Comment: This is part of a pattern, a Bush-Cheney habit of ignoring the Constitution. And it's grounds yet again for immediate impeachment, arrest, and imprisonment of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzales Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
Comment: This is a big step forward for Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, who said a couple of weeks ago that a troop increase would be just fine with him. Madeline ZanePERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: Last night on NBC News, Jim Miklaszewski reported that the new strategy will be announced next Tuesday, and that an administration official "admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one."
Excerpt: A State Department official leaked word this week that President Bush is considering sending "no more than 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops" to Iraq. "Instead of a surge, it is a bump," the official said.
This claim was bolstered last night by CBS's David Martin, who reported that military commanders have told Bush they are prepared to execute a troop escalation of just 9,000 soldiers and Marines into Iraq, "with another 10,000 on alert in Kuwait and the U.S."
Excerpt: Both Abizaid and Casey have expressed qualms in recent weeks about boosting U.S. forces in Iraq. Abizaid said an increase of 20,000 could not be sustained for long by the overburdened American military.
Excerpt: Pelosi spoke specifically about a possible funding request for additional U.S. troops..."I'm saying it will get careful scrutiny and oversight to see whether or not that is a good expenditure of the taxpayer's dollar," the Maryland Democrat told Fox News Sunday.
Comment: Pelosi is obviously testing the waters here. The Democrats are not used to taking principled stand, so if they're going to do something as useful, sensible, and popular as actually blocking war funds, we're going to have to push and prod them every step of the way. PLEASE, everybody reading this, take a couple minutes to email or call your representative and senators and remind them that November's election was a mandate to end the war NOW. Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: In Oct. 2003, 77 senators voted to give President Bush authorization to go to war in Iraq. Just 23 senators voted against it.
But according to a new ABC News survey, 33 out of the original 77 senators "indicated they would vote differently knowing then what they know now." Five senators -- including three Republicans -- said that in retrospect, the intelligence was so wrong that the matter should never have even been brought to a vote. These results would mean that a vote to authorize war in Iraq today would be 43-57, and the resolution would fail.
Excerpt: U.S. Navy forces prevented the militants from fleeing by sea, authorities said...Dinari said some militants were trying to escape by sea but that U.S. Navy forces were deployed to stop them.
Excerpt: The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House complex are not subject to public disclosure....
The five-page document dated May 17 declares that all entry and exit data on White House visitors belongs to the White House as presidential records rather than to the Secret Service as agency records. Therefore, the agreement states, the material is not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
Excerpt: The measures were part of Pelosi's pledge to run "the most ethical Congress in history" and were passed on the opening day of the House session -- usually strictly a ceremonial day -- to signal a break from the GOP-led 109th Congress.
Excerpt: Over the last few years, tales of private military contractors run amuck in Iraq -- from the CACI interrogators at Abu Ghraib to the Aegis company's Elvis-themed internet "trophy video" -- have continually popped up in the headlines. ...
The addition of five little words to a massive US legal code that fills entire shelves at law libraries wouldn't normally matter for much. But with this change, contractors' 'get out of jail free' card may have been torn to shreds.
Excerpt: The Pentagon will send a second aircraft carrier and its escort ships to the Gulf, Defense [sic] officials said on Wednesday, as a warning to Syria and Iran and to give commanders more flexibility in the region.
Excerpt: The general urges the Israeli lobby to turn to Hillary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran. The lobby must also approach the Europeans, he adds, so Bush won't find himself isolated, and he calls for Israel to "clandestinely cooperate with Saudi Arabia so that it also persuades the U.S. to strike Iran."
As Scott Ritter says, a U.S. war in Iran will be a war made in Israel.
Excerpt: The effect would also be devastating on US-Arab relations, on Israel's long-term security, on the flow of oil from the Gulf, on the oil price, on the economies of the industrial world and on the already highly fragile dollar. And yet, some influential voices argue that the only way the US can hope to "win" in Iraq is to destroy Iran.
