Blog For Free!
Archives
Home
2005 July
2005 June
2005 May
2005 April
2005 March
2005 January
2004 December
2004 November
2004 October
2004 September
2004 August
2004 July
2004 June
2004 May
2004 April
2004 March
2004 February
2004 January
2003 December
2003 November
2003 October
2003 September
2003 August
2003 July
My Links
STOP TCPA!!!!
tBlog
My Profile
Send tMail
My tFriends
My Images
Sponsored
Blog
"Those who are willing to give up freedom for a little safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Theodore Roosevelt
digg links, for the techie:
|
| ....seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition |
| 02.29.04 (9:42 pm) [edit] |
Jeff Cooper
NRA Board of Directors
On Inner-City Violence:
"…the consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."
Cooper's Corner, Guns and Ammo
On the value of diversity:
"The goal of good government is the optimum balance of liberty and order. Social diversity does not pull in that direction. Liberty is what we seek over the centuries, but if we grant it to too diverse a population, order disappears. Regarding the United States… it would seem that we ought to choose assimilation over diversity. It seems to me that diversity, rather than being a goal to be sought, should be an obstacle to be circumvented." Jeff Cooper's Commentaries (self-published newsletter)
On Federal Law Enforcement Officials:
"Already a couple of the faithful have sent in checks for a foundation memorial to the innocents who perished at the hands of the ninja at Waco. ... I have been criticized by referring to our federal masked men as "ninja" … [L]et us reflect upon the fact that a man who covers his face shows reason to be ashamed of what he is doing. A man who takes it upon himself to shed blood while concealing his identity is a revolting perversion of the warrior ethic. It has long been my conviction that a masked man with a gun is a target. I see no reason to change that view."
Cooper’s Commentaries (self-published newsletter)
On Crime:
"It is certainly difficult to render a calm and compassionate view of our
current system of justice. After a legal friend of ours had his car trashed on the street, apparently just for kicks, he suggested that the proper solution to our inner city problem might be the mass drowning of street punks. Every month in a different big city we should sew up a thousand of them in a huge sack and dump it into the Mississippi. Such ideas may appear fanciful, but the decent people of this country are increasingly driven against the wall. ... While the federal ninja drive around in their black uniforms and face masks, we note that they never seem to bother the street gangs."
Cooper's Commentaries (self-published newsletter)
|
|
|
| |
| ...I use the word nigger a lot |
| 02.29.04 (3:53 pm) [edit] |
Ted Nugent
NRA Board of Directors
On South Africans:
"Apartheid isn't that cut and dry. All men are not created equal. The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man. I mean that with no disrespect. I say that with great respect. I love them because I'm one of
them. They are still people of the earth, but they are different. They still put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands … These are different people. You give 'em
toothpaste, they fucking eat it ... I hope they don't become civilized. They're way ahead of the game."
--Detroit Free Press Magazine
On Racism:
"I'm a fun guy, not a sexist or a racist…. I use the word nigger a lot because I hang around with a lot of niggers …."
--Detroit Free Press Magazine
On Hillary Clinton:
A "Toxic cunt … This bitch is nothing but a two-bit whore for Fidel Castro."
--Westworld Newspaper
On Dating:
" I met a couple guys in line yesterday who go, 'Write something to my girlfriend, she won't let me go hunting.' I wrote her something and I said, 'Drop dead, bitch.' What good is she, trade her in, get a Dalmatian. Who
needs the wench?"
--WRIF FM Radio, Detroit, Michigan
On the Confederate Flag:
" Those politically correct motherfuckers can take the flag down but I am going to wear it forever."
--The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
On homosexuality:
A "despicable act" performed by "guys that have sex with each other's anal cavities."
--Hannity and Colmes
For more: http://www.nraleaders.com/
|
|
|
| |
| ....Judge Bars Search Evidence, Says F.B.I. Lied for Warrant |
| 02.27.04 (9:36 pm) [edit] |
by William Glaberson, New York Times [US]
February 26th, 2004
A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that an F.B.I. agent made false statements in a sworn application for a search warrant in a drug paraphernalia case. The judge therefore barred prosecutors from using any of the evidence they found during the search.
In the harshly worded decision, the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, said the agent, Elvin Quinones, "recklessly, if not deliberately, disregarded the truth," and then gave confused and "grossly false" testimony when questioned about his earlier statements.
The unusual ruling left in disarray the government's case against Danny and Richard Teng, the father and son who own a warehouse in College Point, Queens. Much of the evidence against them on charges of conspiracy and trafficking in drug paraphernalia was gathered in May during the search of their warehouse.
Gary G. Becker, a lawyer for the father, said he expected that the prosecutors would be unable to continue with the case. He added that because of what he said were obvious and repeated false statements, "it would certainly be appropriate for the U.S. attorney's office and the F.B.I. to investigate this misconduct.''
Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, said only that the prosecutors "will review the judge's ruling and then make a decision on whether to appeal.''
A spokesman for the F.B.I., Joseph Valiquette, said the bureau's lawyers were reviewing the decision. "It's not our desire to come to any premature conclusions,'' Mr. Valiquette said. Mr. Quinones, a 17-year veteran with the F.B.I., did not return a call seeking comment.
At a hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Quinones and other F.B.I. agents described going to the Tengs' warehouse after a tip from a drug informant. They said they suspected that the Tengs were suppliers of items like glass and plastic vials and glassine bags of the type used to package heroin and marijuana. Mr. Becker said the Tengs' business was selling bags to businesses.
In his sworn statement requesting the search warrant Mr. Quinones said that he saw "hundreds of glass crack pipes" at the warehouse and "thousands" of mechanical devices known as "bullets" that are used to dispense cocaine powder during inhaling.
During the search, the judge said, the agents found only three bullets. At the hearing, another agent testified that he had told Mr. Quinones that he had seen only "a couple of them." Judge Garaufis noted that Mr. Quinones admitted that he had seen only one or two bullets, not thousands.
Lawyers for the Tengs also noted that a report by another F.B.I. agent did not mention any crack pipes at the warehouse. After hearing the testimony of Mr. Quinones, the judge said, "I do not believe that he personally actually saw any crack pipes in the warehouse.'' The judge said Mr. Quinones could not explain the difference between a crack pipe and a crack vial.
The ruling said the problems with the search warrant did not end with the false statements.
Mr. Quinones listed glassine baggies and glass vials among the items he saw at the warehouse, but the judge said those items were listed in the "mistaken belief" that they were considered illegal drug paraphernalia under the law. The judge said the error was made both by Mr. Quinones and the assistant United States attorney handling the case, Carrie N. Capwell. Ms. Capwell did not return a call seeking comment.
Without the false allegations about thousands of bullets and hundreds of crack pipes, the judge said, the search warrant should not have been granted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/nyregion/2 6fbi.html" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/nyregion/2 6fbi.html" target="_blank"http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
|
|
|
| |
| ....United for Peace and Justice NY |
| 02.22.04 (7:41 pm) [edit] |
March 20: NYC Still Says No to War!
March and Rally Against War and Occupation
Saturday, March 20 • Assemble at Noon
23rd Street & Madison Avenue, New York City
Last year, two days after the Bush Administration launched its illegal attack on Iraq, more than 300,000 people marched down Broadway in Midtown Manhattan in protest. On March 20, 2004—the one-year anniversary of the Iraq War—we will march in New York City again, as part of a global day of action against war and occupation.
We have received a permit for a march and rally beginning at Madison Square Park, which is located at 23rd Street and Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan. To receive updates on rally speakers, logistics, and other key matters, join our New York alerts list by clicking here
NEXT MEETING
The next general meeting of the UFPJ NY March 20th coalition is on Monday, March 8th at 6:30pm at 235 W. 23rd St, 2nd floor (C/E/1/9 to 23rd St.)
SIGN UP TO LEAFLET!
Email nyc-massoutreach@unitedfo rpeace.org to get involved with leafletting.
Click here for a calendar of NYC events to bring outreach materials to.
• VOLUNTEER Send a blank email to nycvolunteers@unitedforpe ace.org to join our volunteer network
• SPREAD THE WORD Click here for downloadable leaflets, plus details on where you can pick up stickers and other mobilizing materials
• GET UPDATES Click here to receive updates on the March 20 mobilization
• ENDORSE Have your organization join the growing list of March 20 endorsers by clicking here
WORKING GROUPS
To get involved with one of the below March 20th working groups, call the office at 212-868-5545.
-Organizational Outreach
-Mass Outreach (flyering, stickering, etc)
-Publicity
-Program
-Logistics and Security
-Messaging and Literature
-Arts
JOINT DEMONSTRATION PLANNED
An agreement has recently been reached between two coalitions for a joint march and rally in New York City. United for Peace and Justice makes this announcement on behalf of the March 20th Mobilizing Committee, the coalition of national anti-war coalitions we pulled together. Below you will find the joint statement issued by the two coalitions.
Member groups of the March 20th Mobilizing Committee include:
- United for Peace and Justice
- National Youth and Student Peace Coalition
- US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
- Not in Our Name
- Campus Anti-War Network
- And others
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has spiraled into a living nightmare without end as the death toll mounts daily. Here at home, new questions are asked about why this war ever happened, but the Bush Administration continues to lie and evade the truth, hoping people will forget by Election Day.
Now is the time for the voices of peace and justice to speak out. On March 20th a clear, strong message must be sent to the Bush Administration: "End the Occupation of Iraq! Bring the Troops Home! Now!"
The war against Iraq and the military and corporate occupation of that country are tied to other critically important issues. As we build the March 20th demonstrations around the country, we will help draw out the connections that must be made. Precisely because it is an election year, now is the time to put the largest possible number of people in the streets.
