced legislation that would lower the age at which offenders would be eligible for the death penalty to 11. What a warm and friendly guy.

If you can afford to help defeat this man and support a new young Democrat for the Texas House make a contribution here. Please add $.36 to let it know it came from the Texas Tuesdays internet campaign. I would also encourage you to look at and contribute to the Morrison and Van Os campaigns.

Gary Permalink on 6/29/2004

Fahrenheit 9/11: An Ultra-Conservative Critique

Even the Wal-Mart Conservatives urge people to see the film.

I chatted with several other people as they left the theater, all of them roughly my age (early 40s) and of similar economic and cultural background. Each of them indicated that he or she would urge friends to see the film – which means that it will have "legs" even if the GOP and FEC were to choke off advertising somehow.

There were no screaming Bolsheviks (one viewer had an anti-animal rights T-shirt) or marijuana-scented bohemians in the crowd. This wasn't the sort of crowd you'd see at a Phish concert, or storming McDonald's at an anti-WTO rally. There were Wal-Mart customers, people who probably listen to country music (even Toby Keith), and even vote Republican. And they were PISSED – quietly, but palpably. As would-be political prisoner Martha Stewart would say, that's a good thing. And well overdue.

Mr. Nascar Urges Everyone To See Film

Verbatim from Chris Myers (Fox Sports announcer) on today's race at Pomona pre-race program..

"You think you know Dale Earnhardt Jr.? He advised his crew to go see the Michael Moore movie Farenheit 911. He said hey, it'll be a good bonding experience no matter what your political belief. It's a good thing as an American to go see... and it just shows you that Dale Earnhardt Jr. can reach far beyond the steering wheel."

Sung to the tune of Margaritaville:

Heads exploding off in Freeperville,
Looking for their lost Dale Earnhardt.
Some people claim that Michael Moore is to blame.
But I know, that it's George Bush's fault.

Don't know the reason
Bush's stayed here all season.
Nothin' to show but this brand new snafu.
It's a real cutie, an Iraqi beauty.
But how we got here, I haven't a clue.

Heads exploding off in Freeperville,
Looking for their lost Dale Earnhardt.
Some people claim that Michael Moore is to blame.
But I know, that it's George Bush's fault.

Bush blew out the surplus,
Hopped on a campaign bus,
Cut up his base, had to cruise on back home.
But there's booze in the blender,
And soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps him hang on.

Heads exploding off in Freeperville,
Looking for their lost Dale Earnhardt.
Some people claim that Michael Moore is to blame.
But I know, that it's George Bush's fault.
Hecate

Gary Permalink on 6/29/2004

The Debate about the debate on Fahrenheit 9/11

IMDb has discussions on films. They have never had anything like this.

Gary Permalink on 6/28/2004

John Kerry is a Douchebag but I Am Voting For Him Anyway.com

Even Aggies have had enough of Dubya

The above is the low estimate and also does not count interest on the debt.

Gary Permalink on 6/27/2004

Movements to muzzle Michael Moore backfire

'Fahrenheit 9/11' Number One with less than 900 theaters!

Clarence Page - Chicago Tribune: Pollsters tell me that people tune in to radio conservatives to be entertained and to be informed, but more often than not, to be hardened even more firmly in their views. The preacher preaches, the choir listens.

All of which makes it even more amusing to me that so many people are trying desperately hard to put a muzzle on Moore's little movie, simply because they don't like its politics. Most of them seem to be people who usually complain the loudest about liberal "political correctness."

First Walt Disney Co. blocked its Miramax division from distributing the film. Disney did not want to offend its family-oriented audience with divisive politics, a spokesman said at the time. Yet Disney doesn't appear to mind broadcasting conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on its radio stations like WABC-AM in New York.

Then, as Moore found new distributors and a lot of free publicity, a new group called "Move America Forward" drummed up a campaign to harass theater owners with phone calls into dropping the film. Created by a Republican public relations firm, the pro-Bush grass-roots movement grew out of the same letter-writing campaign that nagged CBS into dropping its TV movie, "The Reagans."

In response, the liberal MoveOn.org is encouraging people to support the movie. It doesn't need much help.

Let's hear it for the free marketplace of ideas.

Then another conservative group called Citizens United found another target, the movie's ads, claiming they're political enough to violate new campaign-finance laws.

Granted, the ads don't make Bush look like the brightest bulb on the scoreboard. (el - see below.)

Citizens United, headed by David Bossie, author of an anti-Bill Clinton book, knows a lot about negative ads. The organization produced the famous "Willie Horton" ads against Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis in 1988 and the "Gennifer Flowers" ads against Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As grass-roots organizations go, this one appears to be rooted largely in Astroturf.

Fortunately, Moore's film and its ads probably fit under the law's exemption for news media. Or, at least, they should. If not, Citizens United will have done us all a favor, in my view, by exposing the law's questionable infringements on free speech to a wider audience.

This harassment from the right does not seem to trouble Moore much. "I am deeply concerned about whether or not the FEC [Federal Election Commission] will think I paid Citizens United to raise these issues," he told a reporter, with his tongue firmly in cheek. "How else can you explain the millions of dollars of free publicity this right-wing group has given the movie? I plan on sending them a very nice holiday card this year."

Send one for me too, Mike. After all, my family and I were eager to see your movie entirely because so many other people didn't want us to.

Now I cannot thank those would-be critics enough. The movie succeeded in its mission: It was funny, shocking, provocative, entertaining and occasionally tear-jerking.

Most important, when the curtain came down, that was not the end of the discussion. It was only the beginning.

el - KTRH, the popular all news radio in Houston, had the movie the topic of the day for listener comments Friday.

My favorite dumb comment was someone saying, "they must have animated and altered Bush's face to keep making him look so dumb."

;-) Sorry folks, that is your President in all his glory.

Gary Permalink on 6/27/2004

Cheney Defends Use Of 'Fuck You'

Cheney Fulfills Bush's Vow to Change The Tone In Washington

Vice President Cheney on Friday vigorously defended his vulgarity directed at a prominent Democratic senator earlier this week in the Senate chamber.

Cheney said he "probably" used an obscenity in an argument Tuesday on the Senate floor with Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and added that he had no regrets. "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it," Cheney told Neil Cavuto of Fox News. The vice president said those who heard the putdown agreed with him. "I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue."

The forceful defense by Cheney came as much of Washington was discussing his outburst on the Senate floor in which a chance encounter with Leahy during a photo session in the usually decorous Senate chamber ended in colorful profanity. The obscenity was published in yesterday's editions of The Washington Post.

President Bush had made his vow to "change the tone in Washington" a central part of his 2000 campaign, calling bipartisan cooperation "the challenge of our moment."

"Our nation must rise above a house divided," he said in his victory speech in December 2000. "I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we will seize this moment and deliver."

Cheney said yesterday he was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with Leahy because Leahy had "challenged my integrity" by making charges of cronyism between Cheney and his former firm, Halliburton Co. Leahy on Monday had a conference call to kick off the Democratic National Committee's "Halliburton Week" focusing on Cheney, the company, "and the millions of dollars they've cost taxpayers," the party said.

In other hyprocrisy, the official Bush-Cheney website has a political ad called The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party and it shows people like Al Gore, Howard Dean, Al Gephardt and John Kerry morphing into HITLER! It starts with Gore in a speech, morphing into Hitler, with a crowd shouting "Seig Heil!". Watch before they pull it down. (Click the green "Watch!" button.)

The Bush-Cheney campaign, the GOP, and its supporters had earlier made much of a contest entry that compared Bush to Hitler a private citizen had created in MoveOn.org contest to create political ads . That ad on the liberal political action committee's website was taken down within hours and not defended. This ad is on the official Bush-Cheney campaign's website .

(el - I am at another convention, not political, not sure when I'll catch up on postings)

Gary Permalink on 6/27/2004

Texas Democratic Convention Report

My Experiences and thoughts

I will busy at another convention this weekend so unless I do this now I won’t get to it. This will be a quick summary from notes.

One of the things redistricting messes up is internal party politics. What brought this observation on was someone who appeared to be significant in his old district in 2000 but for the 2004 election had fewer friends and people who know him. This was not a DeLay redistricting problem but something that comes up every ten years. Moral, if there is something you really want to do make friends and get public notice quickly in your new district. If not someone else may really want to go to the national convention or take a position you want.

Texas has an 18-year-old presidential elector from my district. This probably doesn’t mean that much as if Bush doesn’t carry Texas he has to be carrying less than four states, or isn’t on the ballot. Still I think it makes a good statement that the party put him on the ballot.

There was a beautiful a cappella rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner that opened the main Convention. The American sign-language translation was also very graceful and quite lovely.

There was no state song or state pledge to the flag - Good. (The state pledge to the flag is something Texas schools have just started requiring for no good reason. Probably to promote state jingoism, pump up testosterone.)

The prayer that opened the convention went on forever and ever and ever – I am probably still standing there. At least it proves Democrats also have our very religious voters.

There were a huge number of delegates – the most ever. There was also the largest percentage of first-time delegates – the podium a couple of times said 80%, which seemed high to me. Still, my looking at the whole floor when first timers were standing seemed over half, maybe two-thirds. But our section of the floor and particularly our district seemed less than half. My ex-wife in the center said it seemed like more than 80%. Speaking of our district seating, we were off to the side where the lights were turned off, I am pretty sure not everyone could see all of our delegation in the dark.

A sad note, there was a slide show of Texas deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. It went on forever, could have been even longer than the opening prayer. The music that was going to play over the speakers had problems so they turned it off. Several times songs were started up from the floor – Battle Hymn of the Republic “My eyes had seen the glory” but I think no song, not even Ani Difranco's anti-Bush "Self- Evident" would have lasted long enough.

“My father always told me to vote and to always vote Democratic. If I didn’t I had no right to bitch when they screwed us.” That may have been from a Rosa Walker, my notes aren’t clear.

Senator Edwards gave a great speech. Even before he spoke there seemed a vast preponderance of sentiment for him to be the Democratic VP candidate. I had also seen him before in a small meeting. Very good speaker, very personable, JFK charisma, and he would attract moderate voters in swing states.

Representative Kucinich also gave a great speech. For the vast majority of Democrats at the convention his speech was even more rousing than Edward's was, which was hard to believe considering the tremendous reception and many standing ovations for Edwards. Of course, Kucinich spoke to our patriotic and idealistic ideals, not to our practical and electable sides. I feel Kucinich is correct but not practical until we move the country back to the middle. He is getting much support for next time. I don’t see how anyone should be a Green with Kucinich in our party and the support he has. As the Populists did in the late 1800’s the Greens should join the Democrats and work to support universal health care, sane environmental laws and incentives, instant runoff voting, and the other issues which are an urgent and pressing necessity.

“No More War, No More War, No More War.”

“With NASA, Houston can be a new center of technology for peace.”

The Texas Killer D’s were honored and fortunately Turner and other non-supporters like Whitmire didn’t speak. There really wasn’t a good place on the program for them and their positions were tremendously unpopular on the floor. This was not a divided party, no one supported them giving DeLay that easy of a victory in redistricting.

The most impressive seminar I went to was on Technology. This was the one with an Austin candidate, can’t find his name, who is using email with great success. His conclusion is that email is the present day key for cost effective political technology, not Internet websites. He does have his website and email guru, a college student he hired when an Internet consulting company wanted $20,000 for what he wanted to do. When the student told him he thought it would take a day to do what he wanted he was hired, it actually took a weekend. Something I should mention to the next politician I try to get a job from. I hit up a couple at the convention and ran into another geodemographics person looking for a job.

The Convention went way over time. Some of that was the problems with a rump caucus in one district because it appeared the rules weren’t followed when selecting delegates. Our district meeting before the Convention had problems because some articulate candidates wanted to go to Boston and people who had worked the phones and emails more had already sewed up the positions. The rejected candidates then had an objection to the way leaders of our district, which stretches across three counties, had recommended positions be assigned to each county instead of all positions being open to a district-wide vote. Technically, there were district-wide votes but the floor leader for each county nominated the candidate chosen by the county sub-caucus assigned that position and that person won the district-wide vote, sometimes in a run-off. There were other objections mainly due to the speed in which business was conducted. We were done before the floor convention started at 6 PM and many districts had to go back and finish business after 9 PM.

I got Dump Delay and Denton Democrat buttons. Pat, my ex-wife who is in another district, found the reasonably priced food (chili fries) and drinks (extra cans being sold for a half-dollar from a table) in the Convention Hall. I found the free food and drinks at the parties.

At the end of the Convention, we were waiting for the platform, the nominations for delegates to go to Boston and the resolutions. After what seemed a slow start on the resolutions they nearly all went the progressive’s way, nearly all by huge majorities. The most divided or closest vote I can remember was mandatory jail time if someone causes a death due to failure to yield in an accident. (The motorcycle clubs have gotten organized and joined the Democratic Party and lose too many people each year.) I have no idea how the final vote on that was; the chair seemed to say it passed after saying it failed or two previous calls. The other close votes were on medical marijuana, and a Department of Peace.

The party platform was very good, I speed-read before the vote, some divisive issues were only implied and not declarations. I would suggest that like the national party Texas should work on the platform and get it passed weeks before the convention. The language impressed me and so did the sentiments expressed.

I found out you can go and watch the debates and votes in the committees working on the resolutions, the platform and the delegate nominations even if you are not a member. I went and watched the end of the Boston nominations. Surprised how this was the big push among delegates, “We want to go to Boston.” The Muslim candidate I supported in our district was chosen as an alternate. Last Presidential election American Muslims mostly supported the GOP. They sure learned their lesson.

After the Convention I found my ex-wife and two other beautiful delegates and suggested we head to Kim Son Vietnamese restaurant. Food was good, (their tofu was better than Mai’s!) conversation was better. I’ve had better Kung Pao Chicken and the seafood was bland. One of the entrees was free due to Pat’s Entertainment book. Only needed three entrees for four people and we had leftovers. We stayed three hours just talking. I hadn’t seen Chris in years. Pat is working out ways to register more voters in her district and Janette is working out how to run for office. I am working out how to get a paying job.

Gary Permalink on 6/25/2004

Kerry and the religious vote

Kerry gets America and religion

The fact is, the religion gap in America is not a clear-cut black-white, Red-Blue situation. It's fuzzier than that.

For example, while Time found a majority (56%) agrees that "We are a religious nation, and religious values should serve as a guide to what our political leaders do in office," less than half (48%) say "the President should allow his personal religious faith to guide him in making decisions as President".

In that discrepancy -- the 8% that agreed with the former statement but not the latter -- probably lies the religious swing vote.

In fact, based on Election 2000 exit poll data, the swing is probably a little bigger than that.

Much of the media (not all) have pounded the notion that the majority of the nation is intensely devout, and those who are more secular are an elitist, out-of-touch minority.

But the 2000 electorate was evenly split between those who attend service weekly or more than weekly (42%) and those who attend seldom or never (42%).

About 60% of regular attendees went for Bush (not 100% mind you). The seldom/nevers were in the mid-to-high 50s for Gore.

How did Gore win the popular vote?

By edging out Bush (51%-46%) in the religious swing: the 14% of the electorate that attend services "monthly".

Gary Permalink on 6/24/2004

How the Republican Party sows ruin on the Great Plains

Lie Down For America

The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for President, George W. Bush,carried it by a majority of greater than 75 percent.

This puzzled me when I first read about it, as it puzzles many of the people I know. For us it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Figuring this out, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood. When I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High Plains county so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. "How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican?" she asked. How could so many people get it wrong?

Her question is apt; it is, in many ways, the pre-eminent question of our times. People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests. This derangement has put the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government; it has elected presidents, senators, governors; it shifts the Democrats to the right and then impeaches Bill Clinton just for fun.
...

Not too long ago, Kansans would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers- when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists' worst imaginings, when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work- you could be damned sure about what would follow.

Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today's Kansans of their job security and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land and the next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinic. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed- unions, antitrust laws, public ownership- and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.

Let us pause for a moment and gaze across this landscape of dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate- and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in result, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its revolutionaries demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.

This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.

In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere, simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who were once radical are now reactionary. Although they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization, and although they face the same array of economic forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today's rebels make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tears down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold.

Gary Permalink on 6/24/2004

Quick Takes

GOP trying to stop documentary films and advertising for them as political campaigning.

Why am I a Democrat?

As a 2004 high school graduate I am a Democrat because I see the cost of college tuition skyrocketing now more than ever under Republican leadership. I am a Democrat because I was raised on a small farm by my grandparents who could barely make it on social security and what little they do have goes to medicine and doctor bills.I am a Democrat because I don't believe Texas students in high school are getting the best education available to them. I am a Democrat because I care.

-Bobby Whittington

I am a Democrat simply because I believe that Democrats are taking on the important causes of equality, fiscal and social responsibility, the environment, and education. Democrats are fighting for the issues that face ALL Americans.

And Republicans? Well, they're just fighting.

-Allen Osburn

Petty Perry may call for special session in middle of Democratic Convention

Why prolong this insidious war? Gouge the economy? Rape the environment? Only one retort left - Because Dubya Said So!

Michael Isikoff and Newsweek Magazine Deceive the Public About Fahrenheit 9/11

el - Newsweek happens to have some good writers and editors who appear split down the middle about Bush. The magazine ends up with half the stories being strongly pro-Bush and half about as strongly anti-Bush. In most cases the magazine seemed to alternate weeks. Last year I liked it because domestically liberals had to take what we could get and half good stories was more than you could get elsewhere in a general news publication.

Continue Web Roundup here and here and here.

Gary Permalink on 6/24/2004

Texas Democratic Party Platform

In html - page one, page two, page three.

Whole document in pdf - 1.5 mb.

GOP platform in pdf 1.6 mb.

Gary Permalink on 6/24/2004

Award-Winning Hal Crowther Unloads

Hal Crowther

"If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing 'Hail to the Chief.'"

I never imagined 2004. It would be sophomoric to say that there was never a worse year to be an American. My own memory preserves the dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the consequences of 1941 and 1929, and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived through all those dark years, might have added 1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great War in France that each failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back another generation or two and we encounter 1861.

But if this is not the worst year yet to be an American, it's the worst year by far to be one of those hag-ridden wretches who comment on the American scene. The columnist who trades in snide one-liners flounders like a stupid comic with a tired audience; TV comedians and talk-show hosts who try to treat 2004 like any zany election year have become grotesque, almost loathsome. Our most serious, responsible newspaper columnists are so stunned by the disaster in Iraq that they've begun to quote poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. They lower their voices; they sound like Army chaplains delivering eulogies over ranks of flag-draped coffins, under a hard rain from an iron sky.

Where does it go from here? The nightmare misadventure in Iraq is over, beyond the reach of any reasonable argument, though many more body bags will be filled. In Washington, chicken hawks will still be squawking about "digging in" and winning, but Vietnam proved conclusively that no modern war of occupation will ever be won.

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent civilians, and in every other action apparent innocents kill our soldiers -- and there's never any way to sort them out. And now these acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais.

The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so much deceit exposed, would have brought on mass resignations or votes of no confidence in any free country in the world. In Japan not long ago, there would have been ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling themselves with samurai swords. Yet up to this point -- at least to the point where we see grinning soldiers taking pictures of each other over piles of naked Iraqis -- neither the president, the vice president nor any of the individuals who urged and designed this debacle have resigned or been terminated -- or even apologized. They have betrayed no familiarity with the concept of shame.

Impeachment is impossible when the president's party controls both houses of Congress, though Watergate conspirator John Dean, who ought to know, claims in his new book that there are compelling legal arguments for a half dozen bills of impeachment against George W. Bush. Peer pressure? At the White House, world opinion gets no more respect than FBI memos or uncomfortable facts. Many Americans seem unaware that scarcely anyone on the planet Earth supported the Iraq adventure, no one anywhere except the 40-50 million Republican loyalists who voted for George Bush in 2000.

Among significant world leaders he recruited only Great Britain's Tony Blair -- whose career may be ruined because most Britons disagree with him -- and the abominable Ariel Sharon, that vile tub of blood and corruption who recently used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate a paraplegic in a wheelchair at the door of his mosque. (Palestinians quickly squandered any sympathy or moral advantage they gained from this atrocity by strapping a retarded 16-year-old into a suicide bomber's kit. Such is the condition of the human race in the Middle East, variously known as the Holy Land or the Cradle of Civilization.)

The rest of the known world, along with the United Nations, has been dead set against us from the start. But they carry no weight. Thanks to our tax dollars and the well-fed, strong but not bulletproof bodies of our children -- though mostly children from lower-income families -- George Bush and his lethal team of oil pirates, Cold Warriors and Likudists commands the most formidable military machine on earth. No nation, with the possible exception of China, would ever dare to oppose them directly.

But the Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one can stop these people except you and me, and the other 100 million or so American citizens who may vote in the November election.

One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush is much too strong. Just to spell it out is to sound like a bitter partisan. I sit here on the 67th birthday of Saddam Hussein facing a haystack of incriminating evidence that comes almost to my armpit. What matters most, what signifies? Journalists used to look for the smoking gun, but this time we have the cannons of Waterloo, we have Gettysburg and Sevastopol, we have enough gunsmoke to cause asthma in heaven. I'm overwhelmed.

"... It is always a simple matter to drag 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. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

Goering's dark wisdom gained weight when a friend called me and reported that Vice President Cheney was so violently partisan in his commencement speech at Westminster College in Missouri -- so rabid in his attacks on John Kerry as a anti-American peace-marching crypto-communist -- that the college president felt obliged to send the student body an email apologizing for Cheney's coarseness.