Excerpt: Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters", according to several Israeli military sources.
Excerpt: Sheehan is among 12 human rights and anti-war activists who will travel across this Caribbean island next week, arriving at the main gate of the Guantanamo base on Thursday -- five years after the first prisoners were flown in.
Comment: It's not surprising, but it still really @#$@#&s me off when the media can't call it like it is. This AP story is on Sheehan going to Cuba, AKA "the peace mom". Note the photo caption. Sheehan has her hand up making a V-shape. Many would call this the "peace sign", especially since that's what Sheehan is known for, noted even in the article. What does the AP call it? The "victory signal". Sandra K.PERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: A former Guantanamo inmate and relatives of other detainees plan to demonstrate next week outside the US "war on terror" prison in Cuba to call on Washington to shut down the facility. Asif Iqbal, who for "years" was held at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay and finally released without being charged, will be the first ex-prisoner to protest at the site, organizers of the demonstration told AFP.
Excerpt: As the Sheehan group continued to shout "de-escalate, investigate, troops home now", Emanuel and other Democrats were forced into retreat and continued their discussions behind closed doors. Sheehan then criticized new House Speaker Pelosi and said: "Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic leadership can no longer tell us what is on the table! We are the ones that put them in power and they are not including the peace movement! It needs to be at least included in the discussion." Sheehan then demanded that funding for the Iraq war be stopped immediately and shouted for the impeachment of President Bush.
Comment: Odd that the only coverage of this incident we could find in any print media was in The Conservative Voice.
Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: Senior Bush administration officials in Washington said that Mr. Khalilzad's principal contact in Washington was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and that she gave the green light for Mr. Hussein to be turned over, despite the reservations of the military commanders in Baghdad. One official said that Ms. Rice was supported in that view by Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush's national security adviser.
Comment: It appears that the intent was to exhaust Saddam that he would break down emotionally on the gallows for the benefit of the unofficial official cameras. What Really HappenedPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: With much of the Arab world up in arms over the hanging of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on Saturday, it didn't take long for Libya to jump into the fray. The government in Tripoli announced on Thursday that it was planning to erect a statue of Saddam, depicting him standing on the gallows. He will join a similar monument to the Libyan freedom fighter Omar Mukhtar, a national hero who was executed in 1931 after fighting against the Italian occupation.
Excerpt: Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere -- including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach -- private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen's arrests.
Excerpt: A report on the November midterms released this past week by three different e-voting activist groups describes problems with electronic voting machines in 36 states. The report (PDF), entitled "E-Voting Failures in the 2006 Mid-Term Elections: A Sampling of Problems Across the Nation," is based on reports made to a non-partisan hotline that operated the day of the November 7 midterm elections. Calls to the hotline yielded 1022 separate incident reports, the vast majority of which concerned problems with direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines like the Diebold Accuvote model described in my article on how to steal an election. Problems were also reported with scanners and electronic ballot markers, but DREs made up the bulk of the complaints.
Excerpt: The US federal Election Assistance Commission began oversight only in July 2006, and immediately found problems with Ciber's records, but did not act until recently, presumably in fear that the November election results would be brought into question.
Excerpt: The United States has quietly started a campaign projected to cost up to $42 million to bolster Hamas's political opponents ahead of possible early Palestinian elections, say officials linked to the program.
The plan to promote alternatives to Hamas includes funding to help restructure Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah group and provide training and strategic advice to politicians and secular parties opposed to Hamas Islamists.
Excerpt: A new internet initiative called Wikileaks seeks to promote good government and democratization by enabling anonymous disclosure and publication of confidential government records.
"WikiLeaks is developing an uncensorable version of WikiPedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis," according to the project web site.
"Our primary targets are highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia, central Eurasia, the middle east and sub-Saharan Africa, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations."