JOINT STATEMENT BETWEEN MARCH 20th MOBILIZING COMMITTEE AND MARCH 20th NATIONAL COALITION CONCERNING NEW YORK CITY MARCH AND RALLY
On March 20th, the one year anniversary of the U.S. war against Iraq, a Global Day of Action will bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in cities around the world. In New York City the March 20th Mobilizing Committee and the March 20th National Coalition are organizing a unified demonstration opposing the criminal and empire-building policies of the Bush administration and their impact abroad and at home. We will march for an end to the U.S. occupation and corporate control of Iraq and to bring the troops home now. We will march for an end to the occupation of Palestine. We will march to fund human needs, restore cuts in social programs and against the ever-expanding attacks on all immigrants, labor rights and everyone's civil liberties - and we will stand united against racism here and abroad. We represent diverse communities and organizations opposed to the Bush Administration policies for many reasons, but on March 20th we will march together. By working together our two coalitions are confident we will mobilize a massive turnout on March 20th and send a strong, clear message.
|
|
|
| |
| ...anyone but Bush..... |
| 02.20.04 (9:08 pm) [edit] |
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/hr2239_volu nteers/hr2239_effort.asp" title="http://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/hr2239_volu nteers/hr2239_effort.asp" target="_blank"http://www.verifiedvoting.org...
|
|
|
| |
| ....It's the Symbolism, Stupid |
| 02.16.04 (10:59 am) [edit] |
When the Massachusetts high court ruled last week that gay couples must be granted full marriage rights, it lobbed a grenade into John Kerry's lap. Here he is, struggling to define himself as a hog-riding, puck-slamming populist, when the patrician tradition of New England liberalism bites him in the butt.
As a senator, in 1996, Kerry stood against the tide by voting no on the Defense of Marriage Act. But now he's doing the presidential-candidate dance, slippin' and slidin' to position himself between the right wing and his own progressive record. Kerry supports "equal rights" for same-sex couples but not marriage. In fact, he just might back an amendment to the Massachusetts constitution that would overturn the court's ruling. "It depends entirely on what the language is," Kerry says. Sounds like Bill Clinton's famous disclaimer, "It depends on what is is."
There's a twisted reasoning behind Kerry's contortion. He's hoping the amendment in question will void the court's decision but leave room for a civil-union statute. Something like that has happened in California, where voters passed a referendum outlawing gay marriage while the legislature enacted the nation's most sweeping domestic-partner package. But Massachusetts is not Cali. Its history includes a certain tolerance for gay unions, dating back to the 19th century. There's a reason why women living together in those days could be referred to as partners in a "Boston marriage." This genteel tradition is about to collide with blue-collar values, and no one knows which force will prevail. Right now, polls show an even split.
For the present, Kerry is content to claim, "I have the same position that Dick Cheney has," alluding to the vice president's 2000 statement that marriage is a matter for the states to define. Of course, Cheney has now joined the crusade to amend the U.S. Constitution so that states won't have this right. According to his campaign, Kerry opposes that drastic step. So let's get this straight, as it were: Kerry is open to a state marriage amendment but not a federal one. This is a contradiction the Republicans won't let stand. Given their control of Congress, odds are that Kerry will face a moment of truth on this issue. Once again gay people find themselves at the hot center of American politics.
For Kerry, the best thing would be a series of events that puts this question in suspension until the election. The state legislature is scrambling to provide that breathing room. There's a move to petition the high court for more time to comply with its ruling. (The justices set a May deadline, but maybe they'd be willing to wait until, say, December.) Meanwhile the Boston archdiocese is pushing for a quick vote on the amendment, and it could come this week. Whatever happens, the court's decision will stand until at least 2006, the earliest that voters can weigh in. So it looks like gay couples will be waving their marriage licenses as the gavel falls on the Democratic convention in Boston. This is not the best year to be the Bay State's favorite son.
Considering how little would change if people of the same sex could marry, you have to wonder why this issue has such power. It's got nothing to do with wages or war. It's not about the deficit or the distribution of wealth. It doesn't involve the question of when life begins. In short, there's no material reason why gay marriage should be such a megillah. But like so much else in American politics today, this is not a matter of substance. It's the symbolism, stupid.
------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----
Stigma is a social hormone. It stimulates the creation of order. Without stigma, hierarchy would be impossible to maintain. No one would accept an assigned place in society, and it would be hard to discriminate among moral values.
This chaotic situation is pretty much the state of American society. The history of this country is an ongoing battle between stigmatized groups and their oppressors, and every gain has produced a ferocious backlash. The abolition of slavery was just the start. The modern civil rights movement sparked major political changes, from white flight to the rise of the New Right. Feminism has had a similar, if subtler impact. The Republicans wouldn't hold the commanding position they do if it weren't for the migration of pissed-off white guys to the GOP.
Gay liberation should cause far less disruption than other social movements because it doesn't threaten paychecks or require a revision of power relations between men and women. But sexual stigma has a lot to do with how groups are organized—especially male groups. Everything from sports teams to the bastions of patriarchy must be renegotiated when the status of faggots rises. This is much trickier than it might seem. When you talk about patriarchal structures you're dealing with things like religion and the military. That's why issues like gay marriage and the rights of homosexual soldiers are much thornier than discrimination and hate crimes.
Add to this mix the changing nature of marriage. These days, it often follows a long period of cohabitation, and divorce is common. Our ancestors would be stunned to learn that at the age of 30, a third of all American women are single. In their affectional patterns, straights are becoming more like gays once were, and vice versa. Same-sex marriage epitomizes this shift; indeed, it symbolizes everything elastic about status and structure in American life. That's why this issue lies at the heart of the culture wars. It doesn't just involve shared assets and visitation rights. It has to do with the patriarchal order—that is to say, the social order, and if you're a fundamentalist, the word of God.
------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----
Behind the sacramental scrim lies the truth about gay marriage. It's a civic issue, not a symbolic one. That's how the social democracies of Western Europe and Canada perceive this problem. They see it as a matter of granting full citizenship to a formerly outcast group. These nations don't have to freight gay marriage with immaterial meaning. But America is a far less cohesive society, and our politics reflect this instability. Elections hinge on the manipulation of metaphors, most of them related to status anxiety. The more the media blur the distinction between candidates and entertainers, the more these symbolic issues run the show.
It's often said that the Democrats are bereft of symbols. They can't play the Republican game of bashing the other, since they are the party of otherness. But that speaks to a hidden strength. Barred from the magic kingdom, the Democrats have no choice but to represent the alternative: tangibility. They can remind people that politics are about the allocation of resources, not the meaning of marriage.
Are we still living in a material world? God only knows. But one thing is clear: The most significant issue of this presidential campaign is whether Americans will be led by symbols or reality. Which side is John Kerry on?
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0406/goldstein .php" title="http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0406/goldstein .php" target="_blank"http://www.villagevoice.com/i...
|
|
|
| |
| .....Bush raises spectre of ballistic missile attack |
| 02.15.04 (4:52 pm) [edit] |
ABC News [AU]
February 15th, 2004
President George W Bush says the United States continues to face the possibility of attack from ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Bush says this is the reason the US is developing and employing missile defences to guard its people.
In his weekly radio address to the nation, Mr Bush warned of more attacks like those of September 11.
"On September the 11th 2001, America and the world saw the great harm that terrorists could inflict upon our country, armed with box cutters, mace and 19 airline tickets," he said.
"Those attacks also raised the prospect of even worse dangers."
Mr Bush's speech is being seen as a counter to criticism that the US is unlikely to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
-- CNN
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s104536 0.htm" title="http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s104536 0.htm" target="_blank"http://www.abc.net.au/news/ne...
|
|
|
| |
| ....the janet jackson ordeal...or is it? |
| 02.11.04 (8:34 pm) [edit] |
If I never hear about that Janet Jackson Super Bowl stunt/mistake/etc. it will be all too soon. WTF is the big deal anyways?
Exhibit #1:
That's bad/wrong/etc....but it's ok for MILLIONS of American drones to watch this fuck get naked on TV over and over again for $$ and publicity?
I know which one I'd personally rather look at, if I had my rathers.....what a joke our media is and the people in this country are sometimes...I swear!!
|
|
|
| |
| ....N.Y. City Council Passes Anti-Patriot Act Measure |
| 02.10.04 (6:27 pm) [edit] |
by Michelle Garcia, Washington Post [US]
February 5th, 2004; Page A11
NEW YORK, Feb. 4 -- New York City, site of the country's most horrific terrorist attack, Wednesday became the latest in a long list of cities and towns that have formally opposed the expanded investigatory powers granted to law enforcement agencies under the USA Patriot Act.
The New York City Council approved a resolution condemning the law, enacted by Congress six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with a voice vote in its chambers a few blocks from the gaping hole at Ground Zero.
"The Patriot Act is really unpatriotic, it undermines our civil rights and civil liberties," said council member Bill Perkins (D-Manhattan), the bill's sponsor. "We never give up our rights that's what makes us Americans."
The resolution criticized the Patriot Act for allowing infringements on privacy rights. Among other provisions, the Patriot Act allows investigators to see citizens' library records and eases requirements for search warrants. The council requested that Congress deliver periodic reports accounting for the information and records on New Yorkers the federal government has culled under the Patriot Act, but the measure has no means to enforce that request.
The vote follows months of negotiations between resolution supporters and New York City Council leadership. A major sticking point in the original proposal of the resolution centered on language prohibiting the New York Police Department from enforcing immigration laws, collecting information on activist groups and businesses, and refraining from establishing an anti-terrorism reporting database.
After Wednesday's vote, City Council Speaker Gifford Miller (D) said the measure in its final version "strikes the right balance."
"The resolution has evolved to focus on what's really needed: amendments to the law to protect civil liberties particularly, at a time of war," he said.
New York joins 246 municipalities and counties and three states that have passed legislation in opposition to the Patriot Act, according to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, an organization that helps local governments craft anti-Patriot Act legislation.
"So much is being done in the name of New York, we are saying don't use our name to infringe on people's rights," said Glenn C. Devitt, an organizer with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
Local governments in Virginia and Maryland have approved similar measures, including Montgomery County, Prince George's County and Alexandria.
Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, dismissed the local governments' resolutions, saying the majority were passed in locales with left-leaning constituencies and based on "erroneous" information about the Patriot Act.
Corallo said the act has been "one of the most important tools Congress has given the government to fight terrorism and prevent terrorist acts."
A handful of New York council members, both Democrats and Republicans, agreed and voted against the resolution.
Dennis Gallagher, a Republican from Queens, called the resolution a vehicle for attacking the Bush administration. New York suffered a great loss on Sept. 11, 2001, he said. The Patriot Act "is one step in ensuring this never happens again."
But at a rally of supporters, Monica Tarazi, New York director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the Patriot Act and other tactics to fight terrorism has sowed fear within New York's ethnic communities and activists.