If you think it's exceptionally shameless for a man who dodged Vietnam to play the patriot card against a decorated veteran, remember that Georgia Republicans played the same card, successfully, against Sen. Max Cleland, who suffered multiple amputations in Vietnam. In 2001 and 2002, George Bush and his Machiavelli, Karl Rove, approved political attack ads that showed the faces of Tom Daschle and other Democratic senators alongside the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And somewhere in hell, Goering and Goebbels toasted each other with a schnapps.

Am I polarized? I've never been a registered Democrat, I'm sick of this two-party straitacket, I wish to God it didn't take Yale and a major American fortune to create a presidential candidate. The only current Democratic leaders who show me any courage are Nancy Pelosi and old Bob Byrd -- Hillary Clinton has been especially cagy and gutless on this war -- and John Kerry himself may leave a lot to be desired. He deserves your vote not because of anything he ever did or promises to do, but simply because he did not make this sick mess in Iraq and owes no allegiance to the sinister characters who designed it. And because his own "place in history," so important to the kind of men who run for president, would now rest entirely on his success in getting us out of it.

Kerry made a courageous choice at least once in his life, when he came home with his ribbons and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But Sen. Kerry could turn out to be a stiff, a punk, an alcoholic, and he'd still be a colossal improvement over the man who turned Paul Wolfowitz loose in the Middle East. The myth that there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans, which I once considered seriously and which Ralph Nader rode to national disaster four years ago, was shattered forever the day George Bush announced his cabinet and his appointments for the Department of Defense.

I'm aware that there are voters -- 40 million? -- who don't see it this way. I come from a family of veterans and commissioned officers; I understand patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing "Hail to the Chief." President Bush cultivated his patriots by spending $46 million on media in the month of March alone. Somehow I'm on his mailing list. (Is that because my late father, with the same name, was a registered Republican, or can Bush afford to mail his picture to every American with an established address?) Twice a week I open an appeal for cash to crush John Kerry and the quisling liberal conspiracy, and now I own six gorgeous color photographs of the president and his wife. I'm sure some of my neighbors frame the president's color photographs and fill those little blue envelopes he sends us with their hard-earned dollars.

I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans are conceptually challenged. I want to reason with my neighbors; I want to engage these lost Americans. What makes you angry, neighbor? What arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this administration made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 catastrophe, then exploited it to justify the pre-planned destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al Qaeda? All this is no longer conjecture, but direct reportage from cabinet-level meetings by the turncoat insiders Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill.

If the Pentagon ever thought Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction," it was only because the Pentagon gave them to him. As Kevin Phillips recounts in American Dynasty, officials of the Reagan and first Bush administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with arms while he was using chemical weapons on the Kurds. They twice sent Donald Rumsfeld to court Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the dictator was in the glorious prime of his monsterhood.

This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was briefly called "Iraqgate," and, yes, among the names of those officials implicated you'll find most of the engineers of our current foreign policy. (They also signaled their fractious client, Saddam, that it might be all right to overrun part of Kuwait; you remember what happened when he tried to swallow it all.) Does any of this trouble you? Does it worry you that Dick Cheney, as president of the nefarious Halliburton Corporation, sold Iraq $73 million in oilfield services between 1997 and 2000, even as he plotted with the Wolfowitz faction to whack Saddam? Or that Halliburton, with its CEO's seat still warm from Cheney's butt, was awarded unbid contracts worth up to $15 billion for the Iraq invasion, and currently earns a billion dollars a month from this bloody disaster? Not to mention its $27.4 million overcharge for our soldiers' food.

These are facts, not partisan rhetoric. Do any of them even make you restless? The cynical game these shape-shifters have been playing in the Middle East is too Byzantine to unravel in 1,000 pages of text. But the hypocrisy of the White House is palpable, and beggars belief. If there's one American who actually believes that Operation Iraqi Freedom was about democracy for the poor Iraqis, then you, my friend, are too dangerously stupid to be allowed near a voting booth.

Does it bother you even a little that the personal fortunes of all four Bush brothers, including the president and the governor, were acquired about a half step ahead of the district attorney, and that the royal family of Saudi Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and other Bush family enterprises? Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that it's much easier to establish links between the Bush and bin Laden families than any between the bin Ladens and Saddam Hussein. Do you know about Ahmad Chalabi, the administration's favorite Iraqi and current agent in Baghdad, whose personal fortune was established when he embezzled several hundred million from his own bank in Jordan and fled to London to avoid 22 years at hard labor?

That's just a sampling from my haystack. Maybe I can reach you as an environmentalist, one who resents the gutting of key provisions in the Clean Air Act? My own Orange County, N.C., chiefly a rural area, was recently added to a national register of counties with dangerously polluted air. You say you vote for the president because you're a conservative. Are you sure? I thought conservatives believed in civil liberties, a weak federal executive, an inviolable Constitution, a balanced budget and an isolationist foreign policy. George Bush has an attorney general who drives the ACLU apoplectic and a vice president who demands more executive privilege (for his energy seances) than any elected official has ever received. The president wants a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage from homosexuals, of all things. Between tax cuts for his high-end supporters and three years playing God and Caesar in the Middle East, George Bush has simply emptied America's wallet with a $480 billion federal deficit projected for 2004 and the tab on Iraq well over $100 billion and running.

"A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word means," Barry Goldwater said in 1994, when the current cult of right-wing radicals and "neocons" had begun to define and assert themselves. Goldwater was my first political hero, before I was old enough to read his flaws. But his was the conservatism of the wolf -- the lone wolf -- and this is the conservatism of sheep.

All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at "liberals" and maybe a name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke, whom most of them have never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous but not harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college fraternity prank" (and who once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog" -- you don't have to worry about shame when you have no brain).

I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most sophisticated political campaign in human history will be out trolling for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you.

Hal Crowther is a former writer for Time and Newsweek, the Buffalo News and the North Carolina Spectator before parking his column at the weekly Independent in Durham, N.C., and The Progressive Populist, among others. He won the H.L. Mencken Award for column writing in 1992.

Gary Permalink on 6/24/2004

"Win One For The Nippers"

Female German Soccer fans offer encouragement to their team.

In other Naked News, World Naked Bike Ride Day appears to go off without a hitch or a stitch.

"There were a few completely naked, a few topless. The Saturday afternoon bowlers certainly got a shock."

They did get some attention in Seattle.

"We saw a lot of swaying, but it wasn't of minds,"

The FBI send out a warning that included this as part of an "eco-terrorist campaign."

"We're just grateful it's not pogo sticks."

The Austin scene.

The lovely Suicide Girls blog: People over the face of the planet have celebrated World Naked Bike Ride Day on Sunday, except the lonely city of Edinburgh, Scotland, which celebrated "the world's first non-naked naked bike ride."

“It was truly ridiculous” organiser Lucy Anderson told the Sunday Herald. “The press coverage last week of what we were planning to do was very negative. When everyone turned up today just one girl took her top off, and she was told she would be arrested if she kept it off. Everyone did the route in their shorts.

Comments - Our "Naked Bike Ride Day" here in Asheville, NC involved about 15 clothed riders, followed by about 6 cop cars. A large police van awaited at their destination in case any of them arrived nude.

Blogs of the Toronto event. And some pictures.

Gary Permalink on 6/23/2004

Radio's Jon Matthews pleads guilty

Houston radio Clinton-hater accepts conviction of indecency with a child

Gary Permalink on 6/23/2004

Poet and Peacemaker Mattie Stepanek Dies

Facing the Future

Every journey begins
With but a small step.
And every day is a chance
For a new, small step
In the right direction.
Just follow your Heartsong.

by Mattie Stepanek

Mattie suffered from a hereditary disease called dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy. It is a rare form of muscular dystrophy that had already claimed the lives of his three older siblings (Mattie's mother, Jeni also suffers the same disease.) Mattie needed to take a portable oxygen tank on wheels with him wherever he went. During the summer he was confined to a bed in the intensive care unit of a children's hospital. Mattie was only able to move about on his motorized wheelchair. Even though he had been facing a terminal illness for the last six years, Mattie had never seen his condition as an obstacle between him and his goals.
-- My Hero

Teen's Advocacy, Poetry Touched Many Hearts

Mattie Stepanek : 1990-2004 "Remember to play after every storm."

Matthew Joseph Thaddeus Stepanek, 13, the cheerful, bespectacled child poet who charmed Oprah and sold more than 500,000 books of dreamy verse, died yesterday at Children's Hospital in Washington. He had a rare form of muscular dystrophy that affected his breathing, digestion and heart rate.

Mattie began reciting poems at 3, before he could write. His mother, Jeni Stepanek, who has the adult-onset form of the disease and who lost her three older children to it, took notes.

He told Larry King in February 2003 that he wrote almost every day. "How my mom describes it is I'm like a volcano," he said. "I either do nothing, thinking about when I'm going to do it, or I just burst, spurt out everything."

His first book of poems, "Heartsongs," was published in 2001 by VSP Publishers, a small Virginia publisher, and within weeks it shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, helped by his appearances on "Larry King Live," "Oprah" and "Good Morning America" and by an article in People magazine.

Four more books of poetry followed: "Journey Through Heartsongs," "Hope Through Heartsongs," "Celebrate Through Heartsongs" and "Loving Through Heartsongs." Some of his poems were set to music and released as an album of songs 14 months ago by Billy Gilman.

Gary Permalink on 6/23/2004

One page digest of Clinton Book

The Digested Bill Clinton
Slate reads My Life so you don't have to.

Gary Permalink on 6/23/2004

Poll: Kerry ahead by 8 points

Following a slate of good news on all fronts Bush numbers continue to decline. If Nader doesn't run Kerry leads 53% - 45%, with Nader in the race Kerry leads 48% - 44% - 6%.

Ruy Teixeira has some analysis of recent polls, including the interesting Mother Jones results. Among other things he notes that the LA Times 13% Democrat lead in party identification may not be much of an outlier.

We Democrats and liberals may not be all that happy with public statements and positions from the Kerry camp this election as his major goal is to get the independent and swing voters. However, as Bush continues to sink in the polls that may be a non-issue as those swing voters want a change in direction and Kerry has more room to swing and point out the failures of the last four years.

The electoral vote polls are now leaning Bush's way - My DD has 274 - 264. The map shows why Edwards would be a good pick, to convert over the border states of the South. Richardson for the SouthWest states would be another good choice.

In a closer analysis, Kerry wins the popular vote by more than Gore and picks up one more state but still loses the electoral count. (However, it is still early yet and some of the trends are not in Bush's favor.)

I did not get a chance to intoduce a resolution calling for the President to be elected by direct popular vote at the State Convention.

Gary Permalink on 6/23/2004

Rev. Moon Crowned Mesiah, Hitler and Stalin See the Light

Blogger John Gorenfeld's story goes front page at the Washington Post.

More than a dozen lawmakers attended a congressional reception this year honoring the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in which Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be "reborn as new persons."

Details of the ceremony -- first reported by Salon.com writer John Gorenfeld -- have prompted several lawmakers to say they were misled or duped by organizers. Their complaints prompted a Moon-affiliated Web site to remove a video of the "Crown of Peace" ceremony two days ago, but other Web sites have preserved details and photos.

Moon, 85, has been controversial for years. Renowned for officiating at mass weddings, he received an 18-month prison sentence in 1982 for tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice. In a 1997 sermon, he likened homosexuals to "dirty dung-eating dogs."

Among the more than 300 people who attended all or part of the March ceremony was Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), who now says he simply was honoring a constituent receiving a peace award and did not know Moon would be there. "We fell victim to it; we were duped," Dayton spokeswoman Chris Lisi said yesterday.

Other lawmakers who attended or were listed as hosts felt the same, she said. "Everyone I talked to was furious," she said.

Some Republicans who attended the event, including Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (Md.), said they did so mainly to salute the Washington Times, a conservative-leaning newspaper owned by Moon's organization. "I had no idea what would happen" regarding Moon's coronation and speech, Bartlett said yesterday.

But a key organizer -- Archbishop George A. Stallings Jr., pastor of the Imani Temple, an independent African American Catholic congregation in Northeast Washington -- said Moon's prominent role should have surprised no one. He said a March 8 invitation faxed to all lawmakers stated that the "primary program sponsor" would be the "Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), founded by Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, who will also be recognized that evening for their lifelong work to promote interfaith cooperation and reconciliation."

The event's co-sponsors were the Washington Times Foundation, the United Press International Foundation, the American Family Coalition, the American Clergy Leadership Conference and the Women's Federation for World Peace, according to the invitation. Stallings, a former Roman Catholic priest who was married in Moon's church, said Moon's association with those organizations is well known.

"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not know that any event that is sponsored by the Washington Times . . . could involve the influence, or the potential presence, of the Reverend Moon," he said.

Use of the Dirksen building requires a senator's approval. Dayton said he gave no such permission, and Stallings said the question of who did so is "shrouded in mystery."

Moon has claimed to have spoken in "the spirit world" with all deceased U.S. presidents, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and others. At the March 23 event, he said: "The founders of five great religions and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin . . . and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons."

Gary Permalink on 6/23/2004

Texas Tuesdays - various State House races

Supporting the Texas Democratic candidate seeking to retake the Texas State House.

More reports from the State Convention, looks like I better hurry up with that interview.

One of the most interesting things for me were the fights over who would go to the national convention in Boston. These took place in the Senate District caucuses and in the committee meeting to decide the at-large seats.

I am running late to meet my brother for lunch.

Gary Permalink on 6/22/2004

New Call For Bush Impeachment

War Crimes

In light of the Defense and Justice Department documents, there is probable cause to believe that the commander-in-chief condoned the methodology of torture to secure information from prisoners.

The Constitution mandates the impeachment of a President for high crimes and misdemeanors. There is no higher crime than a war crime. Willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, which are considered war crimes under The War Crimes Act of 1996. Even if Bush’s lawyers could successfully parse the meaning of torture, they cannot deny that the atrocities we’ve seen constitute inhuman treatment.

Bush impliedly admitted sanctioning willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment in his 2003 State of the Union Address. He would be liable under the doctrine of command responsibility for war crimes committed in Iraq as well. The captain goes down with his ship. It is time to call for the Impeachment of George W. Bush.

Gary Permalink on 6/22/2004

Supreme Court: Patients May Not Sue HMO's Under State Laws

When campaigning for President, Bush lied and took credit for the Texas law providing a "patient's bill of rights" permitting law suits against HMO's for not providing necessary treatments. His justice department was directed to oppose the Texas law and the GOP and the White House has been unwilling to support a federal law.

Gary Permalink on 6/22/2004

7 of 9 in GOP Sex Scandal

Candidate For Senator Hurt by Sex Revelations

Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Jack Ryan of Chicago began publicly trying to salvage his candidacy Tuesday, defending his character and calling the uproar over allegations that he urged his then-wife to have sex in front of others "a new low for politics."

Calls for Ryan to exit the race came almost immediately after the revelations, contained in court documents stemming from his divorce from former "Star Trek: Voyager" and "Boston Public" actress Jeri Lynn Ryan, were made public late Monday.

Jeri Lynn Ryan charged during a custody hearing that Ryan took her on surprise trips to New Orleans, New York and Paris in 1998, and that he insisted she go to sex clubs with him on each trip.

She said that after going out to dinner with Ryan in New York, he demanded that she go to a club with him.

"It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," she said. She said Ryan asked her to perform a sexual act while others watched, and she refused.

She said they left and Ryan apologized to her and said it was out of his system. But then, she said, he took her to Paris and again took her to a sex club.

She said she cried and became physically ill at the club, and her husband got angry with her. She said she could never get over that incident.

She also accuses him in the papers of being controlling and lying repeatedly throughout the proceedings.

Gary Permalink on 6/22/2004

Sunday Talk Show Breakdown

LiberalOasis has the weekly recap. This week the 9/11 Commission members fanned out to try to provide some support for the Bush administration but ended up contradicting Bush and Cheney statements at every stop.

Gary Permalink on 6/21/2004

Michael Moore Wants To Bring Down A President

MICHAEL MOORE is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit 9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President Bush and the war in Iraq. He wants it to be remembered as the first big-audience, election-year film that helped unseat a president.

"And it's not just a hope," the Oscar-winning filmmaker said in a phone interview last week, describing focus groups in Michigan in April at which, after seeing the movie, previously undecided voters expressed eagerness to defeat Mr. Bush. "We found that if you entered the theater on the fence, you fell off it somewhere during those two hours," he said. "It ignites a fire in people who had given up."

Gary Permalink on 6/21/2004

Fever Pitch, Houston has no equal among warmongers

WAR Fever - why do more Houstonians hanker to solve problems with violence?

According to the author of an eight-month survey conducted by the University of Texas, Houston suffers from an acute case of "war fever."

People with that affliction might be good citizens, says Dr. Alfred McAlister, but they have come to accept using tanks and guns to solve problems. "We found that in the U.S.A., these attitudes were strongest in the Houston area," says McAlister, a behavioral scientist at the UT School of Public Health in Houston. "People in Houston are generally more likely to accept justifications for war, like the idea that it is okay to make war to increase our economic security."

McAlister offers a version of his survey questionnaire on the Web site www.peacetest.org. The site has already sparked controversy, especially after e-mails were sent to Houston medical students encouraging them to try the test.

One student took exception to the term "war fever," which McAlister gleaned from a statement made by Secretary of State Colin Powell shortly before the Iraq war. The student reposted the invitation on his blog, writing after the term, "this is an obvious attempt to label those who won't fellate terrorists as mentally sick."

Political implications aside, researchers say the theories McAlister has employed to design and interpret his survey are not controversial, at least not in the world of academia. "I have not run across any serious critiques of the approach anywhere," says sociology professor Lester Kurtz, an authority on peace studies at UT-Austin. "My guess is it would be more likely to be controversial to the general public -- which you would hope, because the whole reason we do this stuff is to make people think and debate."

War Test - When is military action justified?

Kill test - Is killing ever right?

el - The Texas Democratic Party passed a resolution calling for the creation of a United States Department of Peace.

Gary Permalink on 6/21/2004

Bush, Osama, and Clinton Alike

Dowd - It's a Guy Thing - Because They Could

Gary Permalink on 6/21/2004

TIME Breaks Silence - Male and Female Rapes At Iraq Prison

Time seems to be the first to bring to the American public the rape charges at Abu Ghraib.

Gary Permalink on 6/20/2004

Newsweek: 9/11 Comission believes Cheney lied to it

Cheney Was Really In Charge

Cheney said that Bush gave an order to shoot down hijacked airplanes. Evidence contradicts that, Cheney gave the order alone. Angry White House forces watered-down report. Angry staffers leak the real story.

el - Look, Cheney is in charge of this country and every insider's report that has come out reconfirms this. Bush rubberstamps Cheney's decisions. The VP picked the cabinet, fired a cabinet level officer (didn't even go through the President), made the decision to go after Iraq, made the final decision to go to war, told the president where to go on 9/11, pushed the wealthy tax-cuts, and decided how post-war Iraq would be governed and who would get the contracts.

Gary Permalink on 6/20/2004

Other Reports from Texas State Dem Convention

I am too tired to do my report, and may not get to it tomorrow because of other plans but I can link to others. I did not get out until after 6:30 PM and I then went with three very attractive and intelligent ladies to Kim Son Vietnamese restaurant where we stayed talking until after 10 PM. Long days, but I did drop off several resumes and had several conversations about positions.

Typically the Houston Chronicle, where the convention is being held, buried the first day below the fold in the local section and carried a non-story tortured headline "Democrats debate party loyalty at convention." There was no debate, people only wanted to hear Texas D's speak. The Chronicle headlines the only debate about this in the home district of both members. There are thirty-one districts. This minor matter apparently was made the headline and top of the article to move U.S. Senator Edwards electrifying speech back to page b36. Today, as of very early Sunday morning, they are only carrying a short AP story - "seemed more like a peace rally today" of the close of the convention.

The Free State Standard shows why the AP story was only somewhat slanted - "I did get to hear Dennis Kucinich speak. I was quite surprised at the number of Kuchinich supporters at the convention. However, he is so energetic and has such a powerful message I can see why his delegates are so devoted. Lots of folks were walking around with peace-related banners, and the atmosphere was totally electric."

Here is a more reasonable story of the first day from the San Antonio Express: VIP ... or VP?: Edwards energizes Texas Demos.

Houston Cable News has better reporting than the Chronicle, "the only metropolitan newspaper to never win a Pulitzer": Party faithful believe anger and resentment spawned by the redistricting fight could lead to some upsets in November.

Bloggers: Aggro mentions the poor technology workshop. I attended the later good one. Sarah also thinks Edwards would make a great VP, as did about everyone at the convention. Greg's Opinion: What a grind. There is more about the convention on his blog. Burnt Orange Report notes: "even though there are no "Dean" delegates, Dean people will make up around 1/4 of the Texas Delegation to Boston in July, around 75 people." I will note that there was the largest percentage of first-timers at a Democratic State Convention, some reports I heard from the platform say 80%, which seemed high for my district (maybe 30-40%) although others said that 80% was about right for theirs.

Partly why the convention got out hours late. Vince also does some name dropping and has a conversation with candidate Jim Nickerson. (I have a surprise email interview coming up.) I seem to always miss the blogger meetings - check out this one at the convention. Morrison said: "the DeLay scandals have upset a lot of Republicans who generally support limited government." Off the Kuff had some of the best linkage about the convention.