Excerpt: Wikipedia is the model for the economic system Tapscott and Williams are investigating: harnessing collaborative, external resources, labor and capital to benefit an organization.
If readers think Goldcorp and Wikipedia are outliers, the authors offer examples of collaborative success at organizations as diverse as Internet telephony company Skype and Procter & Gamble.
Excerpt: President Bush wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday that "it is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues." The claim about fueling record revenue is flat wrong, and it is shocking that the president should persist in making such errors. After all, tax cuts are the central plank of his domestic policy. How can he fail to understand the basic facts about them?
Comment: It speaks well of Chavez' character that his only action is to deny them permission to continue broadcasting lies, while his very life is at stake. Phil H.PERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: The end of year figures for the Venezuelan economy showed a mixed bag of good news and bad news. On the negative side the final inflation figure for 2006 was 17%, while on the plus side the government collected $25 billion dollars in taxes and the economy grew by 10.3% over the year -- the third consecutive year in which growth was over 10%.
Excerpt: Harriet Miers led an office that will oversee the legal clashes that could erupt if Democrats aggressively use their new subpoena power. Bush advisers inside and outside the White House concluded that she is not equipped for such a battle and that Bush needs someone who can strongly defend his prerogatives.
Comment: President Bush told us that Harriet Miers was the most qualified person in America to sit on the Supreme Court, yet she's deemed not up to a coming struggle with puny Democrats issuing subpoenas?
Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: The documents indicate that military officials and contractors working at Guantanamo Bay believed Rumsfeld personally authorized unusual interrogation methods. ... In a related development, US Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he plans to call US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to testify before the committee on the Justice Department's refusal to turn over documents related to the administration's interrogation policies.
Excerpt: Officials say a three-term Westlake councilman shot himself days before he was to take office as its first black mayor.
Coroner Terry Welke says handgun soot on the wound and in the depths of the wound indicates that the gun barrel was touching Gerald "Wash" Washington's torso when it went off. There was no immediate indication of motive. Wekle says no note was found.
Sheriff Tony Mancuso says the mayor-elect's family did not accept the results, and asked for a state police investigation.
Excerpt: Energy giant ExxonMobil borrowed tactics from the tobacco industry to raise doubt about climate change, spending $16 million on groups that question global warming, a science watchdog group said on Wednesday.
"ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer," Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists said at a telephone news conference releasing the report.
Excerpt: Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota), the first Muslim elected to Congress, used a Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson rather than a Bible as he re-enacted his swearing-in with Pelosi.
Excerpt: Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, became a Buddhist decades ago, though his family does not share that faith. (He used a Bible, citing tradition.) Rep. Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, the other Buddhist, does not practice daily, but she is influenced by Buddhist values.
Excerpt: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that while his country does not want nuclear weapons, it must have the ability to defend itself against nuclear states.
Excerpt: A German businessman of Syrian descent who said he wanted to surprise his daughter with a holiday visit was detained for four days in a Las Vegas cell before being sent home without explanation.
Excerpt: Spocko not only recorded the programming and posted audio files on his site, but also sent letters to advertisers on the station, including AT&T, Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, and others -- pointing out the station's content and directing them to his blog to hear proof through his audio files.
Since Spocko began contacting advertisers, they have departed KSFO in droves. Netflix, MasterCard, Bank of America, and most recently, Visa have pulled their advertising from the station. According to Spocko, Federal Express, AT&T and Kaiser Permanente are weighing their departure as well.
Excerpt: There are still no rescue chambers or wireless tracking and communications equipment in the country's 606 underground coal mines, and it's unlikely there will be until federal requirements kick in more than two years from now. Hundreds of emergency air packs that are to be stored underground -- though currently required by law -- are on backorder and will take months to deliver.
Excerpt: The son of the late Jack Anderson said Wednesday that the longtime investigative reporter's family is pleased with the FBI's abandonment of its efforts to recover government documents leaked to his father.