"This country is not about registering [people] and ethnic profiling," she said. "We need this [resolution]. We need this as Americans."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1397 0-2004Feb4.html" title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1397 0-2004Feb4.html" target="_blank"http://www.washingtonpost.com...
|
|
|
| |
| ....Climate Collapse : The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare |
| 02.09.04 (7:53 pm) [edit] |
by David Stipp, Fortune Magazine [US]
February 9th, 2004
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.
Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.
Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.
Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.
The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the tropics—that's why Britain, at Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north. That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the ocean depths. The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on the go.
But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the current's salinity—and its density and tendency to sink. A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Scientists aren't sure what caused the warming that triggered such collapses in the remote past. (Clearly it wasn't humans and their factories.) But the data from Arctic ice and other sources suggest the atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were dismayingly similar to today's global warming. As the Ice Age began drawing to a close about 13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures in Greenland rose to levels near those of recent decades. Then they abruptly plunged as the conveyor apparently shut down, ushering in the "Younger Dryas" period, a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age conditions. (A dryas is an Arctic flower that flourished in Europe at the time.)
Though Mother Nature caused past abrupt climate changes, the one that may be shaping up today probably has more to do with us. In 2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities—mainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking Arctic ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at northerly latitudes. A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or grandkids. Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.
Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change. Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.
Such jeremiads are beginning to reverberate more widely. Billionaire Gary Comer, founder of Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate change as a philanthropic cause. Hollywood has also discovered the issue—next summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow, a big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist trying to save the world from an ice age precipitated by global warming.
Fox's flick will doubtless be apocalyptically edifying. But what would abrupt climate change really be like?
Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda"—a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.
When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks—he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from—at least in public.
The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies. Here is an abridged version:
A total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal. Or the conveyor might only temporarily slow down, potentially causing an era like the "Little Ice Age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850. That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was mild compared with the Younger Dryas.
For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change. A century of cold, dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the bill—its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here are some of the things that might happen by 2020:
At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variation—allowing skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. The average temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in key agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like Siberia's.
Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.
Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.
Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands—waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.
Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe.
Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its location—the conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere. Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to cope—its government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources.
China's huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts of Asia and East Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already produces conflict, such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes.
As the decade progresses, pressures to act become irresistible—history shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid. Imagine Eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations, invading Russia—which is weakened by a population that is already in decline—for access to its minerals and energy supplies. Or picture Japan eyeing nearby Russian oil and gas reserves to power desalination plants and energy-intensive farming. Envision nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land. Or Spain and Portugal fighting over fishing rights—fisheries are disrupted around the world as water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to new habitats.
Growing tensions engender novel alliances. Canada joins fortress America in a North American bloc. (Alternatively, Canada may seek to keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the energy-hungry U.S.) North and South Korea align to create a technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity. Europe forms a truly unified bloc to curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors. Russia, threatened by impoverished neighbors in dire straits, may join the European bloc.
Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to shore up their energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea. Israel, China, India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.
The changes relentlessly hammer the world's "carrying capacity"—the natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that support the population. Technological progress and market forces, which have long helped boost Earth's carrying capacity, can do little to offset the crisis—it is too widespread and unfolds too fast.
As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.
Over the past decade, data have accumulated suggesting that the plausibility of abrupt climate change is higher than most of the scientific community, and perhaps all of the political community, are prepared to accept. In light of such findings, we should be asking when abrupt change will happen, what the impacts will be, and how we can prepare—not whether it will really happen. In fact, the climate record suggests that abrupt change is inevitable at some point, regardless of human activity. Among other things, we should:
• Speed research on the forces that can trigger abrupt climate change, how it unfolds, and how we'll know it's occurring.
• Sponsor studies on the scenarios that might play out, including ecological, social, economic, and political fallout on key food-producing regions.
• Identify "no regrets" strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security.
• Form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.
• Explore ways to offset abrupt cooling—today it appears easier to warm than to cool the climate via human activities, so there may be "geo-engineering" options available to prevent a catastrophic temperature drop.
In sum, the risk of abrupt climate change remains uncertain, and it is quite possibly small. But given its dire consequences, it should be elevated beyond a scientific debate. Action now matters, because we may be able to reduce its likelihood of happening, and we can certainly be better prepared if it does. It is time to recognize it as a national security concern.
The Pentagon's reaction to this sobering report isn't known—in keeping with his reputation for reticence, Andy Marshall declined to be interviewed. But the fact that he's concerned may signal a sea change in the debate about global warming. At least some federal thought leaders may be starting to perceive climate change less as a political annoyance and more as an issue demanding action.
If so, the case for acting now to address climate change, long a hard sell in Washington, may be gaining influential support, if only behind the scenes. Policymakers may even be emboldened to take steps such as tightening fuel-economy standards for new passenger vehicles, a measure that would simultaneously lower emissions of greenhouse gases, reduce America's perilous reliance on OPEC oil, cut its trade deficit, and put money in consumers' pockets. Oh, yes—and give the Pentagon's fretful Yoda a little less to worry about.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/ar ticles/0" title="http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/ar ticles/0" target="_blank"http://www.fortune.com/fortun...,15114,582584-1,00.html
|
|
|
| |
| ....The Trillion-Dollar Question |
| 02.08.04 (7:26 am) [edit] |
For many months people have been trying to write about what happened in the run-up to the Invasion of Iraq. In article after article many have tried to lay out the facts, the lies, the deceptions and the consequences - but this has apparently fallen on deaf ears. American's are nothing if not slick, hip, and cynical all in one punch. And these really cool Americans of indistinguishable shapes and of all sizes have now decided that the only question that really matters is:
"Forget how we got there - How do we get out of Iraq?"
What is meant by this question is: How do we get to keep the oil and the bases; stop the hemorrhaging of our money; and bring the troops home now? The unmentioned question being: How do we avoid the legal and social consequences of all the brutality and the unprovoked aggression? The short answer to both questions is: We can't, and we won't!
The Problem
In a nutshell, we want to "move on" without paying for anything that we've done - because that's the politically expedient thing to do at this juncture. But what we did was not something that can be overlooked or forgotten, especially given our track record in world affairs. For those interested in the facts of our global past - check out: Breaking The Silence
Another major part of the problem is our relationship with the media. 'Media' once provided an independent public voice, that in part involved journalistic principles that no longer exist. The logos are still there: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS, and the list goes on. But make no mistake these are no longer "news organizations." They are now informal disinformation cells that spin and twist what little they do mention of current events - while they work to bury the truth.
After Vietnam and a corporate review of the reporting on that war, the major interests affected - decided to simply buy out their critics. That's what happened to journalism. In that conflict between the powerful and the media at that time, truth was the major casualty, and freedom has died a little more each day since.
What has also died, since we failed to pay attention to this change, was the critically thoughtful and independent view - that view which is so necessary to any life in an open society. These bits of history are now only sub-sets within the same huge corporate empires whose tentacles lie behind every major economic interest in the world today. It stands to reason then, that these wholly owned subsidiaries will never report on what is really happening: as it is they themselves, their friends, and their lackeys, who are the real terrorists on this planet today. Nor is not in their best interest to have the truth leak out, in any form - much less be published or broadcast by their own affiliates.
What About the real Questions
Those 'Questions' have no answers that we care to hear. It has been common knowledge for centuries that no nation can have both guns and butter simultaneously, yet as we persist with our fantasies of Empire, many seem to think we have a free pass to ignore reality and do whatever we want. Wars cost money - and two wars are more costly than one. Where will the funds for everything come from?
Bush decided to just take from the future and from everything else that he's supposed to be charged with faithfully providing for, according to the constitution. Since he's consumed the role of Congress he's no longer content to just suggest laws, now he makes them. Next he may decide to just eliminate the courts because they just waste his time and get in the way of HOMELAND Security, our police-state in waiting.
These bizarre events are happening in large part because we do not have a free and independent media. That's also part of why and how we have allowed the congress to become so totally unnecessary. When elected officials are no longer interested in exposing corruption, because they themselves are the beneficiaries, then the cry for open and honest government goes unheeded. Why do we still feel the need to maintain this fiction - that Congress serves some function "for" the people of the United States - because now even the idea is a total sham. John Kerry is a perfect example of what's wrong with the whole system. He vegetated in Congress for 35 years, at our expense, and he has failed repeatedly. Now Kerry is using the length of his failures as a politician, to justify his electability to the office of President. How crass is that.
The Failures of the System
The average US citizen pays a great deal in taxes. Most mega-corporations and the very wealthy pay little or none, and many actually get refunds. The "playing field" of taxes is so un-even; it is practically speaking now at a 45-degree angle. If the Bushwhackers get their way it will soon be completely vertical - with no chance of upward mobility for those at the bottom.
Beyond that, the "needs of Globalism" have been added to the entirety of the working world. A major part of why Americans cannot compete with the rest of the planet, for jobs, is the everyday costs of healthcare and all of its attendant problems. We've paid our taxes, but we still have no universal health care. With a governmental healthcare program in place, 99% of all those costs would be eliminated from the cost of doing business, because - if the government had been doing its job, then neither companies nor individuals would be responsible for their health care costs. That's part of what taxes on all of us are were meant for, and that single fact would give the American worker a much better shot at competing for any job in the world-wide economy.
What has prevented this "innovation" from happening is the near total fascination these thieves have with privatizing everything that was government, before they ascended to their thrones. The record of this government with regard to health care prices, drug costs, and medical insurance is a shameless crime against every person in this nation who actually works for a living. With all of that "off-the-backs" of the working people, employers could not claim that as a reason for going offshore.
If the unions hadn't sold-out their constituents, and become as corrupt as the businesses they are supposed to oppose, for the sake of their members - then possibly decent wages would not have been allowed to disappear, in favor of the offshore sweat-shops around the world. The only criteria for business today, seems to be, the obscene amounts of compensation given to top managers. There is no interest at all in paying anyone else a living wage. That equals a zero sum future for millions upon millions of Americans - and none of this needed to happen if we had had even a shell of federal governmental protection.
If companies had to pay a premium for taking their businesses out of this country and if they had to face a stiff tariff on whatever they sold here, because their products were not made in the USA - then going offshore might not appear to be such a great windfall for the mighty. That measure could go a long way toward leveling the playing field. After all these are companies who built their businesses here with American workers, with tax breaks, and often with local cooperation: How can they not owe "anything" to the people who built those enterprises, or to the nation that made their very existence possible?
