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| ... Fair Expectations ... |
| 09.30.04 (8:44 pm) [edit] |
"It's time to end the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that President Bush is afforded in presidential debates." - Steve Cobble
[b]"We the People" must stop treating the election of the President of the United States of America like a football game-- or a match of tactical "wins"-- ... Too much is at stake to participate in the bizarre pre-occupation that many have with so-called "performance" in the debates ... Instead we must be clear regarding the horrendously disastrous track-record of the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]and our need for a new administration to restore credibility, competence and integrity to the White House and to America ...[/b]
George W. is right – it's time to end "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
I'm talking about the presidential debates. It's long past time to quit treating George W. like some precious little elementary school kid from the boondocks. He's supposed to be the president. He needs to be held to the same debate standards to which other first-term presidents were held, the standards that helped derail his father and Jimmy Carter.
Standards like truth. Coherence. His actual record in office. An ability to go beyond scripted sound bites. Some connection between the dreamscapes that his PR people paint for him, and the cruel reality on the ground that his policies have helped to create.
(As for Dick Cheney – some tenuous connection with the truth would be a good start . . .) The media have never held George W. Bush to the same standards as his debate opponents. Despite being the incumbent governor, the eloquent Ann Richards could only win by slaughtering Bush in their debates, a wildly unfair set of expectations. Al Gore actually won two out of the three debates, according to the viewing audience – but he lost ground during their debate series, as much as 10 points in the polls, because he was unable to "knock Bush out" (and because of intense post-debate right-wing spin).
Why? Because in the past, Bush's reputation for mangling phrases, for making up words, for not knowing what he was talking about, was an asset when the media judged the debates. He "won", not because he did better than his opponents, but because he did "better than expected," according to the pundit class.
George W. has always only had to "exceed expectations", which are always set low to begin with. He has never actually had to "win" a debate; he wins by not losing, or in some cases, even by not losing badly.
This media frame is long outdated. Bush is the president now (whether he really won or not). When he says something, it should be judged by real, factual benchmarks, not artificially enhanced by "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
For instance, can the man who would be Churchill tell the truth? Can he explain how an attack on a nation with no WMDs that was not involved in the 9/11 attacks somehow boosted the war on terror? Can he tell us how we're going to get out of his quagmire in Iraq? Should he be allowed to get away with reciting some truism about "turning the corner" rather than confronting our net loss of a million jobs, stagnant wages, and growing trade deficit?
Will his promises on the budget deficit be measured against his record in squandering the Clinton surplus? Will his tough-guy talk about terrorists be matched up against his failure to follow through on bin Laden? Will the media ask him if he believes that Armageddon will happen soon, and is that belief influencing his Middle East policy?
Will they ask him how it is that his Administration could be warned in early August that al Qaeda was going to attack inside the United States, and yet more than a month later, still not be able to defend the Pentagon? What could explain such a massive display of incompetence?
And what does it mean that he can find the time to drop in on soldiers and National Guard reserves being sent off to Iraq, but he has never been able to find the time to show respect for our fallen, to show respect for their families, by attending even one funeral of one soldier killed in Iraq? Not one, out of more than one thousand killed.
Everyone seems to agree that this is the most important election in our lifetimes. (Granted, people say that every four years, but this time both sides are also acting as if they mean it.) Is it too much to ask that the next leader of the most powerful nation on earth have to earn it, by actually winning the debates, rather than winning by "social promotion" due to "the soft bigotry of low expectations"?
So this time, can we make George W. actually win these debates on his merits – or more likely, allow him to lose them on his demerits?
[b]Source:[/b]
Steve Cobble, AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ... INFLUENCE ... |
| 09.30.04 (7:25 pm) [edit] |
"The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret" - Salvador Dali
[b][i]Times, they are a changin' [/i]... No longer is the blatant abuse of power to enrich the influence-peddlers (lobbyists for corporate interests ...) a "secret" ... The shameless exploitation of the American people on behalf of gluttonous corporations and the wealthiest among us is "business as usual" with the corrupt Bush regime ... [/b]
[i][b]An example ...[/b][/i]
[b]Protecting Industry, Not People:[/b] The[i] Washington Post [/i]reports, "food industry lobbyists met privately with Bush administration officials 10 times while the government was crafting rules to protect the food supply from bioterrorism and those congressionally required rules emerged in significantly weakened form as a result." Caroline Smith DeWaal, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said, "the result is regulations that the industry likes, but that don't fully protect the public interest." http://www.washingtonpost.com... The Bush administration has a history of meeting secretly with industry groups when crafting important legislation: Vice President Cheney had back room meetings with energy officials when crafting his energy policy; the White House also met with the owner of one of the largest pharmacy benefits management companies in drafting prescription drug card legislation; http://www.americanprogress.o... the new mercury emission rules from the EPA contained "at least a dozen paragraphs [that] were lifted, sometimes verbatim, http://www.washingtonpost.com... from the industry suggestions."
[i][b]And ...[/b][/i]
[b]Military Industrial Complex - No-Bid Contracts Gone Wild:[/b] A new report by the Center for Public Integrity shows over the past six years, more than half the Pentagon's $900 billion budget was given out to contractors. More than 40 percent http://www.washingtonpost.com... of that was awarded without competitive bidding. Also, points out the [i]Wall Street Journal[/i], the Pentagon "doesn't adequately monitor its contractors," with poor record-keeping and weak accountability. Some of the Pentagon's largest contractors, http://online.wsj.com/article...,,SB109646763473331232,00 .html?mod=politics%5Fprima ry%5Fhs "including Lockheed Martin Corp. and General Dynamics Corp., received a majority of their defense revenue through no-bid contracts." http://www.nytimes.com/aponli... You get what you pay for: the top 10 contractors "won $340 billion in contracts over the six-year period. In that time, the companies gave $35.7 million to political campaigns and spent $414.6 million on lobbying." The study concluded, "The 10 biggest defense contractors all spent heavily on both campaign contributions and lobbying. But the return on their investment was staggering."
[b]The current administration is not representing "We the People" ... Isn't it time for a change? ...[/b]
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| ... 10 Questions for Tonight's Debate ... |
| 09.30.04 (4:47 pm) [edit] |
[b]On the day of the first presidential debate on foreign policy and homeland security, the Center for American Progress suggests 10 debate questions.[/b] Also check out their list of things President George W. Bush might say http://www.tblog.com/template... to defend his foreign policy record—followed by the facts explaining why the statements are misleading.
"We the People" should pay close attention to the questions posed [i]as well as [/i]the answers given ...
SEE THE DEBATE QUESTIONS HERE THAT JIM LEHRER SHOULD ASK:
[b]1. Vice President Cheney, Speaker of the House Hastert and others have said, in so many words, that al Qaeda would like to see Senator Kerry elected. Assuming you agree with their assessment, could you please tell the American people what the evidence is on this? Don't you think that, given the kind of threat this could represent to all Americans, you owe it to them to reveal the information so that they can make an informed choice in the election?[/b]
Earlier this month, Vice President Cheney said, "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." His comments echoed those of other leading GOP figures. House Speaker Dennis Hastert has said al Qaeda "would like to influence this election" against Bush, and suggested terrorists would be more comfortable with John Kerry as president. And Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage claimed that insurgents have stepped up their deadly assaults in Iraq because they want to "influence the election against President Bush." None of these claims has been backed up with any evidence whatsoever.
[u]Sources[/u]:
. Cheney says U.S. will be "hit" if we elect Kerry http://www.freerepublic.com/f...
. Hastert says al Qaeda roots for Kerry http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO...
. Armitage says insurgents want Kerry to win http://www.sunherald.com/mld/...
[b]2. President Bush, you've said in the past that America will never ask for a permission slip to defend itself. But recently, you said that Fallujah wasn't dealt with more aggressively because of concerns expressed by Iraqi politicians. Why are Iraqi politicians vetoing American military tactics?[/b]
Lt. Gen. James Conway, the outgoing U.S. Marine Corps general in charge of western Iraq – now deputy director of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff – said in September that he disagreed with the hasty order that sent his troops to invade Fallujah in April, as well as the subsequent decision to withdraw from the city and turn over control to the disloyal Brigade. Conway said the disastrous assault increased tensions while making the region more hostile to U.S. forces: "We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah, that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge." Instead, higher ups insisted on the attack, and then demanded troops pull out when the fighting grew fierce. "I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand the consequences of that, and not, perhaps, vacillate in the middle of that. Once you commit to do that, you have to stay committed." When asked by Bill O'Reilly to explain the administration's hesitance, Bush responded, "There was a dual track with a political process going forward. A lot of people on the ground there thought that if we'd have gone into Fallujah at the time, the interim government would not have been established."
[u]Sources[/u]:
. Conway Criticism http://www.latimes.com/news/n...,1,3338025.story?coll=la-home-headli nes
. Bush on O'Reilly http://www.foxnews.com/story/...,2933,133712,00.html
[b]3. Before the war, Gen. Eric Shinseki estimated "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed to secure the peace in Iraq. Have events proven Gen. Shinseki correct? Should America have gone in with more troops?[/b]
U.S. and foreign officials, including Army Commander John Abizaid, are indicating that more armed forces in addition to the 138,000 troops already in Iraq "will be needed over the coming months to secure the nation's first democratic elections, to protect against the possibility of an insurgent offensive," and to allow U.S. commanders to launch a major counteroffensive to quell an insurgent rebellion in the Sunni Triangle. In the march to war, Bush administration officials publicly rebuked Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki for his estimate that "several hundred thousand troops" would be necessary to provide security in post-war Iraq. At the time, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki's estimate as "wildly off the mark." When Army Secretary Thomas White agreed with Shinseki, he was also disparaged.
[u]Sources[/u]:
. Wolfowitz repudiates Shinseki's "suspect" estimate http://www.drumbeat.mlaterz.n...%20Feb%202003/Wolfowitz%2 0critical%20of%20occupati on%20estimate%20022803a.htm
. On White and Shinseki's public feuds with Pentagon http://www.usatoday.com/news/...
. Iraqi insurgents getting stronger http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5...
. Abizaid says more troops may be needed in Iraq http://www.washingtonpost.com...
[b]4. Mr. President, in 2000, you told members of the military that "help is on the way." Yet the war in Iraq has stretched the military to the breaking point. Reenlistment is falling, tours of duty are longer, the National Guard and Reserve contribute about 40 percent of the troops in Iraq, and now you've been forced to call up the Individual Ready Reserve in what people call a back-door draft. Could you have done more to help the military?[/b]
The U.S. is relying on the National Guard and Reserve more than ever, with "citizen soldiers" comprising more than 40 percent of U.S. forces in Iraq alone. The administration's failure to anticipate the demands of post-war Iraq has left guardsmen and reservists with insufficient notice before mobilization, forced thousands of soldiers into back-to-back deployments and left little backup in the event of another terrorist attack. As a result of the strains to the Guard, commanders across the country are concerned about their ability to recruit and retain troops. Reenlistment and retention rates are falling. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has warned that using reservists at this level is "unsustainable." And this year, "the Army National Guard will fall 5,000 soldiers short of its recruiting goal." But with Army planners preparing to maintain current troop levels in Iraq through 2007, it is unclear where the new soldiers will come from. Fearing "sharp declines" in recruiting and troop retention, Army officials are considering cutting the length of combat tours in Iraq, even as commanders consider asking for more troops to secure the January elections.
[u]Sources[/u]:
. On death toll for citizen soldiers http://www.globalsecurity.org...
. Guard commanders concerned about troop recruitment http://www.washingtonpost.com...
. Current troop levels unsustainable http://www.pinr.com/report.ph...
. CBO report says U.S. cannot maintain current troop strength http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD...
. Army planners prepare for 2007 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com...
. Army Guard sees recruiting shortfall http://www.kansascity.com/mld...
[b]5. Republican Senator Richard Lugar said the administration has managed to spend just $1 billion of the $18.4 billion Congress approved to rebuild Iraq because of its "incompetence." Republican Senator Chuck Hegel said, "We need more regionalization. We need more help from our allies." Republican Senator John McCain said, "we made serious mistakes'' in Iraq. Do you agree?[/b]
Appearing this month on ABC's This Week, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) said, "We've got to get the reconstruction money out there. That was the gist of our hearing this week, that $18 billion is appropriated a year ago and only $1 billion has been spent." When asked why the money hadn't been spent, Lugar replied, "This is the incompetence in the administration.'' On Face the Nation, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said we were "in deep trouble in Iraq" and urged more "help from out allies." John McCain (R-AZ), speaking on Fox News Sunday, cited mistakes such as the toleration of looting immediately after U.S. troops took Baghdad and failures to secure Iraq's borders and prevent insurgents from establishing strongholds within the country. President Bush has offered no response to these statements, other than saying the critical senators support him for president.
[u]Sources[/u]:
. Lugar quote: ABC News Transcript, 9/19/04 (Available on Lexis)
. 140 out of 2,300 projects underway http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
. Hagel says we're in "deep trouble in Iraq" http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs...
. Republicans criticize Bush "mistakes" in Iraq http://www.reuters.co.uk/news...§ion=news
[b]6. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said we went to Iraq to avoid a "mushroom cloud," but that country turned out to have no nuclear capability. Meanwhile, in the last four years we've pursued six-party negotiations with North Korea, and Kim Jung Il has quadrupled his nuclear arsenal. Did we miscalculate which country presented the most immediate nuclear threat?[/b]
Charles Pritchard—formerly Colin Powell's top official dealing with North Korea—says, "the White House lacks an effective strategy to dissuade North Korea from building up its nuclear arms." The Bush administration waited 18 months before making a serious proposal to North Korea, allowed its senior officials to make statements that were certain to hand it excuses to leave the discussions, thereby prolonging the crisis, and has spent an estimated 100 hours in three rounds of discussions with the six parties. Meanwhile, North Korea's nuclear weapons potential has quadrupled in size from a suspected two weapons to as many as eight. According to Stuart Taylor of the National Journal, if the present course persists, North Korea will be "making about a dozen [weapons] a year, with every intention of selling them to terrorists and other willing bidders." According to Pritchard, the situation has deteriorated because "the administration has neither offered much of a carrot nor wielded a stick." The administration has refused to engage North Korea in direct negotiations or "put the North Koreans on notice that further developments will trigger economic sanctions or perhaps even military actions."
[u]Sources[/u]:
. New York Times, Warnings Go Unheeded Over North Korea Threat http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
. National Journal, Nuclear Terror: Has Bush Made Matters Worse? http://www.crimlaw.org/defbri...
. Time Magazine,"Why Talking May Only Make the North Korea Situation Worse" http://www.time.com/time/worl...,8599,478492,00.html
. American Progress Report Card http://www.americanprogress.o...
[b]7. After identifying Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil, you chose to focus on Iraq – which turned out to have no nuclear capability. Last week, Iran announced that it was going to pursue a nuclear program that would allow it to produce nuclear materials that could be used to build bombs. Did we miscalculate which country presented the most immediate nuclear threat?[/b]
The Bush administration's own actions and policies have simultaneously encouraged Iran to pursue nuclear weapons while severely limiting our options for compelling Iran to abandon its fuel cycle programs. President Bush declared in his 2002 National Security Strategy that the United States would preemptively attack rogue regimes that pursued weapons of mass destruction. In his 2002 State of the Union address, he identified three of these regimes—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—as forming an "Axis of Evil." The Bush administration then invaded Iraq, despite skepticism within his administration and among nuclear experts over whether Iraq was in fact actively pursuing nuclear weapons. The lesson this taught Iran (and North Korea) is that they should accelerate their weapons programs to deter a U.S. invasion.
[u]Sources[/u]:
. BostonGlobe, "US turning more to UN for help" http://www.boston.com/news/wo...
. GlobalSecurity.org, "Target Iran—Air Strikes" http://www.globalsecurity.org...
. National Journal, "Nuclear Terror: Has Bush Made Matters Worse?" http://www.crimlaw.org/defbri...
. New York Times, "Bush Aides Divided on Confronting Iran Over A-Bomb" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
[b]8. The 9/11 Commission says there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney insists there was a collaborative relationship. Who is right?[/b]
Vice President Cheney said on Sept. 9 that Saddam Hussein "provided safe harbor and sanctuary...for Al Qaeda." It was one of many times that Cheney has described a collaborative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. There is no evidence to support Cheney's claim. The 9/11 Commission – which spent months exhaustively studying the issue – concluded there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda. After the release of the 9/11 report, Cheney claimed there was "overwhelming" evidence of a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq and that he had "probably" seen evidence that was not shared with the commission. After investigating the matter, the 9/11 Commission found "it had access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks." The commission also reaffirmed its position that it had not discovered a "collaboration-cooperatio n between al-Qaeda and Iraq."
[u]Sources[/u]:
. Cheney on Sept. 9 http://www.latimes.com/news/y...,1,1085252.story
. Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed http://www.washingtonpost.com...
. Cheney disputes 9/11 Commission claim http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO...
. 9/11 panel confirms conclusions http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Po...
[b]9. The war in Iraq has cost American taxpayers about $145 billion – and you're slated to ask for another $75 billion before the end of the year. Do you think you've spent the $145 billion in the best way possible? Or would this money have been better spent on key homeland security efforts like protecting our ports and securing nuclear materials?[/b]
So far, the Iraq war has cost American taxpayers roughly $150 billion. An additional $60 billion is expected to be allocated in a supplemental request after the November election. It was costing us $2 billion a year to keep Saddam contained. According to the 9/11 report, Iraq was not involved in the planning or execution of the Sept. 11 attacks and did not have a "collaborative operational relationship" with al Qaeda. However, many homeland security needs, as well as U.S. counterterror operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have been underfunded or neglected because of Iraq. It would cost just $7.5 billion over ten years, for instance, to secure all of America's ports against a terrorist attack, but so far just $500 million has been allocated. Seven billion dollars over five years could pay for 100,000 more community police officers, but the Bush administration's FY2005 budget proposes just $97 million. Experts say the war has "increased the threats America faces, and has reduced the military, financial, and diplomatic tools with which we can respond." A 2004 Harvard study shows that in the two years since 9/11, your administration has secured less of the nuclear materials that can be used to make weapons than in the two years before 9/11.
[u]Sources[/u]:
. Center for American Progress on opportunity cost of war http://www.americanprogress.o...%7bE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7d/Opportu nity%20Cost%20of%20War%20 Report%208%2025.pdf
. War has depleted resources to deal with terror http://www.theatlantic.com/do...
[b]10. Mr. President, you claimed this week that "[the] Taliban no longer is in existence." Yet, the death toll for Afghanis at the hands of the Taliban this year is 45 percent higher than last year. Can you explain your claim in light of this fact?[/b]
While the administration has worked to build a positive picture of its successes in Afghanistan, the situation on the ground tells a different story. Drugs, militants, terrorists and warlords continue to undermine security and democracy in the country. Opium production is expected to reach record high levels this year, and even the Bush administration's ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, recently admitted that Afghanistan was in danger of becoming a "narco-state." The Taliban have been making a steady comeback since their government was ousted by the U.S.-led coalition in 2001, and the Afghan death toll attributed to the group rose by 45 percent this year. Osama bin Laden and senior members of al Qaeda remain at large, and there are indications that senior al Qaeda leaders are involved in planning and directing attacks in Afghanistan. Warlords and armed militias continue to rule the countryside, creating instability and factional fighting, preventing the Karzai government from extending its authority and threatening the legitimacy of the Oct. 9 presidential election.
[u]Sources[/u]:
. Opium: Source 1 http://www.wtopnews.com/index... | Source 2 http://www.boston.com/news/wo...
. Taliban http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
. Al-Qaeda http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5...
. Warlords Source 1 http://www.theledger.com/apps... | Source 2 http://www.hrw.org/background... .
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| ... Claim vs. Fact: What The President Will Say ... |
| 09.30.04 (2:39 pm) [edit] |
"Saddam…had a relationship with al Qaeda." - Vice President Dick Cheney, 9/29/04, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
There was no "collaborative operational relationship" between al Qaeda and Saddam. - 9/11 Commission Report, http://www.americanprogress.o...
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is comprised of sophisticated neo-con operators, well-practised at perpetrating heinous lies, deceptions and falsehoods against "We the People" ... "We the People" need to wise-up and become a little more sophisticated ourselves so that we're no longer ruthlessly manipulated by these incompetent, corrupt and criminal neo-fascists in the traitorous Bush regime ... [/b]
On the morning of the first presidential debate on foreign policy and homeland security, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wants to ask President Bush, "How has the Iraq war made us safer, if it transformed Iraq from a place whose military was surrounded and contained, into what you have repeatedly called the 'central front' in the war on terror?'" Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, wants to ask, "Do you really believe that there are fewer terrorists plotting against America today than there were before you began the invasion of Iraq?" And Richard Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism chief, wants to know "what steps" the president has taken to defend the homeland from a Madrid-style attack. American Progress suggests ten debate questions of its own http://www.americanprogressac... . Below are some of the things President Bush might say to defend his foreign policy record. Beneath them are facts explaining why the statements are misleading. Read the complete list of what the president will likely say, versus what you should know.
[b]CLAIM 1: I HAD A CHOICE TO MAKE:[/b] When prodded on his decision to invade Iraq, President Bush may say, "I had a choice to make: take the word of a madman…or do what's necessary to defend this country." But Bush didn't have to take the "word of a madman" to know Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. He could have taken the word of the CIA, which reported in February 2001, "We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programs." He could have taken the word of his own secretary of state, who said Saddam Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction." Or he could have taken the word of a 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency report, which said there was "no reliable information" proving Iraq was producing chemical weapons. Finally, he could have taken the word of chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, who said the WMD intelligence was weak and asked for more time to carry out inspections.
[b]CLAIM 2: WAR HAS MADE THE WORLD SAFER:[/b] When asked to confront evidence that the war in Iraq has increased terrorism worldwide, the president has a stock answer ready: because of the war, he says, "America and the world are safer." Every available piece of evidence indicates just the opposite. Reports by both the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the British House of Commons concluded the world was less safe because of the war, with al Qaeda recruitment soaring. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported Iraq had emerged as a "rallying point for a seemingly endless supply of young extremists willing to die in a jihad, or holy war." And government data shows "significant" terrorist attacks were at a 21-year high in 2003. When asked if he agreed with the president's assessment, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, "No, I cannot say the world is safer today than it was two, three years ago."
[b]CLAIM 3: THE TALIBAN IS GONE, 10 MILLION WILL VOTE:[/b] The President will likely claim unmitigated success in Afghanistan. He said on Monday that the "Taliban no longer is in existence," and he repeatedly claims "10 million" Afghanis have registered to vote. In fact, with American resources diverted in Iraq, the Taliban has been making a steady comeback since 2001. The Afghan death toll attributed to the Taliban rose by 45 percent this year, and more than forty election workers have been killed or wounded in the past four months. A new report by Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org/background... states that warlords are threatening voters and the number of registered voters is probably much lower than the 10 million President Bush cites. The United Nations says many areas of the country are still too dangerous for people to register there.
[b]CLAIM 4: I LEAD WITH CLARITY:[/b] When questioned on the way he has handled the insurgency in Iraq, President Bush may say, "In order to have credibility with those people who are fighting for freedom, the leaders of this country must not send mixed signals." But Bush sent mixed signals in his ambivalent approach to Fallujah. Marine Commander Lt. Gen. James T. Conway said, "When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to...not vacillate in the middle of something like that. Once you commit, you have to stay committed." In the October issue of the Army Times, Col. Joe Anderson echoes Conway's frustration. "I was in Fallujah in June standing downtown," he says, "and I don't know why we ever left…It's just a damn shame we're [starting over] a year later." For other Bush flip-flops, click here http://www.americanprogressac... .
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... The Lies of W. ... |
| 09.30.04 (11:55 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" have been duped by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] into "buying" their BIG NEO-CON LIES ... The despotic Bushies' illegal and immoral incursion into Iraq warrants impeachment and trial for War Crimes because it was based upon a traitorous pack of lies, deceptions and falsehoods ... -- Instead, Bush is being allowed to get away with heinous mass-murder and neo-fascist atrocities ... It's a shame ...[/b]
What won’t get mentioned in tonight’s debate is that George Bush, Dick Cheney et al. lied to get us into Iraq.
For this I blame the media. For the past six months, the media has basically stopped digging on the issue of the Office of Special Plans, the manipulation of intelligence, the distortions and the lies. It is the single most important failure of the media. As someone who has written extensively and repeatedly about it, it is, to me, very sad. What it means is that Bush will go into the debate tonight far more secure that he ought to be. Kerry can accuse Bush of making the wrong choices, of not having a clear pre-war strategy, of bungling the occupation. But Kerry can’t accuse the president of purposefully misleading America, because he doesn’t have the ammunition—at least not from slam-dunk, mainstream sources that he can wave around.
The facts are that Bush and Cheney wanted to invade Iraq for reasons other than the stated ones. They knew that Iraq couldn’t threaten the United States with WMD, and they knew that Iraq was not allied with Al Qaeda. Yet they manufactured evidence to the contrary, meticulously.
Of course, they miscalculated, too. The occupation is a failure, and America is losing the war it lied to get into. But the latter is a mistake. The former is criminal. And there is a big, big difference.
Six months ago, administration defectors such as Paul O’Neill and Richard Clarke made clear that the president was targeting Iraq long before 9/11. The media was abuzz with stories of visits to the CIA by Cheney to pressure analysts to support pre-arranged conclusions. There was lots of news about Joe Wilson and the deliberate lies about Niger yellowcake. The Senate was bustling with pressure from Jay Rockefeller to investigate the OSP. And lots more. It’s all been lost. The media dropped the ball. Instead of looking into the machinations of Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Harold Rhode, Bill Luti and others who managed the Pentagon’s policy shop and the OSP, instead of digging into Richard Perle’s friends David Wurmser and Mike Maloof (who founded OSP’s precursor) and so on, the media got lost. There hasn’t been a single important investigation of the OSP by a major media outlet in months, and (as far as I can remember) not even a recap! It’s like all the lies never happened.
So now Bush can blame the CIA, and George Tenet, for having given him bad intelligence on Iraq’s WMD, and say that at least the world is rid of a bad guy.
Once the lies are off the table, all Kerry can do is to point out how badly things are going. Bush slips away, at least until historians unravel this.
It’s a shame.
[b]Source:[/b]
Robert Dreyfuss,[i] The Dreyfuss Report[/i], TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
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| ... Jon Stewart: Voters' Best Friend ... |
| 09.29.04 (7:59 pm) [edit] |
"I mean, you've got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night…you know the research on your program."
- Bill O'Reilly, 9/17/04, http://www.wonkette.com/archi...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
"Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch 'The O'Reilly Factor,' according to Nielsen Media Research."
- AP, 9/27/04, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6...
[b]"We the People" might want to pay more attention to those[i] in the know[/i], instead of the insane neo-con ideologues who simply parrot Karl [i]'Joseph Goebbels' [/i]Rove's mendacious propaganda ...[/b]
Okay, not that Jon Stewart needs more PR, but a new survey http://www.business-journal.c... shows that viewers of the Daily Show are better informed on the issues at stake in the election than, well, whole lot of other people. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a senior analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center who conducted the research told the Business Journal:
"In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers -- even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration."
Now think about that for a second: you're more likely to be well-informed on the issues if you are a Daily Show viewer than even a person who reads the[i] New York Times [/i]or watches CNN. Read 'em and weep, Judy Woodruff.
[b]Source:[/b]
[i]lakshmi[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ... Judge Rules Against Patriot Act Provision ... |
| 09.29.04 (5:42 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Patriot Act represents an affront to everything that the United States of America stands for-- including our freedoms and rights under the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... "We the People" must gather our courage and reject this heinous erosion of our freedoms and rights by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] who would destroy our Republic for Which Our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights Stands ...[/b]
A key part of the Patriot Act, a central plank of the Bush Administration's war on terror, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge on Wednesday, in the latest blow to U.S. security policies.
U.S. District Judge Victor Marreo ruled in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the power the FBI has to demand confidential financial records from companies that it can obtain without court approval as part of terrorism investigations.
The legislation bars companies and other recipients of these subpoenas from ever revealing that they received the FBI demand for records. Marreo held that this permanent ban was a violation of free speech rights.
In his ruling, Marreo prohibited the Department of Justice and the FBI from issuing special administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters. But he delayed enforcement of his judgment pending an expected appeal by the government. The Department of Justice said it was reviewing the ruling.
The ruling was the latest blow to the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that terror suspects being held in U.S. facilities like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, can use the American judicial system to challenge their confinement. That ruling was a defeat for the president's assertion of sweeping powers to hold "enemy combatants" indefinitely after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The FBI first received power to get customer records in 1986 legislation, but its power to obtain confidential data was greatly expanded by the Patriot Act -- a controversial law the Bush administration pushed through Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to help it battle terrorism.
The ACLU argued that the anti-terrorism laws give the FBI unconstitutional power to demand sensitive information without adequate safeguards.
The judge agreed, saying the provision "effectively bars or substantially deters any judicial challenge."
"Such a challenge is necessary to vindicate important rights guaranteed by the Constitution," Marreo said.
Under the provision, the FBI does not have to show a judge a compelling need for the records nor does it have to specify any process that would allow a recipient to fight the demand for confidential information.
Prior to December, the letters could only be sent to certain financial institutions.
However, legislation signed by President Bush in December expanded the definition of companies from which information can be obtained and allowed FBI agents to send out the letters without first obtaining a judge's approval.
The legislation allows the FBI to seek information from businesses such as insurance firms, pawnbrokers, precious metal dealers, the Postal Service, casinos, and travel agents.
[b]Source:[/b]
Judge Rules Against Patriot Act Provision, By Gail Appleson, Reuters, http://reuters.com/newsArticl...
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| ... Families USA: New Report Shows Health Care is Far Less Affordable Than It Was Four Years Ago ... |
| 09.29.04 (4:45 pm) [edit] |
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein
[b]"We the People" need an administration that cares about the needs of our citizens ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]doesn't care about the Middle Class, Working Families and/or Poor people in our country ... Please vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America ...[/b]
Despite fewer health benefits for working families, health insurance premiums rose much faster than earnings over the last four years, according to a report released today by Families USA, http://www,familiesusa.org/ the national nonprofit and nonpartisan organization for health care consumers.
In the following 35 states, according to the report, average premium costs for workers rose at least three times faster than average earnings from 2000 to 2004: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Nationally, workers' premium costs rose, on average, by 35.9 percent, while their average earnings over the same period rose by only 12.4 percent.
These comparatively large premium increases occurred despite erosions in health care coverage, with employer- provided insurance packages covering fewer health services and workers paying more in deductibles and copayments.
"Working families were squeezed by runaway health care costs over the past four years," said Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA. "As a result, workers are paying much more in premiums but are receiving less health coverage; wages are being depressed; and millions of people have lost health coverage entirely."
Family health premiums paid by employers and workers rose from $7,028 in 2000 to $9,320 in 2004. The average amount paid by workers for this coverage rose from $1,433 to $1,947 during that period-an increase of 35.9 percent. And, the number of Americans who had total health costs that consumed more than one-quarter of their earnings rose from 11.6 million in 2000 to 14.3 million in 2004-an increase of almost 23 percent. The overwhelming majority of these people (10.7 million) had health insurance.
"Health care costs and coverage for America's working families have gotten considerably worse over the past four years," said Pollack. "It is high time that these growing problems receive priority attention and national leadership."
The Families USA report also found that many more people are now uninsured. Approximately 85.2 million people were uninsured at some time during the 2003-2004 period, an increase of 12.7 million from 1999-2000, when the number of uninsured stood at 72.5 million. In 2003-2004, one out of every three Americans under 65 years of age went without health insurance for some period of time. Over half of these people were uninsured for at least nine months.
"The number of people who were uninsured at some point in 2003-2004 exceeds the combined population of 32 states and the District of Columbia," said Pollack. "This is an epidemic that requires immediate attention."
The report was produced with data compiled and analyzed by The Lewin Group from federal government sources, including the Census Bureau, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Health and Human Services. The analysis allowed Families USA to compare data on health costs and coverage in 2000 with projections for 2004.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Families USA, http://www.familiesusa.org/
Middle-Class Families Lose Again, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Middle Class Misnomer, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Time For A Checkup, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Losing the War ... |
| 09.29.04 (2:52 pm) [edit] |
"That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning." - Richard Bach
[b]Bush has bungled Iraq ... Bush is a loser ... "We the People" must face this dire reality and elect a new administration that will bring fresh eyes, adroit competences and real integrity to our government ...[/b]
Here are some quotes from today’s [i]Washington Post[/i], from intelligence and military officials, most of them anonymous. They’re exactly like the ones I’ve been getting all year from similar officials. This week, in this space, I’ve been writing about the need for more leaks from U.S. officials to highlight Bush’s bungling in Iraq. It’s not just about quotes to a newspaper reporter. These officials need to leak documents, or resign and speak out in public, with their names attached. Not to do so is allow the re-election a president who launched an illegal war.
Okay, the quotes:
“There’s not obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments.”
“It’s getting worse. It just seems that there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of the theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducing attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago.”
“They keep telling us that Iraqi security forces are the exit strategy, but from what I hear from the ground is that they aren’t working. There’s a feeling that Iraqi security forces are in cahoots with the insurgents and the general public to get the occupiers out.”
“There’s a real war going on here that’s not just” the CIA against the administration on Iraq “but the State Department and the military” as well.”
Tomorrow night, Kerry gets one chance, and one chance only, to win the domestic war over Iraq. He needs to look the president in the eye and tell him that the war was wrong, that he deceived the American people (and their senators) about the threat from Iraq, that he doesn’t know enough about foreign affairs to understand the consequences of the bad advice he gets from hawkish advisers, and that we are losing the war. He has to say, “The American people know that this was is not making them safer. The American people need to know that it was a costly, needless mistake. And now, according to our own military and our own CIA, we are losing the war.” He needs to say it over and over. (Memo to Kerry’s wordsmiths: No big words.) He needs to have a simple message, and repeat it and repeat it. If they ask him about Russia, he needs to say: “How can we deal with the problems in Russia when we are engaged in a losing war that was a mistake in the first place?” If they ask him about Iran, he has to say: “We can’t deal with Iran now because we are losing a war in Iraq, in a way that is helping Iran get stronger.”
Then Kerry needs to present an exit strategy. “The president got us into this mistaken war. I can get us out. He can’t.” And he needs to say that over and over, too. The pundit establishment says Kerry can’t present an exit strategy that is different from Bush’s. He can. Kerry has to stop talking about getting the French to help us, and start talking about getting out. How do you get out of Iraq? By leaving. Time to leave.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Robert Dreyfuss, [i]The Dreyfuss Report[/i], TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
The Facade Has Fallen, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... The Facade Has Fallen ... |
| 09.29.04 (1:25 pm) [edit] |
[b]Blind stubborness won't help Iraq http://www.americanprogressac... ... "We the People" must oust the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]and their ruthless cabal of neo-con traitors and install a new administration in Washington D.C. led by John Kerry that will work effectively with other nations and extricate us from this nightmarish disaster in Iraq ...[/b]
Comprehensive data compiled by a private security company with access to military intelligence reports and its own network of Iraqi informants reveals that "Over the past 30 days, more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents have been directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north." The Washington Post reports, "a growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse...than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials." President Bush says we are making "steady progress" in Iraq. Here's what some of America's well-informed intelligence officers and army officials have to say in today's papers: "Things are definitely not improving," says a government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq. Perhaps the Bush administration is looking at a different country: otherwise its sunny pronouncements represent a dangerous disconnect from reality.
[b]STUDY SHOWS REBEL ATTACKS WIDESPREAD: [/b]Last week, President Bush referred to the insurgency in Iraq as a "handful of people," and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi called it a "tiny minority," operating in just three of Iraq's eighteen provinces. But data quoted in the Times shows the attacks are occurring over a "sweeping geographical reach," from "Nineveh and Salahuddin Provinces in the northwest to Babylon and Diyala in the center and Basra in the south." Even the supposedly safe "Green Zone" is facing increased security concerns, and some say security is deteriorating in Baghdad. Other data compiled by Kroll Security indicates attacks on U.S. troops are occurring in "nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq."