From my reading and understanding of Texas political history this was the most moderate and liberal Democratic convention ever and produced a great platform and resolutions. When the Democratic platform gets posted online it will invite a side-by-side comparison with the Republican party platform which seems written by the John Birch Society.

Something happened to the journalist blog that was supposed to occur.

Gary Permalink on 6/20/2004

Advice to Kerry - The Country Wants Change, Tell What You Would Do

The Unhappy Majority

Senator Kerry:

Ordinarily, as a challenger, your first job would be to get the voters inflamed about the way they've fared under the incumbent. According to the Mother Jones poll, you can dispense with this step. The voters are plenty angry. Sixty-two percent of Americans feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Among single Americans, that number is 73 percent. And among African-Americans, it's an astonishing 95 percent.

Indeed, the poll shows the country edging past anger into rage, or benumbed hopelessness. Sixty-four percent of Americans see the country as more divided than ever before, and only 18 percent expect that divide to lessen in the years ahead. Among those few optimists, the largest bloc think things have got to get better — because there's no way they could get any worse!

Senator, you don't need to convince Americans that change is necessary. They know that. They want change. What they don't know is what the change should look like, or who they can trust to deliver it.

There are two models for building a coalition in a time of need. One way is to tell people that their land is under siege, that they have to run to the castle, raise the drawbridge, and make sure the moat is filled with snapping crocodiles. This is the politics of culture wars and racial animosity. Mother Jones poll data suggests that an element of the conservative coalition — surely not all conservatives, but a significant element — are dissatisfied with their lives in some way and, rather than seek true causes, chooses to blame gays, women, and minorities. [el - and Democrats and liberals.] The "moat and crocodile" strategy provides an illusory enemy and an illusory solution.

The other way to build a coalition — progressive, instead of stagnant; inclusive, rather than restrictive; realistic, not illusory — is to show people that there's a train headed for a better life, that it's your train, and that everybody is welcome to climb aboard.

The MOJO Poll - We are currently headed in the Wrong Direction

Take the poll

See Results

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

News Summary

I will be at the Texas State Democratic Convention and don't know how often I can blog. Here are a few sources to tide you over.

The Hamster

Cursor.org

Left Wing Truth - BuzzFlash

Official truth - Most popular New York Times

Insider truth - Most popular Washington Post

Truth for the masses - Most popular Yahoo news

Real Insider Truth - Most popular web links Most current news links

Political Truth - Teagan's Political Wire and links to some blog reports

Left Political Truth - Daily Kos and Diaries, The Democratic Underground, and Democrats.com.

The Anti-Bush Truth - The Smirking Chimp.

Popular Web Truth - Day Pop's News and All Sites

Political News Journalists Truth - The Note and Noted Now

Alternative Truth - Common Dreams, Alternet, OpEd News, The Drudge Retort, The Raw Story, The Progressive Review with Undernews, and my local IndyMedia.

Right Wing Truth - The Drudge Report

All the Truth In Print For The Masses - Google News

All the Truth that's online, somewhere - Google

Why should you have a life while I'm away?

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

About Time

The New York Times says Bush was lying and should apologize.

On Monday, Mr. Cheney said Mr. Hussein "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda." Mr. Bush later backed up Mr. Cheney, claiming that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist who may be operating in Baghdad, is "the best evidence" of a Qaeda link. This was particularly astonishing because the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime.

Mr. Bush is right when he says he cannot be blamed for everything that happened on or before Sept. 11, 2001. But he is responsible for the administration's actions since then. That includes, inexcusably, selling the false Iraq-Qaeda claim to Americans. There are two unpleasant alternatives: either Mr. Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9/11 world.

Now President Bush should apologize to the American people...

el - I've discovered the Times should be read to find out what is the concensus of official thought, it is our official truth paper. You can disagree with it and it often goes off track but it is what the establishment believes to be true or more accurately believes should be presented as being true.

The Stakeholder finds the text of the big lie he told Congress and notes him lying today: ""This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda."

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

Kerry Gets Into Campaign Mode and Kicks Bush's Butt

Kerry as Superman Campaigner

Who Was That Guy In The Cape?

It's as if while we weren't looking John Kerry stepped into the phone booth as Clark Kent and emerged as Superman. Yes, at least for one day anyway, Kerry, master of convoluted context, numbingly nuanced non-answers, and perpetually polysyllabic pentameters, has, voila! turned into a smash-and-slash, take-no-prisoners stump speaker.

A startled political press took note of the transformation in its coverage today. The Washington Post's Lois Romano described Kerry's speech to 800 union members gathered in Atlantic City as "passionate" and "populist."

Romano cited this portion of Kerry's remarks: "I'm running for president to put America back to work...I'm running for president because health care is not a benefit just for the wealthy or the elected or the connected...I'm running for president because I know that we could be a hell of a lot stronger in the world if we were to secure our freedom..."

Both the Boston Globe's Glen Johnson and the New York Times' Robin Toner sat upright for another part of Kerry's sizzling New Jersey speech:

"Our tax code has gone from 14 pages to 17,000 pages. Any of you get your own page? Enron's got its own page. Exxon's got its own page. Looks to me like Halliburton's got its own chapter."

Romano writes that the new Kerry is clearly inteded to address critics in his party who find him aloof and elitist and to attract dissatisfied Republicans and swing voters seeking a reason to vote for him.

el - I could grow to like this candidate.

NYTimes: "We all know that the middle class built this country," he told a cheering convention of the New Jersey A.F.L.-C.I.O., meeting in Atlantic City Tuesday. "Franklin Roosevelt understood that, and so did Bill Clinton."

"But for nearly four years now," he said, "Washington has ignored the middle class, putting wealth ahead of work, something for nothing ahead of responsibility, and what's right for the few ahead of what's right for America."

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

The Air Force has a long-delayed reckoning

The Air Force had the most comprehensive and startling failure of 9/11.

el - Does this mean someone is finally going to look into who was placed in charge of the national Air National Guard by Bush as a reward for destroying Bush's military records?

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

Hullabaloo on the Partisan War

TNR, only available by subscription, had a very interesting article by Peter Beinert. Now Peter as an editor of the New Republic converted a liberal political magazine into a mouth organ of the neoconservative movement - that the United States had a mission to rule the world for the good of the world and to spread democracy. He also even opposed listening to the military generals in the Pentagon as "over and over during the '90s, the generals with firsthand battlefield experience guessed wrong--and the civilians without it guessed right--about what would happen when the United States went to war."

Well, now Peter admits he was wrong, but only wrong to trust Republicans. Hullabaloo blogs him writing: This was a partisan war. By partisan, I don't mean that it was led by Republicans. It was partisan in the sense that the people who formulated it prized group loyalty above all else. They divided the world, the country, and even their own administration into people who could be trusted and people who could not. And, unfortunately, the people who could be trusted knew much less about how to build democracy in Iraq than the people who could not. ... For conservatives, the right lesson of Iraq is that, if you apply a loyalty test to this country's best sources of knowledge--the academy, the press, and the government itself--you'll lose the war on terrorism through sheer ignorance. For liberals, the lesson is to see conservatives as they are, not as you'd like them to be. I'll try to remember it next time.

Digby of Hullabaloo adds his own thoughts: The modern GOP lives in a little world of its own, made even more parochial by the advent of its own media infrastructure. The people who are in charge are second rate thinkers who rose to the top because the pool was so small to begin with.

In America today, there is no such thing as bipartisanship. It didn't have to be this way, but it is. The Democrats compromised with the other side until they came this close to selling their souls and got nothing but the boot on the neck in return. They can go no further.

el - I would prefer all the neoconservatives were in the GOP camp instead of polluting the Democratic Party. The Pax Americana doctrine was fundamentally, morally, strategically, and historically wrong.

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

Rep. Chris Bell Files Ethics Charges Against DeLay

A seven-year-old unofficial truce discouraging House members from filing ethics complaints against one another disintegrated Tuesday when a freshman Democrat accused one of the most powerful members of Congress, the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, of "bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering and the abuse of power."

The Democrat, Representative Chris Bell of Texas, who is leaving Congress because he lost a primary election, filed a 187-page complaint against Mr. DeLay, also of Texas, with the House ethics committee. The complaint accuses the majority leader of illegally soliciting campaign contributions, laundering campaign contributions to influence state legislative races and improperly using his office to influence federal agencies.

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

I hadn't had anything Green in a while

Here is their leading candidate on the Democratic party and John Kerry

Gary Permalink on 6/17/2004

This could be big

Most of Those New Jobs Reported Are Imaginary

The BLS changed their method of calculating new jobs and won't know how accurate it is until next year. They decided everytime a business closed a new business opened they hadn't counted and their has been a sharp rise in business closings. Possibly 85% of the new jobs claimed to have been created since March 2003 are imaginary.

Gary Permalink on 6/16/2004

Bush asserts al Qaeda, Saddam link???

This is just getting silly.

President Bush repeated his administration's claim that Iraq was in league with al Qaeda under Saddam Hussein's rule

No Evidence Connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda, 9/11 Panel Says

Here is a clue - look up al-Zarqawi lies on Google. There are over 10,000 hits mostly on how Bush and Cheney lie about al-Zarqawi to try to establish a link with Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Maybe someone should send Bush and Cheney reporters here. "Google is your friend."

Gary Permalink on 6/16/2004

Natasha Makes The Call

On the phone with 'political consultants' hired to work against Michael Moore

After all the discussion of the organization that's agitating to keep Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 out of theatres, I thought I'd try to talk to the people at Russo Marsh + Rogers. So I call them up and ask to speak with their media representative to ask a couple questions about the firm, and I was told to leave my information and expect a callback.

Then I called the phone number for Move America Forward, and a polite young man comes on who instantly recognized my voice as I started to talk. It's the same person who answered the phone when I called the RM+R number. For a minute I thought I'd dialed wrong, apologized for calling back again, and said goodbye. But I hadn't dialed wrong.

So a little while later, Siobhan Guiney from MAF calls me back. (From her MAF bio: "She has worked as a legislative advocate fighting for the people against liberal corruption.")

...Guiney further denied that any RM+R employees did work for MAF on company time, or that they had any involvement in the organization. But after she'd completely denied the possibility of involvement, she volunteered that some group had falsely accused RM+R of being a GOP PR firm. I said it looked like they did most of their work for the GOP, and asked her what was wrong with being a GOP PR firm. She said that they were political consultants, and not really a PR firm.

el - So they are being paid as political consultants for this campaign? Hmmm... Also movie boycott campaigns always seems to increase attendence. Maybe I should call and ask her if she is aware she is helping to get publicity for this film.

Gary Permalink on 6/16/2004

Stories Today

David Brooks journalist vs. David Brooks hack

Turnabout is fair play, Contact numbers of the GOP hacks providing contacts for Movie Theaters to urge them not show Fahrenheit 9-11. Also here. Or many people are using the contact numbers to urge movie theaters to show the movie.

Room 101 For his dystopia, 1984, his classic novel of totalitarianism, George Orwell created "Room 101," an interrogation room where a prisoner's deepest fears were to be realized and applied. Tier 1 in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, as the now-infamous photos indicate, was the Bush administration's Room 101 for the "Arab mind," and so the crown jewel of its global interrogation facilities.

9/11 Panel can find no evidence of al-Qaeda, Iraq link for attacks. Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration particularly the vice president.

Torture, Incorporated - Many US contractors for lucrative torture business.

US Poll - Iraqis angered by abuse, worried about safety, want us to leave. Winning the hearts and minds has failed.

A guest blog from the Max Sandlin campaign

Salon: Ron Reagan Jr. on Bush White House - "these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people."

The Reagan family feud with Bush. "What's his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?"

Amy Sullivan, who is becoming our best writer on liberal politics and religion, on Jesus Christ Current SuperStar. "Reclaiming some of the Christian market would cut into the profits of Tim LaHaye and Mel Gibson; provide a richer interpretation of Scripture; fatten the bottom lines of Hollywood and New York, and just might save American politics, to boot. Amen."

So Torture Is Legal? ...if the voters can't move the politicians, and the politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all.

A Moral Chernobyl - Prepare for much worst from Abu Ghraib.

Amy Sullivan - Democrats shouldn't be scared of religion. One-half of Democratic voters attend church regularly. And their platform is a good reflection of mainstream religious values. They just need to learn better ways to talk about it.

Lone Star Justice - Alberto Gonzales' strange parochial views of international law. Bush wants him for the Supreme Court.

David Winer cuts off 3,000 bloggers without warning.

The Bush two-step: moral clarity vs legal niceties. By their own words, this administration on torture.

The People's media reaches more people than Fox does. "We paid $3 billion for these television stations," said an executive with a Fox affiliate in Tampa. "We decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is." Thousands of hardy grassroots people have been working steadily and creatively over the years in every area of the media, and the result of their combined efforts is that a new media force is now flowering from coast to coast—a force consisting of hundreds of media outlets that are unabashedly progressive, fiercely independent, diverse, dispersed, and democratic. Collectively, they are a force to be reckoned with, celebrated, strategically deployed? and deliberately expanded.

Summer job hunt - Less than 37 percent of youths are expected to find work this summer, teenagers face the bleakest job market in nearly 60 years.

Dating in Manhatten, legal papers served for not going out on a second date.

GOP slipping Patriot Act 2 into law

Pressure Group Puts Heat on 'Fahrenheit' "Any time any organization protests against a movie, they ensure that the movie will do better at the box office than it would have done otherwise. If they have any doubt about this, just ask Mel Gibson."

What more do you want? How about Naked Happy Girls at 30% Off.

League of Women Voters drops support of paperless voting machines

Fair and balanced from the Right - Mike Savage: "Well there's a big difference between fighting for civil rights, and fighting for homosexual marriage, you moron. It's a big difference for fighting for the equality of all men, despite their race, and fighting for perversion, you idiot! You think people are stupid?" Just your listeners Mike, just your listeners.

Gary Permalink on 6/16/2004

GOP STRATEGIST BEHIND EFFORTS TO INTIMIDATE THEATRE OWNERS

Cosmic Iguana tracked down the owners of the anti-Moore campaign

Gary Permalink on 6/16/2004

Vice President Deceived Public On Halliburton Contracts

More Clear Evidence of Lies

Vice President Dick Cheney stated unequivocally last September that he had no connection to the multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts granted to Halliburton. "I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the [Army] Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government," Cheney stated on national television. As with many things uttered by the vice president, this simply is not true.

The vice president's office was briefed well in advance of two no-bid contracts awarded to Halliburton. A letter from Rep. Henry Waxman to the vice president reveals that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, received a Pentagon briefing in October 2002, one month prior to directing Halliburton to develop a secret plan for restoring and operating Iraq's oil infrastructure. The vice president's office was also made aware of a second sole-source contract worth up to $7 billion awarded to Halliburton four months later for implementing this plan.

Cheney lied to the American public about his involvement with secretive Halliburton contracts. The repeated assertion by Cheney that he was not informed about these contracts does not hold up to basic scrutiny. The staff briefings uncovered by Waxman clearly show direct and early involvement of the vice president's office in the vetting and awarding of no-bid contracts for Halliburton. And earlier this month Time Magazine unearthed an e-mail which indicates that the $7 billion contract awarded to Halliburton on was "coordinated" with Cheney's office.

Gary Permalink on 6/15/2004

Texas Tuesday is running late this week

Maybe people are getting ready for the Convention and the texas blogger Meetup with Morrison. Check out the Morrison campaign and donate. Add 0.36 to show it was from Texas Tuesdays.

Gary Permalink on 6/15/2004

Cheney says al-Qaida, Hussein linked, despite widespread doubts

Cheney offered no details backing up his claim of a link between Hussein and al-Qaida.

In Other Lies: "America's friends know they can trust and America's enemies know they must fear the leadership of President George W. Bush," Cheney said.

"I've watched him make decisions and set the strategy," Cheney said. "I've seen a man who is calm and deliberate, comfortable with responsibility."

Gary Permalink on 6/15/2004

Social Security Better Off Than Forecast

Running a Surplus, Good until 2052

In its first comprehensive analysis of Social Security's finances, the budget office said the program was currently running a surplus. But it also said that as baby boomers retire, "outlays will continually grow faster than revenues, resulting in significant annual deficits."

In its latest report, in March, the Bush administration said the Social Security trust fund would be exhausted in 2042. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office said it would not be depleted until 2052

The results of the study by the nonpartisan budget office are significant because President Bush has strongly suggested that given Social Security's problems, he will make a major effort to overhaul the system if he is re-elected.

Gary Permalink on 6/15/2004

Krugman on Civil Liberties

John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.

Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.

We can't tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft's post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise.

Gary Permalink on 6/15/2004

Chris Bell to File Ethics Charges Against DeLay

Wide-Ranging Charges Break Unwritten Truce Between Parties

Sources close to DeLay said House GOP leaders this week would discuss whether to encourage colleagues to file ethics complaints against Democrats or to keep quiet and assume Bell's charges will amount to nothing. Aides to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said the two leaders neither encouraged nor discouraged Bell when he sent word of his plans to file the complaint. The 18-page document has three components.

Westar: Officers of Kansas-based Westar Energy wrote memos in 2002 citing their belief that $56,500 in campaign contributions to political committees associated with DeLay and other Republicans would get them "a seat at the table" where key legislation was being drafted. Bell's complaint says DeLay "illegally solicited and accepted political contributions in return for official action," but DeLay has said he did no such thing.

TRMPAC: Bell repeats earlier claims that the Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, created by DeLay, laundered $190,000 in corporate donations through the Republican National Committee, which sent $190,000 to Texas GOP candidates. State law bars such candidates from using corporate donations. DeLay and other Republicans deny the charges.

Federal Aviation Administration: Bell's complaint says DeLay "improperly used his office" when it asked the FAA to help locate a private plane last year. The plane was thought to be carrying Texas Democratic legislators who were preventing a quorum that Republicans needed in Austin to pass their contentious redistricting plan. DeLay has denied any wrongdoing.

Gary Permalink on 6/15/2004

Acquittal in Internet Terrorism Case Is a Defeat for Patriot Act

The Saudi computer student was expressing his views under 1st Amendment, his lawyer says. The jury returns six not-guilty verdicts.

Gary Permalink on 6/15/2004

Short Takes - Politics

Ted Rall - BUSH YOUTH?

Kerry's apathetic young supporters.

Kerry's apathetic older supporters?

John F. Kerry has shattered fundraising records, unified an oft-warring party and pushed past President Bush in some national polls. Yet many Democratic voters, officials and even members of Kerry's staff express an ambivalence -- or angst -- about their presidential candidate that belies this strong public standing.

Former Officials not apathetic about Bush Foreign Policy

A group of 26 former diplomats and military officials, including appointees of former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, plan to issue an open statement on Wednesday criticizing Bush's foreign policies. "We just came to agreement that this administration was really endangering the United States," said William Harrop, a former ambassador to Israel under the previous Bush administration.

Is it a Nation Divided or only Washington?

Majorities in both places support stricter gun control as well as the death penalty; they strongly oppose giving blacks preference in hiring while also wanting the government to guarantee that blacks are treated fairly by employers. They're against outlawing abortion completely or allowing it under any circumstances, and their opinions on abortion have been fairly stable for three decades. Virtually identical majorities of Blues and Reds don't want a single party controlling the White House and Congress... Professor Fiorina insists the voters are merely responding to a president who is more partisan than virtually all of his modern predecessors.

Inmaterial Support?

In a ruling for free-speech advocates hosting a website does not count as terrorist support - and some mixed comments.

A terrorist safe house? Or a wedding celebration? Or both?

This is old but still on the discussion table. Good article contrasting foreign and American press. Americans are much more likely to be [gullible stooges/accepting] for officialdom.

Howard Stern - Still Crusading Against Bush

Enron's debacle in California saved Florida (not Texas) ...In one conversation, a top manager in Enron's Portland, Ore., office gloats about how the firm's trading practices "just (expletive deleted) California... to the tune of a million bucks or two a day." In another, energy traders laugh about how much money they scammed from poor grandmothers.

Newsweek - Prison abuse scandal won't go away, war within administration over how much torture

Red Cross - Charge Saddam or release him by end of month

Campaign Report - Middle Class Hurting Under Bush

Bush made political pitch to Vatican to get Bishops to support him!

Pope John Paul II praised Mr. Bush last week for "the promotion of moral values" but reminded the president of the pope's "unequivocal position" on Iraq.

Former Bush National Security Staffer Now Backing Kerry

"I think I have to quit. ... I can't work for these people. I'm sorry, I just can't."

Non-Politics

Blogs take over the net - 10 million by end of the year?

Love really is blind... say neuroscientists. "strong emotional ties to another person inhibit not only negative emotions but also affect the brain circuits involved in making social judgments about that person."

Appalachian Trail nice this time of year

Natural Beauties - Buy the DOMAI Book at Amazon

The technerd who made the World Wide Web free for all given Million dollar prize.

The Onion - Ending months of speculation, presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry announced Tuesday that he has selected the young, vibrant, recently decorated war hero John Kerry 1969 as his running mate.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Religious Short Takes

Taking Life's Final Exit

Excellent article on why dying people speak of taking journeys is anyone's guess.

Religious Right Stronger Than Ever

The Christian Coalition has a firm grip on the GOP leaders.

'Under God' Under a Technicality

Michael Newdow disputed the court's conclusion that he lacked standing because he had no legal interests at stake in the case. When his daughter’s class is led in an observance of loyalty to a nation under God, Newdow said, "My daughter's told that I'm wrong (in my beliefs) every day in the public schools."