Excerpt: I love those year-end roundups -- ubiquitous annual lists of greatest films and albums and lip glosses and tractors. It's reassuring that all human information can be wrestled into bundles of 10. In that spirit, Slate proudly presents, the top 10 civil liberties nightmares of the year...
Excerpt: Most of the infant car seats tested by Consumer Reports "failed disastrously" in crashes at speeds as low as 35 mph, the magazine reported Thursday.
Excerpt: Tens of millions of dollars and repeated security reviews haven't stopped embarrassing security breakdowns in the government's nuclear weapons program -- and now the man in charge has been sent packing.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman on Thursday ousted the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile and oversees the nation's weapons research laboratories.
Comment: This is the first noteworthy Bush-Cheney administration move in recent memory that doesn't seem obviously corrupt, utterly phony, cynically un-American, or just boneheadly stupid. We have to assume, then, that neither Bush nor Cheney were consulted.
Helen & HarryPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: The Army said Friday it would apologize to the families of about 275 officers killed or wounded in action who were mistakenly sent letters urging them to return to active duty.
Excerpt: Buried in the 1,500 pages of FBI files the federal government released last week on former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist are three astonishing memos.
They have nothing to do with Rehnquist's personal addiction to prescription drugs -- as do most of the files the government released.
Instead, they reveal how top federal officials abused their powers, intimidated critics and hid important information from public view for decades.
Excerpt: CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin said the group planned a "solemn march" to meet another small group of protesters crossing from the other end of the bridge and had no intention of disrupting traffic. "We didn't do anything illegal, nor did we plan to do anything illegal," Benjamin said.
Excerpt: First Lt. Ehren Watada, a 28-year-old Hawaii native, is the first commissioned officer in the U.S. to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq. He announced last June his decision not to deploy on the grounds the war is illegal.
Lt. Watada was based at Fort Lewis, Washington, with the Army's 3rd (Stryker) Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. He has remained on base, thus avoiding charges of desertion.
He does, however, face one count of "missing troop movement" and four counts of "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." If convicted, he faces up to six years in prison.
Excerpt: The special prosecutor appointed by outgoing Attorney General Phill Kline to handle the thwarted case against a well-known abortion provider has asked a Kansas judge to again consider reinstating the charges.
Excerpt:
Israelis own 10 percent of the privately owned area on the moon, according to Tom Wegner, a spokesman for Crazyshop, a company that sells plots of moon land to private individuals in Israel.
About 10,000 Israelis have purchased moon property since it became available in 2000. Of the 10 million acres sold worldwide, 1 million are owned by residents of Israel, Wegner said Wednesday.
"Some Israelis believe that buying land on the moon is an original gift and a great investment that their grandchildren might benefit from," he told The Jerusalem Post.
Comment: Ah, but getting access to the land is a real bitch. And without water and sewer, no building permit. Bummer. Chris M.PERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: If what I believe is true, then Bush is sending our young people to die in Iraq for the sole purpose of consolidating his own power against "we the people". They are dying so that Carlyle and Halliburton can drain our treasury with sweetheart contracts abroad and at home, in the name of "bringing democracy to the Middle East", and "homeland security". Our troops are dying, not to defend our country or to spread a better way of life, but to help Bush and Cheney achieve their personal goals of power and wealth.
Excerpt: Had somebody told Iraqis even in late 80's that America would attack them, they would have ridiculed him at great lengths. Had somebody even merely mentioned to Afghans in 90's that after Russia, US will attack their country, they would have considered him crazy. If somebody tells us Pakistanis today that America will attack us in future, what will we do?