[b]CIA NOT HAPPY WITH BUSH SMEAR:[/b] When the NIC delivered a discouraging report in July, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed them as "pessimists and naysayers." In today's Washington Post, several CIA officers and national security professionals respond, reiterating their belief that the "rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged." "I'm not surprised if people in the administration were put on the defensive," said one CIA official, "We weren't trying to make them look bad…Of course, we're telling them something they don't want to hear." A former intelligence officer with contacts at the CIA put it bluntly: people at the CIA are "mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster," he said, "and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper. There's no obvious way to fix it…The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."
[b]IRAQI SECURITY FORCES 'AREN'T WORKING':[/b] An army staff officer quoted in the Post indicated the reality behind the Bush administration's insistence that Iraqis will soon be ready to take control of their security. "They keep telling us that Iraqi security forces are the exit strategy," he said, "but what I hear from the ground is that they aren't working. There's a feeling that Iraqi security forces are in cahoots with the insurgents and the general public to get the occupiers out." On Thursday, President Bush claimed that "nearly 100,000 fully-trained" security personnel are working today," but last Monday the Pentagon said that "only about 53,000 of the 100,000 Iraqis on duty have now undergone training." And, according to Reuters, just 8,169 police officers have received full training. American Progress takes a look at the state of the Iraqi armed forces here.
[b]ELECTION COMPLICATIONS:[/b] "Leading Shi'ite Muslim cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has expressed concern that Iraq has not yet met conditions for fair elections in January." A senior cleric close to Sistani told Iranian state radio: "He expressed concerns…the regulations and conditions set for the elections are unsuitable. There are problems and negative signs." Continued backing from Sistani, the "most revered leader of the country's Shi'ite majority," is critical to the success of the elections.Check out American Progress' checklist http://www.americanprogress.o... to monitor the "progress" Iraq really does have to make if it wants to hold elections in January.
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
Well, Iraq Worked, Right?, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Accurate Intelligence Ignored, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Being President Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Iraqi Civilian Casualties, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... 'Not On My Watch' ... |
| 09.28.04 (2:08 pm) [edit] |
"Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander." - Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.
[b]An humanitarian disaster of immense proportions is occurring in the Sudan and "We the People" are numb, stupified and hardened to the nightmarish consequences-- We lack the competent leadership and moral authority in the White House to work with the United Nations (U.N.) to resolve this conflict-- because the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has no moral authority-- no humane voice-- and no respect in the world community ...[/b]
Representatives from about 30 countries and international organizations are meeting in Oslo today to talk about Sudan. Hopefully, they will pledge support for civilian protection and provide funding for an expanded African Union (AU) mission in Darfur. But with the situation continuing to deteriorate, what is needed is less talk and more action. The U.N. has acknowledged the humanitarian disaster in Darfur, and threatened sanctions, but such symbolic steps have done little to stop the killing. Unfortunately, the international community, led by an America which is "preoccupied in Iraq," has so far been unwilling to do much more than issue tough statements and veiled threats. There is even evidence the international community's cautious denunciations are making things worse. Check out American Progress' new Web site http://www.americanprogressac... , "Sudan: A Challenge for All."
[b]IRAQ HAMSTRINGS POLICY:[/b] The Bush administration has been vocal in denouncing the violence, but with America's troops, money and moral authority tied up in Iraq, it has been difficult for the U.S. to put much substance behind its words. So far this year, the U.S. government has provided $174,866,722 to Darfur – or, about what we spend each day in Iraq. On Thursday, the U.S. Senate approved up to $680 million in aid, but even that move highlighted the extent to which the war has hamstrung American foreign policy, as some of that money had to be shifted from funds earmarked for rebuilding Iraq. "Under the Senate legislation, the extra funds from the Iraq account would be available only if President Bush requested them."
[b]THE LATEST FROM DARFUR:[/b] Under a largely ineffectual threat from the U.N. Security Council, the Sudanese government continues to insist it is "doing all it can to calm Darfur and says it is ready to welcome home" more than 1.4 million villagers who have been uprooted by government-backed militias. But, according to AP reports, "the few who do trickle back find whole villages and tribes on the move, seeking safety from attacks." The situation underscores the inability of the same government that sponsored the militias in the first place to stop the killing now. Yet, so far, this has been the expectation of the international community. The major powers continue to urge Khartoum to "'disarm the Janjaweed,' knowing full well that Khartoum funded and armed the militia and continues to do so." The latest count places the death toll at between 50,000 and 80,000.
[b]THE GENOCIDE LABEL:[/b] Roughly two months after the U.S. Congress said "genocide" was taking place in Sudan, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared "that genocide has been committed in Darfur, and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility, and that genocide may still be occurring." But as Time Magazine reports, "professions of outrage are doing nothing to stop the killing. Immediately after labeling the Janjaweed's slaughter genocide, Powell told lawmakers, 'No new action is dictated by this determination'—despite the fact that the international Genocide Convention, signed by the U.S. and 134 other countries," legally obligates signatories to "prevent and to punish" genocide where it is occurring. Considering "the U.S. use of the G word has done little more than set off a new round of bureaucratic shuffling," some human-rights advocates are concerned that "the significance of the Convention will be undermined."
[b]BACK IN THE CAMPS:[/b] Clearly unable to return home, about 1.2 million displaced Darfurians are subsisting in overcrowded and insecure "prisons without walls," set up hastily by the United Nations. American Progress' Gayle Smith visited the camps in Geneina. In part three of her series, "Eyewitness to a Crisis," she writes, "The stories told by the residents of the Krinding Camp are repetitive, but none of the horror is lost in the retelling of their tales – of the militia attacking at night, of their animals being slaughtered, of the men, women and children beheaded, stabbed, beaten or left for dead; of the wells poisoned by corpses and of the torches that set their homes alight." With no guarantee of security in and around their homes, the displaced are "destined to remain in camps for the foreseeable future."
[b]NOT ON MY WATCH:[/b] In her book on genocide, "A Problem From Hell," http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... Samantha Power recounts how President Bush wrote four words in the margins of a memo he received on President Clinton's response to the Rwandan genocide: "Not on my watch." And yet, just a decade after close to a million Rwandans lost their lives as the world stood by, the international response to the unfolding crisis remains "agonizingly slow." And, unfortunately, it is happening on President Bush's watch. The man who urges Americans to "fight evil" and touts his preference for "action" over deliberation, has offered not one public speech on Sudan and made no contingency plans, even as the situation "threatens to become one of the most devastating humanitarian disasters of our times." You can take action here http://www.americanprogressac... .
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Well, Iraq Worked, Right? ... |
| 09.28.04 (12:30 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" cannot afford to permit another 4 years of corruption, incompetence and bold-faced lies, deceptions and falsehoods leading to the unnecessary deaths, bloodshed, maiming, injury, mayhem and misery caused to innocents, perpetrated by the insane neo-con Bush regime ...[/b]
[i]Newsweek’s[/i] latest issue http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6... provides another good reason not to re-elect the president, unless you think Iraq was a great success:
... "Deep in the Pentagon, admirals and generals are updating plans for possible U.S. military action in Syria and Iran. The Defense Department unit responsible for military planning for the two troublesome countries is "busier than ever," an administration official says. Some Bush advisers characterize the work as merely an effort to revise routine plans the Pentagon maintains for all contingencies in light of the Iraq war. More skittish bureaucrats say the updates are accompanied by a revived campaign by administration conservatives and neocons for more hard-line U.S. policies toward the countries. (Syria is regarded as a major route for jihadis entering Iraq, and Iran appears to be actively pursuing nuclear weapons.) Even hard-liners acknowledge that given the U.S. military commitment in Iraq, a U.S. attack on either country would be an unlikely last resort; covert action of some kind is the favored route for Washington hard-liners who want regime change in Damascus and Tehran." ...
Meanwhile, I continue to wonder why there isn’t more leaking happening during the pre-election struggle about Bush’s bungling of Iraq. It might be starting. Paul Pillar, the CIA’s Middle East officer at the National Intelligence Council, seems to be doing his part. According to Bob Novak’s latest column, Pillar is telling people that the CIA provided “secret, unheeded warnings about going to war in Iraq,” and the “the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.”
[i]The New York Times[/i], meanwhile, carries some more details about Pillar’s views, in a useful, if sketchy leak about the CIA’s 2003 estimates about what a war with Iraq would mean. (The estimates came from Pillar’s unit.) The CIA told Bush that it would be a mess, and specifically that invading Iraq would lead to an increase in the power of “political Islam.” It reports http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... :
... "The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said." ...
But the 2003 estimates are just the tip of giant iceberg. My point is, virtually the entire U.S. national security bureaucracy thought that going to war in Iraq was wrong, even crazy. Right now there ought to be a flood of leaks saying, “I told you so.” Where are they?
[b]Sources:[/b]
Robert Dreyfuss, [i]The Dreyfuss Report[/i], TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
Accurate Intelligence Ignored, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Being President Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Accurate Intelligence Ignored ... |
| 09.28.04 (8:21 am) [edit] |
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
[b]"We the People" have been ruthlessly duped by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] -- Whether or not Bush willingly [i]or [/i]unwittingly ignore(d) intelligence from those whose evidence might not support his neo-con ideology is unimportant ... Bush is responsible for the deaths of over 1050 US Soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians-- and consequently deserves to be impeached and put on trial for War Crimes ... In the meantime, Bush must be defeated on the 2nd November, for the good of our nation ...[/b]
Last week, President Bush dismissed a bleak assessment on Iraq prepared in July by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) as "just guessing as to what the conditions might be like." (Bush later said he should have used the word "estimate" instead, but continues to insist that Iraq is on a path of steady success. Note to media: please ignore this vacillation when discussing the president's "clarity" and "resolve.") But the record shows that estimates on postwar Iraq prepared by the NIC – a group White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan dismissed as pessimists and naysayers – have been extraordinarily accurate. An NIC report prepared two months before the war began, and first reported in the New York Times this morning, "warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare." The report also warned that a war "would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives." Twenty months later, "the warnings about anti-American sentiment and instability appear to have been upheld by events."
[b]BUSH POLICIES HAVE MADE US MORE VULNERABLE:[/b] Speaking yesterday at George Washington University, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said, "The Bush administration's failure to shut down al-Qaida and rebuild Iraq have fueled the insurgency and made the United States more vulnerable to a nuclear attack by terrorists." Kennedy said the shift in attention from al Qaeda to Iraq "has made the mushroom cloud more likely, not less likely."
[b]BUSH NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP:[/b] On Thursday, President Bush claimed that "nearly 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi soldiers, police officers, and other security personnel are working today." But last Monday, the Pentagon said that "only about 53,000 of the 100,000 Iraqis on duty have now undergone training." According to Pentagon documents obtained by Reuters, of the 90,000 in the police force "only 8,169 have received full training." The White House, inexplicably, stands by its 100,000 figure.
[b]INSURGENCY IS PRIMARILY IRAQI:[/b] President Bush has long insisted that Iraq is now the central battle in the global war on terrorism. But, according to the U.S. military's own assessment, "the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem." (Even as scores of foreign terrorists pour across the border.) According to top military officials, "loyalists of Saddam Hussein's regime — who have swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the U.S. military presence in Iraq — represent the far greater threat to the country's fragile 3-month-old government" than foreign fighters. According to the U.S. military, "Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government."
[b]IRAQ TOO DANGEROUS FOR ELECTIONS:[/b] In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Jordan's King Abdullah – one of the Bush administration's closest allies – said, "it appears to me impossible to organize indisputable elections in the chaos currently reigning in Iraq." Abdullah stressed that "partial elections which excluded cities such as Falluja could isolate Sunni Muslims, saying that could create even deeper divisions in the country." Last week, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raised the possibility that elections could be excluded from dangerous parts of the country." Read American Progress' Iraq election checklist http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Middle-Class Families Lose Again ... |
| 09.27.04 (3:00 pm) [edit] |
"The president [Bush] appears to believe that every economic problem is spelled T-A-X.
That misguided thinking has precluded him from adopting a sound policy program.
The centerpiece of his economic agenda, the tax cut that he pushed through Congress, was fiscally irresponsible." - Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, is a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, http://www.commondreams.org/v...
[b]Bush is a reckless neo-fascist [i]ne'er-do-well[/i], callous to the needs of our citizens and who shamelessly panders to gluttonous corporations and the wealthiest amongst us ... "We the People" are [i]saddled[/i] with [i]disastrous economic policies [/i]that the neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]put in place to enrich themselves and their rich cronies, while the rest of us are [i]saddled [/i]with the paying their exhorbitant bills ... Meanwhile, the historically record-level deficit http://www.tblog.com/template... skyrockets; homelessness and poverty rises; and joblessness and the lack of health care for tens of millions of our citizens are unconscionably neglected ... [/b]
By now, it's not much of a surprise that the Bush administration is no friend to working families. The new tax cut that passed last week is no exception. Those in the middle of the income scale will receive an average tax cut of [i]$162 [/i]in 2005, found a report from the Center on Budget And Policy Priorities http://www.cbpp.org/index.htm... —hardly enough to make up for the jobs and benefits that keep slipping away. And those in the top fifth of the income scale will get an average tax cut of $2,390. Even worse, the new cuts are funded by deficit financing, and will have to be [i]repaid with cuts to programs and spending [/i]in the future. So working families and their kids are likely to lose twice. SEE THE REPORT: http://www.cbpp.org/9-23-04ta... .
Since George W. Bush came into office, there have been some very good years for large corporations. How good? Well, according to a report prepared by Citizens For Tax Justice http://www.ctj.org/ and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy http://www.ctj.org/itep/ , 28 large companies [i]enjoyed negative federal income tax rates[/i] each year between 2001 and 2003. And 82 companies had negative tax rates at least one of these years. How did they do it? The huge influx of corporate lobbyists to Washington and Bush and Congress' [i]willingness to stand with corporations [/i]meant that lots of loopholes were exploited and lots of heads looked the other way. SEE THE REPORT: http://www.ctj.org/corpfed04a... .
[b]Sources:[/b]
TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
White House Economic Policies Are Bankrupt, http://www.commondreams.org/v...
Kerry Wins Backing from Nobel Economics Laureates, http://www.commondreams.org/h...
Mountains Of Madness, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Being President Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry ... |
| 09.27.04 (11:45 am) [edit] |
[b]What do you say about a President who tells bold-faced lies about war ([i]and [/i]peace) resulting in the daily massacre and maiming of innocent civilians and US troops??? ... Bush may foolishly believe that [i]he never has to say he's sorry [/i]... "We the People" can respond vigorously by saying that we're only[i] sorry that Bush temporarily "took over" power [/i]in our land, and that we're[i] not sorry [/i]to see him ousted on the 2nd November ... [/b]
"There is nothing, no problem, except on a small pocket in Fallujah." - Ayad Allawi, 9/23/04, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
Data collected on behalf of the United States government indicates attacks in "nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq." - Washington Post, 9/26/04, http://www.washingtonpost.com...
In May 2003, President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, stood under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," and triumphantly announced that major combat operations were over in Iraq. Since that time, 900 U.S. troops have died, key cities have fallen under the control of rebel forces, and the size of the insurgency has quadrupled. Knowing what he knows now, would the president pull the same stunt again? "Absolutely." In a slap in the face to the families of the 900 troops who have died in the last 16 months, Bush informed Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that he wouldn't change a thing about the spectacle he put on aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Bush told a surprised O'Reilly, "You bet I'd do it again." This April, even the president's top political advisor, Karl Rove – not known for easily admitting error – said that he regretted the use of the "Mission Accomplished" banner. Catch Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) speak and answer questions on the Iraq war today at 12:30 on C-SPAN http://inside.c-spanarchives....:8080/cspan/schedule.csp .
[b]VIOLENCE IS FREQUENT AND WIDESPREAD:[/b] In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Bush reiterated his claim that the United States is making "steady progress" in creating a secure and democratic Iraq. Secret security reports prepared for the government and leaked to the Washington Post, however, tell a different story. According to data complied by Kroll Security International on behalf of the U.S. government, "attacks against U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful." While Bush frequently claims that the transfer of power from the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority to the Iraqi provisional government on June 28 has improved conditions in Iraq, attacks on U.S. forces in the past two weeks number about 70 a day, compared to 40 or 50 a day before the transfer. At a Rose Garden press conference last week, Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said "there is nothing, no problem, except on a small pocket in Fallujah." But the Kroll data indicates attacks on troops in "nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq." Read more http://www.americanprogress.o... about the administration's deception on the reality in Iraq.
[b]SENIOR COMMANDER OF IRAQI SECURITY FORCES ARRESTED BY U.S.: [/b]Last week, Bush stressed that "Iraq must be able to defend itself. And Iraqi security forces are taking increasing responsibility for their country's security." Iraqi security forces may have more problems than the president let on. On Sunday, the U.S. military "arrested a senior commander of the nascent Iraqi National Guard." The commander was arrested on suspicion of "having associations with known insurgents." The move raised concerns "about the loyalty and reliability of the new security forces just months before general elections are scheduled across the embattled country."
[b]COLIN POWELL SAYS THINGS ARE GETTING WORSE:[/b] Bush continues to insist that there have been "months of steady progress" in Iraq. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "the insurgency in Iraq is getting worse and that the U.S. occupation there has increased anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries."
[b]ABIZAID PREDICTS FLAWED ELECTIONS:[/b] Powell said that the only hope of turning things around in Iraq was the elections scheduled for January. But Gen. John Abizaid, top U.S. commander in Iraq, "said Sunday he expected flawed elections." Abizaid said he didn't think "Iraq will have a perfect election." But, according to Abizaid, that isn't anything to worry about because Iraq will just be following the U.S. model. Abizaid said, "if I recall, looking back at our own election four years ago, it wasn't perfect either." The administration "appears to be willing to risk holding an election marred by violence and, quite possibly, incomplete balloting to keep to its schedule."
[b]MOST IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION FUNDS NOT BENEFITING IRAQIS:[/b] According to U.S. government officials and independent experts, "less than half of the aid in the Bush administration's reconstruction package for Iraq is being spent in ways that will benefit Iraqis." Much of the money spent on security services, insurance, property losses, contractors' profits, and foreign workers' salaries never reaches Iraqis. According to Frederick Barton of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "We're spending a lot of money we believe is helping people and converting Iraq to a new kind of economy. That's where I think we're kidding ourselves."
[b]IRAQ WAR ASSISTS AL QAEDA RECRUITING:[/b] According to intelligence and law enforcement officials interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, the Iraq war has emerged as "a rallying point for a seemingly endless supply of young extremists willing to die in a jihad, or holy war." Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, dean of Europe's anti-terrorism investigators, said, "In Iraq, a problem has been created that didn't exist there before." The sentiment was echoed by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who said on Friday that the invasion of Iraq has "ended up bringing more trouble to the world," in part because it "has aroused the passions of the Muslims."
[b]ADMINISTRATION PRIVATELY LOWERS EXPECTATIONS:[/b] Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) said that members of the administration have privately told him they've lowered expectations for democracy in Iraq. Kolbe quotes one administration official: "When we went in there, I thought we would build American-style democracy. Hell, I'd be happy with Romanian-style democracy now."
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Mountains Of Madness ... |
| 09.27.04 (8:46 am) [edit] |
[b]From Brad DeLong http://www.j-bradford-delong.... :[/b]
My friend," he says, "I look at this projection of the national deficit, and I shudder before its enormity. Take heed, and stay clear. These peaks, and the entitlement spending--there in the distance are the mountains of madness. I beg you, believe my tale, do not come to this place and this time."
But he is wrong. These [b]Mountains of Madness [/b]are not in the distance. They are here, right in front of us.
Click here for the image: http://www.j-bradford-delong....
[b]"We the People" have been neo-con conned by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] and it is time to rid ourselves of these insane neo-fascist traitors ... Read also "Deficient Deficit Debate" on http://www.tblog.com/template... [/b]
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| ... Iraqi Civilian Casualties ... |
| 09.26.04 (11:52 am) [edit] |
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
[b]For "We the People" to be indifferent to the daily massacre and misery that the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has caused in Iraq is unconscionable ... We must rid ourselves of the despotic Bush regime for they have immorally and illegally reeked horrendous havoc, mayhem and misery upon Iraq [i]and [/i]also upon us here at home in America ...[/b]
Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder http://www.realcities.com/mld... (BAGHDAD, Iraq).
According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.
While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher.
During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed.
Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.
That suggests that more aggressive U.S. military operations, which the Bush administration has said are being planned to clear the way for nationwide elections scheduled for January, could backfire and strengthen the insurgency.
American military officials said "damage will happen" in their effort to wrest control of some areas from insurgents. They blamed the insurgents for embedding themselves in communities, saying that's endangering innocent people.
Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, an American military spokesman, said the insurgents were living in residential areas, sometimes in homes filled with munitions.
"As long as they continue to do that, they are putting the residents at risk," Boylan said. "We will go after them."
Boylan said the military conducted intelligence to determine whether a home housed insurgents before striking it. While damage would happen, the airstrikes were "extremely precise," he said. And he said that any attacks by the multinational forces were "in coordination with the interim government."
The Health Ministry statistics indicate that more children have been killed around Ramadi and Fallujah than in Baghdad, though those cities together have only one-fifth of the Iraqi capital's population.
According to the statistics, 59 children were killed in Anbar province - a hotbed of the Sunni Muslim insurgency that includes the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah - compared with 56 children in Baghdad. The ministry defines children as anyone younger than 12.
"When there are military clashes, we see innocent people die," said Dr. Walid Hamed, a member of the operations section of the Health Ministry, which compiles the statistics.
Juan Cole, a history professor at University of Michigan who specializes in Shiite Islam, said the widespread casualties meant that coalition forces already had lost the political campaign: "I think they lost the hearts and minds a long time ago."
"And they are trying to keep U.S. military casualties to a minimum in the run-up to the U.S. elections" by using airstrikes instead of ground forces, he said.
American military officials say they're targeting only terrorists and are aggressively working to spare innocent people nearby.
Nearly a third of the Iraqi dead - 1,122 - were killed in August, according to the statistics. May was the second deadliest month, with 749 Iraqis killed, and 319 were killed in June, the least violent month. Most of those killed lived in Baghdad; the ministry found that 1,068 had died in the capital.
Many Iraqis said they thought the numbers showed that the multinational forces disregarded their lives.
"The Americans do not care about the Iraqis. They don't care if they get killed, because they don't care about the citizens," said Abu Mohammed, 50, who was a major general in Saddam Hussein's army in Baghdad. "The Americans keep criticizing Saddam for the mass graves. How many graves are the Americans making in Iraq?"
At his fruit stand in southern Baghdad, Raid Ibraham, 24, theorized: "The Americans keep attacking the cities not to keep the security situation stable, but so they can stay in Iraq and control the oil."
Others blame the multinational forces for allowing security to disintegrate, inviting terrorists from everywhere and threatening the lives of everyday Iraqis.
"Anyone who hates America has come here to fight: Saddam's supporters, people who don't have jobs, other Arab fighters. All these people are on our streets," said Hamed, the ministry official. "But everyone is afraid of the Americans, not the fighters. And they should be."
Iraqi officials said about two-thirds of the Iraqi deaths were caused by multinational forces and police; the remaining third died from insurgent attacks. The ministry began separating attacks by multinational and police forces and insurgents June 10.
From that date until Sept. 10, 1,295 Iraqis were killed in clashes with multinational forces and police versus 516 killed in terrorist operations, the ministry said. The ministry defined terrorist operations as explosive devices in residential areas, car bombs or assassinations.
The ministry said it didn't have any statistics for the three provinces in the north: Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah, ethnic Kurdish areas that generally have been more peaceful than the rest of the country.
The Health Ministry is the only organization that attempts to track deaths through government agencies. The U.S. military said it kept estimates, but it refused to release them. Ahmed al Rawi, the communications director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad, said the organization didn't have the staffing to compile such information.
The Health Ministry reports to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whom the United States appointed in June.
Iraqi health and hospital officials agreed that the statistics captured only part of the death toll.
To compile the data, the Health Ministry calls the directors general of the 15 provinces and asks how many deaths related to the war were reported at hospitals. The tracking of such information has become decentralized since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime because both hospitals and morgues issue death certificates now. And families often bury their dead without telling any government agencies or are treated at facilities that don't report to the government.
The ministry is convinced that nearly all of those reported dead are civilians, not insurgents. Most often, a family member wouldn't report it if his or her relative died fighting for rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia or another insurgent force, and the relative would be buried immediately, said Dr. Shihab Ahmed Jassim, another member of the ministry's operations section.
"People who participate in the conflict don't come to the hospital. Their families are afraid they will be punished," said Dr. Yasin Mustaf, the assistant manager of al Kimdi Hospital near Baghdad's poor Sadr City neighborhood. "Usually, the innocent people come to the hospital. That is what the numbers show."
The numbers also exclude those whose bodies were too mutilated to be recovered at car bombings or other attacks, the ministry said.
Ministry officials said they didn't know how big the undercount was. "We have nothing to do with politics," Jassim said.
Other independent organizations have estimated that 7,000 to 12,000 Iraqis have been killed since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations.
Iraqis are aware of the casualties that are due to U.S. forces, and nearly everyone has a story to tell.
At al Kimdi Hospital, Dr. Mumtaz Jaber, a vascular surgeon, said that three months ago, his 3-year-old nephew, his sister and his brother-in-law were driving in Baghdad at about 9 p.m. when they saw an American checkpoint. His nephew was killed.
"They didn't stop fast enough. The Americans shot them immediately," Jaber said. "This is how so many die."
At the Baghdad morgue, Dr. Quasis Hassan Salem said he saw a family of eight brought in: three women, three men and two children. They were sleeping on their roof last month because it was hot inside. A military helicopter shot at them and killed them: "I don't know why."
U.S. officials said any allegations that soldiers had recklessly killed Iraqi citizens were investigated at the Iraqi Assistance Center in downtown Baghdad.
"There is no way to refute" such stories, said Robert Callahan, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. "All you can do is tell them the truth and hope it eventually will get through."
[b]Sources:[/b]
Bush Administration Ignoring Reality in Iraq, http://www.tblog.com/template...
The Hollow World of George Bush, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Why Wait? Here's a Pre-Debate Quiz ... |
| 09.26.04 (9:32 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" are faced with the most important presidential election in a generation ... However, the following light-hearted [i]food-for-thought [/i]is worth pondering before Thursday night's "debate" http://www.tblog.com/template... ...
Instructions for candidates:[/b] Pretend each question is coming from Jim Lehrer, the moderator of the debate, and choose the one answer most likely to please swing voters watching on television on Thursday night. Do not assume that voters want to hear your innermost feelings, let alone the truth.
[b]Instructions for noncandidates:[/b] Some of the answers, right and wrong, are remarks (either verbatim or slightly abridged) made by the candidate in speeches, interviews and news conferences. See how many real quotations you can spot.
[b]Bush Questions[/b]
1. President Bush, you and Mr. Kerry have both been criticized for your conduct during the Vietnam War. Which one of you served his country better?
a) Some have questioned Senator Kerry's decision to take a jaunt halfway around the world to Vietnam, leaving our border with Mexico defended only by my small band of brothers in the Texas National Guard. But I will not stoop to criticizing any man's service.
b) I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.
c) Well, Dan - excuse me, Jim I've already answered the critics of my Guard record by releasing documents that were actually typed on typewriters. But I do want to thank all your colleagues, and the Democrats, for spending so much time on these questions. Beats questions on Iraq.
d) My opponent has said that Vietnam veterans have a motto, "Every day is extra." That's just how we looked on our service in the Guard. And it just so happened that at that point in my life, my schedule didn't have any extra days.
e) I think we agree, the past is over.
2. What was your biggest foreign-policy mistake as president?
a) Hmmm. I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. I'm sure historians will look back and say, Gosh, he could have done it better this way or that way. I'm sure something will pop into my head here, but it hadn't yet. You just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not quick, as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.
b) Well, I guess it's what I said to Karl Rove yesterday, when we were talking about sending the neocons back to their think tanks. If we'd stayed out of Iraq, we'd be up 20 points in the polls.
c) That "Mission Accomplished" banner. Or maybe the flight suit.
d) I'm starting to wonder if we were wrong about those W.M.D.'s.
e) We overestimated how long it would take to defeat Saddam's army, but we underestimated how long some of them would go on fighting as insurgents.
3. When Senator Kerry was your daughters' age, he volunteered to go to Vietnam. Did you ever encourage them to volunteer for Iraq?
a) As Dick Cheney says, they had other priorities, like that Vogue story.
b) I don't think people ought to be compelled to make the decision which they think is best for their family.
c) We don't need any more problems in Iraq, thank you.
d) It did cross my mind after their speech at the convention.
e) I don't believe in telling children what career to pick, but I would be proud if they enlisted.
4. Mr. President, can you name the commonly used term for the inhabitants of any of these countries: Greece, East Timor, Sweden, Kosovo and France?
a) Grecians
b) East Timorians
c) Swedenese
d) Kosovians
e) I just call them all good friends of America, except the Francians.
[b]Kerry Questions [/b]
1. Senator Kerry, you have been described by the Bush campaign as the greatest debater since Cicero. Does that give you an edge tonight?
a) I would have said Demosthenes.
b) There he goes again with the misunderestimation game.
c) I can't make a fair judgment, since I've read Cicero only in the Italian translation - you lose so much from the Latin. But I do have a special admiration for one of his arguments: "No well-informed person ever imputed inconsistency to another for changing his mind."
d) I'm just hoping to do better than Al Gore.
e) The president has won every debate he's ever had.
2. Senator Kerry, you say you have a better plan for winning the war in Iraq and the war on terror. But what specifically would you do differently?
a) Convene a summit meeting of the world's major powers and of Iraqis' neighbors.
b) Personally issue a multilingual invitation to the leaders of France, Germany and the Trilateral Commission to convene in the inner sanctum of Skull and Bones. Over foie gras and a robust riesling.
c) The final victory in the war on terror depends on a victory in the war of ideas, much more than the war on the battlefield. And the war - not the war, I don't want to use that terminology. The engagement of economies, the economic transformation, the transformation to modernity of a whole bunch of countries that have been avoiding the future.
d) Same thing we did in Nam - declare victory and bring the troops home.
e) George Bush has not told the truth to the American people about why we went to war and how the war is going. I will.
3. You now call the Iraq war a mistake. Yet you say that, even knowing what we know now, you would still have voted to authorize it. How does that make sense?
a) It was the correct vote because we needed to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for weapons.
b) I actually voted against the first gulf war before I voted for this one.
c) The vote for authorization is interpreted by a lot of people as a vote to go to war. But if you read it, and if you think about what it gave the president, it gave the president what he said: "America will speak with one voice.''
d) Look, I never liked this war, but I figured it was political suicide to vote against it, and then I was afraid it would sound like a flip-flop if I changed my mind. Makes perfect sense.
e) My vote was a vote to do this the right way. And the president, every step of the way, has chosen the wrong way.
4. Do you now consider your public display of windsurfing off Nantucket to be a faux pas?
a) Faux pas? Non, au contraire. C'etait magnifique! J'ai donné l'image d'homme très fort et très sportif! Et Monsieur Bush, il est un wuss!
b) I was just trying to look like J.F.K. without the yacht.
c) Who among us does not love windsurfing?
d) Teresa said spandex is a hot look for me.
e) Faux pas? What does that mean?
[b]Answers[/b]
For all questions: [i]e. (If either candidate didn't figure that out by now, he may want to develop laryngitis before Thursday.)[/i]
Bush actual quotes: [i]1:b, e; 2:a; 3:b; 4:a, b, d.[/i]
Kerry actual quotes: [i]1:e; 2:a, c, e; 3:a, c, e; 4:e. ("What does that mean?" was uttered by Mr. Kerry on his way into a bistro after a reporter wished him, "Bon appetit.")[/i]
[b]Sources:[/b]
No More Debate On Debates, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Why Wait? Here's a Pre-Debate Quiz, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
Expert Advises Bush Dumb-Down-Diction for Thursday's Debate, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
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| ... No More Debate On Debates ... |
| 09.26.04 (7:09 am) [edit] |
"Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate." - Hubert H. Humphrey
"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debate." - Joseph Joubert
"It's a moral issue. The German theologian Bonhoeffer said, "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children." Now we're leaving our kids unthinkable taxes and debts and so forth." - Pete Peterson [This issue http://www.pbs.org/now/politi... should be[i] debated [/i]...]
[b]Debates [i]matter[/i] http://www.opendebates.org ... Unhappily, "We the People" are not going to get the [i]real[/i] debates between Bush and Kerry http://www.pbs.org/now/politi... that we deserve as citizens of a democratic society ... The presidential debates are purposely engineered[i] to avoid [/i]the very kind of combative discourse necessary for us to see the real candidates (unscripted) and their viewpoints (expressed spontaneously) ... Therefore, Americans [i]must read and read a great deal [/i]in order to uncover the truth and vote intelligently on the 2nd November ...[/b]
After a week of negotiation, the Bush and Kerry campaigns finally agreed to terms for the upcoming presidential debates. Despite earlier Republican posturing about limiting the number of discussions, the four dates proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates – three presidential debates and one vice-presidential – were all accepted, with the first Bush/Kerry matchup taking place Sept. 30 at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.
While the Kerry camp prevailed on the number of debates, negotiator (and longtime Bush family ally) James Baker managed to get most of the president’s other demands met.
Baker and Democratic negotiator Vernon Jordan announced the agreed-upon schedule http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm... Monday evening. After next week’s Florida meeting, Kerry and Bush will square off at Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 8, and at Arizona State University in Tempe on Oct. 13. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney and John Edwards will debate at Ohio’s Case Western University on Oct. 5.
That’s the same debate schedule proposed by the bi-partisan Commission and and accepted by Kerry http://washingtontimes.com/up... in July. But by the time Baker was done negotiating, little beyond the times, locations and moderators http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm... (Jim Lehrer, Charles Gibson, Bob Schieffer and Gwen Ifill) remained unchanged.
Originally, the first debate was supposed to focus on domestic issues and the economy, with the third devoted to foreign policy. Instead, those have been flipped http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... . As the[i] New York Times [/i]explains, the first debate tends to draw the most viewers, and the Bush campaign wanted that larger audience to see a discussion of foreign policy (which it views as its candidate’s strength) instead of economic issues where Kerry performs better in polls.
Bush got his way again with the second, "town hall" debate. As the [i]Boston Globe [/i]noted, this was the debate the Bush campaign had threatened to skip:
... "The biggest question mark had been the middle presidential debate, which could put Bush in the unusual position of facing questions from critics. Bush campaign aides had been reluctant to agree to the St. Louis debate, but with the president commanding a solid lead in many polls, especially in Missouri, they decided it did not present much risk." ...
As a result of negotiation, though, the audience for that debate will no longer comprise undecided voters. Instead, it will feature a crowd split between "soft" Kerry supporters and Bush supporters, from whom Gibson will select questions. The thinking, apparently, is that undecideds would be more likely to grill the incumbent, while a group of "soft" bipartisans would more evenly distribute the tough questions.
The agreement between the campaigns also set the guidelines for everything from makeup (each candidate gets to provide his own makeup person) to the type of table behind which Edwards and Cheney will sit (constructed "according to the style and specifications proposed by the commission in consultation with each campaign"). As the [i]Globe[/i] notes:
... "Governing items large and small, the agreement specifies such things as a stipulation that no crowd shots should be aired during the answers, cameras cannot show the opposing candidate's reactions while the other is speaking, and that Bush and Kerry, as well as Cheney and Edwards, must shake hands at the outset of each debate.
"’Each candidate may move about in a predesignated area ... and may not leave that area while debate is underway,’" says the agreement, evoking images of Al Gore approaching Bush -- much to the then-Texas governor's surprise -- during the 2000 campaign. ‘The chairs will be swivel chairs that can be locked in place and shall be of equal height,’ it adds, a concern of the Bush campaign as the 6-foot president faces off against the 6-foot-4-inch Massachusetts senator." ...
Now that such minutiae have been agreed upon in a 32-page document, both campaigns have begun the game of lowering expectations. As the [i]New York Daily News [/i]notes http://www.nydailynews.com/ne... :
... "Bush and Kerry both want the millions of voters who will watch the first debate on Sept. 30 from Coral Gables, Fla., to believe he's pathetically outclassed.
"That's why Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart, in the finest tradition of Clintonian excess, could maintain with a straight face that President Bush has never lost a debate. Or why chief Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd, normally the essence of sobriety, could recently declare: ‘John Kerry is the greatest debater since Cicero.’" ...
How the expectations game will play out – and whether the debates will effectively change the race’s dynamics – remain to be seen. But at least voters now know when they’ll find out.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Jeff Fleischer, Mother Jones, http://www.motherjones.com/ne...