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Bush Praises Clinton, Unveils Portrait

Isn't this losing his rabid GOP base?

With old political grudges left unmentioned, former President Clinton returned to the White House for the first time Monday and listened with delight as President Bush praised him for his knowledge, compassion and "the forward-looking spirit that Americans like in a president."

The occasion was the unveiling of the official portraits of Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Hundreds of former Clinton administration officials, from Cabinet secretaries to low-ranking aides, filled the East Room and applauded Bush's warm testimonials.

Bush even offered a plug for Clinton's biography, being published next week. Pausing in his description of Clinton, Bush said, "I can tell you more of the story, but it's coming out in fine bookstores all over America."

Photo - Chelsea looking very pleased

The Whole Family had fun

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Presidential Stories

Fairy-tale presidencies leave real problems
Cynthia Tucker - AJC

Ronald Reagan liked a good story. Indeed, he preferred a good story to dreary facts, details or truths. He often repeated supposedly factual anecdotes -- stories of war heroes or welfare queens -- that were largely fact-free.

Speaking to a journalist who fervently believed that, as a child, he had seen Reagan filming a movie in his hometown, Reagan told the man he had never been there. But the president sympathized with the man's errant recollection, according to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon.

"You believed it because you wanted to believe it. There's nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time," Reagan said.

His was a fairy-tale presidency, dedicated to telling the American people what they wanted to hear. It was just what the voters were looking for after four years of Jimmy Carter, who had an annoying way of reminding Americans that the United States had made mistakes, that citizenship requires sacrifice, that might does not make right.

And so the Reagan presidency was a flimsy construction of myths -- a president can cut taxes while increasing spending, with no adverse economic consequences; there is no racism in America; a rising tide lifts all boats.

George W. Bush is the natural heir to the fairy-tale presidency. Like Reagan, Bush came into office with little grasp of federal policies, little understanding of the wider world and little patience for complexity. Like Reagan, Bush uses charm and a sunny disposition to mask the harshness of his hard-right politics. Like Reagan, Bush holds a handful of core beliefs that are never shaken by adverse evidence.

With his certainty that American power proved American righteousness, Reagan backed brutal dictators from Saddam Hussein to Chile's Augusto Pinochet. But he showed a certain pragmatism in choosing his invasions. After all, he did not fear that critics might paint him as insufficiently Reagan-esque. So he virtually ignored the vicious 1983 attack on a U.S. barracks in Lebanon that left 241 Marines dead; he invaded hapless Grenada, which could hardly have fended off the Georgia National Guard.

Bush has not been so discriminating. His invasion of Iraq has left U.S. soldiers facing a relentless insurgency, stretched the military too thin and provided a handy recruiting tool for al-Qaida. Even the White House has admitted that the torture photos from Abu Ghraib have stirred resentment that will plague Americans for a generation.

So much for Iraqis greeting us as liberators and Iraqi oil funds paying for reconstruction and Ahmad Chalabi as freedom fighter. Like so many of Reagan's tales, those were good stories. Like so many of Reagan's tales, they weren't true.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Governors pay their respects when Bush won't

How State Governors handle Iraq War funerals

With each body that is returned home, the nation's governors have to decide the most appropriate way to pay their respects. Some send condolences, or telephone the grieving family, or send someone to the funeral in their place. Some go to the funerals but only rarely give a eulogy. Very few regularly attend memorial services.

It is a tricky decision. Politicians who attend funerals for the war dead can be accused of trying to draw attention to themselves. But a leader who avoids public displays of sympathy runs the risk of appearing uncaring.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Moore: From anti-Bush to anti-Blair

Moore to start 'war room' for June 25th Opening

The 50-year-old filmmaker - whose latest documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top prize at May's Cannes Film Festival for its highly critical look at President George W. Bush's connections with high-ranking Saudis and his hawkish Iraq policies - has new prey in sight: British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Moore intends to focus on Blair's role in backing the war, reports Reuters.

"I personally hold Blair more responsible for this war in Iraq than I do George W. Bush, and the reason is Blair knows better. Blair is not an idiot. What is he doing hanging around this guy?" says Moore.

The director adds that Blair is like an older brother to Bush, and therefore must be held to a higher standard when trouble arises, much like what happens in a family.

Before Moore starts on his cinematic Blair-bashing, however, he is rounding up his own troops in anticipation of critical and political backlash to "Fahrenheit." He will reportedly create a "war room," in which two of Bill Clinton's former advisers, Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, will support the movie's claims with the help of a small staff. The group will operate 24 hours a day, monitoring all media for any efforts to discredit the film.

"You come at me with anything, we come back with the truth," Moore says.

Although Moore is obviously outspoken against Bush, he wants to make it clear that this does not make him an automatic supporter of the presumed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Moore is a registered independent voter, and adds that if Kerry is elected, "I'd keep my eye on him, too."

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Kinky for governor? Why not?

Kinky Friedman recycles his campaign pitch

Why am I running for governor of Texas in 2006? Why the hell not? I already have several good campaign slogans, starting with "How hard could it be?"

Compared with the daunting financial crunch that Arnold Schwarzenegger inherited when he became governor of California, being governor of Texas is a notoriously easy gig. It's rather like being the judge of a giant chili cook-off.

Consider that in the past a series of wealthy Texas oilmen have ascended to the office, some of them rarely bothering to leave their ranches to go to Austin unless there was a football game. And it's clear that not much was expected of our first female governor, Ma Ferguson, who, regarding bilingual studies, once said: "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for Texas."

I'm not anti-death penalty but I am anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed. Max Soffar has been on death row for 23 years, brought to trial solely on the basis of a long-ago recanted confession and represented by the infamous Joe Cannon, a state-appointed attorney known to have slept through some clients' capital murder cases.

Here's another reason I'm running: Texas has a tradition of singing governors. Pappy O'Daniel's successful race took place in the 1940s. He had a band called the Light Crust Doughboys. I, of course, had a band called the Texas Jewboys. His slogan was "Pass the biscuits, Pappy." One of my own most popular, often-requested songs is Get Your Biscuits in the Oven (And Your Buns in the Bed). The parallels are almost uncanny.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Some new to me Texas blogs

Captain's (B)Log is hating his job as a dishwasher.

JRamseyS is looking for a new job and considering leaving therapy.

Vince of Free State Standard received a letter from a state senator saying his blog had it wrong.

Yellow Dog Blog, which is not new to me, has a report of one of those Republicans going after those seats designed for them getting scolded in the newspaper for lies.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Robots Ho!

Spirit and Opportunity: Another Sign of Water on Mars

NASA's Spirit rover has discovered more evidence of water on Mars, a high concentration of salt in a trench dug by the rover in the Gusev Crater region it has been exploring.

"We have found more evidence of salts, more evidence for the action of water — much more compelling evidence than we found anywhere else at Gusev," said principal scientist Steven Squyres of Cornell University.

Cassinni looks at battered Phoebe

The spacecraft Cassini, due to begin exploring Saturn next month, flew within 1,250 miles of the planet's mysterious moon Phoebe at the weekend.
The first pictures sent back show a black, bruised and tiny world, about 125 miles across. Phoebe reflects only about 6% of the sunlight that falls on it.

"This odd moon has a little ice and a lot of black material on its surface but, beyond that, we know very little," said Dale Cruikshank, a Nasa scientist who will use data from the flyby to calculate Phoebe's chemical composition.

The incoming data will take time to interpret. But the closer look at Phoebe has already revealed a brutal history. It is pitted by craters - many overlapping - suggesting that it has been hammered by lumps of rock and ice several hundred metres across.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

The End of Oil

Mother Jones has more from Paul Roberts:

For them, they’re in fat city. On the one hand, they are struggling to find more oil, so they know that they will need a new line of business in the next ten years or so. That’s why a lot of them are moving into natural gas. Not because it’s the clean fuel of the future, but because that’s what’s easy to discover out there. But for right now they’re making boat-loads of money and they are going to re-invest that money in whatever they choose. They can reinvest it in alternative energy, they can reinvest it in gas, they can reinvest it in R&D. Mainly, they’ll reinvest it in advertising to tell you how they are reinvesting it. As far as they are concerned, there will always be demand for oil, at least in the near term. U.S. demand may drop, but they can always sell it to the Chinese.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

Powell: Terror report was 'wrong'

Denying that the Bush administration was trying "to cook the books," Secretary of State Colin Powell Sunday called a recently released annual State Department report asserting a decline in terrorism last year "a very big mistake" and "very embarrassing."

Powell said officials at the CIA, where a new terrorist threat information center helped compile the data, and other agencies were required to work over the weekend to determine how the faulty data ended up in the report. He said a meeting is set for Monday to get to the bottom of the inaccuracy and that he plans to issue a corrected report as soon as possible.

Gary Permalink on 6/14/2004

INFP Again

Personality Test

I like this one best - it has the in between choices.

Test Results
Your personality type is INFP.
Introverted (I) 79% Extraverted (E) 21%
Intuitive (N) 68% Sensing (S) 32%
Feeling (F) 60% Thinking (T) 40%
Perceiving (P) 95% Judging (J) 5%

Idealist

INFPs generally have the following traits:

Strong value systems
Warmly interested in people
Service-oriented, usually putting the needs of others above their own
Loyal and devoted to people and causes
Future-oriented
Growth-oriented; always want to be growing in a positive direction
Creative and inspirational
Flexible and laid-back, unless a ruling principle is violated
Sensitive and complex
Dislike dealing with details and routine work
Original and individualistic - "out of the mainstream"
Excellent written communication skills
Prefer to work alone, and may have problems working on teams
Value deep and authentic relationships
Want to be seen and appreciated for who they are
The INFP is a special, sensitive individual who needs a career which is more than a job. The INFP needs to feel that everything they do in their lives is in accordance with their strongly-felt value systems, and is moving them and/or others in a positive, growth-oriented direction. They are driven to do something meaningful and purposeful with their lives. The INFP will be happiest in careers which allow them to live their daily lives in accordance with their values, and which work towards the greater good of humanity. It's worth mentioning that nearly all of the truly great writers in the world have been INFPs.

Not true - Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein were INTPs. Those were truly great writers. ;-)

Gary Permalink on 6/13/2004

Bush being an SOB

Hullabaloo doesn't think much of mean, smirking Bush

"Bush's brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it.

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. 'Did you meet with any of them?' I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. 'No, I didn't meet with any of them,' he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. 'I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.

'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'

I must look shocked -- ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush -- because he immediately stops smirking.

'It's tough stuff,' Bush says, suddenly somber, 'but my job is to enforce the law.' As it turns out, the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange Bush recounted never took place, at least not on television. During her interview with King, however, Tucker did imply that Bush was succumbing to election-year pressure from pro-death penalty voters. Apparently Bush never forgot it. He has a long memory for slights." [Carlson, Talk, 9/99]

Gary Permalink on 6/13/2004

Rumors of War (Flight of Fancy)

Normally I strongly support and use Snopes but they are still weaseling on the Saudi Flight story.

I note one thing in particular, they were only willing to use AP, NYT, and newspaper accounts. If they had checked with Judicial Watch, a non-partisan non-profit which uses FoI requests to document abuses of the law, Snopes would have found this:

The FoI response that Judicial Watch received did not include the flight from Lexington but did note 160 Saudi's flew between Sept. 11 - 15. Many of these flew out of JFK on the 13th. The question Judicial Watch asked was who 'was allowed to leave the U.S..' Since this was a US Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) agency document it is unclear why they should have records of these people if they were on purely domestic flights.

PDF FOI response 160 names who were allowed to leave the country.

Gary Permalink on 6/13/2004

New York Times reports declining production at all major oil companies

Odd, They don't mention the end of oil. You can get that information here. Dr. Hubbert correctly predicted the peak and decline of U.S. oil production and predicts during this decade world production will start to rapidly decline.

Gary Permalink on 6/13/2004

Hiding a bad guy named triple X

Top US General in Iraq Hid Prisoner From Red Cross

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed "Triple X" by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters. The disclosure, by military sources, is the first indication that Sanchez was directly involved in efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross, a practice that was sharply criticized by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in a report describing abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Our Own Texas Loons Crowing ABout Their Fantasies

Steve Gillard Examines the Texas GOP Party Platform 'Wackjobs of Texas'

I will excerpt this bit about who is paying the GOP to get a new school system:

Instituting a voucher program that will be a model for the nation has been a burning priority for certain Texans.

In particular, during the 2002 election cycle, a San Antonio hospital bed magnate named James Leininger invested $624,774 mostly in GOP candidates, according to campaign watchdog Texans for Public Justice, apparently with the goal of establishing a voucher program in Texas. From 2000 to 2004, Leininger's entire family gave $2,497,250 to state candidates, which does not include the contributions of numerous companies in which he owns sizable interests. This past February, Leininger and his wife joined Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his wife along with anti-tax guru and Washington lobbyist Grover Norquist, among others, on a private cruise in the Bahamas to "talk about school finance."

A month later, the governor called the Legislature into an unscheduled special session on the subject, which fizzled because of Republican bickering. Vouchers could soon become a policy reality. Perry has declared himself open to a voucher program as part of any eventual school finance package. But many of the faithful seem to be having second thoughts -- because they see vouchers as a Trojan horse for the federal government.

In looking at their entire platform and their intense debates I have to agree with Steve:

The GOP is so rent with ideological battles and bigotry, they have no solutions to real issues. This is like watching Trotskyites and Maoists battle each other over meaning in their self-created fantasy world.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'

Red Cross Memos Point To Rumsfeld's Office

New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House.

The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly.

According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident.

"There are some extremely damaging documents around, which link senior figures to the abuses," said Scott Horton, the former chairman of the New York Bar Association, who has been advising Pentagon lawyers unhappy at the administration's approach. "The biggest bombs in this case have yet to be dropped."

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Florida Elections Chief Resigns Over GOP Pressure

Was Facing Political Heat To Purge Thousands of Voters

The head of Florida's elections division resigned Monday amid reports he was feeling political heat over a push to purge thousands of suspected felons from the state's voter rolls.

Ed Kast, who has worked for the state elections division for more than a decade, said only that he was resigning to "pursue other opportunities."

But Kast has told a handful of associates that he was uncomfortable with growing pressure to trim felons from voter rolls in time for the fall election, friends say.

"I've known him for 20 years, and I believe he has acted because under the circumstances it's the only thing he could do," said Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, past president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.

"Ed had made a number of comments that the nature and timing of this felons list was not something he was responsible for. I think he felt in good conscience he could no longer be involved in the operations."

Hours earlier, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson joined a lawsuit to force state election officials to reveal the names of 47,000 suspected felons who could be dropped from voting lists, saying he wanted to be sure mistakes in 2000 are not repeated.

In other news: New Florida Voting Machines Make Recounts Impossible

Touchscreen voting machines in 11 Florida counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug.

Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., has asked state Attorney General Charlie Crist to investigate whether the head of the state elections division lied under oath when he denied knowing of the computer problem before reading about it in the media. A spokeswoman for Crist said he was reviewing the request.

The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election, state officials said.

Officials with the company and the state Division of Elections said they believe they can fix the problem by linking the voting equipment with laptop computers. Florida's two largest counties — Miami-Dade and Broward — are among those affected by the flaws.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Electoral Vote Map

Kerry 290 - Bush 244

Janette sends me another site keeping track of the electoral college votes via polls. Interesting is that the race is starting to become too close to call in some of the South: Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina right now. Edwards must be looking at that map, or hoping Kerry is. Bush has not been ahead on the map since May 24.

If you know an American who lives abroad and wants to vote tell them to go here, http://www.TellAnAmericanToVote.com and you can get a ballot to vote by mail. Less than 600 disputed votes decided the last election, or five votes of justices.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Molly Ivins is mad

The day the Constitution died

When, in future, you find yourself wondering, "Whatever happened to the Constitution?" you will want to go back and look at June 8, 2004. That was the day the attorney general of the United States -- a.k.a. "the nation's top law enforcement officer" -- refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with his department's memos concerning torture.

In order to justify torture, these memos declare that the president is bound by neither U.S. law nor international treaties. We have put ourselves on the same moral level as Saddam Hussein, the only difference being quantity. Quite literally, the president may as well wear a crown -- forget that "no man is above the law" jazz. We used to talk about "the imperial presidency" under Nixon, but this is the real thing.

When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Ashcroft about his department's input, he simply refused to provide the memos, without offering any legal rationale.

Another memo written by former Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge in California, establishes a basis for the use of torture for senior Al Qaeda operatives in custody of the CIA.

Among the legal memos that circulated within the administration in 2002, one is by White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, famously declaring the Geneva Convention "quaint," and another from the CIA asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the Geneva Convention did not apply to its operatives. The only department consistently opposing these legal "arguments" was State.

The damage is incalculable. When America puts out its annual report on human rights abuses, we will be a laughingstock. I suggest a special commission headed by Sen. John McCain to dig out everyone responsible, root and branch. If the lawyers don't cooperate, perhaps we should try stripping them, anally raping them and dunking their heads under water until they think they're drowning, and see if that helps.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

IN(F/T)P?

My Bloginality is INFP!!!

Except I used to be INTP and am a weak F.

Meyer-Briggsies know what I mean.

A longer test.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Tort Reform?

Debunk the myths

Argument: If juries didn't give such high awards in medical malpractice cases, malpractice insurance wouldn't be so high. So we need to cap jury awards in order to bring down insurance rates.

Response: Despite the recent dramatic increases in malpractice insurance rates, payouts in lawsuits and settlements for medical malpractice have been relatively unchanged in inflation-adjusted dollars since the mid-1980s.

In an attempt to hold down insurance costs, many states have instituted caps on jury awards in medical malpractice cases. And what happened? Rates continued to rise.

So what explains the recent explosion in malpractice insurance costs? The insurance companies' fortunes in the stock and bond markets. Simply put, when the insurance companies lost money in the markets, they increased premiums they charge doctors in order to maintain their profits. Rates have skyrocketed in the last few years because low interest rates in the bond market and the stock market's fall in 2001 reduced insurance company profits; they raised their rates in response.

The best way to bring down malpractice costs may be to weed out bad doctors. A study by Public Citizen revealed that 5% of doctors were responsible for 54% of all malpractice payouts. But only 7.6% of these dangerous doctors were ever disciplined by their states' medical boards. If doctors were willing to crack down on the incompetents in their own ranks – including revoking the licenses of the worst offenders – malpractice costs would decline dramatically.

Wrapping up

One good way to argue against tort reform, particularly when it comes to things like product liability, is to put it in terms of whom you can trust. Tort reform advocates are essentially saying that you can't trust juries made up of ordinary citizens, so instead we should simply trust corporations not to make products that harm people, or doctors not to make mistakes that can ruin people's lives. If something bad happens to you, tough luck.

The jury system is one of the cornerstones of American democracy. Among other things, it ensures that people are accountable for their actions. And the decisions are meted out not by the powerful but by regular citizens. Didn't George W. Bush go around the country claiming, "I trust the people"? But here's a funny story: in 1999, Bush's daughter Jenna was involved in a fender-bender with someone driving an Enterprise rental car. Because the other driver had a suspended license, Bush sued Enterprise.

More here.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Ron Jr. On His Father

The Only Decent Reagan Tribute

How much better if this had been the only service.

History will record his worth as a leader. We here have long since measured his worth as a man. Honest, compassionate, graceful, brave. He was the most plainly decent man you could ever hope to meet.

He used to say, "A gentleman always does the kind thing." And he was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. A gentle man.

Big as he was, he never tried to make anyone feel small. Powerful as he became, he never took advantage of those who were weaker. Strength, he believed, was never more admirable than when it was applied with restraint. Shopkeeper, doorman, king or queen, it made no difference, Dad treated everyone with the same unfailing courtesy. Acknowledging the innate dignity in us all.

Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

New Iraqi Leader A Terrorist Bomber

Prime Minister Set Car Bombs for the CIA

Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.

Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said. Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.

One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed." Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb.

Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time.

But one former senior intelligence official recalled that "bombs were going off to no great effect."

When Dr. Allawi was picked as interim prime minister last week, he said his first priority would be to improve the security situation by stopping bombings and other insurgent attacks in Iraq — an idea several former officials familiar with his past said they found "ironic."

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Use of Dogs to Scare Prisoners Was Authorized

Military Intelligence in charge of abuse

U.S. intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators.

A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.

The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a U.S. Army general to be "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Texas University Diversity Plan Under Attack

Perry on Bush's Plan: "Texans see it as a problem"

Seven years ago, after a federal court outlawed the use of race in the admissions policies of the state's public universities, the Legislature came up with an answer: It passed a law guaranteeing admission to the top 10 percent of the graduating class from any public or private high school. After a few years of hard work, diversity was restored and other states, including California and Florida, adopted similar approaches. The law looked like a success.

But the 10 percent rule, which seemed to skirt the tricky issue of race so deftly, is coming under increasing attack these days as many wealthy parents complain that their children are not getting a fair shake.

Parents whose children have been denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, the crown jewel of Texas higher education, argue that some high schools are better than others, and that managing to stay in the top 25 percent at a demanding school should mean more than landing in the top 10 percent at a less rigorous one.

el - Problems obvious from the beginning, conservatives don't think.

"It's a big-time social class story," said Marta Tienda, a Princeton University professor of sociology and public affairs who has studied the effects of the rule. "School type is the proxy for social class."

Guidance counselors and administrators at rural schools question the motives behind changing the rule.