Comment: Note that such an attack isn't far-fetched at all. There have existed contingency plans for an attack in the event that the US puppet leader there falls, for years now -- due to the Pakistani nuke arsenal, and how bin Laden or others might get a piece of it (there's been several assassination and coup attempts). There's also the possibility of an attack if nuclear war suddenly looked likely between Pakistan and India -- which has almost happened once already, a few years back. And lastly, if the puppet strays too far from Bush's orders, that too could cause an attack. JR MooneyhamPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: The problems in our country, in our world, are due to the presence of certain groups who are bent on destroying us -- "us" being the right-minded citizens who buy these books and listen to talk radio. The liberals (or the Democrats, leftists, feminists, environmentalists, whatever -- the terms are interchangeable) represent a malignant force of motiveless evil. They "assault" everything we hold dear, endanger our safety, undermine our culture. They even "plot" against Christmas. Why? Who knows? They're just evil, folks, and they need to be stopped at all costs.
Excerpt: If you only have $5 in your pocket, you can't afford to buy a piece of grilled salmon with a side of steamed asparagus. But you do have enough for a value meal at McDonalds, don't you? I've never seen a fruit cup for sale that cost under $3. But I can buy a candy bar for 50 cents.
Excerpt: Rather than explain Watergate, we hear the same chorus from all the networks, that the nation needed to move beyond Watergate, needed to "heal," and that the pardon, while controversial, was needed. The pundits agree that prosecuting Nixon would have led the country in a downward spiral.
But there is another scenario. Impeachment and/or prosecution could have shown Americans that no person is above the law, that all governments must be held accountable.
Excerpt: If we condone Israel using a nuclear weapon against a Muslim country, then we will not have a "war on terror" anymore, we will have the war against Islam that some of the conservative nut-jobs in this country have been hoping and pushing for. Do you know that there are one billion Muslims in the world? One billion.
Comment: It's well-known that Israel has nuclear weapons, and increasingly common knowledge that Israel has plans to use those weapons. In light of this, the silence from the Bush-Cheney administration makes it pretty dang obvious that this criminal White House would indeed support Israel's use of nukes. Helen & Harry HighwaterPERMANENT LINK
Excerpt: Americans owe a debt to former President Jimmy Carter for speaking long hidden but vital truths. His book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid breaks the taboo barring criticism in the United States of Israel's discriminatory treatment of Palestinians. Our government's tacit acceptance of Israel's unfair policies causes global hostility against us.
Israel's friends have attacked Carter, a Nobel laureate who has worked tirelessly for Middle East peace, even raising the specter of anti-Semitism. Genuine anti-Semitism is abhorrent. But exploiting the term to quash legitimate criticism of another system of racial oppression, and to tarnish a principled man, is indefensible. Criticizing Israeli government policies -- a staple in Israeli newspapers -- is no more anti-Semitic than criticizing the Bush administration is anti-American.
Excerpt: I, HappySysiphus, do hereby resolve that in the New Year I will finally get it through my skull that Rock n' Roll and The Nation State are dead concepts that have no validity in or beyond the 21st century.
Excerpt: So now that Saddam Hussein is dead, his tyranny becomes irrelevant. What's been accomplished by the war and occupation of Iraq, and the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein, is only this: We've made a madman into a folk hero. A tyrant has been re-cast as a victim.
Excerpt: One of the most advanced countries in the world did not help to reconstruct Iraq, they didn't even help produce a decent constitution. They did, however, contribute nicely to a kangaroo court and a lynching. A lynching shall go down in history as America's biggest accomplishment in Iraq. So who's next? Who hangs for the hundreds of thousands who've died as a direct result of this war and occupation? Bush? Blair? Maliki? Jaffari? Allawi? Chalabi?
Excerpt: We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States -- and Britain -- gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support -- given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War -- is dead.
Excerpt: People want to believe that Saddam's death will stabilize the country. But Saddam has been in the American scope since the first Iraq war. Does anybody really believe that he had not chosen his replacement long before his capture? He was vain, egotistical, and sociopathic, but he never would admit defeat. Not even unto death. So what makes anyone think that his supporters will suddenly run into the Americans soldiers arms and start working for peace?