Do Debates Matter?, http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
The History of Presidential Debates: Before Television, http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
The History of Presidential Debates: The Televised Years, http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
Open Debates, http://www.opendebates.org
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| ... What the World is Saying... About President Bush's U.N. Speech ... |
| 09.25.04 (2:02 pm) [edit] |
"We all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us." - Margaret Guenther
[b]Ironically the world community wants the United States of America to be successful and ([i]wanted[/i], prior to the corrupt Bush regime's insane neo-con warmongering) to lead the world based upon the principles enshrined in the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... The world admires the rule of law ... "We the People" should carefully listen to our friends and neighbors around the world because their warnings have merit ...[/b]
President Bush addressed the world's leaders yesterday morning at the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly. The speech came at the end of one of the most violent weeks in Iraq since the interim government assumed power at the end of June. Nonetheless, the president defended the decision to go to war, offered an upbeat assessment of progress, and asked member states to provide more financial and military assistance to secure the country. The following is a sampling of international commentary in response to the speech from around the world.
[b]Italy[/b]
"It was enough to observe the applause given Annan while he condemned the American war and the violation of the rule of law and compare it to the deadly silence that accompanied Bush's 30-minute speech to understand the incredible damage that this short-sighted and ideological presidency has inflicted on America's image."
-[i]Vittorio Zucconi, La Republica, September 22, 2004[/i]
[b]Germany[/b]
"Again, the U.S. president spoke at the United Nations, again he defended the Iraq war... but his speech and reality are separated by a deep trench. Chaos dominates in Iraq... and we cannot see a convincing strategy how to crush the revolt. George W. Bush and Iraq: the balance sheet is devastating. Those who doubt it should talk to intelligence experts, study intelligence dossiers or follow the news on a regular basis. The facts are available."
-[i]Malte Lehming, Der Tagesspiegel, September 22, 2004[/i]
[b]United Kingdom[/b]
"Mr. Bush's willful blindness to the mayhem his war has wrought may be most charitably dismissed as electioneering, especially as his Democrat opponent had finally come out fighting only the day before. But the UN General Assembly is not a forum for electioneering. It is, as the Secretary General showed in his exemplary address about the rule of law, a platform to the world. It offered Mr. Bush the chance to banish his image as a go-it-alone gun-slinger and admit in all humility that the U.S. needed help. Regrettably, it was an opportunity he chose not to grasp."
-[i]The Independent, September 22, 2004[/i]
[b]Israel[/b]
"U.S. President George Bush's speech in the UN General Assembly opening did not supply any news regarding the Israeli-Palestinians conflict. The issue was raised only at the end of the speech after global terror, Iraq and Sudan's crisis, the war on AIDS, and human cloning."
- [i]Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz, September 22, 2004[/i]
[b]France[/b]
"By calling for respect of the right of law in his remarks, Annan proved to what extent the war in Iraq has poisoned international diplomatic relations.... As for President Bush's address, it elicited much skepticism on the part of the diplomats listening to him. The bitterness that dominated last year at the UN over the inability of multilateralism to prevail in Iraq has been replaced with concern over the chaos which is growing there.
-[i]Luc de Barochez, Le Figaro, September 22, 2004[/i]
[b]Saudi Arabia[/b]
"In his speech to the UN yesterday, U.S. President George Bush made what it was described as a rare criticism of the Jewish state when urged a halt to settlements on occupied Arab lands and an end to the cowing of the Palestinian people. But this is not the first time he has made such a criticism; he said the same thing many times before, but nothing has ever changed on the ground."
-[i]Al-Quds Al-Arabi, September 22, 2004[/i]
[b]Denmark[/b]
"President Bush's motives for adopting a more conciliatory tone toward the United Nations are clear. He knows that the United Nations must become a real player in Iraq if the circle of violence is to have any chance of being replaced by the peaceful and democratic developments that are crucial to the history books' judgment on the Iraq war. And Bush is able to note that there is still not a single country that has offered troops for the special UN force that is a precondition if UN personnel are going to be able to return to Iraq in earnest and prepare the election which, it is planned, will be held in only four months."
-[i]Ole Damkjaer, Berlingske Tidende, September 22, 2004[/i]
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
The Hollow World of George Bush, http://www.tblog.com/template...
George's Man In Baghdad, http://www.tblog.com/template...
UN-Convincing Yet Again, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... The Hollow World of George Bush ... |
| 09.25.04 (12:14 pm) [edit] |
"You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power." - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
"All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles A. Beard
[b]Bush is a hollow man-- a dangerously stupid man so drunk with power that he fails to acknowledge reality. "We the People" cannot afford such a reckless and delusional, callous thug in a position of responsibility ...[/b]
[b]The power of positive thinking is the president's shield from reality.[/b]
The news is grim, but the president is "optimistic". The intelligence is sobering, but he tosses aside "pessimistic predictions". His opponent says he has "no credibility", but the president replies that it is his rival who is "twisting in the wind". The UN secretary general speaks of the "rule of law", but he talks before a mute general assembly of "a new definition of security". Between the rhetoric and the reality lies the campaign.
In Iraq, US commanders have plans for this week and the next, but there is "no overarching strategy", I was told by a reliable source who has just returned after assessing the facts on the ground for US intelligence services. The New York Times reports that an offensive is in the works to capture the insurgent stronghold of Falluja - after the election. In the meantime, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists linked to al-Qaida operate from there at will, as they have for more than a year. The president speaks of new Iraqi security forces, but not even half the US personnel have been assigned to the headquarters of the Multinational Security Transition Command.
George Bush's vision of the liberation of Iraq has melted before harsh facts. But reality cannot be allowed to obscure the image. The liberation is "succeeding", he insists, and only pessimists cannot see it.
In July, the CIA delivered to the president a new national intelligence estimate that detailed three gloomy scenarios for Iraq's future, ranging up to civil war. Perhaps it was his reading of the estimate that prompted Bush to remark in August that the war on terrorism could not be won, a judgment he swiftly reversed. And at the UN, Bush held a press conference where he rebuffed the latest intelligence.
Bush explained that, for him, intelligence is not to inform decision-making, but to be used or rejected to advance an ideological and political agenda. His dismissal is an affirmation of the politicisation and corruption of intelligence that rationalised the war.
In his stump speech, which he repeats word for word across the country, Bush explains that he invaded Iraq because of "the lesson of September the 11th". WMD goes unmentioned; the only reason Bush offers is Saddam Hussein as an agent of terrorism. "He was a sworn enemy of the United States of America; he had ties to terrorist networks. Do you remember Abu Nidal? He's the guy that killed Leon Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer was murdered because of his religion. Abu Nidal was in Baghdad, as was his organisation."
The period of Leon Klinghoffer's murder in 1985 on the liner Achille Lauro (by Abu Abbas, in fact) coincided with the US courtship of Saddam, marked by the celebrated visits of then Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld. The US collaborated in intelligence exchanges and materially supported Saddam in his war with Iran, authorising the sale of biological agents for Saddam's laboratories, a diversification of his WMD capability.
The reason was not born of idealism, but necessity: the threat of an expansive Iran-controlled Shia fundamentalism to the entire Gulf.
The policy of courting Saddam continued until he invaded Kuwait. But realpolitik prevailed when US forces held back from capturing Baghdad for larger, geostrategic reasons. The first Bush grasped that in wars to come, the US would need ad hoc coalitions to share the military burden and financial cost. Taking Baghdad would have violated the UN resolution that gave legitimacy to the first Gulf war, as well as creating a nightmare of "Lebanonisation", as secretary of state James Baker called it. Realism prevailed; Saddam's power was subdued and drastically reduced. It was the greatest accomplishment of the first President Bush.
When he honoured the UN resolution, the credibility of the US in the region was enormously enhanced, enabling serious movement on the Middle East peace process. Now this President Bush has undone the foundation of his father's work, which was built upon by President Clinton.
Bush's campaign depends on the containment of any contrary perception of reality. He must evade, deny and suppress it. His true opponent is not his Democratic foe - called unpatriotic and the candidate of al-Qaida by the vice-president - but events. Bush's latest vision is his shield against them. He invokes the power of positive thinking, as taught by Emile Coue, guru of autosuggestion in the giddy 1920s, who urged mental improvement through constant repetition: "Every day in every way I am getting better and better."
It was during this era of illusion that TS Eliot wrote The Hollow Men: Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the Shadow."
[b]Source:[/b]
By Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ... George's Man In Baghdad ... |
| 09.25.04 (9:11 am) [edit] |
"But I understand that – what mixed messages do. You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending mixed messages. That's why I will continue to lead with clarity and in a resolute way." - President Bush, 9/23/04 http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
"When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to...not vacillate in the middle of something like that. Once you commit, you have to stay committed." - Marine Commander Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, criticizing President Bush's ambivalent approach to the invasion of Fallujah, 9/14/04 http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD...
[b]"We the People" must hold the corrupt and incompetent Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] accountable for their disastrous bloody neo-con guerrilla quagmire in Iraq ... The despotic Bushies have proved that they are unfit to lead our nation except on a road to chaos, disaster, bloodshed and misery ...[/b]
President Bush told reporters yesterday that "what's important for the American people to hear [about Iraq] is reality. And the reality is right here in the form of the Prime Minister." But Americans hoping to gain a new perspective on "reality" in Iraq should have been sorely disappointed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's statements, first to Congress and then at the Rose Garden with the president. Rather than offering a serious assessment of the challenges he faces in defeating an ever-growing insurgency in Iraq, Allawi largely parroted, often almost word-for-word, optimistic Bush administration talking points. Unfortunately, daily attacks on U.S. troops, the beheadings of foreigners, the growing list of cities under insurgent control and the increasing chance the security situation will compromise the January elections all serve to "undercut the verbal sunshine produced in the White House Rose Garden." Find out more about how the administration is ignoring reality in Iraq http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b]MISLEADING CLAIM #1: WE ARE MAKING PROGRESS:[/b] President Bush said yesterday, "These have been months of steady progress" in Iraq. Allawi echoed the president, reminding Congress not to forget "the progress we are making." Both pointed to the building of new schools and hospitals as proof of "progress," but neither mentioned that the security situation has gotten so bad the U.S. has had to divert crucial reconstruction funds from water, sewage, transportation, electricity and other projects to pay for increased security, leaving many Iraqis "without the crucial services that generally form the backbone of a stable and functioning democracy." Meanwhile, the security situation continues to deteriorate, with "[l]arge swaths of Iraq" remaining outside the control of the interim government. The continuing violence "has overshadowed signs of progress and put a damper on the prospect of democratic elections."
[b]MISLEADING CLAIM #2: ELECTIONS WILL DEFINITELY GO FORWARD:[/b] Asked whether he believed, "given the situation on the ground in Fallujah and other northern cities in the Sunni Triangle, that elections are possible in four months," President Bush said, "I do, because the Prime Minister told me they are." Neither Bush nor Allawi provided evidence for their belief – perhaps because there isn't any. On the same day Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite leader, "threatened to withdraw his support for the elections," and just days after U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested "elections may have to be delayed because of security concerns," U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "raised the possibility that some areas of Iraq night be excluded" from voting in January. "Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," Rumsfeld said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life."
[b]MISLEADING CLAIM #3: INSURGENCY A "TINY MINORITY": [/b]Bush referred to the insurgency on Wednesday as "a handful of people who are willing to kill in order to stop the process." Allawi said the problem in Iraq was a "tiny minority…who will kill anyone, destroy anything, to prevent" Iraq from achieving its goals, adding that 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces are safe enough to hold elections tomorrow. The Bush administration's own data indicates otherwise. According to the Defense Department, there were more attacks per day on U.S. forces in August than during any month since Bush's "mission accomplished" appearance in May 2003, and preliminary analysis suggests troops "are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before." Meanwhile, September threatens to become one of the deadliest months of the war for U.S. troops. Several reports indicate Iraq "has become increasingly mottled with areas…where militants appear to operate with impunity, running cities that even some U.S. military officers label 'no-go' zones."
[b]MISLEADING CLAIM #4: THE SOUTH IS SAFE:[/b] Allawi emphasized that most of northern and southern Iraq are safe enough to hold elections tomorrow, but "He might want to check in with the British troops in the 'tranquil' south he described." British soldiers at a base in al-Ammara, considered a year ago to be one of the more peaceful parts of Iraq, told the BBC that last month alone they suffered 853 separate attacks, "the most frequent combat experienced by a British army unit since the Korean war."
[b]MISLEADING CLAIM #5: WORLD IS SAFER WITH SADDAM GONE:[/b] President Bush likes to say, "We are safer – we are safer and the world is better off because Saddam is sitting in a prison cell." Allawi borrowed the president's words for a big applause line on Thursday: "My friends, today we are better off, you are better off and the world is better off without Saddam Hussein," he said. As Jim Fallows points out in this month's Atlantic Monthly, "the United States succeeded in removing Saddam Hussein, but at this cost: The first front in the war on terror, Afghanistan, was left to fester, as attention and money were drained toward Iraq." North Korea and Iran have "surged ahead" with nuclear programs. America's military power has been diluted and "Because of outlays for Iraq, the United States cannot spend $150 billion for other defensive purposes." And, "Worst of all, the government-wide effort to wage war in Iraq crowded out efforts to design a broader strategy against Islamic extremists and terrorists; to this day the Administration has articulated no comprehensive long-term plan."
[b]WORLD IS LESS SAFE:[/b] Moreover, the world is demonstrably less safe than it was before America invaded Iraq. As a July report by the British House of Commons showed, the "Coalition's failure to bring law and order to parts of Iraq" turned Iraq into a "battle ground" for al Qaeda. And the International Institute for Strategic Studies says the war in Iraq has swelled the ranks of al Qaeda, focusing the energies and resources of the terrorists, while diluting those of the global counter-terrorism coalition. James Fallows writes that among national security officials, "One view prevails: [the war] has increased the threats America faces, and has reduced the military, financial, and diplomatic tools with which we can respond." Read more in American Progress' security report card http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
The Long Hard Slog to Elections, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush Administration Ignoring Reality in Iraq, http://www.tblog.com/template...
CIA's 'just guessing', Bush guesses, http://www.tblog.com/template...
The Pinocchio President, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Neo-Cons to Hold Conference to Plan World War IV Strategies, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Middle Class Misnomer ... |
| 09.24.04 (9:53 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]has run-up the highest deficit in our nation's history-- to charge on the Middle Class & Working People's "Credit Card" their illegal and immoral neo-con wars and their amoral tax cuts for corporations and their rich cronies ... [/b]Who do you really think will be paying the interest payments on the neo-fascist Bushies' US debt??? ... You and me-- and [i]not [/i]them ... "We the People" must show them that we refuse to be their dupes ... Vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America and let us rid ourselves of the corporate-take-all Bush regime ...
Congress passed a $146 billion tax package billed as the "middle-class tax cut" last night. Scratch below the surface, however, and a few glaring deficiencies appear. Many of the benefits are skewed directly to the wealthy and corporations. Low-income families were ignored, as provisions to provide them with relief were sliced out of the final legislation. And still no word on who's paying for this. The legislation was not a tax bill for the middle class. As the Boston Globe writes, "it represents unfinished business from the legislation oriented to wealthy taxpayers passed last year. Taken as a package, these four bills are a windfall for the wealthy and a threat to programs that have sustained middle-class and lower-income Americans for generations." The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities agrees, calling the legislation the "latest step in the continuing slide toward fiscal irresponsibility, the thwarting of normal democratic processes, and favoritism toward the comfortable and well-off accompanied by neglect of working-poor families who need help the most."
[b]WHO'S PAYING FOR THIS THING?: [/b]Congress passed the $146 billion legislation with no word on who was going to pay for it. It will add to the already exploding deficit, which is projected to reach $422 billion this year, a record high. And one thing's certain: eventually someone will pay for the tax cuts. That means either raising taxes or, more likely, slashing programs. Cutting programs means "there is a substantial possibility that many, if not most, middle-class households will lose more from the measures ultimately adopted to offset the tax cuts' costs than they receive in tax-cut benefits." In the meantime, we will burden future generations by adding to a deficit, already project to reach $2.3 trillion in the next ten years.
[b]YOU CALL THIS MIDDLE-CLASS?: [/b]Conservatives pegged this legislation the "middle-class" tax cut. Don't believe the hype. Forty-four percent of the tax cut goes to the richest tenth of Americans. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale "will get only 10 percent of the bill's tax cuts, a peculiar result for a bill promoted as a middle-class tax relief package."
[b]LOW-INCOME CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND:[/b] The tax legislation turns a cold shoulder to the families who need the most help (ironic, given the fact that it was passed just days before National Family Day). The bill did not expand the availability of the child tax credit to low-income families, although the benefit has eroded to such an extent that full-time minimum-wage workers are currently ineligible. Fixing this would cost $4 billion over 10 years, or approximately a third of the cost of the corporate tax breaks in the bill. Also, the legislation provides "marriage penalty" relief for all households…except those with low incomes.
[b]MILITARY FAMILIES:[/b] In addition to increasing taxes on working families, the new tax legislation includes a provision which could hurt military families. Most of the tax cut extensions are for the next five years. Congress Daily reported, however, conservatives imposed a two-year limit on the provision which would help military families by counting combat pay as income and thereby qualify for fairer benefits from the earned income tax credit. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), who tried in vain to make the combat pay provision permanent, expressed her frustration, saying, "They are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice ... there's no reason we can't give them and their families the certainty they deserve that this provision will be there for them."
[b]BIG BUSINESS BONANZA:[/b] At the same time the tax legislation saved a few pennies by cutting benefits for the poor and for military families, Congress "added about $13 billion worth of business tax breaks" to the bill. Not that some of these companies need any more help from the federal government; according to a new study by the watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice, eighty-two of America's largest and most profitable corporations paid no federal income tax in at least one year during the first three years of the George W. Bush administration — a period when federal corporate tax collections fell to their lowest sustained level in six decades." Under the current 35 percent tax rate, these corporations were responsible for $35.6 billion in income taxes. However, these companies – including powerhouses like Boeing, ITT and Pepco – generated "so many excess tax breaks that they received outright tax rebate checks from the U.S. Treasury, totaling $12.6 billion." (Instead of cracking down on wealthy tax dodgers, President Bush shrugs it off, saying, "we've heard the rhetoric before, 'tax the rich.' The rich hire lawyers and accountants so that the middle class gets stuck with the bill.")
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Tax Dodging With Dubya ... |
| 09.23.04 (4:30 pm) [edit] |
"When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income." - Plato, The Republic, Greek author & philosopher in Athens (427 BC - 347 BC)
[b]Taxes are a necessary evil ... Our Founding Fathers did not dispute the necessity of taxation-- they disputed taxation without representation, assuming citizens would hold our servants in government accountable for decisions upon how to use our money wisely ... Without taxes, we would not have roads, national parks, firemen, police, schools, sewage systems, water systems and all of the institutions that render a society civilized ... "We the People" live in times where lobbyists, special interests and those with big-money are effectively bribing crooked politicos like the Bushies to cheat our nation out of their responsibility to contribute to the development and upkeep of our nation ... This travesty of tax dodging, boondoggles and insane cuts for corporations and the hyper-rich must stop-- for the entire burden is being shifted on the backs of the working people and those families struggling to make ends meet ... Meanwhile the corporate top-dogs & fat-cats are livin' obese and obscene lives of which like Emperors Caligula and Nero only dreamt ...[/b]
Since George W. Bush came into office, there have been some very good years for large corporations. How good? Well, according to a report prepared by Citizens For Tax Justice http://www.ctj.org/ and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy http://www.ctj.org/itep/ , 28 large companies[i] enjoyed negative federal income tax rates [/i]each year between 2001 and 2003. And 82 companies had negative tax rates at least one of these years. How did they do it? The huge influx of corporate lobbyists to Washington and Bush and Congress' [i]willingness to stand with corporations [/i]meant that lots of loopholes were exploited and lots of heads looked the other way. SEE THE REPORT http://www.ctj.org/corpfed04a...
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| ... The Long Hard Slog to Elections ... |
| 09.23.04 (2:02 pm) [edit] |
"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream." - The Trumpet of Conscience, Martin Luther King Jr.
[b]"We the People" must face facts and elect a new Kerry Administration in the United States of America who can effectively extricate us from the bloody fiasco in Iraq [i]and[/i] work with other countries through the United Nations to assist the Iraqi people to ultimately realize a secure society ...[/b]
Military leaders met with Congress yesterday to warn lawmakers that the upcoming months in Iraq will be even more violent and turbulent in the lead-up to the election. Officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, told Congress in a closed-door briefing yesterday "that it would be impossible to hold elections in Iraq while several major cities are in the hands of insurgents." Much of the country, including Fallujah, Samarra, Baqubah and Ramadi, is increasingly in the violent hands of insurgents. Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, admitted yesterday that it was possible that more U.S. troops would be needed to secure Iraq's elections: "I think we will need more troops than we currently have."
[b]THE REALITY IN IRAQ:[/b] The situation in Iraq already is a sobering one. The U.S.-led coalition forces are widely perceived as "occupiers," not "liberators." The number of Iraqi insurgents has quadrupled over the past year. Insurgent attacks on U.S. forces are up 20 percent since the spring and 100 percent since last winter; last month, attacks on U.S. troops averaged 90 a day, five times as many as last winter. Even the highly fortified Green Zone is no longer considered completely secure.
[b]THE COST OF WAR COMES HOME:[/b] As military leaders warn the situation in Iraq is about to get more chaotic, a new study by the National Priorities Project examines the effect of the war in Iraq on each of the fifty states. NPP compiled data on the number of soldiers killed and wounded in each state, the dollar amount each state is paying for the war, and the number of their reservists and National Guard troops on active duty. The result is sobering. Pennsylvania, for example, has shelled out $6.3 billion of taxpayer money for the war in Iraq. Fifty-two men and women from the Granite State have been killed; 270 have been wounded. The state of Michigan has ponied up $4.6 billion. Thirty of its troops have been killed, and 2,352 of its National Guard soldiers and reservists have been called to active duty. (For a view of the federal scale, check out American Progress and Project Billboard's running total of the cost of war http://www.americanprogress.o... .)
[b]THE COST OF MISSED OPPORTUNITIES:[/b] The National Priorities Project also calculates the cost of the Iraq war in missed opportunities. Current policies, the study finds, weakened international institutions and reduced capacity to work in cooperation with allies and others to prevent terrorism; neglected homeland security needs and nonproliferation; and diverted money away from domestic programs. In Florida, for example, the state paid seven times as much money for the war as it did for homeland security and domestic programs combined. In fact, for the amount of money Florida gave the federal government for the war in Iraq, 140,821 container inspectors could have been hired to protect America's ports. And for the $5.7 billion the state of Ohio has had to spend for the war in Iraq, 779,785 people could have received health care coverage.
[b]ALLAWI IS IN THE HOUSE:[/b] Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi will address a joint session of Congress today "as an increasingly violent insurgency complicates his country's plans for its first Democratic elections." He has joined President Bush in avoiding addressing the crucial questions about instability and ongoing violence in Iraq thus far. Allawi was remarkably removed from reality yesterday on CNN; asked by Wolf Blizter what he would do to deal with the deep and disruptive tensions between religious and ethnic groups in Iraq, the former exile said, "There are no problems between Shia and Sunnis and Kurds and Arabs and Turkmen…usually we have no problems of ethnic or religious nature in Iraq." Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, suggested in today's Boston Globe "that the administration should spend less time staging an attractive photo opportunity and more adopting a realistic view of the challenges ahead. 'As Prime Minister Allawi comes here, we need real accomplishments and real progress and honest measures of capability, not sound bites of rhetoric which are not substantiated by the figures being issued in detail by the United States government.'"
[b]LEGITIMACY QUESTIONS:[/b] The New York Times reports Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's "most powerful Shiite leader, is growing increasingly concerned that nationwide elections could be delayed, his aides said, and has even threatened to withdraw his support for the elections unless changes are made to increase the representation of Shiites." Sistani is worried that control is overwhelmingly going to the political parties which cooperated with the American occupation and are comprised largely of exiles. Sistani's aids claim the cleric is attempting to contact U.N. advisor Lakhdar Brahimi to voice his concerns.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
Bush Administration Ignoring Reality in Iraq, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Bush Administration Ignoring Reality in Iraq ... |
| 09.23.04 (7:07 am) [edit] |
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is either telling us bold-faced lies [i]and/or [/i]living in a fantasy world ... Either way, it's time for "We the People" to do our duty and extricate our nation from this national nightmare that the traitorous Bush regime has inflicted upon us and the entire world community ...[/b]
In late July, top administration officials, including the president, received a 50-page National Intelligence Estimate from the CIA's National Intelligence Council that spelled out bleak prospects for Iraq. While the President Bush claims the CIA intelligence estimates are "just guessing," the last time such a report was prepared, he used it to justify going to war in Iraq. At least 13 times since the report was delivered top administration officials have publicly contradicted the assessment by the NIE. The failure to see reality has also sparked criticism from Republican allies in Congress.
[b]National Intelligence Estimate Provides 'Dark Assessment'[/b]
"A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq...The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms."
- New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
[b]The Sobering Reality in Iraq[/b]
... The number of Iraqi insurgents has quadrupled http://www.time.com/time/arch...,10987,1101040920-695820, 00.html over the past year.
... Insurgent attacks on U.S. forces are up 20 percent since the spring and 100 percent since last winter http://www.brookings.edu/view... ; last month, attacks on U.S. troops averaged 90 a day, five times as many as last winter.
... Entire Iraqi cities, such as Fallujah and "no go" sections of the Sunni Triangle, have fallen to insurgent control. Even the highly fortified Green Zone http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e021... no longer considered completely secure.
... Reconstruction is lagging. Iraq's main power plant produces less than half the electricity http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,1,3750922,print.story?coll=la-headlines-f rontpage it did before the start of the war.
... There is ongoing Iraqi elections, which are scheduled for January, may have to be postponed http://www.iht.com/articles/5... due to the deteriorating security situation.
[b]Republican Senators Tell It Like It Is[/b]
"We're in deep trouble in Iraq. We need more regionalization. We need more help from our allies...to say, 'Well, we just must stay the course and any of you who are questioning are just hand-wringers,' is not very responsible."
- Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), 9/19/04, http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs...
"We made serious mistakes...allowing those sanctuaries [for insurgents] has contributed significantly to the difficulties that we're facing, which are very, very significant."
- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 9/19/04, http://news.bostonherald.com/...
"[The administration has done a] poor job of implementing and adjusting at times [in Iraq]...we do not need to paint a rosy scenario for the American people."
- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), 9/19/04, https://registration.dfw.com/reg/login.do?url=http://www.dfw.com%2Fmld%2Fdfw%2Fnews%2Fnat ion%2F9711497.htm%3F1c
"We've got to get the reconstruction money out there... $18 billion is appropriated a year ago and only $1 billion has been spent...this is incompetence in the administration."
- Sen. Richard Lugar, 9/19/04
[b]Administration Ignores Reality[/b]
1. "[Iraq is] on the path to lasting democracy and liberty"
- President George W. Bush, Aug. 5, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
2. "Iraq is continuing to move forward to build a free and peaceful future."
- White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Aug. 6, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
3. "I think Iraq's got a real crack at becoming a successful free system. And of course, they have a great deal going for them... they're making solid progress."
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Aug. 6, http://www.dod.gov/transcript...
4. "It's going well [in Iraq]."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Aug. 23, http://www.dod.gov/transcript...
5. "We are on a good path and we are making good progress [in Iraq]."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Aug. 23, http://www.dod.gov/transcript...
6. "We've got a very good start in Iraq."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Aug. 23, http://www.dod.gov/transcript...
7. "We're making progress on the ground [in Iraq]"
- George W. Bush, Aug. 23, http://www.detnews.com/2004/n...
8. "We're moving in the right direction [in Iraq]."
- Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 24, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
9. "The successes that have been achieved over the past period of months...[in Iraq] have been really remarkable."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Sept. 7, http://www.dod.gov/transcript...
10. "I think we have made enormous progress [in Iraq]."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Sept. 7, http://www.dod.gov/transcript...
11. "We continue to make progress as we help the Iraqi people move forward to a brighter future."
- Scott McClellan, Sept. 9, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
12. "I'm very encouraged about [the situation in Iraq]."
- Donald Rumsfeld, Sept. 14, http://www.dod.gov/transcript...
13. "The president talks often about the progress we've made in places like...Iraq."
- Scott McClellan, Sept. 15, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
CIA's 'just guessing', Bush guesses, http://www.tblog.com/template...
UN-Convincing Yet Again, http://www.tblog.com/template...
The Pinocchio President, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... CIA's 'just guessing', Bush guesses ... |
| 09.22.04 (3:07 pm) [edit] |
"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception." - George Orwell
[b]"We the People" cannot be sure [i]whether or not [/i]Bush is simply trying to deceive [i]us[/i] ... Or,[i] whether or not [/i]Bush is indulging in self-deception ... However, either way, Bush is unfit to serve our nation ...[/b]
Here is George Bush's take on http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sto... the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate predicting a grim future for the U.S. occupation on Iraq: "The CIA laid out several scenarios. It said that life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better. And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."[b] Pop Quiz:[/b] What illegal substance is the president on these days?
[b]Sources:[/b]
President Bush Fails To Answer Critical Questions, http://www.tblog.com/template...
The Pinocchio President, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Gates of Hell, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Neo-Cons to Hold Conference to Plan World War IV Strategies, http://www.tblog.com/template...
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| ... Today's Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 269 vs. Bush 253 (Map of the USA) ... |
| 09.22.04 (11:05 am) [edit] |
"It's exciting; I don't know whether I'm going to win or not. I think I am. I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes." - George W. Bush, 2000 Campaign
[b]Well, George W. Bush has proved that he really [i]wasn't ready [/i]for the job ... Indeed, many Americans conclude that Bush [i]isn't fit [/i]for the job ... "We the People" must remain steadfast and encourage our family members, friends and neighbors to vote ... Vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America ...[/b]
[b][u]Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 269 vs. Bush 253[/u][/b]
[b]Legend:[/b]
Blue - Strong Kerry (143)
Light Blue - Weak Kerry (18)
Blue Outline - Barely Kerry (108)
White - Exactly tied (16)
Red Outline - Barely Bush (42)
Light Red - Weak Bush (42)
Red - Strong Bush (169)
[b]Needed to win:[/b] 270
[b]Sept. 22 New polls:[/b] AZ CO FL IA MI NJ NM NY OK PA RI WA WV
[b]News from the Votemaster[/b]
Thirteen new polls today and since ARG is going to release 30 new polls today I will have even more tomorrow. Before getting into today's data, a small technical note. Since there are so many overlapping polls now, something that didn't happen before, questions like should a Sept. 14-16 poll replace a Sept. 12-18 poll are starting to occur. To be consistent, I have formulated a set of rules described below. As a consequence of these rules, five of the new Mason-Dixon polls are not being included (MI, MO, OR, PA, and WI), because they do not meet the new criteria for replacing an existing poll. Only one of these changes who is ahead (WI) but since ARG is releasing a new poll for Wisconsin today, having one poll be in dispute for one day is a small price to pay for a clear and consistent set of rules about which poll is most recent.
The big news today is that Kerry is once again ahead in the electoral college by dint of his edging ahead in Florida (49% to 48%) and New Jersey (47% to 43% among RVs). However, these gains were partially offset by loses in Iowa and New Mexico. In Iowa, a new Gallup poll puts Bush ahead 48% to 43%. In New Mexico. a new Mason-Dixon poll taken Sep. 15-16 puts Bush ahead 47% to 43%, compared to Zogby's Sept. 13-17 poll showing a Kerry lead of 54% to 42%. That is a 15% switch in a couple of days, far outside the MoE. Clearly there are serious methodological issues here. These issues far overshadow the MoE, which is why I don't include the MoE in the spreadsheets. If one pollster is mostly sampling Democrats and another is mostly sampling Republicans, the MoE doesn't mean a lot.
A new Senate poll in Colorado puts Salazar ahead of Coors there again. In another poll in Colorado, when people were asked to free associate, when the interviewer said "Coors" most people said "beer." When the interviewer said "Salazar" most people said "attorney general," a good sign for Ken Salazar since state attorneys general are not usually well known (quick-name your state attorney general).
In voting news, the Pentagon has restricted access to the website overseas voters, both military and civilian, can use for registering to vote, citing attempts to hack it. The story was first reported by the International Herald Tribune. Is the Pentagon, with its billions of dollars, incapable of building a simple website that is difficult to break into? And is the answer to attempted break-ins to disenfranchise overseas voters, including the servicemen and women who are defending this country with their lives? Is this how we support the troops? By taking away their right to vote?
Microsoft and other companies are attacked all the time, and their reaction is to put up strong defenses. Surely the Pentagon is capable of doing what the computer industry does every day?
I recently talked to a knowledgeable source who has been in Iraq for a long time and his impression is that the reservists and national guardsmen there are quite unhappy, especially about having their tours of duty extended. It is not unthinkable this unhappiness might be expressed if they were allowed to vote.
Fortunately, overseas voters, including members of the armed forces, who haven't registered yet can fill in the necessary registration forms online via overseasvote2004.com and then print them. Instructions for sending the printed forms to the U.S. are given on the Americans abroad page http://www.electoral-vote.com... . But time is running out.
Political analyst and author Ruy Teixeira has written an interesting article about how the polls are normalized. Professor David Price also has a good article on polling and its problems. Another interesting election article is one in the LA Times by law professor Richard L. Hasen on the Colorado referendum.
If you are not interested in the mechanics of the site, you can stop reading today. At the start of the campaign season, polls were few and far between and nearly all took three days. It was very clear then which poll was more recent since they were usually weeks apart. Now there is a plethora of polls of varying lengths so I have to define "most recent" a lot more carefully to avoid making subjective judgements about which polls to use. Here are the rules. They are are designed to be reasonable and also to not require any changes to the thousands of lines of code used to produce the 60 or so web pages, charts, graphs, etc. that are automatically generated from the spreadsheet data every day.
The spreadsheet is the glue that holds everything together. Everything else is produced from it. It is perhaps unfortunate that the spreadsheet date is the end date rather than the middle date, but it is too late to change that. A suffix will now be added to the pollster to indicate the poll's duration. Using the middle date would require massive changes to the software and data, so that is not a possibility any more. Here are the design principles dictating the rules:
1. Only replace a poll if the new one is more recent.
2. Shorter polling periods are better than longer ones.
3. Polls can only be averaged with other polls of the same length.
4. Dates cannot be averaged.
5. It is undesirable to have the spreadsheet date go backwards.
When a new poll comes in, the middle date during which it was taken is compared to the middle date of the current poll for that state. If the new poll is more recent it replaces the current one. The rules for multiple polls and ties between the new poll(s) and the existing poll are as follows:
1. If two or more new polls have the same polling period, and are more recent, they are averaged and go in.
2. If two or more new polls have the same middle date but different lengths, shorter beats longer.
3. If a new poll has the same middle date and length as the current one it is averaged in, otherwise it is discarded.
The purpose of rule 3 is to prevent having to average dates, which will be confusing because people will look for a poll ending on the date on the spreadsheet and there won't be one. Thus averaging comparable poll values for the same time period is OK but averaging dates is not OK. Yes, I realize that With a bit of effort, the rule set could be made even more complicated and ultimately resemble the internal revenue code, but I would prefer not to try.
As an example of how rule 3 works, yesterday's poll for Ohio was Zogby's Sept. 13-17 poll. The new Mason-Dixon poll was taken Sept 14-16, the new Univ. of Cincinnati poll was taken Sept. 12-18, and the new Rasmussen poll was also taken Sept. 12-18. All four of these center around Sept. 15. The three new ones are therefore discarded because they would require averaging the dates with the current one. Tiebreakers always have a certain amount of arbitrariness in them, and in this case ties with different polling periods are broken in favor of the first one published. Fortunately, in this case it doesn't matter because the same candidate (Bush) is ahead in all of them. Given the tremendous number of polls coming in now, no poll in a battleground state is likely to last more than a few days anyway, the occasional discarded poll will hardly matter.
As example 2, the current Zogby poll for New Mexico was taken Sept. 13-17. The new Mason-Dixon poll was taken Sept. 15-16, so it is half a day newer and replaces Zogby. In contrast, the Mason-Dixon poll for Missouri, taken Sept. 14-16 is discarded because it is not newer than the Zogby Sept. 13-17 poll and date averaging is not allowed. The rules have been designed to avoid replacing something by something that is not newer. While this may seem like splitting hairs, splitting hairs is tough work, but somebody has to do it.