"The State of Texas has done a great thing by offering this opportunity to get our most gifted students into a challenging educational setting," said Cherri S. Franklin, principal of the public junior and senior high school in Marfa. "And the rich people don't want them there."

Bruce Walker, vice provost and director of admissions at the University of Texas, said data collected by the university showed that students admitted under the 10 percent rule consistently get better grades than other students. Critics question that data, however, and argue that SAT scores are a better measure of students' abilities.

State Senator Royce West, a Democrat from Dallas, predicted that reaching consensus on changes to the 10 percent rule would be difficult. Senator West, who heads the committee that will hold the hearing on the rule, conducted an end-of-session filibuster to block a cap on it.

"I am not going to stand here and let this rule be abolished when it has not served its purpose yet," he said. He said any changes would have to continue some form of preference for students at schools that have historically been underrepresented.

Mr. Walker of the University of Texas said, "The only thing that would satisfy everyone is an open-door policy and an unlimited number of spaces."

Gary Permalink on 6/12/2004

Daily Show Clip

Jon Stewart has Ashcroft on tape

Gary Permalink on 6/11/2004

Torture and Rumors of Torture

Seymour Hersh Talks of Child Torture, Looks Frightened

Talking about what he hasn't published yet.

He had just returned from Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it.... He lamented of his journalistic colleagues, "I don't know whey they don't just tell it like it is."...

He said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were the military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.... He talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with their superiors)....

He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. "When these guys memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."...

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He looked frightened.

Gary Permalink on 6/11/2004

Latest Headlines

I am going to busy the next several days so here are headlines and not digests to tide you over if I can't post.

White House Requested The Information From Iraq Prisoners

INTERNAL PENTAGON REPORT OUTLINING FRAMEWORK FOR USE OF TORTURE

Justice Department lawyers believe they are facing defeat on Supreme Court terror cases

Very Hot Summer but Iraq has major power Woes

HOWARD DEAN - Press is a failed institution and holding President Kerry's feet to the fire.

Transforming Where in the Middle East Exactly?

Fed Warns It May Raise Interest Rates Rapidly

Blair's party has historical defeat (3rd place) in local elections

Howard Stern will have more influence than Rush Limbaugh

Clashes continue in chaotic Iraq

Who Rules America - Six top lobbyists meet weekly with top GOP aides

Trouble for Bush, more swing voters get their news from the internet than radio

Take Action - Senator Rick Santorum Launches Attack on Civil Rights and Health Care With Poorly Drafted Bill

Morford Investigates Internet Rumors of End of the World. More Here. (el - Nonsense, wait till 2012.)

Public Broadcasting Veers to the Right - Adding Conservative Shows, Pressure On Liberal Shows With Bush New Board Members

New Details Of Plans For War Before 9/11 in A PRETEXT FOR WAR

Liberals See Signs Of a Political Comeback

Hightower's Dirty Dozen - Corporate Industry Nows Runs Federal Departments

If She's Horny She's Likely Fertile Shows New Research

Taking America Back By The Grassroots, Dean's Latest Dozen Candidates

Dogs Smarter Than Thought, Better At Understanding Communication

WORLD MILITARY 2003, U.S. Accounts For 47% of all world military spending, China 4%, Russia less, Iraq invasion made nuclear weapons desirable for North Korea, Iraq instability could spread

SUMMARY SIPRI REPORTS

Swing Voters in Swing States Strongly Oppose Bush's Policies

The Bush administration routinely bypassed or overruled Pentagon experts on international law and the Geneva convention to construct a sweeping legal justification for harsh tactics in the war on terror.

Torture Began With Lindh - Rumsfeld ordered 'take the gloves off' in interrogating him.

Religious Left Seeks Stronger Voice In Political Debate

The Armageddon Plan - Cheney, Rumsfeld Developed Plan In Reagan Years To Takeover Power if Washington Destroyed

Economy Provides No Boost for Bush

Iraq Today - Lawless, Chaotic, Deadly

Reagan and Saddam: The Unholy Alliance

"Transfer of Sovereignty" Condemned as Farce, U.S. war crimes routine policy

Political Ads - Dumb and Dumber "Can you imagine if there was going to be a vote in November and there would only be one light beer?" he mused, seeming to relish the prospect. We considered how the conventions of negative campaigning might apply. ("There they go again. Flip-flopping Miller Lite says it's 'less filling' and that it 'tastes great.' So which one is it? We're Bud Light, and we approved this message.")

Schisms From Reagan Administration Lingered for Years

State Department Concedes Lies or Mistakes, Last year most terrorist attacks in 20 years instead of least in 34 years

Krugman - False Claims For Reagan Economics

How Reagan Beat the Neocons

Three on supreme court reveal partisan politics (el - Friedman has another 'No shit, Sherlock' moment.)

Reagan White House On AIDS, a great joke

TOM DELAY - SCUMBAG, Helping himself with Charity

Charity Begins At Home For DeLay

A Tough Time for 'Neocons'

"Born In The USA" Anti-Bush

Check out "The Backbone Campaign" to take back America

Amy Goodman Interviews Chomsky on Reagan's Legacy

Today she interviewed a victim of the South African hit squads which Reagan supported while calling Nelson Mandela and the ANC terrorists. (Website now offline.)

Why Democracy Now and Pacifica is Important. (Even when I disagree with them like last night on The Other Side.)

Is this MATRIX in action? Secret Service visit after email wishes Bin Ladan would rid the earth of Bush's filth.

USDA preventing Japan from Buying US beef

White House Lies Exposed - Saudis Flew Out When All Planes Grounded

TIME - Bamford's Book Reveals CIA's "spectacular intelligence failures" leading to 9/11, Iraq War

How Reagan Built Up Al Qaeda

'United States of Amnesia' for Ronald Reagan's death

The Nation reports subscriptions rising, now America's most read political weekly. (link to current articles)

Liberals Can Learn From Reagan

Slate: Reagan Won The Cold War by convincing Gorbachev he wouldn't attack

In a general preference congressional ballot, Democrats are up 54-35.

South Africa - Reagan's heart of darkness

Cuban Cigars Cost man Three years In Prison

Time to come clean - reservists really were just following orders.

Generation Kill - two months on the frontlines with the Marines at War

Is U.S. like Germany in the 30's? The strongest criticism that the administration levels at Sen. John Kerry is that he changes his mind. In fact, instead of a president who claims an infallibility that exceeds that of the pope, America would be much better off with a president who, like John F. Kennedy, is honest enough to admit mistakes and secure enough to change his mind.

Another Election 2004 Model - Kerry 301 - Bush 237

First Instant Book Printing Machine In Bookstore

Customers pay AuthorHouse (www.authorhouse.com) a minimum of $698 to prepare a black-and-white paperback book for printing and to obtain an ISBN number to make the work available at retail outlets. IUniverse (www.iuniverse .com) charges $459 for its basic package, which includes, among other items, five paperback copies, an ISBN number and availability through online and retail merchants. The $500 Xlibris package (www .xlibris.com) includes an ISBN number and bar code, registration with Amazon and other online merchants, a Web page and one author copy.

But the Bookends store in Ridgewood charges $150 for printing 10 copies of any work up to 200 pages. Larger books are priced higher, and and subsequent 10-book orders are discounted. All royalties are kept by the author. The store also offers editing and marketing services through associates at an additional cost.

Gary Permalink on 6/11/2004

School finance to be independent, justice says

HoustonChronicle : Perry Facing Criticism over Texas Supreme Court Prediction

If Gov. Rick Perry thinks he knows how the Texas Supreme Court will rule on a school finance lawsuit, he didn't pick up any insider information from court members, Justice Wallace Jefferson said Wednesday.

Jefferson, one of three Perry appointees on the high court, said he has never discussed school finance or any other issue with the governor. He said he doubted that any justice had, although people often try to guess how the court will rule on pending litigation.

"This court is independent, vigorously independent. We consider the facts and the law when they're presented," Jefferson said in an interview.

A lawsuit brought by a number of school districts, rich and poor alike, seeking to overturn the current school law is scheduled to go to trial Aug. 9 in state district court in Austin. Among other issues, the plaintiffs are seeking more state funding for public education.

A likely appeal of the district court's ruling will be decided by the nine-member Supreme Court, perhaps as early as next year.

Perry, in a private meeting in Dallas on May 13, predicted the lawsuit will fail because his appointees to the high court won't force the Legislature to make changes in the school law, one participant in the meeting said this week.

The governor said he knew where his appointees "stand on this," recalled John Carpenter, who then was president of the Highland Park school board. Highland Park, one of the state's wealthiest districts, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Perry spokeswoman Kathy Walt said he has not discussed the school lawsuit with the justices but does believe the state ultimately will win the case.

el - Nobody really likes Robin Hood but it is the best solution now to a bad problem.

Carpenter said Perry's comments were made in a meeting with about 25 to 30 Highland Park school officials and residents of the heavily Republican district.

They were made a few days before a special session on school finance ended with no agreement on how to cut local school property taxes. Perry has indicated he may call another session later this summer.

Austin lawyer Buck Wood, who represents more than 250 property-poor districts in the suit, said plaintiffs have a strong case and that it is "incredible" for Perry to suggest otherwise.

The Supreme Court reversed two lower courts last year and reinstated the suit, clearing the way for the upcoming trial.

Texas Democratic Chairman Charles Soechting said Perry's "arrogant remarks say more about him than about the professionalism of the justices who serve on our state's highest (civil) court."

Gary Permalink on 6/10/2004

The Politics of Hope

The Progressive Vision

If we provide them with a clear choice—between the politics of hope and the politics of fear—they stand with us.

For investing in schools rather than tax cuts on the rich
For health care as a right, not a privilege
For defending Social Security, Medicare, the public school, the national parks
For an America that leads; that finds its security in collective security, not as a 'globocop' seeking to police the world
For raising the minimum wage, empowering workers and holding corporations accountable
For fair trade rather than corporate free trade
A renewed democracy over crony capitalism and big-money politics
Energy independence over big oil subsidies
Choice, equal opportunity, civil rights, environmental protection—these are mainstream values now.
We can build an America where full employment comes first, and the blessings of prosperity and growth are widely shared.

We can build an America where every child gets the nutrition and health care and pre-school needed to make equal opportunity a reality from the start.

We can build an America that guarantees its citizens affordable health care and the highest quality public education.

We can build an America that builds a democracy that is a beacon to the world. That secures its people without trampling their liberties. That celebrates voting and service, and guarantees that every vote will count and be counted.

We can build an America that addresses its situations before they become calamities.

This is not an impossible dream. Last weekend, we celebrated the sacrifice of the Greatest Generation in World War II. That generation, raised in the Depression, steeled in the war, shared service and sacrifice. The wealthiest paid taxes of over 90 percent to help pay for that war. African Americans left segregated communities to fight for this country. Japanese Americans left intern camps They came home and passed the GI bill opening up college and training to an entire generation. They subsidized housing to create the American dream. They organized unions to insure that profits and productivity were shared. For 25 years, they built the broad middle class that made America strong, and we all grew together.

The contrast between that generation and the current crowd is apparent. After 9/11, when Americans yearned for unity and clamored to serve, the president could have challenged all of us. He might have said as we track down those who committed this act, we will act to eliminate our dependence on Persian Gulf oil, announce a 10-year Apollo New Energy program to invest in renewable and efficiency, and enlist every American to join in that effort.

Instead he told us to hug our children and go shopping. And then pushed to bailout the airlines while doing nothing for the workers that they laid off.

Americans deserve better than this. The Right has failed. Our time has come.

Gary Permalink on 6/10/2004

Keep Lincoln, Washington and FDR

The only thing I'll favor is replacing the Benjamin's with the Reagan's.

Gary Permalink on 6/10/2004

Voters Shift in Favor of Kerry

Dislike Direction of Country Under Bush, Solid Lead for Kerry

Widespread unease over the country's direction and doubts about President Bush policies on Iraq and the economy helped propel Sen. John F. Kerry to a solid lead among voters nationwide, according to a new LA Times poll.

The surveys suggest that attitudes may be coalescing for a contest that pivots on the classic electoral question at times of discontent: Will voters see more risk in stability or change?

More than one-third of those questioned in the nationwide poll said they didn't know enough about Kerry to decide whether he would be a better president than Bush. And when asked which candidate was more likely to flip-flop on issues, almost twice as many named Kerry than Bush.

Yet Kerry led Bush by 51% to 44% nationally in a two-way matchup, and by 48% to 42% in a three-way race, with independent Ralph Nader drawing 4%.

Lifting Kerry is a powerful tailwind of dissatisfaction with the nation's course and Bush's answers for challenges at home and abroad. Nearly three-fifths believe the nation is on the wrong track, the highest level a Times poll has recorded during Bush's presidency.

Also, 56% said America "needs to move in a new direction" because Bush's policies have not improved the country. Just 39% say America is better off because of his agenda.

Majorities disapprove of Bush's handling of the economy and Iraq, despite recent encouraging news on both fronts.

Asked which candidate "will be a strong leader for the country," voters divided exactly in half, with 44% choosing each; in a Times' poll in March, Bush held a 9-percentage-point lead on that question.

Also, while Bush narrowly led in March when voters were asked which candidate "has the honesty and integrity to serve as president," the two now are essentially tied, with Bush attracting 41% and Kerry 40%.

Perhaps most troubling for the Democrat, nearly half said Kerry "flip-flops on the issues," while just a quarter applied that description to Bush.

But for Bush, the flip side of the flip-flop charge is a deepening perception that he is too rigid: By a resounding 58% to 16%, poll respondents said the phrase "too ideological and stubborn" applied more to Bush than to Kerry.

Kerry has established these advantages even while voters are just filling in their portrait of him. More than one-third of them — and nearly half of independents — said they did not know enough about Kerry "to decide whether he would be a better president" than Bush. Just 53% said they knew a great deal or even a fair amount about Kerry's domestic policies; only 42% felt that way about his foreign policies.

Kerry has unified Democrats, muted the traditional GOP advantage among men and opened a narrow edge among suburbanites.

Kerry also performs well among many groups that his party's nominees have traditionally relied upon: women, singles, those who attend religious services rarely or never and lower-income families.

Rating Bush's job performance: In the new poll, 51% approved of his performance while 47% disapproved, down only slightly since March.

Over the last 50 years, presidents who have won another term have generally enjoyed approval ratings about 55% or more by this point in the election year, while those who lost had fallen below 50%. So Bush finds himself on the cusp.

Gary Permalink on 6/10/2004

Bush Scandals - 2004

Bernard Weiner has a nice simple guide to all the Bush scandals out there. He concludes:

At this point, Bush/Cheney/Rove care about one thing and one thing only: staying in power. If they get kicked out of the White House in November, they can't complete their agenda of police-state powers at home, and controlling the world situation abroad. They will be in an extremely tenuous, vulnerable position, with many revenge-minded politicos and ordinary citizens working to get them convicted and into the federal slammer.

For all these reasons, be advised that Bush&Co. will do anything, ANYTHING, necessary to stay in the White House, including selling out their grandmothers, distorting the election vote-counts, and looking the other way while a major terrorist attack is mounted inside the U.S. (remembering 9/11 and thinking, perhaps erroneously, that if and when the big terrorist attack happens, the frightened populace once again will rally-'round-the-president).

If the Bushies were to emerge victorious in November, they would be a lame-duck administration, so all restraints would be off. They might well figure they'd be able to do whatever they want to do domestically and around the globe. Native-fascism at home, imperial wars abroad, wrecking even more of the environment, more extremist judges appointed, more corruption, the economy tanking, the middle-class getting squeezed even more, Social Security and Medicare down the tubes.

In sum, if you want to stop these guys, you've got to do it NOW.

Gary Permalink on 6/10/2004

Operation Copper Green and the Third Degree

Hersh's article on the Road to Torture is worth a complete digest. Rumsford wanted to be in charge of intel and so pushed for aggressive interrogation by the military and contractors.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone , his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, [to Congress] said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

“We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs.

“Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

“Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”

By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear.

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison.

“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer."

“So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The mysterious civilians, [Brigadier General Janis Karpinski] said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system.

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails.

“This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

“The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

“They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease.

“The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”

“The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades.

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.”

Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”

el - The term third degree came from Germany under Hitler and described aggressive interrogation techniques for certain prisoners to protect German troops or citizens.

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

Baghdad - Heart of Darkness

Iraq today is hot, chaotic, unhappy, and deadly.

So say Riverbend and Christopher Allbritton in very depressing reports.

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

Kurds Threaten to Walk Away From Iraqi State

Kurds, screwed again by UN resolution, threaten to withdraw from Iraqi government

"The Kurdish people will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq."

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

Draft is quietly being reinstated

Pending Draft Legislation Targeted for Spring 2005
The Draft will Start in June 2005

There is pending legislation in the House and Senate (twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation so the draft can begin at early as Spring 2005 -- just after the 2004 presidential election. The administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public's attention is on the elections, so our action on this is needed immediately.

$28 million has been added to the 2004 Selective Service System (SSS) budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005. Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005 that the system, which has lain dormant for decades, is ready for activation.

College and Canada will not be options. In December 2001, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada's minister of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30-point plan which implements, among other things, a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

Reagan - The Great Taxer

krugman on why Reagan was better than Bush.

Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people.

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

GOP Losing Ground With Public

A Democrat Takeover of Congress?

Are recent wins a harbinger of Democratic House gains in 2004?

In off year elections Democrats won two seats that should have been Republican cakewalks. Now the most recent poll shows the public would prefer a Democrat for Congress by 13%. Despite the terrible redistricting protecting incubents is a Dem takeover possible?

Generic congressional ballot polls (in which people are asked whether they plan to vote for "the Republican" or "the Democrat" for Congress in November) show solid and growing Democratic advantage – as much as 13 points in the latest Time/Harris poll. And while generic ballot polls are useless in determining the outcomes of individual races, political observers generally consider a 5-point lead an indication that a party will pick up seats.

The two special-election wins put Democrats just 11 seats from winning a House majority – a task that would be far easier had House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) not successfully muscled through his mid-decade redistricting ploy in the Texas legislature. But even DeLay's glorious plan isn't going completely according to plan: despite a map that should net the GOP seven to eight seats, expectations are being lowered as the targeted Democrats hold their own in fundraising and the polls. Democrats now have realistic hopes of limiting their Lone Star State losses to just two or three seats.

Meanwhile, DeLay himself faces a possible criminal indictment and ethics complaints in the House and Delay's Democratic challenger, Richard Morrison, is receiving enthusiastic nationwide support from Democrat activists seeking to "stick it" to the Hammer.

Redistricting has made large swings in the partisan balance of power more unlikely, as incumbents work the process to solidify their control. Therefore, goes the argument, everything would have to fall the Democrats' way for them to regain control of the House. Which is generally true, in a typical election.

But 2004 is not a typical election. The country is torn between the realities of a broken war effort and a moribund economy, and attempts by Republicans to cynically rally voters around the flag and keep them perpetually scared with their conveniently timed "terror warnings."

Republicans cannot run on the economy, since rosy job creation numbers don't match reality on the ground. They cannot run on Iraq, because body bags, prison photos, and Chalabi-the-Iranian-spy don't make for good campaign commercials. They cannot run on the War on Terror, since they successfully linked (however erroneously) Iraq to the War on Terror. All they have left is fear (terror warnings) and hate (gay marriage).

Making things worse for Republicans, they control all three branches of government. That's right, I said worse. Given the chance to control all the levers of government, Republicans have saddled the country with an unwinnable and costly war, record deficits, the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover, and the most vicious attacks on civil liberties since Richard Nixon. Essentially, the country is learning what happens when Republicans have unfettered control of our government.

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

Worse and Worse - Country in Crisis

Republican administrations actually have been worse each time, moving farther and farther to the right as well as into greater illegalities. Should we blame the Democrats for not prosecuting and not loudly denouncing their actions? The last is my interpretation. The following is the See The Forest digest:

It is hard now to avoid seeing the true nature of the group that has taken over the Republican Party. The record is certainly clear, their intentions are clear, their activities are clear, and it's time to take a stand. After seizing control of the country by the narrowest of margins in 2000 the Republicans have illegally excluded Democrats and the public from almost all aspects of management of the government. They have positioned ideological agents throughout the departments, agencies and the courts. In one of their first acts in power they allowed companies like Enron to "harvest" the people of California and Oregon, and appointed FERC members would not do their job to stop this. Their tax cuts, that went to only a few, have bankrupted the country and spent our Social Security retirement money. They have handed out our country's natural resources, and given the right to pollute our air and water for profit to a few rich cronies. They have launched aggressive war in an imperialistic scheme to bring the Middle East's oil supplies under their control.

And they increasingly poison the public environment with lies.

A Republican Party Campaign Manual The Art of Political War argues that "Politics is war conducted by other means. In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. ... In political wars, the aggressor usually prevails." Moreover, "Politics is a war of position. In war there are two sides: friends and enemies. Your task is to define yourself as the friend of as large a constituency as possible compatible with your principles, while defining your opponent as the enemy whenever you can. The act of defining combatants is analogous to the military concept of choosing the terrain of battle. Choose the terrain that makes the fight as easy for you as possible."

We have to realize that we are dealing with an organized revolutionary conspiracy to seize power, enrich the few, and subject us to an ideological/theocratic/imperialist dictatorship. They often describe THEMSELVES as being modeled on the old Communist Party and their methods for infiltrating and seizing power.

This is an emergency and we must recognize it as such. These people will go to all costs to succeed, including fomenting civil war.