So what this is about, is forcing businesses to pay the true costs of going offshore. If that were done, few if any jobs would leave this country. The Bush solution for unemployment in the United States is to open the floodgates at the borders, admit illegals in the millions, to go with the10 to12 million already here, and then to give their middle finger to those Americans who still cannot find work. The entire infrastructure of the USA is in tatters - but the government is opposed to putting people to work on federal projects - because all of this must be done by corrupt corporations thorough private no-bid contracts which can then be doled out as political favors. So our roads and bridges crumble, our schools become broken and leaky shadows of their former selves, and our water and power systems fall apart.
There is no mystery as to how the nation can get back on its feet. Yet no one running for office is talking about any of this - at least not substantially. The questions don't get asked, the solutions are not considered - but huge money is still being spent in the trillions, for a lot of crap that the world would definitely be better off without. Wars against anyone-who-might-someday- pose-a-threat to the corporate powers that be: that's nothing that we need to be sending our sons and daughters, husbands and wives to fight and die for. One new case that has gone unaddressed is the revelation that Pakistan supplied not only technology, but blueprints for nuclear weapons as well. Under the terms of the Bush Doctrine we should have sent in tomahawk missiles and Stealth aircraft to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age - but so far, Mr. Belligerence has had nothing to say. On the home front, no elected official has yet challenged this cabal of private interests, the no-bid contracts, or the international criminal intrigues. Until these crimes become the topic of political discussions - nothing will change.
To answer the original trillion-dollar question, we must first get real. Then we must get serious about these people and their crimes against us all. They should be removed from office, without pay and Jailed (under the terms of the war-on-terror which they wrote), and then brought to a very public trial for their failures to defend the Constitution, the people of this nation, and the laws of this land.
Iraq can be handed over to the Arab League, who could oversee the formation of a new government for Iraq. That new government could then take stock and send us the bill for all that we've laid waste to in that land, in the false name of liberation. Afghanistan is taking care of itself, by reverting to the warlord culture that was there before us. We need to withdraw our troops and terminate the contracts that these wars were fought for, and then maybe we might begin to have a country that can get along with the rest of the world - instead of continually trying to destroy this planet and all who depend upon it for survival.
Ultimately there is no answer to the trillion-dollar question, any more than anyone can recall the bullet once fired from the barrel of a gun. We allowed these creatures to do what they did in our names, and as difficult as this might seem, it is still up to us to rectify what we can of what we have done already. But failing that - we must stop all further contrived aggressions before they begin anew, or we truly will be looking at oblivion.
by Kirwan February 8, 2004
http://www.americaheldhostile.com" title="http://www.americaheldhostile.com" target="_blank"http://www.americaheldhostile...
|
|
|
| |
| ....Feds Win Right to War Protesters' Records |
| 02.07.04 (7:02 pm) [edit] |
by Ryan J. Foley, Associated Press [US]
February 7th, 2004
DES MOINES, Iowa - In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
Federal prosecutors refuse to comment on the subpoenas.
In addition to records about who attended the forum, the subpoena orders the university to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum.
The group, once targeted for alleged ties to communism in the 1950s, announced Friday it will ask a federal court to quash the subpoena on Monday.
"The law is clear that the use of the grand jury to investigate protected political activities or to intimidate protesters exceeds its authority," guild President Michael Ayers said in a statement.
Representatives of the Lawyer's Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) said they had not heard of such a subpoena being served on any U.S. university in decades.
Those served subpoenas include the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House, and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq (news - web sites) in 2002.
They say the subpoenas are intended to stifle dissent.
"This is exactly what people feared would happen," said Brian Terrell of the peace ministry, one of those subpoenaed. "The civil liberties of everyone in this country are in danger. How we handle that here in Iowa is very important on how things are going to happen in this country from now on."
The forum, titled "Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" came the day before 12 protesters were arrested at an anti-war rally at Iowa National Guard headquarters in Johnston. Organizers say the forum included nonviolence training for people planning to demonstrate.
The targets of the subpoenas believe investigators are trying to link them to an incident that occurred during the rally. A Grinnell College librarian was charged with misdemeanor assault on a peace officer; she has pleaded innocent, saying she simply went limp and resisted arrest.
"The best approach is not to speculate and see what we learn on Tuesday" when the four testify, said Ben Stone, executive director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, which is representing one of the protesters.
Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based American Association of University Professors, said he had not heard of any similar case of a U.S. university being subpoenaed for such records.
He said the case brings back fears of the "red squads" of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam War protesters.
According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the Drake subpoena asks for records of the request for a meeting room, "all documents indicating the purpose and intended participants in the meeting, and all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting."
It also asks for campus security records "reflecting any observations made of the Nov. 15, 2003, meeting, including any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting."
Several officials of Drake, a private university with about 5,000 students, refused to comment Friday, including school spokeswoman Andrea McDonough. She referred questions to a lawyer representing the school, Steve Serck, who also would not comment.
A source with knowledge of the investigation said a judge had issued a gag order forbidding school officials from discussing the subpoena.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=5 19" title="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=5 19" target="_blank"http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... &ncid=519&e=2&u=/ap/20040 207/ap_on_re_us/activist_ investigation
|
|
|
| |
| ....Mystery Voting Machine? |
| 02.06.04 (5:54 am) [edit] |
Introduction To The Concerns About Electronic Voting
A growing concern over the inadequacies of election equipment in the United States has recently been heightened by the problems of the 2000 Presidential election. Added to the mix is the election reform mandated by recent federal legislation attempting to address the concerns. The result is that many states are scurrying to replace their older equipment with new electronic voting computers.
Unfortunately, election technology has not advanced to the point where it can provide us with electronic systems that are reliable enough to trust with our democracy. In other words, we just aren’t there yet.
Here are the facts:
**Computer experts say today’s voting machines are prone to errors and vulnerable to fraud.
**Defective hardware and bugs in software could decide who wins an election.
**Even thorough testing can’t reveal malicious programs that could subvert an election.
**Many election officials don't realize the risks inherent in using electronic voting machines.
**Courts have ruled that secret software can be used to record and count our votes.
**Manual recounts will be impossible in districts that don’t allow voters to inspect a paper record of their votes.
[b]What does this mean about the 2004 election?[/b]
Americans will use voting computers with secret software that has not been sufficiently scrutinized, just as they have in past elections.
They will have to trust computers to record and count their votes correctly – computers that are not advanced enough to ensure the security and accuracy that could justify their trust.
If something odd occurs, manual recounts of the original ballots will be impossible, because the only record of the votes will be in electronic form, which will, of course, match the questionable tally.
[b]HAVA isn’t a solution[/b]
In response to the 2000 Florida debacle, Congress passed a law, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandates voting process reform in all the states. Unfortunately, many are interpreting the requirements in a way that does not provide the safeguards necessary to ensure integrity in our elections.
HAVA requires that voters be able to verify their ballots before they are cast and counted.
HAVA requires that all voting machines provide a “permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity” and that the voter must be given the “opportunity to change the ballot or correct any error before the permanent paper is produced.“
Mr. Darryl R. Wold, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) believes that HAVA requires a voter-verifiable paper trail. Senator John Ensign (R-NV), who contributed the audit requirements now incorporated into HAVA, explains that the intent of the provision was to provide a voter-verifiable paper trail. However, many proponents of touch screen voting systems are claiming that the HAVA requirement does not mean the system must allow the voter to verify the paper record. They claim the HAVA requirements are met if the voter verifies a screen version of the ballot, and if a paper report can be printed later for audit purposes. However, if the voters cannot verify the actual audit record in the voting booth, meaningful recounts are impossible since the recount would simply be an identical re-tabulation of the original count that was in question. Since HAVA remains open to this kind of interpretation, it does not provide a solution.
[b]Fixing software isn’t a solution[/b]
In July 2003, computer researchers from Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities published a scathing review of one of the most widely used electronic voting computers, the Diebold touch screen. Their analysis showed that the software was badly designed, full of errors, and open to fraud.
Some people say that the manufacturers could simply fix the software, and the problem will be solved. However, they fail to see that the solution is not that simple. There are two unfixable problems with electronic voting machines:
No one knows how to write bug-free software. The more complex the software, the more difficult it is to find the bugs, and election software is very complex.
Malicious code embedded into the software could go undetected. Neither close inspection of the code nor thorough testing of the computer could ensure that malicious software has not slipped through the cracks.
[b]Here’s a solution![/b]
Representative Rush Holt has already proposed a solution, in the form of a bill introduced into the House. The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 2239) would mandate the necessary safeguards for U.S. elections in every state. Now we need to get the bill out of the Committee on House Administration and bring it to action on the floor.
When enacted, this federal law would require all states to use election equipment that provides a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.
This means that voters could check a paper ballot or paper record of the ballot for accuracy before casting the vote --without having to trust the voting machine. Voter verification of ballots is crucial, because only the voter can check whether the ballot is accurate.
A paper audit trail makes it possible to reconstruct the election results from the original voter-verified records, without having to trust the election equipment. In other words, it is possible to do a meaningful recount if an election is in dispute.
Working together with others across the nation, we must convince our Congress to pass H.R.2239. Click here to find out how you can help.
But ...
Just in case our representatives in Congress don’t take this problem as seriously as they really should, we can address the problem state by state and county by county.
Working together with others in our states, we must convince our state legislatures to take action to safeguard our elections. Click here to find out how you can help.
Support:
http://www.verifiedvoting.com/fair_elections.asp" title="http://www.verifiedvoting.com/fair_elections.asp" target="_blank"http://www.verifiedvoting.com...
To help:
http://www.verifiedvoting.com/resources/hr2239_volu nteers/hr2239_effort.asp" title="http://www.verifiedvoting.com/resources/hr2239_volu nteers/hr2239_effort.asp" target="_blank"http://www.verifiedvoting.com...
|
|
|
| |
| ....Bush's missing year |
| 02.05.04 (8:53 pm) [edit] |
by Eric Boehlert, Salon.com [US]
February 5th, 2004
In 1972, George W. Bush dropped out of his National Guard service and later lied about it. With the media finally paying attention, will he now come clean?