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| ... UN-Convincing Yet Again ... |
| 09.22.04 (9:04 am) [edit] |
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
"The fascists cannot argue, so they kill." - Anon
"Fascism is capitalism plus murder." - Upton Sinclair
[b]Bush squandered [i]yet again [/i]another opportunity to rally the world community behind the US efforts to make the best of his botched-up bloodbath in Iraq ... Bush is a neo-con, neo-fascist whose hubris is despised by the world community http://www.tblog.com/template... ... Why is Bush so arrogant and so foolish? ... Because at heart, Bush is a [i]pathological liar [/i]and an[i] incompetent [/i]buffoon clearly[i] out-of-his-depth [/i]as a leader ... "We the People" need a change of leadership ... The world recognizes it and we need to acknowledge that fact too ...[/b]
[b]UN-Convincing[/b]
The White House botched a golden opportunity to appeal to the international community yesterday. The U.S. needs international assistance – both military and financial – to secure an increasingly violent Iraq. Yesterday was also a chance to rally the global community behind critical issues like nuclear proliferation in the Axis of Evil and the war in Afghanistan. Instead, as the New York Times writes, President Bush delivered an "inexplicably defiant" speech in which he "glossed over the current dire situation in Iraq for an audience acutely aware of the true state of affairs, and scolded them for refusing to endorse the American invasion in the first place." American Progress' Bob Boorstin points out, "The president touted the worldwide march of democracy, but sugar-coated grim challenges facing Iraq and Afghanistan, where growing turmoil threatens to disrupt upcoming elections. And while he called on the United Nations and its member-states to step up to the plate in Iraq, he failed to outline a plan or vision that could provoke any meaningful international support." Here are some of the critical issues gaps from Bush's U.N. speech:
[b]WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO IRAN?: [/b]President Bush said, "We're determined to prevent proliferation." The speech, however, contained not a single word about how the administration plans to deal with the very real growing nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran. Iran is flying full-speed-ahead toward nuclear capability. At a military parade earlier this week, the Iranian president announced the country would openly defy the U.N. nuclear agency. The Iranian government announced "that it had begun converting tons of uranium into gas, a crucial step in making fuel for a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb." After President Bush threatened Iranian hardliners rhetorically by naming Iran part of the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address, the White House then did nothing to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Europe was left holding the bag in trying to control Iran's desire to develop the ability to produce weapons-grade nuclear material and today the U.S. lacks almost any influence to keep the Iranian nuclear genie in the bottle.
[b]WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO NORTH KOREA?: [/b]Charles Pritchard, formerly Colin Powell's top official dealing with North Korea, has warned for months that "the White House lacks an effective strategy to dissuade North Korea from building up its nuclear arms." Under Bush's watch, North Korea's nuclear arsenal is thought to have quadrupled. And, according to Pritchard, the situation has deteriorated because "the administration has neither offered much of a carrot nor wielded a stick." The administration has refused to engage North Korea in direct negotiations or "put the North Koreans on notice that further developments will trigger economic sanctions or perhaps even military actions."
[b]AXIS OF EVIL PART TWO:[/b] What Bush also didn't mention: No acknowledgement that, despite his ominous warnings of Iraq's threat before the invasion – and despite the billion dollars spent fruitlessly searching Iraq for any evidence to back up his inflated claims – no WMD were ever found in that country and, in fact, a new report by weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer found the sanctions put in place by the United Nations were holding Saddam's WMD desires firmly in check.
[b]IGNORING IRAQ:[/b] The administration has a record of unrealistically rosy predictions in Iraq. (Exactly one year ago today, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle stated, "Next year at about this time, I expect there will be a really thriving trade in the region, and we will see rapid economic development…And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.") President Bush optimistically stated, "Today, the Iraq and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups." What he didn't mention: Iraq needs action, not platitudes. As the Wall Street Journal reports, "few at the U.N. share Mr. Bush's view of progress in Iraq, where U.S. forces fighting insurgents have suffered mounting casualties since the president declared an end to major combat operations more than a year ago." President Bush blew off a recent CIA report which warned that, with the current lack of stability and security, Iraq was in danger of falling into a civil war, saying the intelligence agency was "just guessing." And, in a new sign that the Iraq war is costing more than the White House expected this year, the Pentagon announced it has begun tapping into a $25 billion emergency fund. "When White House officials requested the $25 billion fund in May, they characterized it as an 'insurance policy' that they hoped they wouldn't have to tap."
[b]IGNORING AFGHANISTAN:[/b] President Bush cited success in Afghanistan as an accomplishment of his global leadership. What he didn't mention: Escalating violence forced the United Nations to evacuate its staff from the city of Herat last week after a mob turned "international aid facilities into smoldering, looted ruins." President Karzai's government currently has little to no authority outside the city of Kabul; the rest of the countryside is controlled by warlords and the reconstituted Taliban. The $2.2 billion opium racket is booming, with money going into the pockets of terrorists worldwide. The U.S. has not captured Osama bin Laden nor his deputy, who are thought to still be directing attacks in Afghanistan. Voter registration fraud coupled with rampant violence have led to serious doubts over whether the country will be able to hold elections – which have already been postponed twice – in October.
[b]DODGING DEMOCRACY:[/b] President Bush yesterday said, "peaceful nations must stand for the advance of democracy." What he didn't mention: His good friend Vladimir Putin's attack on democracy in Russia. In recent weeks, Putin has decreed "the most sweeping consolidations of presidential power since the fall of communism." On Sept. 13, Putin "announced a plan to eliminate the general election of regional governors and of independent seats in parliament, essentially removing the last real checks on his personal dominion over the largest nation on Earth." Putin now has control over "an absolute majority in parliament, all major television stations, the Russian gas giant Gazprom, the country's corrupt judicial system and a massive state security apparatus." According to the pro-democracy Committee 2008 organization's Vladimir Kara-Murza, "Putin is now past the point where his regime can be removed peacefully by democratic means. There's no independent media, there's no parliament to speak of, there are no real parliamentary elections and now with the decision about the regional governors, there are no elections at all." The administration has also failed to push for democratic government in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere around the world.
[b]DEMOCRACY FUND LACK OF DETAILS:[/b] President Bush proposed the creation of a Democracy Fund to be set up through the United Nations. What he didn't mention: Any details. As Slate's Fred Kaplan put it, "He catalogs some of the world's problems, then suggests nothing—not the vaguest plan of action—for how to deal with any of them." First, "the United Nations already has agencies for much of this work." The White House offered no explanation of how this fund would be different. And second, Bush said, "to show our commitment to the Democracy Fund, the United States will make an initial contribution." He declined to announce the scope of that contribution, or when it would be made.
[b]BIG TALK, BUT NOT WALKING THE WALK:[/b] Yesterday, the president touted his commitment to fighting AIDS, saying, "AIDS is the greatest health crisis of our time." What he didn't mention: He has a poor track record when it comes to follow-through on his ambitious U.N. proposals. While two years ago the United States promised to lead the global fight against AIDS and made a commitment to provide $15 billion over five years, the White House subsequently underfunded that promise, asking Congress for only $2 billion last year. The administration also tried to cut funding to the Global Fund, the existing international group which has been devoted to fighting AIDS, by 64 percent in 2005.
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
President Bush Fails To Answer Critical Questions, http://www.tblog.com/template...
President Bush Declares Another Premature "Mission Accomplished" At The U.N., http://www.tblog.com/template...
George Bush, Master of Sanctimony, http://www.tblog.com/template...
White House Doesn’t Play Well With Others, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... President Bush Fails To Answer Critical Questions ... |
| 09.22.04 (7:02 am) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" deserve answers ... [/b]
President Bush yesterday addressed the United Nations http://www.tblog.com/template... . Here are six critical questions he neglected to answer:
[b]How does the administration plan to deal with the growing nuclear threat from North Korea?[/b]
Bush made no mention of North Korea is his speech today before the United Nations. Charles Pritchard, formerly Colin Powell's top official dealing with North Korea, has warned for months that "the White House lacks an effective strategy to dissuade North Korea from building up its nuclear arms." Under Bush's watch, "North Korea's nuclear arsenal, which was once thought to number one or two weapons, appears to be growing substantially." According to Pritchard, the situation has deteriorated because "the administration has neither offered much of a carrot nor wielded a stick." The administration has refused to engage North Korea in direct negotiations or "put the North Koreans on notice that further developments will trigger economic sanctions or perhaps even military actions." In short, the Bush administration has no real policy for dealing with North Korea. According to Stuart Taylor of the National Journal, North Korea may already have eight nuclear weapons and could be on its way to "making about a dozen a year, with every intention of selling them to terrorists and other willing bidders."
[u]Sources[/u]
. New York Times, Warnings Go Unheeded Over North Korea Threat http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
. National Journal, Nuclear Terror: Has Bush Made Matters Worse? http://www.crimlaw.org/defbri...
. American Progress Report Card http://www.americanprogress.o...
[b]How does the administration plan to deal with the growing nuclear threat from Iran?[/b]
President Bush also neglected to mention Iran, even as the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) prepare to address the country's growing nuclear challenge. Even after President Bush famously named Iran to the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address, the White House has done nothing to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions. By threatening Iran rhetorically, President Bush emboldened Iranian hardliners and fed their desire to develop the ability to produce weapons-grade nuclear material as quickly as possible. The White House then abdicated all responsibility, leaving the hard work to the Europeans; today the U.S. lacks almost any influence to keep the Iranian nuclear genie in the bottle.
[u]Sources[/u]
. Boston Globe, "US turning more to UN for help" http://www.boston.com/news/wo...
. National Journal, "Nuclear Terror: Has Bush Made Matters Worse?" http://www.crimlaw.org/defbri...
. New York Times, "Bush Aides Divided on Confronting Iran Over A-Bomb" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
[b]Is President Bush ignoring reality in Iraq?[/b]
President Bush said Iraq was "on the path to democracy and freedom" and claimed his invasion of the country was "good for the long-term security of all of us." What he didn't mention: A classified National Intelligence Estimate, given to him in July but reported on only last week, "spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq." The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the most favorable outcome being an Iraq "whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms." As for the president's war making the world safer for "all of us," the available evidence flatly contradicts such a claim. The International Institute for Strategic Studies says the war in Iraq has swelled the ranks of al Qaeda, focusing the energies and resources of the terrorists, while diluting those of the global counter-terrorism coalition. Meanwhile, the security situation has deteriorated to such an extent that September threatens to be one of the deadliest months for American troops since the war began, and the administration has had to divert crucial funds from reconstruction projects just to maintain a semblance of order.
[u]Sources[/u]
. New York Times, U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
. BBC, Al-Qaeda 'spurred on' by Iraq war http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi...
. LA Times, September Proving to Be One of the Deadliest Months for U.S. Troops http://www.latimes.com/news/n...,1,1201842.story?coll=la-iraq-comple te
. New York Times, Iraqis Warn U.S. Plan to Divert Billions to Security Could Cut Off Crucial Services http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
[b]Is President Bush ignoring reality in Afghanistan?[/b]
President Bush cited success in Afghanistan as an accomplishment of his global leadership. What he didn't mention: Escalating violence forced the United Nations to evacuate its staff from the city of Herat last week after a mob turned "international aid facilities into smoldering, looted ruins." President Karzai's government currently has little to no authority outside the city of Kabul; the rest of the countryside is controlled by warlords and the reconstituted Taliban. The $2.2 billion opium racket is booming, with money going into pockets of terrorists worldwide. The United States has not captured Osama bin Laden nor his deputy, who are thought to still be directing attacks in Afghanistan. Voter registration fraud coupled with rampant violence have led to serious doubts over whether the country will be able to hold elections – which have already been postponed twice – in October.
[u]Sources[/u]
. Washington Post, U.N. Pulls Workers From Afghan City http://www.washingtonpost.com...
. Boston Globe, Crackdown on Afghanistan's cash crop looms http://www.boston.com/news/wo...
. AP, Rice Won't Speculate on Bin Laden's Fate http://www.kansascity.com/mld...
. Los Angeles Times, Bin Laden's Hand Seen in Afghanistan http://www.latimes.com/news/n...,1,2073306.story?coll=la-headlines-w orld
. Toronto Star, Afghan Vote Threatens Bush's Credibility http://www.thestar.com/NASApp...
[b]What is President Bush doing to promote democracy in Russia?[/b]
President Bush told the General Assembly today that, "Because we believe in human dignity, peaceful nations must stand for the advance of democracy." But Bush ignored his good friend Vladimir Putin's attack on democracy in Russia. In recent weeks, Putin has decreed "the most sweeping consolidations of presidential power since the fall of communism." On Sept. 13, Putin "announced a plan to eliminate the general election of regional governors and of independent seats in parliament, essentially removing the last real checks on his personal dominion over the largest nation on Earth." Putin now has control over "an absolute majority in parliament, all major television stations, the Russian gas giant Gazprom, the country's corrupt judicial system and a massive state security apparatus." According to the pro-democracy Committee 2008 organization's Vladimir Kara-Murza, "Putin is now past the point where his regime can be removed peacefully by democratic means. There's no independent media, there's no parliament to speak of, there are no real parliamentary elections and now with the decision about the regional governors, there are no elections at all."
[u]Sources[/u]
. Los Angeles Times, Whispered in Russia: Democracy Is Finished http://www.latimes.com/news/n...,1,1418022.story?coll=la-home-world
. Washington Post, Democracy in Trouble http://www.washingtonpost.com...
[b]Why should the international community trust that the administration will follow through on the pledge for a global Democracy Fund?[/b]
President Bush today proposed the creation of a Democracy Fund to be set up through the United Nations. He has a poor track record when it comes to follow-through on his ambitious U.N. proposals. For example, President Bush two years ago promised the United States would lead the global fight against AIDS and made a commitment to provide $15 billion over five years. He subsequently underfunded that promise, asking Congress for only $2 billion last year. He also tried to cut funding to the Global Fund, the existing international group which has been devoted to fighting AIDS, by 64 percent in 2005. The Bush administration also failed to fund U.N. peacekeeping missions which the United States voted to authorize. Since February, President Bush has authorized four new peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Cote D'Ivoire, Sudan and Burundi through the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. share of the missions is estimated to be $600 million, but the administration has failed to request these funds from Congress.
[u]Sources[/u]
. Miami Herald, America's global AIDS policy criticized http://www.aegis.com/news/mh/...
. San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. takes solo course in global AIDS fight http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/art...
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
President Bush Declares Another Premature "Mission Accomplished" At The U.N., http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... On Being a Liberal ... |
| 09.21.04 (4:01 pm) [edit] |
... "For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal...." - John F. Kennedy, Speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963
"What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then … we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."" - John F. Kennedy, September 14, 1960
[b]I, WinstonSmith am a Liberal and moreover I am proud to be a Liberal ... "We the People" have allowed the right-wing to hijack this honorable and distinguished appellation for far too long and to aggressively misrepresent it (which is wrong [i]whether or not [/i]one agrees with Liberal viewpoints) ... We Liberals must take our heritage back [i]and[/i] be unafraid to talk Liberal-Talk [i]and[/i] be more forceful in promoting the Liberal agenda that stands by those who struggle and those who are the most vulnerable in our society ... Today I came across this article in [i]GuerrillaNews[/i] http://www.guerrillanews.com/... and wish to share it with you: ...[/b]
I gotta hand it to the neo-cons. They have been able to take the word "liberal" and re-define it for a whole generation. Not that they seem to know what the word means, (they don't) but by carefully, and skillfully repeating it, maligning it, defiling it and negatively associating it they have created a mantra that the "ditto heads" froth at the mouth to misuse. It is their version of the "F" word or more appropriately for them, the "N" word. A buzz word to denigrate, repudiate and polarize.
Back in the 50's it was easier for them. They just called anyone progressive a "communist" or a "pinko" or a "red" or a "commie." That was the mantra of their time.
But the trouble with that was the word was soon associated with one of the most embarrassing and shameful times in our history, the McCarthy hearings. Since "Tail Gunner Joe" went down in shameful flames (will someone please break the news to the deranged Ann Coulter) the phrase had to be discarded. It was no longer effective. Neither was McCarthy who died in disgrace.
Let's look at the real defintion of the word "Liberal" shall we?
lib·er·al Lib"er*al, Adj. 1. Favoring political and social reforms tending towards democracy and personal freedoms for the individual; advocating reform or progress in education, religion, etc. 2. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; not bigoted. 3. Open to new ideas for progress; tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded. 4. Describing Democratic forms of government, as distinguished from monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, fascism, etc.
Hey, I'm down with that. I don't see anything there to be ashamed of, do you? So why then have we let these amoral cowards re-define this word to suit their regressive myopic agenda?
I think it's because we got caught off guard. After the shame of the McCarthy era how could anyone have ever thought in their wildest dreams that a whole pig pen full of "baby McCarthy's" would pop up again. Just as craven, just as ignorant but way more effective. It seemed inconceivable.
But it's time to fight back. There is no shame in being a liberal. Don't run from the "real" definition of "Liberal." And I don't mean the Fox News Alan Colmes kind. That's how they want us to see ourselves. Alan seems like a nice guy but he has no balls and looks like a dentist from Peoria.
Stand up and be counted Liberals! Fuck these neo-con imbeciles. Am I a "liberal?" Hell yes! I would puke blood if I ever got called a "conservative." A word I now associate with horrible hypocrites like "Blackjack" Bill Bennett, Dickless Cheney, Sean "Lardass" Hannity, Rush "Junkie" Limbaugh, Newt "I want an annulment after 17 years of marriage so I can marry my intern" Gingrich, Ollie "Unibrow" North, Bill "No Smiley", Bob "Traitor" Novak and Brit "I Like to Smell My Own Farts" Hume. Does anyone want to be like these fucking LOSERS!!! Hell no!!!!
Had he lived Bill Hicks would have scorched these dipshits so bad that they would have been praying for death.
Bill Hicks was a "Liberal". Steve Earle is a "Liberal." Howard Zinn is a "Liberal." Al Franken is a "Liberal." Chuck D is a "Liberal." Michael Moore is a "Liberal." Paul Newman is a "Liberal." Meryl Streep is a "Liberal." Robert DeNiro is a "Liberal." James Carville is "Liberal." Bruce Springsteen is a "Liberal." The Rev. Martin Luther King was a "Liberal." Bill Maher is a "Liberal." Sam Shepard is a "Liberal." Ghandi was a "Liberal." The Dalai Lama is a "Liberal." Maureen Dowd is a "Liberal. Jon Stewart is a "Liberal." Molly Ivins is a "Liberal." Noam Chomsky is a "Liberal." John Cassavetes was a "Liberal." Jack Nicholson is a "Liberal." Jesus Christ was a "Liberal."
And I'm a "Liberal" too.
Wake the fuck up people!
The Revolution starts NOW!
"I eventually made it back to[i] there[/i]. Beyond that I have no idea."
[b]P.S. Our Founding Fathers were "Liberals" too!!![/b]
[b]Sources:[/b]
George Washington: "I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice & liberality", http://www.tblog.com/template...
Think Again: The Word 'Liberal', http://www.tblog.com/template...
On Being a Liberal, http://www.guerrillanews.com/...
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| ... President Bush Declares Another Premature "Mission Accomplished" At The U.N. ... |
| 09.21.04 (2:24 pm) [edit] |
"To be prepared is half the victory." - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
[b]A flag-covered casket http://www.truthout.org/docs_... surrounded by the word "OIL" sits in a storefront window in Chicago, Illinois.[/b] Titled, "Vote World Peace, Not World War," this display features several dismembered mannequins smeared with theatrical blood in addition to the casket, and symbolizes the ever-increasing numbers of Iraq War casualties - both in terms of fallen U.S. soldiers and ongoing presidential campaign infighting.
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney neo-cons rushed into their insane, illegal and immoral war in Iraq without the proper preparation for the "post-war" [[i]sic[/i]] phase ... Consequently, we are embroiled in a horrific bloody fiasco in Iraq that even our representatives in Congress from both parties condemn as having been badly bungled by the Bushies' "incompetent" planning ... Bush made a stupid appearance on the 1st May 2003 aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln bombastically declaring "Mission Accomplished": It wasn't true [i]then[/i], and it's not true[i] now [/i]... Today at the United Nations (U.N.), Bush[i] again [/i]prematurely declared some sort of bizarre "victory" regarding his miserable failure in Iraq and his disastrous debacle in Afghanistan-- demonstrating that he is out-of-touch with reality[i] and [/i]unfit to lead our nation ... Bush is a national disgrace who fools no-one except perhaps himself ...[/b]
This morning at the United Nations, President Bush declared premature victory in Iraq and Afghanistan but failed to mention some of the world's greatest threats to the American people.
The president touted the worldwide march of democracy, but sugar-coated grim challenges facing Iraq and Afghanistan, where growing turmoil threatens to disrupt upcoming elections. And while he called on the United Nations and its member-states to step up to the plate in Iraq, he failed to outline a plan or vision that could provoke any meaningful international support. Nor did the president make any reference to Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or other hotspots where democracy has taken a step backwards.
Stunningly, the president also failed to mention Iran and North Korea. Iran - topic number one at the United Nations – has just announced that it will continue to enrich 37 tons of uranium, enough material for five nuclear weapons. And North Korea, which has quadrupled its nuclear stockpile over the past three years, continues to make aggressive moves unchecked. The record on both is particularly ironic given the administration's admission that a terrorist armed with a nuclear weapon poses the greatest threat to the American people.
The president's proposal for a United Nations democracy fund is a welcome idea, but will he treat it like his other high-profile initiatives? The administration and Congress have failed to fully fund the president's Millennium Challenge Account and his plan to combat HIV/AIDS. And both initiatives are designed to work around rather than strengthen international cooperation.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Robert O. Boorstin is the senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress., http://www.americanprogress.o...
Crude Dudes, U.S. oil companies just happened to have billions of dollars they wanted to invest in undeveloped oil reserves, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ... Your Media is Killing You ... |
| 09.21.04 (11:49 am) [edit] |
"A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad." - Albert Camus
"MEDIA is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism." - Graham Greene
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent." - Gore Vidal
[b]Without a free media, independent journalism and a responsible press to keep watch over our government and keep us informed, our Republic is dead ... "We the People" must enter into the debate regarding the failure of our media to hold the corrupt politicos in the traitorous Bush regime, who have hijacked our nation, accountable for the myriad crimes that they have committed in our name against our own vulnerable citizens and against the world community ...[/b]
The American mainstream television news media, in whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the American people and is singularly responsible for the untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people.
The trajectory of this plunge is easy to chart. The 1980s saw unprecedented deregulation of the rules pertaining to the ownership of media outlets. Thus began the combination and consolidation of dozens of differing viewpoints under the iron control of a few massive corporations. The many voices became one voice, and a dullard's voice at that.
The opening year of the 1990s saw the push towards our first war in Iraq. Rather than hold to basic standards set by Edward R. Murrow and the other giants of journalism - see it for yourself, do the legwork, because the American people deserve to know what is happening - the mainstream television news media decided their best course was to allow themselves to be hand-fed by the Pentagon. No footage, no reports, no news whatsoever would be released to the public without first passing through Defense Department screeners. The American people learned from this that war looks like a video game, that death is remote, that victory is a simple matter of pushing a button.
After surrendering their integrity to governmental and military entities which lie as a matter of course, the mainstream television news media learned with the trial of O.J. Simpson the simple truth espoused by H.L. Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Day after day, for sixteen months, every television was filled around the clock with soap-opera entertainment passing itself off as news. The American people, deprived of substantive information about the world around them, learned that real news is only about celebrities.
Then came the greatest entertainment-as-news extravaganza of all time: The Monica Lewinski scandal and the impeachment of a President who lied about sex. As an athlete will lose muscle tone if he stays away from the gym or the playing field, so did the intellectual muscles of the media atrophy after years of avoiding the basic efforts required in their field. Why run a scoop down about the war if I can just publish this Pentagon-prepared battle assessment? Why investigate Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster when I can just regurgitate this fax I just got from the Republican National Committee's media headquarters? If I can just get in front of the camera with a salacious bit of gossip, I can become an anchor. For many 'journalists,' the inflated nonsense of the impeachment was their "White Bronco."
Meanwhile, during the period beginning with the O.J. trial and concluding with the impeachment extravaganza, the Taliban was taking control of Afghanistan in the wake left by the completion of our anti-Soviet policies in that nation. A man named Osama bin Laden was preparing to attack anything and everything American he could get close to. UNSCOM weapons inspectors under Scott Ritter were taking Iraq's chemical and biological warfare capabilities apart literally brick by brick, and the sanctions against that nation, which were killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, were also reducing Saddam Hussein's conventional arsenal to a large collection of formidable paperweights.
One threat was on the rise, another was on the wane, but this is boring stuff compared to ill-fitting leather gloves and a stained blue dress. The American people were never provided the full scope of the security issues facing their country, because the television news media they relied upon didn't want to put in the work. Often, when then-President Clinton acted to address these security issues, he was accused of "wagging the dog," i.e. manufacturing unimportant threats to obscure the really important stuff, like whether or not he purchased gifts for Lewinski at the Big Dog store on Nantucket.
Think of these points - media laziness, media complicity with the powers-that-be, media obsession with fantastically unimportant gossip and tabloidism - and then remember those tall buildings in New York collapsing to the ground. Perhaps the 'journalists' involved could have been focusing on other things before that dark day?
Sunday night's episode of the CBS News program '60 Minutes' had a long, detailed and graphic expose on the fighting that recently took place in Najaf and Fallujah. All of the commercials for the program, however, focused on the '60 Minutes' interview with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It was a clever bit of sleight-of-hand; by now, Americans have been well-trained to spurn whatever tiny molecules of substantive news that might somehow blunder across their screens, because the truly important stuff has more to do with who is sleeping with J-Lo and how Ben feels about it.
Sports is, of course, the champion distraction. Listen to any sports talk radio show; if the American people could rattle off housing or budget statistics, if they could quote from memory the casualty statistics from Operation Iraqi Freedom, the way they can tell you in half a second how many doubles Manny Ramirez hit in his rookie season, half-bright loafers like George W. Bush would never have a prayer in American politics. Perhaps CBS knew this. Millions of viewers made time to watch Belichick, and were treated to a bloody and terrifying and accurate view of the Iraq occupation that has been thoroughly, completely and utterly absent.
For more than two years now, this column space has been dedicated to describing, with all truth and verified data in hand, the mess an invasion of Iraq would create. This column was among the first to declare that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that any alleged connection between Osama bin Laden and the government of Iraq was laughable on its face, that democracy was a pipe dream in Iraq, that we would not be greeted as liberators, and that any military action in Iraq based upon these unfounded claims would result in a destabilized Middle East, a world filled with furious former allies, and an ocean of blood spilled by American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
All of this has come to pass.
How is it that little truthout.org, with its limited resources and small staff, got it right time and again while ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN and Fox - with their massive financial resources and their huge pool of reporters - got it so totally and continuously wrong? The answer comes in two parts.
The first part is the degree to which these nationally broadcast news stations have become compromised by the corporations that own them. The ownership of the media is key to understanding the process. Take the example of General Electric, owners of NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. This company is one of the largest defense contractors in America; they get paid every time we go to war, and yet we somehow believe they will tell us the truth of war, even though it affects their profit margin. Such thinking is folly.
Take the example of AOL/TimeWarner, owner of CNN. This company lives and dies by the 'outsourcing' of American technological jobs overseas, where labor is cheaper. Do you think they will tell a straight story about the economy with so much on the line? Such thinking is folly, and never mind the fact that AOL/TimeWarner's largest investor is a Saudi. So much for the truth about who really supports Osama bin Laden and international terrorism. So much for the truth about what really happened on September 11, and why.
The decision by the mainstream television news media to get into bed with the very entities they are supposed to stand watchdog against has been a mortal one. Once it becomes acceptable to get your reporting from Defense Department and military spin-doctors, without doing any work on your own, the game is over. What started with the Gulf War as a new 'reporting' technique has become an institutionalized process of standing as mouthpiece for those who deserve the strongest scrutiny.
The White House and Defense Department boys know this, and exploited it ruthlessly in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration sought to capitalize on the tragedy by using it as an excuse to invade Iraq, something the power-pitchers in the administration had wanted for more than a decade. A shadowy and little-known media consulting company called The Rendon Group got a $100,000-a-month contract from the Pentagon right after the attacks. The Rendon Group was getting paid to offer media strategy advice. Or, in other words, propaganda.
The Rendon Group has been around a long time, and stands at the center of the media's failure to report accurately on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Rendon Group has received close to $200 million from the Pentagon and CIA over the last several years to spread anti-Hussein propaganda far and wide. One of the first steps they took was to create in 1992, out of absolute thin air, the Iraqi National Congress. The Iraqi National Congress, and its most famous spokesperson Ahmad Chalabi, are entirely the creation of a media strategy company doing the bidding of the United States government.
Since 1992, the Iraqi National Congress has become accepted completely by the mainstream news media as a legitimate group. They were embraced by the American Congress under Newt Gingrich and given hundreds of millions of dollars. They were, with the help of the aforementioned Congress, the driving force behind the passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998, an Act which made the removal of Saddam Hussein a matter of American law. All this for a group made out of nothing by what amounts to a media consulting company.
The post-9/11 money paid to the Rendon Group returned handsome dividends for the investment. Rendon creation Ahmad Chalabi, who has since been accused of giving vital national security secrets to Iran, arranged an interview between Judith Millerof the New York Times and an Iraqi defector named Adnan Ishan Saeed al-Haidieri. al-Haidieri claimed to have personal knowledge of the vast and growing stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Miller, thinking Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were worthy sources, believed al-Haidieri and printed an exclusive report on the threat posed by Iraq in the Times.
Time and a little legwork has since exposed al-Haidieri as a total fraud, but Rendon's propaganda got out there; as the New York Times goes, so goes the rest of the mainstream media. Miller's report, released in 2001, created a landslide push towards war, and allowed George W. Bush to sell the American people a frightening and utterly inaccurate portrait of why war was necessary, and necessary now.
Companies like The Rendon Group are a bellweather for exactly how depraved our journalistic institutions have become. Millions of dollars in government contracts are there for the taking by anyone who wants to scam the media with bogus stories. The media is more than happy to oblige, because it relieves them of having to put the necessary work in. Meanwhile, stories that might negatively affect the parent companies go by the boards, and everyone is happy.
Well, almost everyone is happy. The families of 1,033 American soldiers who have died in Iraq aren't happy. The families of the 17,000 or so American soldiers who have been 'medically evacuated' from Iraq for things like missing legs and faces aren't happy. The families of the 20,000 or so civilians killed in the invasion of Iraq aren't happy, and a lot of them are taking their unhappiness to the streets with grenades and rifles so they can make more American families unhappy by killing American soldiers.
Don't look to the mainstream television news media for an apology or a reversal of course anytime soon. They can't report the truth now. To do so would expose them as the incompetent lapdogs they have become, and as anyone who has ever screwed up at work knows, the hardest person to face after a grievous error is the person you find in the mirror.
The second part of the answer to that question - How is it that little truthout.org got it right time and again while the entire mainstream television news media got it wrong? - is simplicity itself.
We put in the work. We did the research in triplicate. We talked to the people who knew the score. We took the time. We cared. We understood that September 11 did not require us to click our heels and say "Yes sir!" to whatever balderdash Mr. Bush and his crew spouted. Quite completely the opposite is true. We understood that September 11 made it more important than ever for us to be very, very good at what we do.
The American mainstream television news media, in whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the American people and is singularly responsible for the untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. It is not too late for them to reverse course, to take again the simple rules and requirements espoused by Murrow and Mencken and place them at the forefront of their institutional mission. Nothing less than the basic stability of our republic is at stake.
[b]Sources:[/b]
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.', http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
Journalism Under Fire, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... White House Doesn’t Play Well With Others ... |
| 09.21.04 (10:09 am) [edit] |
"Every step of the way in Iraq there have been pessimists and hand-wringers who said it can't be done." - White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 9/15/04
"To say, 'Well, we just must stay the course and any of you who are questioning are just hand-wringers,' is not very responsible." - Sen. Check Hagel, 9/19/04
[b]President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and their cabal of neo-con cronies are arrogant, corrupt and incompetent ... Iraq is a bloody shambles ... Our ailing economy is an unconscionable mess ... "We the People" need a[i] change [/i]of leadership and we need it [i]now[/i]!!! ...[/b]
President Bush made his annual address to the United Nations this morning. For the past four years, the president has alienated much of the international community, blatantly squandering support offered to the United States after the attacks of 9/11. His policies have alienated much of the world, leaving the United States with few allies in the global war on terrorism. On issue after issue, the White House has adhered to a go-it-alone strategy, putting right-wing ideology ahead of health issues and refusing to support international efforts to fight poverty, global warming and AIDS. President Bush assails the United Nations, then expects support for U.S. initiatives when he makes his once-a-year address. What the Bush administration fails to realize: It isn't that the United States is asking the U.N., or any nation, for a permission slip – this is about protecting U.S. interests and taxpayer dollars. Working with the U.N. gives legitimacy to international efforts; it also is in the nation's self-interest, as it means U.S. taxpayers aren't solely responsible for the bill for global endeavors.
[b]ARROGANCE SQUANDERS SUPPORT:[/b] President Bush went out of his way to denigrate and alienate the United Nations and its member states in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. ("International law?" joked Bush about the preemptive invasion of Iraq. "I better call my lawyer. He didn't bring that up to me.") Addressing the United Nations two years ago on 9/12/02, he taunted, "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" On 2/13/03, Bush warned the United Nations was in danger of becoming "an ineffective, irrelevant debating society." On 2/18/03, Bush questioned the U.N.'s "backbone and courage."
[b]ALIENATING ALLIES IN IRAQ:[/b] The White House angered and alienated much of the world with its single-minded push to invade Iraq. Showing the depth of the alienation, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned the war last week as "illegal." The international community, deterred by the ongoing violence and lack of support for the war at home, declined to send support troops for the U.N. team helping to prepare for elections, meaning the team has been confined to the heavily fortified "Green Zone" in Baghdad, unable to reach many Iraqis. Even staunch supporters of the war in Iraq are beginning to withdraw support: Great Britain "is to start pulling troops out of Iraq next month despite the deteriorating security situation in much of the country." Embracing the United Nations from the start would have prevented the problems of legitimacy that have plagued the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Interim Governing Council. Instead, the United States is stuck with few allies and nearly 90 percent of the cost.
[b]IRAN IGNORED:[/b] President Bush is expected to urge the UN and its agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to take a hard line on the growing nuclear challenge from Iran. What he won't say: after famously labeling Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil, the White House did nothing to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions. By threatening Iran, in fact, he emboldened Iranian hardliners and fed their desire to develop the ability to produce weapons-grade nuclear material as quickly as possible. He abdicated all responsibility, leaving the hard work to the Europeans; today the U.S. lacks almost any influence to keep the Iranian nuclear genie in the bottle.
[b]UNDERMINING GLOBAL EFFORTS:[/b] President Bush has also alienated U.N. allies by terminating negotiations on the Kyoto and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties, not supporting key international AIDS conferences and working on behalf of the tobacco industry to undermine international efforts to reduce smoking. The White House has also worked on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry to undermine other countries' efforts to make medicines more affordable.
[b]UNDERFUNDED MISSIONS:[/b] The Bush administration has failed to fund the United Nations to execute missions the United States has voted to authorize. Since February, President Bush has authorized four new peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Cote D'Ivoire, Sudan and Burundi through the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. share of the missions is estimated to be $600 million, but the administration failed to request these funds from Congress. The failure to request funding for new operations approved by the United States undermines our credibility abroad as a reliable and trustworthy member of the Security Council.
[b]SIDESTEPPING POVERTY:[/b] Leaders from more than 50 governments attended two U.N. conferences yesterday on how to handle the problem of global poverty. More than 100 countries adopted proposals aimed at fighting hunger and poverty on an international scale. Notably absent? President Bush. The United States declined to support the initiative, even though it was nonbinding.