Excerpt: We interrupt the Corporatist State Media's Saint Gerald Ford Memorial Beautification Propagandafest for this report from the reality-based community... All right, I've had up to here with this Canonization of Ford by the Corporatist State media. Can we all take a deep breath and contemplate Gerald Ford as a politician, and how his actions belied his bumblin' "regular guy" persona? Well, perhaps a two-by-four up side your head is necessitated...
Excerpt: "Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day."
And thus began our ten-week course.
This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact.
Excerpt: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." I have seen this quote attributed to both Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. No matter its true source, it is very true. It’s time we stand up as a country and say, “STOP, THIS INSANITY!” The President has retired with his “war cabinet” to try to determine a new course in Iraq. This same group got us into the quagmire that is Iraq in the first place.
Excerpt:The Washington Times has targeted American politicians of the center and left with journalistic attacks -- sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonate through the broader right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media.
Washington Times articles are routinely cited by C-SPAN, for instance, without explanations to viewers that the newspaper is financed by an ultra-right religious cult leader, a convicted tax fraud and a publicly identified money-launderer. Most American listeners just think they’re getting straightforward news.
Excerpt: It has become a holiday ritual: Joe Lieberman and family-research officials hold a well-attended press conference to decry the impact on children of excessive video game sex and violence.
And, again in 2006, Lieberman indulged in another yearly ritual: taking campaign money from the entertainment industry.
Excerpt: It took 2 days to work out the daily chores: starting the morning fire, making breakfast, dousing the fire, walking the dogs, negotiating who would be home by 4pm to start the fire up again (so the room would be warm by 7ish). Once we had the system it wasn't that hard.
Excerpt: A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions, and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects. The intellectual property would be available to generic drug companies. The power of competitive markets would ensure a wide distribution at the lowest possible price, unlike the current system, which uses monopoly power, with its high prices and limited usage.
The prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries. For diseases that affect the developed world, governments are already paying as part of the health care they provide for their citizens. For diseases that affect developing countries, the funding could be part of development assistance. Money spent in this way might do as much to improve the wellbeing of people in the developing world -- and even their productivity -- as any other that they are given.
Excerpt: The wondrously named Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board held its first public hearing the other day on the National Security Agency's illegal eavesdropping program. If you expected it to discover any truths about the secret program, you can forget it. The board spent its time explaining why it was more important to work from within the administration than to challenge it. Thus wags the tail of a watchdog with neither bark nor bite.
Excerpt: My brother is betting his life that you are not going to ask this of him. He has placed his trust in the idea that we will not ask him to die for anything less than the necessary defense of our democracy. Reasonable people may at one time have disagreed about the necessity of the Iraq war, but now that it has become abundantly clear from every quarter that we cannot win, will you be responsible for asking my brother to stay?
Excerpt: When one day a year either makes or breaks the bank, how fragile indeed has our economy become. Decades ago when we manufactured almost everything here in America, the Christmas holiday was just that, a holiday. Of course retail business made money, but the money spent on gifts stayed in American pockets.
Now everything is made in China, India, Mexico, and many other countries too numerous to mention. Once the money is sent out of the country, it will never return.
It's beginning to look a lot like Chaos Ev'rywhere you go; There's felons in the Grand Hotel, some in the House as well, The sturdy kind that knows the Justice Department has gone to hell. ...
Excerpt: Will Congress ever wake up and cut the funding for the Bush insanity? Will Congress ever get up the spine to hold the Bush war criminals to account? Does Congress have an inkling as to the exact and legal definition of treason? Treachery? Murder? War crimes? Impeachment? War crimes tribunals?
Excerpt: George Bush, (or as I've repeatedly called him and hope it catches on because I find it ironic and fitting: The Other Butcher of Baghdad) has repeatedly rejected all forms of counsel concerning his War on Terror. Or at least, all counsel that doesn't jive with his search and destroy methodology, even if pesky things like law, convention, and constitution get in the way. I call this the War of Terror on Freedom, or WTF for short.