Feb. 5, 2004 | In 1972, George W. Bush simply walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas Air National Guard. He skipped required weekend drill sessions for many months, probably for more than a year, and did not take a mandatory annual physical exam, which resulted in his being grounded. Nonetheless, Bush, the son of a well-connected Texas congressman, received an honorable discharge.
If an Air National guardsman today vanished for a year, military attorneys say that guardsman would be transferred to active duty or, more likely, kicked out of the service, probably with a less-than-honorable discharge. They suggest the penalty would be especially swift if the absent-without-leave guardsman were a fully trained pilot, as Bush was.
Bush's National Guard record, long ignored by the media, has surfaced with a vengeance. If the topic continues to rage, and if the media presses him, Bush may finally be forced to release his full military records, which could reveal the truth. By refusing to make all those records public, Bush has until now broken with a long-standing tradition of U.S. presidential candidates.
Democrats have seized on the story of Bush's "missing year," which was first raised in a 2000 Boston Globe article. This week Democratic front-runner Sen. John Kerry called on Bush to give a fuller explanation of his service record. That brought an outraged response from Bush-Cheney '04 chairman Marc Racicot, who denounced Kerry's request as a "slanderous attack" and "character assassination." White House spokesman Scott McClellan also tried to slam the door on the subject, declaiming that Democratic questions about Bush's military service "have no place in politics and everyone should condemn them."
In a sign that the Bush team is taking the issue seriously, on Wednesday Bush's campaign spokesman questioned the integrity of the retired Guard commander who claims Bush failed to show for duty in 1972, citing the commander's recent donation to a Democratic candidate for president.
Republicans clearly want to quarantine the issue of Bush's service and have it labeled as outside the bounds of acceptable public discourse. With good reason: If the story takes root it could do real damage to Bush's reelection run, which is anchored on his image as a trusted leader in America's war on terrorism. Trying to make the subject go away could prove difficult, though. "It's a booby trap that's out there ticking for Bush," warns retired U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth. "His opponents are going to keep turning this screw until something gives."
Right now, the network news is covering the political jousting. It remains unclear, however, whether mainstream journalists will take the time to examine Bush's military record and ask the president why, after receiving pilot training that cost 1970s taxpayers nearly $1 million, he took it upon himself to decide he was finished with his military requirements nearly two years before his six-year obligation was up.
Bush's infrequent responses to questions on the issue have been by turns false, misleading and contradictory. His memory has also proved to be highly unreliable: During 2000, Bush variously could not remember which weekends he served during the year in question, where he served, under whose command, or what his duties were.
The story emerged in 2000 when the Boston Globe's Walter Robinson, after combing through 160 pages of military documents and interviewing Bush's former commanders, reported that Bush's flying career came to an abrupt and unexplained end in the spring of 1972 when he asked for, and was inexplicably granted, a transfer to a paper-pushing Guard unit in Alabama. During this time Bush worked on the Senate campaign of a friend of his father's. With his six-year Guard commitment, Bush was obligated to serve through 1973. But according to his own discharge papers, there is no record that he did any training after May 1972. Indeed, there is no record that Bush performed any Guard service in Alabama at all. In 2000, a group of veterans offered a $3,500 reward for anyone who could confirm Bush's Alabama Guard service. Of the estimated 600 to 700 Guardsmen who were in Bush's unit, not a single person came forward.
In 1973 Bush returned to his Houston Guard unit, but in May of that year his commanders could not complete his annual officer effectiveness rating report because, they wrote, "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of the report." Based on those records, as well as interviews with Texas Air National guardsmen, the Globe raised serious questions as to whether Bush ever reported for duty at all during 1973.
Throughout the 2000 campaign Bush aides never forcefully questioned the Globe's account. Instead, they searched for military documents that would support Bush's claim that he did indeed attend drill duties during the year in question. His aides eventually uncovered one piece of paper that seemed to bolster their case that he had attended a drill in late 1972, but the document was torn and did not have Bush's full name on it.
Today, the White House says that although Bush did miss some weekend drills, he eventually made them up, and more importantly he received an honorable discharge. Bush supporters routinely cite the president's honorable discharge as the ultimate proof that there was nothing unbecoming about his military service.
But experts say that citation does not wipe away the questions. "An honorable discharge does not indicate a flawless record," says Grant Lattin, a military law attorney in Washington and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who served as a judge advocate, or JAG officer. "Somebody could have missed a year's worth of Guard drills and still end up with an honorable discharge." That's because of the extraordinary leeway local commanders within the Guard are given over these types of issues. Lattin notes that the Guard "is obviously very political, even more so than other military institutions, and is subject to political influence."
For failing to attend required monthly drill sessions and refusing to take a physical, 1st Lt. Bush just as easily could have been moved to active duty, given a less-than-honorable discharge, or had his flying rights permanently revoked, says Eugene Fidell, a leading Washington expert on military law. "For a fully trained pilot, he was assigned to a nothing job [in Alabama], and the available records indicate he never performed that job."
In the Guard today, as a general rule, "if someone doesn't show up for drill duty, doesn't show up, and doesn't show up, they'll be separated from their unit and given an other-than-honorable discharge" most likely noting "unsatisfactory participation," says D.C. military lawyer David Sheldon, who served in the Navy and represented officers before the Court of Military Appeals.
Meanwhile, recent questions have surfaced not only about Bush's military service, but his official records. "I think some documents were taken out" of his military file, the Boston Globe's Robinson tells Salon. "And there's at least one document that appears to have been inserted into his record in early 2000." That document -- the aforementioned torn page that did not have Bush's full name on it -- plays a central role in the story.
"His records have clearly been cleaned up," says author James Moore, whose upcoming book, "Bush's War for Re-election," will examine the issue of Bush's military service in great detail. Moore says as far back as 1994, when Bush first ran for governor of Texas, his political aides "began contacting commanders and roommates and people who would spin and cover up his Guard record. And when my book comes out, people will be on the record testifying to that fact: witnesses who helped clean up Bush's military file."
If Bush wanted to resolve the questions about his National Guard service, he could do so very easily. If he simply agreed to release the contents of his military personnel records jacket, the Guard could make public all his discharge papers, including pay records and total retirement points, which experts say would shed the best light on where Bush was, or was not, during the time in question between 1972 and 1973. (Many of Bush's documents are available through Freedom of Information requests, but certain items deemed personal or private cannot be released without Bush's permission.)
Releasing military records has become a time-honored tradition of presidential campaigns. During the 1992 presidential election, Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, called on his Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, to make public all personal documents relating his draft status during the Vietnam War, including any correspondences with "Clinton's draft board, the Selective Service System, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, the United States departments of State and Justice, any U.S. foreign embassy or consulate." That, according to a Bush-Quayle Oct. 15, 1992, press release.
Calls to the White House seeking comment on if and when the president's full military records will be released were not returned.
The spark that reignited this issue came when ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, co-moderating a Democratic debate on Jan. 22, asked retired Gen. Wesley Clark why he did not repudiate comments made by his supporter, filmmaker Michael Moore, who publicly labeled Bush a "deserter." Jennings editorialized, "Now that's a reckless charge not supported by the facts."
Republican pundits agreed. Bill Bennett, a director of Empower America, told Fox News that Clark's "failure to distance himself, repudiate, absolutely condemn Michael Moore's description of the president as a deserter was a terrible thing."
Was the New York Times spun by Bush?
Most informed observers agree that Moore's choice of words was sloppy and inaccurate. "Deserter" is a criminal term: It refers to a military personnel who abandons his post with no intention of ever returning. But Democrats have taken hold of the broader issue of whether Bush was AWOL. Their willingness to bring up a previously off-limits subject reflects their sense that Bush's aura of invincibility has worn off and the confidence imparted by Kerry's resurgent campaign. Democrats feel Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, has the personal history to question Bush's service.
But the issue is also ripe because of Bush's own reelection strategy. By donning a fighter flight suit and landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln for a photo-op in May 2003, he has tried to paint himself as a seasoned military leader in the United States' war on terrorism. With newfound aggressiveness, Democrats are trying to puncture that aura by hammering away on the fact that Bush's own military record fails to back it up.
That's what Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe did this Sunday on ABC News' "This Week," when he referred to Bush as "a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard." That brought a quick rebuttal from South Carolina's Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who told CNN it was wrong for Democrats to be "taking shots at [Bush] for being a guardsman."
In similar fashion, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claimed Tuesday night that by bringing up Bush's National Guard service, the Democrats are impugning the patriotism of guardsmen, implying that their contributions are less worthy than those who serve in the military. As those disingenuous comments suggest, Republicans are trying to change the subject, falsely framing the debate as a repeat of the National Guard controversy that dogged Vice President Dan Quayle during the 1988 presidential campaign.
It's easy to see why they're pursuing this strategy. If the story were simply about how Bush used his family connections to land a slot in the Texas Air National Guard (and all indications are he did just that ), it wouldn't matter much. But the real story is not how Bush got into the Guard. It's how he got out.
Until the last two days the mainstream media has routinely ignored or downplayed the issue. Slate columnist Michael Kinsley took euphemism to new heights when he wrote in a Dec. 5 column that Bush was "lackadaisical" about fulfilling his Guard requirement. On Jan. 17, the Associated Press, recapping the "deserter" controversy, did Bush a favor, erroneously reporting that his absent-without-leave time lasted just three months in 1972, instead of the 12-18 months actually in question. And on Feb. 1, ABC News, suggesting Democrats might turn off voters by attacking Bush's military service, reported Bush simply "missed some weekends of training." None of those descriptions come anywhere near describing the established facts at the center of the controversy.
Perhaps that's not surprising. The press, apparently deeming the National Guard story unworthy, paid more attention to the debate over Moore's "deserter" comment than they did to the actual story of Bush's unexplained absence when it came out during the 2000 campaign.
While co-moderating the Democratic debate, ABC News' Jennings was sure he knew the facts about Bush's military record. But as the Daily Howler noted, a search of the LexisNexis electronic database indicates that ABC's "World News Tonight," hosted by Jennings, never once during the 2000 campaign ran a report about the questions surrounding Bush's military record. Asked if ignoring the story was a mistake, and whether ABC News planned to pursue it in 2004, a network spokeswoman told Salon, "We continue to examine the records of all the candidates running for president, including President Bush. If and when we have a story about one of the candidates, we'll report it to our audience."