[b]IGNORED SLAVERY:[/b] In his last address to the United Nations, President Bush focused heavily on the issue of human trafficking. A new report, however, shows international slavery is on the rise. "Right now the world has a glut of human slaves - 27 million by conservative estimates and more than at any time in human history." Yet the president has provided little more than rhetoric in combating the problem. "For instance, between 14,000 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States annually, according to the U.S. government, most forced into the sex trade, domestic servitude, or agricultural labor. At any one time, between 52,000 and 87,000 are in bondage." Yet "last year, only nine trafficking cases were prosecuted in the U.S. with a total of 17 convictions - the smallest sliver of those working the new slave trade."
[b]WITHDRAWN SUPPORT FOR WOMEN'S HEALTH:[/b] The White House has allowed ideology to undermine crucial public health measures for women. The New York Times reported recently that there has been little progress in goals set by the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, a plan of action which called for "universal access to reproductive health care, and lower infant, child, and maternal mortality rates." Today, the number of women who die during childbirth remains high and the HIV epidemic is "exploding among women and children." President Bush withdrew U.S. support for the Cairo agreement and cut financing to international family planning groups that provide information about abortion, letting the right-wing of his conservative base dictate an ineffective global health strategy. Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, stated: "In a reversal of its historic role, my own country has emerged as one of the most significant obstacles to progress…on issue after issue, the current administration has placed ideology above evidence and bias over science."
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Time For A Checkup ... |
| 09.21.04 (6:49 am) [edit] |
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein
[b]How is it that the richest nation in the world can barely meet the health benchmarks set by former Soviet Union countries?[/b] It's all about averages, says Merrill Goozner of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. There's a huge race- and class-based health care disparity in the United States. And it's a problem that's going to take more than promises of universal health care to solve. "We the People" need fresh eyes to find a solution to the problem for the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is callously ignoring the problem of health care[i] for all of our citizens[/i] in our nation.
[b]Merrill Goozner is director of the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest http://www.cspinet.org/ and a contributing editor to The American Prospect. He has been a journalist and researcher for more than 20 years.[/b]
The United States spends more on health care than any country on earth—nearly 15 percent of its overall economy. That's nearly a half again as much as other countries and on a per capita basis, no one else is even close. Yet if one looks at the performance of our health care system, we're clearly not getting what we pay for.
[i]USA Today [/i]last week published a list of the top 50 countries in terms of life expectancy. The United States ranked third from the bottom. That's right. We're number 48. This year, Americans can expect an average life span of 77.4 years, nearly four years behind the Japanese.
Of course, our longevity has been rising every year by a small amount. But many countries that spend nowhere near our levels on doctors, hospital stays, drugs and sophisticated tests are clearly getting a lot more for their money.
Take the oppressed citizens of the British isles, for instance. We're constantly told they are suffering under the yoke of an incompetent national health care system. Yet they live nearly a year longer on average than Americans.
How about those beer-swilling, sausage-stuffing Germans? They live 14 months longer on average.
Just over the border in Canada, the press constantly claims that our northern cousins are suffering endless waits for basic procedures that we take for granted. Surely they must be dying off at a faster clip. Uh-uh. They have two-and-a-half more years than the average American. Perhaps they spend it waiting on lines for their health care.
Among large industrialized countries, the life expectancy leaders—all with an average life expectancy over 80 years—were Japan, Switzerland and Sweden. What do they have in common? They have national health care plans. But more importantly, they have a high degree of income and social equality across their societies—which, more than any other single factor, correlates with superior health outcomes.
A quick look at the Centers for Disease Control website at health disparities in the United States gives a few clues about why our health care system performs so poorly despite outlandish costs. While the overall U.S. life expectancy rate is 77 years, the rate for blacks is about 72 years with black males at a Third World-level of 68 years.
Infant mortality—a prime indicator of how well health care services are distributed in a society—is another area where the United States lags sadly behind its industrialized rivals. The CDC rankings of selected countries showed the United States at 28th out of 37 countries.
Who fell below us in safe and healthy childbirths and infant care through the first year of life? Virtually all the laggards (other than the United States) are countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. How can it be that we not much better off than Romania in this vital statistic? It's not middle-class moms in suburban hospitals losing babies. It's poor mothers without prenatal care. It's teenagers who hide their pregnancies, deliver low birth weight babies and have few support systems to help them care for their newborns.
The health effects of race and class are America's hidden health care story. Low-wage work leads to lousy diets because the foods that are plentiful and cheap happen to be the worst for you. Fear of unemployment and economic decline defines America's large lower middle class today and this produces tremendous psychic stress —an unreported epidemic. We spend billions on drugs to lower blood pressure, reduce cholesterol and treat diabetes, but almost nothing on social programs to offset the income-related lifestyles that lead to these conditions.
In this election season, by all means let's have a debate about how to provide health insurance to the 43 million Americans without it. But let's also talk about who in this society suffers from ill health, why they suffer and what can be done about the social and economic disparities that lead to ill health. It will take more than universal insurance coverage to tackle those issues.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Health Care: Conflict of Interest 101, http://www.tblog.com/template...
JobWatch: US States Still in Job Hole [Graphical Analyses of the Status Across US States], http://www.tblog.com/template...
Mind the Gap in the Middle, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Under the Radar: Corrupt CEOs Un-Ethical???, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Poor Children Left Behind, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush's Cut-and-Spend Plan Is Math-Challenged, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Economic Policy Institute, JobWatch, http://www.jobwatch.org/state...
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| ... JobWatch: US States Still in Job Hole [Graphical Analyses of the Status Across US States] ... |
| 09.20.04 (5:41 pm) [edit] |
"Seems like the government's got more interest in a dead man than a live one." - Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
“Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Whenever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there ... I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.” - Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
"Rich folk come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep acoming, Pa, cus' we're the people that live." - Ma Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
[b]"Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow ... And in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." - The Grapes of Wrath [/b]
[b]Nothing is more disspiriting than to witness the despair of those who lose their very livelihoods ... For our nation's spirit, survival and well-being, "We the People" must reject the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] for they have brought war, death and disaster abroad[i] and [/i]rising joblessness, poverty and neglect of those in need here at home ...[/b]
Recent months have brought the overdue news that a majority of states finally have growing payrolls. But as welcome as these reports have been, job growth in most instances is still insufficient.
In the so-called "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, 33 months after that recession ended, only nine states still had fewer jobs than when the recession started. There was a strong regional pattern—the nine states were California and eight states around the northeastern part of the country.
The current jobless recovery is a much different story. By August 2004, the current recession has also been over for 33 months, but the jobs picture across the country is very different. Thirty-two states, spread across the country, are still in the jobs hole. In some cases, the job deficit is still severe: Colorado, for example, is still down over 70,000 jobs (3% of employment) and Ohio has lost over 224,000 jobs (4% of employment).
Simply looking at the number of jobs, however, understates the severity of the shortfall. For example, while Texas has 93,000 fewer jobs compared to the start of the recession, the working-age population has grown by over 5%. In order to have kept up with a growing population, the state of Texas would need over 600,000 more jobs than it actually has.
And in all but one (Alaska) of the 18 states with more jobs than when the recession began, job growth has been insufficient to keep up with population growth. So while Wisconsin has 2,000 more jobs than when the recession began, it will need to add over 26,000 jobs per month for the rest of 2004 in order to have enough jobs by the end of the year to account for the growth in population over that time. (Wisconsin has only added an average of 7,000 jobs a month in the last six months.)
Unemployment rates, which are higher in 44 states than when the recession began, offer another glimpse into state-level labor market pain.
[b]Job growth lags projections for Bush Administration tax cuts in 48 states [/b]
The Bush Administration's economic policies continue to fail to generate the jobs that the administration claimed would be created. When President Bush argued for his "Jobs and Growth" tax cut plan last year, his Council of Economic Advisers predicted the creation of millions of jobs. Thus far, the national economy has fallen over two million jobs short of what was projected, http://www.jobwatch.org/natio... with only two states ahead of projections.
For most states in August, the difference between the Bush Administration claim and the actual jobs situation is enormous. Florida, for example, will have to add almost 50,000 jobs per month in the rest of 2004 in order to receive its share of the predicted benefits of the tax cut, but it has only added an average of 14,000 over the last six months. Michigan will have to add 55,000 jobs per month, but it has lost a total of 9,000 jobs in the last six months.
[b]Tables (August)[/b]
. Job growth compared to working-age population growth, start of recession through August 2004 - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
. Job growth compared to job growth projected by Bush Administration tax plan, June 2003 through August 2004 - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
. Unemployment rate by state, 41 months after start of recession - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
. Total payroll employment by state - http://www.jobwatch.org/20040...
[b]Organizations[/b]
For information on the jobs situation in particular states, go to the web sites of the organizations in the Economic Analysis and Research Network http://www.epinet.org/content... (EARN).
[b]Sources:[/b]
Mind the Gap in the Middle, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Under the Radar: Corrupt CEOs Un-Ethical???, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Poor Children Left Behind, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush's Cut-and-Spend Plan Is Math-Challenged, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Economic Policy Institute, JobWatch, http://www.jobwatch.org/state...
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| ... Bush's Cut-and-Spend Plan Is Math-Challenged ... |
| 09.20.04 (2:42 pm) [edit] |
"Anyone who says, 'I don't care if Bush gets elected' is basically telling poor and working people in the country, 'I don't care if your lives are destroyed. I don't care whether you are going to have a little money to help your disabled mother. I just don't care, because from my elevated point of view I don't see much difference between them.' That's a way of saying, 'Pay no attention to me, because I don't care about you.' Apart from its being wrong, it's a recipe for disaster if you're hoping to ever develop a popular movement and a political alternative."--Noam Chomsky, 2004
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] ruthless and reckless deficit spending is placing the back-breaking burden of all of their [i]corporate-take-all-wel fare-for-the-rich [/i]spending & squandering of our US taxpayer dollars on[i] illegal and immoral warfare in the Middle East [/i]upon the 'credit card' of the American Middle Class and Working People ... "We the People" are very foolish indeed if we do not reject this insanely incompetent, brutish and dishonest Bush regime ...[/b]
[b]Even allies say it would be nearly impossible to reduce the deficit while expanding programs.[/b]
To hear President Bush talk about his plans for a second term, voters might think that the era of big government spending is back.
From his proposal to overhaul Social Security to his commitment to fighting terrorism and his initiatives on health, education and job training, the agenda Bush is spelling out in speeches and campaign documents calls for the robust use of government money.
All this comes from the same candidate who promises to cut the federal budget deficit in half by 2009 and whose Cabinet agencies are preparing for some serious belt-tightening of domestic programs if he is reelected.
That mixed message - a smaller deficit, but costly new initiatives - may have more appeal to swing voters than the simpler message of old-fashioned conservatism, which calls for smaller government and less spending.
But many analysts say Bush's second-term promises may be a poor predictor of what he could actually accomplish. Even some administration allies say it would be nearly impossible for Bush to achieve all his ambitious objectives and still halve the deficit by 2009.
"Can it be done?" said G. William Hoagland, top budget aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). "Sure. On paper. But politically it's very difficult."
To do it all, Hoagland said, "lots of other things would have to be eliminated, terminated."
The result: Unlike Bush's 2000 campaign platform - whose major elements of tax cuts, school accountability and prescription drug subsidies for the elderly were enacted - his 2004 promises may have to be sharply scaled back or abandoned if he wins a second term.
Bush has made a big issue of arguing that Sen. John F. Kerry's health and education campaign promises do not square with his promise to reduce the deficit. Bush argues that his Democratic rival would have to raise taxes or add to the deficit to enact his spending plans.
But if he wins reelection, Bush will have tough choices of his own. Some analysts predict that much of his agenda would wither if he achieved what seemed to be his top priority: making permanent the tax cuts enacted in his first term. Doing so would cut government revenue by more than $1 trillion between 2005 and 2014.
"The one sure thing that will happen if he becomes president is the tax cuts will be permanent," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, a forecasting company in West Chester, Pa. "That will result in large, persistent budget deficits, so he will not be able to follow through on his other pledges."
Bush has repeatedly pledged that in five years, he would halve the deficit - measured as a share of the U.S. economy - from this year's expected peak of $521 billion, which amounts to 4.5% of the gross national product. That means Bush is aiming for a deficit of about $260 billion, or 2.25% of the GNP, in 2009.
But that goal may already be out of reach, according to the latest figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which provides economic analysis to Congress. Unless current tax and spending policies change, the CBO projects that the deficit will be about $312 billion in 2009.
Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, disputed the CBO's estimate, saying it assumed a higher long-term level of spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan than was reasonable. On the other hand, the CBO figure does not include the costs of making Bush's tax cuts permanent or other elements of his second-term agenda.
Even many Republicans are skeptical that Bush can - or will try particularly hard - to stick to his deficit reduction promise, because it probably would require a level of spending restraint with no precedent in modern times.
"I don't think he's that philosophically committed to deficit reduction if it involves politically painful choices," said Steve Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a Washington political group that advocates for lower taxes and smaller government. "He hasn't talked about any program he would want to cut."
The only part of the budget easily controlled every year by Congress and the president is discretionary spending, which covers programs from the Pentagon to school aid to law enforcement. The cost of mandatory programs - such as Medicare, welfare and food stamps, which pay out benefits to anyone who is eligible - can be changed only if Congress alters those programs' basic structure.
White House budget plans call for cutting overall funding for discretionary spending, other than for domestic security, by about 12% over five years, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group in Washington.
The group's analysts say that even bigger domestic cuts will be required if the plan is adjusted to reflect additional tax and spending initiatives Bush has endorsed but did not fold into his budget. These include spending on defense and anti-terrorism efforts and cuts in the alternative minimum tax - a tax intended to keep the wealthy from sheltering all their income. It increasingly is applying to - and raising taxes on - middle-income individuals.
"We'd be talking about a 25% to 30% cut" in domestic programs, said Richard Kogan, a senior fellow and budget expert at the center. "There's no precedent for that in the postwar period. It's just not realistic to think anything like that is going to happen."
A glimpse of what could be in store in next year's budget was provided in an Office of Management and Budget memo, leaked this year, that set stringent spending targets for federal agencies and departments as they began planning their budgets for fiscal year 2006, which begins Oct. 1, 2005. The memo sets targets below 2005 spending levels for a wide range of domestic programs: a 2.6% cut in education, a 3.1% cut in veterans' affairs and a 1.9% cut in the Environmental Protection Agency.
Kolton, the OMB spokesman, described the memo as a routine document giving agencies preliminary guidance as they began their budget planning, and said it did not reflect where the budget would end up. But Democrats contend it is a window onto what it would take to meet Bush's deficit-reduction goals without raising taxes.
Many analysts think that persistent budget deficits will also put a damper on Bush's ability to win approval of an overhaul of Social Security - a program that, starting in 2019, is expected to pay out to retirees more than it collects in taxes from workers.
Bush has not put forward a specific plan, but has said he wants to give workers the option of investing part of their Social Security payroll tax in private accounts - an approach many think could save money by harnessing the power of the stock market to provide equal or better returns to workers than the government trust fund investments.
Independent analysts, including the CBO, have estimated that it could cost at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years to make the transition to the new system, because the program would continue to pay benefits at current levels even as some younger workers diverted their payroll taxes to private accounts.
Bush campaign aides say those costs will be far outweighed by the long-term savings they expect from changing the Social Security system. But to make that case to Congress, Bush will have to overcome lawmakers' tendency to make decisions based on the short-term.
"When the savings materialize in 2040, we will all be dead," said Robert Reischauer, a budget expert and president of the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy research center in Washington. "We live in the present and borrow in the present."
Bush has proposed initiatives in health and other domestic programs that his campaign estimates will cost about $73.4 billion over 10 years. They include tax incentives for individuals to establish tax-sheltered health savings accounts, as well as expanded college scholarships and aid to economically distressed communities.
It is not clear how hard Bush would push for those initiatives, or how receptive Congress would be. Even now, some administration priorities have run into resistance in the House, where many conservatives are restless about the rise of government spending under Bush. Appropriations bills passed by the House in recent weeks shortchanged administration requests for more aid to community colleges, an initiative on space exploration, a foreign aid program for emerging democracies and an arts initiative promoted by First Lady Laura Bush.
Bush's domestic spending initiatives are a drop in the bucket compared with his ambitious tax policy agenda, which doesn't end with extending his tax cuts.
He has proposed several tax-sheltered accounts to encourage saving. The short-term cost to federal coffers are expected to be relatively modest - $5.6 billion over 10 years, according to the Bush campaign - but the cost is expected to be far greater in the future, when people start withdrawing money from these accounts. An analysis by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center estimates that the revenue losses could eventually run $35 billion a year.
Bush has called for an overhaul of the tax code to make it simpler and fairer, and promises to appoint a commission to study the idea. But tax overhaul is a notoriously difficult idea to turn from campaign rhetoric to legislative reality.
Grover Norquist, a conservative strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, predicted that the fate of Bush's second-term agenda would hinge on whether the election gives the Republicans a bigger margin of control in Congress.
"He will move as quickly toward fundamental tax reform as the makeup of the House and Senate will allow," said Norquist. "It's the same with Social Security."
[b]Sources:[/b]
Mind the Gap in the Middle, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Under the Radar: Corrupt CEOs Un-Ethical???, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Poor Children Left Behind, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Katrina vanden Heuvel,[i] Editor's Cut[/i], TheNation, http://www.thenation.com
Bush's Cut-and-Spend Plan Is Math-Challenged, By Janet Hook and Warren Vieth, [i]The Los Angeles Times[/i], http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
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| ... Mind the Gap in the Middle ... |
| 09.20.04 (12:30 pm) [edit] |
"You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings." - Pearl S. Buck
[b]"Congress is getting ready to raise taxes on four million low-income families, affecting nine million kids ..." is the [i]lede[/i] of a new report entitled "Poor Children Left Behind" http://www.tblog.com/template... , which should outrage our sense of the right course of action for a civilized society to take with regards to providing aide to our citizens in need ... Let "We the People" take action and vote on 2nd November to elect John Kerry for President of the United States of America in order to change the direction [i]away from [/i]the outrageous neglect of those in poverty and distress, callously displayed by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]...[/b]
[b]ECONOMY – GAP IN THE MIDDLE:[/b] Today's [i]Washington Post [/i]analyzes the "widening divide" http://www.washingtonpost.com... in America's middle class, "between those in its upper reaches whose jobs provide the trappings of the good life, and those in the lower rungs whose economic fortunes are less secure." Though the Post argues the damage is part of a structural change in the workforce, Bush administration policies http://www.americanprogress.o... encouraging companies to export jobs and rewarding them for reducing worker benefits have not helped. According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, "Of the 2.7 million jobs lost during and after the recession in 2001, the vast majority have been restructured out of existence." And because of "slack in the labor market," http://www.commondreams.org/h... new jobs created under the weak Bush recovery have not generated wages comparable to those jobs that were lost. Therefore, the middle class continues to shrink, even as jobs are added at both the high and low ends of the income ladder.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
Poor Children Left Behind, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Fear and Loathing in 2004 ... |
| 09.20.04 (11:44 am) [edit] |
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." - Marie Curie
"MACHINATION, n. The method employed by one's opponents in baffling one's open and honorable efforts to do the right thing.
So plain the advantages of machination It constitutes a moral obligation, And honest wolves who think upon't with loathing Feel bound to don the sheep's deceptive clothing. So prospers still the diplomatic art, And Satan bows, with hand upon his heart. --R.S.K." - Ambrose Bierce
[b]"We the People" are being inundated with neo-con trash and neo-fascist garbage from the right-wing attack-dogs within the insane Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]propaganda machine and we must discipline ourselves to reject these vile diversionary tactics in favor of focusing on the issues affecting our lives: namely war [i]versus[/i] peace; poverty [i]versus[/i] prosperity; and our future role in the world community ...[/b]
With just 43 days left in the presidential race, author Hunter S. Thompson's classic works http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... are being updated. We have reached Fear and Loathing 2004 – an epic struggle by an incumbent administration to do whatever it can to scare American voters into supporting it on November 2. The stage has already been set – through politicizing 9/11 and the war on terrorism, the White House has tried to own America's national security as a political issue, even as that politicization weakens both unity at home and security efforts abroad. Now, top administration officials – with the help of the media – are taking their efforts to the next level, claiming al Qaeda wants President Bush to lose, and that Iraqi insurgents are ramping up their attacks in an effort to hurt President Bush's election prospects. In every instance, however, they provide absolutely no evidence to back up the charges.
[b]CHENEY LEADS THE WAY:[/b] The Washington Post profiles Vice President Dick Cheney's main role on the campaign trail: fear monger. Cheney "rallies Republicans on the campaign trail with visions of apocalypse," speaking "like Darth Vader, as the ticket's voice of fear." Just last week, it was Cheney who claimed if John F. Kerry is elected, "the danger is that we'll get hit again" by terrorists. Like his claims about Iraq's WMD, Iraq's al Qaeda connections, and other national security matters, Cheney provided absolutely no intelligence or evidence to substantiate his assertion.
[b]WHAT CHENEY DOESN'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT:[/b] Cheney's rhetoric is, in many ways, designed to hide his embarrassing national security record that could have put America at risk, had it been implemented. With top Bush officials worrying about Iran pursuing nuclear weapons and aiding Iraqi insurgents against U.S. troops, Cheney is making sure his aggressive effort to do business with the Iranian government stays out of the public eye. As a new American Prospect report http://www.prospect.org/web/p... shows, it was Halliburton CEO Cheney who evaded U.S. sanctions laws and did business with Iran and Iraq. He even traveled abroad to attack the U.S. government's tough counter-terrorism policies against Iran because they were getting in the way of his oil business. See the full article http://www.prospect.org/web/p... .
[b]ARMITAGE BLAMES IRAQI INSURGENCY ON SUPPORT FOR KERRY:[/b] Though Secretary of State Colin Powell has refused to engage in the crass politicization of national security, that hasn't stopped his underlings. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, citing no evidence, made the outrageous claim late last week that insurgents have stepped up their deadly assaults in Iraq because they want to "influence the election against President Bush." Knight Ridder noted, "State Department officials could not offer any intelligence assessments to back up Armitage's statement."
[b]KONDRACKE PARROTS ARMITAGE, PROVIDES NO EVIDENCE:[/b] Media Matters, the nonpartisan media bias watchdog, caught Fox News pundit Mort Kondracke peddling Armitage's claim. On 9/16/04, Kondracke said, "There's clearly a campaign going to raise the level of casualties...designed to discourage the United States from persisting...and maybe even trying to help elect John Kerry." Kondracke, who has no background in counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency, provided no evidence to back up his charge.
[b]HASTERT THROWS WEIGHT AROUND WITH NEW SLANDER CAMPAIGN:[/b] Fresh off of embarrassing himself by calling George Soros a drug dealer, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) this weekend said al Qaeda "would like to influence this election" and that the terrorist group wants Sen. John Kerry to win. He offered no evidence.
[b]STEALTH CONSERVATIVE FLACK IS NOW A TERRORISM EXPERT?: [/b]CNN's Bill Schneider yesterday parroted GOP attacks, stating, " I can guarantee you, [al Qaeda terrorists] don't like George Bush...They would very much like to defeat President Bush." Schneider, of course, provided no evidence, nor any credentials that he is a terrorism expert with the knowledge to make such a claim. Then again, this should be expected from Schneider: though he is billed by CNN as a nonpartisan political analyst, he is actually a resident scholar at the far-right American Enterprise Institute who recently published an article advancing the White House line on Kerry's readiness to be commander in chief. E-mail Bill Schneider http://www.cnn.com/feedback/f... and demand that he back up his claims with evidence.
[b]FEAR AND LOATHING GOES LOCAL:[/b] The fear and hate mongering from the White House has trickled down to top Senate races. The New York Times reports that on Sunday's Meet the Press, GOP Senate candidate John Thune (R-SD) "accused Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) of emboldening America's enemies by criticizing President Bush on the eve of war in Iraq." Daschle said in 2003 "that he was saddened that Mr. Bush had 'failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war.'" Thune claimed that raising questions about the case for war "embolden the enemy." Daschle responded on Sunday, saying, "John's attacks on me, where I come from, would earn a trip to the woodshed" and noting that he, and not Mr. Thune, had served in the military. "There's only one veteran running here,'' Daschle said.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Poor Children Left Behind ... |
| 09.20.04 (9:31 am) [edit] |
"Poverty is the parent of revolution." - Aristotle
[b]"We the People" should be ashamed of ourselves-- for permitting the corrupt and gluttonous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]to jeopardize our fiscal well-being [i]via[/i] ruthless and reckless deficit spending on corporations and the richest-of-the-rich and thus putting their swindle of America on the "credit card" of Middle Class and Working Americans ... Meanwhile, those in need, the poor, the homeless and the sick and the miserable are left destitute, desperate and impoverished ... The traitorous neo-con Bushies are without conscience[i] and [/i]are unfit to serve our nation, for they are only serving their own private interests and that of the wealthiest among us ... We would do well to rid ourselves of the despotic Bush regime and its' insane [i]neo-fascist corporate welfare state[/i], for not only is it morally right to do so, [i]but also it is highly practical[/i], for history shows that when the masses are abused, mistreated and have nothing to lose, they will revolt ...[/b]
Congress is getting ready to raise taxes on four million low-income families, affecting nine million kids: This week, the House of Representatives will vote on legislation which will change the threshold for the child-tax credit, a law which was intended to help low-income families. In many cases, the value of the tax credit has actually declined by almost 10 percent for low-income families, which, in effect, acts as a tax hike for these families. According to a letter from Leonard Burman of the Urban Institute and John Karl Scholz of the University of Wisconsin, "for many low-income families whose earnings have not kept pace with inflation, the [child-tax credit] provision actually magnifies the damage done by inflation." (For more on the millions of poor families affected by the shrinking child-tax credit, watch Left Out: The Children and Families Left Behind by the President's Tax Proposal http://www.americanprogress.o... , a film sponsored by the American Progress Action Fund in which parents chronicle what this missing tax credit means to their families.)
[b]A DAY LATE, LOW-INCOME FAMILIES LEFT SHORTCHANGED:[/b] Last year, the media provided thorough coverage of the low-income families left out by the tax bill…after the bill passed. In June 2003, conservatives in Congress pushed through President Bush's proposal to accelerate tax cuts. The proposal, however, left out low-income families. The final legislation increased the child tax credit provision of the 2001 tax cut for middle- and upper-income families, but not the comparable provision of the 2001 law that targeted low-income families. Thus, more than 20 million of the country's poorest children received less than the full benefit, and 8 million children received no benefit at all. The New York Times led the charge to expose the ramifications of the vote, but only after the measure passed.
[b]PRIORITIES, PRIORITIES, PRIORITIES:[/b] According to the Joint Tax Center, it would cost approximately $4.3 billion to fix this inequity for the millions of families who are currently seeing their child-tax credit shrink. That's less than 5 percent of the total tax bill. (Doing this would also simplify the tax code.) As it stands, the cost of the tax credit isn't paid for, meaning the cost is likely to fall directly on the backs of the middle-class and poor through future spending cuts.
[b]NO WAY TO SUPPORT THE TROOPS:[/b] The tax measure that passed in June 2003 was a slap in the face of U.S. troops. Conservatives in Congress refused to allow combat pay to be included in the credit, which "had the effect of cutting the credit for many families with parents who served in Iraq or Afghanistan."
[b]KEEP IT SHORT:[/b] The Bush White House, hoping to score political points, is pressuring Congress to extend tax cuts for five years, regardless of the damage it would do to the economy in the long run. The normally conservative-friendly Wall Street Journal editorial page charged that's too long, saying, "We think this is a rare tax-cutting case in which shorter is better, both on political and policy grounds." The Washington Post agreed, saying, "If lawmakers want to extend the tax cuts, they should find a way to pay for them. If they don't have the will to do that -- and there are ample ways -- they should at least contain the fiscal damage by keeping the extension to a year or two."
[b]IT'S A PATTERN:[/b] This is part of an overall pattern in which the lower and middle classes are being left behind to pay for tax cuts for the rich. The alternative minimum tax (AMT), for instance, is increasingly falling on the shoulders of the middle class. Last month the Congressional Budget Office revealed President Bush's tax cuts since 2001 "have shifted more of the tax burden from the nation's rich to middle-class families." And as the Washington Post reports, the effects of these policies are coming home to roost: "Income inequality has grown. In 2001, the top 20 percent of households for the first time raked in more than half of all income, while the share earned by those in the middle was the lowest in nearly 50 years." (Meanwhile, President Bush has refused to close loopholes or roll back tax cuts for those earning over $200,000 a year because he acknowledges "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.")
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... For More Wars ... |
| 09.20.04 (8:38 am) [edit] |
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to 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 any country." - Hermann Goering
[b]For more wars...
...Vote Bush.[/b] Analysts from all parts of the political spectrum and a majority of voting Americans believe http://www.usatoday.com/news/... that Bush will start another war. And further, no less than a conservative military analyst observed that "It's less likely to happen with a Kerry administration."
[i]Duh[/i].
This same analyst, Loren Thompson, of the The Lexington Institute http://www.disinfopedia.org/w... (aka the Institute for Manifest Destiny) used the word that ought to make the nation as a whole cringe in horror: "The Bush administration is on a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and part of that ... is eliminating countries of anti-Western aggression." [Don't let us forget the[i] real reasons [/i]behind the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc[i]. junta's [/i]illegal and immoral incursion into Iraq:-- the Middle East oil [i]and[/i] enriching corporate cronies including Halliburton, Carlyle Group, Bechtel, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. ... ]
Ahh, "elimination." It's like having a pawn jauntily knocked off the board or watching an unsightly blemish disappear from the youthful face of a supermodel...
[b]"We the People" need a change of direction [i]away from [/i]the insane neo-con, neo-fascist Bush/Cheney doctrine of Global Corporate Empire ... [i]Say NO to Perpetual Wars for Perpetual War-Profits [/i]... Vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America ...[/b]
[b]Sources:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
Sir Isaac Newton and the Coming Invasion of Iran, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Neo-Cons to Hold Conference to Plan World War IV Strategies, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Sir Isaac Newton and the Coming Invasion of Iran ... |
| 09.19.04 (4:53 pm) [edit] |
"Either war is obsolete or men are." - R. Buckminster Fuller
"The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice." - Spinoza
[b]"We the People" had better prepare ourselves ... For should the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]hijack our nation [i]again[/i], they will continue their insane neo-imperial War on the Middle East and instigate their horrific neo-con, neo-fascist designs upon Iran as the next stage in their March of Death-- an illegal and immoral endeavour that will have unforeseen consequences ... World War IV will be a catastrophic failure ...[/b]
Nearby my apartment, a man by the name of Faramarz runs his business. Faramarz is such a nice, friendly guy – one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet. Faramarz has been in Japan for over 21 years. He is one of the few foreigners I have met who has been here longer than I.
Faramarz is married to a Japanese and his business sells exquisite, handmade Persian Carpets. These are some of the largest and most beautiful carpets I've ever seen. They are the kind of things you would see on the floor of a palace or the office of the CEO of some huge Japanese company. I imagine that carpets like these grace the floors of places like Buckingham Palace or the Taj Mahal. Faramarz's handmade carpets are as beautiful and detailed as any you will ever see.
Faramarz has two employees named Ramin and Aribizu. These guys impress me so much. They are so friendly and intelligent. They can each speak more than three languages and their English is superb. It's amazing that they come from what many of us in the west would consider a "backward third-world country."
Every person I have ever met from their country was extremely intelligent and proficient in several languages. One of my best friends in college was from the same place, and he could speak English, French, Russian, and Farsi. Farsi, as some of you may know, is the native language of people from Persia – or what we now call Iran.
Last night, Faramarz invited me over to sit and chat in his office for a few minutes. It was fun. Faramarz and his two employees had a wager on a sale that they were working on. The sale didn't go through; Faramarz lost the bet, so he had to buy ice cream for everyone. I thought:
"What a bunch of sincere, easy-going, peaceful people."
Faramarz and I started to discuss world events and I spent my time trying to explain the thinking of my countrymen. Faramarz and his friends all seemed to feel sorry for me. Well, not for me exactly – but for you, me, all of us we call, "Americans."
You see, this kind of thinking I have found quite common over these last few years when I meet people from other countries (and I meet quite a lot due to my job). It all boils down to this:
"Everyone all over the world likes American people. We just hate your government."
In the last year I have met people from Bulgaria, Romania, China, Thailand, Korea, Australia, England, Scotland, New Zealand, France, Afghanistan, and Kenya. And they all said basically the same thing. People everywhere are beginning to despise the United States.
The talk then went into the Chinese concept of "Ying and Yang." Faramarz explained to me that what is going on in the Middle East all fits in perfectly with the concept of Ying and Yang. In Japan, this concept is described as, "Dark versus Light."
I was a bit surprised to hear Faramarz explain his take on this concept to me. I would expect to hear something like this from someone from China or Korea, but someone from Iran?
Then again, when you realize that the Middle East has always been the road to the Far East, it shouldn't be too surprising to hear them speaking a philosophy that mirrors Eastern Asian thought.
Simply put, Ying and Yang represent the balance of everything in the world. Dark and light, good and evil, you and me.
Yang is the spirit of "light." He has the side of good and light. We and everything else that is not dark. Ying is, of course, the complete opposite. Ying is the "dark" part of the spirit. Evil and darkness; defeat is on his side of the balance.
In this Eastern philosophy, balance is everything. If something falls, something else must come back. That means if one manages to become the most powerful, the entire universe will be out of balance. So if Yang won, everything in the world would be happy – but not for long, for the balance would be upset. And for as long as Yang is in power, the reverse effect must come into play, and Ying will dominate after that for an equal or longer period of time – until the cycle reverses itself again.
Of course many Westerners might just chuckle at this silly "Eastern" notion. But last night it dawned on me: I realized that this concept of "Ying and Yang" is exactly the same as Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion, called "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis," published in 1686. Isaac Newton stated:
"...that for every action (force) there is an equal and opposite reaction."
All actions are "forces," so this undisputable law says every force has an equal and opposite force. For every action, there is a reaction. For every behavior, there is a consequence. Like the rock thrown into the pond, the ripples radiate out, eventually hitting the shore, and then again returning to its center. For every act, a consequence.
One might take issue with my interpretation of how Ying and Yang and Newton's Third Law of Motion are, ultimately, the exact same thing. But I think anyone could see where there is a correlation.
Furthermore, could any educated person in the entire Western world argue with Newton's Third Law of Motion? I don't think so. Agreed?
Whether you want to call it Ying and Yang or Newton's Law, it is an undeniable fact that every action has an equal reaction.
That's why now I'd like to tell you folks in America a little more about Persia (Iran):
Did you know that Persia is one of the oldest civilizations in the world? And that Persia was once one of the largest empires the world had ever seen?
Did you know that, even though Persia has lost battles, it has never been conquered even once in over 3,000 years?
Did you know that Iran has more than three times the population of Iraq, and 63% of that population is under 31 years old? Did you also know that, geographically speaking, Iran is four times larger than Iraq?
Did you know that Iran's economy was twelve times the size of Iraq's, as of 2003?
Did you also know that, although no one is sure of the total casualties during the Iran-Iraq war of 1979 to 1988, estimates range from 800,000 to 1 million dead, at least 2 million wounded, and more than 80,000 taken prisoner? That there were approximately 2.5 million who became refugees and whose cities were destroyed? That the financial cost is estimated at a minimum of $200 billion? And even though, according to some estimates, Iran lost about one million soldiers, it was still not defeated?
Of course, you do know that now the Bush administration and the neocons are setting America up for a war with Iran. Right?
With George W. Bush as your next president, go ahead, America, attack Iran. But, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, you will be forced to pay the piper. And it will, most certainly, be a catastrophically heavy price.
Please don't send me mail arguing with me about this observation. Argue instead with Ying and Yang – or, better yet, argue with Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion:
"...for every action (force) there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Facts on Iran: http://www.cia.gov/cia/public...
Facts on Iraq: http://www.cia.gov/cia/public...
[b]Sources:[/b]
Neo-Cons to Hold Conference to Plan World War IV Strategies, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Rummy Targets Iran, http://www.tblog.com/template...
What the Neo-cons Can't Tell Americans, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Health Care? To Bush, It's a Sound Bite ... |
| 09.19.04 (10:47 am) [edit] |
"The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals." - Sir William Osler, Science and Immortality
[b]"We the People" must rid ourselves of the selfish, tyrannical and barbaric Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i], callous to the needs of those who are sick, struggling, poor and in dire need ...[/b]
The good news is if the compassionate George W. Bush is elected in November he won't be taking over the health care system. Mr. Bush has announced that in order, one assumes, to reassure the uninsured and the elderly. It's not clear that's the kind of reassurance they needed from a compassionate conservative.