Excerpt: I remain convinced that for the US to extricate itself from its problems and restore its standing in the world there must be punishment for the US leaders who have committed these great crimes. Either *we* administer the payback or there will be no end to the troubles. How can any nation ever trust us and be confident that our obviously flawed system will never again be controlled by such people?
Excerpt: Mr. George Bush, esteemed President of the United States of America and most aggressive proponent for continued military action, claims that we are winning this war. I would like to note with disappointment and distaste that he is counting his victories by the number of bodies that need to be buried. His only clearly defined plans amount to Hunt and Kill an undefined enemy.
Excerpt: Oh and god (God?), could you please do something about George Bush? Bush is out to burn our planet to a crisp and won't that just be a bother. Please? The children will still need some place to rest their weary little heads and if Bush burns the planet to a crisp, the children will just be so screwed. Well, we will too but the children should come first. Shouldn't the children come first? I think that the children should come first but hey, that's just me.
Excerpt: Back in August, the Filipino government received what can only be described as a threatening letter from the US Chamber of commerce (which was subsequently leaked to the Filipino press), expressing the Chamber's concerns about "the effects this decision will have on the pharmaceutical industry", explaining that, "if regulations are susceptible to amendment without due process, a country's reputation as a stable and viable destination for investment is at risk" and, rather menacingly concluding: "We know you would want to avoid such a situation (from) occurring".
Excerpt: Just as the Media did not cover the "Anti-War Rallies" before this illegal war, they are now not covering the stories which are important for the public discourse, the debate which our Founding Fathers demanded that we have. The reason that they "gave" us the Right to Free Speech!
Mr. Bush and his Cabal, and the Media owners along with our Public Servants have decided that we don't need to know. That we don't need to have these debates. That we don't need to be listened to. That we don't count!
Excerpt: It was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, so lively and quick / I knew in a moment that Bin Laden must have been licked. / More rapid than eagles his fighter escort they came / And my house shook as he called out by name / "Now, AFGHANISTAN! now, YEMEN! now, SOMALIA and IRAQ! / Then, IRAN! on SYRIA! on, NORTH KOREA you'll take that! / When you stand up to the Empire, we'll put you against the wall! / And dash away! dash away! dash away everyone of you all!"
Excerpt: The best holiday presents for my family; our nation; and the world would be for the troops to speedily and safely exit from Iraq and for BushCo to be held accountable for their crimes against our Constitution and humanity. These gifts, however, will not be realized unless the grass roots community who put the Democrats back in power re-doubles our efforts for peace and accountability.
One way out by David Michael Green, The Regressive Antidote
Excerpt: George W. Bush's priorities in Iraq are George W. Bush -- period, full stop. No great surprise there. Still the magnitude of what is being sacrificed to preserve this man's incredibly fragile sense of himself is breathtaking.
Excerpt: Back then, and even more so today, it became quite popular to advise your children to: Run. Hide. Look away. Go get someone bigger. Be afraid. As a result, modern children and adults alike are easily paralyzed by fear and have no idea how to defend themselves.
Excerpt: The leaks concerning the strategies now under consideration only underscore the abject criminality of the war as well as the desperate crisis that is gripping the American political establishment, which remains deeply divided over how to confront the political and military debacle confronting the US occupation.
Excerpt: It's impossible to say for sure, but plenty. How many did God drown in the flood or burn to death in Sodom and Gomorrah? How many first-born Egyptians did he kill? There's just no way to count them all. This list doesn't include those figures.
Excerpt: It seems forgotten that the 9/11 atrocities happened on the president's watch. Turn back the clock and witness a distraught nation rallying around the president and giving him a carte blanche to react as he saw fit. Recall that virtually every government around the world instinctively embraced America, wished her well, demonstrated solidarity and offered full cooperation in hunting down the terrorists responsible for the carnage.