If Kerry does win this election AND take office, he has his work cut out for him -- there are some things to take care of right away -- if he expects to also govern the country. We simply MUST expose widely the Right's anti-democracy agenda. Crimes have been committed and this is not an occasion for a healing amnesty.

It is time for those who think this is the OLD Republican Party to take their head out of the sand and see that things have changed. Turn on the radio and listen to Limbaugh or Hannity for ten minutes -- yes they ARE the mainstream of the Republican Party now -- and you'll KNOW that the country is crisis.

el - Note this is not from a radical but from a mainstream member of a liberal think tank.

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

Reason For Torture - The President is Above the Law

Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush

The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law. Washington Post also covers this memo well.

A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.

Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the administration's top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department's position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.

el - The basis of the Constitution, and we have been through this before with presidents and is covered in 7th grade civics class, is that no one, even the president is above the law. Like Reagan, like Nixon, lawyers for Bush try to make the case this is not so. In this case they argue that the president has unlimited authority, not bound by law, to authorize illegal acts of interrogation. Note that the departments familar with POW issues did not agree with this.

Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel's office.

The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.

Digby at Hullabaloo notes that they are using the Nuremberg defense: Aside from the obvious fact that the Nuremberg defense failed spectacularly, it is also interesting because one of the war crimes the Nuremberg defendents, which included the SS, SA and the Gestapo as well as individuals, were tried and convicted of were using what they believed to be a legally prescribed interrogation method they called "the third degree." I'm sure you've all heard of it.

The Convention Against Torture was proposed in 1984 by the United Nations General Assembly and was ratified by the U.S. in 1994. It states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture," and that orders from superiors "may not be invoked as a justification of torture."

That prohibition was reaffirmed after the Sept. 11 attacks by the U.N. panel that oversees the treaty, the Committee Against Torture, and the March 2003 report acknowledged that "other nations and international bodies may take a more restrictive view" of permissible interrogation methods than did the Bush administration.

The report then offers a series of legal justifications for limiting or disregarding antitorture laws and proposed legal defenses that government officials could use if they were accused of torture.

The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere.

The report seemed "designed to find the legal loopholes that will permit the use of torture against detainees," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, an international-law professor at the Ohio State University who has seen the report. "CIA operatives will think they are covered because they are not going to face liability."

Digby writes: Unbenownst to anyone up to now, the US Constitution is apparently the basis for a legal dictatorship. Very interesting indeed that such a radical new interpretation of presidential power should be "discovered" by an administration that was installed by a 5 to 4 vote by the Supreme Court, isn't it?

What's the old saying, "begin as you mean to go on?" They went on as they began, all right, using all levers of power in service of their desired goals regardless of legal precedent or constitutional legitimacy. We shouldn't be surprised. This is what people who pursue power for its own sake always do.

Demosthenes: The line of argument made in the memo isn't new, but very, very old... it's the first stage in a possible process where the powers of the laws is eroded and the powers of the executive rise in their place. Arguing that the president has the right to "set aside the laws" is an argument for absolute executive power, because the supremacy of "the laws" is the only real power that the legislature and judiciary have. Without this legal supremacy, the United States becomes like every other fragile republic in the Americas.

We know what will happen. We've seen it dozens of times before, and we'll see it dozens of times in the future. Republics are always haunted by the spectre of their "commanders-in-chief" becoming simply "commanders". The Latin word for commander is "imperator", more popularly known as "emperor". America may yet have its Napoleon; its Octavian. That it hasn't happened yet does not mean it won't.

Josh Marshall also sees this: So the right to set aside law is "inherent in the president". That claim alone should stop everyone in their tracks and prompt a serious consideration of the safety of the American republic under this president. It is the very definition of a constitutional monarchy, let alone a constitutional republic, that the law is superior to the executive, not the other way around. This is the essence of what the rule of law means -- a government of laws, not men, and all that.

Legal debate on the memo, which first year law students ridicule, is at, among other places, discourse.net: That the President’s powers are at their greatest in these circumstances cannot be disputed. But while the discretion is indeed very great, I do not see how it could possibly be read to include the authority to commit war crimes, even pre-Nuremburg. And today it clearly cannot include that authority, at least without explicit Congressional authorization. Thus, the entire discussion of Presidential power is based on a premise so false that any student who has taken introductory International Law should be able to recognize its error. And as any logician will tell you, when you begin with an erroneous premise, you are in trouble... Page 23 really goes off the rails, making an argument popular with the Federalist Society (el - see European look at this influential group), but not taken seriously by mainstream academics, for unlimited, uncontainable, Presidential power... The Constitution does not make the President a King. This memo does.... If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is NOT (and should not be) a defense.

Wildest leap - radical muckrakers From The Wilderness tie the leak of these documents to CIA revenge, a plan to bring down the president by impeachment before or after the election. All of their facts are correct, including a good discusion of the harm the administration did the CIA in the Valerie Plame affair, you can dispute the implications.

Atrios also brings us Beautiful Horizons clear analysis of the law and why this memo is so very wrong on the law. Atrios recomends jail for the administration.

Kevin Drum had the basics, unlike all other president's facing threats to the U.S. Bush lacked good moral clarity.

Froomkin: "And just imagine what those guys will do if they don’t have to worry about re-election."

Thanks to natasha to pointing out billmon, who knows who is in charge of this interpretation giving Bush divine rights to rule as he sees fit: Praise the Lord and Pass the Thumbscrews - Mary L. Walker - Christian, Republican, Patriot, Torture Attorney. Someone should do another post on all the Christians on a crusade in this administration: Rice, Ashcroft, the generals. None of them believe in the law because their righteousness trumps that.

Natasha also reports on another prison scandal. What the Bush administration is doing to reporters who try to come to this country now without declaring they are a reporter can only be compared to totalitarian regimes. Way to make friends and influence people, you guys. These are reporters thay are mistreating.

Gary Permalink on 6/09/2004

One of America's Stupidest Men Said

ACLU is America's "most dangerous organization ... second next to Al Qaeda"

From the June 2 broadcast of The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Finally, the ACLU -- we talked about this yesterday and I -- and, you know, I have to pick on the ACLU because they're the most dangerous organization in the United States of America right now. There's by far. There's nobody even close to that. They're, like, second next to Al Qaeda.

From the June 2 broadcast of FOX News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: "Talking Points" wants you to know that we are rapidly losing freedom in America. Judges are overruling the will of the people, and fascist organizations like the ACLU are imposing their secular will.

ACLU - make a donation today or become a member in Bill's name.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

THE Controversial Anti-Reagan Column

Ted Rall Unloads

Sample - Ronald Reagan eventually admitted to "trading arms for hostages," yet avoided prosecution for treason and the death penalty.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

Doctor puts 'Bush on the Couch'

Bush - Sick, Twisted

Dr. Justin Frank has taken it upon himself to put "Bush on the Couch" (the title of his new book). Based on his applied psychoanalysis of Dubya's life, the White House is occupied by an "untreated ex-alcoholic" with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies. Even though he's a helluva nice guy.

Bush shows an inability to grieve - dating back to age 7, when his sister died. "The family's reaction - no funeral and no mourning - set in motion his life-long pattern of turning away from pain [and hiding] behind antic behavior," says Frank, who contends Bush may suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

George H.W. Bush's "emotional and physical absence during his son's youth triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W."

Bush has shown a "lifelong streak of sadism," ranging from "childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs)" to "insulting journalists, gloating over state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad."

Bush's years of drinking "may have affected his brain function - and his decision to quit drinking without the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher risk of relapse."

Frank's recommendation? "The sole treatment option - for his benefit and ours - is to remove [him] from office."

el - Kids who torture animals are disturbed and grow up to be sadistic bullies.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

Florida Latino Vote Up For Grabs

Signs of Weakening Bush Support?

In 2000, Bush won Florida by a mere 537 votes, but his advantage among Cubans was about 4-to-1. Non-Cuban Hispanics tend to vote Democratic and are flocking to the state. On Nov. 2, the key to Florida — the decisive swing state four years ago — could well be this disparate Hispanic vote.

Even with the huge GOP advantage with Cubans, Democrat Al Gore almost pulled even with Bush among all Hispanic voters in 2000 (Bush 49 percent, Gore 48 percent) — thanks to non-Cubans along I-4. Hispanics represented 17 percent of the Florida population in 2002, with various groups of non-Cubans comprising two-thirds of the Hispanic total.

Jeb Bush split the non-Cuban vote during his 2002 re-election bid largely because he is fluent in Spanish and reached out to voters in their own language. His TV commercials appealed to the pride Hispanics have for their native countries. It didn't hurt, either, that his wife, Columba, is Mexican.

But there's no guarantee that the president can fare as well as his brother.

"People are upset with the president, which is good. What we want him to do is show the real John Kerry and not the one that President Bush and his hatchet men portray him to be," Martinez said. Following the White House's lead, Kerry recently began airing Spanish-language ads.

el - Everbody wants a free and democratic Cuba. That is not the Castro regime. There is a question if the current isolation and pressure actually keeps Castro in power. Wouldn't closer contacts weaken Castro's hold?

Poll: Cuban Americans split on Kerry

Democrat John Kerry enjoys a commanding lead over President Bush among Cuban Americans born in the United States and a decided edge among Cubans who arrived in the country after 1980, according to a new poll of Miami-Dade Hispanics that reveals deep divisions within a community traditionally viewed as staunchly Republican.
But the poll, to be released today, shows Bush crushing Kerry among the largest -- and perhaps most politically active and vocal -- group of Cuban-American voters: those who arrived before the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Those voters -- who make up about two-thirds of all Cuban-American registered voters in Miami-Dade, according to the survey -- back the Republican incumbent overwhelmingly, 89 to 8 percent, with just 3 percent undecided.

Among all Cuban-American voters, Bush leads Kerry 69 to 21 percent, with 10 percent undecided -- a massive lead, but a decline from 2000 when more than eight of 10 Cuban Americans helped Bush narrowly defeat Al Gore in Florida and win the White House.

Kerry leads Bush 40 to 29 percent among Cubans who arrived in the United States after 1980, with 31 percent undecided.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

UN Moves On Iraq, Cheney Stonewalls Bush Approving Torture

Security Council Endorses Transfer of Iraq Sovereignty

The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously today to approve a new resolution that endorses a U.S. transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government and authorizes foreign troops to provide security for at least a year with Iraqi consent.

The resolution passed 15-0 after the United States made several last-minute concessions to incorporate demands by France and Russia, which had insisted on giving the Iraqi government more explicit authority to ensure it exercised genuine sovereignty after the scheduled transfer of political power on June 30.

Ashcroft Refuses to Release Torture Memo

Angry Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee called on Ashcroft to provide the document, saying leaked portions that have appeared in news reports suggest the Bush administration is reinterpreting U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture.

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the memo on interrogation techniques permissible for the CIA to use "appears to be an effort to redefine torture and narrow prohibitions against it." The draft document was prepared by the Justice Department's office of legal policy for White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.

"If such a memo existed, do you believe that is good law? Do you think that torture might be justified?" demanded Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.).

"I condemn torture," Ashcroft responded. "I don't think it's productive, let alone justified."

Policy memo endorses torture for terror suspects

A group of lawyers in the U.S. administration argued in a paper last year that President George W. Bush has supreme authority over the questioning of terrorist suspects, and can legally order interrogators to torture or commit other crimes against them.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

Texas Tuesdays: Martin Frost Interviews

My earlier post today on Nick Lampson was in error, but I will leave it up because he's a good guy. I am supposed to be writing and linking about Martin Frost for Congress today. Texas Tuesdays: Martin Frost Interviews

BL: A lot of Texas Democrats are having trouble staying motivated. We haven't won a statewide race since 1994, Republicans control all branches of government, and now our communities are chopped up through redistricting. What will it take for Democrats to start winning in Texas again?

MF: A. I'm a baseball fan, so I will answer this with a baseball analogy. We cannot afford to swing wildly at every pitch hoping for a homerun. We need to pick our pitches carefully, hit singles and doubles and run bases aggressively. It is not realistic to think that George Bush won't carry his home state of Texas, and an enormous amount of time and resources could be wasted in that effort. But, there are five highly competitive congressional races in play and over a dozen state house races. Winning these key congressional and state house races will strike a major blow to Tom DeLay and the most extreme elements of the Republican Party and will set the stage for Texas fielding and electing statewide office holders in 2006 or 2010. Mainstream Democrats more accurately reflect the view of average Texans. We must win these highly competitive congressional and state house races to give voice to mainstream Democratic points of view.

Martin Frost, this week's candidate for Congress. Give some money to the cause. Be sure to add the .36 for Texas Tuesdays, too.

An interesting story in this race, a bill to make state sales tax deductable for states without income taxes was given to Frost's opponent Sessions to co-sponser, a tactic normally given to candidates in trouble like in this other bill he was given. The bill had been shelved but Frost gets it brought up to vote, and Sessions voted against his own bill. You can't do much better than that when you want to make a hypocrite out of your opponent.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

Easter Lemming Mascot

Every since she doubled my hits ARIA GIOVANNI! is the Easter Lemming Mascot. She just has a thing for black stockings and not much else. (contains nudity)

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

Texas Tuesdays - Nick Lampson

Every Tuesday some Texas bloggers point out some Texas Democratic congressmen who need your support.

This week's candidate profile is incumbent Congressman Nick Lampson. Congressman Lampson currently represents the 9th district. Lampson is now running in the redrawn 2nd district. Clearly, the biggest challenge will be in finding Dem voters in the northeastern part of Harris county.

Lampson was first elected in 1996, ousting the infamous Steve Stockman, who had infamously offed legendary Texas Congressman Jack Brooks in the 1994 elections. Feel free to chip in a little coffee money for the Lampson campaign, always remembering to add .36 to the donation so we can potentially track how successful we are in this endeavor.

Lampson faces a tough re-election in this district, which was clearly carved out to elect a Republican. Harris County Judge Ted (wacky creative sentences) Poe is the GOP nominee, and there's clearly no shortage of ammo available to fire with, so the race is not a foregone conclusion.

Personally, i feel this is going to be a tough challenge but Nick Lampson is well known and has represented Texas well.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

A Miscelleny of Links

I leave shortcuts on my desktop I hope to eventually get to, here is an effort to reduce the clutter.

From latest to the earliest:

The Take Back America Conference and Alternet report.

Houston whistleblower who revealed sham behind No Child Left Behind loses job, perhaps recieved enough in settlement to pay lawyer. - reg. req.

Recent News Quiz - I had 18 of 20.

Another article on Church-going tying to political party. Not mentioned is church attendence recently declining or that there are advantages to not being tied to particular faiths and avid religious buffs.

Methodist minister writes about Bush and the rise of Church Fascism.

FBI and UK spys shrugged off warning Al-Qaeda wanted to fly planes into buildings.

Independent voters swinging to Kerry, they want an Iraq exit strategy, the GOP religious strategy isn't working, and more from Donkey Rising.

Bush Ads turning off GOP activists and Novak, (traitor) should know.

Kerry's Astrological Chart.

Rumsfeld fired former Gitmo head for not supporting his abuses.

Abrupt Climate Change and the article that started it all the Great Climate Flip-Flop.

As I predicted, Rumsfeld bans the troops from having camera phones and other electronic cameras.

TXU is a huge mercury polluter and huge Bush supporter. Bad guys, don't buy their electricity from their dirty lignite plants. There are Green sources. "There is one, and only one, unregulated source of mercury emissions in this country, and it's coal-fired power plants."

Dave Berry Commencement Address; The first thing you'll notice is that your professors did not go out there with you. They're not stupid; that's why they're professors. They've figured out that college is a carefree place where the most serious real problem is finding a legal parking space. So your professors are going to stay in college until they die. Even then, they'll go right on teaching classes. This is called ''tenure.''

But you, the members of the Class of 2004, have committed the grave tactical blunder of acquiring enough credits to graduate. So now you're leaving college and embarking upon the greatest adventure -- and the biggest challenge -- of your young lives: moving back in with your parents. Decades ago, when I graduated from college, my friends and I would rather have undergone a vasectomy with a fondue fork than move back in with our parents. But times have changed, and today many graduates don't want to go straight from college into a harsh and unforgiving world fraught with unbearable hardships, such as no free high-speed Internet.

Jon Stewart was funnier.

Da Vinci author refrained from the real controversy about Jesus's wife and kids and his survival.

I had something else from Citizen Smash, one of the California brown shirts, but see today he is attacking a high school teacher for wanting to end Bush's Iraq War. I don't know, to me he seems ready to join the kneecap busting brigade.

Remembering what the Iraq War costs.

General Clark has a strategy for winning the war if only the Bush chickenhawks would listen.

Interesting blogs that ended up on my desktop.

One Good Thing, who's a member of the knife-wielding feminists.

Reading A1, what is wrong with the NYTimes by reading the front page from the left.

Noam Chomsky's blog.

Ariana Huffington Online

Not a blog nut a huge number of progressive links at Link Crusader.

Notes on the Atrocities

And the simple and direct Bush Lies.

Some Very Scary Sh*t about John Ashcroft found by Mike Harris.

I have a some more but I'm tired and I have a small cat trying to sleep on my lap.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan

This list of "66 Things to Think about When Flying in to Reagan National Airport" appeared in the Nation on March 2, 1998 after the renaming of Washington National Airport after Ronald Reagan. As Corn says, "the piece remains relevant today – particularly as a cheat sheet for those who dare to point out the Reagan presidency was not all that glorious and was more nightmare in America than morning in America."

Link and above text from Alternet

Seven:
Michael Deaver's conviction for influence peddling, Lyn Nofziger's conviction for influence peddling, Caspar Weinberger's five-count indictment, Ed Meese ("You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime"), Donald Regan (women don't "understand throw-weights"), education cuts, massacres in El Salvador.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

Kerry After Latino Vote With TV Ads

HouChron - Bush, Kerry campaigns know Latinos in swing states could decide election

The scene opens with a doting, older woman sitting at a table with her curly-headed grandson as she lovingly pastes photos of family members into a scrapbook.

"Grandma," the child asks in Spanish, "what's a Democrat?"

For the next 30 seconds, this television advertisement pitches the Democratic Party against a backdrop of strategic symbols in Hispanic culture -- family tradition, respect for the elderly, military service and educational achievement.

It's slick, entertaining and indicative of a more sophisticated approach to woo the nation's fastest-growing pool of potential voters.

el - Whoo-Hoo, One of Gore's many mistakes was mostly conceding the Latino media to the Bush campaign in swing states.

"The Kerry campaign just went up with our first ad in Florida, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada," said Armando Gutierrez, who also produced Spanish-language campaign ads for Gore and Clinton. "Bush has been up in those states for weeks now -- months in Florida. Bottom line ... no one has gone up this early before. In the case of the Kerry campaign, we'll be on the air non-stop now until the convention."

Research indicates most American Hispanics use both English and Spanish media -- how much of one or the other depends on things such as age, length of U.S. residency and comfort level with speaking English. But advertising in Spanish frequently resonates with Hispanics at a deeper level, even for those whose dominant language is English.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

Defense Professionals Increasingly Backing Kerry

Bush Support Eroding Among Military Due To "Competency Gap"

An increasing number of current and former military officials, defense industry executives, and homeland security professionals have grown disenchanted with the direction of President Bush's national security policies, and some are rallying around John F. Kerry, according to interviews with military and industry officials.

"I have been a Republican my entire adult life," said A. Martin Erim, the group's chairman and president of Defense Holdings Inc. in McLean, Va., which consults on mergers and acquisitions in the defense industry. "I voted for George W. Bush in the last election, but I have undergone a major transformation since 9/11 because of how the administration has handled things."

Republican defense industry executives such as Erim join the ranks of such former career civil servants as Richard A. Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism czar; Rand Beers, another former National Security Council official now advising Kerry; Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence chief; and others who recently have expressed opposition to the president to whom they once reported.

Outspoken former officers such as Zinni, Hoar, Crowe, and Shalikashvili "are simply reflecting a widespread view that can't be expressed by active-duty officers," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank in Arlington, Va. Thompson said he voted for Bush in 2000 but has not decided whom he will support in November.

"There is a huge reservoir of resentment about how Rumsfeld has treated the military and conducted the war in Iraq," Thompson said.

A former senior official with the Pentagon added: "I am amazed at how much anger there is. It's popped up in the last month."

The frustration in military and intelligence circles springs from what some perceive as a ''competency gap," the belief that top administration officials are not up to the job of protecting America in the changing world.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

WSJ.com - Dean Is Back, and Not on the Fringe, Either

Dean Studying Conservative Tactics To Use To Rebuild Democratic Party

The feisty former Vermont governor, determined not to be a fringe player, is boning up on the political right for guidance on how to better organize the left -- not just for November's elections but beyond. He is studying the tactics used by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Ralph Reed, who helped make the Christian Coalition a political power. A decade after Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Reed, now a private consultant and adviser to President George W. Bush's campaign, helped usher in an era of Republican power, Mr. Dean hopes to begin to shift the balance back toward his progressive agenda.

Conservatives dismiss the whole Dean phenomenon as an overhyped, second coming of the 1970s liberal George McGovernites that moved Democrats to the left for years after. But there are two distinctions -- ones that echo themes of the Republican "revolution" a decade ago. First, the record government spending and huge budget deficits under President Bush give Mr. Dean an opening to stress fiscal responsibility. Second, increasing unhappiness about Iraq lets him cast the elections as a moral struggle about what it means to be an American.