At last count there were more than 43 million Americans without health insurance, including 8.5 million children. A recent study conducted by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Health found that about 18,000 unnecessary deaths occur each year because of individuals' lack of health insurance. According to the institute, the cost to the United States because of poor health and early deaths of uninsured adults is the equivalent of $65 billion to $130 billion annually.
On the positive side, people without insurance do not have to worry about the government meddling in their lives and that independence makes them feel good — until they get sick and can't get medical treatment. If Mr. Bush is re-elected those 43 million people can count on Mr. Bush not interfering in their lives. If Mr. Kerry is elected, Mr. Bush said in mid-September in Michigan, we can expect a "government takeover of health care with an enormous price tag."
That's probably true. It would be very expensive to provide medical care for 43 million people. Better they stay uninsured than that we impose an additional burden on the good people who pay taxes and make this country what it is.
It's not only the uninsured who won't have to worry about the government involving itself in the minutiae of medical care. The elderly's needs have been addressed by both candidates. Unlike the 43 million, the elderly do have insurance. It's called Medicare. The elderly have just learned that next year Medicare premiums will increase by 17.4 percent and they will have to pay $78.20 a month for their coverage. The presidential candidates are understandably very concerned about this since each of them cares not only about the elderly but about how the elderly will vote. Each of them has addressed this huge increase in premiums in his own way.
Mr. Bush's response to the announcement was to tell supporters at rallies that Mr. Kerry voted for the legislation that brought about the increase. Mr. Kerry said that if elected he will rescind the increase. On the same day the increase in Medicare premiums was announced it was disclosed that another effort on the Bush health care front was a disappointment if not an outright failure. The disappointment was the government-sponsored drug lottery.
Earlier this year the Bush administration set up a drug lottery system for those afflicted with cancer and certain other serious illnesses whose victims require expensive drugs for treatment. Of the 500,000 persons afflicted with serious illnesses who were eligible to participate, 50,000 were to be selected by lottery. The lucky 50,000 would have an opportunity to obtain drugs for treatment that they could not have otherwise afforded. The remaining 450,000 would have to wait until 2006 to receive those drugs, assuming they survived until then.
As exciting and compassionate as a program designed to give one-eighth of the people in need affordable medicine appeared to be, the program has been a flop. That's because of the 500,000 people eligible to participate, only 7,000 have applied and fewer than 4,000 are enrolled. That is hard to understand. In addition to the fun of participating in a lottery and eagerly awaiting the results, the effects of winning can be terribly important to the participants since the winners can then afford to buy the drugs they need to stay alive. One Medicare official suggested that it had been a mistake to describe the process as a lottery. He said that many of the elderly didn't like to participate in gambling activities. When the program was announced, Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services, said the program was a boon to the elderly. It was obviously not perceived as such by the elderly sick since they've not tried to enter the lottery.
There is one bit of good news from a public relations point of view, however. If fewer than 50,000 people enroll then everyone who does will be a winner. No one who applied will be denied admission and forced to wait for their required drugs until 2006. George Bush will like that. It makes for a great sound bite on the campaign trail and that, as far as this administration is concerned, is what health care is all about.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Christopher Brauchli is a Boulder lawyer and and writes a weekly column for the Knight Ridder news service. He can be reached at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu - http://www.commondreams.org/v...
What America is Saying … About Poverty and Health, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Journalism Under Fire ... |
| 09.19.04 (7:13 am) [edit] |
"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:57
"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823. ME 15:491
"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.
[b]"We the People" must demand significant improvements from our journalists and from journalism in general, for the real scandal over the last four years is the major debacles by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] here at home and abroad that have gone un-reported and/or under-reported ...[/b]
Part biography, part reprimand, part love letter to the promise of his profession—this speech, given by Bill Moyers at a Society of Professional Journalists conference on Sept. 11, 2004, will be referred to for years to come by those who are worried about the state of journalism. It’s a true classic: “I believe democracy requires ‘a sacred contract’ between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.”
[b]Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist currently hosting the PBS program Now With Bill Moyers. Moyers also serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which gives financial support to TomPaine.com.[/b]
Thank you for inviting me to share this occasion with you. Three months from now I will be retiring from active journalism and I cannot imagine a better turn into the home stretch than this morning with you.
My life in journalism began 54 years ago, on my 16th birthday, in the summer before my junior year in high school, when I went to work as a cub reporter for the Marshall News Messenger in the East Texas town of 20,000 where I had grown up. Early on, I got one of those lucky breaks that define a life’s course. Some of the old timers were sick or on vacation and Spencer Jones, the managing editor, assigned me to help cover the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in town refused to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that—here’s my favorite part—“requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired a lawyer—Martin Dies, the former Congressman notorious for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities—but to no avail. The women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax. In the meantime the Associated Press had picked up our coverage and turned the rebellion into a national story. One day after it was all over, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a “Notice to the Editor” citing one Bill Moyers and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion. I was hooked.
Looking back on that experience and all that followed, I often think of what Joseph Lelyveld told aspiring young journalists when he was executive editor of the New York Times . “You can never know how a life in journalism will turn out,” he said. “Decide that you want to be a scholar, a lawyer, or a doctor…and your path to the grave is pretty well laid out before you. Decide that you want to enter our rather less reputable line of work and you set off on a route that can sometimes seem to be nothing but diversions, switchbacks and a life of surprises…with the constant temptation to keep reinventing yourself.”
So I have. My path led me on to graduate school, a detour through seminary, then to LBJ’s side in Washington, and, from there, through circumstances so convulted I still haven’t figured them out, back to journalism, first at Newsday and then the big leap from print to television, to PBS and CBS and back again—just one more of those vagrant journalistic souls who, intoxicated with the moment is always looking for the next high: the lead not yet written, the picture not yet taken, the story not yet told.
It took me awhile after I left government to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. I’ve seen plenty of reality. Journalism took me to famine and revolution in Africa and to war in Central America; it took me to the bedside of the dying and delivery rooms of the newborn. It took me into the lives of inner-city families in Newark and working-class families in Milwaukee struggling to find their place in the new global economy. CBS News paid me richly to put in my two cents worth on just about anything that happened on a given day. As a documentary journalist I’ve explored everything from the power of money in politics to how to make a poem. I’ve investigated the abuse of power in the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and the unanswered questions of 9/11. I’ve delved into the “Mystery of Chi” in Chinese traditional medicine as well as the miracle that empowered a one-time slave trader to write the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Journalism has been a continuing course in adult education—my own; other people paid the tuition and travel, and I’ve never really had to grow up and get a day job. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I’ve enjoyed the company of colleagues as good as they come, who kept inspiring me to try harder.
They helped me relearn another of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of “bias,” or, these days, even a point of view, there’s no use even trying. You have to love it, and I do. I remember what Izzy Stone said about this. For years he was America’s premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I.F. Stone’s Weekly the government’s lies and contradictions culled from the government’s own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.”
That’s how I felt 25 five years ago when my colleague Sherry Jones and I produced the first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees. When we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress, there was a loud outcry, including from several politicians who had been allies just a few years earlier when I worked at the White House.
I loved it, too, when Sherry and I connected the dots behind the Iran-Contra scandal. That documentary sent the right-wing posse in Washington running indignantly to congressional supporters of public television who accused PBS of committing— horrors!— journalism right on the air.
While everyone else was all over the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, Sherry and I took after Washington’s other scandal of the time— the unbridled and illegal fundraising by Democrats in the campaign of 1996. This time it was Democrats who wanted me arrested.
But taking on political scandal is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington. When my colleagues and I started looking into the subject of pesticides and food for a Frontline documentary, my producer Marty Koughan learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of a National Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script—we still aren’t certain how—and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our broadcast before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial page editors were flooded in advance with pro-industry propaganda. There was a whispering campaign. A Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast on the morning of the day it aired—without even having seen it—and later confessed to me that the dirt had been supplied by a top lobbyist for the chemical industry. Some public television managers across the country were so unnerved by the blitz of dis-information they received from the industry that before the documentary had even aired, they protested to PBS with letters prepared by the industry.
Here’s what most perplexed us: Eight days before the broadcast, the American Cancer Society—an organization that in no way figured in our story—sent to its three thousand local chapters a “critique” of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired, and that did not claim what the society alleged? An enterprising reporter in town named Sheila Kaplan looked into these questions for Legal Times and discovered that a public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. The firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that “charitable” work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking points about the documentary— talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, the public relations firm.
Others also used the American Cancer Society’s good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired; including right-wing front groups who railed against what they called “junk science on PBS” and demanded Congress pull the plug on public television. PBS stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up, and the National Academy of Sciences felt liberated to release the study that the industry had tried to demean.
They never give up. Sherry and I spent more than a year working on another documentary called Trade Secrets , based on revelations—found in the industry’s archives—that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. And they portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry, revealing that we live under a regulatory system designed by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known over the years what the industry was keeping secret about the health risks of its products, America’s laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health than they were.
Hoping to keep us from airing those secrets, the industry hired a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI, and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations. One of the company’s founders was on record as saying that sometimes corporations need to resort to unconventional resources, including “using deceit”, to defend themselves. Given the scurrilous underground campaign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understatement. Not only was there the vicious campaign directed at me personally, but once again pressure was brought to bear on PBS through industry allies in Congress. PBS stood firm, the documentary aired, and a year later the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Trade Secrets an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.
I’ve gone on like this not to regale you with old war tales but to get to a story that is the one thing I hope you might remember from our time together this morning. John Henry Faulk told me this story. Most of you are too young to remember John Henry—a wonderful raconteur, entertainer, and a popular host on CBS Radio back when radio was in its prime. But those were days of paranoia and red-baiting—the McCarthy era—and the right-wing sleaze merchants went to work on John Henry with outlandish accusations that he was a communist. A fearful CBS refused to rehire him and John Henry went home to Texas to live out his days. He won a famous libel suit against his accusers and wrote a classic book about those events and the meaning of the First Amendment. In an interview I did with him shortly before his death a dozen years ago, John Henry told the story of how he and friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken house when they were about 12 years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it to me, “All the frontier courage drained out our heels—actually it trickled down our overall legs—and Boots and I made a new door through the henhouse wall.” His momma came out and, learning what the fuss was about, said to Boots and John Henry: “Don’t you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can’t hurt you.” And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, “Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it’ll cause you to hurt yourself.” John Henry Faulk told me that’s a lesson he never forgot. It’s a good one for any journalist to tuck away and call on when journalism is under fire.
Our job remains essentially the same: to gather, weigh, organize, analyze and present information people need to know in order to make sense of the world. You will hear it said this is not a professional task—John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times recently reminded us there are “no qualification tests, no boards to censure misconduct, no universally accepted set of standards.” Maybe so. But I think that what makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of which the public is aware only when we violate it—think Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jim Kelly. Ed Wasserman, once an editor himself and now teaching at Washington and Lee University, says that journalism “is an ethical practice because it tells people what matters and helps them determine what they should do about it.” So good newsrooms “are marinated in ethical conversations…What should this lead say? What I should I tell that source?” We practice this craft inside “concentric rings of duty and obligations: Obligations to sources, our colleagues, our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community”—and we function under a system of values “in which we try to understand and reconcile strong competing claims.” Our obligation is to sift patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation of the truth—and this, says Ed Wasserman, is an ethical practice.
It’s never been easy, and it’s getting harder. For more reasons then you can shake a stick at.
One is the sheer magnitude of the issues we need to report and analyze. My friend Bill McKibben enjoys a conspicuous place in my pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment; his bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring left off. Recently in Mother Jones, Bill described how the problems we cover—conventional, manageable problems, like budget shortfalls, pollution, crime—may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable situations. He puts it this way: If you don’t have a job, “that’s a problem, and unemployment is a problem, and they can both be managed: You learn a new skill, the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates to spur the economy. But millions of skilled, well-paying jobs disappearing to Bangalore is a situation; it’s not clear what, if anything, the system can do to turn it around.” Perhaps the most unmanageable of all problems, Bill McKibben writes, is the accelerating deterioration of the environment. While the present administration has committed a thousand acts of vandalism against our air, water, forests and deserts, were we to change managers, Bill argues, some of that damage would abate. What won’t go away, he continues, are the perils with huge momentum—the greenhouse effect, for instance. Scientists have been warning us about it since the 1980s. But now the melt of the Arctic seems to be releasing so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield abrupt—and overwhelming—changes, the kind of climate change that threatens civilization. How do we journalists get a handle on something of that enormity?
Or on ideology. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom and explain the mindset of violent exhibitionists and extremists who blow to smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index? That’s what I said—the Rapture Index; Google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series that have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors, who, earlier this year, completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush’s armor of the Lord. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true.
According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its “biblical lands;” when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. True believers ”will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow."
I’m not making this up. We’re reported on these people for our weekly broadcast on PBS, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you that they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why they have staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released “to slay the third part of men.’ As the British writer George Monbiot has pointed out, for these people, the Middle East is not a foreign policy issue, it’s a biblical scenario, a matter of personal belief. A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed; if there’s a conflagration there, they come out winners on the far side of tribulation, inside the pearly gates, in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the accompaniment of harps plucked by angels.
One estimate puts these people at about 15 percent of the electorate. Most are likely to vote Republican; they are part of the core of George W. Bush’s base support. He knows who they are and what they want. When the president asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, more than one hundred thousand angry Christian fundamentalists barraged the White House with e-mails, and Mr. Bush never mentioned the matter again. Not coincidentally, the administration recently put itself solidly behind Ariel Sharon’s expansions of settlements on the West Banks. In George Monbiot’s analysis, the president stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli expansion into the West Bank than he stands to lose by restraining it. “He would be mad to listen to these people, but he would also be mad not to.” No wonder Karl Rove walks around the West Wing whistling “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He knows how many votes he is likely to get from these pious folk who believe that the Rapture Index now stands at 144—just one point below the critical threshold at which point the prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the sky is filled with floating naked bodies, and the true believers wind up at the right hand of God. With no regret for those left behind. (See George Monbiot. The Guardian, April 20th, 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Col...,5673,1195727,00.html .)
I know, I know: You think I am bonkers. You think Ann Coulter is right to aim her bony knee at my groin and that O’Reilly should get a Peabody for barfing all over me for saying there’s more to American politics than meets the Foxy eye. But this is just the point: Journalists who try to tell these stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged and dismissed. This is the very kind of story that illustrates the challenge journalists face in a world driven by ideologies that are stoutly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. Ideologues—religious, political, or editorial ideologues—embrace a world view that cannot be changed because they admit no evidence to the contrary. And Don Quixote on Rocinante tilting at windmills had an easier time of it than a journalist on a laptop tilting with facts at the world’s fundamentalist belief systems.
For one thing, you’ll get in trouble with the public. The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should be been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don’t want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism. The poll also found that five or six of every 10 Americans “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.” No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.
If raging ideologies are difficult to penetrate, so is secrecy. Secrecy is hardly a new or surprising story. But we are witnessing new barriers imposed to public access to information and a rapid mutation of America’s political culture in favor of the secret rule of government. I urge you to read the special report, Keeping Secrets, published recently by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (for a copy send an e-mail to publications@knightfdn.org mailto:publications@knigh tfdn.org ). You will find laid out there what the editors call a “zeal for secrecy” pulsating through government at every level, shutting off the flow of information from sources such as routine hospital reports to what one United States senator calls the “single greatest rollback of the Freedom of Information Act in history.”
In the interest of full disclosure, I digress here to say that I was present when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act on July 4, 1966. In language that was almost lyrical, he said he was signing it “with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.” But as his press secretary at the time, I knew something that few others did: LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of FOIA, hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official review of realty. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket-veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the tenacity of a congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all, and that was after a 12-year battle against his elders in Congress, who blinked every time the sun shined in the dark corridors of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had drafted, and even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from a handful of newspaper editors overcame the president’s reluctance. He signed “the f------ thing,” as he called it, and then set out to claim credit for it.
But never has there been an administration like the one in power today—so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and, in defiance of the Constitution, from their representatives in Congress. The litany is long: The president’s chief of staff orders a review that leads to at least 6000 documents being pulled from government websites. The Defense Department bans photos of military caskets being returned to the U.S. To hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron, and other energy moguls, the vice president stonewalls his energy task force records with the help of his duck-hunting pal on the Supreme Court. The CIA adds a new question to its standard employee polygraph exam, asking, “Do you have friends in the media?” There have been more than 1200 presumably terrorist-related arrests and 750 people deported, and no one outside the government knows their names, or how many court docket entries have been erased or never entered. Secret federal court hearings have been held with no public record of when or where or who is being tried.
Secrecy is contagious. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced that “certain security information included in the reactor oversight process” will no longer be publicly available, and no longer be updated on the agency’s website.
New controls are being imposed on space surveillance data once found on NASA’s web site.
The FCC has now restricted public access to reports of telecommunications disruption because the Department of Homeland Security says communications outages could provide “a roadmap for terrorists.”
One of the authors of the ASNE report, Pete Weitzel, former managing editor of The Miami Herald and now coordinator for the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, describes how Section 214 of the Homeland Security Act makes it possible for a company to tell Homeland Security about an eroding chemical tank on the bank of a river, but DHS could not disclose this information publicly or, for that matter, even report it to the Environmental Protection Agency. And if there were a spill and people were injured, the information given DHS could not be used in court!
Secrecy is contagious—and scandalous. The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years, a judicial committee acting in private has stripped information from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.
Secrecy is contagious, scandalous—and toxic. According to the ASNE report, curtains are falling at the state and local levels, too. The tiny south Alabama town of Notasulga decided to allow citizens to see records only one hour a month. It had to rescind the decision, but now you have to make a request in writing, make an appointment and state a reason for wanting to see any document. The state legislature in Florida has adopted 14 new exemptions to its sunshine and public record laws. Over the objections of law enforcement officials and Freedom of Information advocates, they passed a new law prohibiting police from making lists of gun owners even as it sets a fine of $5 million for violation.
Secrecy is contagious, scandalous, toxic—and costly. Pete Weitzel estimates that the price tag for secrecy today is more than $5 billion annually (I have seen other estimates up to $6.5 billion a year.)
This “zeal for secrecy” I am talking about—and I have barely touched the surface—adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear—as if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were the Taliban—they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a safe, decent or just world and from working to bring it about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of the press—that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.
I thought of this last week during the Republican National Convention here in New York—thought of the terrorists as enablers of democracy’s self-immolation. My office is on the west side of Manhattan, two blocks from Madison Square Garden. From where I sit I could see snipers on the roof. Helicopters overhead. Barricades at every street corner. Lines of police stretching down the avenues. Unmarked vans. Flatbed trucks. Looking out his own window, the writer Nick Turse (TomDispatch.com 9/8/04 http://www.tomdispatch.com/in... ) saw what I saw and more. Special Forces brandishing automatic rifles. Rolls of orange plastic netting. Dragnets. Pre-emptive arrests of peaceful protesters. Cages for detainees. And he caught sight of what he calls “the ultimate blending of corporatism and the police state—the Fuji blimp—now emblazoned with a second logo: NYPD.” A spy-in-the sky, outfitted “with the latest in video-surveillance equipment, loaned free of charge to the police all week long.” Nick Turse saw these things and sees in them, as do I, “The Rise of the Homeland Security State.”
Will we be cowed by it? Will we investigate and expose its excesses? Will we ask hard questions of the people who run it? The answers are not clear. As deplorable as was the betrayal of their craft by Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Jim Kelly, the greater offense was the seduction of mainstream media into helping the government dupe the public to support a war to disarm a dictator who was already disarmed. Now we are buying into the very paradigm of a “war on terror” that our government—with staggering banality, soaring hubris, and stunning bravado—employs to elicit public acquiescence while offering no criterion of success or failure, no knowledge of the cost, and no measure of democratic accountability. I am reminded of the answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a college student to define “real news.” “Real news,” said Richard Reeves “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” I am reminded of that line from the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day : “People do terrible things to each other, but its worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.”
I have become a nuisance on this issue—if not a fanatic—because I grew up in the South, where, for so long, truthtellers were driven from the pulpit, the classroom and the newsroom; it took a bloody civil war to drive home the truth of slavery, and still it took another hundred of years of cruel segregation and oppression before the people freed by that war finally achieved equal rights under the law. Not only did I grow up in the South, which had paid such a high price for denial, but I served in the Johnson White House during the early escalation of the Vietnam War. We circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that did not confirm to the official view of reality, with tragic consequences for America and Vietnam. Few days pass now that I do not remind myself that the greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
That’s why I have also become a nuisance, if not a fanatic, on the perils of media consolidation. My eyes were opened wide by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to my first documentary on the subject, called Free Speech for Sale . On our current weekly broadcast we’ve gone back to the subject more than 30 times. I was astonished when the coupling of Time Warner and AOL—the biggest corporate merger of all time—brought an avalanche of gee-whiz coverage from a media intoxicated by uncritical enthusiasm. Not many people heard the quiet voice of the cultural critic Todd Gitlin pointing out that the merger was not motivated by any impulse to improve news reporting, magazine journalism or the quality of public discourse. Its purpose was to boost the customer base, the shareholders’ stock and the personal wealth of top executives. Not only was this brave new combination, in Gitlin’s words, “unlikely to arrest the slickening of news coverage, its pulverization into ever more streamlined and simple-minded snippers, its love affair with celebrities and show business, “the deal is likely to accelerate those trends, since the bottom line “usually abhors whatever is more demanding and complex, slower, more prone to ideas, more challenging to complacency.”
Sure enough, as merger as followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than “the news we need to know to keep our freedoms.” One study reports that the number of crime stories on the network news tripled over six years. Another reports that in 55 markets in 35 states, local news was dominated by crime and violence, triviality and celebrity. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek , showed that from 1977 to 1997, the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every 50 stories to one in every 14. What difference does it make? Well, it's government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our backyard or send us to war. Knowing what government does is “the news we need to keep our freedoms.”
Ed Wasserman, among others, has looked closely at the impact on journalism of this growing conglomeration of ownership. He recently wrote: “You would think that having a mightier media would strengthen their ability to assert their independence, to chart their own course, to behave in an adversarial way toward the state.” Instead “they fold in a stiff breeze”—as Viacom, one of the richest media companies in the history of thought, did when it “couldn’t even go ahead and run a dim-witted movie” on Ronald Reagan because the current president’s political arm objected to anything that would interfere with the ludicrous drive to canonize Reagan and put him on Mount Rushmore. Wasserman acknowledges, as I do, that there is some world-class journalism being done all over the country today, but he went on to speak of “a palpable sense of decline, of rot, of a loss of spine, determination, gutlessness” that pervades our craft. Journalism and the news business, he concludes, aren’t playing well together. Media owners have businesses to run, and “these media-owning corporations have enormous interests of their own that impinge on an ever-widening swath of public policy” —hugely important things, ranging from campaign finance reform (who ends up with those millions of dollars spent on advertising?) to broadcast deregulation and antitrust policy, to virtually everything related to the Internet, intellectual property, globalization and free trade, even to minimum wage, affirmative action and environmental policy. “This doesn’t mean media shill mindlessly for their owners, any more than their reporters are stealth operatives for pet causes,” but it does mean that in this era, when its broader and broader economic entanglements make media more dependent on state largesse, “the news business finds itself at war with journalism.”
Look at what’s happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today’s newspaper markets are monopolies. I urge you to read a new book—Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering (published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trust)—by a passel of people who love journalism: the former managing editor of the New York Times, Gene Roberts; the dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Thomas Kunkel; the veteran reporter and editor, Charles Layton, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. They find that a generation of relentless corporatization has diminished the amount of real news available to the consumer. They write of small hometown dailies being bought and sold like hog futures; of chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devouring other chains whole; of chains effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, minimizing competition; of money pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy. They point as one example to the paper in Oshkosh, Wis., with a circulation of 23,500, which prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Andrew Johnson administration. In 1998, it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years. In New Jersey, the Gannett Chain bought the Asbury Park Press , then sent in a publisher who slashed 55 people from the staff and cut the space for news, and who was rewarded by being named Gannett’s manager of the year. Roberts and team come to the sobering conclusion that the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning—that it won’t be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.
They illustrate the consequences with one story after another. In Cumberland, Md., the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him that he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But management had a cost-saving solution: Put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. (“Any police brutality today, officer?” “No, if there is, we’ll fax a report of it over to you.”) On a larger scale, the book describes a wholesale retreat in coverage of key departments and agencies in Washington. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter. And incredibly, there were no full-time reporters at the Interior Department, which controls millions of acres of public land and oversees everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
There’s more: According to the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The number of full-time radio news employees dropped by 44 percent between 1994 and 2000. And the number of television network foreign bureaus is down by half. Except for “60 Minutes” on CBS, the network prime time newsmagazines “in no way could be said to cover major news of the day.” Furthermore, the report finds that 68 percent of the news on cable news channels was “repetitious accounts of previously reported stories without any new information.”
Out across the country there’s a virtual blackout of local public affairs. The Alliance for Better Campaigns studied 45 stations in six cities in one week in October 2003. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs—less than one-half of one percent of local programming nationwide.
A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests—and to the ideology of free-market economics.
Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a quasi-official partisan press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power. Stretching from Washington think tanks funded by corporations to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s far-flung empire of tabloid journalism to the nattering know-nothings of talk radio, a ceaseless conveyor belt—often taking its cues from daily talking points supplied by the Republican National Committee—moves mountains of the official party line into the public discourse. But that’s not their only mission. They wage war on anyone who does not subscribe to the propaganda, heaping scorn on what they call “old-school journalism.” One of them, a blogger, was recently quoted in Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard comparing journalism with brain surgery. “A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can’t? Nothing.”
The debate over who and isn’t a journalist is worth having, although we don’t have time for it now. You can read a good account of the latest round in that debate in the September 26 Boston Globe, where Tom Rosenthiel reports http://www.boston.com/news/na... on the Democratic Convention’s efforts to decide “which scribes, bloggers, on-air correspondents and on-air correspondents and off-air producers and camera crews” would have press credentials and access to the action. Bloggers were awarded credentials for the first time, and, I, for one, was glad to see it. I’ve just finished reading Dan Gillmor’s new book, We the Media, and recommend it heartily to you. Gilmore is a national columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and writes a daily weblog for SiliconValley.com. He argues persuasively that Big Media is losing its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet – that “citizen journalists” of all stripes, in their independent, unfiltered reports, are transforming the news from a lecture to a conversation. He’s on to something. In one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit—just a few hundred dollars—to start a paper then. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840. They were passionate and pugnacious and often deeply prejudiced; some spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes, and land-grabbers. But some called to the better angels of our nature—Tom Paine, for one, the penniless immigrant from England, who, in 1776 –just before joining Washington’s army—published the hard-hitting pamphlet Common Sense , with its uncompromising case for American independence. It became our first best-seller because Paine was possessed of an unwavering determination to reach ordinary people—to “make those that can scarcely read understand” and “to put into language as plain as the alphabet” the idea that they mattered and could stand up for their rights.
So the Internet may indeed engage us in a new conversation of democracy. Even as it does, you and I will in no way be relieved from wrestling with what it means ethically to be a professional journalist. I believe Tom Rosenthiel got it right in that Boston Globe article when he said that the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist but whether your own work constitutes journalism. And what is that? I like his answer: “A journalist tries to get the facts right,” tries to get “as close as possible to the verifiable truth”—not to help one side win or lose but “to inspire public discussion.” Neutrality, he concludes, is not a core principle of journalism, “but the commitment to facts, to public consideration, and to independence from faction, is.”
I don’t want to claim too much for our craft; because we journalists are human, our work is shot through with the stain of fallibility that taints the species. But I don’t want to claim too little for our craft, either. That’s why I am troubled by the comments of the former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon. Simon rose to national prominence with his book Homicide, about the year he spent in Baltimore’s homicide unit. That book inspired an NBC series for which Simon wrote several episodes and then another book and an HBO series called "The Wire," also set in Baltimore. In the current edition of the libertarian magazine Reason, Simon says he has become increasingly cynical “about the ability of daily journalism to affect any kind of meaningful change….One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little.’
Perhaps.
But Francisco Ortiz Franco thought it mattered. The crusading reporter co-founded a weekly magazine in Tijuana whose motto is “Free like the Wind.” He was relentless in exposing the incestuous connections between wealthy elites in Baja, Calif. and its most corrupt law enforcement agencies and with the most violent of drag cartels. Several months ago, Francisco Ortiz Franco died sitting at the wheel of his car outside a local clinic—shot four times while his two children, aged eight and l0, looked on from the back seat. As his blood was being hosed off the pavement, more than l00 of his fellow Mexican reporters and editors marched quietly through the streets, holding their pens defiantly high in the air. They believe journalism matters.
Manic Saha thought journalism mattered. He was a correspondent with the daily New Age in Bangladesh, as well as a contributor to the BBC’s Bengali-language service. Saha was known for his bold reporting on criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and Maoist insurgents and had kept it up despite a series of death threats. Earlier this year, as Saha was heading home from the local press club, assailants stopped his rickshaw and threw a bomb at him. When the bomb exploded he was decapitated. Manik Saha died because journalism matters.
Jose Carlos Araujo thought journalism mattered. The host of a call-in talk show in northeastern Brazil, Araujo regularly denounced death squads and well-known local figures involved in murders. On April 24 of this year, outside his home, at 7:30 in the morning, he was ambushed and shot to death. Because journalism matters.
Aiyathurai Nadesan thought journalism mattered. A newspaper reporter in Sri Lanka, he had been harassed and threatened for criticizing the government and security forces. During one interrogation, he was told to stop writing about the army. He didn’t. On the morning of May 3l, near a Hindu temple, he was shot to death—because journalism matters.
I could go on: The editor-in-chief of the only independent newspaper in the industrial Russian city of Togliatti, shot to death after reporting on local corruption; his successor stabbed to death 18 months later; a dozen journalists in all, killed in Russia over the last five years and none of their murderers brought to justice.
Cuba’s fledgling independent press has been decimated by the arrest and long-term imprisonment of 29 journalists in a crackdown last year; they are being held in solitary confinement, subjected to psychological torture, surviving on rotten and foul-smelling food. Why? Because Fidel Castro knows journalism matters.
The totalitarian regime of Turkmenistan believes journalism matters—so much so that all newspapers, radio and television stations have been placed under strict state control. About the only independent information the people get is reporting broadcast from abroad by Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty. A stringer for that service, based in the Turkmenistan capital, was detained and injected multiple times with an unknown substance. In the Ukraine, Dmitry Shkuropat, a correspondent for the independent weekly Iskra, who had been working on a story about government corruption, was beaten in the middle of the day on a main street in the city of Zaporozhy and taped interviews for his pending story were taken. The director of Iskra told the Committee to Protect Journalists (to whom I am indebted for these examples) said that the newspaper often receives intimidating phone calls from local business and political authorities after publishing critical articles, but he refused to identify the callers, saying he feared retaliation. Obviously, in the Ukraine journalism matters.
We have it so easy here in this country. America is a utopia for journalists. Don Hewitt, the creator of "60 Minutes," told me a couple of years ago that “the 1990s were a terrible time for journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists; we’re living like Jack Welch,” he said, referring to the then CEO of General Electric. Perhaps that is why we weren’t asking tough questions of Jack Welch. Because we have it so easy in America, we tend to go easy on America—so easy that maybe Simon’s right; compared to entertainment and propaganda, maybe journalism doesn’t matter.
But I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined. The late Martha Gellhorn, who spent half a century reporting on war and politicians—and observing journalists, too—eventually lost her faith that journalism could, by itself, change the world. But the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself, she said. “Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.” I second that. I believe democracy requires “a sacred contract” between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
Secrecy in the Bush Administration, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." - George Orwell
"You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself." - James Baldwin
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." - Martin Luther King Jr.
[b]Nothing is more oppressive to a free people than a corrupt government that conducts the public's business in secret ... The traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]is one of the most secretive administrations that we've ever had the misfortune to have thrust upon us ... "We the People" must rid ourselves of the despotic Bush regime, for they are not protecting us ... They are corrupt and they are harming us ...[/b]
Rep. Henry A. Waxman has released a comprehensive examination of secrecy in the Bush Administration. The report analyzes how the Administration has implemented each of our nation’s major open government laws. It finds that there has been a consistent pattern in the Administration’s actions: laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government.
The Administration has supported amendments to open government laws to create new categories of protected information that can be withheld from the public. President Bush has issued an executive order sharply restricting the public release of the papers of past presidents. The Administration has expanded the authority to classify documents and dramatically increased the number of documents classified. It has used the USA Patriot Act and novel legal theories to justify secret investigations, detentions, and trials. And the Administration has engaged in litigation to contest Congress’ right to information.
The records at issue have covered a vast array of topics, ranging from simple census data and routine agency correspondence to presidential and vice presidential records. Among the documents that the Administration has refused to release to the public and members of Congress are (1) the contacts between energy companies and the Vice President’s energy task force, (2) the communications between the Defense Department and the Vice President’s office regarding contracts awarded to Halliburton, (3) documents describing the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, (4) memoranda revealing what the White House knew about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and (5) the cost estimates of the Medicare prescription drug legislation withheld from Congress.
There are three main categories of federal open government laws: (1) laws that provide public access to federal records; (2) laws that allow the government to restrict public access to federal information; and (3) laws that provide for congressional access to federal records. In each area, the Bush Administration has acted to restrict the amount of government information that is available.
[b]Laws That Provide Public Access to Federal Records[/b]
Beginning in the 1960s, Congress enacted a series of landmark laws that promote “government in the sunshine.” These include the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act, and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Each of these laws enables the public to view the internal workings of the executive branch. And each has been narrowed in scope and application under the Bush Administration.
[b]Freedom of Information Act[/b]
The Freedom of Information Act is the primary law providing access to information held by the executive branch. Adopted in 1966, FOIA established the principle that the public should have broad access to government records. Under the Bush Administration, however, the statute’s reach has been narrowed and agencies have resisted FOIA requests through procedural tactics and delay.
The Administration has:
. Issued guidance reversing the presumption in favor of disclosure and instructing agencies to withhold a broad and undefined category of “sensitive” information;
. Supported statutory and regulatory changes that preclude disclosure of a wide range of information, including information relating to the economic, health, and security infrastructure of the nation; and
. Placed administrative obstacles in the way of organizations seeking to use FOIA to obtain federal records, such as denials of fee waivers and delays in agency responses.
Independent academic experts consulted for this report decried these trends. They stated that the Administration has “radically reduced the public right to know,” that its policies “are not only sucking the spirit out of the FOIA, but shriveling its very heart,” and that no Administration in modern times has “done more to conceal the workings of government from the people.”
[b]The Presidential Records Act [/b]
The Presidential Records Act, which was enacted in 1978 in the wake of Watergate, establishes the important principle that the records of a president relating to his official duties belong to the American people. Early in his term, President Bush issued an executive order that undermined the Presidential Records Act by giving former presidents and vice presidents new authority to block the release of their records. As one prominent historian wrote, the order “severely crippled our ability to study the inner workings of a presidency.”
[b]The Federal Advisory Committee Act[/b]
The Federal Advisory Committee Act prevents secret advisory groups from exercising hidden influence on government policy, requiring openness and a balance of viewpoints for all government advisory bodies. The Bush Administration, however, has supported legislation that creates new statutory exemptions from FACA. It has also sought to avoid the application of FACA through various mechanisms, such as manipulating appointments to advisory bodies, conducting key advisory functions through “subcommittees,” and invoking unusual statutory exemptions. As a result, such key bodies as the Vice President’s energy task force and the presidential commission investigating the failure of intelligence in Iraq have operated without complying with FACA.
[b]Laws that Restrict Public Access to Federal Records[/b]
In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration increased public access to government information by restricting the ability of officials to classify information and establishing an improved system for the declassification of information. These steps have been reversed under the Bush Administration, which has expanded the capacity of the government to classify documents and to operate in secret.