ABC was not alone in turning away from the story in 2000. CBS News did the same thing, and so did NBC News. But it was the New York Times, and the way the paper of record avoided the issue of Bush's no-show military service, that stands out as the most unusual. To this day, the Times has never reported that in 1972 the Texas Air National Guard grounded Bush for failing to take a required physical exam. Nor has the paper ever reported that neither Bush nor his aides can point to a single person who saw Bush, the hard-to-miss son of a congressman and U.S. ambassador, perform any active duty requirements during the final 18 months of his service. Instead, the Times served up stories that failed to delve deep into the issue.
The Boston Globe story broke on May 23, 2000. The next day Bush answered reporters' questions on the campaign trail, defending his military record. His comments were covered by the Times Union (of Albany, N.Y.), the Columbus Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Houston Chronicle, among others, which all considered the story newsworthy. Not the Times: The paper ignored the fact Bush was forced to respond to allegations that he'd been AWOL during his Guard service.
Throughout the 2000 campaign, the Times' Nicholas Kristof wrote a series of biographical dispatches about Bush's personal history. On July 11, he wrote about Bush's post-college years, including his National Guard service, but no mention was made of the controversy surrounding Bush's missing year.
The Times finally addressed the issue on July 22, two months after the Globe exposé was published. The Times article, written by Jo Thomas, focused on Bush's post-Yale years in the late '60s and early '70s. In a section on the National Guard controversy, the Times reported that Bush's commanding officer had told the Boston Globe that Bush had never showed up, quoted Bush as insisting that he had, and noted that "Emily Marks, who worked in the Blount campaign and dated Mr. Bush, said she recalls that he returned to Montgomery after the election to serve with the Air National Guard." But then the Times went on to write, "National Guard records provided by the Guard and by the Bush campaign indicate he did serve on Nov. 29, 1972, after the election. These records also show a gap in service from that time to the previous May. Mr. Bush says he made up for the lost time in subsequent months, and guard records show he received credit for having performed all the required service."
On Oct. 31, the Boston Globe published another damning story, suggesting Bush failed to serve -- in fact, did not even show up for duty-- during the final 18 months of his commitment. The Times' Thomas quickly wrote, "A review of records by The New York Times indicated that some of those concerns [about Bush's absence] may be unfounded." Contradicting the Globe's account of Bush war service, the paper reported that Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett "pointed to a document in Mr. Bush's military records that showed credit for four days of duty ending Nov. 29 and for eight days ending Dec. 14, 1972, and, after he moved back to Houston, on dates in January, April and May."
The document cited by the Times is apparently the mysterious torn paper that appeared in Bush's records in 2000. That document, a "Statement of Points Earned," tracks when guardsmen have served, and whether they have fulfilled their annual duty. It contains references to "29" and "14" and other numbers whose meaning is not clear. The Times did not inform its readers that the document is badly torn, undated, and unsigned; does not have Bush's name on it (just a wayward "W"); and has a redacted Social Security number.
"The Times got spun by Dan Bartlett," Robinson at the Globe told Salon. He and others note that if the documents provided by the Bush campaign proved he did Guard duty upon returning to Houston in January and April of 1973, then why, on Bush's annual effectiveness report signed by two superiors, did it say, "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of the report," which covered the dates between May 1, 1972, and April 30, 1973?
"I had a lot of arguments with Dan Bartlett and never got spun by him," says Thomas, now an assistant chancellor for public affairs at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. "But if he gave me some documents that proved his point, I'm not going to ignore them." She added, "The Times carried no brief for or against Bush."
Nonetheless, the author James Moore says it was those two Times stories, which seemed to back up Bush's sketchy account of his Guard service, that effectively stopped other reporters from pursuing the story.
Here are the known facts of that story: Following his graduation from Yale University in 1968, with the Vietnam War raging, Bush vaulted to the top of a 500-person waiting list to land a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard. Then, despite having no aviation or ROTC experience, he was approved for an automatic commission as a second lieutenant and assignment to flight school.
By every indication, Bush's service between 1970 and 1972 as a fully trained pilot in the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron near Houston was commendable. But then came the spring of 1972 -- and Bush simply vanished.
"The National Guard is extremely political in the sense of who you know"
Contrary to the official campaign biography that appeared on the Bush Web site during 2000, which stated he flew fighter planes until his discharge in late 1973, Bush flew for the last time ever in April 1972. In May, he moved to Alabama to help out in the Senate campaign of Winton Blount, a friend of Bush's father. Bush asked to be transferred to an Alabama Air National Guard unit where he could do "equivalent training." Bush asked to be transferred to a postal unit for paper-pushing duties -- and remarkably, his Houston commanders signed off on the request. But officials at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver eventually overruled the request, pointing out the obvious: Doing paperwork in a postal unit did not qualify as "equivalent training" for a fully trained pilot.
The situation remained unresolved for months. During that time, Bush was still obligated to attend drill sessions with his regular unit near Houston. Guard records indicate he did not.
In September 1972, Bush won approval to do temporary training at the 187th Squadron in Montgomery. But the unit's commander, retired Brig. Gen. William Turnipseed, told the Boston Globe he was "dead certain" Bush never showed. "Had he reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not. I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered."
On Wednesday, Bush-Cheney '04 spokesman Terry Holt told Salon that Turnipseed recently donated $500 to Sen. John Edwards' campaign. Holt questioned whether the motives behind Turnipseed's comments regarding Bush's service were "pure," or whether he's part of a "political attack." Turnipseed could not be reached for comment.
In any case, as already noted, there is no official National Guard record of Bush's ever serving in Alabama, and not a single guardsman who served at that time has ever come forward and corroborated that Bush was there.
Meanwhile, in July of that summer, Bush's "failure to accomplish" his mandatory annual physical (that is, to take it) forced the Guard to ground him.
Following Blount's election loss in November, Bush returned to Houston. But he did not return to his Guard duties, at least according to his commanding officers. In May 1973, his two superior officers at Ellington Air Force Base noted on Bush's evaluation that he had not been seen during the previous year. In the comments section, Lt. Col. William Harris Jr. wrote that Bush "cleared this base on 15 May 1972, and has been performing equivalent training in a non flying role with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama." The problem is, Bush never reported for duty there, or anywhere else in Alabama. According to his discharge papers, Bush took the whole year off instead.
Bush was finally recorded as having crammed in 36 active-duty credits during May, June and July 1973, thereby meeting his minimal requirement. But as the Boston Globe pointed out, nobody connected with the Texas unit recalls seeing Bush during his cram sessions, leading to suspicions that Bush was given credits for active duty he did not perform.
The suspicion stems in part from the incorrect, and inconsistent, answers that Bush and his spokesmen have given to the question of why, after going through extraordinarily rigorous flight training, he simply walked away from flying. The day the Globe story appeared on May 23, 2000, Bush explained to reporters that when he returned to Houston in 1973, his old fighter plane was being phased out. "There was a conscious decision not to retrain me in an airplane," he said, suggesting it was the Texas Air National Guard's decision to end his flying career. That's not true. The plane to which Bush was referring, the F-102, was phased out during the 1970s, but it was still being used in 1973. Bush did not tell reporters about his failed physical exam and how that resulted in his being grounded.
That misleading answer about Bush's Guard service was just one of many the candidate and his aides gave during the campaign. For instance, a campaign official told Cox News reporters in July 1999 that Bush's transfer to the Alabama Guard unit was for the same flying job he held in Texas. That's false. There was no flying involved at either Alabama unit (not that Bush ever reported to them, according to Guard records), and without passing a physical, Bush couldn't fly anyway.
Also in July 1999, Bush's then-spokeswoman Karen Hughes told the Associated Press it was accurate for Bush to suggest, as he'd done in a previous campaign, that he served "in the U.S. Air Force," when in fact he served in the Air National Guard.
Asked in 2000 why Bush failed to take his physical in July 1972, the campaign gave two different explanations. The first was that Bush was (supposedly) serving in Alabama and his personal physician was in Texas, so he couldn't get a physical. That's false. By military regulations, Bush could not have received a military physical from his personal physician, only from an Air Force flight surgeon, and there were several assigned to nearby Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. The other explanation was that because Bush was no longer flying, he didn't need to take a physical. But that simply highlights the extraordinary nature of Bush's service and the peculiar notion that he took it upon himself to decide that a) he was no longer a pilot and b) he didn't have to take a physical.
Early in September 1973, Bush submitted a request to effectively end any requirements to attend monthly drills. Despite Bush's record, the request was approved. He was given an honorable discharge, and that fall he enrolled in Harvard Business School.
One of the obvious questions raised by Bush's missing year is why he was never brought up on any disciplinary charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and why he was given an honorable discharge. (It's unlikely Bush could have run for president if he'd been tainted with anything less than an honorable discharge from the military.)
But the issue is not that black and white. "An honorable discharge usually means the person has not committed any misconduct," says retired JAG officer Lattin. "He may have failed to honor his obligation, but he hasn't committed a criminal act. And that's an important distinction."
It's important, because based on Lattin's interpretation of the military law, a guardsman on non-active duty who fails to show up for his monthly drill sessions, as Bush did, is not subject to the UCMJ. The UCMJ, Lattin says, applies only to active-duty servicemen. And while guardsmen who report for weekend duty are covered for those 48 hours by the UCMJ's unique codes (regarding desertion, being AWOL, etc.), a non-active guardsman who refuses to report for duty in the first place cannot be covered by the UCMJ. Instead, an absent-without-leave guardsman is subject to the state's military codes of justice, which mirror the UCMJ.
But even then, says Lattin, cases of guardsmen who fail to attend drill sessions are rarely dealt with under the military's criminal code, but rather administratively, which is less burdensome. Administrative options include transferring the solider to active duty, or separating him from his unit while beginning dismissal procedures that would likely -- although not always -- result in a less than, or other than, honorable discharge. Also in Bush's case, he could have been permanently stripped of his flight privileges.
So why was no administrative action taken against Bush during his missing year or more? "It could have been mere inefficiency, or a reluctance to create controversy with the son of an important federal official," says Fidell, the military law expert. "Observers of the Guard at that time have said it did seem to be an entity in which connections might be helpful."
Lattin is more blunt. "The National Guard is extremely political in the sense of who you know," he says. "And it's true to this very day. One person is handled very strictly and the next person is not. If George Bush Jr. is in your unit, you're going to bend over backward not to offend that family. It all comes down to who you know."