In the months that followed, the president's popularity went through the roof -- some polls had him standing taller than any of his predecessors with a 90% approval rating. Instead of holding him accountable for his failure to protect the nation from threats that were all too apparent, he was granted a mandate to reshape the world and dilute our sacred civil liberties.
Who else could have squandered that kind of political capital? If we had picked a president by a random process from a pool of white middle aged blue bloods -- we would have fared better.
Excerpt: In Iraq there are no good options, but President Bush's plan to expand the armed forces appears inclined to the worst. ...
The surge is a surefire formula, in fact, for turning what still could be called a retreat with honor into an outright defeat with humiliation. That is just what America's enemies around the world would like to see -- and it is just what the wise men and the sage woman on the Iraq Study Group wanted to avoid. Their plan as of two weeks ago (it seems so long already) was for "our" Iraqis to win the war, of course, if such a thing were possible, but much more importantly for the Iraqis to bear responsibility for losing it if they fail to get their act together. It was a cynical strategy for shifting blame, and far from ideal, but at least it wasn't built on a cheerleader's delusion that more American muscle is what it takes to set the Iraqis straight.
Use our New York Times login unk.news and password unknownExcerpt: In late October, Christopher Soghoian, a Ph.D. student in the School of Informatics at Indiana University, found his attention wandering during a lecture in his Cryptographic Protocols class. While sitting in class, he created a Web site he called "Chris's Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator."
A visitor to the site could plug in any name, and Mr. Soghoian's software would create a page suitable for printing with a facsimile of a boarding pass, identical in appearance to one a passenger who had bought a Northwest Airlines ticket would generate when using the airline's at-home check-in option.
The fake pass could not be used to actually board a plane -- boarding passes are checked at the gate against the roster of ticket buyers in the airline's database -- but it could come in handy for several other purposes, Mr. Soghoian suggested, such as passing through airport security so you could meet your elderly grandparents at the gate.
Or, as he told his site's visitors, it could "demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless." It worked well, indeed.
No cryptographic recipe was cracked; no airline computer system was compromised. Without visiting an airport, Mr. Soghoian needed access to nothing other than a public Web site to embarrass those responsible for airport security.
To thank Mr. Soghoian for helping the government identify security weaknesses, the TSA sent him a letter warning of possible felony criminal charges and fines, and ordered him to cease operations, which he promptly did. It was too late, however, to spare his apartment from an FBI raid.
Excerpt: The stories keep getting better. Here's someone who climbs a fence at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, boards a Delta plane, and hangs out for a bunch of hours.
Best line of the article: "It blows my mind that you can't get 3.5 ounces of toothpaste on a plane," he said, "yet somebody can sneak on a plane and take a nap."
Excerpt: Bashir Assad, the President of Syria, has repeatedly offered peace talks with Israel. Most recently he has added that he has no preconditions for negotiations -- he is not even demanding that Israel promise in advance to return the Golan Heights. The response of Ehud Olmert has been astonishing. We can't, Israel's Prime Minister says, act against our friend, George W. Bush, who has no interest in an accommodation between Israel and Syria.
Therefore, Israel refuses to grasp the hand that Syria has offered.
Excerpt: A village bully is a problem. A bully in charge of an army is a catastrophe.
We will need to understand that systems of power seek out those individuals for high office and enforcement duty who have been weakened by moral, ethical and intellectual defects. Only these defective individuals can be effectively exploited by these systems as willing tools and species traitors. The real problem is not these individuals, the George Bushes, the Henry Kissingers, the Conrad Blacks, the Rupert Murdochs, the Pat Robertsons and Dr. Strangeloves of the world, but rather the systems of power that find such impaired humans useful.
Excerpt: Unfortunately, it will never be our oil and gas. Not after the atrocities Bush has committed on the Iraqi peoples. Not unless, one day, we buy it, one barrel at a time on the open market. The puppet regime in Iraq can go ahead an sign all the rip-off production sharing agreements it wants with Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell, but the successor regime will simply renege.
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