[b]The Classification and Declassification of Records[/b]
The classification and declassification of national security information is largely governed by executive order. President Bush has used this authority to:
. Reverse the presumption against classification, allowing classification even in cases of significant doubt;
. Expand authority to classify information for longer periods of time;
. Delay the automatic declassification of records;
. Expand the authority of the executive branch to reclassify information that has been declassified; and
. Increase the number of federal agencies that can classify information to include the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Statistics on classification and declassification of records under the Bush Administration demonstrate the impact of these new policies. Original decisions to classify information — those in which an authorized classifier first determines that disclosure could harm national security — have soared during the Bush Administration. In fiscal years 2001 to 2003, the average number of original decisions to classify information increased 50% over the average for the previous five fiscal years. Derivative classification decisions, which involve classifying documents that incorporate, restate, or paraphrase information that has previously been classified, have increased even more dramatically. Between FY 1996 and FY 2000, the number of derivative classifications averaged 9.96 million per year. Between FY 2001 and FY 2003, the average increased to 19.37 million per year, a 95% increase. In the last year alone, the total number of classification decisions increased 25%.
[b]Sensitive Security Information[/b]
The Bush Administration has sought and obtained a significant expansion of authority to make designations of Sensitive Security Information (SSI), a category of sensitive but unclassified information originally established to protect the security of civil aviation. Under legislation signed by President Bush, the Department of Homeland Security now has authority to apply this designation to information related to any type of transportation.
[b]The Patriot Act[/b]
The passage of the Patriot Act after the September 11, 2001, attacks gave the Bush Administration new authority to conduct government investigations in secret. One provision of the Act expanded the authority of the Justice Department to conduct secret electronic wiretaps. Another provision authorized the Justice Department to obtain secret orders requiring the production of “books, records, papers, documents, and other items,” and it prohibited the recipient of these orders (such as a telephone company or library) from disclosing their existence. And a third provision expanded the use of “sneak and peak” search warrants, which allow the Justice Department to search homes and other premises secretly without giving notice to the occupants.
[b]Secret Detentions, Trials, and Deportations[/b]
In addition to expanding secrecy in government by executive order and statute, the Bush Administration has used novel legal interpretations to expand its authority to detain, try, and deport individuals in secret. The Administration asserted the authority to:
. Hold persons designated as “enemy combatants” in secret without a hearing, access to a lawyer, or judicial review;
. Conduct secret military trials of persons held as enemy combatants when deemed necessary by the government; and
. Conduct secret deportation proceedings of aliens deemed “special interest cases” without any notice to the public, the press, or even family members.
[b]Congressional Access to Federal Records[/b]
Our system of checks and balances depends on Congress being able to obtain information about the activities of the executive branch. When government operates behind closed doors without adequate congressional oversight, mismanagement and corruption can flourish. Yet despite Congress’ constitutional oversight role, the Bush Administration has sharply limited congressional access to federal records.
[b] GAO Access to Federal Records[/b]
A federal statute passed in 1921 gives the congressional Government Accountability Office the authority to review federal records in the course of audits and investigations of federal programs. Notwithstanding this statutory language and a long history of accommodation between GAO and the executive branch, the Bush Administration challenged the authority of GAO on constitutional grounds, arguing that the Comptroller General, who is the head of GAO, had no “standing” to enforce GAO’s right to federal records. The Bush Administration prevailed at the district court level and GAO decided not to appeal, significantly weakening the authority of GAO.
[b]The Seven Member Rule[/b]
The Bush Administration also challenged the authority of members of the House Government Reform Committee to obtain records under the “Seven Member Rule,” a federal statute that requires an executive agency to provide information on matters within the jurisdiction of the Committee upon the request of any seven of its members. Although a district court ruled in favor of the members in a case involving access to adjusted census records, the Bush Administration has continued to resist requests for information under the Seven Member Rule, forcing the members to initiate new litigation.
[b]Withholding Information Requested by Congress[/b]
On numerous occasions, the Bush Administration has withheld information requested by members of Congress. During consideration of the Medicare legislation in 2003, the Administration withheld estimates showing that the bill would cost over $100 billion more than the Administration claimed. In this instance, Administration officials threatened to fire the HHS Actuary, Richard Foster, if he provided the information to Congress. In another case, the Administration’s refusal to provide information relating to air pollution led Senator Jeffords, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, to place holds on the nominations of several federal officials.
On over 100 separate occasions, the Administration has refused to answer the inquiries of, or provide the information requested by, Rep. Waxman, the ranking member of the House Committee on Government Reform. The information that the Administration has refused to provide includes:
. Documents requested by the ranking members of eight House Committees relating to the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere;
. Information on contacts between Vice President Cheney’s office and the Department of Defense regarding the award to Halliburton of a sole-source contract worth up to $7 billion for work in Iraq; and
. Information about presidential advisor Karl Rove’s meetings and phone conversations with executives of companies in which he owned stock.
[b] The 9-11 Commission[/b]
On November 27, 2002, Congress passed legislation creating the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (commonly known as the 9-11 Commission) as a congressional commission to investigate the September 11 attacks. Throughout its investigation, however, the Bush Administration resisted or delayed providing the Commission with important information. For example, the Administration’s refusal to turn over documents forced the Commission to issue subpoenas to the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration. The Administration also refused for months to allow Commissioners to review key presidential intelligence briefing documents.
[b] The Collective Impact[/b]
Taken together, the actions of the Bush Administration have resulted in an extraordinary expansion of government secrecy. External watchdogs, including Congress, the media, and nongovernmental organizations, have consistently been hindered in their ability to monitor government activities. These actions have serious implications for the nature of our government. When government operates in secret, the ability of the public to hold the government accountable is imperiled.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Full Report: Commitee on Government Reform Minority Office, http://democrats.reform.house...
End the Tyranny of Secrecy in the U.S.A., http://www.tblog.com/template...
Shredding the Constitution, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Un-American Bush Regime Increasing Un-democratic Govt. Secrecy, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush Administration Documents on Secrecy Policy ... c/o The Federation of American Scientists, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush/Cheney Inc.: A History of Refusing to Release Documents, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... The Pinocchio President ... |
| 09.18.04 (6:54 am) [edit] |
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." - Abraham Lincoln (attributed)
[b]This last week in Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings on the bloody fiasco in Iraq, Senator & Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), blamed the blind optimism of "the dancing in the street crowd" within the Bush administration: "The lack of planning is apparent." Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican went on to confirm "an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble" in Iraq. http://www.cincypost.com/2004... ... "We the People" must demand accountability for the nightmarish neo-con bloodbath in Iraq ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] rushed into their illegal and immoral neo-con war in Iraq and then recklessly and incompetently mismanaged it causing the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of innocent people; misery and mayhem; and our reputation as a nation is in tatters around the world ... The despotic Bush regime is not fit to serve our nation ... We need a change ... We need competent government ... We need John Kerry to restore our dignity, our honor, our competency and our democracy ...[/b]
With the number of casualties and wounded in Iraq rising daily, and entire cities destabilized by insurgent forces, President Bush's chest- thumping message of progress appears increasingly out of touch and counterproductive. Although the president's own intelligence officials have warned him for months that Iraq was dangerously unstable, his administration has sugarcoated the sobering reality and failed to make necessary changes to win the war.
[b]... The president's own intelligence estimates conclude that Iraq will remain dangerously unstable through 2005.[/b] The 50-page National Intelligence Estimate – ignored by President Bush – provides a “dark assessment” and concludes that Iraq is headed toward major political, economic and security difficulties in the coming months, including possible civil war.
[b]... Efforts to rebuild Iraq's economy and create democratic institutions cannot move forward while insurgents run free. [/b]The president claims Iraq is on the path to democracy, but months before scheduled national elections, major portions of the country remain under attack as the nationalist insurgency continues to grow. Reconstruction has failed to move forward and the United Nations remains unable to fully assist in planning for the January elections.
[b]... President Bush's grandstanding on Iraq does not help the situation.[/b] Putting his own reelection needs ahead of the welfare of American troops and the Iraqi people, the president continues to deny that serious problems exist in his strategy and refuses to make necessary changes to win the war and build peace in Iraq.
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
Yesterday's Men, and Tomorrow's, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Reality Check Badly Needed, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Not Walking the Walk, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Gates of Hell, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Yesterday's Men, and Tomorrow's ... |
| 09.17.04 (4:32 pm) [edit] |
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government." - Thomas Jefferson
"You can't say civilization don't advance -- for in every war, they kill you in a new way." - Will Rogers
[b]The following article published in [i]The Economist [/i]raises some alarming questions regarding the ability of misguided ideologues to hijack a democratic government and impose their deadly neo-fascist agenda producing dire consequences in the large-scale slaughter of human beings (Iraq, Afghanistan ...)[i] and [/i]the bankrupting of our nation economically (for the staggering reckless deficit spending [i]on credit[/i], will produce an inflationary spiral in the not too distant future ...) ... "We the People" must recognize that the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is taking us in the wrong direction with a "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" mantra reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany ...[/b]
[b]Is the neo-conservative moment over?[/b]
One of the canonical texts of the American conservative movement is Richard M. Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences" (1948). Four years ago, few people expected that ideas would have any consequences for the new Bush administration - particularly neo-conservative ideas. George Bush came across as a genial cowboy with more interest in ranching than reading. And the neo-cons - many of whom are secular Jewish intellectuals - looked like fish out of water in a party dominated by evangelical Christians and hard-headed business people.
Yet today there is little doubt that neo-conservative ideas have had profound consequences. It is an exaggeration to say that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy has been hijacked by a neo-con cabal [I don't agree. It is clear that the neo-cons have indeed hijacked U.S. foreign policy.]: Donald Rumsfeld is hardly one of them. But the brains at the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard have certainly made the running. They started making the case for regime-change in Iraq as early as the mid-1990s. And after September 11th they linked the case for removing Saddam to the wider case for democratising the Middle East.
The invasion of Iraq has a reasonable claim to be regarded as the neo-conservative moment in American foreign policy. But is that moment now over? Are the neo-conservatives destined to be sidelined even if Mr. Bush is re-elected in November?
The neo-cons have had all manner of problems recently - not least the travails of Conrad Black, one of their leading sponsors. But their main problem is obvious: the war in Iraq has blown holes in their credibility. Whatever happened to those weapons of mass destruction? Or the garlands of flowers awaiting American troops? Iraq looks less like a beachhead for democracy than a failed state in the making, and the war less like a brave idea than a brainwave of think-tankers without military experience.
The Iraq debacle has inevitably attracted fierce criticism from both the Michael Moore left and the Pat Buchanan right. Now it is getting closer to home. In the current issue of the National Interest, Francis Fukuyama (a star in the neo-con firmament ever since he proclaimed "The End of History"in 1989) blasts the war wing of the neo-con movement - particularly Charles Krauthammer - for ignoring their movement's traditions. The neo-conservative movement, points out Mr. Fukuyama, was founded on scepticism about social engineering - the conviction that grand schemes like LBJ's Great Society programme produce unintended, uncontrollable consequences. But when it comes to implanting democracy in Iraq, the neo-cons have swapped conservative scepticism for Wilsonian naivety. Mr. Fukuyama points to America's sorry record of nation-building, to the absence of democratic traditions in the Middle East and the neo-cons' failure to take the question of American legitimacy seriously.
Mr. Krauthammer has reportedly written a withering rebuttal of Mr. Fukuyama in the forthcoming edition of the National Interest. That might have been expected. But, in many ways, the amazing thing about the neo-cons is how uncontrite they are. Most intellectual movements would have been humbled by the neo-cons' confrontation with reality. But they seem as feisty as ever. The Weekly Standard blames the failures in Iraq on the Pentagon's miscalculations. Young Turks such as Max Boot urge America to find new dragons to slay in Iran.
The neo-cons have three things going for them. The most important is Mr. Bush's unwavering support for the war. The Republican convention had one over-arching message: that the war in Iraq was part of the wider war on terror. John McCain argued that the sanctions regime in Iraq had been failing. Dick Cheney asserted that war against Iraq had persuaded Libya to abandon its nuclear-weapons programme. And Mr. Bush reiterated the idealistic case for spreading democracy in the Middle East. Such idealism hardly seems to be justified by the daily news from Iraq, but so far John Kerry has made a hash of both criticising the policy and advancing an alternative strategy of his own.
The neo-cons also remain rich in intellectual creativity. At home, they have taken the lead in everything from designing "big-government conservatism" to opposing unbridled biotechnological research: witness the rather eloquent report from the President's Council on Bioethics, "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Happiness". An aspiring Republican is still likely to get ideas out of the Weekly Standard, as opposed to merely discovering that abortion is a bad thing yet again in the National Review.
[b]Intellectual Fuel [/b]
Lastly, when it comes to conservative influence-peddling, the neo-cons still have no rivals. The paleo-conservative dream of the world's only superpower retreating within its own borders has not won over Mr. Bush. Libertarians are anathema to the religious right. Old-fashioned Rockefeller Republicans are losing their political base in the north-east. Most other pressure groups focus on a narrow range of issues, such as reducing taxes or protecting gun rights.
This is not to say that everything in the neo-con garden is rosy. The neo-cons will get the blame if Mr. Bush is defeated in November. If he wins, they could be in even bigger trouble should either Iraq or big-government conservatism implode.
Yet, in its own strange way, even Mr. Fukuyama's spat with Mr. Krauthammer points to yet another neo-con advantage: their extraordinary capacity to reinvent themselves. The neo-cons have changed shape dramatically since the 1960s; now Mr. Fukuyama and other neo-con dissidents may change them once again. The lesson of the past four years is not just that ideas have consequences. It is that even the Republican Party, once ridiculed as the stupid party, needs intellectual fuel to keep it going. So far, for all their mistakes, the neo-cons still have no real rivals when it comes to supplying that fuel.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/worl...
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| ... The Bush Cocoon ... |
| 09.17.04 (12:47 pm) [edit] |
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
"Supposing is good, but finding out is better." - Mark Twain
"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" - Will Rogers
[b]Bush lives his pathetic life in a plastic bubble ... [/b]Dubya brags about[i] not [/i]reading newpapers or anything else for that matter ... Dubya doesn't talk to anyone except for Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and a corrupt coterie of sychophants, war-profiteers and corporate crooks ... Dubya is in denial regarding his insane, illegal and immoral guerrilla quagmire in Iraq [i]and [/i]the disastrous consequences of his economic malfeasance here at home ...
Even the conservative Andrew Sullivan http://www.andrewsullivan.com... warns:
[b]THE BUSH COCOON:[/b] Ryan Lizza http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?... observes the surreal nature of Dr Pangloss's re-election tour:
... "For the most part, spending time on the trail with Bush is like being transported to a parallel universe. The only music is Christian rock and country tunes about plain-talking everymen. The only people who ask the president questions are his most feverish supporters, never the press. In this alternate universe, Iraq and Afghanistan are marching effortlessly toward democracy. The economy is, in the words of former Broncos quarterback John Elway, who introduces Bush in Greenwood Village, "the best in the world." John Kerry, whose platform is to the right of Clinton's in 1992, is calling for a massive expansion of government." ...
Yes, it's working - for now. But if the voters realize at some point in this campaign that the president is simply living in a dreamworld, they might vote for someone who, for all his faults, is at least able to recognize reality.
[b]"We the People" had better [i]take stock[/i] of the reality [i]on the ground [/i]before the 2nd November ... Vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America!!! [/b]
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| ... Reality Check Badly Needed ... |
| 09.17.04 (9:19 am) [edit] |
"To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq... The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms." - New York Times, 9/16/04, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
"Iraq is on the path to lasting democracy and liberty" - George W. Bush, 8/5/04, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
[b]It is time to demand that our elected servants in the White House[i] come clean with us [/i](and they need to be honest with themselves [i]too[/i]) regarding the grim reality on the ground in Iraq ... Please write to Congress http://www.congress.org and express your outrage at the deception by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] regarding their disastrous bloodbath in Iraq ... "We the People" deserve no less ...[/b]
The White House has a problem recognizing reality. With the U.S. mired in a bloody war that gets grimmer with each passing day, President Bush clings to the rosiest projections, no matter how unlikely. Suicide bombings, kidnappings, rising casualties, cities under siege and ambushes all paint a picture of a nation descending into intractable violence. In just 17 days this month, 52 U.S. soldiers have died, threatening to make September the second deadliest month in the 18 months since the war began. And these clashes came a day after a team of kidnappers grabbed two Americans and a Briton in an early morning raid on their home. Even the fortified Green Zone is no longer completely secure. Yet the White House refuses to acknowledge the situation is spiraling dangerously out of control, preferring disingenuous rhetoric to hard action.
[b]HEAD IN THE SAND:[/b] A classified National Intelligence Estimate, given to President Bush in July, "spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq... The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms." However, the president is continuing to misrepresent the situation to the American public. On 8/5/04, he stated, "Iraq is on the path to lasting democracy and liberty." His press secretary, Scott McClellan, said on 9/15/04, "The President talks often about the progress we've made in places like...Iraq."
[b]CONSERVATIVES SPEAK OUT:[/b] The president may be out of touch with reality, but his fellow conservatives are increasingly concerned about the deteriorating situation. Conservative Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), noting the White House's recent plan to divert $3.4 billion from reconstruction efforts to emergency security efforts, said: "Now, that does not add up, in my opinion, to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we're winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble." Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) also "expressed exasperation at the administration's rosy prewar assessments that as soon as Hussein was deposed, a euphoric Iraqi population would embrace democracy." He charged, "The nonsense of that is [now] apparent."
[b]CRESCENDO OF CRITICISM:[/b] Some of the nation's editorial boards criticized the president's lack of candor on Iraq today. USA Today points out, "While all of the options have downsides, the longer the administration denies the deepening crisis in Iraq, the longer the crisis will fester. That places U.S. troops in greater peril, risks turning Iraq into a terrorist haven and dims hopes of creating a viable government, much less a model of democracy in the Middle East." Despite the NIE report projecting "dicey to disastrous" scenarios for Iraq, the Boston Globe notes, "President Bush and Vice President Cheney nevertheless go on campaigning on the false pretense that their Iraq policy has been a great success." Instead, "continuing mayhem…casts light on the unmistakable failures of the Bush administration's efforts at peacemaking and nation-building in postwar Iraq."
[b]NO EVIDENCE OF WEAPONS:[/b] Before the invasion, President Bush and his administration hyped the threat of an armed and dangerous Iraq to frighten Americans into supporting the war. President Bush ominously warned on 10/7/02, "Iraq could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." Vice President Cheney did him one better, claiming, "We believe Saddam has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." And Donald Rumsfeld sounded the alarm bells, saying, "We know where the [WMDs] are." A new report by the top American weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, finds "no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year." According to the report, which will be made public in the upcoming weeks, the sanctions put in place by the United Nations were holding these desires firmly in check. The report provides another devastating blow to the administration's case for rushing to war.
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
GlobalSecurity.org: U.S. Casualties in Iraq, http://www.globalsecurity.org...
Losing the Battle with Terror, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Not Walking the Walk, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Think Again: Meanwhile, in the Real World..., http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Global Fears Find A Voice ... |
| 09.17.04 (6:28 am) [edit] |
"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil." - Albert Schweitzer
[b]The good health, well-being and very survival of our planet and our people is in danger. "We the People" must take action [i]now[/i] and write Congress http://www.congress.org demanding an end to the bloodbath in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to address urgent problems facing our world ... Please vote for John Kerry for President of the United States of America on 2nd November 2004, because he will bring new thinking and a breath of fresh air to cleanse the squalid and sordid failures, corruptions and heinous bloodbaths reeked by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]with their callous disregard for life ...[/b]
The International Ethical Collegium http://www.un.org/Pubs/chroni... is an important new global voice. Its membership includes philosophers, diplomats, scientists, human rights activists and current and former Heads of State and governments, like ex-President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson http://www.asanet.org/footnot... , who want the global community to respond "intelligently and forcefully to the decisive challenges facing humankind." (The group has recently published an important Open Letter to George W. Bush and John Kerry, which is reprinted below.)
The Collegium http://www.un.org/Pubs/chroni... sees three great challenges confronting the modern world--all of which require robust multilateral solutions: an ecological threat that includes global warming, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and a shortage of drinkable water in many of the world's poorest regions; a global economy in which deregulation has created massive disparities in income and a less secure world; and, finally, a "crisis of thought and meaning" whereby humanity is thwarted by forces like "violence and intolerance [and] materialistic obsession."
In an interview this week, the International Collegium's Secretary General Sacha Goldman http://www.un.org/Pubs/chroni... talked about how sovereign states' own self-interest, threatened to undermine the hope of collective action to confront the world's most immediate problems. "The US is losing its moral leadership," Goldman said, and that's troubling because nations "don't exist anymore on their own." Interdependence, as the Open Letter states, "is the new reality of this century--from global warming to global markets, global crime and global technology." For more click here http://www.thenation.com/edcu...
[b] Collegium International
To The Candidates of the 2004 United States Presidential Elction: President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry.[/b]
On November 2, one of you will be elected the next President of the United States. Because your great country is powerful far beyond its borders, billions of women and men who cannot vote will be profoundly affected by the choice made by the United States electorate.
We, the members of the International Ethical Collegium, write to you as citizens of the world who are in effect your constituents, but who have no vote. We ask that you consider your responsibility not just to the United States and its citizens but also to the world in this new era of interdependence, when sovereignty still circumscribes elections but can no longer circumscribe the consequences of elections.
Interdependence is evident in our world, from global warming to global markets, global crime, and global technology. However, more than anything else, terrorism has unveiled this fateful interdependence that defines our twenty-first century world. The atrocious attacks of September 11, 2001, like those that followed in Casablanca, Bali, Madrid and elsewhere, elicited the condemnation and sympathy of the entire world, even as they showed that no nation can any longer be secure or sovereign by itself.
We believe that the realities of interdependence require that the promise of its benefits be realized in affirmative ways through an architecture of interdependence that assures full equality in the distribution of economic, social and human resources. This condition requires the United States to recognize four crucial principles and needs, that define the central concerns of the Collegium:
** the need to establish democracy at a global level, where it can regulate and offer popular sovereignty over global anarchic forces that have escaped the sovereignty of individual nations, and at the same time secure diversity and equality among diverse democratic cultures and civilizations;
** the need to define the public goods of our common world, and to protect them as common heritage--including such crucial goods as access to knowledge and information and communication technologies, as well as to such non-renewable resources as drinking water and fossil fuels;
** the need to establish and formulate common interdependent values that can act as a bulwark against relativism and cynicism, even as they invite intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue and democratic deliberation;
** the need to define economic, social and cultural rights as intrinsic to and inseparable from political rights, extending across cultures and generations.
We believe that these needs represent the fundamental concerns of the world's voiceless citizens who will have to live with the consequences of United States leadership. At the same time, we recognize that, as leaders of your great nation, you are agents of hope, capable of using the power given to you by the American people to the advantage of all humankind. We also know that since the United States can no longer find peace or justice without engaging cooperatively and multilaterally with the world and its international institutions, the world can have neither justice nor peace without the involvement of the United States.
In this spirit, although you have a legal obligation only to your country's citizens, we would ask you to read this letter and offer the world's citizens--your other invisible constituents--a considered response. You can be sure it will be met with a gratitude that recognizes that you have moved beyond the responsibilities of politics to embrace the responsibilities of ethical leadership and in doing so, have affirmed both the reality and the promise of interdependence.
[b]Endorsed on behalf of the International Collegium members by:[/b]
Milan KUCAN , former President of Slovenia and Michel ROCARD, former Prime Minister of France, Co-chairs of the International Collegium
Andreas VAN AGT, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands; Henri ATLAN, Bio-physicist and Philosopher, France; Lloyd AXWORTHY, President of University of Winnipeg, former Foreign Minister of Canada; Fernando Henrique CARDOSO, former President of Brazil; Manuel CASTELLS, Sociologist, Spain; Mireille DELMAS-MARTY, Professor of law, Sorbonne and College de France; Ruth DREIFUSS, former President of the Swiss Confederation; Gareth EVANS, President of the ICG, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Australia; Malcolm FRASER, Chairman of the InterAction Council, former Prime Minister, Australia; Bronislaw GEREMEK, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Poland; Bacharuddin Jusuf HABIBIE, former President of Indonesia; H.R.H. HASSAN BIN TALLAL, Jordan; Vaclav HAVEL, former President of the Czech Republic; Stephane HESSEL, Ambassador of France; Alpha Oumar KONARE, former President of Mali; Claudio MAGRIS, Author, Italy; Edgar MORIN, Philosopher, France; Sadako OGATA, President of Japan International Cooperation Agency(JICA), former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Japan; Jacques ROBIN, Philosopher, Founder of Transversales, France; Mary ROBINSON, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, former President of Ireland; Wolfgang SACHS, Economist, Germany; Mohamed SAHNOUN, Ambassador of Algeria; George VASSILIOU, former President of the Republic of Cyprus; Richard VON WEIZSACKER, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany; Huanming YANG, Director and Professor, Beijing Genomics Institute, China.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor's Cut, The Nation, http://www.thenation.com
Earth to America, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Not Walking the Walk ... |
| 09.16.04 (6:22 pm) [edit] |
[b]"We the People" must take our national security into our own hands and elect John Kerry as the next President of the United States of America ... We must rid ourselves of the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i], for they have betrayed us ... Rather than protect us, the corrupt Bushies rushed forward into their illegal and immoral neo-con war in Iraq (having nothing to do with terror; 9/11 and who posed no threat) for sordid and squalid motives having nothing to do with our nation's best interest ... This is unacceptable ...[/b]
"Our highest responsibility is to the safety and security of the American people."
- Sen. Bill Frist, 9/15/04, http://frist.senate.gov/index...
[i]VERSUS[/i]
Conservatives in Congress this week killed a series of proposed amendments to the Homeland Security spending bill, including funding increases to secure ports, airports, borders, chemical plants and rails, as well as to train and equip firefighters and other emergency responders.
- American Progress, 9/16/04, http://www.americanprogressac...
On homeland security issues, conservatives in Congress talk a good game. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) said yesterday that "our highest responsibility http://frist.senate.gov/index... is to the safety and security of the American people." But this week in the Senate, in a series of votes on the 2005 spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security, conservatives showed their true colors. While conservatives, including Frist, have eagerly spent more than $135 billion http://www.americanprogress.o... for the security of Iraq, they refused to support modest increases http://www.americanprogressac... in funding for vital homeland security needs in the United States, including: $300 million dollars for port security, $146 million for firefighters, $70 million to track shipments of hazardous materials, $50 million for more federal Air Marshals, $70 million to secure chemical plants and $350 million to improve security at points of entry into the United States. American Progress has more details http://www.americanprogressac... on critical homeland security funding that was thwarted this week by conservatives in Congress.
[b]POLICE AND FIREFIGHTERS STILL CAN'T COMMUNICATE:[/b] The Christian Science Monitor reports that three years after 9/11, "the goal of compatible and adequate communications among the nation's first responders is nearly as remote as ever http://www.csmonitor.com/2004... ." Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communication Commission, "is opting for a hands-off approach by encouraging the private sector to take the initiative in ensuring preparedness in an emergency." Efforts to devote a small portion of the broadcast spectrum to first responders are being opposed by lobbyists from the National Association of Broadcasters. This week, the Senate leadership killed an amendment to spend $70 million on systems that allow real-time communication http://www.americanprogressac... between state and local first responders.
[b]SECURITY OF NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS UNCERTAIN:[/b] A report http://www.gao.gov/highlights... issued Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) "is not yet in a position to provide an independent determination that each plant has taken reasonable and appropriate steps" to protect against security threats. Safety plans that have been provided to the NRC by nuclear power plant operators do not yet contain basic information "such as where responding guards are stationed." Nevertheless, the NRC "does not plan to make some improvements in its inspection program that GAO previously recommended and still believes are needed." This includes recommendations such as "following up to verify that all violations of security requirements have been corrected." Meanwhile, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security continue to warn "that al Qaeda remains interested in targeting nuclear plants http://www.latimes.com/news/l...,1,5661571.story?coll=la-news-state ."
[b]CHEMICAL PLANT SECURITY GETS AN F:[/b] Sen. Charles Schumer issued a report card http://schumer.senate.gov/Sch... on the nation's homeland security policy, awarding America's chemical plant security policy an "F." Schumer notes that "there are 112 hazardous material facilities where the release of chemicals could threaten more than 1 million people." Nevertheless, "security at these plants remains lax and no federal security standards govern these facilities." Other areas of high concern: train and subway security (D), truck security (D), and port security (D+). Also check out American Progress' report card on America's security three years after 9/11 http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Think Again: Meanwhile, in the Real World... ... |
| 09.16.04 (2:08 pm) [edit] |
"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason." - Ernest Hemingway
"The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service." - Albert Einstein
"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism." - Martin Luther King Jr.
[b]Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, finally admitted http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi... what eminent international legal scholars have been saying http://www.globalpolicy.org/s... for a long time now:-- that the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]neo-con invasion of Iraq is "illegal" ... "We the People" have the opportunity (as well as the obligation) to stand firm against the despotic Bushies' appalling arrogance, tyranny and corruption by doing our duty on the 2nd November 2004 and firing these neo-con crooks, and voting for John F. Kerry to be our next President of the United States of America ...[/b]
Clio, the muse of history, enjoys mocking both our passions and pretensions. But the amazingly trivial pursuits of our modern-day political media make this practice far easier than it need be. The issue of "character," while hardly irrelevant to political leadership, has managed to crowd out virtually all discussion of issues in the U.S. political system.
The cruel irony of dynamic reveals itself in the fact that while most of the mainstream media cannot manage to distinguish between the kinds of moral choices that would lead one young man to sit out a war he supported thirty years ago while another risked his life to fight it, and then returned home to help save his fellow soldiers languishing in a hellish jungle war that could not be won, 130,000 young Americans are rapidly falling into a similar situation. With an increasingly chaotic, unpopular occupation in Iraq heading toward outright guerrilla warfare, and fewer than six weeks until a presidential election, a quick glance at the headlines would seem to suggest that the media considers '70s-era typewriter fonts, pay stubs and whether or not medals (or ribbons) were tossed over a fence to be the pressing issues of the day. Like a recurring nightmare, American soldiers are once again "dying for a mistake," and they are doing so at a rate that has actually increased since the June 28 handover of power, though one would never guess as much from the relative dearth of press coverage.
Examine last Tuesday's grim milestone. Sept. 7, 2004, saw not only the 1,000th American serviceperson killed in Iraq, but also, according to Thomas F. Schaller http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/i... , marked "the official inflection date marking an identical period both before Saddam Hussein was captured and after he was captured." Its significance? In the first 269 days from the war's start on March 19, 2003, to Hussein's capture on Dec. 13, 2003, there were 459 American fatalities, which equal a rate of 1.71 a day. In the 269 days since that day, however, 539 Americans died, which averages out to a rate of 2 a day. In another telling statistic, the daily casualty rate for 2004 stands at 18 a day, more than twice what it was in 2003 (when it was 8.4 a day). The Pentagon reports the number of U.S. wounded at approximately 7,000. But during the two months since the handover, these numbers have risen by 1,500. The numbers reflect an explosion in the level of violence in Iraq, with attacks on American troops and their Iraqi allies averaging 87 per day. But if you listen to the conservative spin, major combat operations continue to be over, despite some "miscalculations," and we've turned the corner in Iraq.
As the media effectively ignore these alarming casualty rates, many misconceptions fostered by the war's architects remain uncorrected. According to a late August poll http://www.pipa.org/OnlineRep... by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, only 41 percent of those polled were able to correctly place U.S. deaths in Iraq in the 800-to-1,000 range, at a time when the actual toll was well over 900. More disturbing is the fact that half the poll's respondents continue to hold the misperception that Iraq was either closely linked with al Qaeda before the war (35 percent) or was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks (15 percent). Fewer than half of Americans were aware that the 9/11 Commission had effectively dismissed this possibility.
While it gives every indication of developing into an all but hopeless quagmire, Iraq is in some ways a less worrisome problem than those that have recently been ignored. Iran and North Korea continue to develop their nuclear programs with little notice from the suddenly decidedly less hawkish right wing. Although the United States is currently constructing an untested and likely nonfunctional missile shield, conservative disdain for international treaties has actually made potential threats more likely. America is not a party to the "Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty," and is therefore helping to undermine the world community's ability to combat nuclear proliferation. As American Progress senior fellow Lawrence J. Korb recently noted http://www.americanprogress.o... , "By refusing to establish an inspection regime for the fissile materials cutoff, the Bush administration has thwarted a 10-year effort by the international community to lure Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs."
Macho rhetoric notwithstanding, America continues to turn a blind eye toward Pakistan and its nuclear supermarket, as India, Israel, Iran and North Korea also continue their programs unabated. As Korb concludes, "the administration is doing things that increase the dangers of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands." Despite the critical importance of containing nuclear proliferation, and in spite of the rhetoric about the dangers we face, try typing "Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty" into a search engine. You'll find just how much weight the story has been given in the press.
As conservatives continue to browbeat the media into spinning their obvious failures and untruths into favorable coverage with the false claim of "liberal bias," it becomes nearly impossible for any American voter to make an informed judgment about his or her political choices. Perhaps in another year or so, we will be treated to another series of apologies from the[i] New York Times [/i]and[i] Washington Post [/i]about how they dropped the ball on these stories, but don't hold your breath.
As Edward Wasserman recently noted in the Miami Herald, "The performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 will be remembered as a disgrace. To be sure, it was an angry, fearful time, and independent-minded reporting might not have been heard above the drumbeats of patriotism and war. But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news organizations that now realize that they got the prewar story wrong without concluding that the real problem was they were afraid to tell the truth." This is all the more unfortunate in a nation with so proud a tradition of a free press; after all, despite repeated right-wing attempts to stifle free speech in the name of national security, the only thing the media genuinely have to fear is—you guessed it—fear itself.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of six books, including the just-published [i]When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences[/i]. Paul McLeary is a New York writer. - http://www.americanprogress.o...
Gates of Hell, http://www.tblog.com/template...
"Impotence", http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Earth to America ... |
| 09.16.04 (7:23 am) [edit] |
"We won't have a society if we destroy the environment." - Margaret Mead
[b]"We the People" are not isolated on this Planet Earth as Americans ... We must work together with our nations in order to collectively make our world a safe, clean and healthy place so that people along-side the natural world can flourish and prosper together ... If we do not protect the environment, we will ultimately destroy ourselves ...[/b]
There's no doubt that American policy in the past four years has affected the rest of the world, and the 2004 election outcome will just continue this impact. To educate American voters about the [i]election's influence far from home[/i], EarthAction http://portland.indymedia.org... has started the[b] Earth To America [/b]project, an online effort to bring the voices of world citizens to American voters and remind us how [i]we're all connected[/i]. If you're an American voter, read the letters. If you're a citizen of another country, tell American voters how November 2 will affect you.
Visit [b]Earth to America [/b]on http://www.earthtoamerica.org...
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| ... End the Tyranny of Secrecy in the U.S.A. ... |
| 09.15.04 (3:30 pm) [edit] |
"There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at TYRANNY. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you." - William Hazlitt
[b]Our U.S. Constitution was established by our Founding Fathers with the fundamental praecipe that our elected representatives are accountable to "We the People" ... Undue secrecy undermines our [i]right to know [/i]what actions our elected officials take in our name, and is highly dangerous for the survival of a democratic system of government ...[/b]
[b][u]End Cheney's Shenanigans[/u][/b]
For three-and-a-half years, Vice President Dick Cheney has gone to great lengths to conceal who helped him write the administration's ill-conceived energy policy, which is little more than billions in tax giveaways http://www.americanprogress.o... to the energy industry. (We do know, however, through news reports that disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay was extensively involved http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... .) Cheney repeatedly defied federal court orders to disclose who participated in order to buy himself time to appeal the litigation seeking the information in the Supreme Court. There, five justices did not side with Cheney, but further delayed the ruling by sending the case back to a federal appeals court on technical grounds http://writ.news.findlaw.com/... . (Antonin Scalia, who refused to recuse himself from the case despite going on a hunting trip with Cheney http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO... weeks before, subsequently voted to resolve the case in Cheney's favor.) Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) has introduced a resolution, H. Res. 745 http://frwebgate.access.gpo.g...:hr745ih.txt.pdf , that would put an end, once and for all, to Cheney's shenanigans. The resolution would require – within 14 days of passage – that Cheney disclose to the House of Representatives the names of the people who were involved in his energy task force. It is being considered by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce today. Write your representative http://www.americanprogressac... and say you deserve the truth – urge him or her to vote for the resolution when it reaches the House floor.