"We've lost our standing as the moral leader of the world," Mr. Dean says. "I want [the U.S.] to be the moral leader of the world in how we provide for our people....I want to elect a president as good and strong as the American people."

Mr. Dean's new political apparatus, Democracy for America, keeps him in almost-candidate mode. In the past 10 days, he has popped up in Hawaii, Salt Lake City, San Juan and Washington D.C., and is scheduled to appear today at a labor rally in New York City. "The circus left town but the act remains. He started something that is still moving down the tracks, that he has some ownership over it," says Paul Maslin, who polled for Mr. Dean in the presidential race.

Mr. Dean's famous e-mail list took a substantial hit after his withdrawal from the presidential race in February, but it's beginning to grow again. Every two weeks, in sets of 12, he is making "Dean Dozen" endorsements to boost lower ticket, often state and local candidates, much as the Christian Coalition did in building its network in the late '80s and early '90s. Like Mr. Gingrich's conservative "Contract for America" in 1994, there have been early discussions of a Progressive Manifesto -- laying out goals such as health-care reform -- that would give new voters a clearer idea of the Democratic mission.

No single individual, other than Mr. Kerry's future running mate, may be more important to the success of the Democratic ticket against President Bush. After all the bitterness of last winter, a Dean ally jokes that the two "blue-bloods have bonded." In some respects they resemble two senior vice presidents, who vied for the same chief executive job and now find common interest in staying as a team -- not breaking apart.

Certainly, Mr. Dean's free-spirited independence makes him an asset as Mr. Kerry tries to fend off defections to third party candidate Ralph Nader. As a trained doctor, Mr. Dean is working with old labor allies to promote health-care proposals at the heart of Mr. Kerry's domestic agenda.

"My constituency is divided on John Kerry," Mr. Dean acknowledges in an interview. Among young people, he says, the task is harder now that he no longer is a candidate, and the challenge is to keep alive that sense of community and civic involvement his campaign bred among otherwise disaffected voters.

"Governing in the real world means you can make things better, dropping out means hope is dead," Mr. Dean wrote.

Gary Permalink on 6/08/2004

'Reagan was a killer'

How People View The Dead Is Shaped By Personal Experiences. Here are Greg Palast's:

In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis.

People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua because he didn't like the government that the people there had elected.

Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young woman's lungs filled up and she stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while they buried the mother of three.

And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered hundreds of American marines in their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a whipped dog Â? then turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med war was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning down Cubans building an airport.

Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatolla. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.

Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah -- no kidding --in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.

Then the Reagan roaches mixed their cowardice with crime: taking cash from the hostage-takers to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners of Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.

I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby orders this demonstration to disperse" - and then came the teargas and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the Gipper.

In Chaguitillo, all night long, the farmers stayed awake to guard their kids from attack from Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't even Sandinistas, those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President told us were 'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they want with Texas, anyway?

Nevertheless, the farmers, and their families, were Ronnie's targets.

In the deserted darkness of Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was that third-rate gangster movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.

el - He doesn't mention Ronnie shipping the ingredients for poison gas to Saddam, training his scientists, supplying the helicopters, supplying satellite photos to show where to gas, or sending Rumsfeld to shake Saddam's hand and to assure him we wouldn't condemn him using the poison gas. At least not until it suited the White House's purpose.

It is one thing not to speak ill of the dead but to make stuff up repeatedly on TV like he was the most popular President ever... He wasn't. Since Truman FIVE presidents have been more popular, including Clinton. But there has never been a president as popular with millionaires, which includeds nearly all the people you see on TV. Why? Could reducing their tax rate from 70% to 28% have something to do with it? It didn't matter if he later raised taxes. Taxes would never go above 40% for the people that matter.

Gary Permalink on 6/07/2004

Krugmann Reviews Greenspans Tenure

The Maestro Slips Out of Tune

After becoming a symbol of America's economic turnaround in the 90's, and anointing himself the nation's high priest of fiscal probity, he lent crucial aid and comfort to the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. In the end, that will be his most important legacy.

Gary Permalink on 6/07/2004

Many Americans Still Unsure Whom To Vote Against

The Onion Poll: Who Can I Not Support

According to Gallup Poll results released Monday, 6 percent of Americans are still undecided about whether to vote against President Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry in November's presidential election.

According to the poll, 46 percent of the registered voters surveyed would vote against Bush if the election were held tomorrow, while 45 percent said they were ready to vote against Kerry. Factoring in the 2 percent margin of error, the two candidates are essentially deadlocked in the race to determine which candidate America doesn't support.

"As the messy occupation of Iraq drags on, Bush's approval rating continues to drop, strengthening the position of the anti-Bush voting bloc," Harmon said. "This trend is offset by the Bush camp's $80 million anti-Kerry ad campaign, which has cemented anti-Kerry sentiment in several key swing states. As the election approaches, it's becoming more and more difficult to determine the likely loser."

Harmon said voters are conflicted, wanting to cast environmental and antiwar votes against Bush, but wishing also to oppose Kerry's position on taxation.

Tina Schalek, a Branson, MO theater manager, said she is also undecided.

"John Kerry's only virtue is that he hasn't been in a position to make any major mistakes," Schalek said. "On the other hand, I hate Bush's views on abortion. My only consolation is that a vote against either candidate is a vote against Nader."

In spite of such ambivalence among swing voters, surveys reveal that the majority of Americans have determined which candidate they will vote against.

"It's time to trim the Bush from the White House," Akron, OH resident Doug Hamm said. "In 2004, it's time for Bush to get bushwhacked!"

Pressed to elaborate on his views, Hamm said, "To be honest, Kerry could be a guy with a paper bag over his head, for all I care. I'd vote for anybody as long as he wasn't Bush."

Karla Barr of Chicago had similarly strong opinions about Kerry.

"Kerry is a wishy-washy flip-flopper, changing his tune every time the wind blows," Barr said, repeating a phrase she'd heard on The Rush Limbaugh Show. "Can I trust a man who can't make up his mind about Communism? I don't think so."

Added Barr: "We have to remember how close the 2000 election was, when we voted against Gore. Actually, to be fair, when I voted against Gore, I was voting against Clinton."

Is it Reality or is it The Onion?

Gary Permalink on 6/06/2004

CBS Deeply Buries Real Poll Results

CBS Poll Kerry Over Bush 49 -41

The entire article is about the perceptions of veterans about Kerry and Bush. Only if you really look on the bottom, in a chart, their poll of registered voters shows a big lead opening up for Kerry. Instead their story is that Bush is leading among veterans where there is an 8% margin of error they don't mention. If you are comparing two results like support for Bush and Kerry, there need to be a 15% difference for any significant results. With only 170 veterans polled it is impossible to say that Bush is leading among them. Kinda blows their story doesn't it?

And that so-called liberal media never quits does it?

Atrios showed me the way here and I did my own calculations.

Gary Permalink on 6/06/2004

Pundits pretended that Gore was lying

Four Part Series On Our Miserable Media Political Discourse

The Daily Howler documents the abuse the media heaps on the man who should be President.

PART 1: Two years ago, Gore nailed Iraq, guess how your pundits reacted?

PART 2: Gore discussed the rush to war, giving some good sound advice.

PART 3: Gore discussed the rush to war, but Sean was upset by his hairdo.

PART 4: Media admits they may be unfair and there is "an industry of Gore-haters".

Gary Permalink on 6/06/2004

Remembering Ronald Reagan

James Remembers Reagan

The father of the modern conservative movement has passed to the great unknown and his loss is being eulogized across the world. My memories of him are of the "great communicator" and of the everlasting legislative legacy, which I abhor.

I admired Reagan's ability to present a strong, capable, compassionate, optimistic, presence when the nation was in a time of great trouble. He was able to always convey in public the aura of self-assurance and confidence that a leader must possess. He delivered moving and heartfelt speeches that still resonate today. The office of president was the greatest role the former actor ever undertook and he played it with wonderful verve. HE had a vision of America that most of us shared, we were the good guys, the white-hatted cowboys who rode to the rescue of people, nations and each other. We saved Europe, brought democracy to Japan and forced "Mr. Gorbachev, (to) tear down this wall".

I could have been a Reagan Democrat, if I hadn't watched the business of government that often bears little resemblance to the speeches of politicians. Reagan oversaw some of the most damaging legislation in the last fifty years.

The drastic cutting of federal mental health funding led to the "mainstreaming" of a large group of people with serious mental illness. this led to a large portion of the large homelessness problem that started during his administration. Prior to the early eighties I almost never saw a homeless person but with the vast expulsion of mental patients into main stream society suddenly had a mumbling, sad, semi coherent, person asking for change and help.

The cutting of the top tax bracket started a trend that continues to this day. When ten percent of the population owns ninety percent of the wealth it follows that perhaps they should shoulder ninety percent of the tax burden. That has never occurred in America but prior to Reagan the multi-tiered tax structure had more tiers. (el - My brother is a little off-base here. The last analysis considering all taxes shows pretty much a current flat tax system. The problem is that a portion of family income is needed for basic existence and this shouldn't be taxed.) The ramifications over the next twenty years fueled in part by this tax structure has been a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. The middle class has been shrinking and the poor have increased and the rich are a smaller but vastly richer group of people.

The investments in weapons systems such as the much vaunted "star wars" missile defense system has been greatly beneficial to military contractors but after twenty years of multimillion if not multibillion dollar investment has led to a system that doesn't work and who's tactical uses is highly questionable.

When Reagan entered office we had a growing understanding and cooperation with the Soviet Union. Having recently completed the Apollo-Soyuz space mission and other symbolic joint endeavors the future looked bright for a cordial relationship. Reagan's remarks and increased military spending drove the Soviet Union into collapse. This is often held up as his greatest legacy. I'm not so sure it is much of a legacy. We "loan" and gift billions of dollars each year to the countries of the former Soviet Union. Many of the eastern border states are in a constant state of revolt and revolution. The Russian military can't pay its troops and its control on its vast nuclear arsenal is shaky. The average citizen in Russia is less likely to be employed, receive medical care or have a safe stable retirement. Moscow is really run by a collection of Mafia dons and political hacks. I must admit that Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia and several other countries are in a renaissance. The legacy of the collapse will not truly be known for years and like most victories it will be a mixed bag at best.

The Iran-Contra scandal which was a truly impeachable offense involving the deception of congress and direct violation of congressional edict as well as the deception of the American public and the attempted over throwing of a duly elected foreign government. Reagan's inability to recall his knowledge was either a successful ploy or the first indications of the horrible disease that would curse his later years.

His legacy of corrupt administrative officials and an executive branch constantly under investigation with numerous appointed officials convicted of various charges would end only under Clinton. A president who with the exception of one appointed official and of course his own blowjob related investigation would lead a clean, law-abiding administration. The legacy of official misconduct and administrative investigation has returned under the current administration.

The legacy of appealing to the best and noblest portions of our nature has been cruelly twisted by the current trend of making great, popularly supported pronouncements followed by little real action or the opposite action. (el ? This also occurred under Reagan.) I admired the man's ability to appear presidential and respected the hope he brought to millions of people. He was a great politician and speaker but he wasn't a great statesman. His passing will be mourned but in the next few days when his triumphs are heralded try to remember that many of those triumphs have led us to a country ever more divided politically, economically and socially.

Gary Permalink on 6/06/2004

Gore Blasts Bush Again

Former Vice President Al Gore, returning to campaign-combat action, laid out another scathing indictment of the Bush administration Friday night, accusing his 2000 election foe of squandering the nation's economic surpluses and its standing in the world.

He also accused Republicans of betraying the public interest and using deception in crafting environmental, economic and energy policies.

"They put George Orwell to shame in their use of the English language," Gore said. "Their single objective ... is to help the wealthy and powerful who have been a part of their electoral and contributor base."

Gore offered two sides in his comments -- first presenting the jocular Tennessee native son with a sense of humor who joked about the nation's economic downturn under Bush, saying he was the first one laid off. But he showed little mercy for Bush.

Kerry leads Bush 46 percent to 41 percent in Washington state, according to the most recent poll by Seattle-based Elway Research in April.

Gary Permalink on 6/06/2004

Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides

Is Bush Losing It In More Ways Than One?

From Capitol Hill Blue, the oldest newssite on the internet.

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”

Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.

“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”

In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.

Aides say the President gets “hung up on minor details,” micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.

“This is what is killing us on Iraq,” one aide says. “We lost focus. The President got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al Qaeda. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war but the President insisted the focus stay on those two, tenuous items.”

Aides who raise questions quickly find themselves shut out of access to the President or other top advisors. Among top officials, Bush’s inner circle is shrinking. Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen out of favor because of his growing doubts about the administration’s war against Iraq.

"Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'that's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now.'"

Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will."

God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”

“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”

But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the record.

Gary Permalink on 6/06/2004

Sci Fi Babes #1

Kate Beckinsale after really coming to everyone's attention in Pearl Harbor has been on a science fiction and fantasy ride.

She dominates a fantastic poster for Underworld and is the best thing about the movie.

She earns another poster presence on this summer's Van Helsing, an even worse movie with her as the only saving grace.

She is already signed with Underworld 2 but will also try again for critical success next year playing Ava Gardner in Martin Scorsese's movie about Howard Hughes.

With hot babes like Kate around why is this pair of hooters the most downloaded person on the internet? Or have I answered my own question?

Gary Permalink on 6/05/2004

Why the Libertarian Party Sucks

From My DD - Their most exciting and best financed cadidate Russo eliminated.

"Badnarik has no money and no personality, he's from Texas and all but assures that the Libertarian Party in 2004 will be no different than the Libertarian Party in previous elections."

el - I would add recent. At one time they appeared to be heading somewhere but they keep shooting themselves in both feet. I think this is my friend Peter's problem with them too.

I'll steal my lines from another conversation I am having... Interesting, I went off the reservation for the libertarians long ago over their fear of the unchecked power of government concentration ignoring my fears of the abuses of unchecked power of individuals and corporations.

I am a balance-of-powers-tarian.

Gary Permalink on 6/05/2004

"Reagan's Liberal Legacy"

What the Republicans Don't Tell You Now.

The great success of Reagan's 1980 campaign was that it united the disparate strands of the conservative movement: supply-siders, libertarians, religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and big business. The fact that Reagan's presidency didn't accomplish anything approaching its seismic promise--the size of government grew, abortion remained legal, and entitlements still abounded--is one that his partisan biographers elide by focusing on what Reagan believed and said rather than on what he actually did. The imaginary Reagan who inhabits these books embodies the ideas on which all these groups can agree. His shining example helps maintain the coalition while putting pressure on current GOP politicians to hew to the hard-right ideal.

The real Reagan, on the other hand, would bring discord to the current conservative agenda. If you believe, as conservatives now do, that raising taxes is always wrong, then it's hard to admit that Reagan himself did so repeatedly. If you argue that the relative tax burden on low-income workers is too light, as the Bush administration does, then it does not pay to dwell on the fact that Reagan himself helped lighten that burden. If you insist, as many hardliners now do, that America is dangerously soft on communist China, then it is best to ignore Reagan's own softening toward the Soviet Union. As with other conservative media efforts--Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, The Washington Times--the purpose of the Reagan legacy project is not to deliver accuracy, but enhance political leverage.

But, as Reagan himself liked to cite from John Adams, facts are stubborn things. And the fact is that Reagan, whether out of wisdom or because he was forced, made significant compromises with the left. Had he not saved Social Security, relented on his tax cut, and negotiated with the Soviets, he'd have been a less popular, and lesser, president. An honest portrait of Reagan's presidency would not diminish his memory, but enlarge it.

Gary Permalink on 6/05/2004

Taxes, gays, abortion targeted by state GOP

HouChron: Our own Texas loons in their native habitat

Texas Republican delegates on Friday adopted an ultraconservative party platform that attacks a wide range of targets -- from taxes and homosexuality to abortion and the United Nations -- and gives a mixed review to Gov. Rick Perry's priorities.

Republican delegates renewed their long-standing opposition to expanded gambling, despite Perry's proposal to legalize video lottery machines at racetracks and on Indian reservations to raise new money for public schools.

The new platform not only condemns homosexuality -- "the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society" -- it also advocates felony penalties for anyone issuing a marriage license or performing a marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple.

Another plank re-emphasizes long-standing conservative antipathy toward the United Nations by calling for the United States to rescind its membership in the U.N. and physically evict the U.N., which is headquartered in New York, from U.S. soil.

An anti-big-government attitude pervades the document with various planks calling for reduced spending, tax cuts and abolition of the Internal Revenue Service. The platform proposes replacing the federal income tax with a national retail sales tax.

The document also includes a plank calling for new restrictions on lawsuits brought over exposure to asbestos.

The platform also calls for repeal of the hate crimes law, repeal of the minimum wage, opposes the provision of reproductive health services, including condoms, in public schools and proposes the death penalty as a punishment option for rape.

el - The Texas Republican Party grassroots are now Neo-Confederates and Christian Christian Reconstructionists.

Gary Permalink on 6/05/2004

Reagan Dies After Long Battle With Alzheimer's Disease (washingtonpost.com)

Role Model For Bush Administration Is Gone

Gary Permalink on 6/05/2004

Texan Razorback Hogs

Presidential Pigs

The President gets off the helicopter in front of the White House, carrying a baby pig under each arm.

The Marine guard snaps to attention, salutes, and says: "Nice pigs, sir."

The President replies: "These are not pigs, these are authentic Texan
Razorback Hogs. I got one for VP Cheney, and I got one for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ."

The Marine again snaps to attention, salutes, and replies, "Nice trade, sir."

Thanks to Janette

Gary Permalink on 6/04/2004

UN Envoy: 'Bremmer is the Dictator of Iraq'

Lakhdar Brahimi, wrapping up his U.N. mission to bring an interim government to Iraq, looked a little tired and disheartened Wednesday as he said the compromise he negotiated was the best possible under American control.

When the U.S.-appointed Governing Council announced this week that it had selected a new prime minister, Brahimi seemed to be caught flat-footed. The man tapped for the post, Iyad Allawi, has close ties to the CIA. Almost immediately after being named prime minister, he called for the United States to keep its troops in Iraq, a position unpopular with many Iraqis.

Asked how big a role the American administration had in forming the government and selecting the prime minister and president, Brahimi reminded reporters that American Ambassador L. Paul Bremer runs things in Iraq.

"Bremer is the dictator of Iraq," he said. "He has the money. He has the signature."

He later added: "I will not say who was my first choice, and who was not my first choice ... I will remind you that the Americans are governing this country."

Gary Permalink on 6/04/2004

Rumsfeld Personally Approved Extreme Gitmo Procedures

Rumsfeld OK's All Extreme Interrogations

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must personally review the use of four types of interrogation methods before they can be used on foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a senior Army general said on Thursday.

Gen. James Hill, who as head of U.S. Southern Command is responsible for Guantanamo Bay, pointedly refused to reveal the nature of these four methods, although he denied guard dogs were used in interrogations or that prisoners were given chemicals or injections of any kind.

Human rights activists have accused the United States of using torture at Guantanamo, where prisoners are held indefinitely and most without being charged.

U.S. policy is that the prisoners are not covered by the Geneva Conventions establishing rights for prisoners.

Hill declined to answer when asked whether U.S. forces subjected Guantanamo prisoners to interrogation techniques including sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, isolation for longer than 30 days, dietary manipulation and placing inmates in body "stress positions."

Hill said four techniques that deviate from the military's traditional interrogation methods require him to notify Rumsfeld in advance. Rumsfeld then has seven days to either reject the request or allow the technique to be used, Hill said.

Gary Permalink on 6/04/2004

Three Harsh Reports on CIA Due Out

NYT - Current and former intelligence officials noted that Mr. Tenet was anticipating heavy criticism from three reports expected to assail the agency either over its failure to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, terror plot or the assessments that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons before the American invasion last year.

Most damaging among them is a Senate Intelligence Committee report, due this month, which is expected to single out errors made by the agency in its prewar judgments.
Some Republican senators, including Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, signaled to the administration in the past two weeks that the report's conclusions would be so critical that it would raise questions about who should be held accountable, an official said. Another official said the highly critical nature of the report was widely known at the White House.

The two other reports expected soon are from an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, due in late July, and from Mr. Tenet's own weapons hunter in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, who is expected to issue a progress report sometime this summer.

Under Mr. Tenet, the C.I.A. has been the subject of blistering critiques for what its detractors have called the two worst intelligence failures of the last 50 years: not anticipating Sept. 11 and exaggerating the threat of Iraq's unconventional weapons.

"If criticism either actual or anticipated was a factor, he would have left a long time ago," said David Boren, the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and a mentor to Mr. Tenet who talked to the director on Thursday afternoon. "It's been months of his desiring to leave."

Mr. Tenet had talked so often of leaving, friends said, that last December Mr. Bush personally asked him to stay.

el - oddly detailed accounts from unnamed sources then discuss Tenet's decision with his family and Bush's reactions.

Gary Permalink on 6/04/2004

Operations Direction Of CIA Also Steps Down

The man in charge of the spies and dirty tricks branch of the CIA announces retirement.

A second top CIA official is to retire from his post, less than a day after the surprise resignation of the agency's director George Tenet.
James Pavitt, deputy director for operations, who was in charge of the agency's spies, is said to have made the decision some weeks ago.

The CIA says Mr Pavitt's decision was unconnected with Mr Tenet's departure.

But analysts say the move will mean more upheaval at a critical time for the agency.

The BBC's Ian Pannell, in Washington, says it is his department's record in gathering intelligence in Iraq that has come in for the strongest criticism.

In particular they are criticised for not having enough good human intelligence on the ground, that they placed too much credence on badly sourced material.