Lattin stresses that the Bush episode, and the Guard's failure to take any administrative actions against him, have to be viewed in context of the early '70s. With the Vietnam War beginning to wind down and the U.S. military battling endemic low morale, the Pentagon showed little interest in chasing after absent-without-leave guardsmen. "It was too hard and there were too many of them," says Lattin. "There was a 'who cares' attitude. Commanders didn't want to deal with them. And they knew they'd stir up a hornet's nest, especially if one of the [missing guardsmen] was named George Bush."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/ 05/national_guard/" title="http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/ 05/national_guard/" target="_blank"http://www.salon.com/news/fea...
|
|
|
| |
| .....Republican Senator Says Bin Laden 'Obviously' Will Be Caught Before Election |
| 02.04.04 (4:46 pm) [edit] |
The Hill News [US]
February 4th, 2004
Sen. Grassley sees terrorist nabbed by Nov. 2 vote
He doesn’t bother to attend secret CIA briefings of his fellow senators because he seldom learns anything he hasn’t read in the newspapers, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is convinced the U.S. will track down the elusive mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks before November.
“Obviously, he’ll be caught between now and the election,” Grassley said Monday when asked if he’s disappointed that Osama bin Laden hasn’t been killed or captured.
“I think they’re on his trail now in a way they haven’t been all year,” Grassley said. “It will happen because we will be able to divert more resources [to hunting down bin Laden].”
Grassley, who’s an overwhelming favorite to win a fifth term in November, declined to say why he’s so confident that bin Laden will be brought to justice. But it certainly didn’t come from one of those secret CIA briefings.
“I think it’s legitimate for me to question all of our intelligence information because that I never learned anything from those briefings that I hadn’t learned in the newspapers. If they don’t know anything more than they’re telling us, what’s the use of having an intelligence agency, and why bother to brief us?”
Although President Bush’s re-election prospects would no doubt be boosted if bin Laden is found, Grassley said Democrats may have a better chance if Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) wins his party’s presidential nomination rather than the current front-runner, Sen. John Kerry (Mass.).
“ I would say that Senator Kerry is more of a threat than [Howard] Dean but less of a threat than Senator Edwards” because of the latter’s strength in the South, he said.
...snip...
http://www.hillnews.com/under_dome/020404.aspx" title="http://www.hillnews.com/under_dome/020404.aspx" target="_blank"http://www.hillnews.com/under...
Note: Is the 'fix' in ? October surprise ?
|
|
|
| |
| .....Faulty Evidence And an Eager Victim |
| 02.03.04 (6:44 pm) [edit] |
by William Raspberry, Washington Post [US]
February 2nd, 2004; Page A17
When President Bush is asked whether he regrets attacking Iraq on what now turns out to be bad information, he always answers to the effect that the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power.
Which is no answer at all. I can think of many world leaders (and even a few members of the Bush administration) whose absence from power would leave the world better off. But that does not justify turning thought into violent action.
The president wants us to forget this awkward truth: The justification he offered for attacking Iraq was not that Hussein was a bad guy but (1) that he was contemptuously in violation of U.N. resolutions and (2) that he and his weapons of mass destruction were an urgent danger to the United States -- so ominous, in fact, that if we waited for more inspections and negotiations, it might be too late.
Former weapons inspector David Kay now says, to the obvious embarrassment of the administration, that he believes Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when American bombers struck Baghdad almost a year ago. Does that mean that we launched the war on false pretenses?
No, in Kay's view; yes, in mine.
Kay explains that he thought at the time that the WMDs existed and were a menace. The problem, he has been at pains to say, is not Bush administration mendacity but failure of the intelligence apparatus. Bush, by that explanation, is not villain but victim.
Well, he was a most eager victim, practically begging for justification -- any justification -- for the war he was determined to have. He was only temporarily stalled when Secretary of State Colin Powell persuaded him to take the case to the U.N. Security Council. But the administration's chapter-and-verse accounting of how Hussein had violated U.N. agreements and directives did not produce a call for war.
The Bush administration was left with a single rationale: Iraq's urgent threat to America.
Thus came Powell's Feb. 5 multimedia extravaganza before the Security Council. You may remember it.
"Let's look at one [satellite image]. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji. This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. . . .
"Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in the red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers."
Again:
"At this biological-weapons-relate d facility, on November 25, just two days before inspections resumed, this truck caravan appeared, something we almost never see at this facility, and we monitor it carefully and regularly . . . five large cargo trucks appeared along with the truck-mounted crane to move missiles. We saw this kind of housecleaning at close to 30 sites."
Oh, and enough anthrax (one spoonful of which was enough to shut down the U.S. Senate in the fall of 2001) to "fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons."
And this: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Well, not so solid after all, it turns out.
The question -- to give Powell the benefit of the doubt Kay gives the president -- is: Did the intelligence agencies serve the secretary of state a batch of cooked evidence?
Or was Colin, my personal hero, in the kitchen?
Does it matter? Perhaps the administration oversold the evidence. Perhaps the war was, in retrospect, too hasty, even unnecessary. But, hey, it happened, so let's just get on with it. What's the point of raking through the ashes of year-old decisions?
Maybe there is no point -- if you believe, as Kay claims to believe, that it's all about failed intelligence.
But there is a vital point if you believe, as I'm increasingly inclined to believe, that the administration lied to us in calculated and quite deliberate ways. If that happened, if it still is happening, I want to know as much about it as can be discovered. After all, there's an election coming up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4337 -2004Feb1_2.html" title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4337 -2004Feb1_2.html" target="_blank"http://www.washingtonpost.com...
|
|
|
| |
| ....Another Year of Suck Movies...Great! |
| 02.02.04 (3:55 pm) [edit] |
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- You'd think there isn't an original idea left in Hollywood with all the sequels, spinoffs and remakes crowding the 2004 movie lineup.
Yet fans are not likely to complain, considering the savory characters featured in this year's many retreads, which include about two dozen sequels and prequels and at least a dozen updates of old movies or TV shows.
The three heavy hitters arrive in quick succession during the busy summer season:
• "Shrek 2" premieres just before Memorial Day, as the animated ogre with the Scottish brogue (again voiced by Mike Myers) accompanies his princess bride Fiona (Cameron Diaz) to meet her parents, with their pal Donkey (Eddie Murphy) along for the ride. Julie Andrews and John Cleese join the voice cast as Shrek's disapproving in-laws, and Antonio Banderas provides the voice of crafty cat Puss-in-Boots.
• "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" debuts in June, with author J.K. Rowling's boy sorcerer (Daniel Radcliffe) and his chums (Rupert Grint and Emma Watson) in their third year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This time, the gang faces an escaped convict (Gary Oldman) who's coming after Harry for mysterious reasons. Michael Gambon replaces the late Richard Harris as wise headmaster Dumbledore.
• "Spider-Man 2," opening over Fourth of July weekend, reunites director Sam Raimi with Marvel Comics' anxious-teen-turned-super hero Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), girl-next-door Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter's pal Harry Osborn (James Franco). Now a college student, webmaster Peter battles new super-villain Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), who has been transformed into the tentacled "Doc Ock."
While most sequels ratchet up the action, Raimi chose to ratchet up the moral and personal dilemmas and private quandaries that set "Spider-Man" apart from many Hollywood franchises and helped turn it into a $400 million mega-hit.
"The next one is going to seem a little smaller and more intimate. I hope people are not hoping it's bigger and better. Hopefully, they'll think it's smaller and better," Raimi said. "I really turned the film inward on the characters, and it seems like that's what the audience responded to in the first film. So we focused on developing the characters to the next level, and the actors have taken the performances, all of them, up a notch."
The sequel picks up two years after "Spider-Man," which ended with Peter turning his back on his great love, Mary Jane, realizing it was a sacrifice he had to make to travel the high road with his superpowers.
"In those two years, we see the weight of this decision upon Peter Parker," Raimi said. "It's a much tougher road than he ever thought. And the sacrifices he makes here are much more extreme than he ever thought.
"It's about the growth of a boy into a man. Really, a simple coming-of-age story. This boy just happens to be one bitten by a radioactive spider."
New director on 'Potter'
"Harry Potter" fans who want to see every detail from the books translated into the screen versions might be uneasy over the projected length of "Prisoner of Azkaban." Director Alfonso Cuaron expects to bring the movie in at less than 2 1/2 hours, the shortest of the series so far and well under the nearly three-hour running time of the last installment, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."
This time, Rowling's story lent itself to a tighter script than the first two flicks, Cuaron said.
"I'm sure that somebody is going to miss something very specific that was ingrained in his or her mind when they read the book. But I think fans are going to love the movie," Cuaron said.
Cuaron signed on for "Harry Potter" after making the racy Spanish-language hit "Y Tu Mama Tambien." He hesitated initially, wondering if it was a good idea to leap into blockbuster country, where every frame would be under the microscope of a profit-minded studio and an eager but finicky audience.
Helping to put the filmmaker on the Hogwarts Express was a remark from a friend, who told him, "in serving Harry Potter, you may do the best film of your career," Cuaron said. "It turned out to be probably the most free experience I ever had in a studio movie."
On the other hand, Andrew Adamson felt a bit artistically constricted on "Shrek 2." A co-director on both "Shrek" movies, Adamson felt he and his collaborators wrapped up the 2001 original too neatly, making it tougher to develop the sequel.
Adamson's main beef: He wishes they had not let Shrek and Fiona marry at the end of the first film. The filmmakers could have strung out the romantic mayhem in the sequel if the two had yet to tie the knot, Adamson said.
"But it actually forced us to push the story through more twists and turns and prevented us from letting the film fall back into sequel cliches," Adamson.
Among the twists: Turns out Shrek wasn't the fairy-tale true love meant for Fiona, after all. A guy named Prince Charming was (Rupert Everett provides the voice of the unlucky-at-love prince).
While the filmmakers had not been thinking sequel on the first "Shrek," they have left more leeway to continue the story after the new installment, Adamson said.
"This time at least, we're preparing for it. We're trying not to make the same mistakes," Adamson said. "In the first movie, Shrek learned he could be lovable to some degree. This movie, he learns how to love, and at some point, he needs to learn to love himself. So there is still more to be told about these characters. They still have room to go."