[b]BUSH'S ASSAULT ON OPEN GOVERNMENT:[/b] A new report http://democrats.reform.house... by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) details the Bush administration's assault on open government. The report reveals a consistent pattern whereby "laws designed to promote access to information have been undermined while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or operate in secret have been expanded." The administration has withheld from the public and Congress not only information about Cheney's energy task force but also: communications between the Defense Department and the vice president's office regarding contracts awarded to Halliburton, documents describing the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, memoranda revealing what the White House knew about Iraq's WMD, and cost estimates of the Medicare prescription drug legislation. Read the full report http://democrats.reform.house... (or, if you're short on time, the executive summary http://democrats.reform.house... ).
[b]THE COST OF SECRECY:[/b] A study by the coalition openthegovernment.org http://www.openthegovernment.... reveals that the excessive secrecy of the Bush administration comes at a high price, literally. According to the report, "the federal government spent $6.5 billion last year creating 14 million new classified documents and securing accumulated secrets – more than it has for at least the past decade." For every dollar the administration spent on declassifying documents last year it spent $120 to keep documents secret.
[b]STEPPING OVER THE LINE:[/b] The government's efforts to keep Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's speeches secret from the media went so far over the line even the administration was forced to admit it. AP reports the administration "has conceded that the U.S. Marshals Service http://www.law.com/jsp/articl... violated federal law when a marshal ordered reporters with The Associated Press and the Hattiesburg American to erase their recordings of a speech" by Scalia. The Justice Department said that "the reporters and their employers are each entitled to $1,000 in damages and reasonable attorney fees."
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
Shredding the Constitution, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Un-American Bush Regime Increasing Un-democratic Govt. Secrecy, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush Administration Documents on Secrecy Policy ... c/o The Federation of American Scientists, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bush/Cheney Inc.: A History of Refusing to Release Documents, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Gates of Hell ... |
| 09.15.04 (12:06 pm) [edit] |
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to 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 any country." - Hermann Goering
[b]"We the People" are faced with a[i] life-and-death [/i]choice:-- to support a neo-con, neo-hitlerian bloodbath in Iraq [i]or[/i] to call for an end to the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] and their insane power-grab in the Middle East ... To make the wrong choice is catastrophic for our nation's soul ... Are we nothing more than unwitting dupes in a dangerously barbaric game played by the neo-fascist Bushies??? ...[/b]
The lead story in today’s[i] Wall Street Journal [/i]is the latest to report that the Iraqi resistance is getting, well, serious:
... "Iraq’s once highly fragmented insurgent groups are increasingly cooperating to attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets, and steadily gaining control of more areas of the country. Iraqi government officials are especially concerned that the violence in Baghdad in the past week may be fueled in part by growing support for the insurgents in the capital and growing contact with rebel groups active in the countryside to Baghdad’s north. … “The insurgents are no longer operating in isolated pockets of their own. They are well-connected and cooperating,” said Sabah Kadhim, a senior adviser to Iraq’s Interior Ministry." ...
It’s the same point made in Dextin Filkins’ [i]New York Times [/i]report on Tuesday, that the resistance is growing, and that it has reached the point where efforts to kill it only make it stronger. At a conference on Monday organized by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, a big topic was the Financial Times' call for the withdrawal of U.S. and U.K. troops on a fixed and urgent schedule—but few of the intelligent people there, either from the podium or in talks that I had in the corridors, seemed ready to agree. There is a reluctance among the U.S. establishment to consider pulling out of Iraq, but no one seems to have a workable solution. War is hell, Abu Musa, secretary general of the Arab League, tell us. He is urging Arab states to get involved http://english.aljazeera.net/... in support of the failing Iraqi government:
... "The gates of hell are open in Iraq," Musa said while expressing hope that Arab countries can "help Iraq through this crisis, re-establish sovereignty throughout the country and end the American occupation"....
The U.S.-appointed government of Iraqistan could use Arab assistance, but that would doom the ambitions of the Shiites—tacitly backed by Iran, and to a lesser extent by Israel—for a Shiite-run Baghdad. That’s because the Sunni Arabs aren’t going to allow the Shiites to take over.
The Bush administration is AWOL. All they want is to get to the election without having to cut this Gordian Knot. And Kerry? Well, the hero of the Swift boats continues to be AWOL on Iraq, too. With each passing day, Kerry’s inexplicable inability to articulate a position on Iraq becomes ever more painful.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Robert Dreyfuss, The Dreyfuss Report, TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
"Impotence", http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... "Impotence" ... |
| 09.15.04 (10:55 am) [edit] |
"In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners." - Albert Camus
[b]"We the People" have been ruthlessly deceived by the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i], for the situation in Iraq is not progressing ... In fact, the bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq is dire and this tragic fiasco is rapidly spinning out of control ... We must demand an end to this barbaric insanity immediately ... Write to your representatives in Congress on http://www.congress.org ...[/b]
The Americans, who were promised bloody street fights during the capture of Baghdad, had succeeded in avoiding these by handing many dollars over to one of Saddam Hussein's famous National Guard's generals, who, for his own safety, was promptly spirited out of Iraq. A year and a half later the Americans face an urban guerilla they could not buy off the end of with whole suitcases of dollars. Because, this time, they're confronting the incorruptible fanatics under the leadership of Al-Zarqawi, the man who reportedly decapitated American Nick Berg with his own hands, the one who is also the source of the bloody March 3rd attacks which killed over 200 in the Shi'ite holy cities. These Sunni Islamists linked to Al-Qaeda redouble their audacity. Sunday, they conducted a mortar attack against American forces right into the famous "Green Zone", the securitized perimeter where American Forces General Headquarters are located behind a fortified wall.
A coordinated attack, the Al-Zarqawi organization claiming "fifty targets attacked by rocket fire" as well as nine suicide attacks. However, the Iraqi capital was above all the scene of real street fights that continued for over an hour. An American patrol was in an awkward position while the reinforcements dispatched to its rescue fell into another ambush in their turn. The situation was such that the Americans preferred to send combat helicopters to fire against a crowd of civilians parading near a Bradley tank that was on fire. Yesterday, the Americans indulged in a punitive operation, launching air raids against the Sunni bastion of Fallujah. Their avowed objective: the partisans of Al-Zarqawi, the most sought-after man in Iraq, while residents asserted that all the victims were civilians. Air raids, which are an expression of the impotence of the occupation troops, their inability to control any part whatsoever of Iraqi territory, with the exception of the famous "Green Zone".
The latest sign of this impotence: the Iraqi Prime Minister's announcement that certain parts of the country will undoubtedly not be able to participate in the general elections planned to take place before January 2005.
[b]Jean-Marcel Bouguereau is the "Nouvel Observateur"'s Editor-in-Chief. He is also an editorialist at the "République des Pyrénées", for which this article was written.[/b] - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
[b]Read also:[/b]
Neo-Cons to Hold Conference to Plan World War IV Strategies, http://www.tblog.com/template...
What the Neo-cons Can't Tell Americans, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Neo-Cons to Hold Conference to Plan World War IV Strategies ... |
| 09.15.04 (7:48 am) [edit] |
"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable." - Aldous Huxley
[b]The following is alarming and "We the People" should warn our family, friends and neighbors-- For we are in perilous danger from the insane neo-con, neo-fascist war-mongers whose vile plans for global domination are not in our nation's best interest ...[/b]
[b]JAMES WOOLSEY & CO. WILL OUTLINE WORLD WAR IV STRATEGIES [/b]at a forum scheduled two weeks from now on Wednesday, 29 September, at the Mayflower Hotel http://marriott.com/property/... in Washington, D.C.
The forum is disconcertingly titled: "World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We Fight, How We Fight," and is sponsored by the Committee on the Present Danger http://www.fightingterror.org... and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies http://www.defenddemocracy.or... .
They won't let you in the door as the conference is being organized as a watering hole for like-minded supporters of the Iraq War and those committed to broadening America's military engagement with other "problem nations" (think Iran and Syria). It runs from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. in case you want to peek in the doors at the Mayflower; there are big open hallways there.
The intro blurb on the announcement reads:
[i]The Cold War is now being called by some "World War III" because it was global, had an ideological basis, involved both military and non-military actions, required skill and the mobilization of extensive resources and lasted for years. Today's "war on terrorism" has the same elements, hence a broader name, "World War IV." Our speakers will explore its antecedents, its methods and its possible outcome[/i].
Featured speakers in the program include Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz http://www.defenselink.mil/bi... (invited), Senator Jon Kyl http://kyl.senate.gov/ (invited), Senator Joseph Lieberman http://lieberman.senate.gov/ (apparently confirmed -- Joe, what are you thinking?!), R. James Woolsey http://www.disinfopedia.org/w...%2C_Jr. , Norman Podhoretz http://www.commentarymagazine... , Eliot Cohen http://apps.sais-jhu.edu/facu... , Rachel Ehrenfeld http://public-integrity.org/e... , and others.
I can just see Jim Woolsey soon releasing bumper stickers at these events and maybe tee-shirts, coffee mugs, and buttons that say "WORLD WAR IV: Test of Loyalty," or some other sticky absurdity.
I am going to try and attend this meeting, but if there are readers out there who make it through the "non-transferable invitation" guards at the door, inquire about how Woolsey can live with himself encouraging Americans to sacrifice lives and treasure on one hand while personally profiting off of their defense of our democracy on the other.
War profiteering is a disgusting trade. But someone of James Woolsey's credentials should either recuse himself from commenting on national security policy http://www.thewashingtonnote.... -- or forfeit his defense/war-related profit-making activities.
Another alternative might be for Woolsey to contribute all the profits he is making at Paladin, Fluor, Booz Allen and other firms to those servicemen and women (and their families) who have been killed, are missing or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[b]Sources:[/b]
TomPaine, http://www.tompaine.com
What the Neo-cons Can't Tell Americans, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... What the Neo-cons Can't Tell Americans ... |
| 09.14.04 (2:27 pm) [edit] |
"War's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at." ~William Cowper
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta's [/i]horrendous bloodbath in Iraq is spinning [i]out of control[/i] http://www.tblog.com/template... ... "We the People" must rid ourselves of these neo-con crazies in the despotic Bush regime before they continue to thrust upon us their mad (and incompetent) plans driven by their insane lusts for global domination, oil, etc., with their next step: Iran http://www.tblog.com/template... ...[/b]
Why did the United States invade Iraq? President George W Bush claims that Iraq was an immediate threat, while Senator John Kerry says we Americans were misled into war. Other theories abound: filial revenge, oil dependency, or Halliburton's profits. But in fact, Bush's foreign policy advisers are driven by Cassandra-like visions of a dangerous future.
Bush's foreign-policy team is a bold group. They do not see history in terms of news cycles or election intervals. These grand strategists view the world in century-long sweeps. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, often identified as the chief neo-conservative architect, is a gifted intellectual. He fully appreciates the Iraq campaign's complexities and the historic parallels to Vietnam. Still, Wolfowitz and Bush's other advisers perceive the world in a light that ordinary Americans do not.
So what did they see on September 11, 2001? As New York's World Trade Center burned, this group saw two new terrifying trends coming together with devastating results. First, they saw a deadly new terrorist enemy and a greater Middle East festering with anti-Americanism. But we all saw this. Wolfowitz, however, saw this trend arcing decades into the future. To him, the Persian Gulf was becoming more dangerous and increasingly unstable. Next, Wolfowitz saw the inevitable spread of weapons of mass destruction. In 1950, only the US and the Soviet Union had atomic bombs. By 2000, poverty-stricken Pakistan and autarkic North Korea had acquired nuclear capabilities. With the threshold clearly dropping, what's to stop Micronesia or Sudan from getting the bomb in 2050? Only lack of effort.
Foreseeing a porous anti-American region possessing nuclear weapons, the architects of Bush's security strategy became driven by the fear of a nuclear terrorist attack on a major US city. While the odds of a mushroom cloud over Manhattan are unlikely this year, it increases substantially over the longer term. If by 2050 the Gulf region became a mix of unstable nuclear-armed autocracies, weapons would inevitably leak to nameless terrorist groups - resulting in undeterrable destruction.
Like the Greek prophet Cassandra, endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated by Apollo never to be believed, Wolfowitz & Co see a doomsday looming on the horizon and they are desperately working backward to change our fate. They decided to divert either the diffusion of nuclear technology or Middle Eastern instability. Because globalization makes technological quarantine impossible, and they hold multilateral conventions in low esteem, they chose to accelerate the spread of democracy. If the region is going nuclear down the road, it must be as benign as possible. With no confidence that a participatory government was likely in the next few decades on its own, the administration wanted to give the region a superpower push. September 11 gave them the perfect opportunity to act.
Iraq became the lever to transform the region for several reasons. To start, the US had been making a case against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein for more than a decade. Advancing that argument was easier than starting over with another country. Second, Iraq would certainly acquire nuclear weapons - it might just take decades for the technology to spread. But if Iraq could become a stable democracy, it would send shock waves through the region, forcing other governments to change. In that case, the inevitable spread of nuclear technology would involve safe democracies, not hostile theocracies.
Make no mistake - Bush's advisers believe that the US, guided by their policies, can change the world. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice argued that the geopolitical "tectonic plates" started shifting after September 11 as they had after World War II. Consider that comparison. That period witnessed America's determination to contain Soviet power, to reconstruct Europe and to establish a global economic system. It was the most audacious peacetime decision to use US power to reshape the planet.
Bush's advisers have identical aspirations today. The collapse of the Soviet Union validated their belief that US power can be globally transformative. Wolfowitz & Co embraced a willingness to act - over the short and long runs - to enhance US security (not credibility or status). If US muscle could fell the Soviet colossus, they calculated, why couldn't it create stability in the Middle East?
The major obstacle for that policy, however, was that Americans have always been uncomfortable exercising power for naked national interest. Instead, as historian Walter McDougall argues, Americans picture their role in the world as an extension of their personal values - promoting liberty, spreading democracy, and fighting evil. Moreover, Bush's advisers believe that ordinary Americans cannot comprehend and should be shielded from complex foreign policy (or even energy policy). Knowing that the US will not go to war based on hazy geopolitical trend lines, Bush's advisers justified their grand strategy in tangible terms - chemical weapons, links to terrorists, and tyranny. September 11 provided an opportunity to cloak geopolitical transformation in righteous intervention.
This Machiavellian gambit carries several deeply troubling implications. To start, the controversy over the intelligence used to justify the war becomes nearly irrelevant when grand strategy drives planning. But most important, it begs the question: if transformation was the goal, why has the post-war reconstruction gone so badly? Where were the planning and resources? Besides miscalculating the Iraqi reception, Bush's advisers were unable to ask Americans for prolonged sacrifice of blood and treasure to ensure its desired, yet unspoken, objectives. Unfortunately, this is where Wolfowitz's grand world view collided with nearsighted media cycles. The result is a less stable Iraq and a more dangerous region. Perhaps, like Cassandra, Wolfowitz hasn't changed the future after all.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Richard Daniel Ewing is a non-resident fellow at the Nixon Center in Washington, DC., http://atimes.com/atimes/Midd...
Out of Control, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Rummy Targets Iran, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Protect the Vote ... |
| 09.14.04 (11:28 am) [edit] |
"The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations - great or small - to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century" - Adlai E. Stevenson
[b]Our [i]vote[/i] is one of our most precious rights that generations of Americans have fought and died for because it is the special occasion when our people express our collective will and hold our elected representatives and civil servants accountable ... "We the People" must not permit the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] with their callous disregard for the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights, to undermine the 2004 presidential election and rig another banana republican [i]coup d'etat [/i]as they did in the tragic hijacking of America in 2000 ...[/b]
[b]Bob Herbert, [i]The New York Times[/i], warns us of the dangers we face and reminds us to stand firm and fight against tyranny http://www.truthout.org/docs_...:[/b]
More than 80 percent of the population of Detroit is black. This is very well understood by John Pappageorge, who is white and a Republican state legislator in Michigan. "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote," said Mr. Pappageorge, "we're going to have a tough time in this election."
Oops! Republicans aren't supposed to actually say they want to suppress black votes. That's so retro. It's so Jim Crow. This is the 21st century, and the thing now is to do the dastardly deed, but never ever acknowledge it.
That's where our friend Pappageorge went wrong.
After his startling quote was published several weeks ago in The Detroit Free Press, Mr. Pappageorge, who is 73, apologized and said he certainly never meant to suggest that anything racist or illegal take place. But he reiterated to me in a phone conversation last Friday that he did indeed mean that the vote in Detroit needed to be kept down.
A lot of other Republicans have similar views about the vote in areas with large African-American populations. Most blacks vote Democratic. If those votes can be suppressed, Republicans benefit. And there is increasing evidence that a big effort to suppress the vote among blacks and some other heavily Democratic voting groups is under way, which is why it is important to keep the following phone number handy:
[b] 1-866-OUR VOTE. [/b]
That's a hot line set up by the Election Protection Coalition, a group that was formed to identify and stamp out attempts to disenfranchise voters, especially in predominantly black and Latino precincts around the country.
On Election Day in November, the coalition expects to have as many as 25,000 volunteers, including 5,000 lawyers, available to provide assistance to voters who encounter irregularities or feel they are not being treated fairly at the polls. Voters who call the hot line will immediately be put in touch with volunteers in their local area.
The coalition is also urging people to call the hot line now if they are aware of efforts to discourage or prevent people from voting.
Among the groups included in the Election Protection Coalition are the People for the American Way Foundation, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the League of Women Voters, the N.A.A.C.P., the American Civil Liberties Union and the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group in Washington.
The attempt to prevent blacks from voting has been a staple of America's political history, like long-winded speeches and balloons. I wrote three columns last month about a situation in Orlando, Fla., in which armed state police officers went into the homes of elderly black voters to question them as part of a so-called criminal investigation involving absentee ballots. This tactic sent a definite chill through voters who were old enough to remember the torment inflicted on Southern blacks who tried to vote in the 1950's and 60's.
A new study by the People for the American Way Foundation and the N.A.A.C.P. describes many recent examples of voter harassment and intimidation - the latest entries in the long and sordid history of disenfranchisement in the U.S. The study, called "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow," noted:
"Voter intimidation and suppression efforts have not been limited to a single party, but have in fact shifted over time as voting allegiances have shifted. In recent decades, African-American voters have largely been loyal to the Democratic Party, resulting in the prevalence of Republican efforts to suppress minority turnout."
In Texas, students at the predominantly black Prairie View A&M University were threatened with arrest by the local district attorney, a Republican, who suggested they were not eligible to vote in the county in which the school was located. This was nonsense. Students can vote in their college towns if they designate the campus as their home address. The whole point, of course, was intimidation. The threat of arrest is an excellent way of deterring someone from voting.
There are endless stories of attempts to discourage blacks from voting. Few get substantial publicity, so this is not seen as a big national problem. It deserves a brighter spotlight. When duly registered blacks are improperly challenged at the polls, or Florida tries to use a patently discriminatory voter felons list, or black votes are criminally tampered with or simply not counted at all - something should be done.
[b]The number to call is 1-866-OUR VOTE. [/b]
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| ... Health Care: Conflict of Interest 101 ... |
| 09.14.04 (9:14 am) [edit] |
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Thomas Jefferson
[b]The vast majority of Americans want a National/Universal Health Care System http://www.reuters.com/newsAr... to provide health care when our people are sick, injured and/or dying ... "We the People" need to change our thinking about caring for all of our citizens when they fall ill, or are injured and/or are dying-- and make this a [i]top priority issue [/i]in the upcoming presidential election ... Over 18,000 Americans die each year due to the lack of health care ... Over 45 million of our citizens lack health care coverage ... This scandalous nightmare is barbarically insane ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]doesn't give a damn about health care for those in need-- and instead has[i] no problemo [/i]wasting hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars squandered on illegal and immoral neo-con warfare based upon lies, deceptions and falsehoods ... John F. Kerry[i] does [/i]care about the right things ... Kerry cares about health care for our citizens and will not wantonly waste our U.S. Soldiers' lives and U.S. Treasure on wars for oil and Mideast domination ...[/b]
On the campaign trail yesterday, President Bush and Vice President Cheney seized on what they called an "independent study" http://www.washingtonpost.com... that found Kerry's health care plan would cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years – about three times the cost of previous estimates. The study was conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative organization that employs Cheney's wife, Lynne, and Cheney's daughter, Liz. White House aides "were crowing about the study in conversations with reporters before it appeared on the conservative group's Web site."
[b]BUSH GROSSLY DISTORTS KERRY PLAN:[/b] Bush described John Kerry's health plan as "a government takeover of healthcare http://www.johnkerry.com/issu... ." It is unclear exactly what Bush is talking about. Kerry proposes http://www.johnkerry.com/issu... : making it easier for employers to offer health insurance and reducing premiums by setting up a pool for catastrophic costs, providing incentives for administrative efficiency and expanding existing government programs to cover children and the poor.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center of American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| ... Shredding the Constitution ... |
| 09.14.04 (7:36 am) [edit] |
"The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth." - Pierre Abelard
[b]The dangerously tyrannical direction being set by the corrupt, despotic and incompetent Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]should be cause for anger, outrage and our collective will to install a new government on the 2nd November ...[/b]
[b][u]Shredding the Constitution[/u]
Interview With Elaine Cassel [/b]
Law professor Elaine Cassel speaks with Scott Horton about the Bush/Ashcroft assault on American civil liberties. Interview conducted Sept. 4, 2004. Check out Scott's other interviews http://weekendinterviewsh ow.c... with prominent libertarians and antiwar personalities.
Listen to Streaming Audio: http://www.weekendinterviewsh...
Download MP3: http://www.weekendinterviewsh...
Elaine Cassel writes for FindLaw http://writ.news.findlaw.com/... and the blog Civil Liberties Watch http://babelogue.citypages.co...:8080/ecassel/ . She teaches at Concord University School of Law and is the chair of the American Bar Association's Behavioral Sciences Committee. Her most recent book is [i]The War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights[/i] http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... .
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| ... Out of Control ... |
| 09.13.04 (5:38 pm) [edit] |
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~John F. Kennedy
"The next war ... may well bury Western civilization forever." ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder." ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has so badly bungled their illegal and immoral neo-con fiasco in Iraq, that it has devolved into a nightmarish guerrilla quagmire ... "We the People" need wiser leadership that John F. Kerry will provide and a new administration with fresh eyes to attempt to extricate us from this horrendous disaster and finally put an end to this shameful bloodbath in Iraq ...[/b]
The mission in Iraq is far, far from accomplished. A surge in deadly violence this weekend brought the bloodiest day in Iraq in recent months; suicide bombings, mortar fire and fierce battles between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi security forces http://www.washingtonpost.com... , including a firefight between an Iraqi crowd and a U.S. helicopter crew, killed dozens, leaving even more injured. Attacks against U.S. forces now average 87 per day, the worst monthly average, reports Newsweek, "since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003." Casualty figures keep escalating: the U.S. death toll passed 1,000 last week and over 7,000 have been wounded. Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted this weekend, "We did miscalculate the difficulty" of winning the peace in Iraq.
[b]FALLUJAH FAILINGS:[/b] In a significant setback for U.S. efforts in Iraq, Fallujah, one of the nation's biggest cities, is now entirely under the control of rebel insurgents. This weekend, the Iraqi military force put in place in the explosive city by the Marines disbanded. There is strong evidence that many members have been working with insurgents http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,1,2459641.story against the U.S. forces that provided them with weapons and paychecks. Last April, the White House withdrew Marine troops from the city, hoping the newly created Brigade would work with the Iraqi government to fight the insurgency. The city quickly fell under the control of the insurgents, as many in the Brigade openly joined the rebel forces against the United States. Today, the city is a safe haven for insurgents, a place to "take refuge, plot attacks and run manufacturing centers for car bombs and other explosives."
[b]GENERAL DISAGREES WITH APPROACH TO FALLUJAH:[/b] Lt. Gen. James Conway, the outgoing U.S. Marine Corps general in charge of western Iraq, said yesterday that he had disagreed with the hasty order that sent his troops to invade Fallujah in April as well as the subsequent decision to withdraw from the city and turn over control to the disloyal Brigade. Conway said the disastrous assault increased tensions while making the region more hostile to U.S. forces: "We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah, that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge." Instead, higher ups insisted on the attack, and then demanded troops pull out when the fighting grew fierce. "I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand the consequences of that, and not, perhaps, vacillate in the middle of that http://www.latimes.com/news/n...,1,3338025.story?coll=la-home-headli nes . Once you commit to do that, you have to stay committed." Marine Col. Jerry Durrant agrees: "The whole Fallujah Brigade thing was a fiasco."
[b]LIGHTS OUT IN IRAQ:[/b] Nineteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has failed to achieve significant reconstruction, contributing to the ongoing frustrations of the Iraqi people. According to Bathsheba Crocker, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, when it comes to economic opportunity, services, and social well-being http://www.usnews.com/usnews/... , "Iraq is actually moving backward." The Los Angeles Times reports the job of restoring electricity to war-torn Iraq is "steeped in errors and misjudgment http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,1,3750922,print.story?coll=la-headlines-f rontpage ." Electricity for Iraqis was central to White House reconstruction plans, but today, Iraq's largest source of electricity, the Baiji power plant, "produces less than half the electricity it generated" two years ago. Why is the country still in the dark? Lack of planning, inconsistent leadership and an over-reliance on private contractors. The Bush administration "vastly underestimated the time, money and effort needed to restore the country's power grid." It's indicative of the failures of the entire reconstruction process, still marked by "tainted water supplies, limited sewage treatment and curtailed construction of public buildings." The ongoing failure has dire ramifications for the unstable security situation, producing "a deep reservoir of confusion and anger that feeds the country's deadly insurgency."
[b]PROBLEMS WITH DEMOCRACY:[/b] The increased violence has serious ramifications for the scheduled elections. "We're dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5... ," says a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. "This idea of a functioning democracy here is crazy. We thought that there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose." The Bush White House is blithely insisting elections will occur in January as planned. Security concerns, however, have left others less confident. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated this weekend on Meet the Press that "It would be lovely if they took place in January, but I sure don't see it." Iraqi officials are also increasingly skeptical. One senior Iraqi official told Newsweek, "I'm convinced that it's not going to happen. It's just not realistic. How is it going to happen?" Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari echoed that thought, saying, "The timetable really depends at the end of the day on the security situation." Some worry that the Bush administration, desperate to avoid the appearance of yet another setback, will stick to the schedule despite ongoing problems. Ghassan Atiyya, director of the independent Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, warns, "Badly prepared elections, rather than healing wounds, will open them."
[b]Sources:[/b]
The Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.o...
Time to Leave Iraq, http://www.tblog.com/template...
'I Thought We Were Different', http://www.tblog.com/template...
Bloodbath:-- U.S. Troop & Iraqi Civilian Casualty Counts Rise, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Over 1,000 Dead U.S. Soldiers: A Look At Portraits of the Men and Women, http://www.tblog.com/template...
'Not Everything Has Gone As We Would Have Liked It To' ... Ooopppsss, http://www.tblog.com/template...
Failing Miserably to Protect America, http://www.tblog.com/template...
End of Term Report Card: Bush Administration on National Security, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Today's Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 269 vs. Bush 233 (Map of U.S.A.) ... |
| 09.13.04 (12:46 pm) [edit] |
[b]Electoral Vote Predictor 2004: Kerry 269 vs. Bush 233[/b]
[b]Sept. 13 New polls:[/b] ME
[b]Legend:[/b]
Blue - Strong Kerry (147)
Light Blue - Weak Kerry (43)
Outline Blue - Barely Kerry (79)
White - Exactly tied (36)
Outline Red - Barely Bush (65)
Light Red - Weak Bush (16)
Red - Strong Bush (152)
[b]Needed to win: 270 [/b]
[u][b]News from the Votemaster[/b][/u]
Not much to report. The only state poll is Maine http://www.electoral-vote.com... , but it is interesting. Kerry and Bush are tied at 43% each. This result is bad news for Kerry, who expected to win Maine easily, as Gore did in 2000. Maine is one of the two states that does not use a winner-take-all system for allocating its votes in the electoral college (Nebraska is the other one). The winner of each of the two congressional districts gets one, and the statewide winner gets the other two. The poll did not break down the results by CD.
Also noteworthy in Maine is that 43% of the voters say Bush deserves another term while 55% say it is time for someone new. This finding suggests that a lot of people there dislike Bush but are not sure Kerry is the answer. Finally, although the people of Maine are not so hot on George Bush, they definitely like bear-baiting. The referendum on banning it is losing 52% to 35%. I think bears should be allowed to vote on that one.
Zogby did a survey among rural voters. The good news for Bush is that he is ahead 52% to 37% in this demographic group. The bad news is that in 2000 he led 59% to 37% at this point. Jobs, terrorism, Iraq, health care, and education are the top issues down on the farm. Not surprisingly, those rural voters who see jobs as the most important issue prefer Kerry and those who see terrorism as the key issue prefer Bush.
I have it on good authority that overseas voters are registering in huge numbers this time, maybe double or triple 2000. I was told that the number of people who showed up at the Democratic party caucus in England earlier this year was 10 times what it was in 2000, ditto in other countries. Americans overseas vote in the state they last lived in, even if that was decades ago. There are about 7 million overseas Americans and probably about 5 million are over 18. In Florida, it was the overseas absentee ballots that swung the election. I believe that something like 8% are military, but the rest are students, teachers, artists, government workers, business executives, spouses of foreign nationals, missionaries, retirees, and more. What is significant here is that these people represent a lot of votes and are not included in any of the polls. Nobody knows if they are largely Democrats or Republicans, but their votes could be one of the big surprises of this election. if anyone has any actual data (as opposed to speculation) on this group, I'd be interested.
[b]"We the People" should be cautiously optimistic for the election is far from over ... But we must also be diligent and make sure we have registered to vote ... Encourage your friends, family and neighbors to vote too ...[/b]
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| ... 'I Thought We Were Different' ... |
| 09.13.04 (9:54 am) [edit] |
"What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage." ~Marcus Tullius Cicero
[b]"We the People" must seriously ponder upon the type of human beings we want to be and our choice in our country's leadership on 2nd November will determine the type of nation we will become ...[/b]
Several months ago in North Carolina, where many American military officers have retired, I ran into an elderly general I had known in Vietnam. He was always the personification of the "officer and a gentleman," a man so honorable that even members of the press had nothing to say against him.
We chatted about our melancholy memories of meeting in Vietnam in the late 1960s and, of course, we talked about Iraq. Finally, he said sadly, shaking his head, "And I thought we were different."
This week, as we approach the third anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, one question hangs over many in the country, surely most of the people I meet. It is no longer a question of whether we can "win" this war (we cannot, in any traditional sense, without a cost so humongous it would destroy us morally as a nation). It is no longer a question of whether the purported reason for the Iraq war was false or even falsified (we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the WMD threat did not exist).
No, this third anniversary brings us face to face with a deeper and endlessly haunting question: Have we changed as a people so as to be willing, as the polls show us, to re-elect men and women who have misled us and lied to us every step of the way? And others: Are we willing to accept the fact that, even as our American losses topped 1,000 this week, we probably also killed up to 2,500 "insurgents" in only the last week? Have we, the rational, "exceptional" people of our history, been overtaken by the war fever and that same identification with the demented warrior-leader as lesser peoples throughout history?
War never stands alone. It quickly develops its own rationale, its own being, its own hypnotic power - and the neocons who used a naive president to get us into this war knew that from the start. People never get out of a fight, despite knowing it is hopeless, midway through the conflict, even when it becomes abundantly clear that it is in their interest to do so. (Read Barbara Tuchman's great "The March of Folly" and compare Iraq to her examples of human "folly," from the Trojan Horse to Vietnam.)
Nor do wars simply end, even for the victor. All of Europe suffered for the next 50 years (and, indeed, until today) for the Allies' "winning" World War I, with the bloom of British, French and German youth destroyed and the stage set for the next world war. In the uneven and unexpected practice of war, no one ever walks out the door the same way he walked in.
Even the administration now admits the doleful truths of Iraq. This week, the Pentagon acknowledged that "insurgents" control important parts of central Iraq and that it was unclear when American and Iraqi forces would be able to secure those areas, much less hold elections in January, which has been the supposed answer to everything. (You can bet that forces will not go into those areas until after the American elections.)
In fact, many in the administration, especially the career uniformed military who have been privately against this war from the very beginning, are simply reflecting in slightly muted terms what the major military analysis groups of the world are saying.
Britain's highly regarded Royal Institute of International Affairs, for instance, in a bleak assessment of where the U.S. stands 18 months after the launch of the war, suggests that at the most, the U.S. and its coalition can hope only for a "muddle through" scenario - holding the country together but falling short of the original goal of creating a democracy friendly to the West. The Middle East team of the institute, which is chartered by Queen Elizabeth II, warned that Iraq would be lucky if it managed to avoid a complete breakup and civil war and if the country did not become the spark for a vortex of regional upheavals.
Still another bleak report came from the Carnegie Endowment by the accomplished scholar Graham E. Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA. He warns that while Islam and democracy are not incompatible in principle, the "increasing radicalization of a Muslim world that feels under siege is creating a highly negative environment not conducive to strengthening moderate versions of political Islam." Until the external sources of radicalization are diminished, he writes, such as the Palestinian problem, the departure of U.S. troops from the region and an end to the "broad-brush, anti-Muslim discrimination resulting from the war on terrorism," there are no grounds for optimism.
In short, our presence there is working directly against our purported reasons for going there. And if President Bush is re-elected, the Palestinian problem will almost surely have reached its point of no return, as Israel expands and the next target of the Great Anti-Terrorist Crusade becomes Iran. War without end.
Is this what the American people really want? Have we changed so much, from our mission of being an example to mankind to becoming its emperor? All one can really do on this third anniversary is pose the questions.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate, TruthOut, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
Time to Leave Iraq, http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| ... Time to Leave Iraq ... |
| 09.13.04 (7:09 am) [edit] |
Pyrrhus inherited the throne of Epirus in Northern Greece around 306 B.C., and as a young man proved himself on the battlefield again and again. Pyrrhus apparently had great strategic skills, but he also had the reputation of not knowing when to stop. In 281 he went to Italy and defeated the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum, but suffered bitterly heavy losses. The devastation led to his famous statement, "One more such victory and I am lost" -- hence the term "Pyrrhic victory" for any victory so costly as to be ruinous.
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq can't even be called a "Pyrrhic victory"-- for indeed it is a tragic and miserable failure costing the precious lives of tens of thousands of human beings ... The despotic Bushies based their illegal and immoral neo-con war-mongering and neo-fascist war-profiteering in Iraq on a pack of heinous lies, deceptions and falsehoods ... It is time for "We the People" to call for an end to this insane carnage, slaughter and unconscionable bloodbath ... The Bush Crime Family, Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. will just have to find some other way to reap massive mountains of gold-- and [i]not[/i] through war-profiteering and criminal blood-money ...[/b]
The U.S. media momentarily focused on Iraq when the toll of Americans killed passed 1,000, but that only means that they won’t pay attention again until it reached 2,000. Meanwhile, Iraqis continue to die by the thousands.
[b]Time to leave.[/b]
The [i]Chicago Tribune[/i] http://fairuse.1accesshost.co... says that 1,000 Iraqis, many of them civilians, died in the battle of Najaf: “Three weeks of urban warfare killed at least 1,000 Iraqi rebels and civilians, the governor of this battle-weary city said Saturday in his first estimate of the death toll since the standoff ended two weeks ago.”
Monday’s news? “Sixteen killed in U.S. strikes on Fallujah.” From the [i]Guardian[/i] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Ira...,2763,1303375,00.html :
... "Witnesses said the bombing, which began at sunrise and continued for several hours, was centred on the city's residential al-Shurta neighbourhood. The attack damaged buildings and created clouds of black smoke, with ambulances and private cars rushing the injured to hospital.
Military officials said intelligence reports indicated that the strikes had been successful. "Based on analysis of these reports, Iraqi security forces and multinational forces effectively and accurately targeted these terrorists while protecting the lives of innocent civilians," the statement said.
However, Dr Adel Khamis, of Fallujah general hospital, said at least 16 people—including women and children—had been killed, and 12 others wounded." ...
Meanwhile in Baghdad, dozens more were killed yesterday http://www.military.com/NewsC...,13319,FL_violence_091304 ,00.html , including an Al Arabiya television reporter who died live, on air, screaming, “I’m dying!”:
... "At least 37 people were killed in Baghdad alone. Many of them died when a U.S. helicopter fired on a disabled U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle as Iraqis swarmed around it, cheering, throwing stones and waving the black and yellow sunburst banner of Iraq’s most-feared terror organization.
The dead from the helicopter strike includ | |