Gary Permalink on 6/04/2004

'George Tenet is clearly the first sacrificial lamb here.'

Explosive Interview - Democracy at Stake?

Democracy Now interviews ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern: George Tenet is clearly the first sacrificial lamb here. Things are going quite badly here in Washington. Somebody has to start being held accountable. And Tenet is sort of a tragic figure because he did all he could to help George Bush, much more than he should have as an objective intelligence professional. For example, the estimate that was prepared in September and October of 2002, which was used to persuade our Congress that Saddam Hussein was about to rain mushroom clouds upon us. That was George Tenet actually corrupting the Intelligence process to the policy that had already been decided. The decision for war antedated that estimate by six or seven months at least. And so we had the bizarre experience of a decision for war before there was any intelligence estimate, and the intelligence estimate sort of playing catch-up ball so that the Congress, that needed to approve this war, would be deceived.

I am more frightened now than at any time over the last three and a half years, that this administration will resort to extra-legal methods to do something to ensure that there are four more years for George Bush.

Ashcroft’s statement last week, gratuitous statement, uncoordinated with the department of, CIA, with the Department of Homeland Security, his warning that there is bound to be a terrorist strike before the US elections. That can be viewed and this can be reasonably viewed as the opening salvo in the justification for doing, taking measures to ensure that whatever happens in November comes out so that four more years can be devoted to maybe changing that war crimes act or protecting at least these vulnerable people for four more years.

As is well known, it has been the Pentagon that had sort of adopted Chalabi. The CIA and State department dismissed him as a swindler several years ago. I don’t see any direct connection there between George Tenet’s resignation and the Chalabi thing. But I must say that if it weren’t so sad, one could sort of, one could sort of focus and then say, well there’s poetic justice for you, you know? The folks that were running Chalabi or vice versa as the case may be that is, the folks that were being run by Chalabi, were the Neo-cons who are responsible for the fix that this country is in now in Iraq. They groomed him and they went out drinking with him, and I can easily believe the story that was printed in the press yesterday that one of them got a little too potted. Intelligence officers often, sometimes are guilty of the same fault, but you like to brag a little and somebody told Chalabi, you know those Iranians, we’ve got ‘em pegged, we’ve got their communications and we can read everything they’re saying. Chalabi goes and tells the Iranian in Baghdad and the fool puts that message on the same code as has been broken. And so the CIA and NSA now has no doubt is a transcript of Chalabi saying, this is what I learned from, and there’s a good chance that there might be a name in there. And one can guess about five people who may have told him that. And most of them, yeah most of them reside in the Pentagon.

With respect to Tenet, you know, the Senate Intelligence Committee is just about to come out with a report that is going to bring him over the coals. It’s going to be very acerbic. Pat Roberts is no longer his defender. For the first time in George Tenet’s political existence he does not have support on the hill and that is the death knell for him. And the president will be able to point to this and say, well we did get rid of one of the malefactors, and maybe that will shield Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for another month or two.

Gary Permalink on 6/04/2004

Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative's Name!

Bush permited blowing Valerie Plames Cover

Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.

Their damning testimony has prompted Bush to contact an outside lawyer for legal advice because evidence increasingly points to his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

The move suggests the president anticipates being questioned by prosecutors. Sources say grand jury witnesses have implicated the President and his top advisor, Karl Rove.

White House spokesmen, however, dismiss the hiring of outside counsel as a routine precaution.

Bush has been an outspoken critics of leaks, saying they can be very damaging, but he has expressed doubts that the government's investigation will pinpoint who was responsible. While Bush has said he welcomed the leak investigation, it has been an awkward development for a president who promised to bring integrity and leadership to the White House after years of Republican criticism and investigations of the Clinton administration.

Even though he has a White House counsel, Bush is dependent on outside lawyers for private matters. A memo distributed to the staff last year reminded officials that the counsel's office works solely for the president in his official capacity and is not a private attorney for anyone.

Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a federal crime. The grand jury has heard from witnesses and combed through thousands of pages of documents turned over by the White House, but returned no indictments.

The probe is being handled by Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, appointed after Attorney General John Ashcroft stepped aside from case because of his political ties to the White House.

Wilson has suggested in a book that the leaker was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. But Wilson's book, "The Politics of Truth," gave no conclusive evidence for the claim.

Sources within the investigation say evidence points to Rove approving release of the leak. They add that their investigation suggests the President knew about Rove's actions but took no action to stop release of Plame's name.

el - Anytime the President has to get a lawyer something big is coming.

Gary Permalink on 6/04/2004

Nude Bike Riders Has Church Upset

Did You Want The Nude Bike Ride or the Church Youth Group Ride Today?

A planned nudist bicycle tour in the Netherland's so called bible-belt has upset local churchmen who are holding their own youth charity bike ride the same day.

They have tried in vain to get local authorities to ban the nudists to stop them clashing with the youth chapter of the Reformed Church when they both take to the road in the eastern town of Apeldoorn on June 12.

The nudist tour is part of the World Naked Bike Ride which also takes place in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto and Pforzheim in Germany.

The organizer of the church bike tour told the ANP news agency Thursday he had tried to coordinate the routes with the nudist tour to avoid any embarrassing meeting but had obtained no reply.

He is now asking the 300 or so cyclists on his youth tour to call the police if they see any nudists.

"Nudity in public is provocative and illegal," he said.

Or perhaps he is worried about what else could happen: "Nine naked men walking down the road would cause a heap of trouble for all concerned." avi video.

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

The Bizarre Tenet Resignation Announcement

Bush has an afterthought, Oh, BTW the head of the CIA is resigning.

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

The Choice This Year Is Between Empire and Democracy

Thom Hartman's Latest Compares Dreams Of Empire

For the first time since George Washington outspokenly warned us of engaging in foreign entanglements abroad, that the neocon vision of Empire has largely taken over an American administration.

Vision is a two-edged sword. The upside of people holding a vision is that they will work to fulfill a vision in a way that mere money can never animate. This is true from companies to nonprofits to churches to nations. A powerful and positive vision is the key ingredient for the success--particularly long term--of any venture.

The downside is when the vision is toxic and dysfunctional (think Jim Jones or Hitler) it can cause generations--centuries--of suffering, war, and desolation.

Empire and democracy are mutually exclusive--ultimately a nation must choose one or the other.

Interestingly, in all of history, no two fully democratic nations have ever gone to war with each other. Emmanuel Kant was right when he wrote, back in 1795, that the idea of a world of democratic nations, which was only a flickering experiment in faraway North America and just catching fire in France, might eliminate for all time the scourge of war.

Will we pursue, as most recently did Hitler, the historic--and failed--vision of empire, sustained by wiping out the wealth of our commons and our middle class while spilling the blood of our children? Or will we pursue democracy--helping create a humane, multilateral, cooperative world while working for greater social justice at home?

Those of us who share this latter vision of democracy must--in the best grassroots traditions of the historic vision-driven populist, progressive, civil rights, and anti-war movements--help bring it about by awakening our neighbors, friends, and co-workers; and by infiltrating the Democratic Party to challenge the corporatist vision of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which is even today struggling to seize the soul of the Democratic Party in service of corporate rule and empire.

Shall we move back towards the failed darkness of bloody empire, or forward into the light of worldwide democracy?

The choice, this year more than most in the history of America, is ours.

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

Medicare drug discount card program is a huge failure

‘Seniors have overwhelmingly rejected’ it says Sen. Daschle

While the Republicans try to put on a brave face at disappointing uptake numbers, the Democrats are saying the new law is a joke, they say it helps drug companies and insurance companies more than elderly patients.

The full Medicare prescription drug benefit goes into effect in 2006, the discount card is designed to carry patients (elderly ones) through to that moment.

Even with the discounts, American seniors can get far better prices if they buy from Canada. The Families USA health advocacy group said that the 30 most popular drugs for the elderly had gone up in price so many times, on average four times (ten times in some cases) that any discounts achieved with the Medicare discount card were meagre in comparison to the recent price increases.

Seniors on low incomes will also get a $600 a year subsidy for their prescriptions. However, the Democrats say that low income seniors who already get care assistance from their states cannot get this subsidy.

The number of seniors getting their cards has been a huge disappointment – less than 500,000 so far, plus 2.2 million who automatically get a card because they have been in a Medicare health maintenance organization. With 41 million on Medicare, this number is pathetic, say many experts.

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

Chalbi's Turnover of US Tapping Iran Codes Probed

Why does Bush-Cheney Hate America? Next time Chalbi visits why don't they have the Marines escort him to Jordan where he would be thrown in jail for bank fraud conviction?

Chalabi was once held in high enough esteem to sit behind first lady Laura Bush during the state of the union address. He is alleged to have met in Baghdad with a top Iranian agent and disclosed to him that the U.S. had cracked Iran's secret codes and was eavesdropping on all Iranian intelligence messages.

Chalabi told the Iranians he learned about the code intercepts from an American who was "drunk" when he told him. What followed was a frantic exchange of messages between the Baghdad Iranian agent and his headquarters in Tehran all of which were intercepted and decoded by U.S. agents back here.

That led to a raid last month on Chalabi's Baghdad headquarters and an end to his hopes of joining in the new leadership coalition in post-war Iraq.

A small number of civilian Pentagon employees are being given lie detector tests in an effort to determine who told Iraqi leader Amhad Chalabi that the U.S. had broken secret codes used by Iran, according to the New York Times.

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

Congressman Goes To War On Bush's Middle Class Squeeze

How the Bush Administration and GOP congressional policies are failing the middle class

The Middle Class Squeeze highlights how Bush Administration and Congressional policies are failing middle-class Americans. Stagnating or declining real wages for workers, exploding health care and college costs, and record-high gas prices -- among other challenges -- are damaging most Americans' way of life. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration and Congress have passed trillion-dollar tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy, and have pushed a variety of policies that hurt workers and their families. Taken together, these developments are squeezing the middle class, and threatening most Americans' valued way of life. Congressman Miller, as the Senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, will document the squeeze on the middle class each week.

May 27, 2004, Issue #2 -- Prices at the Pump: The Bush Gas “Tax"

May 20, 2004, Issue #1 -- Paychecks: Workers Feeling the Squeeze

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

Media Bias Wars

So-called liberal NPR mostly uses republican and administration sources.

Despite a perception that National Public Radio is politically liberal,
the majority of its sources are actually Republicans and conservatives,
according to a survey released today by Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting, a left-leaning media watchdog.

"Republicans not only had a substantial partisan edge," according to a
report accompanying the survey, "individual Republicans were NPR's most
popular sources overall, taking the top seven spots in frequency of
appearance." In addition, representatives of right-of-center think tanks
outnumbered their leftist counterparts by more than four to one, FAIR
reported.

NPR ombudsman disputes bias and FAIR responds.

We compared the tilt toward Republicans in 2003 (61 percent to 38 percent) with that found in 1993 (57 percent to 42 percent) to indicate that the tilt is not based on which party is in power--with control of the White House and both houses of Congress reversed, the imbalance remains.

National Media 'Reporters' not conservative

According to a new survey, only 12 percent of local reporters, editors, and media executives are self-described conservatives, while twice as many call themselves liberal. At national news organizations, the gap is even wider - 7 percent conservative vs. 34 percent liberal.

el - The survey did not split out the publishers and editors who decide what stories get played and how played where the bias is in the opposite direction. BTW - here is the resume of that reporter, a feature I will try to do more of.

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

Abortion and Florida Key Kerry Concerns Now

Events Forcing Abortion Issue on Kerry

With a divided nation on abortion Kerry doesn't want this issue but can't avoid it.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) yesterday released the results of a study that examined nearly two dozen votes and bills to determine which senators supported Catholic teaching most consistently. Kerry's record was the most pro-Catholic. Durbin and his staff denied that they cherry-picked issues to make Kerry come out on top. They said they spent three weeks combing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' annual legislative report and looked at every bill on which the bishops took a clear stand, from abortion and war to raising the minimum wage.

Meanwhile Kerry learned lessons from Gore on how to take back Florida. (el - I would say avoiding spanish speaking media was Gore's key problem.)

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

CIA Head Resigns

AP - Personal Reasons? Or Taking heat For Failures of Intel Despite Cheney - Rumsfeld Bypass of CIA?

Oh, how silly, the CIA being bypassed isn't in this story. What liberal media?

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

Valerie Plame Affair Back In The News

A Year Ago Someone Outed A CIA Agent Protecting Americans From Nuclear Weapons, Now The Prez Gets A Lawyer?

BTW, Did The NYT cover it better above, the AP, the Washington Post, or the LA Times? How about CBS News for first reporting the consultation with the lawyer?

How come most people don't know know what this is about - people at the top putting political payback over protecting America from terrorists? Some liberal media.

Gary Permalink on 6/03/2004

Bush Attacks On Kerry Unprecedented

Bush Leads In The War Of Lies

Kerry did not question the war on terrorism, has proposed repealing tax cuts only for those earning more than $200,000, supports wiretaps, has not endorsed a 50-cent gasoline tax increase in 10 years, and continues to support the education changes, albeit with modifications, all contrary to Bush TV ads.

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.

The assault on Kerry is multi-tiered: It involves television ads, news releases, Web sites and e-mail, and statements by Bush spokesmen and surrogates -- all coordinated to drive home the message that Kerry has equivocated and "flip-flopped" on Iraq, support for the military, taxes, education and other matters.

"There is more attack now on the Bush side against Kerry than you've historically had in the general-election period against either candidate," said University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communication. "This is a very high level of attack, particularly for an incumbent."

Gary Permalink on 6/02/2004

New York Magazine On Scandalous Judy Miller of the Times

Colleagues Tell On Fake WMD Reporter

A Formerly Great Paper in dysfunction from the top with a Mata-Hari Mafia bitch as its star reporter.

What, it doesn't quite go that far? That's why you have bloggers to tell what they are covering up.

Dysfunction from the top allows propaganda swill to spill as Kautilyan tells on the only reporter he ever loathed.

Mafia daughter bitch sleeps with her sources and channels her and her friends neocon fantasies and more as you learn how to read a magazine story from Steve Gilliard.

Links from Cursor.org.

Gary Permalink on 6/02/2004

John Kerry intern scandal - Alexandra Polier's account

Kerry Intern Tracks Down Her Own Scandal

Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the “intern” sifts through the mud and the people who threw it.

I was too overwhelmed and confused to know what had happened. I had never had an affair with John Kerry. Who was trying to make me the next Monica Lewinsky?

The Beginning

“Get in touch with my office. Maybe there’s something you can do for the campaign.”

He introduced me to his finance director, Peter Maroney. We were the youngest people in the room by fifteen years, and after discovering the coincidence of growing up in the same hometown, we hit it off. I found him charming, smart, and charismatic—a cuter version of his boss. A phone friendship with Peter followed, and we started dating that spring.

While finishing at Columbia, I got an editorial-assistant job at the AP. As Kerry’s campaign switched into high gear, Peter had little time or energy left for me. Eventually the relationship fizzled out, but we remained friends, talking often.

The Scandal

When I left the States last fall, we stayed in touch via e-mail, and Peter would send me links to articles mentioning his successes. His name popped up in my in-box on the morning of Matt’s dinner party, and I clicked it open. “Al,” it read, “there’s a rumor going around the office that you slept with my boss.”

Though my name wasn’t mentioned in the initial Drudge “exclusive,” it made its first appearance in the British tabloid The Sun on Friday, February 13. The article, by one Brian Flynn, referred to Kerry as a SLEAZEBALL in the headline and said I was 24 (didn’t I wish). It purported to quote my father at home in Pennsylvania discussing the senator, saying, “I think he’s a sleazeball.” The article also claimed to quote my mother as saying Kerry had once chased after me to be on his campaign. My mother was not even home when Flynn called, and Flynn didn’t tell my father—who at this stage was unaware of the Drudge allegations—that he was interviewing him. My father, a Republican, who believed Kerry had flip-flopped on various issues, said, ‘Oh, that sleazeball.’ ”

My father, in spite of his Republican leanings, suspected a right-wing conspiracy, so at my suggestion he concluded his statement: “We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation and intend on voting for him for President of the United States.” Our denials made the front pages from New York to Calcutta.

By the end of the week, the reporters had gone, empty-handed. But millions of people around the world still thought it was true. My name would be forever associated with a sex scandal.

Tracking the Story

I began by calling political reporters and strategists, who told me that as early as the New Hampshire primary, on January 27, two weeks before the story appeared on Drudge, there had been rumors swirling that Kerry had an intern problem. “We shook the tree,” says one reporter, who spent three weeks reporting it for The Hill only to come up empty-handed. “A bunch of names fell out, and yours had the most flesh to it.”

“The John Kerry campaign has just been rocked by the scandal that people who knew John Kerry have been quietly predicting for months,” opined David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, on The National Review’s Website. “Now we know why Teresa Heinz was reluctant to bankroll her husband’s campaign.”

Damning stuff, except that Frum was merely working with the rumors that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.

As I began to trace the rumor, I learned that the vaguer it was, the easier it was to spread. Without a specific intern’s name attached, the story was initially impossible to disprove.

As I continued to dig, it occurred to me that Bush wasn’t the only one with a motive. Clark, Dean, and Edwards all stood to gain if Kerry imploded. “This story played into so many agendas, everyone wanted it to be true,” says one reporter who covered the Clark campaign.

Drudge had posted a leaked private e-mail from Craig Crawford, a political columnist at The Congressional Quarterly, to some colleagues at MSNBC: “Drudge item on Kerry intern issue is something Chris Lehane has shopped around for a long time.” Drudge quickly dropped the posting, and Lehane complained to Crawford that it wasn’t true, but Lehane’s name was familiar to me. I knew he was feared by rival campaigns as a master of the black art of leaking political-opposition research.

Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s former campaign manager, told me he’d also heard Lehane had been shopping the rumor—presumably on Clark’s behalf.

The Sources

I called Lehane himself, who, having backed the wrong team, is now running his own political PR firm in San Francisco. I asked him where he’d first heard the rumors about Kerry and me. He blamed political reporters. I asked him if he had used the rumors to try to help Clark. He denied it. “There are just so many media outlets out there now, Alex, that these kind of baseless rumors can easily get turned into stories,” he said smoothly, and then the phone went dead.

On February 6, six days before Drudge, an obscure political Website called Watchblog.com ran a commentary by someone calling himself Son of Liberty. “Rumor has it that John Kerry is going to be outed by Time magazine next week for having an affair with a 20-year-old woman who remains unknown.”

“Someone who ran off to, where did she go, Kenya? It made an excellent opportunity for someone to finger-point at her.”

No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge—who, post-Monica, is taken seriously by other sites.

Drudge’s initial posting on February 12 claimed that ABC News, Time, The Hill, and the Washington Post were all working on stories about a Kerry intern. “It had been looked into.”

My relationship with Peter had put me close to the senator, and I certainly hadn’t kept it a secret that I had been excited to meet and talk to Kerry. The more people I talked to, the more one supposed source kept coming up, a woman whom Drudge had called my “close friend.”

I couldn’t believe one of my closest friends would tell such a thing—we went all the way back to tenth grade. I had even asked her to be a bridesmaid. She denied it again, then softened her position. “I may have told Bill that you knew Kerry. Look, I was once with you when you phoned Kerry’s office and then he called you right back. And I thought, How amazing, and I got excited and I told friends about it.” She started to cry. “I’m very, very sorry,” she sobbed. “If all this leads back to me, it wasn’t intentional.”

I called Jarrell and asked him what he thought. “Come on Alex,” he said. “Who else could it be?”

“I was calling to ask you who your source was for your story which named Alex Polier as the intern in the Kerry story,” she said.

“Ah, many people have asked me; it was a fantastic source,” he said. “I broke that story to the world, you know,” he added proudly. “But your source was wrong,” she pointed out. He paused, startled. “You’ve just ambushed me,” he cried. “You’ve ambushed me!”

“Why did you quote my mother when she wasn’t even home?” I persisted.

“I really can’t talk about this right now, Alex,” he said.

The End

My final call, inevitably, had to be to Matt Drudge, who said he couldn’t talk for long as his father had just arrived for the weekend. In fact, we spoke for nearly 40 minutes. “In retrospect, I should have had a sentence saying, ‘There is no evidence to tie Alex to John Kerry.’ I should have put that,” he told me. Then he added, “If Clark had not gone out there and said, ‘Kerry is going to bomb,’ I never, ever, would have gone anywhere near this.” Once he’d posted his initial story, he was then encouraged and gratified by the prompt coverage in the UK press. “When the London Times made it a banner headline, like we’re going to war, I realized this must be true. Murdoch is going all the way with this! For me to do media coverage was one thing, for them to jump from media coverage to say this is actually an affair between her and him and all the rest was something else!”

I started out as an ambitious young woman inspired by politics and the media. I’ve ended up disenchanted with both. If I had been an ambitious young man, this story would not have happened. I’m never going to know exactly what happened, but that matters less to me now. I lost a good friend and learned a few lessons. I am struck by the pitiful state of political reporting, which is dominated by the unholy alliance of opposition research and its latest tool, the Internet.

It was important for me to set the record straight. I don’t mean to dredge up old news by writing this, and I’m not trying to create any now, though I’m not unaware of the irony that I am adding to the ink spilled on this story. I don’t intend to discuss it again in public either. But for me, this painful experience will be hard to forget. It may be only a minor footnote to the campaign, but it has changed my life completely.

Digested from New York Metro.com, New York Magazine

Gary Permalink on 6/02/2004