From Olympic hockey to ancient Troy
This year's non-sequel and non-remake highlights include a "Wedding Singer" reunion for Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the romance "50 First Dates"; Tom Cruise as a hitman in "Collateral"; Kurt Russell in "Miracle," the story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team; Gene Hackman as an ex-president running for mayor in "Welcome to Mooseport"; the end-of-the-world thriller "The Day After Tomorrow," with Dennis Quaid; Nicole Kidman's "The Interpreter," a tale of United Nations intrigue; Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg reteaming for the drama "The Terminal"; and Will Smith in the sci-fi adventure "I, Robot."
Also: "The Village," the latest fright flick from M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense"); the epic "Troy," with Brad Pitt as Greek hero Achilles; the musical "Andrew Lloyd Webber's the Phantom of the Opera," directed by Joel Schumacher; Oliver Stone's "Alexander," with Colin Farrell as the great conqueror; Leonardo DiCaprio in the Howard Hughes biography "The Aviator," directed by Martin Scorsese; Russell Crowe as Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock in Ron Howard's "Cinderella Man"; and the comic-book adaptations "Constantine" with Keanu Reeves, "Catwoman" with Halle Berry, "Hellboy" with Ron Perlman, and "The Punisher" with Thomas Jane.
Among the year's other sequels: Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer and pals return in "Barbershop 2: Back in Business," which co-stars Queen Latifah, who gets her own spinoff, "Beauty Shop"; "The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement," with Anne Hathaway and grandma Julie Andrews on a hubby hunt; "Kill Bill -- Vol. 2," the conclusion to Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino's vengeance saga; and Renee Zellweger's return to romantic misadventures in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason."
Also: Matt Damon's second time out as the amnesiac spy in "The Bourne Supremacy"; Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller's "Meet the Parents" follow-up "Meet the Fockers"; "Blade: Trinity," Wesley Snipes' third time as the vampire slayer; Frankie Muniz in "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London"; "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed," with the Great Dane and his ghost-hunting gang; Naomi Watts in the horror tale "The Ring 2"; and John Travolta's "Get Shorty" postscript "Be Cool."
With "Ocean's Twelve," George Clooney reprises the title role from the heist hit "Ocean's Eleven," a remake of the Frank Sinatra flick.
The assassination thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," another Sinatra film from the '60s, gets an update with Denzel Washington in the lead.
Among other remakes and adaptations: Nicole Kidman in the comic thriller "The Stepford Wives," about a town of oddly obedient women; Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as cop partners in "Starsky & Hutch," updated from the '70s TV show; Tom Hanks in the Coen brothers' retelling of "The Ladykillers," about a gang of inept crooks; The Rock as a take-no-prisoners sheriff in "Walking Tall"; "Flight of the Phoenix," starring Dennis Quaid in the story of crash survivors scavenging their wrecked plane to build a new one; "Van Helsing," a new take on the "Dracula" saga, featuring Hugh Jackman; "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," which transplants the romance to 1950s Cuba; Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez and Susan Sarandon in "Shall We Dance," based on the Japanese film; and "Dawn of the Dead," with Ving Rhames and Sarah Polley among survivors in a world of undead zombies.
Other movies, while not straightforward remakes, mine familiar territory. Hilary Duff's "A Cinderella Story" gives a modern twist to the fairy tale as a downtrodden stepdaughter who meets her prince online then leaves behind her cell phone rather than a slipper for him to track her down.
Jennifer Garner does the child-in-an-adult-body thing a la "Big" in "13 Going on 30," about a teenager who wishes for a new life and suddenly finds herself stuck in the body of her grown-up self.
Writer-actress Nia Vardalos follows up her surprise blockbuster "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" with "Connie and Carla," a romance that carries shades of the cross-dressing comedies "Some Like It Hot," "Tootsie" and "Victor/Victoria."
"Connie and Carla" stars Vardalos, Toni Collette and David Duchovny in the tale of two female musical-theater singers who witness a murder and hide out from mobsters by posing as drag queens -- "women dressed as men dressed as women," Vardalos said.
The success of the low-budget "Greek Wedding" has landed Vardalos in the middle of big-money Hollywood. The music budget alone on "Connie and Carla" equaled the entire $5 million cost of making "Greek Wedding," Vardalos said.
Sky-high expectations often trip up newly minted stars on their first follow-up to a major hit. But Vardalos figures she's already taken that tumble with the failed TV adaptation "My Big Fat Greek Life."
"I'm not worried about the sophomore jinx. That already hit me with the TV show," Vardalos said. "I'm now in my junior year, and I feel great."
|
|
|
| |
| ....YOUR MEDIA RIGHTS |
| 02.01.04 (3:30 pm) [edit] |
Are you happy with our mass media? Do you feel the values in most TV programs are appropriate and nurturing for our youth or our society? If not, what would you like to see? Did you know that you "own" the public airwaves? A 1966 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling states: "Under our system, the interests of the public are dominant" They are the owners of the channels of television—indeed, of all broadcasting." And in a Supreme Court decision in 1969 the court states "It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount." It has been thought that the sweeping degregulation of broadcasting since the late 1980's negates these laws. This is not the case. The Federal Communications Commission's 1984 ruling states: "(deregulation) "does not constitute a retreat from our concern with the programming performance of television station licensees."
Most people do not realize that television broadcasters have a unique corporate charter unlike any other corporation. Based on legislation dating back to 1927, television broadcasters have an overriding obligation to "serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity." By law they are obligated to broadcast programs that inform our community on local, national and global issues that affect our lives—from diverse perspectives! This duty to serve the public before their own pocketbooks has been affirmed by more than a half-century of law in the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Yet, in reality the situation is essentially turned upside down: TV broadcasters serve their profits first and put the genuine interests of the public a distant second. What needs to change is for the public to begin to articulate what we define as our public interest. Once that happens, citizens will have the power to force the media to be accountable.
It's not just the concern with what is currently on television. From gratuitous violence and stereotyping to the lack of diverse perspectives, mainstream television seems to confirm our worst fears about human nature. Yet, despite the glaring problems with what is ON television, we would argue that an even more important problem is what is NOT ON television!
Because more than half of the American people get all of their news about the world from television, it is not surprising that in American society, nothing is truly "real" until it has been brought into prominent public attention by being on television. Therefore, if we don't hear regularly televised reports about a wide array of local or national issues, the general public will assume that these areas are not yet critical. However, just because the mass media ignore critical trends does not mean they will conveniently cease to exist.
Television has become an advertising machine that generates consumption. Therefore, it is in their interest to ignore or minimize trends that bring into question the fairness and sustainability of the way of life they promote. Most people do not realize that 6 major corporate conglomerates own all of the American media. Hollywood is big business.
Power in a democracy is the power to communicate. If we don't have the power to be informed and to communicate about local, national and global issues affecting our lives we will not have the power to respond to them. The media has had an essential role in shaping our concerns and priorities as a country. As the mass media goes, so goes our future.
The last taboo topic on television is for television to reflect on itself. Numbed by consumerism and distracted by "entertainment," television never turns the cameras around to look at how it promotes a narrow and biased view of the world that is increasingly out of touch with the global reality. Challenging the mindset of television programming is not simply a matter of "taste," it is rather a matter of our survival if we are to mobilize ourselves to make life-preserving choices. It has been said that television broadcasters want provocative programming that won't provoke anyone." Despite the immense power of television to reach millions of people, the overriding message of commercialism is numbing and suffocating, severely restricting the public's access to vital information and to creatively respond to the hard challenges ahead of us.
It is time for the public to make its collective voice heard in the media. It is time for the public to recognize that, despite whatever our other differences may be, we need to stand together and decide that we are no longer willing to be passive spectators in the face of a broadcast media that seeks to exploit rather than serve the public interest.
Our Media Voice, a campaign for media accountability, was formed to provide the forum for our collective voice to be heard. Our goal is to build a vehicle that creates an informed and engaged public who are equipped to understand and participate in making hard choices ahead of us locally, nationally and globally. As citizens, we know that, by law, broadcasters have an unequivocal responsibility "to serve the public interest" before they serve their own profits. The Campaign is establishing a national citizens media education campaign, coalition of organizations to work together, local chapters, a clearinghouse for media activism, and citizen feedback forums.
We are launching televised citizen feedback forums to provide a democratic means for the public to express its collective interests on an ongoing basis. These feedback forums will be presented on television and other media involving a representative sample of citizens whose feedback will hold broadcasters accountable to serve the public interest. They will be held in local communities around the nation to determine public views, concerns, and interests. This non-partisan, participatory, democratic process will become a vehicle for articulating each community's voice. Local organizations could sponsor these regular citizen feedback forums. These forums could employ live polling of a random sample of local citizens to get an accurate sense of public views. In addition to important issues such as gratuitous sex, violence, the effects of media on youth and our political process, citizen feedback forums could raise questions vital to a sustainable future for the Earth. What are the long-term effects of media-driven consumerism on our resources and societies? All the technology required for successful feedback forums already exists. What is required is a public that wants to be informed, involved and committed to creating a healthy, democratic, and sustainable world together.
How might the mass media nourish and strengthen our culture and enable us to cope with ecological, social, and spiritual challenges? Citizen feedback could be presented to representatives of television broadcaster at the end of each program, holding them accountable for their legal responsibility to present a balanced diet of relevant, socially-responsible programming with diverse perspectives that serves the public interest.
It's time to communicate with broadcasters. Citizens have a right to review the broadcaster's public file, which holds their FCC reports; we have a right to challenge their FCC licenses; and we have a right to demand a hearing regarding what will serve the public interest. It's time to take back the airwaves that belong to citizens. It's time for the public to have a voice in how this powerful institution, our mass media, is being used. It's time to invite a diversity of perspectives that inform, educate and empower the citizenry to make wise choices in responding to the crucial issues ahead of us.
Let your voice be heard. Share this information with your family, friends, neighbors, co-workers and groups that you belong to.
http://www.ourmediavoice.org/" title="http://www.ourmediavoice.org/" target="_blank"http://www.ourmediavoice.org/...
|
|
|
| |
|
QUOTE:
Stupidity has a bad habit of getting its way. --"The Day After"
QUOTE: Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
– A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"
QUOTE: War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.
– General Omar Bradley
I hope....that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats...
– Benjamin Franklin
"There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly."-- Klaatu, The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951.
|
